The United Nations (UN) urged world leaders to work double time in implementing the measures in mitigating climate change as the world risks "big misses" across its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). According to The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2023: Special Edition, the UN said that failure to redouble global efforts to achieve its SDGs may add to more political instability, upend economies, and lead to irreversible damage to the natural environment. "World leaders made a historic promise to secure the rights and well-being of everyone on a healthy, thriving planet when they agreed to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 SDGs in 2015. However, the combined impacts of the climate crisis, the war in Ukraine, a gloomy global economic outlook and lingering effects of the Covid-19 pandemic have revealed systemic weaknesses and significantly hampered progress towards the Goals," the UN said. "With only seven years remaining for implementation of the Goals, the stakes are huge. Using the latest available data and estimates, the report presents a sobering picture of the SDGs as the High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development starting July 10 to 19, where countries will showcase  concrete actions they are taking to achieve the SDGs, kicks off. The Forum, comes ahead of the SDG Summit (Sept. 18 to 19), which is a defining moment for world leaders to urgently reverse course and turbo-charge the SDGs," it added. The body noted that in the around 140 targets that can be evaluated, half of them show moderate or severe deviations from their desired trajectory with more than 30 percent of these targets have no progress or, even worse, regression below the 2015 baseline. The report also stressed the impact brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic which have stalled "three decades of steady progress in reducing extreme poverty, with the number of people living in extreme poverty increasing for the first time in a generation." "If present trends persist, by 2030, a staggering 575 million people will remain trapped in extreme poverty and an estimated 84 million children and young people will still be out of school. Based on data collected in 2022 in 119 countries, 56 per cent of the countries lacked laws that prohibit direct and indirect discrimination against women. Global temperature rise has already hit 1.1 °C above pre-industrial levels and is likely to reach or surpass the critical 1.5 °C tipping point by 2035," the UN said. It also noted that the poorest and most vulnerable sectors are the ones taking the brunt of the said global challenges.

All hopes are not lost

Meanwhile, the UN explained that despite the number of setbacks being experienced in the road towards the achievement of SDG, it had still observed several improvements in the overall situation of the word which it described as "potential for further advances". "The share of global population with access to electricity has increased from 87 percent in 2015 to 91 per cent in 2021, with close to 800 million additional people being connected. The report also illustrates that by 2021, 133 countries had already met the SDG target on under-5 mortality, and an additional 13 are expected to do so by 2030. Despite the global manufacturing growth slowdown, medium-high- and high-technology industries demonstrated robust growth rates. Developing countries installed a record-breaking 268 watts per capita of renewable energy-generating capacity in 2021.Additionally, the number of people using the Internet has grown by 65 percent since 2015, reaching 5.3 billion people of the world's population in 2022," "These important development gains demonstrate that a breakthrough to a better future for all is possible through the combination of collective action and strong political will, and the effective use of available technologies, resources, and knowledge. This advance can lift hundreds of millions out of poverty, improve gender equality and put the world on a low-emissions pathway by 2030. Strengthening data ecosystems will also be key to understanding where the world stands and what needs to be done to achieve the SDGs," the body explained. For more information, please visit: [https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/report/2023/](https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/report/2023/)