It’s United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) week, when heads of state and representatives from at least 145 countries descend upon Manhattan for the global body’s annual high-level session. For New Yorkers who aren’t participating in or covering the sessions — like my Vox colleagues Jonathan Guyer and Jen Kirby are, dashing from meeting to meeting — UNGA week means one thing: gridlock alerts, when the combination of crowds and security closures turns the east side of Manhattan into a parking lot.

Cars aren’t the only thing stuck in traffic at the United Nations, however. One of the main topics of debate this week was the state of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) — 17 targets on human development, the environment, and more that world leaders set in 2015 to be met in the year 2030. The SDGs were a bold plan to envision a world without extreme poverty, where no one went hungry, and where everyone had a chance at a quality education and decent health care. In short, a more perfect future.

In some regards, we’re succeeding; the world is making strong progress on goals like electricity access and child mortality.

But months past the halfway point to 2030, a UN report indicates that for far too many of the SDGs, the world is making about as much progress as a taxi crawling along 42nd Street this week. To wit:

  • The UN says that on 80 percent of the SDGs, progress is “weak” or “stalled” or has “gone into reverse.”
  • Despite the SDG goal to eliminate extreme poverty — defined as living on less than $2.15 a day — current projections suggest that more than half a billion people will remain extremely poor in 2030.
  • The world has slid back to hunger levels not seen since 2005 — 735 million people are currently facing hunger, up from 613 million in 2019.
  • Unless things change, by 2030, 84 million children will be out of school, and 300 million people will leave school unable to do basic reading and writing — a far cry from the SDG goal to “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education” for all.

It was that success that set the stage for the SDGs in 2015, goals that, in the words of then-UK Prime Minister David Cameron, “inspire the world with what we want to achieve — to reduce preventable deaths to zero, to eliminate illiteracy and malnutrition and to eradicate extreme poverty in a generation.”

So what happened?

Covid-19, for one thing.

But the causes go beyond a single virus or war. The hard but vital work of global development no longer inspires the energy it once did, whether in the chambers of the UN or on the streets.

Read the full article about the Sustainable Development Goals by Bryan Walsh at Vox.