Sustainable development goals on life-support

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This article was published 11/12/2021 (1737 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

AS today’s world becomes more fractious and uncertain, mounting social, economic and environmental problems are dwarfing imperfect solutions. The flawed but still important COP26 global climate agreement and other deals reached at the UN summit are recent examples.

The tentative new global minimum 15 per cent corporate tax deal agreed to in October by 136 countries, intended to claw back an estimated US$150 billion in annual lost tax revenue, is another.

Various leaders, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, have pledged their governments will “build back better” coming out of the pandemic, while progressive groups are demanding a Green New Deal. Both are, in essence, calling for mini national versions of the previously established UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) — even though near the midpoint of their timeline, hitting the SDGs themselves already seems almost impossible.

Adopted in 2015 by the UN’s 193 member states, the goals comprise a 17-point, 169-target action plan calling for, among other things, the elimination by 2030 of global poverty, hunger, infrastructure deficits and overconsumption, while also achieving gender equality, progress on climate change and universal access to quality education, health care, clean water, sanitation and electricity.

A report released in September indicated meeting all 17 SDGs would require US$10 trillion in annual funding channelled toward transformative development initiatives from now until the 2030 deadline. That yearly sum equals one-tenth of global economic output, at a time when governments around the world already shattered deficit-spending records last year by taking on US$19.5 trillion to blunt pandemic-induced recessions.

Even prior to the pandemic, critics routinely labelled the SDGs as cynical, empty virtue-signalling by tone-deaf globalist elites. Realists say, with some justification, that the goals need to be better calibrated to align across countries with wildly differing capacities and resources.

Nevertheless, the SDGs arguably remain the world’s most compelling road map to address the underlying factors producing crises seeded by the current iteration of globalized finance and capitalism. The undeniable benefits of this system — which has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, produces enough food to feed 10 billion people, and continues to churn out awe-inspiring technology — are now being steadily overshadowed by its faults.

Humanity has never been wealthier or more connected. Yet collective progress has been achieved via the brutal, deliberate exploitation and marginalization of significant portions of the global population and environment — the consequences of which are becoming rapidly apparent.

Experts sounded the alarm for years before 2020 saying a devastating pandemic was imminent, the result of widespread destruction of natural ecosystems. COVID-19 has now killed more than 5.1 million people, and is forecast to push 150 million people out of the middle class and tens of millions more into extreme poverty.

Estimates suggest climate change could plunge more than 100 million others into poverty by 2030. Analysis by the U.S. government, meanwhile, indicates in excess of 290 million people are grappling with newfound hunger this year. And pre-pandemic, more than 2,100 billionaires — 88 per cent of them men — had already accumulated more wealth than 4.6 billion people.

But striving to hit the SDGs’ targets shouldn’t be viewed as a zero-sum outcome.

Every tenth of a degree temperatures are kept from rising in the future will produce radically different outcomes in avoiding climate catastrophe. The chances of limiting global heating to 1.5 C above pre-industrial times are hanging on by a thread, but scientists emphasize a world that warms by 1.8C will still be remarkably better off than a world that warms by 2-2.5 degrees.

Likewise, the seeming impossibility of ever truly eliminating poverty and hunger or achieving the other 15 aspirational goals of the framework does not mean countless lives won’t be improved, and more equitable economies and stable societies can’t be built by trying — especially now that public interest globally appears to favour a big-government approach to providing more expansive social programs and taking more aggressive climate action.

In his 2004 CBC lecture series and award-winning book A Short History of Progress, Canadian historian Ronald Wright examines what dynamics have triggered the collapse of past societies, focusing on what modern nations must do to dodge similar fates going forward. To address climate change, resource depletion, political instability and inequality, Wright notes: “The reform that is needed is not anti-capitalist, anti-American, or even deep environmentalist; it is simply the transition from short-term to long-term thinking.”

Even if they are merely aspirational, the SDGs represent the type of long-term thinking that is more urgently needed than ever. Missing them doesn’t matter — but not trying to achieve them does.

Kyle Hiebert is a Winnipeg-based researcher and analyst, and former deputy editor of the Africa Conflict Monitor.