A new Sustainable Development Agenda

Post-2015

Voices around the world are demanding leadership in 2015 on poverty, inequality and climate change.

These universal challenges demand
 global action, and this year presents unprecedented opportunities for achieving the future we want. This September, world leaders will gather at the United Nations in New York to adopt a new agenda for sustainable development. This is also the year when they will reach a global agreement on climate change at the Paris Climate Conference.

These new global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will guide policy and funding for the next 15 years, beginning with a historic pledge to end poverty. Everywhere. Permanently.
Paul Ladd, Director of the UNDP Team on the Post-2015 Development Agenda, talks about 2015, a year in which countries will shape a new development agenda and reach a global agreement on climate change.

This is also the deadline year for the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which in September 2000 rallied the world around a common 15-year agenda to tackle the indignity of poverty.

The MDGs established measurable, universally-agreed objectives for eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, preventing deadly but treatable disease, and expanding educational opportunities to all children, among other development imperatives.

The MDGs drove progress in several important areas:

• Income poverty
• Access to improved sources of water
• Primary school enrollment
• Child mortality

Yet the job is unfinished for millions of people—we need to go the last mile on ending hunger, achieving full gender equality, improving health services and getting every child into school. Now we must shift the world onto a sustainable path.

This new development agenda should apply to all countries, promote peaceful and inclusive societies, create better jobs and tackle the environmental challenges of our time—particularly climate change.

The SDGs must finish the job that the MDGs started, and leave no one behind.