As much as 85% of the United Nations' anti-poverty agenda for the end of this decade is sputtering out, stalled or losing ground altogether.
Progress toward 48% of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals for 2030 is "weak and insufficient," the U.N. said on Monday, while 37% is "stalled or gone into reverse" including key targets on poverty, hunger and climate.
Just 15% of the SDGs – which include 169 specific targets lumped together around 17 broad goals that the world agreed to in 2015 – remains on track. Climate finance is far below the US$100 billion a year that rich nations promised starting in 2020.
One of the key goals – eliminating hunger by 2030 – is projected to miss the target by as many as 600 million people.
"Unless we act now, the 2030 Agenda could become an epitaph for a world that might have been," U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres says in a foreword to the report.
"The SDGs are the universally agreed roadmap to bridge economic and geopolitical divides, restore trust and rebuild solidarity," he says. "Failure to make progress means inequalities will continue to deepen, increasing the risk of a fragmented, two-speed world. No country can afford to see the 2030 Agenda fail."
In 2022, the report says, the prevalence of undernourishment remained unchanged compared to a year earlier, after a big increase in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and a slower rise in 2021.
The global population facing chronic hunger stood at 9.2% in 2022, up from 7.9% in 2019, affecting around 735 million people, or 122 million more since 2019.
An estimated 2.4 billion people, or 29.6% of the world’s population, suffered moderate to severe food insecurity, meaning they lacked access to enough food. Africa has a higher proportion of its population facing hunger compared to other regions, but Asia has the most people facing hunger.
The report projects that more than 600 million people worldwide will face hunger in 2030, "highlighting the immense challenge of achieving the zero hunger target."
The lagging fight against extreme poverty
The report by the U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs blames the COVID-19 pandemic, the "triple crises of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution," and Russia's war on Ukraine.
The most progress has been made on Goal 12, ensuring sustainable consumption and production patterns, and on Goal 14, conserving and sustainably using the oceans, seas and marine resources.
The next most progress is on Goal 9, building resilient infrastructure, promoting inclusive and sustainable industrialization and fostering innovation, and Goal 15, protecting, restoring and promoting sustainable use of land-based ecosystems.
The report is meant to sound the alarm ahead of a summit that Guterres is calling ahead of the U.N. General Assembly's annual gathering in September.
For solutions, the report urges governments and leaders to recommit to seven years of accelerated action and multilateralism using concrete policies to help the poor, reduce inequality and end the "war on nature."
It calls for special aid to developing countries, women and girls and vulnerable populations – and massive reforms of the world's financial architecture.
The mountain of debt
Among the most ambitious of the goals was to eliminate extreme poverty which is defined as living on less than US$2.15 a day. Last year, the World Bank updated that figure – the extreme poverty line – from its previous amount of US$1.90 a day.
Between 2015 and 2018, the extreme poverty rate fell from 10.1% down to 8.6% – from 740 million people down to 656 million people. Once the pandemic began in early 2020, the rate went back up to 9.2%, or 93 million more people.
At this rate, the U.N. report says, it will take 286 years to reach gender equality; by 2030 some 575 million people will still live in extreme poverty and 84 million kids will be out of school.
"To deal with the root causes of this dire situation, we need deep reform of our outdated, dysfunctional and unfair international financial architecture," the report says.
"Developing countries are bearing the brunt of our collective failure," it says. "Many face a huge financing gap and are buried under a mountain of debt. One in three countries is at high risk of being unable to service their debt."
This report has been updated with additional details.
