Helen Clark: ‘Davos must look at how war and climate change affect poverty’
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Version 0 of 1. The 2,500 business leaders, academics and policymakers meeting at the World Economic Forum in Davos this week need to look beyond current financial concerns and focus on the effects that war and climate change are having on the fight against poverty, the head of the UN Development Programme (UNDP) has warned. Speaking as she prepared to travel to Davos, Helen Clark urged the forum to reflect on the global consequences of climate change, Ebola and the crises in Syria, Iraq, South Sudan and Central African Republic. “They’ll be discussing the new global context of volatility, uncertainty and unpredictability – no doubt with both the Swiss franc issue and the rouble on their minds,” she said. “But they need to look at this whole overview of what is happening with war, conflict and climate: globalisation speeds up the impact of any adverse trend anywhere.” The former New Zealand prime minister, who will also be discussing the best ways to help the Ebola-affected west African countries recover from the epidemic, called on those at Davos – and the wider international community – to show ambition and determination during a crucial year for development. In September, the UN general assembly will meet in New York to adopt the sustainable development goals (SDGs), which will replace the millennium development goals (MDGs). Less than three months later, the UN will hold negotiations in Paris in a bid to reach agreement on cutting carbon emissions. Clark, who was in London to discuss the SDGs at the Overseas Development Institute, acknowledged the scale of the issues but said she was confident of real progress if everyone played their part. “It’s going to require leadership globally, locally and nationally to really pick up the agenda and run with it,” she said. “It’s not just something that public finance can do: it needs investment, it needs trade – and it [means] dealing with the corruption that permits the illicit financial flows that are draining developing countries’ resources.” Perhaps the biggest difference between the MDGs and their mooted successors, said Clark, was the scale of the ambitions underpinning the latter. “The MDGs were in many ways about tackling poverty with official development assistance,” she said. “The SDGs are about the way we live, behave, invest, do business, produce and consume … This isn’t just going to be ODA, it’s going to be growing economies and domestic resource mobilisation and allocation; it’s going to be bankability, which means being credit-worthy and attracting investment and facilitating trade. All of this means better governance, better regulation, an enabling environment, and the rule of law.” Vital to the new agenda, she said, was the presence of SDG 16, which calls for the promotion of peaceful and inclusive societies, the provision of access to justice for all, and the building of effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels. “You don’t eradicate poverty without a number of other things going on,” said Clark. She also said that although the current shape of the SDGs – 17 goals and 169 targets – was unlikely to change dramatically, the UN was still exploring ways to simplify the agenda around six key themes: people, dignity, prosperity, justice, partnership and planet. “There’s not a great appetite for the member states to open it up again because they feel that a lot of compromise and consensus was built in the open working group,” she said. “The question is whether this idea of having the six organising or clustering principles will get some traction. In terms of framing the agenda, there’s something quite catchy about that and we need to catch people’s imagination with this because if you just say ‘sustainable development’, eyes glaze. If you say, ‘17 goals’, it takes a genius to recite the 17.” |