Peru is among the world’s 10 megadiverse countries. But despite its many resources some 4.5 million people face severe food insecurity. Several communities are advancing towards sustainability for Peruvian food systems.  

It was a challenging year for families everywhere. Alongside a pandemic that has taken millions of lives, the broader socio-economic effects of COVID-19 reversed decades of important gains for the most vulnerable. UNDP doubled down on its commitment to build forward better, working with partners at all levels of society to ensure people have the means to live in dignity, and the skills and resources to recover from crises and create fulfilling lives. Here are some of their stories.

From uneven economic recovery to unequal access to vaccines; from widening income losses to divergence in learning, COVID-19 has had a disproportionate impact on the poor and vulnerable in 2021. It is causing reversals in development and is dealing a setback to efforts to end extreme poverty and reduce inequality. Because of the pandemic, extreme poverty rose in 2020 for the first time in over 20 years. Through this series of charts and graphs, we share select research from the World Bank Group that illustrates the severity of the pandemic.

For nomadic herders in the mountains of Mongolia, traditional cheeses offer a sustainable alternative to tourism income, with benefits for snow leopard conservation. The majority of people in this region live in semi-nomadic subsistence communities that make a living from livestock herding. For these communities, ecotourism represents an increasingly important part of the economy that simultaneously promotes the conservation of local biodiversity. But when the pandemic hit, the dramatic loss of international tourists shuttered the ecotourism industry in Mongolia.

Promoting regional knowledge and South–South cooperation, UNCTAD’s TrainForTrade port management programme has created a network to help port communities reboot their economies.

Developing productive capacities in least developed countries (LDCs) is necessary for boosting their response to and recover from crises such as COVID-19, according to a recent UNCTAD report.

Women Entrepreneurs was launched to support businesswomen in the aftermath of the earthquake that struck Haiti on January 2010 and it was then relaunched in 2018 to support women living in the most vulnerable neighbourhoods of the capital, Port-au-Prince. The initiative has been funded by the Korean International Cooperation Agency and implemented by UNDP in collaboration with the community platforms. As such, Women Entrepreneurs has been providing training and enhancing women’s business skills, thereby boosting their autonomy and resilience.

Commodity prices across the board have increased significantly in recent months in the Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region. A new UNCTAD study reviews the price increases and their potential. The report underlines that structural differences across the region will likely result in heterogenous impacts of commodity price increases on trade and GDP growth. Most importantly, the high level of uncertainty on commodity markets and the high degrees of commodity dependence across the region underscore the need to boost the resilience of LAC economies to future shocks.

Without resolute measures to address this growing divide, COVID‑19 will continue to claim lives and destroy jobs, inflicting lasting damage to investment, productivity, and growth in the most vulnerable countries. The pandemic will further disrupt the lives of the most vulnerable with rising extreme poverty and malnutrition, shattering all hope of attaining the SDGs. The IMF suggests narrowing the pandemic divide through collective action to boost access to vaccines, secure critical financing, and accelerate the transition to a greener, digital, and more inclusive world.

Nobody has a crystal ball. How we can prepare for an increasingly uncertain future when we don't know what it is? Hello Future is a UNDP video series exploring the trends shaping our world. From digitalization to inequality, to the climate emergency, to crisis response, we examine the critical issues facing humans and the place we call home, and what we must do if we're to get out of this century alive.

The global economic recovery continues, but with a widening gap between advanced economies and many emerging market and developing economies, IMF reports. Growth prospects for advanced economies this year have improved by 0.5 percentage point, but this is offset exactly by a downward revision for emerging market and developing economies driven by a significant downgrade for emerging Asia. Faster-than-expected vaccination rates and return to normalcy lead to upgrades, while lack of access to vaccines and renewed waves of COVID-19 cases in some countries, notably India, lead to downgrades.

UNCTAD’s updated SDG Pulse shows how the COVID-19 health crisis exacerbated many imbalances in 2020 and delayed progress towards the SDGs by presenting indicators such as trade and debt.

Global growth is surging again, only a year after COVID-19 triggered the deepest recession since World War II.  According to the World Bank, this year is likely to mark the strongest post-recession rebound in 80 years: global GDP is expected to expand 5.6 percent. Almost all advanced economies will go back to their pre-pandemic per-capita income levels in 2022. In some parts of the world, the pandemic’s damage is being repaired quickly. For the world’s 74 poorest countries, accounting for roughly half of all people living on less than $1.90 a day, the global “recovery” is nowhere to be seen.

Developing countries whose economies depend on commodities must enhance their technological capacities to escape the trap that leaves most of their populations poor and vulnerable, says UNCTAD’s Commodities and Development Report 2021. About two thirds of developing countries were commodity dependent in 2019, meaning at least 60% of their merchandise export revenues came from primary goods, such as cacao, coffee, copper, cotton, lithium and oil. The report recommends identifying new sectors and designing targeted policies to promote innovation.

Today, more and more people are turning their ideas and imaginations into livelihoods. The creative economy is one of the world’s most rapidly growing sectors, contributing 3% of the global GDP. Creativity is also a renewable, sustainable, limitless resource that we can find anywhere around the world. As we face climate crisis and the pandemic, its potential to drive a human-centric, inclusive development has never been more relevant. From 6 to 16 July 2021, UNESCO will highlight the infinite possibilities of digital technologies in an immersive virtual reality exhibition, Korea: Cubically Imagined.

The question is formulated at the High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF),  the core UN platform for follow-up and review of the Sustainable Development Goals (SGDs). This next meeting of the HLPF (6-15 July) focuses on a sustainable and resilient recovery from COVID-19. The HLPF will review 9 of the 17 SDGs, where ministers and other participants will explore policies and international cooperation to control the pandemic and its impacts. To reach a better and more sustainable future for all by 2030, the world needs to be back on track in less than a decade.