Volcanoes are erupting in The Philippines, but on-fire Australia received some welcome rain. The Iran war cries have been called off and The Donald’s military powers are about to be hamstrung by the Senate. Meanwhile, his impeachment trial is starting, and we’re all on Twitter for a front-row seat.
What Could Go Right? The Race to 2030
Have the UN goals for a better world been a success or a failure? It depends through which lens you look at them.
Emma Varvaloucas
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The Race to 2030
In 2015, United Nations (UN) members adopted the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These goals are 17 big-ticket items, like clean water, gender equality, zero poverty, and so on, that together constitute comprehensive progress on a global scale. Each goal includes several targets, and a deadline to meet them was set for 2030.
At the halfway point last September, officials announced that only 15 percent of the targets were on track, with the UN Secretary-General calling for an SDG “rescue plan.”
The amount of media attention on the SDGs is limited. But if you heard about them last year, you would be forgiven for thinking that the world is going backwards, given the emphasis on their failure. It’s not. The SDGs were not made in order to create progress, but to speed it up. Not meeting their targets implies not meeting that higher bar of success, not that no progress has been made at all.
We can take a more balanced view of whether or not the world has moved forward since 2015 using a recent working paper published by three researchers at the Brookings Institution. (One of them, John W. McArthur, is a member of The Progress Network.) The paper tracks 24 SDG-related indicators across 100 countries.
The simplified report card from its findings is this: Things are better across most of the indicators, although six of them are worse. There has been accelerated progress on a handful of issues, but others have slowed down. Status quo progress still represents mind-bogglingly large numbers of people becoming ill with preventable diseases, dying prematurely, or lacking access to things like education, sanitation services, drinking water, or the internet.
With that as the fair, full context to keep in mind, I wanted to pull out the three areas that have seen the most progress since 2015. They are:
- Marine-protected areas, which have already increased by over 160 percent and are on track to nearly quadruple by 2030
- The number of people receiving antiretroviral therapy for HIV, which has increased by over 60 percent, and the number of annual new HIV infections, which fell by nearly 40
- Electricity access, which is now expanding faster: on average, 1.6 percent of a country’s population gains access to electricity every year
We could look at the first point, marine-protected areas, through the lens of the major gains that have been made. In 2000, only two million square kilometers of the world’s oceans were designated as protected, meaning that activities there are limited for conservation purposes. A previous target aimed to protect 10 percent of the world’s oceans, just under 40 million square kilometers—about four times the size of Canada—by 2020. We are almost there today, at 8.4 percent. An additional 1.7 percent has been committed to but not yet implemented.
Or we could look at it through the lens of what has yet to be done. The new target for marine-protected areas is 30 percent protected by 2030. We are on track to reach only half that, according to the Brookings paper.
Any of the SDGs could be looked at through either of those lenses, and we need both to see clearly.
As McArthur and his co-author, Homi Kharas, wrote about their paper in Project Syndicate, “There is no reason to give up hope. The problem is not that everything is getting worse. It is that many things are not getting better any faster than they were before.”
What Could Go Right? S6 E26
How does one define utopia? Is it a place, a plan, or a proposal? Have we come closer to utopia through progress in feminism? Zachary and Emma speak with Kristen R. Ghodsee, ethnographer, professor, and author of Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life. They discuss the history of utopian movements, the danger of fearing change, and how weirdos and dreamers help move society forward. | Listen now
By the Numbers
52%: The share of Australia’s oceans that will soon be protected, far exceeding its target of 30% by 2030
37: The number of countries that have cut the probability of dying before age 70 in half since 1970
75%: The decrease in youth incarceration in the US between 2000 and 2022.
44%: The decrease in breast cancer mortality in the US between 1989 and 2022
Quick Hits
⚡ Big technology companies like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are looking to nuclear power to generate emissions-free electricity needed to power AI-based projects. (NYT $)
📉 Opioid overdose deaths in the US are dropping even faster than in recent months. One reason is the availability of the overdose reverser naloxone. A study found that its use by laypeople increased 43 percent between 2020 and 2022.
🔬 In a 10-year study conducted across multiple countries, a change in treatment regime for cervical cancer patients reduced the risk of dying by 40 percent. The study’s researchers are hailing the finding as the most significant breakthrough for cervical cancer since 1999.
🙅 California just became the fifth American state to ban legacy admissions in higher education in some way, and the second to ban them in private institutions. It’s a step forward for equal access to education.
⚖️ Earlier this year, state legislators in Nebraska voted to eliminate the two-year waiting period for voting rights to be restored to convicted felons who had served their sentences. After a legal challenge to the new law, the Nebraska Supreme Court has ruled that it is constitutional.
🚭 Teen tobacco use in the US has fallen to roughly eight percent, the lowest level recorded since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began measuring it in 1999.
🦠 Egypt has been certified malaria-free, after being plagued by the disease since 4000 BCE. Timor-Leste has eliminated elephantiasis, a parasitic disease that leads to disfigurements from swelling later in life. And India has eliminated trachoma, a bacterial infection that is a leading cause of blindness.
😷 A certain strain of flu, called B/Yamagata, has essentially gone extinct due to social distancing and masking measures followed during the Covid-19 pandemic. It may be the first documented instance of a virus going extinct due to changes in human behavior.
🫀 Doctors are now using a technology to create “digital twins” of organs before they go in for surgery. The digital duplicates allow doctors to plan upcoming operations, since they can be rotated and taken apart to show exactly what is going on inside, and to gauge the impact of various surgical techniques. (WaPo $)
🪪 The world has made progress on the issue of statelessness. A new report from the United Nations’ refugee arm says that over half a million stateless people have gained a nationality over the past decade. Twenty countries have improved rights, and 22 have adopted national action plans toward ending statelessness.
🌟 The European Space Agency just released its first images from its Euclid telescope project to create the largest and most accurate map of the universe. The mosaic of 260 images represents 14 million galaxies—and just one percent of the final map.
🦵 External fixators are devices used to save a limb when an arm or leg is severed, for example by a mine explosion or collapsed building. They are expensive, however, and difficult to access in conflict zones since they are mostly donated from rich countries. Two British professors have developed an alternative already being used in Ukraine and other areas: a tool kit for making fixators that doctors can put together themselves.
👀 What we’re watching: A judge in Georgia ruled that election officials have to certify results by November 12, after a Trump-aligned policy institute filed a case that sought permission for election officials to delay certification in the case of fraudulent ballots. Election officials, the judge said, would need to elevate fraud concerns to higher bodies, such as the attorney general’s office.
💡 Editor’s pick: That 60 percent of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck is a myth, writes Ben Krauss for the Substack Slow Boring. Plus: In The Atlantic, Daniel Engber questions whether Americans have really reached peak obesity ($), and The Washington Post looks into whether it’s really true that millennials have become the wealthiest generation ($). (Since we have reported on both trends positively, we also need to consider counter-arguments.)
TPN Member Originals
(Who are our Members? Get to know them.)
- This new map can help us heal our democracy | WaPo ($) | Danielle Allen
- How to win male voters without harming women | Politico | Richard V. Reeves
- Why isn’t Kamala Harris running away with the election? | NYT ($) | David Brooks
- Democrats need to talk about their good issues | Slow Boring | Matthew Yglesias
- FEMA funding and the disaster response | Tangle | Isaac Saul
- Why I changed my birth certificate 25 years after I transitioned | NYT ($) | Jennifer Finney Boylan
- Ta-Nehisi Coates and the myth of black fragility | NYT ($) | John McWhorter
- Why humility is the key to well-being | The Atlantic ($) | Arthur C. Brooks
- The breakthrough drug to conquer addiction: Ozempic? | NYT ($) | Maia Szalavitz
- America’s AI leadership depends on energy | Foreign Policy | Jason Bordoff
- How the Biden team plans to build peace from Sinwar’s death | NYT ($) | Thomas L. Friedman
- Why Israel won’t take the win | Nonzero | Robert Wright