UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon
UNITED NATIONS (CMC) – The United Nations says all of its 193 members, including those in the Caribbean, have reached agreement on the draft outcome document that will constitute the new sustainable development agenda to be adopted by world leaders at the Sustainable Development Summit here in September.
It said the countries agreed to an ambitious agenda that features 17 new sustainable development goals that aim to end poverty, promote prosperity and people’s well-being while protecting the environment by 2030.
The draft outcome document follows a negotiating process that has spanned more than two years and has featured the unprecedented participation of civil society.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon welcomed the agreement, saying it “encompasses a universal, transformative and integrated agenda that heralds an historic turning point for our world.
“This is the People’s Agenda, a plan of action for ending poverty in all its dimensions, irreversibly, everywhere, and leaving no one behind. It seeks to ensure peace and prosperity, and forge partnerships with people and planet at the core. 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’.
Caribbean Community (CARICOM) leaders at their summit in Barbados last month issued a communiqué noting that they are acutely aware of the opportunity provided to build truly vibrant societies and resilient economies and chart a new era of sustainable development for the region and the world.
They said the summit in September “will seek to get world leaders to embrace a new agenda and set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) designed to achieve a global paradigm shift in thinking about sustainable development and in the mechanisms needed to achieve the goals.
“Heads of Government welcomed the intention of the SDGs to end poverty, transform the world to better meet human needs and the necessities of economic transformation, while protecting the environment, ensuring peace and realising human rights,” the communiqué noted.
Ban, who met with the regional leaders during their summit, said that the UN system stands ready to support the implementation of the new agenda, which builds on the successful outcome of the Third International Conference on Financing for Development in Addis Ababa.
He said it will also contribute to achieve a meaningful agreement in the COP21 in Paris in December.
More than 150 world leaders are expected to attend the Sustainable Development Summit at the UN headquarters in New York between 25 to 27 September to formally adopt the outcome document of the new sustainable agenda.
The new sustainable development agenda builds on the success of the Millennium Development Goals, which helped more than 700 million people escape poverty.
The eight Millennium Development Goals, adopted in 2000, aimed at an array of issues that included slashing poverty, hunger, disease, gender inequality, and access to water and sanitation by 2015 and UN officials said the new sustainable development goals, and the broader sustainablity agenda, go much further, addressing the root causes of poverty and the universal need for development that works for all people.