Sustainable Development Report 2020 Covid-19 and the Sustainable Development -Goals
Executive Summary - Sustainable Development Solutions Network, July 2020 - The world is facing the worst public health and economic crisis in a century.
As of June 20th, 2020, around 463,000 people had died from Covid‑19 across the world. The health crisis is affecting all countries, including high-income countries in Europe and North America.
The necessary measures taken to respond to the immediate threat of Covid‑19, including the shutdown of many economic activities for weeks, have led to a global economic crisis with massive job losses and major impacts especially on vulnerable groups. This is a significant setback for the world’s ambition to achieve the SDGs, in particular for poor countries and population groups.
The only bright spot in this foreboding picture is the reduction in environmental impacts resulting from declines in economic activity: a key objective will be to restore economic activity without simply restoring old patterns of environmental degradation. However, all long-term consequences of the pandemic remain highly uncertain at this point.
The use of the sustainable development report 2020 findings and data should be accompanied by the following bibliographic citation
Sachs, J., Schmidt-Traub, G., Kroll, C., Lafortune, G., Fuller, G., Woelm, F. 2020. The Sustainable Development Goals and COVID-19. Sustainable Development Report 2020. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
