This is the year to get the Sustainable Development Goals back on track

The United Nations summit on Sustainable Development Goals, that was held in New York, assessed progress towards achieving the SDGs. Given this emerging scenario, the UN SDG Report, 2023 identified five key areas for urgent action: Commitment of governments to seven years of accelerated, sustained and transformative actions to deliver on the promises of SDGs; concrete, integrated and targeted government policies and actions to eradicate poverty, reduce inequality and to end the war on nature with a focus on advancing the rights of women and girls and empowering the most vulnerable; strengthening of national and subnational capacity, accountability, and public institutions to deliver accelerated progress; recommitment of the international community to deliver and mobilise resources to assist developing nations, and continued strengthening of the UN development system. Results that deserve deliberation A team of 64 scholars analysed 3,000 studies, mostly peer-reviewed published articles across the world to examine ‘Scientific evidence on the political impact of the sustainable development goals’ within national and global governance to address pressing challenges of poverty eradication, social justice and environmental protection. In the prologue to this report, Gro Harlem Brundtland, former Prime Minister of Norway and renowned for the famous Brundtland report, ‘Our Common Future”, expressed the hope that politicians and policymakers will take note of the suggestions advanced in this report and steer the world towards sustainable development.