GSP Digest

Redistribution

The United Nations Sustainable Development Summit took place on 25–27 September in New York, and Member States adopted the new 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. ¹ Compared to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the 2030 Agenda’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are intended to be universal in their application and therefore relevant to developed and developing countries alike. Their formulation was achieved through lengthy state-led negotiations with regular technical contributions from United Nations (UN) agencies and departments during the process, as well as many from civil society.

Upon review of the MDGs’ success at their close, a report of the UN Secretary-General finds that the world has fulfilled the objective of cutting the 1990 global rate of extreme poverty in half, although this progress has been demonstrably uneven across countries when observed in disaggregation. ² It was lessons like these that led to promises of a new agenda that would ‘leave no one behind’, presumably including many hard-to-reach groups for whom poverty has persisted despite gains for others. To this end, Tanvi Bhatkal, Emma Samman, and Elizabeth Stuart argue that ‘[g]overnments will not meet the SDGs unless they tackle the specific obstacles faced by marginalized groups’. ³

More generally, wealth inequality remains an immense problem on a global scale. According to Credit Suisse’s Global Wealth report, the world’s richest 1% now own more than all of the other 99% combined. ⁴ Commenting on the report, Max Lawson (Oxfam) reminds us,

We urgently need to get the middle classes growing again across the world, raising the incomes of ordinary families [. . .] To do this we need to redistribute wealth away from the bank accounts of billionaires and into the wages of workers across the world. ⁵

In the nuts and bolts of its implementation, there are emerging signs that the agenda may be up to this task. For instance, as the Inter-Agency and Expert Group on Sustainable Development Goal Indicators (IAEG-SDGs) debates measurement criteria, the proposed indicator, which is described as ‘non-controversial’ or largely accepted, for Target 10.4 on policies to reduce inequalities is ‘labour share of GDP, comprising wages and social protection transfers’. ⁶ This measure of relative well-being, one of only a few, is essential to ensuring the universal applicability of the new agenda, particularly its relevance for higher income countries. A similar observation about an increased awareness of the role of the middle class has been made by Nora Lustig (Center for Global Development) with reference to the IMF-World Bank Annual Meetings:

But now inequality in the rich countries is getting plenty of attention, as the plight of a beleaguered middle class in Europe and the United States (where the median wage has hardly moved in the last 30 years) raises the question of whether lack of consumer-led demand is contributing to weak growth (for the moment despite the benefits of cheap oil for consumers’ wallets), and the doubts about enough high-wage middle class jobs in the oncoming age of robots. ⁷

But Sanjay G. Reddy and Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven are unsure that the new agenda is equipped to address the structural causes of inequality. They write,

The weakest point in the SDG framework is its lack of attention to the dynamics of development and the constraints it faces. The framework fails to give attention to the question of how wealth and power is produced and reproduced in the global economic system or within national economies. ⁸

Financing for the implementation of the new agenda is another unknown, following the absence of any meaningful agreement at the Third International Conference on Financing for Development (see GSP Digest 15.3). Some are focused on global levies, tax avoidance, and evasions (discussed further in the ‘Regulation’ section). Yet, another way to approach the issue of financing development is the ‘Global Financing Facility’, a World Bank Trust Fund for maternal and child health. ⁹ The interesting point here is how health system strengthening is hidden behind the focus on particular vulnerable groups of populations, which usually attracts the attention of donors much better than general programs to strengthen health systems.

Another important redistributive mechanism is remittances, which are particularly relevant in the current situation of high levels of migration to European countries. Dilip Ratha, head of Global Knowledge Partnership on Migration and Development (KNOMAD) and an author of the World Bank’s latest Migration and Development Brief, says that ‘migration is intimately linked to the development process. The inclusion of migration and remittances in the SDGs is a welcome step forward’. ¹⁰ But regarding migrant workers’ remittances, there has been a significant slowing of growth to only 2%. This can be compared to the rise of 3.3% in 2014 and of 7.1% per year from 2010 to 2013, as the World Bank’s latest migration and remittances data point out. ¹¹ Similarly, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) also mentions in its report ‘Labour Migration, Remittances and Human Development in Central Asia’ that remittance flows have dropped since 2014. ¹² The ability of many migrants to send money back to their family and respective home countries was effectively restricted in 2015, mainly by virtue of weaker currencies vis-à-vis the US Dollar and lower oil prices. ¹³

Regulation

In the field of global regulation, a lot of attention was given to the UN Global Compact, taxes, trade, and migration. One of the most important negotiations on trade was the European Union’s (EU) pledge to include anti-corruption provisions in any future trade deals. ¹⁴ This new approach seeks to end the practice of bribery, revenues from which are estimated at €120 billion per year. Second, the Trans-Pacific Partnership deal signed on 5 October still needs to pass the US Congress, where support is uncertain and issues are deeply embedded within the 2016 presidential campaign. ¹⁵

In terms of economic and trade data, a recent World Trade Organization press release shows a revision of their own forecasts. ¹⁶ Meanwhile, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) international trade statistics presents empirical information on the slowdown in the second quarter of 2015. ¹⁷ Regarding the international monetary and financial system, the Trade and Development Report focuses on strategies and available solutions to achieve sustainability of financial resources. ¹⁸

Based on feedback from the business community, the private sector is seeking to engage with the UN on how best to align company goals with the objectives of the 2030 Development Agenda. ¹⁹ For this purpose, the UN Global Compact will facilitate by translating its ten principles ²⁰ into a guide of good practices ²¹ . The UN Private Sector Forum and members of the corporate community have shown their support. ²² This year, the forum’s major topic of concern was the refugee crisis. ²³ In addition, the Global Compact argues that the urgency of the crisis requires support and commitment from all global actors, including the corporate community, going beyond financial support. ²⁴

But the degree and type of engagement by the private sector with the UN have come under increased scrutiny, most recently with the release of the Global Policy Forum report ‘Fit for Whose Purpose’. In it, the authors argue that an increased reliance upon corporate ‘partnerships’ with the UN provides business with outsized influence in setting priorities, weakening the organization’s representativeness and reducing predictability of funding. In some cases, these endeavors even run the risk of ‘turning UN agencies, funds and programs into contractors for bilateral or public-private projects, eroding the multilateral character of the system and undermining democratic governance’. ²⁵

Financing discussions elsewhere have focused on improving tax collection and compliance efforts including the fight against tax avoidance, which is estimated in terms of lost public revenue totaling US$240 billion each year. For this purpose, the G20 meeting in Australia set up a 2-year tax reform program under the auspices of the OECD that would include several new requirements: (a) multinational disclosures to tax offices must detail their global activities country by country, (b) tougher rules so that digital multinationals will not be able to claim they are not operating in a country if they do not have a substantial number of employees located there, and (c) countries are to develop cross-border policies to harmonize tax breaks. ²⁶ To this end, the federal government of Australia has recently introduced changes in legislation to target more companies under the tax office’s scope, including penalty strengthening. ²⁷ On the other hand, the non-governmental organisation (NGO) Action Aid criticized these reforms for not taking into account the needs of many developing countries. ²⁸

Another OECD effort, one in which over 80 developing countries have participated, is the Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) initiative and its new agenda, which provides governments with tools to build domestic instruments for closing legal loopholes that allow corporate profits to be transferred to low- or no-tax environments. ²⁹ In the course of the 8 October 2015 G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors meeting in Lima, participants expressed their full support for the BEPS Action Plan, called for a rapid and widespread implementation of the BEPS measures to put an end to tax avoidance and submitted their endorsement to the G20 leaders for their adoption at the Antalya Summit. ³⁰

Rights

Human rights experts have expressed their dismay with the diminished role of human rights in the 2030 Development Agenda. ³¹ Neil Hicks, an international policy advisor for Human Rights First, notes that ‘One obvious objection is that the term “human rights” is not mentioned anywhere at all in the 17 proposed goals’. ³² While there are references to labor rights, reproductive rights and even ‘human rights’ among SDG targets, albeit as part of the education curriculum for future generations, Hicks suggests that the absence of a guiding framework grounded in human rights for present-day development efforts is evidence of growing pushback by states against what they perceive to be interference in their national sovereignty amid a growing body of international law on human rights guarantees. Others have also noted the absence of a more cohesive, rights-based approach to the SDGs. ³³ Still, they suggest that the importance of human rights is highlighted in the broader discussions and that realization of ‘human rights for all’ underpins many of the new goals.

However, this view that human rights are in the background of the new agenda is not acceptable to all. In terms of the businesses and human rights perspective, civil society groups such as the European Coalition for Corporate Justice point out that this is a missed opportunity to ensure that businesses are held accountable for human rights violations. ³⁴ At the same time, the 2015 UN Forum on Business and Human Rights held in Geneva from 16 to 18 November provided an opportunity to bring up some of these concerns. ³⁵ In other words, there are other avenues where issues not highly visible in the new development agenda can be brought to the forefront.

In other discussions, particularly those related to the refugee crisis in Europe, UN experts called on the European states to ensure that their response is rooted in their human rights obligations. ³⁶ However, some European states are reluctant to provide the necessary assistance to asylum seekers and there has been some backlash against migrants in several European countries. Worrying practices of off-shore detention and interception of refugee and migrant boats point to the lack of attention being paid to the human rights of those seeking asylum. On the ground, recent building of fences in some European countries has led to outcry by human rights supporters. These recent developments make the SDG Goal 10 on reducing inequalities all the more important. Part of the goal includes ‘facilitating orderly, safe, regular and responsible migration and mobility of people, including through the implementation of planned and well-managed migration policies’. ³⁷ As such, how states will carry out this particular goal and others remains to be seen. At the regional level, the European Commission announced in September 2015 an emergency relocation proposal ‘to relocate 120,000 people in clear need of international protection from Italy (15,600), Greece (50,400) and Hungary (54,000)’, including a €780 million support package available to participating EU member states. Another €1.8 billion would go into a trust fund for African countries to focus on the ‘external dimension’ of the migrant crisis and address the ‘root causes of irregular migration’ from the continent. Human movement caused by adverse climate–related events is also increasingly on the migration agenda; in 2013, there were 22 million people displaced due to natural disasters. The office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) delegates set an agenda on climate and disaster displacement at the Nansen Initiative Global Consultation 2015 in Geneva, hoping that COP21 to be held in December will produce an agreement on this issue. ³⁸

Health

The provisional agenda of 68th World Health Assembly, held in Geneva in May 2015, was discussed in the previous issue of the Digest. Among others, the World Health Assembly (WHA) adopted a Global Malaria Strategy aiming at malaria elimination by 2030; it comes at an important moment in time as an estimated 584,000 people died from the parasite in 2013, mostly in the African region. ⁴⁴ WHA also reaffirmed the organization’s will to finalize a framework of engagement with non-state actors by the next assembly. Finally, WHA endorsed an action plan to tackle antimicrobial resistance. ⁴⁵ The inability to treat conditions caused by antimicrobial resistance was ranked a priority in 2014 and a five-aim action plan links the issue to broader measures such as investment in research and development and improving access to medicines.

A recent study by the Access to Medicine Foundation confirmed the essential role pharmaceutical companies have played in creating equitable access to treatment, but recent events have revealed our dependency on pharmaceutical pricing. ⁴⁶ Daraprim, a 62-year old drug treating life-threatening conditions related to AIDS, saw a price increase of 5500% overnight, from US$13.50 to US$750 per tablet. ⁴⁷ This increase was justified by Turing as necessary to cover development costs for better treatments. Pharmaceutical companies regularly put this argument forward in order to justify the cost of treatments; however, the veracity of this claim is difficult to assess.

A series of dramatic price increases for both new and older treatments feeds into debates around Universal Health Coverage (UHC). A WHO and World Bank report counts over 400 million people without access to essential health services. ⁴⁸ The World Bank also analyzed UHC programs taking place in 24 countries in ‘Going Universal’. ⁴⁹ The study has provided evidence on two options used to attain UHC, either health coverage for the entire population with a focus on the poor or plans with differing levels of co-payments. Finally, one should not forget there is more to UHC than access and affordability, as the quality of health care services matters greatly. ⁵⁰

After Liberia in early September, Sierra Leone was declared Ebola-free on 7 November 2015, a year after the peak of the crisis that claimed 4000 lives and infected another 8000 in that country alone. ⁵¹ Neighboring Guinea is still waiting to pass the required 42-day period without a new infection to be declared Ebola-free. A year after the outbreak, many lessons can be drawn from the crisis as covered in an Overseas Development Institute (ODI) report. ⁵² Weaknesses in health systems within the three affected countries, dysfunction in the international response to the crisis, and the militarization of the response to the epidemic have been particularly exposed.

Social protection

Social protection appears in several of the 169 targets that make up the new agenda, which covers a myriad of development aims. It is explicitly mentioned within goals on ending poverty, achieving greater gender equality and reducing income and other inequalities. There are also allusions to social protection in goals on inclusive growth with decent work and on healthy lives. Given these broad-ranging themes, it is important to recall some modalities of the negotiations to discern where Member States’ priorities truly lie. As the chairs of the Open Working Group synthesized member inputs, they developed a hierarchy of focus areas placing more consensual topics toward the beginning of the document and the less consensual ones toward the end. The dedicated target on ‘social protection systems and measures for all, including floors’ appeared early, and remains in the adopted framework as Target 1.3, the third out of what are effectively 169 ranked targets. The fact that Member States would ascribe a primarily poverty-ending (Goal 1) function to the new ‘sustainable development agenda’ is no doubt a result of the fusion between the Rio+20 and post-MDG processes, through which ‘sustainable development’ continued its evolution from being a largely environmental topic to a development model comprising three distinct pillars (economic, social, and environmental). ⁵³

During the negotiations, there had long been differences of opinion even among social protection advocates about whether social protection was an end unto itself or rather a means to achieving other ends. In the absence of a dedicated goal on social protection, the new framework appears to have settled that debate; as it is now conceived, social protection policies contribute to poverty reduction, are a method by which to reduce inequalities and to achieve other aims articulated in the agenda. But as we prepare for practical implementation, the virtue of extending social protection coverage as an end unto itself appears to be an emerging measurable objective in the proposed SDG monitoring framework.

On 26–28 October 2015 in Bangkok, the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs Statistics Division organized a second meeting of the IAEG-SDGs to discuss the draft global indicator framework. ⁵⁴ Although more recently amenable to something larger, the group initially agreed to limit the framework to one indicator per target, which is no small feat given the density of many of the targets such as the one on gender equality:

Recognize and value unpaid care and domestic work through the provision of public services, infrastructure and social protection policies and the promotion of shared responsibility within the household and the family as nationally appropriate. (Target 5.4)

In these cases where social protection is mentioned simply as one of several means to achieve a target, indicators are unlikely to focus squarely on social protection and instead focus on more direct indications of impact (e.g. percentage of time spent on unpaid domestic and care work). The currently proposed indicator for Target 1.3 on the implementation of social protection systems and floors would, however, monitor just that: ‘the percentage of the population covered by social protection floors/systems . . .’ The UN Statistical Commission is expected to agree upon a final framework for monitoring the 2030 Agenda at its 47th session held on 8–11 March 2016 before an eventual adoption by Member States at the 71st UN General Assembly in September 2016 in New York.

Education

Key international organizations and stakeholders have strongly advocated for a prominent role for education in the new 2030 Development Agenda. For Julia Gillard, former Prime Minister of Australia and currently Board Chair for the Global Partnership for Education, education has not played a central role in the previous development agenda for two main reasons. First, the necessity to face immediate humanitarian crises has relegated education and other sectors to second place. Second, the absence of good data and information to monitor the impact of educational interventions and their quality reduces donor interest in education because it makes it difficult to get a sense of the results. Despite these difficulties, Gillard refers to the new development agenda and affirms that ‘this is now education’s time’. She continues, ‘People are more understanding now about how pivotal education is to the rest of the development agenda, that we can’t succeed in anything else fully unless we also succeed in education’. ⁵⁵ A recent post by Wolfgang Lutz for the World Economic Forum emphasizes the same idea, arguing that education should top the new development agenda. For Lutz, beyond the possible impact of education for economic growth, education has a transformative role for the whole development agenda. ⁵⁶ The author shows how in the last decades education has played a key role in the development of many countries including Finland, Korea, and Mauritius.

The 38th United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) General Conference approved the Education 2030 Framework for Action. ⁵⁷ This new framework of action tries to deliver country guidelines to implement the principles approved in the Incheon Declaration. This new Education 2030 agenda is the result of a consultative process in which international organizations, teacher unions, civil society representatives, and the private sector have participated. The objective of the Education 2030 agenda and the Framework of Action is to address the Education for All goals that remain unaccomplished, but also the new education priorities established during the post-2015 debate. In this sense, the Framework of Action proposes ways and actions to implement the new education agenda at the international, regional, and national levels.

In the context of the new education development agenda, some relevant commenters insist on the involvement of the strategic role of the private sector to accomplish the goals established by the international community, particularly in developing countries. This is the case of Vikas Pota, Chief Executive of the Varkey Foundation, who in a recent article published in The Guardian advocates for the participation of the private sector to overcome the difficulties of developing education worldwide. ⁵⁸ His main argument is that the efforts of developing country governments will not be enough to accomplish the important challenges that these countries need to face in the next years. For Pota, there are some private sector initiatives such as Bridge International Academies and the literacy initiatives promoted by Deutsche Bank that demonstrate the positive impact of private sector involvement. In contrast, Action Aid International warns about the negative role of education privatization observed in many developing countries. ⁵⁹ This international NGO posits that the private sector is supplanting public education instead of complementing it, in case of public shortages. In addition, Action Aid International points to the infringement of the most elemental of human rights as an effect of the increase in education privatization, including, for example, a reduced equality of opportunity produced by school fees.

Meanwhile on 12 October, one day after the International Day of the Girl Child, the Education for All Global Monitoring Report and the United Nations Girls’ Education Initiative launched a special report about the achievements of the last 15 years toward gender parity. ⁶⁰ The report shows how despite the progress made, gender inequalities continue to be an important global challenge for the Education for All agenda. In this respect, the report remarks how gender inequalities persist in measures of adult literacy and access to primary education. In a similar vein, the World’s Women 2015 report produced by the UN DESA Statistics Division highlights that two-thirds of world’s illiterate adults are women. ⁶¹

Finally on 5 October, World Teachers’ Day was celebrated. On the occasion, UNESCO remarked on the importance of teacher involvement to achieve the 2030 Agenda and particularly the Education 2030 agenda. At the same time, UNESCO reminded us of the global shortage of quality trained teachers, and the organization estimates that 10.9 million primary teachers will need to be recruited to achieve universal primary education by 2020. ⁶² For its part, the UNESCO Institute of Statistics has released a new paper about the situation of teacher shortages and the negative effect on prospects to accomplish the Education 2030 agenda. The article shows a complete picture of the teacher shortage by region and the projected demand for new teachers over the next 15 years. ⁶³

Food

This year’s State of Food Insecurity report shows continuous reductions in hunger. ⁶⁴ A total of 72 developing countries, more than half the countries monitored, have reached the MDG 1c target of halving hunger by 2015. Today, about 795 million people are undernourished globally, which is 167 million less than 10 years ago and 216 million less than in 1990/1992. The decline is more pronounced in developing regions, despite significant population growth. Although both MDG 1c indicators, the prevalence of undernourishment and the proportion of underweight children aged under 5 years, declined in developing regions overall, undernourishment declined faster than the rate for child underweight in regions such as West Africa, Southeast Asia, and South America. This suggests the need for improvements concerning the quality of diets, but also hygiene conditions and access to clean water, particularly among the poorest groups of the population.

The main hindrances, as highlighted by the report, for countries that have failed to reach the MDG hunger target are natural and human-induced disasters or political instability. The 2015 Global Hunger Index confirms that conflicts are strongly associated with severe hunger, and that famines, although fewer, now usually occur as the result of armed conflict. ⁶⁵ According to Welthungerhilfe, more than 80% of those affected by armed conflict stay within their countries and are therefore particularly affected by severe food insecurity due to limited availability, access, and utilization of food. ⁶⁶ A recent report warned that South Sudan may face severe food shortages, as parts of the population fell into the fifth stage of food insecurity for the first time since the start of the conflict 2 years ago. ⁶⁷ Nearly 4 million people now face severe food insecurity with tens of thousands existing on the brink of famine.

The world’s current single largest driver of displacement due to conflict, the protracted crisis in Syria, has left an even higher number of Syrians food insecure (9.8 million) than internally displaced (7.6 million). ⁶⁸ Recent numbers even estimate that more than 10 million Syrians do not have enough food to eat as a result of continuing violence, in addition to facing disrupted food production and hikes in domestic fuel and food prices. ⁶⁹ As worldwide displacement has hit an all-time high since records began, over half of the world’s refugees are children, making the effects of displacement on food security and nutrition even more significant. ⁷⁰

Against this backdrop, the international community agreed on a Zero Hunger Goal in New York in September as a part of the SDGs agenda. This goal reflects a sea change in the perception of, and ideally the response to, hunger since the adoption of the MDGs following the Millennium Summit in 2000. Not only do the SDGs place a much stronger emphasis on hunger through a stand-alone goal, but they also go beyond food security by explicitly including a nutrition target to ‘end all forms of malnutrition’ by 2030. The inclusion of two out of the six World Health Assembly (WHA) nutrition targets, ‘stunting and wasting in children under 5 years of age, and [. . .] the nutritional needs of adolescent girls, pregnant and lactating women and older persons’, responds to existing evidence: The nutrition target to be achieved by 2025 recognizes the decisive first 1000 days for future life chances, the particular vulnerability of adolescent girls to the effects of undernutrition, and the loss of national economic activity due to undernutrition. This constitutes a significant departure from the MDGs, which only included one single nutrition indicator: child underweight. ⁷¹

The 2015 State of Food and Agriculture offers approaches to address food insecurity and malnutrition in this context. ⁷² It shows how social protection systems have been critical as an economic way to directly foster progress toward the MDG 1 hunger and poverty targets in a number of developing countries. Social protection can both ensure increases in food consumption as well as a household’s ability to produce food and augment income while improving children’s nutrition, health, education, and life chances. As the majority of the food insecure and poor live in rural areas and depend on natural resources, the report stresses the importance of coherence across social protection, agricultural, and rural development strategies to pursue a systems approach that also overcomes structural supply-side bottlenecks. The report was released on World Food Day (16 October), which aims to raise awareness of global food production and scarcity and was celebrated during this year’s EXPO in Milan in support of the exhibition’s theme: ‘Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life’. ⁷³

Habitat, land, housing

As the world reflected on the ways to make a transition from MDGs to the SDGs, the key relationship between natural resources and social policy was clearly emphasized. Clean water and sanitation (Goal 6), sustainable cities and communities (Goal 11), climate action (Goal 12), and life on land (Goal 15) were among the goals agreed in the new agenda. The new SDGs are crafted ‘by all for all’ with a participatory and inclusive approach toward universality and progressive elimination of inequalities, unlike the MDGs which focused on reaching only 50% of the world’s population. The way in which the SDGs have been framed has emphasized that without taking into account sustainability and the protection of the planet, social and economic development would be impossible. ⁷⁴

Despite some progress, today 663 million people have no access to adequate drinking water and 2.4 billion people have no access to adequate toilets, which disproportionately affects children’s health, education, nutritional status, and ultimately their development, equality, and equity. The sixth goal of the SDGs, to ‘Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all’, is furthering this agenda through a systems approach. Water management means working across borders in trans-boundary river basins, which plays key role in achieving not just SDG 6 but in achieving all 17 SDGs that set the wider global development agenda. ⁷⁵ The 6.1 and 6.2 targets aim not only to improve drinking water and sanitation by eliminating open defecation but also to improve the entire water cycle. All countries are called upon to improve water quality, reduce water scarcity, reduce the amount of untreated wastewater, implement integrated water resources management and trans-boundary cooperation, and to protect water-related ecosystems. ⁷⁶

Water Sanitation and Hygiene Strategies (WASH) face many challenges like accountability, pricing evaluation, and stakeholder involvement in global collaborations. ⁷⁷ In the Global South, where a single episode of sickness can determine whether a household is pushed into poverty or not, health interventions have to be preventive rather than curative. Thus, social policy goals are achieved through a developmental approach of ensuring better infrastructure for health than instruments such as health insurance or better hospitals. There is an increasing realization that to achieve WASH as a human right, interconnected sustainable goals have to be achieved.

The UN-Water Chair, Michel Jarraud, commented that ‘the linkages between human rights and access to water and sanitation are deeply interwoven. And because water, as a fundamental resource, cuts across all aspects of sustainable development . . .’ ⁷⁸ The importance of water is also mentioned in SDGs related to health, consumption, cities, and the environment.

Regarding the sustainable development of cities, the 11th goal emphasizes the need to ‘make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable’. Mr Ban Ki Moon, during World Habitat Day, said that

. . . it also targets the unfinished goals of MDGs including the ongoing challenges of slums, housing and basic needs . . . also incorporate a new constellation of issues such as urban sprawl, segregation, transport, resilience to climate change, safety and public space. ⁷⁹

Challenging the new SDGs, Jockin Arputham, an activist fighting for the rights of slum dwellers, asserts that the upcoming Habitat III have to abide by the commitment that cities would be slum-friendly rather than slum-free with no forced evictions and no eviction without relocations that are acceptable to those who are relocated. ⁸⁰

Simultaneously, a lot of emphasis is on land along with water to maintain the ecosystems. The SDG 15 focuses on an aim to ‘Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss’. This is a target to achieve land restoration through a specific target on land degradation neutrality (LDN). At the 12th conference of the parties (COP 12) of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), the Executive Secretary emphasized strong interlinkages among desertification, land degradation and drought (DLDD), food insecurity, migration, conflict, and political instability. The land rehabilitation could enable countries to restore up to 12 million hectares of degraded land a year and help to close half the remaining emission gap, enabling them to stay within a 2° temperature rise. ⁸¹