As the time frame for the global Millennium Development Goals came to a close this year, world leaders have adopted a new set of goals that include ambitious targets on combating climate change, ensuring sustainable consumption and improving health.
At the U.N. Sustainable Development Summit in September in New York, more than 150 world leaders formally adopted “Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.” The agenda includes 17 new Sustainable Development Goals and 169 targets and builds on the success of the global Millennium Development Goals, which had eight goals and 21 targets and spanned the years 2000 to 2015. The new Sustainable Development Goals address health and well-being, poverty and hunger, as well as a range of social and environmental needs, such as education, gender equality, job opportunities, climate change, energy access, resource consumption, biodiversity loss and ocean conservation.
The new agenda “demonstrates unprecedented scope and ambition,” said the World Health Organization in a Sept. 25 statement. While lauding progress made under the millennium goals, “much remains to be done,” WHO said.
“Reports of global progress have often masked discrepancies in progress between and within countries,” the agency statement said. “There is a recognition of the need to focus not only on ensuring that people survive, but that they thrive as well.”
The goals contain targets to be met over the next 15 years. For example, some of the specific targets under the new goal to “ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages” are to reduce the global maternal mortality ratio to less than 70 per 100,000 live births by 2030; halve the number of deaths and injuries related to traffic crashes by 2020; end the epidemics of AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria by 2030; and ensure universal access to sexual and reproductive health care by 2030. Indicators for measuring progress toward the goals are expected to be released in March.
A woman holds a baby in a waiting room in Bogota, Colombia, in 2010. New Sustainable Development Goals adopted in September include targets for improving maternal health.
Photo courtesy Pan American Health Organization
“We are resolved to free the human race from the tyranny of poverty and want, and to heal and secure our planet,” the 2030 agenda reads. “We are determined to take the bold and transformative steps which are urgently needed to shift the world onto a sustainable and resilient path.”
While the Sustainable Development Goals are much broader than the Millennium Development Goals, they also reflect a much different era in global health and development, said APHA member Jen Kates, PhD, vice president and director of global health and HIV policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation. When the U.N. adopted the Millennium Development Goals in 2000, “there really wasn’t a movement around global health and so (those goals) really reflected a different moment in time,” Kates told The Nation’s Health.
For instance, the millennium goal target of halving the proportion of people living in extreme poverty by 2015 was met five years ahead of time. The target of reducing the rate of children who die before age 5 by two-thirds was not entirely met by 2015. However, more than 6 million fewer children in that age group died in 2013 than did in 1990.
And while the world has yet to accomplish targets to reverse the spread of diseases such as HIV and malaria, global malaria mortality rates declined 58 percent between 2000 and 2015, and new HIV infection rates fell by about 40 percent between 2000 and 2013.
Kates noted that the years-long process of developing the Sustainable Development Goals was more inclusive and transparent than its predecessor, and the goals are much more explicit in recognizing the social determinants of health. She noted that while the Millennium Development Goals relied more heavily on high-income nations assisting poorer nations in reaching the targets, the Sustainable Development Goals call on all countries to work toward the new targets within their own communities and across the world.
“(The Sustainable Development Goals) are meant to be a framework for all of us, including state and local health workers in the U.S.,” Kates said.
Chris Beyrer, MD, MPH, associate director of the Center for Global Health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and director of the university’s Center for Public Health and Human Rights, noted that nearly half of the eight millennium goals zeroed in on precise health problems, such as maternal mortality and early childhood survival. That specificity, he said, helped unite global coalitions and attract financial investments.
Beyrer said that while the Millennium Development Goals and their metrics were “more powerful than anyone expected” and much progress has been made, events such as the international Ebola outbreak and Syrian refugee crisis show how much work has still to be done.
“Real development requires more than assistance and aid,” he said. “One of the things we’ve learned is you can’t skip the governance component, and that’s been a painful and important lesson.”
To learn more about the new goals, visit http://sustainabledevelopment.un.org.
- Copyright The Nation’s Health, American Public Health Association
