The Covid-19 crisis has illustrated in a most dramatic fashion the insufficient resilience of our societies. With its far-reaching impact, affecting the three dimensions of sustainable development, this pandemic exacerbates vulnerabilities and threatens our collective pledge to leave no one behind. It shows there is still a long way ahead for the realization of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

For the first time since 2015 and the adoption of the Agenda, we are experiencing serious setbacks in its implementation. The pandemic has pushed more than 120 million people worldwide into extreme poverty; it has worsened food insecurity and widened pre-existing inequalities of all kinds at the expense of our most fragile populations. Forced school closures have also had a devastating impact on 1.5 billion children’s education and well-being, while diverse lockdown measures have seen growing unpunished violence towards women and girls.

The High Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF) of the United Nations, which took place from 6 to 15 July 2021, and in which France participated actively, enabled Member States and various stakeholders to discuss the ways to ensure a sustainable and resilient recovery from Covid-19, putting us on track to realize the 2030 Agenda.

In order to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030, we first need to address this crisis with a sense of urgency.

• To put an end to this pandemic, the only reliable solution at our disposal is to ensure universal access to vaccines. The Access to Covid-19 Tools Accelerator (ACT-A), and more specifically its vaccines pillar, the Covax facility, are key to realizing this goal. Out of 3.2 billion jabs administered worldwide, only 60 million have gone to people in Africa. Tangible action is needed: as announced at the G7 Summit in Carbis Bay last month, France will double its original commitment and deliver 60 million doses by the end of the year.

• The Covid-19 crisis is not only a health crisis, but also a socio-economic one. As a result, numerous countries have experienced severe public debt distress. As early as May 2020, the G20 and the Paris Club agreed upon the Debt Service Suspension Initiative (DSSI), enabling more than 70 countries to regain budgetary flexibility and engage in more substantive emergency recovery plans. In order to answer any forthcoming issue about debt sustainability, they also adopted the Common Framework for Debt Treatments beyond the DSSI, which enables creditor countries, in the Paris Club and beyond, to coordinate and cooperate on debt treatments for low-income countries.

As we enter the Decade of Action to deliver the SDGs, the clock is ticking, and States should not use the unprecedented acuteness of the pandemic to shirk their responsibilities. Even before the Covid-19 outbreak, our development trajectories were structurally incompatible with the achievement of the SDGs. We should therefore use this pandemic as an opportunity to put ourselves back on track, with more resilient, just, and sustainable trajectories.

One of our major issues to do so is to address the SDGs’ financing deficit:

• France urges all countries to respect their Official Development Aid (ODA) commitments. Through a new programming bill on inclusive development and combating global inequalities, currently being adopted in France's Parliament, France is strengthening the means and tools of its development policy. This bill targets a growing trajectory for ODA, reaching 0.55% of France’s Gross National Income (GNI) by 2022 and a final aim of 0.7%. It sets clear objectives to concentrate aid in the form of grants to the benefit of the most vulnerable countries.
• Building back better after the Covid-19 crisis requires mobilizing all sources of financing. One of the messages put forth in the Paris Summit on Financing African Economies in May is that reinforcing internal public resources and fighting against illegal financial flows are paramount to adequate funding for sustainable development.
• Furthermore, the private sector should also contribute, and clear standards ought to be set to avoid SDG-washing. The Framework for SDG Aligned Finance launched by the OECD and UNDP answers this urgent need, and we should now work towards its operationalization.

More than ever, the 2030 Agenda must remain our collective roadmap:

• The integrated and crosscutting nature of the 2030 Agenda guides our action. Global public goods are deeply interrelated, and we need to consider them in a comprehensive way if we want to prevent future crises from happening. A good example of that is the Prezode Initiative, an innovative international endeavour that draws on multiple areas of knowledge with the ambition of understanding and assessing the risks of emergence of zoonotic infectious diseases.
• The 2030 Agenda is based on multilateralism: issues related to global public goods do not have any borders. They thus require a coordinated approach at a global level. France will continue to take its full part in the fight against global inequalities and in the protection of global public goods.

These messages are, among others, the ones that France has conveyed throughout the High Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development 2021. France played an active role in most of the sessions of the Forum, which were rich in recommendations, best practices, and knowledge-sharing. The French Mission to the UN also organized, on the side lines of the Forum, a high-level side-event on the role of partnerships between Governments and civil society to build policies and responses for a sustainable, inclusive, and resilient recovery from Covid-19 and for the achievement of the 2030 Agenda. Finally, we co-sponsored several side-events to the HLPF on various themes, all related to the SDGs (such as public health and climate, circular economy, One Health approach for human, animal and environmental health and pollution prevention, agroecology, and food security, etc.). As we move through this Decade of Action, France will continue to work in a multilateral spirit towards the realization of the 2030 Agenda and the Paris Agreement.

Photo: Dikaseva on Unsplash

About the Author:

Ambassador Nicolas de Rivière
Permanent Representative of France to the United Nations