UNITED NATIONS (AP) – In a grim report, the UN warned on Monday that at the current rate of global progress, 575 million people will still live in extreme poverty and 84 million children will not go to school. school in 2030 – and it will take 286 years to achieve equality between men and women.
The report on progress towards 17 far-reaching goals adopted by world leaders in 2015 to improve the lives of more than 7 billion people around the world indicates that only 15% of the approximately 140 specific goals assessed by experts are on track to be achieved by the end of the decade.
Nearly half of the goals are moderately or seriously off track, he said, and of those, 30% have seen no movement or have regressed, including key goals on poverty, hunger and the climate.
The ambitious goals for 2030 are to ensure that hunger is eradicated and that no one lives on less than 2.15 dollars a day, which corresponds to the extreme poverty line, to provide every child with a primary and secondary education of quality, to achieve gender equality, to guarantee drinking water, sanitation and access to affordable energy for all, to reduce inequalities and to take urgent action to combat climate change.
“If we don’t act now, the 2030 agenda could become the epitaph of a world that could have been,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a preface to the report. “The lack of progress means that inequalities will continue to worsen, increasing the risk of a fragmented two-speed world.”
The report was released ahead of a summit Guterres convened during the annual gathering of world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly in September, which he said will be “a moment of truth and judgment”.
Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs Li Junhua said conflicts, including the war in Ukraine, climate change, the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, especially its devastating financial impact on countries development, and geopolitical tensions “all threaten to derail hard-deserved progress” towards achieving the Goals.
He said in a foreword that the pandemic has seen the biggest drop in childhood vaccinations in three decades, an increase in deaths from tuberculosis and malaria and learning losses in 80% of the 104 countries studied. It also halted three decades of progress in reducing poverty and produced the biggest increase in inequality between countries in three decades, he said.
“As of May 2023, the devastating consequences of war, conflict and human rights abuses have displaced 110 million people, including 35 million refugees – the highest figure on record,” the chief of ECOSOC.
Li told a press conference launching the report that at the September summit, the UN would like political leaders to come up with “a new road map” to accelerate action at global, regional and national levels to achieve the goals by 2030.
With seven years to go, the report says achievement of the goals is “in deep trouble” and “it’s time to sound the alarm”.
At current rates, not only will 575 million people still live in extreme poverty in 2030, but only about a third of countries will meet the goal of halving national poverty levels.
“Amazingly, the world is back to levels of hunger not seen since 2005, and food prices remain higher in more countries than during the 2015-2019 period,” the report said.
In 2021, the number of hungry people was close to 800 million, well above pre-pandemic levels, and in 2022, around 45 million children under 5 were wasted and 148 million were stunted while 37 million were overweight. , it said.
On education, the report says years of underinvestment and learning losses mean that without a major effort, not only around 84 million children will be out of school in 2030, but around 300 million students will lack basic literacy and math skills to succeed in life. and only one in six countries will reach the goal of universal secondary education completion.
Regarding the fight against global warming, the report states: “If there has ever been a highlighting of the short-sightedness of our dominant economic and political systems, it is the intensification of the war against nature.
The small window of opportunity to prevent temperatures from rising beyond the internationally agreed threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) to prevent the worst impacts of the climate crisis is closing fast, the report says. and the critical 1.5 degree tipping point is likely to be reached or exceeded by 2035.