Global Sustainable Development Report 2019

The UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs has released the Global Sustainable Development Report 2019. This report, entitled ‘The Future is Now: Science for Achieving Sustainable Development’, is the first quadrennial Global Sustainable Development Report prepared by an independent group of scientists.

Main Points

The following are the main points from the Executive Summary of the Report:

Since the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals, there have been many positive developments. Countries have started to incorporate the Goals into national plans and strategies, and many have set up coordinating structures for coherent implementation.

However, despite the initial efforts, the world is not on track for achieving most of the 169 targets that comprise the Goals. The limited success in progress towards the Goals raises strong concerns and sounds the alarm for the international community. Much more needs to happen – and quickly – to bring about the transformative changes that are required: impeding policies should urgently be reversed or modified, and recent advances that holistically promote the Goals should be scaled up in an accelerated fashion.

Adding to the concern is the fact that recent trends along several dimensions with cross-cutting impacts across the entire 2030 Agenda are not even moving in the right direction. Four in particular fall into that category: rising inequalities, climate change, biodiversity loss and increasing amounts of waste from human activity that are overwhelming capacities to process them. Critically, recent analysis suggests that some of those negative trends presage a move towards the crossing of negative tipping points, which would lead to dramatic changes in the conditions of the Earth system in ways that are irreversible on time scales meaningful for society. Recent assessments show that, under current trends,

the world’s social and natural biophysical systems cannot support the aspirations for universal human well-being embedded in the Sustainable Development Goals.

Just over 10 years remain to achieve the 2030 Agenda, but no country is yet convincingly able to meet a set of basic human needs at a globally sustainable level of resource use. All are distant to varying degrees from the overarching target of balancing human wellbeing with a healthy environment. Each country must respond to its own conditions and priorities, while breaking away from current practices of growing first and cleaning up later. The universal transformation towards sustainable development in the next decade depends on the simultaneous achievement of country-specific innovative pathways.

Nevertheless, there is reason for hope. Human well-being need not depend on intensive resource use, nor need it exacerbate or entrench inequalities and deprivations. Scientific knowledge allows for the identification of critical pathways that break that pattern, and there are numerous examples from across the world that show that it is possible.

The science and practice of sustainable development thus points the way forward. Advancing the 2030 Agenda must involve an urgent and intentional transformation of socio-environmental-economic systems, differentiated across countries but also adding up to the desired regional and global outcomes, to ensure human well-being, societal health and limited environmental impact. Achieving that transformation – a profound and intentional departure from business as usual – means carefully taking into account the interactions between Goals and targets. Policymakers will find similarities and contradictions within them, as well as systemic interactions and cascade effects, as action towards one Goal can alter the possibilities for meeting other goals. A significant amount of knowledge is already available about those important interactions, and more research is under way.

An important key to action is to recognize that, while the present state of imbalance across the three dimensions of sustainable development arises from not having fully appreciated the interlinkages across them or having unduly prioritized the short-term, it is these same interlinkages that will lead to the desired transformative change when properly taken into account. The most efficient – or sometimes the only – way to make progress on a given target is to take advantage of positive synergies with other targets while resolving or ameliorating the negative trade-offs with yet others. Translating that insight into practical action for the Goals is informed in the Report by current assessments that emphasize the need for urgency, forward-looking expectations about a growing global population seeking higher levels of well-being and normative considerations, such as leaving no one behind.

Those actions can be undertaken by a more diverse group of people and organizations than governments of United Nations Member States alone. At the local, national and international levels, new key development actors are emerging and gaining greater power and influence. Innovative and powerful partnerships can result from collaborations between traditional stakeholders and emerging actors. The success of the 2030 Agenda thus depends on the cooperation of governments, institutions, agencies, the private sector and civil society across various sectors, locations, borders and levels.