The annual report of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), presented yesterday, aims to recognise new risks, reduce “global pressure” and look at nature as a “collaborator” in human development, said the director, Pedro Conceição.
The Portuguese economist and director of the UNDP Human Development Report Office said today, in the first virtual presentation of the report in 30 years, that the challenge for the study was to recognise and confront “a new generation of risks” that are forming in the world, at environmental, economic and social levels.
The new risks, although at an early stage, have already been “overlaid” and “exacerbated” during the covid-19 pandemic, said Pedro Conceição, anticipating a range of “global changes” that will be felt on the planet.
Some of the new risks indicated by Pedro Conceição were the increased economic impacts that women have suffered, unlike men, along with changing social expectations about the role and work of women, but also environmental risks that the most vulnerable countries will suffer in the future.
Achim Steiner, UNDP administrator, said at the same virtual event that 2020 was a “long, dark year” that threatened to reverse decades of development, recalling that science issued warnings of the approach of a global pandemic like covid-19 because humans “gave up on nature”.
The covid-19 pandemic, climate change and inequalities are all interlinked and are major obstacles to development, presenting a time when “humanity is waging war against itself,” said Achim Steiner, defining the “age of humans” or “anthropocene,” the title of the report.
Pedro Conceição highlighted three mechanisms that the report presented yesterday indicates for “enabling and encouraging people to make different choices”, such as introducing “new social norms” to reduce pressure on the planet or creating “incentives and regulations to promote action” and changes in consumption, investment or “priorities”.
The third mechanism is “to look at nature as a potential contributor to the advancement of human development” and not as “a constraint”.
Achim Steiner argued that a transition to ecological and more sustainable development is needed, adding that the world must “decide to do things differently”.
“If we don’t act, future generations won’t even have another option,” he said.
The United Nations Development Programme administrator stressed that the report “combines the wisdom of life experience and the ability to look to the future with courage and the will to take responsibility.
Stefan Lofven, Prime Minister of Sweden, host country for the launch of the UNDP 30th report, stressed that gross domestic product (GDP) is no longer the only measure of success, with UNDP ranking countries according to the quality of their health, education and living standards.
The Swedish Prime Minister was pleased that the report included “planetary” measures and “inspiration and recommendations to turn things around”.
Under the theme “The Next Frontier: Human Development and Anthropocene”, the UNDP report, which marks its 30th anniversary this year, notes that for the first time, “in a relationship of 300,000 years” rather than the planet shaping humans, it is humans who are shaping the planet.
