The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), also known as the Global Goals, were adopted by the United Nations in 2015 as a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure that by 2030 all people enjoy peace and prosperity.
Over the past two years, the COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc on almost every aspect of our lives. And it is still far from over. The pandemic wiped out more than four years of progress on poverty eradication and pushed 93 million more people into extreme poverty in 2020.
At the same time climate change has become a crisis. To avoid the worst effects of climate change, as set out in the Paris Agreement, global greenhouse gas emissions will need to peak before 2025 and then decline by 43 per cent by 2030, falling to net zero by 2050. Instead, under current voluntary national commitments to climate action, greenhouse gas emissions will rise by nearly 14 per cent by 2030.
The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2022 -“Despite some progress, serious data gaps persist in SDG monitoring. s. It has also been an opportunity to experiment with innovative data collection methods, explore new data sources and modernize ICT infrastructures to meet data demands for policymaking.”
During the pandemic, partnerships were formed among government agencies, academic institutions, local governments, private businesses and civil society organizations to collect urgently needed data for policymaking. Such collaboration fostered new ideas and resources; it also increased the resulting data’s inclusivity, timeliness and utilization