After more than two years of intense negotiations, the U.N.'s 193 member states have unanimously agreed on a new Sustainable Development Agenda (SDA) with 17 goals -- including the elimination of extreme poverty and hunger -- to be reached by 2030.
At a press briefing Monday, Ambassador MachariaKamau of Kenya (photo), one of the co-facilitators of the intergovernmental consultative process, told reporters the implementation of the agenda could cost a staggering 3.5 trillion to 5.0 trillion dollars per year.3
This looks like "an astronomical figure", he said, compared with the hundreds of millions of dollars – not trillions – the United Nations has been traditionally seeking for development aid.
"It is ambitious, but not unattainable," he said, and could come mostly from domestic resources, both public and private.
"All countries have to rise to the occasion," he said, adding that it was imperative for the business sector to get on board.
Still, the U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs Wu Hongbo of China struck a more cautious note when he told reporters "it will be very difficult to give specific figures."But all 193 member states, he said, are expected to mobilise domestic sources to help attain the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The SDGs are a successor to the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which were approved by heads of state in 2000, and will end in December this year.
The new goals, which will be part of the U.N.'s post-2015 development agenda and to be approved at a summit meeting of world leaders Sep. 25-27, cover a wide range of political and socio-economic issues, including poverty, hunger, gender equality, industrialisation, sustainable development, full employment, human rights, quality education, climate change and sustainable energy for all.
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the new development agenda "encompasses a universal, transformative and integrated agenda that heralds an historic turning point for our world."He said the integrated, interlinked and indivisible 17 Sustainable Development Goals are the people's goals and demonstrate the scale, universality and ambition of this new Agenda.
Ban said the September Summit, where the new agenda will be adopted, "will chart a new era of Sustainable Development in which poverty will be eradicated, prosperity shared and the core drivers of climate change tackled."