Inadequate enforcement mechanisms and overly ambitious targets are among the reasons for failure.

The United Nations Millennium Development Goals set ambitious targets for lowering poverty, improving health and nutrition, expanding education, increasing gender equality, and ensuring environmental sustainability. Those targets have served as a useful rallying call.

Five years ago, in this very Hall, the assembled world leaders adopted an ambitious set of targets and goals to promote peace and prosperity.

Some participants were concerned that in the rush to achieve ambitious development targets, Governments might ignore the vital principle of free, prior and informed consent.

Linking actions directly to the needs derived from ambitious and monitorable targets would mean a breakthrough towards greater boldness and accountability in the fight against poverty.

In middle income countries and others where the goals are already within reach, Governments should adopt a Millennium Development Goals plus strategy, with more ambitious targets.

In middle income countries and others where the Goals are already within reach, Governments should adopt a Millennium Development Goals plus strategy, with more ambitious targets.

The last thing a crisis weary Europe needs is a new competitiveness gap. But ambitious climate targets, as Germany and other successful European economies have shown, are not the problem.

In 2005, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) European Conference of Ministers of Transport (ECMT) Joint Transport Research Committee launched a working group project to achieve ambitious road safety targets.

China s move from imitation to innovation has been a matter of national policy in recent years. In 2011, for example, the government established a set of ambitious targets for the production of patents.

China and India have used very different political models to achieve their ambitious GDP growth targets. Nonetheless, as their economies mature, both will need to embrace structural change and to address the challenges of overdue political reforms.

This recommendation may not sound revolutionary, but by linking actions directly to the needs derived from ambitious and monitorable targets, its implementation would mark a fundamental breakthrough towards greater boldness and accountability in the fight against poverty.

It seems very ambitious.

The International Action Programme from the 2004 International Conference for Renewable Energies (Bonn, Germany) contains ambitious national targets for the expansion of renewable energy in more than 20 countries, including many initiatives for increased cooperation with developing countries.

INFOCAP is comprehensive and ambitious.

The SDGs are extremely ambitious.

But it requires us to put in place a new climate change agreement now one that all countries can accept. It must be comprehensive and ambitious, and it must set clear targets for emission reductions, adaptation, financing, and technology transfer.

That's as ambitious as we are.

This Plenary Meeting has an ambitious agenda.

CAMBRIDGE In 2000, 189 countries collectively adopted the United Nations Millennium Declaration, which evolved into a set of concrete targets called the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). These ambitious targets ranging from halving extreme poverty and reducing maternal mortality by three quarters to achieving universal primary schooling and halting (and beginning to reverse) the spread of HIV AIDS are supposed to be met by the end of 2015.

While confirming that eradicating poverty is the greatest global challenge facing the world today, the World Summit on Sustainable Development also acknowledged that oceans and coastal areas are critical for global food security and agreed on ambitious new targets for resources management and fisheries.

Targets

Well, particle physicists are nothing if not ambitious.

This is one of the more ambitious ones.

We would have liked a more ambitious result.

And we have ambitious hopes for its future.

Some participants identified the following potential targets (or elements for targets)

The plan was to convene world leaders in Copenhagen and renew vows to cut carbon while committing to even more ambitious targets. But it is obvious that even a last minute scramble to salvage some form of agreement will fare no better in actually helping the planet.

Because it is only natural for politicians to promise to do everything, the UN is currently poised to consider an impossibly inclusive 169 targets. The proposed targets range from the ambitious ( end the epidemics of AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria ) to the peripheral ( promote sustainable tourism ) to the impossible ( by 2030 achieve full and productive employment and decent work for all women and men, including for young people and persons with disabilities ).

I mean, think about that. How grand. How ambitious.

Funding targets

In a few days, India will host a meeting in Hyderabad of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity. The assembled countries will consider how to raise the resources necessary to achieve the ambitious Aichi Biodiversity Targets, adopted two years ago at the last such meeting in Japan.

The latter Plan aimed to achieve the ambitious Lisbon Strategy targets to make the European area competitive in terms of the economy, human resources and investment in human capital, and specifically to make it the most competitive area in the world by 2010 in economic development and social cohesion.

The team from Taiwan was a little bit more ambitious.

At this defining moment in history, we must be ambitious.

We cannot afford to fail, and we must remain ambitious.

In other areas, however, we clearly must be more ambitious.

We remain convinced that the MDGs, while ambitious, are achievable.

Setting targets and establishing a conducive environment in which these targets can be reached

Beyond Inflation Targets

Smart Development Targets

Objective and targets

These are leaders who are highly ambitious for the greater good.

We are convinced that these are ambitious but absolutely legitimate goals.

Given those differing cultural perceptions, the reform proposals were extremely ambitious.