The United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) has released the Asia and the Pacific Sustainable Development Goals Progress Report 2021. The report comes at a time when the
global pandemic COVID-19 has swept across the economic, social and environmental contours of development with far-reaching impact. It provides an update on the region’s progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) based on data that pre-date the pandemic, and provides a valuable benchmark to take stock despite the impact of the pandemic in national data sources, which are yet to be more visible.
The Asia-Pacific region must accelerate progress everywhere and urgently reverse its regressing trends on many SDGs to achieve its ambitions by 2030, says the 2021 edition of the Asia and the Pacific SDG Progress Report. The report shows that the region fell short of its 2020 milestones for the Goals, even before entering the global pandemic. In the last decade, Asia and the Pacific has made extraordinary progress in good health and well-being (Goal 3), which may partly explain its relative success in reducing the health impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on its population. Despite these hard-won gains, the region faces many challenges, such as providing an adequate healthcare workforce, reducing premature deaths and improving mental health.
Also Read : India needs to prevent wildlife accidents to achieve goal 15 of the SDGs
Presenting the sub regional picture for South Asian countries, Dr. Nagesh Kumar, Director of UNESCAP’s South and South-West Asia Office, observed that the sub region made most of its progress on end poverty (Goal 1), zero hunger (Goal 2) and good health and well-being (Goal 3).However, the sub region is regressing on reduced inequalities (Goal 10), sustainable cities and communities (Goal 11), climate action (Goal 13), life below water (Goals 14) and peace, justice and strong institutions (Goal 16). Progress is slow or stagnant on most of the remaining goals. Dr Kumar underlined that the sub region was facing challenges due to natural disasters, lack of access to basic water and sanitation services (with 62 per cent of people in rural areas lacking access) and inadequate government spending on education, health services and social protection. He added that the sub region needs to maintain current progress on poverty reduction to lift an estimated 198 million people out of extreme poverty by 2030 to accelerate the progress on SDGs.
An alarming observation in the report is regressing climate action trends (Goal 13) and life below water (Goal 14). The Asia-Pacific region is responsible for more than half of the global greenhouse gas emissions and adverse impacts of natural disasters on people and economies increase year-by-year. As we find our way out of this pandemic, the ESCAP report suggests we must focus efforts on more equitable and greener growth.
Participating in the discussions, Ms. Armida Salsiah Alisjahbana, United Nations Under-Secretary-General and ESCAP Executive Secretary, said, “Recovery measures are an excellent opportunity for us to rethink our options for development pathways that are inclusive, more resilient, and respect planetary boundaries.” “As we enter the Decade of Action to deliver the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, we need to reinforce our collective commitment to the SDGs and let it provide our compass for building back together, better and greener.”
The report highlights the impact of mandatory lockdowns and social distancing measures on data collection activities, particularly from vulnerable groups.
Governments should renew their commitments to the SDGs’ monitoring framework so that recovery can accelerate a global transformation as promised by the 2030 Agenda to build back better.
The report states that there are 640 million multi-dimensionally poor people in the Asia-Pacific region, and the COVID-19 pandemic could push an additional 636 million vulnerable people to multidimensional poverty. Moreover, it also says that monetary poverty could impact 71 million more children in the region by the end of 2020. At least 850 million students in the Asia-Pacific region were affected and had lost almost half of the academic year by September 2020.
Further, unemployment increased by 15 million in the region in 2020. Compared to 2019, workers in the region lost 7.1 per cent of their labour income in 2020, more than USD 1.0 trillion. In April 2020, lockdown measures impacted some 829 million informal workers in the Asia-Pacific region.
The report is based on data drawn from the Global SDG Indicators Database from countries in the Asia-Pacific region maintained by Statistics Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Only SDG indicators with at least two data points available for more than half of the countries in the region were included in the calculations.
As part of its commitment to support countries with national level follow-up and review of the SDGs, ESCAP has developed a “National SDG Tracker” tool for countries looking to replicate the progress assessment found in the report. National governments can use the tool to produce snapshots of progress towards the ambitions of the 2030 Agenda.
