We must cap virtue-signalling climate budgets to meet the most urgent human needs
The international development system is in disarray. Aid budgets have been slashed in the UK and abroad, USAID has been gutted, and the development banks like the World Bank divert ever more of their funding to climate even as global poverty reduction has slowed.
Hunger still afflicts 733 million people, conflict has displaced over 120 million. Easily treatable malaria still kills nearly 600,000 annually, mostly children.
On Monday, UN Secretary-General Guterres and many state leaders descend on Seville in Spain to drum up billions for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) –169 sprawling targets to reduce poverty, improve health, advance education, protect the planet, and promote peace. President Trump’s decision to withdraw is being decried as isolationist. Yet, the real isolation is the SDG agenda’s detachment from reality.
A US representative declared, “the United States rejects and denounces the… Sustainable Development Goals”. Far from a reckless retreat, this rejection offers lumbering development giants a chance to replace a failing framework with one that works.
The SDGs were doomed from the beginning, when they were adopted by the United Nations and endorsed by world leaders in 2015. The preceding Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) essentially had eight clear targets like halving extreme poverty and cutting child mortality. This helped drive remarkable progress: global poverty fell from 36 per cent in 1990 to 10 per cent by 2015.
By contrast, the SDGs are a bloated wish-list lumping vital goals like eradicating malnutrition and poverty eradication alongside countless vague promises like “promoting sustainable tourism” and fostering “lifestyles in harmony with nature.” By refusing to prioritise, the UN ensured none would succeed.
Inevitably, this behemoth agenda is “alarmingly off track” according to the UN’s own secretary-general. Only 17 per cent of the goals are on pace to be met by 2030. On average, the world will be more than half a century late in fulfilling its promises.
Achieving the full list would additionally cost a spectacular $10-15 trillion each year. In an era of fiscal restraint, this is fantasy. The UN’s refusal to focus attention on what matters most has squandered credibility and cash.
My think tank, the Copenhagen Consensus, worked with more than a hundred top economists and several Nobel Laureates to identify 12 proven development solutions that deliver the greatest benefits for low cost. These are policies such as efficient learning through structured teacher plans and targeted tablet learning, delivering effective mosquito nets to tackle malaria, agricultural research to drive higher yields, more income and fewer hungry, and better legal protection to ensure poor farmers’ rights over their land, increasing productivity.
In total, politicians could set aside just £26 billion a year – a rounding error compared to the cost of the SDGs – to deliver immense benefits. Focusing on these 12 policies would save 4.2 million lives annually and make the poorer half of the world more than £800 billion better off every year. Each pound invested would deliver an astounding 52 pounds of social benefits.
As it reels from swingeing aid cuts by the UK, US, and Europe, the United Nations and international development industry could seize this moment, by rallying global political support around a compact set of 10-15 targets that maximise impact for the poorest. This means hard choices: saying no to low-value goals, redirecting virtue-signalling climate budgets to the most urgent human needs, and embracing cost-benefit analysis to maximise the return on every dollar.
Trump’s exit from the SDGs is an opportunity. The question is whether the United Nations Secretary-General and political leaders have the courage to grab it. The world’s poorest don’t need 169 unrealised promises and more political hot air. They need efficient development.
Bjorn Lomborg is president of Copenhagen Consensus and visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. His new book is “Best Things First”