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September 16, 2013

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UN goals: ending poverty, fighting climate change

By Jeffrey D. Sachs | September 16, 2013, Monday | Print Edition

THE world’s governments meet at a special session of the United Nations General Assembly on September 25 to discuss how to accelerate progress on the Millennium Development Goals, and also to agree on a timetable for a new set of Sustainable Development Goals.

The MDGs, adopted in 2000, will conclude in 2015, to be followed by the SDGs, most likely for the 2015-2030 period.

The millennium goals focus on ending extreme poverty, hunger, and preventable disease.

They have been the most important global development goals in the UN’s history.

The sustainable goals will continue the fight against extreme poverty, but also add the challenges of ensuring more equitable economic growth and environmental sustainability, especially the key goal of curbing the dangers of human-induced climate change.

Setting international development goals has made a huge difference in people’s lives, particularly in the poorest places on the planet. Sub-Saharan Africa has benefited from the MDGs, and we can learn from that success in designing the SDGs.

From 2000 to 2010, Sub-Saharan Africa’s poverty rate (as measured by the share of those living on less than US$1.25/day) fell to 48.5 percent, after having risen from 56.5 percent to 58 percent in the 1990-1999 period, while overall annual economic growth, which averaged 2.3 percent from 1990 to 2000, more than doubled, to 5.7 percent during the 2000-2010 period.

There were significant improvements in disease control as well. From 1990 to the peak year, around 2004, annual malaria deaths rose from roughly 800,000 to 1.6 million.

After that point, upon the MDGs-inspired mass distribution of anti-malaria bed nets, malaria deaths began to decline, to around 1.1 million per year in 2010, and perhaps lower now.

When UN member states turn to the next set of global development goals, they should learn from the MDGs.

First, keeping the list of SDGs relatively short — no more than 10 — will make them easy to remember.

Second, all governments, rich and poor, should be accountable for meeting the SDGs as implementers. The MDGs applied mainly to poor countries as implementers and to rich countries as donors. The SDGs should apply to all countries as implementers (and also to rich countries as donors). Indeed, when it comes to problems like climate change, which will be at the core of the new SDGs, rich countries have more work ahead of them than poor countries do.

Third, the SDGs should build on the MDGs. The MDGs helped to cut global extreme poverty by more than half. The SDGs should take on the challenge of ending extreme poverty for good. The World Bank, to its credit, has already adopted the goal of ending extreme poverty by 2030. UN member states should do the same.

Finally, the SDGs should mobilize expert groups around the key challenges of sustainable development.

Fifty years ago, US President John F. Kennedy declared that, “By defining our goal more clearly, by making it seem more manageable and less remote, we can help all people to see it, to draw hope from it, and to move irresistibly towards it.”

The MDGs have helped to play that role in the fight against poverty. The SDGs can do the same for the complex challenge of achieving sustainable development.

Jeffrey D. Sachs is Professor of Sustainable Development, Professor of Health Policy and Management, and Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. He is also Special Adviser to the United Nations Secretary-General on the Millennium Development Goals. Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2013.www.project-syndicate.org. Shanghai Daily condensed the article.

 

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