It means we die earlier, we are less educated, our income is decreasing. (Representative)
United Nations:
A UN report published on Thursday argued that an unprecedented series of crises, chief among them COVID-19, has set human progress behind by five years and fueled a global wave of uncertainty.
The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) announced that for the first time since it was created 30 years ago, the Human Development Index – a measure of countries’ life expectancy, education levels and standard of living – has dropped below two years. Directly, in 2020 and 2021.
“It means we die earlier, we are less educated, our incomes are going down,” UNDP chief Achim Steiner told AFP in an interview.
“With just three parameters, you can understand why so many people are starting to feel desperate, hopeless, worried about the future,” he said.
The paper said that the Human Development Index has risen steadily over the decades, but began to slip in 2020 and continued to decline in 2021, eroding the gains of the previous five years.
Titled “Uncertain times, unsustainable lives,” the report points to the COVID-19 pandemic as a key driver of the global reversal, but also says that a complex number of crises – political, financial and climate-related – have taken time. is not allowed. To fix the population.
“We’ve had disasters before. We’ve had conflicts before. But the confluence of what we’re facing now is a major setback for human development,” Steiner said.
According to the study, the shock is truly global, affecting more than 90 percent of countries around the world.
Switzerland, Norway and Iceland have all retained their places at the top of the list, while South Sudan, Chad and Niger are at the bottom.
While some countries had begun to recover from the pandemic, many other countries in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and the Caribbean had not yet turned a corner before being hit by a new crisis: the war in Ukraine.
‘Lost trust’
Although the repercussions of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on food and energy security have not yet been counted in this year’s index, “without a doubt, the outlook for 2022 is grim,” Steiner said.
A major contributor to the recent decline of the Human Development Index is the global decline in life expectancy, which has declined from 73 years in 2019 to 71.4 years in 2021.
The report’s lead author, Pedro Concicao, described the reduction as an “unprecedented setback”, noting that some countries – in the United States – had declines of two years or more.
The report also describes how transformative forces, such as climate change, globalization and political polarization, present humanity with a complex level of uncertainty “never seen in human history”, leading to increased feelings of insecurity. .
“People have lost trust in each other,” Steiner said.
“No matter in institutions, our neighbor now sometimes becomes the biggest threat, whether it is literally in the community, or by nations globally, which is crippling us.”
“We cannot continue with the playbook of the last century,” argued Steiner, focusing on economic change rather than reliance on growth as a panacea.
“Frankly, the changes we need now are the metrics we need to introduce to the metrics of the future: less carbon, less inequality, more sustainability.”
There is also a positive note in the report, stating that improvements can be made by focusing on three main areas: investment in renewable energy and preparedness for future pandemics, insurance for shock, and protection against future crises. Innovation to strengthen handling ability.
Steiner also called for reversing the recent declining trend of development aid to the most vulnerable countries.
Continuing down that road would be a grave error, Steiner said, and “underestimating the impact it will have on our ability to work together as nations.”
(Except for the title, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)