UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) Policy Briefs

World population continues to grow and is expected to peak at a level of almost 11 billion around the year 2100. Most of this growth will take place in low-income and lower middle-income countries.

Climate change is one of the most pressing issues of our times. Sport plays an important role as part of the solution. Sport is a key social platform that can reach and influence millions of peoples worldwide and raise awareness on climate change, promote a culture in favour of climate action, and champion sustainable behaviours. The sport sector can contribute to tackle climate change by reducing sport organizations's climate footprint while governments and international organizations facilitate this goal by setting right policies and guidelines.

Documenting more evidence around post-COVID 19 transport measures can provide useful references in revamping transport systems. It is paramount, however, that governments and the private sector revisit such short-term policies with a view to ensuring that any emergency-based actions that may have had inadvertent negative consequences on sustainable development would not become permanent measures.

INFFs have an important role to play both in the immediate response to the current crisis and in rebuilding better. Integrated financing strategies can serve as a starting point for locally driven reform processes, providing a foundation for action. The INFF methodology puts forward discrete steps to improve financial policymaking.

The COVID-19 pandemic has posed new demands on development cooperation in its various forms: finance, capacity support, policy change and multi-stakeholder partnerships. The ongoing challenge of the pandemic and its consequences has also shown the durability and adaptability of development cooperation.

Development strategies that focus solely on urban development and leave rural communities behind are not adequate to overcome the development challenges we face. The in-situ development of rural economies and societies must be a central objective of development if nations are to achieve the goals of the 2030 Agenda. A precondition for substantial rural transformation and growth is higher agricultural productivity and the subsequent reallocation of productive resources towards expanding the non-agricultural rural sector. A dynamic local rural economy can benefit from and complement urban growth, alleviate poverty, and reduce migratory pressures on growing cities. Country examples show that it is possible to accelerate in-situ development by investing in infrastructure, offering educational opportunities, expanding financial services, and speeding up the adoption of technologies in food and non-food producing sectors. These investments help create a virtuous circle of agricultural productivity and non-agricultural development.

This policy brief reviews trends and impacts of wildfires on sustainable development, in all its environmental, economic and social dimensions. It provides an analysis of the key drivers of wildfires and proposes measures to reduce the risk and impacts of future wildfires.

Global progress towards SDG 1 had already slowed prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and the world was not on track to achieve this goal by 2030. The prospect of achieving SDG 1 by 2030 has been further dimmed by the impact of COVID-19. The global extreme poverty rate (SDG target 1.1) is projected in a baseline scenario to decline to only 9.2 per cent by 2030. This would mean that as many as 785 million people could find themselves in extreme poverty by 2030, far from reaching SDG 1. Given this context, achieving SDG 1 by 2030, will require extraordinary efforts by countries, both individually and collectively. The scenario analysis presented in this policy brief shows that a decline in income inequality can be a potent driver of poverty reduction and if combined with robust economic growth, can produce highly positive, if not miraculous, results for the eradication of extreme poverty, by 2030.

Activities geared to strengthening the capacity of public servants to implement the 2030 Agenda have multiplied rapidly since 2015, with a multiplicity of national and international actors involved. Yet, available information does not easily allow for a consolidated picture of how ongoing efforts address gaps at the level of individual countries. Areas identified in the Agenda itself as needing capacity building, such as data, statistical systems, follow up and review, have received high attention, as have planning and SDG localization. The landscape of capacity building for SDG implementation appears fragmented. There likely is untapped potential for cross-fertilization of capacity building initiatives. Reporting on capacity-building activities for public servants has not been a consistently high priority of governments. Because of this, the degree of responsiveness of capacity-building activities to recipients’ and countries’ needs is hard to assess. Government-wide capacity-building gap assessments and strategies are rare. Little is known about the changes in learning outcomes due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which can have longer-term impacts on capacity in the public service.

By putting stress on national socio-economic systems, the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed new tensions and trade-offs among policy areas, and exacerbated already existing tensions. In many countries heavily affected by the pandemic, this has revealed problems of lack of policy integration and policy coherence, both within and across sectors as well as across levels of government. Integrated policy-making has been critical in responding effectively to the pandemic, and will be paramount in post-COVID recovery to realize the Sustainable Development Goals.