The 17 goals of the Agenda for Sustainable Development 2030 approved by world leaders at a UN summit in September 2015 came into force in January 2016. These global development goals or SDGs are a set of 17 interlinked objectives with a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for the people and the planet for now and into the future. The SDGs provide a roadmap for tackling developmental, environmental and other socio-political challenges.
The SDGs replaced the earlier Millennium Development Goals or MDGs that the world had adopted from 2000 to 2015 to tackle global problems of poverty, hunger, diseases, illiteracy and development. The MDGs met with a level of success, such as lifting about a billion people out of extreme poverty, reducing child mortality and school dropouts by more than half from the 1990s’ levels, and reducing HIV/AIDS infections by about 40 percent since 2000.
The UN recently released the ‘Global Sustainable Development Report 2023’ written by top scientists and other experts from around the world to review the progress made in achieving the SDGs and to suggest measures to realise them by 2030 deadline.
After analysing all the data, the report comes to the stark conclusion—the world is not on track to achieve any of the 17 SDGs and cannot rely on change to happen organically. It noted that, based on the current rate of progress, the world will not eradicate poverty and hunger, or provide quality education for all by 2030. Instead, by the end of this decade, our world is expected to have 575 million people living in extreme poverty, 600 million facing hunger, and 84 million children and young people out of school. Humanity will overshoot the Paris climate goal of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5°C above the pre-industrial levels. The report further states that, at the current rate, it will take 300 years to attain gender equality. It warns that at current pace the SDGs may only be realised by 2050.
There has been no substantial progress for SDG targets such as achieving food security, ending malnutrition, eliminating malaria epidemics, ensuring safe and affordable housing, reducing greenhouse gases, ensuring sustainable fisheries, and reducing homicide rates and unsentenced detainees. On the other hand, the situation has deteriorated sharply since 2015 on targets such as achieving food security, increasing vaccine coverage, ensuring sustainable economic growth and reducing greenhouse gases. Except for increased access to mobile networks, the report notes that progress for most SDG targets has been disappointing.
However, the report’s conclusion that the world is close to achieving the target of full employment and ensuring sustainable and inclusive industrialisation is questionable considering the prevailing high unemployment rates and skewed patterns of industrialisation, especially in developing countries.
Progress has been hampered by several factors such as the Covid pandemic, the cost of living crises, armed conflicts and natural disasters. The pandemic forced all countries to divert precious development funds to tackling mass vaccination, upgrading health infrastructures, and giving income and food support to the vulnerable people who were impacted. The World Bank estimates that about 97 million people around the world slipped into extreme poverty due to the pandemic, with India accounting for a major share. Considerable fiscal support was also given to kick-start economic activities that were disrupted by the pandemic.
The cost-of-living crisis with high rates of inflation, compounded by the immense fiscal strain caused by the pandemic, interrupted progress towards achieving the SDGs. Inflation rates in many developing countries exceeded 5 percent or even touched double digits. Many countries faced debt levels at 50-year highs, which constrained efforts to extend social protection to the poor and vulnerable.
Armed conflicts, as well as the increasing cost of natural disasters—estimated at $303 billion in 2022—were among the other factors stymying progress. By the end of 2020, around two billion people were living in conflict-affected countries. In 2021, the number of refugees and internally displaced persons was the highest on record at 89 million and, for the first time, global military expenditure exceeded $2 trillion. Between March and May 2022, approximately 26.5 million people in the Sahel region of Africa faced a food and nutrition crisis.
Accelerating action and systemic transformation are key to achieving the SDGs. The report identifies six points for transformation—human well-being and capabilities, sustainable and just economies, sustainable food systems and healthy nutrition, energy decarbonisation with universal access, urban and peri-urban development, and global environmental commons.
These shifts would involve scaling up investment in primary healthcare and ensuring access to life-saving interventions, accelerating secondary school and girls’ enrollment, increasing investment in water and sanitation infrastructure, shifting to healthier and more diversified diets, reducing food waste and loss, large scale deployment of renewables and phasing out of fossil fuels by 2030 with affordable and universal access to energy, shifting to a circular economy with emphasis on waste recycling, greater use of electric vehicles and expanding public transport and city infrastructure. It calls for expanding protected areas, abandoning intensive agricultural practices in protected areas, restoring degraded forest lands, economising water use and relying on nature-based solutions to enhance biodiversity, ecosystem services, human well-being, and sustainable development.
Mobilising the political leadership, building a broad societal consensus for the proposed policy shifts, addressing the governance and institutional deficits, bringing about behavioural changes, and increasing science-policy-society interactions are critical for realising the SDGs.
(ninankn@yahoo.co.in)
K N Ninan, Lead author, GEO-7, UN Environment Programme