UN seeks cash, commitments to revive stalled development goals

Ireland and Qatar are co-facilitators of the political declaration that was adopted as the summit kicked off in New York. (Photo/Reuters)

World leaders are seeking to salvage stalled global targets to fight issues such as hunger, poverty and climate crisis that have been knocked off course in recent years by the Covid-19 pandemic and economic headwinds.

Roughly halfway to the 2030 deadline to meet the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) - agreed as a development yardstick in 2015 - only 15 percent of the targets are on track, raising the stakes for a two-day SDG Summit that started on Monday.

"It's time to take a hard look at how badly we are off track," said John Gilroy, climate and sustainable development lead for the Permanent Mission of Ireland to the United Nations.

Ireland and Qatar are co-facilitators of the political declaration that was adopted as the summit kicked off in New York.

"At the halfway point to the SDG deadline, the eyes of the world are on you once again," UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the gathering. "We can prevail. If we act now. If we act together."

'Behind the schedule'

Seeking to regain lost momentum, Guterres has called for at least $500B per year in extra funding from wealthy nations to help reach the goals by 2030 - and leaders are expected to make new interim SDG commitments this week, including benchmarks to cut inequality and poverty by 2027.

Nearly half of the targets in the 17 goals are moderately or severely behind schedule, according to a UN assessment released earlier this year.

The text of the political declaration released earlier this month warned that achievement of the SDGs was "in peril" and that hunger and malnutrition were on the rise.

The UN this month also released research in collaboration with 95 developing nations that found 72 of them reported an increase in planet-heating emissions since 2019, and only one in five cut poverty levels – key metrics in the SDG agenda.

Other goals include expanding access to clean water and fighting gender inequality.

Climate 'linchpin'

When laying out the SDGs eight years ago, officials could not anticipate the pandemic and economic pressures that have sent interest rates skyrocketing and curbed countries' ability to borrow, Achim Steiner, head of the UN Development Programme (UNDP), told reporters last week.

Many countries are defaulting back "to a kind of recovery-growth trajectory that rightly focuses on jobs and incomes and also on managing the crisis - but actually also locks us in to pathways that will ultimately exacerbate inequality," he said.

The growing effects of climate crisis are also hampering progress to meet key goals, researchers say.

Rising temperatures and more frequent storms are aggravating hunger and making it harder for people to access healthcare and clean water, said research released this month by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).

Climate is the "linchpin" for social justice issues facing the world, said Jean Su, energy justice program director at the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental nonprofit.

Still time?

While there has been some progress, the numerous setbacks of recent years have left millions of children in extreme poverty, UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell said in a statement accompanying a report released this month.

The report from UNICEF and the World Bank found about 333 million children globally were estimated to be living in extreme poverty as of 2022, down from 383 million in 2013.

But that number had dropped to an estimated 319 million in 2019 before the pandemic struck - and is nowhere near the trajectory needed to hit the SDG target of eradicating extreme poverty for all people by 2030.

Source: TRT