Five years after the signature by the 193 United Nations countries of the 2030 Agenda and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (Sustainable Development Goals, SDGs in the English acronym), awareness of the need to adopt an integrated approach to address the complex economic, social, environmental and institutional issues necessary to achieve the transition towards a model of sustainable development seems to be consolidating worldwide. In the face of this greater awareness of public opinion, the world shows significant signs of progress on an economic level and on some social aspects, but also a worrying deterioration of the environmental situation and of some social and political dynamics, punctually highlighted by the increasingly numerous reports of the international organizations and research centers.
Precisely the richness and multiplicity of the reports prepared and the amount of global initiatives to move towards sustainable development in a global perspective confirm the unprecedented attention that is placed on the implementation of the 2030 Agenda by civil society organizations, businesses, financial intermediaries, administrations and local communities. Suffice it to recall, by way of example, the mobilization of the young gods Fridays For Future oriented to solicit a more incisive action in the fight against climate change to understand how much the new generations, but not only, show a deep interest in the question of sustainable development.
The awareness of the global risks deriving from the unsustainability of the current development model clearly emerges from the Global Risks Report 2019 of the World Economic Forum, which opens with these words: “The world as a sleepwalker towards the crisis? Global risks are increasing but the collective will to face them is lacking ". Created on the basis of a survey involving nearly a thousand public, private, academic and civil society policy makers, the Report describes a world increasingly concerned about political tensions, the macroeconomic situation and environmental disasters; a world that knows perfectly well how to drift and is aware of the fact that there is no common will to face global challenges. For many people interviewed, we live in an increasingly anxious, unhappy and lonely world. Anger increases and empathy seems to be on the wane. Environmental risks continue to dominate the results of Global Risks Report: Extreme weather conditions represent the risk of greatest concern, but many of the respondents are increasingly concerned about the failure of environmental policy globally.
In this context, the demographic theme returns to discuss. The world population, which remained below one billion people until 1820, continues to grow rapidly, as shown by i Population prospects 2019 UN. According to the most reliable hypothesis, the world population will go from 7.7 billion this year to 8.5 billion in 2030, then grow to 9.7 billion in 2050 and 10.9 billion in 2100. Obviously, the dynamics of the population will be very different from one region to another: Europe will go from the current 748 million to 710 in 2050, while Africa will almost double, from 1.3 to 2.3 billion, with an even more marked increase in the States sub-Saharan Africans. More than half of the population increase between now and 2050 will occur in nine countries: India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Indonesia, Egypt and the United States. Between 2010 and 2020, 14 countries in the world received more than one million migrants and another 10 have given in to over one million people. Among the countries destined to receive a net influx of migrants in the future, the Report cites, in order, Belarus, Estonia, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Russia, Serbia and Ukraine.
On the issue of climate change, the signs of danger and inadequacy of collective responses are multiplying. The most recent was the further advance of theEarth Overshoot Day, the day on which the world consumed all the resources produced by the Planet in that same year, set in July 29 in 2019 (last year was August 1, in 2000 the day fell in mid-September). Overall, in one year the resources of 1.7 planets are consumed on average, but if everyone consumed as the Americans would take 5 planets, 3 if the world had the lifestyle of the Germans, 2.7 if the model was the Italy.
Scientists also report that climate change is taking place faster than imagined. The recent report "Climate change and territory", presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) highlights the dramatic consequences of climate change on hunger and migration. Global warming will result in the desertification of ever larger portions of land, especially in the poorest regions, in particular Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America. The consequence will be an inevitable increase in migration, within the same countries and beyond borders: "economic migrants" will increasingly be "climate migrants", with the potential to exacerbate conflicts and tensions of a social, cultural and political nature.
The IPCC also estimates that human activities have caused approximately 1 degree of global warming since pre-industrial times, which is likely to reach 1.5 ° C between 2030 and 2052 if it continues to increase at the current rate. According to the IPCC, if today we began to drastically reduce emissions and absorb CO2 present in the atmosphere, heating could be kept within 1.5 degrees (the most ambitious goal of the Paris Agreement), as emissions from the past alone would not cause this threshold to be exceeded. On the contrary, in the absence of immediate and drastic measures, there is a risk that in just 12 years this level may rise to 2 ° C, causing irreversible damage to the environment and to our health, with serious repercussions also on poverty and inequalities. On these points, see the Macrotrends 2019-2020 Report by Harvard Business Review Italy, "Out of Balance: breaking and recomposition of the balances". So the next ten years will be crucial in determining what kind of world will exist in the decades to come. “If we act with decision, innovation and quality investments - concludes the IPCC - we can prevent the worst climate change that we know from happening, and thus the SDGs would also be reached. If we don't, we will face a world where it will be increasingly difficult for us and future generations to thrive. "
