For some reason, Smurfs are holding flags corresponding the SDGs at the UN headquarters in New York. … [+]
It’s a gloomy milestone. For the second year running, the world has backslid on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
As a refresher, the SDGs are the flagship UN project to improve wellbeing and development by 2030. They’re sometimes referred to as the Global Goals in an effort to rebrand this unwieldy mouthful of syllables. The SDGs replaced the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which had mixed results when their period ended in 2015. The SDGs are a rather kitchen-sink approach to development, with 17 goals that just about no one can name off the top of their head.
But as the closest thing the world has to a unifying vision for progress, the SDGs are our best bet. And now, halfway through the time period devoted to the SDGs, countries are going in the wrong direction. The Covid-19 pandemic is a major reason, but it isn’t the only one.
Critically, according to the Sustainable Development Report 2022, which was authored by Jeffrey Sachs, Guillaume Lafortune, Christian Kroll, Grayson Fuller and Finn Woelm, the proportion of people in extreme poverty has substantially increased since 2019. This represents the first (and arguably most elemental) SDG. The goal related to decent work and economic growth has also seen regression.
The impacts have been unequal, of course. While the US and other wealthy countries have in the last couple of years experienced high employment and some optimism about worker power, unemployment rates have steadily increased in low-income countries.
Overall, the 10 countries ranked highest in the SDG Index are all in Europe; the bottom 10 are all in sub-Saharan Africa. (A further 30 countries, many of them small islands, have not been ranked.)
Yet no country is on course to achieve all 17 of the SDGs. Finland comes highest at 86.51/100; the world as a whole is at 66 (roughly where Turkmenistan sits in the index). Even in world-leading Finland, climate action is going backwards.
More generally, the report explains, the persistence of gender pay gaps shows that the goal of gender equality hasn’t been achieved. In the US, high murder rates and inequalities in the criminal legal system limit its progress on the goal related to peace, justice, and strong institutions.
And across the board, the wealthier countries are falling short when it comes to environmental targets. In fact, they’re hurting other countries’ chances of achieving the SDGs as well. The report refers to these spillovers as “significant negative socioeconomic and environmental impacts outside their borders…through trade and consumption.”
To some extent, the better a country’s SDG Index score, the worse its International Spillover Index score. In other words, a minority of countries are enjoying prosperity and development at the expense of others.
Spillovers come from tax havens that squirrel away money far from the countries where it’s earned and could contribute to development and poverty reduction. Spillovers also come from products that are produced in a lower-income country before being consumed in a higher-income country, with the environmental and health impacts concentrated in the producer country. According to the report, “Approximately 40 percent of the European Union’s carbon footprint relating to its consumption of good and services takes place in other countries.” While the EU has made substantial progress on cutting down on domestic CO₂ emissions, the same can’t be said for imported CO₂ emissions.
Thus, the report recommends that countries analyze these spillovers and the ways that domestic consumption affects emissions. This year, Sweden became the only country to do so.
The Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), the UN’s main cheerleader for the SDGs, is all but pleading with countries to take the goals more seriously. While Bangladesh and Cambodia have progressed the most, particular laggards at SDG-related policy include Russia, Brazil, and the US.
The US is particularly noteworthy as one of just six countries (along with Haiti, Iran, Myanmar, South Sudan, and Yemen) that has never submitted a voluntary national review. Basically, alongside some of the world’s most conflict- and famine-affected countries, the US (with an SDG Index score of 74.55, roughly the same as Cuba’s) has declined to send in a single progress report on the SDGs.
Clearly, dramatic acceleration will be needed to keep the SDGs within reach.
