It shouldn’t come as a surprise but we are way off the mark on meeting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by the year 2030. Not that we were on the right track to begin with but the Covid-19 pandemic has pushed us further off course.
In a way, the year 2020 has encompassed all that is standing in our way: more and more people falling below the poverty line, record unemployment, increased homelessness, and worsening health - especially of women and children. These problems didn’t start with the pandemic but they surely became worse.
This week in The Global Tiller, we take a look at how our commitment to the SDGs is faring, what are some realistic ways going forward and what we can learn from our mistakes to make the goals even more equitable and impactful.
According to the Gates Foundation, the pandemic has pushed us back 25 years in about 25 weeks. There has been a 7% increase in extreme poverty and the number of people suffering from food insecurity is expected to increase by 83 to 132 million. In fact, the only good sign in the ongoing pandemic may be the progress made towards financial inclusion as over 130 governments created ways to pay people to stay home and maintain social distance.
As countries struggle to get their economies back on track, it may be tempting to ignore the SDGs and focus on reviving the economies at all costs (read: ignore environmental implications of economic decisions). But one thing which should be clear to all is that now is not the time to ignore these goals in favour of rapid economic recovery.
The rhetoric of war, which has been built around the response to this virus, seems to be leading us into a situation where crises mentality will be used to justify ignoring standard rules of operation and sustainable practices. Already, we have seen several leaders, such as India’s Narendra Modi, France’s Emmanuel Macron or New York governor Andrew Cuomo, share "battle plans", "mobilise troops", or appoint themselves as commanding generals against the novel coronavirus.
But, let’s be clear, we are not at war. The Covid-19 pandemic is not here to impose democracy or extract our resources, it is a virus resulting from humanity’s increased encroachment into nature. Abandoning SDGs at this time would be like applying band-aid on a bullet wound. For that matter, we may be better off taking the lede of the German president who rightly called the pandemic a “test of our humanity”.
Sure it’s easier to divert money away from SDG-compliant projects towards saving fossil fuel industries, but it also paves the way for more deadly pandemics to follow suit. In fact, owing to the perverse ways in which we measure economic growth, many countries were actually diverting money into industries causing climate change in a misguided attempt to reach the SDGs.
So how about we use the disruption caused by the pandemic as an opportunity to reevaluate the SDGs and ensure that they are more in line with the realities of 2020, which are significantly different from those of 2015 when the SDGs were agreed upon. We have seen in recent months that countries can take drastic measures when the situation calls for it. So why not do the same to create sustainable cities, renewable energy, good quality education, ending poverty, or any of the other 13 SDGs?
I would love to hear from you your thoughts on how we can rethink SDGs and what are some ways in which we, as individuals and as community members, set our own goals for a sustainable future.
I hope you enjoy the additional resources below.
Stay safe and happy reading!
Hira - Editor - The Global Tiller
Here’s what helped me think better about how the pandemic has impacted the SDGs:
Four ways cities must harness the UN's Sustainable Development Goals to build back after COVID
… and now what?
There is an ongoing debate in our house around the role and utility of the UN. There are basically two schools of thought:
one, that the UN has proven to be useless because national governments don’t respect UN decisions so there is no point in wasting money on it;
and the other, that the idea of the UN is a great one but there’s need for a reform to eventually give it the power it needs to have real and positive impact on the world and take over national governments.
One is super idealistic (and I admit to being the culprit here!) and the other one leans more towards the realpolitik approach.
The SDGs encompass quite a lot of this debate too. The concept is great and (almost all) national governments have signed on but there’s always an excuse not to follow them.
Here in Tahiti, the SDGs are M.I.A. Very few people know what they are and the UN is more of an abstract political entity. I know this to be the case in many other countries that are signatories to the UN. However, Taiwan - a country which is not part of the UN - takes the SDGs very seriously as they serve as the standard framework for governments, NGOs and businesses’s strategies and actions.
So, can someone tell me what’s going on here? Are countries behaving the same way as some adults did when I was a kid when they told me to do something while they did the exact opposite? It annoyed me a lot back then, and apparently it still does!
This is not leadership. This is not setting an example. In the words of Greta Thunberg, “how dare you” be so comfortable in such a paradox? To create something and then decide against it because it’s not convenient? The reason is always the same: it’s about the national economy, national security, national interest. Maybe that’s the problem: it’s national!
Similar to the concept of the European Union, the UN has also been built on the idea that, at some point, the world will come together and transcend nationalities, to work together on bigger challenges. And we are certainly facing big challenges now: climate change, global poverty, nuclear risks. None of them can be tackled at the national level.
Unlike France, which naively insisted that the atomic cloud after Chernobyl would not cross the national borders, our big challenges are global.
Our lives are becoming more and more connected. We’re part of communities that transcend boundaries, cultures and nationalities. It’s time for a reset. Not only an economical reset, as the World Economic Forum argues, but a complete institutional reset, one that will finally provide the governing tools to address issues that are global, one that will favour working together beyond artificial administrative lines drawn as arbitrarily as a child making a sandcastle.
Let’s be bold and tell our political leaders: you may like the power you have nationally but it doesn’t make sense anymore. We have to think globally (at international institutions) and act locally (at the level of cities). The intermediate (national) level is becoming more and more useless and restrictive.
As we’re heading towards 2021 and hopefully a post-pandemic time, how about jumping on a new era?
We need to take decisive steps to end this period of escalating risk and safeguard our future. Fortunately, it is in our power to do so. The greatest risks are caused by human action, and they can be addressed by human action - Toby Ord in 'The Precipice'.
I will be happy to hear your comments and ideas on this as I know this is always cause for big conversations. If you want to know more about my views on this, here’s a piece about a borderless world I wrote a few years ago.
Philippe - Founder - Pacific Ventury