FROM AROUND THE WORLD
I f this were an inspirational sports movie, now would be about the time our defeated protagonists would be trudging into the locker room while our coach gives a rousing pep-talk that turns things around for a second half win. However, those hoping for an 11th-hour Hollywood ending for the successful completion of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will likely walk out of the cinema disappointed. Instead of that come-from-behind victory that both ends human hardship and gets a handle on harmful emissions, we get “an epitaph for a world that might have been.” That grim phrase opens the recently released The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2023: Special Edition , along with other doomsayer gems like “promise in peril” and “sound the alarm”, among many other signs that all is very far from well as the world reaches the SDG midpoint. The document does not mince words about the lackluster progress towards the framework the UN hoped would lift the world out of poverty and ensure the world’s 8 billion people can grow in a sustainable, climate-friendly way. The SDGs were adopted in September 2015 as part of the UN’s 2030 Agenda, building on an earlier set of much narrower global goals, the eight Millennium Development Goals. The new 17 objectives, containing 169 smaller targets, were going to be challenging to achieve on their own, but they promised a new way forward to a world that left no one behind. That was before the COVID-19 pandemic, a fragile world economy, global supply chain disruptions, the war in Ukraine, tens of millions of displaced people, and a smattering of
climate-related events of increasing frequency that give us the first real taste of what a warming world could look like. Now, with only seven years left before the deadline, the news is, to put it mildly, not great. Of the 140 SDG targets for which data is available, progress is weak on about half and about a third have stalled or gone in reverse. A mere 15 percent of the targets are actually on track. Some developing countries are struggling to even maintain stagnation on their goals, with many seeing early gains slipping backwards. For example, SDG 14 – Life Below Water’s Ocean Health Index is one particular area that has seen decreases in many countries. Even countries that have seen the most progress towards achievement still have long ways to go. First, the bad news Taking a deeper look at the individual goals gives a picture at what the world will look like in 2030 if current trends continue. Kicking things o ff with SDG 1 – End Poverty, an estimated 575 million people will still be living in extreme poverty, in other words, living on less than US$1.25 per day. Billions are without safe drinking water, sanitation and hygiene, making the completion of SDG 6 – Clean Water and Sanitation especially challenging. For example, reaching safe drinking water targets will require a sixfold increase
The document does not mince words about the lackluster progress towards the framework the UN hoped would lift the world out of poverty.
in global progress. The raw numbers for this particularly critical goal are also sobering; 2.2 billion people lacked basic handwashing facilities in 2022. In 2020, 2.4 billion people lived in water-stressed countries.
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