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New York, March 25 – The United Nations called for spending US$70-120 billion in the next two years and US$20-40 billion annually thereafter in sustainable and smart investment in order to significantly reduce the possibility of another pandemic.

It said such a spending contrasted with the economic losses worth trillions of dollars to the world economy inflicted by the pandemic.

The call followed the release of The Financing for Sustainable Development Report 2021, which said the pandemic has widened the already unequal world and led to the elimination of development gains achieved in the last decade by millions of people in poor countries.

 The report, a joint product of 60 United Nations agencies, said the pandemic has caused the worst recession in 90 years to the global economy and has affected disproportionately the world’s most vulnerable people. The pandemic has also eliminated 114 million jobs and pushed about 120 million people in extreme poverty.

The report said, “sustainable and smart investment, for example in infrastructure, would reduce risks and make the world more resilient to future shocks. It would create growth; allow better life for millions; and combat climate change. “

“Provide ultra-long-term financing [e.g., over 50 years] to developing countries, at fixed interest rates, to take advantage of current historically low interest rates; 

“Better use public development banks as a tool for sustainable development investment; 

Reorient capital markets toward aligning with sustainable development by removing short-term incentives along the investment chain and mitigating the risk of Sustainable Development Goals-washing. “

The report recommended to: 

“Find a global solution for taxation of the digital economy to combat corporate tax avoidance, reduce harmful tax competition; and better use technology to combat illicit financial flows. 

Create a global reporting framework to hold companies accountable for their social and environmental impact and incorporate climate risks into financial regulation.”

“Review regulatory frameworks, such as antitrust regulations, to reduce the market power of large digital platforms. 

Modernize labour market and fiscal policies to reflect the reality of a changing global economy, including an increasingly digitalized world. “

Only immediate action can prevent a lost decade for development for many countries.”

“What this pandemic has proven beyond all doubt is that we ignore global interdependence at our peril. Disasters do not respect national boundaries,” UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed said. “A diverging world is a catastrophe for all of us. It is both morally right and in everyone’s economic self-interest to help developing countries overcome this crisis.” 

“The growing gap between rich and poor countries is troublingly retrogressive, and requires an immediate course correction,” said UN Under Secretary-General Liu Zhenmin, Under-Secretary-General of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs, which produced the report. “Countries must be helped to not only stay afloat financially, but to invest in their own development. To rebuild better, both the public and private sectors must invest in human capital, social protection, and sustainable infrastructure and technology.” 

The world’s response to the pandemic has been highly uneven and has widened the gap between rich and poor. The report cited a historic total of US$16 trillion in stimulus and recovery funds have been approved to fight the pandemic and restore the economy, but less than 20 per cent of that amount was spent on developing countries. It said by January 2021, all but nine of the 38 countries rolling out vaccines were developed countries.  

The report urged immediate action from governments, including: 

Reject vaccine nationalism and step up contributions to the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator to close the remaining funding gap of over US$20 billion for 2021; 

Meet the 0.7% Official Development Assistance (ODA) commitment and provide fresh concessional financing for developing countries, especially least developed countries; 

Avert debt distress by providing liquidity and debt relief support so developing countries can fight COVID-19 and its economic and social fallout. 

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New York, March 10 – The United Nations has launched a ground-breaking system to measure economic growth by integrating natural capital like forests, wetlands and other ecosystems in annual GDP reports. It said the new statistical accounting framework may reshape policy and decision-making towards sustainable development.
The new framework, called the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting—Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA EA), was adopted by the UN Statistical Commission. The UN said the new system would go beyond the commonly used statistic of GDP that has been used since the end of World War II. The current system, however, failed to reflect the dependency of the economy on nature’s overall contributions to human well-being.

Information on the new framework can be found at https://seea.un.org/ecosystem-accounting

“This is a historic step forward towards transforming how we view and value nature,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres on welcoming the adoption of the new economic and environmental framework.  “We will no longer be heedlessly allowing environmental destruction and degradation to be considered economic progress.”

See video (copy and paste link on a browser): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svZkCiigfDc

Guterres told the annual UN Statistic Commission meeting on March 2 that the global economy has increased almost five-fold in the past 50 years but that growth is at a massive cost to the environment.
“The bottom line,” he said, “is that we need to transform how we view and value nature. We must reflect nature’s true value in all our policies, plans and economic systems. With a new consciousness, we can direct investment into policies and activities that protect and restore nature and the rewards will be immense.”
The commission said the new economic reporting system would “mark a major step forward to incorporating sustainable development in economic planning and policy decision-making and could have a significant impact on efforts to address critical environmental emergencies, including climate change and biodiversity loss.”
It said two crucial conferences later this year, the summit on Biodiversity in Kunming, China, and the Glasgow Climate Conference known as COP 26, would demonstrate the benefits of the SEEA-EA to help policy makers make decisions based on hard data.
“The new framework would go beyond the commonly used statistic of gross domestic product (GDP) and would ensure that natural capital—the contributions of forests, oceans and other ecosystems—are recognized in economic reporting,” the commission said.

Elliott Harris, who is the UN Assistant General for Economic Development and top UN Chief Economist, said, “In the past, we have always measured our progress in the form of goods and services that we produce and consume, and value in the marketplace. But we have never done that for nature. We’ve treated nature as if it were free and as if it were limitless. So, we have been degrading nature and using it up without really being aware of what we were doing and how much we were losing in the process.”
The new framework “will allow us to see how our economic activities may affect our ecosystems, how the presence of nature affects us, and how our activities could be changed to achieve prosperity without damaging or destroying nature in the process,” Harris said.

The commission said more than half of global GDP depends on nature. But globally it is estimated that natural capital has declined 40 per cent in just over two decades.
It is estimated that human activity has severely altered 75 per cent of the planet’s terrestrial–and 66 per cent of its marine environment – leading to an average decrease in ecosystem extent and condition of 47 per cent against their natural baselines.  

Governments worldwide continue to make decisions on the economy without consideration to environmental impacts. Globally, countries now spend some US$4-6 trillion dollars a year on subsidies that damage the environment.
Climate change on the other hand contributed to extreme weather with the 2011-2020 period the warmest decade on record according to the World Meteorological Organization.

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Rome/New York, February 23 – The constant economic crises plus the coronavirus pandemic and extreme climate-related weather in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua over a two-year period have pushed up the number of hungry people from 2.2 million to close to 8 million in 2021, including 1.7 million who are considered emergency cases that require urgent food aid, the World Food Program said.

Surveys made by the Rome-based UN organization in January 2021 showed that the four Central American nations have had a series of severe setbacks that included homes and farms destroyed by hurricanes and rampant unemployment due to economic difficulties. About 15 per cent of the people just surveyed said they considered migrating as opposed to 8 per cent in 2018 when the region was hit by drought.

“Considering the level of destruction and setbacks faced by those affected, we expect this to be a long and slow recovery,” said Miguel Barreto, WFP Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean. “2020 was a year to forget across the world, and even more so for communities in Central America that were dealt a series of blows.”

“Urban and rural communities in Central America have hit rock bottom. The COVID-19-induced economic crisis had already put food on the market shelves out of reach for the most vulnerable people when the twin hurricanes Eta and Iota battered them further,” said Barreto. “Many now have nowhere to live and are staying in temporary shelters, surviving on next to nothing”.

WFP said it plans to assist 2.6 million people in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua in 2021 and requires US$47.3 million over the next six months.

Central America was hit by a record Atlantic hurricane season in 2020, which destroyed 200,000 hectares of farmlands and severely hurt the region’s economy, tourism and informal jobs. WFP said 6.8 million people who had a relatively stable life suddenly lost homes and livelihoods.

The pandemic further exacerbated living conditions in the region, doubling the number of hungry people in Guatemala and Honduras. People in those two countries and in El Salvador reported income losses or unemployment during the pandemic.

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New York, February 22 – UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres expressed his full support to the people in Myanmar and called on the country’s military to respect human rights and democracy.

The UN leader said in a speech delivered to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva that he welcomes a resolution to be issued by the council regarding the military coup that toppled the civilian government in Myanmar. Following is Guterres’ statement on the situation in Myanmar:

“We see the undermining of democracy, the use of brutal force, arbitrary arrests, repression in all its manifestations. Restrictions of civic space. Attacks on civil society. Serious violations against minorities with no accountability, including what has rightly been called ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya population. The list goes on. It is all coming together in a perfect storm of upheaval.

Today, I call on the Myanmar military to stop the repression immediately. Release the prisoners. End the violence. Respect human rights, and the will of the people expressed in recent elections.

Coups have no place in our modern world. I welcome the resolution of the Human Rights Council, pledge to implement your request, and express my full support to the people of Myanmar in their pursuit of democracy, peace, human rights and the rule of law.”

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Geneva/New York, January 26 – Learning from the harsh realities inflicted by the pandemic, some world leaders gave strong support to multilateralism as a way to deal with global crises as they contributed ideas and visions for the future to the virtual meeting of the Davos Agenda 2021.

“This is the hour of multilateralism,” said Angela Merkel, the Federal Chancellor of Germany, urging support for the global campaign of vaccination against Covid-19, for transparency, international organizations and for building resilience among nations.

Speaking on the second day of the Davos Agenda 2021, Merkel welcomed US President Joe Biden’s decision to retain the US membership in the World Health Organization. Several other top leaders of governments and international organizations also lauded Biden for promptly claiming back the WHO seat and reversing former President Donald Trump’s decision to exit WHO.

 “If we want to have multilateral agreements, common standards have to be put down as regards conditions of work and the environment. We have to be very fast at finding new answers to digitalization,” she said. “We need to address global monopolies, but going it alone won’t suffice to address them.”

“The vaccine shows we can find a way out of this pandemic, but it will be much harder than we think,” she said.

Merkel pushed back calls for Europe to take sides between the United States and China in a move that she appeared to agree with Chinese President Xi Jinping who addressed the Davos Agenda 2021 the day earlier.

“I would very much wish to avoid the building of blocs,” Merkel said. “I don’t think it would do justice to many societies if we were to say this is the United States and over there is China and we are grouping around either the one or the other. This is not my understanding of how things ought to be.”

“The Chinese president spoke yesterday, and he and I agree on that. We see a need for multilateralism.”

“But there is one question where we are not in immediate agreement. Probably the question of what it means when you have different social models. When does interference begin and where does it end? When do you stand up for elementary values that are indivisible?” she said.

The Chinese leader warned the US president not to nudge Europe into an alliance against Beijing, saying that any attempt to freeze China out of global trade and technology networks risked reigniting the Cold War.

“Forming small groups or launching new cold wars on the world stage; excluding, threatening and intimidating others; resorting to decoupling, supply disruption or sanctions would only push the world towards division, if not confrontation,” Xi said.

“Repeatedly, history and the reality reminded us that, if we walk down the path of confrontation — be it a cold war, a hot war, a trade war or a tech war — all countries are going to suffer in terms of their interests and their people’s well-being.”

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who addressed the forum at its opening, said 2021 offered the world the opportunity for an inclusive recovery from the pandemic while also tackling climate change and biodiversity loss.

“We have reached a moment of truth.  In 2021 we must address these fragilities and put the world on track”, he said.

“It is time to change course and take the sustainable path. And, this year, we have a unique opportunity to do so. We can use our recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic to move from fragilities to resilience.” 

“Inclusive and sustainable recovery around the globe will depend on the availability and effectiveness of vaccines for all, immediate fiscal and monetary support in both developed and developing countries, and transformative longer-term stimulus measures”, he said.

Top leaders from scores of governments, international organizations and corporations were invited to hold the virtual January 25-29 debate known as the Davos Agenda 2021 to try to rebuild trust while the world is struggling to stamp out Covid-19 that has killed over 2 million people in the past 12 months.

Organized by the World Economic Forum, the Davos Agenda 2021 under the theme “A crucial Year to Rebuild Trust,” is expected to gather the world’s foremost leaders to address the economic, environmental, social and technological challenges following the Covid-19 pandemic.

“In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the need to reset priorities and the urgency to reform systems have been growing stronger around the world,” said Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum.

 “Rebuilding trust and increasing global cooperation are crucial to fostering innovative and bold solutions to stem the pandemic and drive a robust recovery. This unique meeting will be an opportunity for leaders to outline their vision and address the most important issues of our time, such as the need to accelerate job creation and to protect the environment.”

The five-day program themes are:

–Designing cohesive, sustainable, resilient economic systems (25 January)

–Driving responsible industry transformation and growth (26 January)

–Enhancing stewardship of the global commons (27 January)

–Harnessing the technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (28 January)

–Advancing global and regional cooperation (29 January)

Organizers said more than 1,500 business, government and civil society leaders from over 70 countries “will set the agenda for a critical year ahead and discuss how to catalyse impact in the rapidly advancing Fourth Industrial Revolution.”

The conclusions from the Davos Agenda week will feed into task forces working on global issues for the upcoming Special Annual Meeting in Singapore.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres; Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General, World Health Organization (WHO) and Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director, International Monetary Fund (IMF) are among the heads of international organizations who will address the forum

WEF said the Fourth Industrial Revolution represents a fundamental change in the way we live, work and relate to one another. It is a new chapter in human development, enabled by extraordinary technology advances commensurate with those of the first, second and third industrial revolutions. These advances are merging the physical, digital and biological worlds in ways that create both huge promise and potential peril. 

It said the pandemic has “demonstrated that no institution or individual alone can address the economic, environmental, social and technological challenges of our complex, interdependent world. The pandemic has accelerated systemic changes that were apparent before its inception. The fault lines that emerged in 2020 now appear as critical crossroads in 2021. The Davos Agenda will help leaders choose innovative and bold solutions to stem the pandemic and drive a robust recovery over the next year.”

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