UN: Corona crisis will destroy decades of world progress
The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals are the most comprehensive agreement on ways to end poverty, environmental destruction, and inequality in access to education, but the COVID-19 crisis has cast a shadow over the future of these goals.
According to the latest United Nations report, the COVID-19 pandemic has set humanity back decades in reducing poverty and addressing the lack of medical, health, and educational facilities. In 2015, five years ago, the international community set itself the task of achieving these goals.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said at the end of last year that the world was falling behind on the steps needed to achieve the 17 Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. But now the COVID-19 pandemic has plunged humanity into an unprecedented economic and social crisis, making achieving the goals set out in the UN development document a much more difficult challenge than before.
According to the report, 71 million people are likely to fall back into poverty this year. This is the first time since 1998 that the world has seen such an increase in poverty. Child labor is also on the rise after decades. The UN also predicts that hundreds of thousands of people, especially the poor, the disabled and women, will die from the coronavirus due to lack of access to medical facilities and vaccinations.
More than a billion people in slums are at risk of this crisis due to the use of shared toilets and crowded public transport. School closures have left 90% of students around the world facing many difficulties. That means 1.57 billion children and adolescents. Of these, 370 million are deprived of a meal that they used to be given at school.
Despite all this, the report also noted some progress made by the end of 2019, including improvements in maternal and child health, access to electricity and an increase in the number of women in government positions. Progress is now threatened by increasing difficulties in securing food for large parts of society, environmental destruction and severe injustice in some countries.
Among the 17 goals that were put on the agenda of countries until 2030 at the United Nations summit in 2015 were the fight against hunger, gender equality, and combating the climate crisis. Problems that can only be overcome with the joint cooperation of the international community.
Source: DW
