The UN High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF), the largest annual gathering tracking progress on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), wrapped up in New York on Thursday, with calls for increased climate action as a critical factor in achieving the goals.
Climate change is more than just one of the 17 SDGs specified in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. It is a threat multiplier with the potential to worsen some of humanity’s greatest challenges, including health, poverty and hunger.
Two flagship reports were launched during the Forum. The opening day saw the release of the annual report measuring progress on the SDGs, which warned that the impacts of climate change are undermining progress on the sustainable development agenda, threatening to reverse many of the gains made over the last decades that have improved people’s lives.
A second flagship report on the state of food security and nutrition launched a week later cites climate change as one of the main drivers of food insecurity, together with conflict and economic inequality.
Climate change and sustainable development have multiple inter-linkages and this is reflected in two transformative agreements adopted by nations within months of each other in 2015: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Paris Climate Change Agreement.
The High-Level Political Forum will inform several other critical meetings on the topics of climate change and sustainable development, including the Climate Action Summit convened by UN Secretary-General on 23 September, the SDG Summit on 24 and 25 September, both in New York, and COP25 in Chile in December.
Original source: UNFCCC
Published on 19 July 2019
