Global Challenges
The world is currently facing a set of interrelated and converging crises that threaten the stability and sustainability of human societies and have already begun undermining decades of progress on sustainable development.
Extreme Poverty and Widening Inequalities
Despite commitments made by global leaders to leave no one behind in the fulfillment of socio-economic rights, the world is not on track to meet the Sustainable Development Goals.
Under current trends, 575 million people will still be living in extreme poverty in 2030. In this era of polycrisis, the world is facing hunger levels not seen since 2005, with a global cost-of-living crisis affecting billions of people (SDG Report, UNSTATS 2023).
Fundamental law and policy reforms are needed to meet the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals.
Climate Change
As human-induced climate change causes global temperatures to rise, the world has already begun to experience more frequent and severe natural disasters, including heatwaves, flooding, droughts, tropical storms and wildfires.
These extreme weather events are displacing communities, destroying homes and infrastructure, and threatening food security. Unless policy-makers come together to hold global temperature increase to well below 2°C above and pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5°C, climate change will cause unprecedented economic and non-economic losses.
Biodiversity Crisis
Changes in exploitation of natural resources, in land and sea use, global heating, pollution and the spread of invasive species have led to a human-induced mass extinction.
According to the most recent figures, wildlife populations have plunged by an average of 69% between 1970 and 2018 (WWF, 2020; IUCN Red List 2017-2020 Report). The abundance of mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles is falling fast, as populations of sea lions, sharks, frogs and salmon collapse.
Human Rights Regression
According to the United Nations, at the current rate, it will take an estimated 300 years to end child marriage, 286 years to close gaps in legal protection and remove discriminatory laws, 140 years for women to be represented equally in positions of power and leadership in the workplace, and 47 years to achieve equal representation in national parliaments.
In education, the impacts of years of underinvestment and learning losses are such that, by 2030, some 84 million children will be out of school and 300 million children or young people attending school will leave unable to read and write.
The global number of refugees has reached 34.6 million in 2022, the highest number ever recorded. This represents 429 out of 100,000 people who fled their countries of origin owing to war, conflict, persecution, human rights violations or events seriously disturbing the public order (SDG Report, UNSTATS 2023).