The Sustainable Development Goals provide the only possible path to lead us from current crises to a future of long-term survival for our planet and inhabitants
An article by Prof. Phoebe Koundouri, Director, ReSEES Research Laboratory, Athens University of Economics and Business; Co-chair, SDSN Europe for sdg-action.org
We currently face three simultaneous global ‘tsunamis’: the COVID-19 pandemic, the economic crisis that derives from the pandemic, and the mother of all crises, the climate crisis. To respond to the health crisis, we take social distancing measures. Biomedical research, meanwhile, has enabled the production of relevant vaccines, which provide hope for containing the pandemic.
To respond to the economic crisis, both short and medium-term measures have been employed. Short-term measures try to avoid the pandemic turning into a major economic and financial disaster that will long outlast the health crisis. Currently, these measures include ensuring that:
- The workforce remains employed even if quarantined.
- Public and private institutions have the financial support to help vulnerable citizen groups.
- Small and medium-sized enterprises are safeguarded against bankruptcy.
- Policies are enacted to support the financial system as non-performing loans mount.
Medium and long-term responses focus on developing fiscal packages that will finance the recovery, comparable to the crisis-related loss of gross domestic product (GDP). These fiscal packages will have to be financed by national debt. As such, they will be paid for by future generations.
The current generation therefore has a moral responsibility to ‘build forward better’ in a way that considers the prosperity of future generations. That means restarting our socio-economic systems and their interaction with natural ecosystems in a sustainable way. One major challenge for a sustainable recovery is the urgency of tackling the climate crisis, to limit global warming to 1.5°C, beyond which the risk of extreme weather events and poverty for hundreds of millions of people will significantly increase.
Currently, there is no country in the world that is not experiencing the drastic effects of climate change. The annual average economic losses from climate-related disasters are in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Between 1998 and 2017, 1.3 million people were killed and 4.4 billion injured by climate-related events. As indicated in the UNEP Emissions Gap Report 2020, current nationally determined contributions (NDCs) for climate change mitigation are inadequate to achieve the Paris goals, and would lead to a temperature increase of at least 3°C by the end of the century. The net-zero emissions goals recently announced in Europe, China, and other major economies could reduce this increase by about 0.5°C.
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