This month, leaders will gather in Sevilla, Spain, on a rescue mission: to help fix how the world invests in sustainable development.
The stakes could not be higher. A decade after the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals and many global commitments to finance them, two-thirds of the targets are lagging. And the world is falling short by over $4 trillion annually in the resources developing countries need to deliver on these promises by 2030.
Thursday night’s order by the Israel Defense Forces to Palestinians in Gaza to evacuate their homes within 24 hours was dangerous and deeply troubling. Any demand for a mass evacuation on extremely short notice could have devastating humanitarian consequences.
Governments need to make certain that multilateral development banks step up to finance the transition to renewable energy, the secretary-general of the UN says.
This week’s annual meetings of the World Bank could have important implications for the climate crisis and could help shift the trajectory of global warming. Multilateral development banks can make or break the transition to renewable energy, and governments are their shareholders. It’s time for those governments to step up and make sure the banks are prepared to advance the process.
On Saturday, I proudly stood with Japan’s Prime Minister, Fumio Kishida, and the people of Hiroshima in memory of an unprecedented catastrophe.
A report released Monday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a litany of broken climate promises. Together with the IPCC’s previous two reports on physical science and adaptation in the past year, it reveals the yawning gap between climate pledges and reality. And the reality is that we are speeding toward disastrous global warming of more than double the limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2100, as cited in the Paris agreement of 2016.
As the world moves ahead to mark International Women’s Day, the clock on women’s rights is moving backwards. All of us are paying the price.
As Secretary-General of the United Nations, I spend much of my time speaking with world leaders and taking the pulse of global trends. It’s clear to me that we are at a defining moment in international relations. Global decision making is plagued by gridlock – and a fundamental paradox lies at the heart of it.
We live in worrying times. The climate crisis, stark inequalities, bloody conflicts and human rights abuses, and the personal and economic devastation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic have put our world under greater stress than it has faced in my lifetime.
