There are only six years remaining until the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) deadline, and the world is not moving forward toward achieving those goals.
The COVID-19 pandemic, rising conflicts, and growing climate chaos have seriously hampered progress.
To get back on track, the world needs massive investments in sustainable development, as well as urgent action in a number of critical areas, including climate change, peace and security, and inequalities between countries, says the recently released Sustainable Development Report 2024.
To address these serious challenges, UN Secretary-General António Guterres has called for a Future Summit at the UN in New York on 22-23 September.
Held on the theme “Multilateral Solutions for a Better Tomorrow”, the summit will bring together UN Member States and agencies, academic institutions, non-governmental organisations, civil society organisations, the private sector and young people.
Humanity is facing unprecedented challenges that can only be addressed through global cooperation, also known as multilateralism. During the Summit, attendees will collectively forge a new global consensus on what our future should look like – and what we can do today to secure it.
The summit will focus on five key areas: sustainable development and financing; international peace and security; promoting digital cooperation and control over new technologies such as artificial intelligence; empowerment of young people and future generations; and reform of the UN structure.
The main challenge under sustainable development is to secure global financing. Ultimately, achieving the Sustainable Development Goals will require massive public investments.
Low-income and lower-middle-income countries in particular lack access to the financing needed to achieve these goals, so the global system must find a way to provide these countries with access to long-term, low-cost financing.
To achieve global peace, one of the main challenges today is competition among superpowers, including competition between the US, Russia and China. The world must move towards a UN-led system in which competition among superpowers is controlled and regulated by the UN Charter rather than by militarism and power politics.
To support this goal, countries must be genuinely committed to global cooperation – and a new UN-based index on multilateralism could play a role in monitoring how committed UN member states are to that goal.
The main challenge for digital collaboration and new technologies is to ensure that they operate transparently and responsibly.
For youth and future generations, high-quality education plays an essential role in their empowerment and progress. The world will need to work towards a new global financial system to ensure that every child, even in the poorest countries, has the opportunity to get a good education.
All these objectives cannot be achieved without reforming the UN system, ensuring that UN entities are given more power and ensuring that they are more representative. To make the UN as representative as possible, it is necessary to promote diverse representation, including the representation of women at leadership levels.
Additionally, looking at decarbonization and other sustainability efforts from a gender perspective and increasing women’s representation in the sector is crucial to making progress on all of the above challenges.
This special report, published on the occasion of the UN Future Summit, is a collaboration between 360info and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), offering solutions to some of the world’s most pressing issues.
,Author: Alison Marks, UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), and the 360info editorial team)
Disclaimer: Originally published by 360info under Creative Commons
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)