A UN report prepared by a group of independent experts urges governments to break down silos and tackle the climate and sustainable development crises in tandem. It calls for synergies between climate action and sustainable development that maximize benefits and minimize trade-offs, to enable countries to overcome challenges and achieve transformative changes.
Its findings reveal the need for an integrated approach across sectors and between countries, policymakers, researchers, financiers, business, and civil society for “a just, equitable and sustainable future for all that leaves no one behind.”
The 2024 Global Report on Climate and SDG Synergy is titled, ‘Synergy Solutions for Climate and SDG Action: Bridging the Ambition Gap for the Future We Want.’ It builds on the first Global Report on Climate and SDG Synergy published by the Expert Group on Climate and SDG Synergy in 2023. The report also draws on the Expert Group’s insights from the 2024 thematic series on seeking synergy solutions across financial systems, policy frameworks, cities, and knowledge and data.
The report highlights that the stocktaking exercises the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Paris Agreement on climate change underwent in 2023 demonstrated that both processes are far off track from reaching their goals, calling for accelerated implementation and synergistic action. According to the latest data, monthly temperature records have been set for over a year now, jeopardizing the achievement of the 1.5ºC temperature goal of the Paris Agreement. The 2024 edition of the UN Sustainable Development Goals Report shows that only 17% of the SDG targets are on track to be achieved by 2030, with progress having stalled or regressed on more than one-third.
The report chalks up this lack of progress to the lack of political will and the fragmentation and inertia in global governance, public administration, economics and finance, and education and research. Noting that over 80% of SDG targets are directly linked to climate, it offers recommendations on how to break down silos and accelerate impact, pointing to the 2025 round of nationally determined contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement as a major opportunity for countries to better integrate the SDGs and national priorities into climate plans.
The experts caution against top-down approaches, recommending that solutions be tailored to local priorities and contexts and suggesting that a global platform for knowledge exchange and data sharing be created to evaluate synergies effectively and inform policy decisions accordingly.
The report’s other recommendations include:
- Frame policies for development as policies for transformation;
- Achieve finance flows consistent with the needs of the SDG and climate action transformations;
- Promote technological innovations for job creation and economic growth;
- Strive for low demand and high well-being, especially in high-energy-demand sectors and urban settings; and
- Build resilience to drive change.
The report was launched on 16 July at a special event convened in the margins of the 2024 UN High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF). It was prepared by a 17-member expert group, co-led by Luis Gomez-Echeverri, Emeritus Research Scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), and Heide Hackmann, Director of Future Africa at University of Pretoria, South Africa. The UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) and the UNFCCC Secretariat co-convened the expert group to produce the report.
According to the web release, the report’s recommendations will support the discussions during the Fifth Global Synergy Conference in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from 5-6 September 2024, and the Summit of the Future (SoF) later that month. [Publication: Synergy Solutions for Climate and SDG Action: Bridging the Ambition Gap for the Future We Want] [Publication Landing Page]