In a nutshell, the UN report paints a rather poor picture of the efforts at achieving its sustainable development goals, courtesy of crises primarily induced by human vanity for power and supremacy over one another, while struggling with the little progress nations had made with their SDGs. This signals a comprehensive failure in meeting targets that seek in achieving sustainability in all fields essential for human progress in life while ensuring a healthy planet for all
By Salam Rajesh
Around 17 percent only of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) targets are on track while nearly half of the goals are showing minimal or moderate progress, and progress on over one third has stalled or even regressed.
Nearly 48 percent of the Sustainable Development Goals exhibit moderate to severe deviations from the desired trajectory, with 30 percent are showing marginal progress and 18 percent moderate progress. 18 percent indicate stagnation and 17 percent regression below the 2015 baseline levels.
This substantively depressing news form part of the assessment profiled in the latest Sustainable Development Goals Report (2024) of the United Nations. The scarring effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, escalating conflicts, geopolitical tensions, and growing climate chaos are hitting the SDGs progress hard, says UN secretary general Antonio Guterres.
The COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent shocks endured between 2020 to 2022 have hampered the global efforts to eradicate extreme poverty, the report stated with particular reference to the SDG 1 (No Poverty).
Outlining the sadder side of the assessment, the report says that the global extreme poverty rate increased in 2020 for the first time in decades, setting back progress by three years. At this estimation, the report says that by the target year 2030, around 590 million people may still be living in extreme poverty despite efforts to reduce poverty globally.
Without a substantial acceleration in poverty reduction, fewer than 3 in 10 countries are expected to halve national poverty by year 2030, it stated, drawing a bleak line on the success rate. The report further stated that despite increasing efforts and commitments to expand social protection programs, significant coverage gaps left 1.4 billion children uncovered in 2023.
With an equally depressing assessment on the SDG 2 (Zero Hunger), the UN report says nearly 1 in 10 people globally face hunger, where 2.4 billion people experienced moderate to severe food insecurity in 2022. Despite progress, 148 million children under the age of 5 suffered from stunting, and if the current trends persist, 1 in 5 children under age 5 will be affected by stunting in 2030, the report stated.
There is a specific reference on climate change in the report (SDG 13: Climate action) where it says that climate change is hindering poverty reduction, and consequent disasters resulted in millions of households becoming poor or remaining trapped in poverty.
It equally reflects serious concerns on achieving goals under SDG 15 (Life on Land). The UN report specifies that between 2015 and 2019, at least 100 million hectares of productive land were degraded annually, adversely impacting global food and water security. This degradation, driven by changes in land use and coverage, significantly contributed to biodiversity loss, including in fragile mountain ecosystems.
Ending poverty requires a wide-ranging approach that combines comprehensive social protection systems, inclusive economic policies, investments in human capital, measures to address inequality and climate resilience, and international cooperation and partnership amongst others, the report stated.
While emphasizing that overfishing can harm biodiversity, ecosystems and fisheries production, and could impose adverse social and economic costs, the report stressed that the sustainability of global fishery resources declined from 90.0 percent in 1974 to 64.6 percent in 2019 and further to 62.3 percent in 2021 due to overfishing, pollution, poor management and other factors. Fish stocks within biologically sustainable levels, however, comprised around 76.9 percent of global marine fish landings in 2021.
Fish resource exploitation is evident in both ocean fishery and inland freshwater capture fishery, so much so that fish population decline and over harvesting is posing serious threat to the sustainable livelihood of the fishing community who eke their livelihood by capture fishery in Manipur’s Loktak Lake, and which could be a problem similar in nature in the other wetlands in India and elsewhere.
Li Junhua, UN under-secretary-general for economic and social affairs, also paints a picture of depression, saying that “The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2024 reveals that progress has ground to a halt or been reversed across multiple fronts, despite reaffirmed pledges. The lingering impacts of COVID-19, compounded by conflicts, climate shocks and economic turmoil, have aggravated existing inequalities”.
Reflecting upon this concern, with obvious note on the crises faced by the world community in the present times, Li is quite clear in saying that “The world must now confront head on the multiple crises threatening sustainable development, marshalling the determination, ingenuity and resources that such high stakes demand. To get the SDGs back on track, one foremost priority for the global community is to rally all stakeholders to end the conflicts causing unimaginable suffering and misery globally. Sustainable development is simply not possible without peace”.
This reasonably sounds true of in those regions where both internal and external conflicts, both of low and high intensity, while displacing people and damaging properties at large, is primarily the reason why the goals specified under the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations are evidently regressing and are not being able to be achieved by the target year 2030 which is just six years away.
As much as India’s neighbor Myanmar is being torn asunder by intense internal armed conflict, reducing people to the status of refugees within their own territory of life, Manipur in India’s far east is reeling under armed conflict-situation internally that had set back progress in all fields by years.
This assumption is well reflected in the assessment of probable achievement of goals for SDG 16 (Peace, justice and strong institutions) wherein the report stressed that ‘Rising conflicts and violent organized crime persist around the world, causing immense human suffering and hampering sustainable development. The number of forcibly displaced people reached an unprecedented 120 million in May 2024, while the civilian casualties in armed conflicts surged by 72 percent in 2023’.
In a nutshell, the UN report paints a rather poor picture of the efforts at achieving its sustainable development goals, courtesy of crises primarily induced by human vanity for power and supremacy over one another, while struggling with the little progress nations had made with their SDGs. This signals a comprehensive failure in meeting targets that seek in achieving sustainability in all fields essential for human progress in life while ensuring a healthy planet for all.