This week the United Nations celebrates its 75th anniversary. By the next time a similar anniversary comes around it will be 2095. We cannot wait that long to see whether the world has successfully limited global heating to 1.5 degrees Celsius and halted the collapse of biodiversity. We need strong action now.
The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed the fragility of many of our natural and social systems not least the situation of millions of informal workers in Latin America and the Caribbean who were stuck between staying at home and losing their jobs or risk going to work and getting ill.
The UN General Assembly is focusing on COVID-19, the Sustainable Development Goals, inequality and the climate emergency. This agenda shows how deeply country priorities and the global agenda are connected. The good news is that countries can harness the global agenda to support a sustainable recovery at home while in turn this approach can help achieve the global goals.
The climate and ecological emergencies are not waiting for the pandemic to go away
The human cost of the pandemic is immense. To date, there have been over 310,000 deaths in Latin America and the Caribbean alone. The economic fallout could push 45 million more people into poverty this year combined with the loss of 17 million formal and 23 million informal jobs.
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