Asia Pacific region needs to accelerate progress towards all Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations 2030 Agenda as SDGs in Asia and pacific will likely miss all goals by 2030 at the current pace of growth.
Goal 17 is the key to enable the success of SDGs. UN ESCAP emphasises the need to implement initiatives in the areas of finance, data, and technology to achieve such ambitious goals, said Dr Tientip Subhanij-Chief Financing for Development Macroeconomic Policy and Financing for Development Division-UN ESCAP.
“Despite its ambitions, SDGs consists of goals on poverty, planet, people, peace and partnerships and it ranges from focusing on people, poverty, hunger, wellbeing, quality education and equality,” she told the National Consultation on Innovative Climate Finance Mechanisms for Financial institutions in Sri Lanka workshop held in Colombo last week. She said further that SDGs implementation needs to be accelerated and more importantly, climate change is something that needs to be addressed urgently.
“We need to step up finance to finance SDGs, We need to review strategies as to how we can move forward and step it up. Accelerating progress on climate action requires significant resources, and therefore private sector has to play an important role in this regard. The choices you make today for climate finance will make critical benefits for the future,” Dr. Subhanij emphasised. “Since it has been assessed that Asia pacific will miss every single goals by 2030 deadline given the commitment of progress, we also need to identify current bottlenecks faced by the financial institutions when it comes to granting loans for green and social projects,” she said.
She added that UN ESCAP has worked actively in engaging fostering climate finance as UN ESCAP has successfully organized several international conferences in the past.
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