UN's sustainable development goals are mission impossible

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

Sustainable Development Goals, launched under the auspices of the United Nations in 2015 as guideposts to a better world by the end of this decade — the world is way off target. This is not the first time it will have missed, by the way. International development types will recall that the Millennium Development Goals laid out in 2000 as guideposts for 2015 were mostly missed too.

We could trundle along this path until the end of the decade to discover then that we failed, again, to measure up to our expectations of global prosperity. But perhaps it’s time for a rethink? As the consequences of climate change roar into view — reminding us, by the way, of our collective failure to meet carbon emissions targets — and the COVID pandemic leaves us wondering what our next unanticipated risk will be, it’s time to re-evaluate how we try to engineer future wellbeing. Goals like the SDGs are meant to be aspirational and ambitious.

(Bloomberg LP has incorporated the SDGs in its sustainability strategy, which is outlined in the Bloomberg Impact Report 2020.) Yet rebounding from one missed target to the next seems pretty pointless. Indeed, it can undermine the notion of collective action. It risks inuring the world’s consciousness to mass destitution; to levels of poverty, sickness and death that should remain unacceptable.

If we care about sustainable development, we should try to bring it about in a different way. Just consider the scale of the failure. The first, and perhaps most important goal, was to put an end to extreme poverty, defined today as scratching by on less than $2.15 a day, in 2017 dollars at purchasing power parity.