Vaccine supply remains constrained and is not in itself sufficient to end the current phase of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. Despite never previously having had to deal with a challenge that has impacted every country in the world simultaneously, the UN has excelled in this crisis, with the World Health Organization, UN Children’s Fund and World Food Programme all playing strong roles.

Blended finance mechanisms can potentially enable larger investor participation and help narrow the annual US$ 2.5+ trillion funding gap. However, in order to leverage more diverse financing flows for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the UN must create enabling environments – a key expectation of the Resident Coordinator (RC) function – while unlocking innovation and monitoring tools to measure impact.

The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the fundamental importance of strong health systems and universal access to quality health care. It has also highlighted the critical work of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the importance of the Triple Billion targets captured in its Thirteenth General Programme of Work 2019–25, as well as the organisation’s mission statement of ‘promote health, keep the world safe, serve the vulnerable’.

Human rights financing faces longstanding underinvestment, which has created structural, contextual and political impediments. This third pillar of the UN system has seen its resources spread thin at a time when the UN’s human rights machinery is most needed. In 2021, just US$ 129.3 million – 4% of the overall UN regular budget (excluding humanitarian affairs) – was allocated to the human rights pillar. Further, due to liquidity problems affecting the UN regular budget, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) received only 75% of its allocation.

The UN of the twenty-first century requires greater flexibility and adaptability; revamped recruitment mechanisms; and new thinking around the sustainability and interoperability of different funding streams and the expertise and capacities they support. The peacekeeping budget and how it is funded has led to a longstanding divide between countries providing the bulk of personnel and those providing the bulk of finances.

The COVID-19 pandemic has not only reinforced the importance of agreeing that certain critical global public goods (GPGs) should be available to everyone, everywhere, it has highlighted the spectacular failure of many countries – including those that have long advocated for provision of GPGs – to look beyond their own borders and ensure a fairer, more multilateral, GPG-centred normative approach.

Long-term climate analysis and predication are essential for climate mitigation and climate adaptation. The earth’s weather and climate systems are globally interlinked – today’s weather in one location will influence the weather elsewhere on the planet, which is why investment in improved weather observation capacity in the Pacific Islands will have global benefits. As such, national weather observations that are shared globally represent a global public good (GPG), while improving observations in locations that fall short of the Global Basic Observation Network (GBON) will have considerable significance.

It is essential to complement traditional funding for peacebuilding with blended finance, which in turn can support employment generation, economic inclusion, and more equitable access to social services.

In addition to increased voluntary and assessed contributions, it is important that new financing options continue to be explored, and that efforts to generate adequate and predictable funding for peacebuilding be renewed.

Can vaccines be classified as a global public good? While the overall numbers of those being vaccinated are heartening, they are also heavily skewed, with 90% of this global drive confined to the European Union, along with 11 other countries. In Asia and the Pacific, the numbers vaccinated remain very low – given current rates, it will take bold new measures if global herd immunity is to be achieved by the end of 2022.

Félix Fernández-Shaw presents a European perspective on the global recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and asks questions on the way forward. He also touches on the increasing importance of the partnership between the EU, its member states, and the UN, stressing the need for effective multilateralism. In this regard, he singles out the need for an effective UN and for strong EU support for the Secretary-General’s development system reforms.

In the first contribution, Ambassador Omar Hilale explores the challenges currently confronting the climate agenda. Specifically, he focuses on the interactions between the COVID-19 pandemic, the global financial crisis and climate change. He argues the world must make the transition towards sustainable modes of production and consumption, and that financing must be made available for the restructuring necessary to make this leap.

In the second contribution to Part Three, the UN’s Multi-Partner Trust Fund Office writes a coming-of-age story on the UN pooled fund mechanism. It traces the evolution of the concept of pooled funding from its inception in 2004 to a mechanism which has a central role to play in making the current UN reform a success. While aggregate trends are positive, funding to pooled mechanisms is largely restricted to a handful of contributors. The paper makes the case that, in order for a quantum leap in funding to take place, a corresponding leap in quality is needed.

In the third contribution, John Hendra and Silke Weinlich ask if the transformational potential of the UN Joint SDG Fund can be turned into reality. They explain that the significance of the Joint SDG Fund lies in the fact that it provides a unique financial instrument to the newly empowered resident coordinators, in turn one of the outstanding features of the Secretary-General’s reforms in the development system.

Henriette Keijzers touches on the important work being done to strengthen the timeliness and quality of UN data and its use in decision-making. She emphasizes the fact that the UN has taken a major leap forward by developing a system-wide data strategy. This strategy focuses on the importance of making change happen through data use cases. She concludes that the UN’s success in realising its ambitious vision on data will depend on the grit and leadership of the entire UN family.

In the final chapter in this section, Navid Hanif and Philipp Erfurth focus on the nexus of new technologies and investment in sustainable development, asking if they are reinforcing forces which can generate synergies and unlock new funding for development. The authors argue that investment in emerging technologies can help accelerate achievement of the SDGs, while grasping the benefits of new technologies can help accelerate investment in sustainable development.

This contribution by Orria Goni, Emily Davis and Thomas Beloe explores how to build back from COVID-19 with a focus on financing strategies, including integrated national financing frameworks (INFFs). The authors argue that financing strategies that put the SDGs at the heart of recovery are crucial.

This contribution by Homi Kharas discusses the financing of the SDGs but widens the horizon to look at, for example, the contributions of private financing of public investment. He stresses that economic growth, and associated increases in domestic revenues, is far and away the largest driver of new financing for the SDGs, estimating that spending on the SDGs by developing countries could increase by US$ 7 trillion as a result.

Cross-border financing of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), when defined as the flows to developing countries of financing that likely finance investments directly related to the SDGs, rose to US$ 675 billion in 2017, up by 17.1% in nominal terms from 2016. The increase was largely due to private flows that rose by almost US$ 100 billion (Figure 1).

In 2030 when the world assesses whether the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris climate agreement should be hailed as multilateralism’s greatest triumph or failure, achievements will be evaluated in real terms against SDG indicators, and in financial terms against SDG investments. If the world was to measure progress on key financial indicators related to the SDGs and the Paris Agreement today, how would we fare?

Searching for ‘SDG investment gap’ on a popular online search engine yields over a thousand results, a search of ‘SDG investment opportunity’ only seven. Omitting ‘SDG’ from this search, yields a reverse result: Investment opportunity produces a multiple of the results of investment gap. If we take this as an indication of perceptions on investing in sustainable development, what conclusions can we draw from these results?

The spectre of devastating global climate change darkens the prospects for development in both industrial and developing countries. The global climate system has already entered dangerous territory, with the impacts of man-made emissions increasing the probability of extreme weather events and irreversible damage to the global environment. During 2018, deaths from extreme weather events exceeded 5,000 people and more than 28 million required emergency or humanitarian aid. Munich Re, a global leader in the reinsurance sector, estimates that disasters, including tornadoes, hurricanes, wildfires, tsunamis, earthquakes and droughts, cost the global economy approximately US$ 160 billion last year.

If trying to grow a plant in the Sahara, it is no help to track the world’s total rainfall. Likewise, investing to protect a Caribbean farm from a hurricane has little bearing on a Pacific island’s resilience to typhoons. For most people, the intuition is clear. International precipitation aggregates are simply not meaningful for specific places and communities grappling with too little rain, too much rain or the wrong type of rain.

A long-held tenant of development policy is that economic growth is of prime importance. Growth expands incomes, and without a growing national income there is little or nothing to redistribute. Without a growing pie, the political and social dynamics would revert to a zero-sum game and thus, an expanding income makes it politically more feasible to redress inequality. Also, growth drives poverty reduction, and that is the overriding objective of development – and of social policies around the world.

The 2030 Agenda has brought not only a new paradigm about how governments address sustainable development for their citizens’ present and future, but it has also triggered a reinvigorated and rare appetite for a new generation of partnerships around Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): true multi-stakeholder partnerships where governments, investors, international organisations, private sector and civil society can come together to tackle complex problems. The United Nations development system entities with different mandates have been instrumental in germinating and bringing about SDGs and thus are particularly well-placed to articulate and convene these types of partnerships.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has launched an ambitious five-year strategic plan through its 13th General Programme of Work (GPW) 2019-2023, which was approved by the Seventy-First World Health Assembly in May 2018 (resolution WHA71.1). With its mission to ‘Promote health, keep the world safe, serve the vulnerable’, the GPW 13 outlines a clear vision for achieving three strategic priorities through its triple billion targets:
- achieving universal health coverage – 1 billion more people benefiting from universal health coverage;
- addressing health emergencies – 1 billion more people better protected from health emergencies; and
- promoting healthier populations – 1 billion more people enjoying better health and wellbeing.