The 2030 UN Sustainable Development Goals and Goals Should not be regarded as an End-To-End Deadline: A Conversation with Paula Caballero

World leaders this week vowed to redouble their efforts on an ambitious plan to end poverty and protect the environment, which is woefully behind schedule.

The UNSDG summit approved a political declaration that stated the goals remain the world’s “overarching roadmap” for the future. “We will act with urgency to realize its vision as a plan of action for people, planet, prosperity, peace and partnership, leaving no one behind,” the agreement states.

“The SDGs need a global rescue plan,” UN secretary-general António Guterres declared at the opening of the summit. To help countries reach the goals, as well as other financial aid, it is proposed by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres that funding for sustainable development increase by at least US$500 billion.

Paula Caballero, the former Colombian diplomat who was instrumental in creating the SDGs’ framework, says that the world needs to take bold and transformational action now to accomplish the SDG agenda.

At the same time, she says that 2030 should not be seen as a final ‘take-it-or-leave-it’ deadline. Caballero, who is now responsible for Latin American activities of The Nature Conservancy, says that the goal of 2030 should not be viewed as an end goal. “It’s a milestone.”

One of the books written by the GSDR is that of Sociologist Shirin Malekpour. The goals and the targets need to be changed instead of what we are doing, says Malekpour.

The agendas for the Paris climate agreement and the UN Development Program are the same despite the fact that they were created seperately in 2015.

“The only way you’re going to deliver on climate mitigation and adaptation is through the SDGs, and you can’t meet the SDGs unless you deal with climate,” she says.

Does that make it a failure? A new look at the U.N. plan to improve the world by 2030 and how many more people will die in extreme poverty

Now imagine that eight years later, more than halfway through your 15-year life improvement plan, not only are you way off track when it comes to accomplishing most of what you committed to, but in some cases you’ve even slid backward. Maybe it was an illness you faced. Maybe you had a bad break up. Maybe there was some bad financial advice you received. Maybe you didn’t try hard enough.

What conclusion would you make? Were your goals a waste of time or would you be even worse off today without them? Do you attempt to make up for lost time by scrapping your plan or double down?

The failure of world leaders to achieve ambitious goals should be meaningful for a number of reasons.

169 of the goals have a list of more specific targets for countries to achieve. Poverty is broken into seven different targets including ensuring equal economic rights for men and women as well as delivering reliable amounts of international aid to countries in need of assistance.

The “perfect storm” of challenges that have left theSDG agenda nearly underwater included the COVID-19PorP, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a food security crisis and worsening climate-related disasters.

Half of the 140 targets that the United Nations is able to measure has been weak and insufficient according to the latest progress report from the U.N. If current trends continue, 575 million people will still be living in extreme poverty in 2030, 128.5 million children will still suffer from stunting — developmental issues that result from chronic undernutrition — and 84 million children and young people will still be out of school.

Antonio Guterres, the Secretary General of the U.N., said that unless action was taken now the agenda would become an epitaph for a world that could have been.

Most world leaders have responded to the grim SDG picture by recommitting to the agenda and calling for more money, stronger partnerships and greater political will to get the goals back on track.

“Now is a good time to bring about bold change and do it quickly”, Linda Thomas Greenfield said last week.

Source: The U.N. plan to improve the world by 2030 is failing. Does that make it a failure?

The Second Document of the United Nations’s Declaration on the Sustainable Development Goals and its Derivation as a First Step toward Restoring Global Trust

“It’s getting ever less and less credible that this is really a useful approach to meeting goals,” said New York University Professor William Easterly, a vocal critic of top-down development planning and an advocate for humbler approaches to solving problems of poverty.

He admitted that it was useful for some other things, and noted that he had been encouraged by a shift away from paternalism.

“Blaming COVID or Russia invading Ukraine for why we’re falling behind on the SDGs is not right,” said Charles Kenny, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development.

Even though it is a “miracle” that the world is on track to achieve the goals, even the most powerful people should not be forgiven if they failed to try very hard to achieve them, Kenny said.

The adoption of the SDGs also marked a turning point for the U.N., said Minh-Thu Pham, a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who was closely involved in the agenda’s creation.

“You don’t have to think very much to know that there was a moment of unity,” he said. If you are looking for a path to restoring global trust between governments, people and their governments, theSDG remind you of that.

Michael Igoe is a senior reporter with Devex, where he has covered foreign aid policy and politics since 2013. He has a degree from the University of Montana in international development, a master of fine arts in Nonfiction, and an undergraduate degree in Russian.