It is vital that countries make the necessary investments to carry out the new sustainable development agenda that will be formally adopted next month, says a senior United Nations official, warning that the world can ill afford the costs of not doing so.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor the first time, we\u2019re not putting a band-aid on the problem. We\u2019re looking at the root causes. And unless we make the investments to look at those root causes, we are going to continue to have the conflicts escalate, we\u2019re going to continue to see the damage in the environment, and more and more people are going to be excluded,\u201d said Amina J. Mohammed, the Secretary-General\u2019s Special Adviser on Post-2015 Development Planning.<\/p>\n
In a recent interview with the UN News Service, Ms. Mohammed stressed that the resources needed to investment in this new agenda already exist and it is just a matter of unlocking them. \u201cWe can find the tools and the instruments that we need to make those monies work in the longer term and in the shorter term for humanity.\u201d<\/p>\n
On 2 August, the UN\u2019s 193 Member States agreed to an ambitious agenda that features 17 new Sustainable Development Goals that aim to end poverty, promote prosperity and people\u2019s well-being while protecting the environment by 2030, concluding a negotiating process that has spanned more than two years and which featured the unprecedented participation of civil society.<\/p>\n
The Sustainable Development Goals, which world leaders will formally adopt at a special summit to be held in New York from 25 to 27 September, succeed the eight anti-poverty targets known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which wrap up at the end of 2015.<\/p>\n