Resilience offers new hope for achieving the UN Global Goals

[...]

“There are multiple challenges that we’re facing, threats that are impeding progress on the sustainable development goals,” she says. “Whether it’s climate change, or COVID, we believe that we really need to be more sensitive to the risks that are occurring and put in place measures to build resilience so that we are able to achieve the SDGs.”

And Girardet says this means “looking at the broad range of disaster potentials that could occur from biological, natural, technological and environmental hazards and making sure that countries are able to better manage these”.

With the new GAR Special Report the case is being made for ‘measuring and addressing current resilience deficits in a holistic manner’ as a way for countries to ‘build resilience and accelerate progress towards the underlying SDGs’.

“We need to understand the risks that we face, and we have to put in place measures to mitigate these risks,” Girardet says. “We don’t always see this happening, and we don’t see enough investment in this – so the report is pointing out some of the areas where we need to make better progress and also giving some examples of where countries have had solutions that are working that other countries can also try.”

[...]