Ahead of next week’s SDG Summit, the outlook for realizing the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is discouraging. Recent cascading crises threaten to reverse the progress made on several goals. They have also exacerbated one of the most significant challenges to realizing the SDGs: financing gaps.
With China’s economy slowing rapidly, many analysts around the world worry that a continued contraction in Chinese growth could potentially have an adverse global impact. Without China acting as the global engine of growth, they say, growth around the world could stall. But the story is more complicated than that.
Even as regular climate diplomacy has resumed between the U.S. and China, officials and observers of both countries have become markedly more pessimistic about the feasibility of carving out a separate lane for climate progress amid rising tensions. That may imperil our chances of a timely energy transition.
