The UN Summit of the Future: Six Priorities and a Timeframe for Action on Sustainable Development Goals in Low- and Middle-Income Countries

SDG actions, too, often are unaligned. For example, as well as increasing spending on health, many COVID-19 recovery packages poured money into shoring up carbon-intensive industries rather than boosting renewables. Only a few countries take into account impacts on incomes, poverty, jobs, inequality, health and education under the Paris Agreement on Climate Change.

A new economics of the common good is needed, too — for setting shared goals and working out how to achieve them17. Crosse-cultural respect, cooperation, civic virtues, and defending the dignity of the socially, politically and economically underprivileged are some of the things this involves. It is important that diverse voices and sources of knowledge come together to discuss how to create a just and sustainable economy.

The UN should establish a global governance mechanism to address planetary stability and security, with a focus on risk of exceeding planetary boundaries, which will lead to irreversible damage to life-support systems.

Private financing can be encouraged by the government by presenting their investments in the context of an integrated development strategies from now to mid-century.

We urge member states of the United Nations to adapt to the changing world in time for the UN Summit of the Future in September. This will entail setting interim targets for 2030 and 2040 and final targets for 2050 that align with science and maintain high, yet achievable, national and global ambitions.

There is insufficient finance to enable low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) to achieve the SDGs4. Many nations are in debt distress after the pandemic and face a tight schedule of repayments, which is setting back development. Weak domestic institutions and corruption5 further hamper the flow of equity and debt finance to LMICs.

To support those discussions, here we highlight six priorities that we consider crucial, along with a schedule for action (see ‘Revised global actions and timelines’). Some goals can and should be met by 2030. The net-zero carbon energy systems need more time to be achieved. The structures of international finance need to be changed. And emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) must be incorporated.

By 2030: The most vulnerable in society are older people, mothers and children, people with disabilities, and those who are unemployed.

The poor should have resilience to climate-related extreme events, as well as shocks and disasters.

In order to achieve food security by 2040, sustainable-agriculture programmes have to be adopted.

Goals and Challenges of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): Synergy between Artificial Intelligence, Digitalization, and Curriculum Management

By 2050: Continuous work to ensure that theSDG remains on track and integrate topics such as the management of artificial intelligence and digitalization in training curricula.

By 2030: Halt and reverse the loss of biodiversity. Reverse the trend of loss of species and ecological functions, and the decline in what nature contributes to humans, by reaching net-positive nature generation through a nature-positive pathway.

By 2050: Nature resilience is key to human health and planetary stability.

Governments need to extend their policies to mid-century. Every country contributes to sustainable development by aligning national priorities with global objectives.

For these and other reasons, some of the goals are still not being assessed using quantitative measures. The goal for climate action, which does not have a measurable target for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, is the most significant example. To be part of the SDGs, national emissions would be reported annually and to a standard to be defined by expert bodies and then agreed by all member states — as would all other newly proposed targets and indicators.

As long as there is timeliness to the existing goals, accounting for artificial intelligence inambitious goals has a lot of merit.

A road map for sustainable development in low-income countries – a case study in the UN Framework on Climate Change and Biodiversity

Measures of cross-border impacts need to be better integrated intoSDG targets to ensure that progress in one region does not come at the expense of another High-income countries have a number of policies that impede progress in LMICs, such as dumping electronic and other waste and supporting tax havens.

Strengthening global governance to achieve this transition will be challenging in the current geopolitical context. But the world has frameworks, agreed by all countries, that provide workable plans for accelerating and scaling sustainable transitions. Both the UN Framework Convention on Climate change and the UN Convention on Biological Diversity are included. The task is to shift the focus from negotiating over problems to delivering solutions, and to introduce strong enforcement mechanisms.

All economic transactions have to account for planetary damage. This requires a price on carbon, as well as tariffs on activities that undermine the functioning of ecosystems, freshwater cycles, marine systems and biochemical flows. The financial system needs to agree on principles for de-risking sustainable investments in LMICs and putting an end to investing in operations that damage the planet.

Source: Extending the Sustainable Development Goals to 2050 — a road map

The digital twin of the EU’s oceans and waters mission: How investment can support the realization of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Governments should put in place dedicated and flexible systems to work across SDG priorities11, and build long-term, in-house knowledge rather than use consultants. They should strengthen their capacities to anticipate, adapt and learn about what works in and across organizations. They should design tools, institutions and partnerships to maximize public value, engage citizens and build and manage digital infrastructures that serve the common good2,11.

Enhanced regional cooperation is also crucial, particularly in managing transnational infrastructure and rainforests, river basins, aquifers, coastal regions and fisheries. Through open-data initiatives there will be needs for transparant data sharing.

Public investment must be scaled up and paced to meet the extended SDGs. This will involve financial commitments and strategic allocations that build complementarities across human capital, infrastructure, business capital and natural capital2,3. It is important for a country to have a skilled workforce and access to quality education so that they can deliver returns from business investment. Investment in important infrastructure in LMICs has been underfunded.

Defining the fulfillment of SDGs through missions with specific goals can help transform societal challenges into practical policy pathways. For example, one target of the European Union’s ‘Restore our Ocean and Waters’ mission is to reduce plastic litter at sea by at least 50% by 2030.

And missions can act as multipliers for investment outcomes; jobs, productivity and growth can result, strengthening their political traction. Over 480 innovation projects and 3.7 billion of public and private investment have been pulled for the EU’s oceans and waters mission. A ‘digital twin’ of the region’s oceans and fresh water is being created to monitor and evaluate progress for this mission, and will benefit policymakers, citizens, entrepreneurs and scientists.

Conventional cost-benefit analyses don’t capture spin-offs. NASA’s Apollo missions led to foil blankets, camera phones and formula milk. Governments will have to develop methodologies to quantify multiplicative effects.

Multilateral and national development banks can work together on innovative missions. For example, Germany’s green steel sector owes its growth to the KfW Development Bank’s green loans programme for heavy industry, which aligned its long-term and low-interest finance to the government’s energy transition mission16.

Action Planning for Sustainable Development Goals: A Comment on Guterres’ “Pact for the Future”, by J’aime Szczepaniak

When a well-thought-out plan isn’t succeeding, what should the response be? Do you not want to Abandon the plan entirely? Hope that it just needs more time to work? If you know why it’s not functioning, then make changes accordingly.

Is there a way to improve on the approach? A group of researchers from Europe and the US suggest a mixture of responses to a Comment article. The researchers suggest that the 17 goals should all remain the same, as should the indicators for the targets. They want greater ambition as well. The goal to end poverty should include providing social protection for vulnerable people, for example. Undernutrition should be tackled by the goal for zero hunger.

There are two reasons why this proposal is well timed. UN secretary-general António Guterres has invited representatives of world leaders to gather in New York City this September for a meeting called the Summit of the Future. A draft of the document to be decided at this event is called the Pact for the Future and refers to an attempt to identify indicators of economic growth, well-being andsustainability. Few of theSDG have a priority, status and attention in national policymaking likeSDG 8. Guterres wants to change this and get policymakers to focus not just on economic indicators such as gross domestic product (GDP), but on a dashboard of indicators that he is calling Beyond GDP.