Background
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Background
At the midpoint to 2030, the global commitment of achieving the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the SDGs is in peril. Just 15 percent of SDG targets with data are on track, while progress on most of the SDGs is either moving much too slowly or has regressed below the 2015 baseline – yet every bit of progress matters and counts.
In 2022, global hunger exceeded both pre-COVID-19 levels and the 2015 baseline, with between 691 and 783 million people facing hunger, 122 million than before the global pandemic and 146 million more than in 2015. In addition, more than 3.1 billion people in the world were unable to afford a healthy diet in 2021. Looking ahead, if current trends persist, it is projected that almost 600 million people will still be chronically undernourished in 2030. This points to the immense challenge of achieving the SDG 2 Zero Hunger target.
Ensuring food security and nutrition and transitioning towards more efficient, inclusive, resilient, and sustainable agrifood systems are critical for achieving the 2030 Agenda. They contribute to ending poverty, improving health and education outcomes, empowering women, ensuring the optimized use of natural resources as well as sustainable consumption and production, creating decent jobs and livelihood opportunities, reducing inequalities and rural-urban disparities, and to tackling the climate crisis and biodiversity loss.
While the world is severely off track to achieve SDG 2 – Zero Hunger – by 2030, there is still time to reverse the situation. However, this cannot be done in isolation. Ending hunger requires a systemic approach, seizing synergistic opportunities and recognizing and addressing the intersecting challenges and trade-offs that exist in agrifood systems and with the other SDGs.
Collaborations across sectors, stakeholders and partners, and geographies are necessary to address global complex challenges. Partnerships involving all levels of governments, UN entities, science and research institutions, youth, extension services, cooperatives, family farmer and other producer organizations, Indigenous Peoples, civil society, parliamentarians, and marginalized communities, as well as private sector, philanthropies and media are key to achieving the SDGs and agrifood transformation.
Building on the momentum of global processes such as the UN Food Systems Summit+2 Stocktaking Moment, the SDG Summit and the upcoming Summit of the Future, partnerships can create opportunities for all to participate in agrifood systems, support sustainable agriculture and rural transformation, and improve livelihoods while addressing social inequalities across agrifood systems.
Scaling up actions to accelerate SDG progress requires knowledge sharing and concerted, coordinated efforts from all stakeholders informed by evidence. Enhancing global, regional, national, and local partnerships for sustainable development can help to ensure all are engaged without leaving no one behind.
Objectives of the segment
- Discuss challenges, share lessons learned and good practices as well as report on innovative tools, mechanisms, and strategies to strengthen and facilitate meaningful multi-stakeholder engagement and partnerships more systematically and impactfully.
- Show successful cases of practical transformative partnerships to support agrifood systems transition.
- Highlight new emerging innovative multi-stakeholder, cross-sectoral partnerships and promising examples from the existing successful partnerships enhanced with transformative elements.
- Demonstrate the potential of transformative partnerships to accelerate the SDG achievement in an integrated, holistic and collaborative manner in the time of interconnected challenges of climate change, poverty, and food insecurity with practical solutions, good practices, and policies that tackle the issues within this nexus in a time of multiple crises.
- Provide inputs to the review of SDG 2 for the Expert Group Meeting (EGM) and High-level Political Forum (HLPF) and build momentum for the Summit of the Future.
Organized by
- Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)
- Major Group for Children and Youth
- Science and Technology Major Group, co-led by the International Science Council (ISC) and the World Federation of Engineering Organizations (WFEO)
For any additional questions, please contact Ms. Alison Graham, Office of Sustainable Development Goals, FAO, alison.graham@fao.org
Concept note and programme
Summary
Participation
The SDG Action Segments are open to all in-person attendees of the ECOSOC Partnership Forum. The Segments will be available to follow along virtually on UN Web TV.
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Concept Note
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