Sustainable Development Report 2023: Implementing the SDG Stimulus

At the midpoint of the 2030 Agenda, all of the SDGs are seriously off track. From 2015 to 2019, the world made some progress on the SDGs, although this was already vastly insufficient to achieve the goals. Since the outbreak of the pandemic in 2020 and other simultaneous crises, SDG progress has stalled globally. In most highincome countries (HICs), automatic stabilizers, emergency expenditure, and recovery plans mitigated the impacts of these multiple crises on socioeconomic outcomes. Only limited progress is being made on the environmental and biodiversity goals, including SDG 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production), SDG 13 (Climate Action), SDG 14 (Life Below Water), and SDG 15 (Life on Land), even in countries that are largely to blame for the climate and biodiversity crises. The disruptions caused by these multiple crises has aggravated fiscal-space issues in low-income countries (LICs) and in lower-middle income countries (LMICs), leading to a reversal in progress on several goals and indicators. Despite this alarming development, the SDGs are still achievable. None of their objectives are beyond our reach. The world is off track, but that is all the more reason to double down on the SDGs. At their core, the SDGs are an investment agenda: it is critical that UN Member States adopt and implement the SDG Stimulus and support a comprehensive reform of the global financial architecture. To achieve the SDGs the world must both alter its current investment patterns and increase the overall volume of investments. The Stimulus’ urgent objective is to address the chronic shortfall of international SDG financing confronting the LICs and LMICs, and to ramp up financing flows by at least US$500 billion by 2025. This year’s report also highlights six priorities to reform the complex system of public and private finance that channels the world’s savings to its investments – what is known as the Global Financial Architecture: 1. Greatly increase funding to national and subnational governments and private businesses, especially in LICs and LMICs, to carry out needed SDG investments. 2. Revise the credit rating system and debt sustainability metrics to facilitate long-term sustainable development. 3. Revise liquidity structures for LICs and LMICs, especially regarding sovereign debts, to forestall self-fulfilling banking and balance-of-payments crises; 4. Create ambitious, internationally-agreed upon criteria for sustainable finance that are mandatory for all public financial institutions. 5. Align private business investment flows with the SDGs, through improved national planning, regulation, reporting, and oversight. 6. Reform current institutional frameworks and develop new mechanisms to improve the quality and speed of deployment of international cooperation, and monitor progress in an open and timely manner.