A rare once-in-a-decade summit began in Seville, Spain on Monday, with world leaders under growing pressure to speed up efforts on poverty reduction, climate action, and sustainable development goals, many of which are now at serious risk of not being achieved.
The U.N. chief, Antonio Guterres, said the event aimed “to repair and rev up” a system of cooperation where “trust is fraying and multilateralism is strained.”
While more than 50 world leaders were due to attend the Spain summit, a notable absentee was U.S. President Donald Trump, after the world’s biggest economy pulled out of the event and refused to back a plan of action hammered out over the last year.
“The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development — our global promise to transform our world for a better, fairer future — is in danger,” Guterres told the opening conference session, as the region sweltered under a heat wave.
“The Sevilla Commitment document is a global promise to fix how the world supports countries as they climb the development ladder,” he said, even as many richer nations make deep cuts to development aid.
Need For Funds
With two-thirds of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals lagging, more than $4 trillion a year in funding was needed, and the world’s financial system needed to be retooled even more quickly to make it happen.
As well as helping countries raise more tax to spend on development, Guterres said reform of world development banks needed to be stepped up so they could lend more and draw in private capital.
Tied to that was a need to reform the world’s credit rating system to be fairer to developing countries as they attempt to invest in projects that will improve their risk ratings over time.
“Countries need — and deserve — a system that lowers borrowing costs, enables fair and timely debt restructuring, and prevents debt crises in the first place,” Guterres said, citing a plan to create a single debt registry for transparency, and efforts to lower the cost of capital through debt swaps.
(With inputs from Reuters)
