UN report: Climate change undermining fight vs poverty

UNITED NATIONS — Hunger is growing and the world is not on track to end extreme poverty by 2030 and meet other UN goals, mainly because progress is being undermined by the impact of climate change and increasing inequality, a UN report said on Tuesday.

The report on progress toward achieving the 17 UN goals notes achievements in some areas, including a 49 percent fall in child mortality between 2000 and 2017 as well as electricity now reaching nearly 90 percent of the world’s population.

But Liu Zhenmin, the UN undersecretary general for economic and social affairs, said that despite some advances, “monumental challenges remain.”

Liu said at a news conference that the most urgent area for action was climate change, which “may impact the progress made over the last several decades” in reducing poverty and improving life for millions of people around the world.

Biodiversity loss

According to the report, biodiversity loss is happening at an accelerated rate, and “the risk of species extinction has worsened by almost 10 percent over the last 25 years.”

Global temperatures have risen, ocean acidity has increased 26 percent since preindustrial times, and “investment in fossil fuels continues to be higher than investment in climate activities,” it said.

Liu said the report also showed “inequality is rising and too many people are left behind.”

That, he said, “is another big challenge for the world.”

The first of the 17 goals adopted by world leaders in 2015 is to eliminate extreme poverty—people living on less than $1.90 a day—and the second goal is to end hunger, achieve food security and promote sustainable agriculture.

According to the report, neither goal is likely to be achieved by 2030.

Extreme poverty

While the number of people living in extreme poverty declined to 8.6 percent of the world’s population in 2018, the report said the pace was slowing and projections suggested that 6 percent of people would still be living in extreme poverty by 2030 if current trends continued.

Francesca Perucci, chief statistician in the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, said an estimated 736 million people were still living in extreme poverty globally, including 413 million in sub-Saharan Africa.

“Extreme poverty today is concentrated and overwhelmingly affects rural populations,” the report said. “Increasingly, it is exacerbated by violent conflicts and climate change.”

While Liu noted “good progress” on 16 of the UN goals, he said  “there’s been no good progress” on ending hunger, which he called “a tragedy for the international community.”

The most direct impact of climate change is on agricultural production, a key factor in increasing hunger, he said.

More people going hungry

According to the report, the number of people going hungry has increased since 2014.

“An estimated 821 million people were undernourished in 2017,” up from 784 million in 2015 and the same number as in 2010, it said.

The worst-hit region is sub-Saharan Africa, where the number of undernourished people increased from 195 million in 2014 to 237 million in 2017, the report said.

On education, it warned that proficiency in reading and mathematics was “shockingly” low.

“Globally, an estimated 617 million children and adolescents of primary and lower secondary school age—more than 55 percent of the global total—lacked minimum proficiency in reading and mathematics in 2015.”

The report said women represent 39 percent of the workforce but hold only 27 percent of managerial positions.

No access to clean water

It said 785 million people had no access to clean drinking water in 2017 while 673 million lacked good sanitation systems, the majority of them in southern Asia.

Perucci said 80 percent of people worldwide were online, but only 45 percent of those living in developing countries and just 20 percent in the least developed countries had access to the internet.

“It is abundantly clear that a much deeper, faster and more ambitious response is needed to unleash the social and economic transformation needed to achieve our 2030 goals,” UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said in the report’s foreword.