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ESCAP’s input to the thematic review of the High-Level Political Forum 2022
A. Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the implementation of the SDGs under review in the 2022 HLPF
1. The Asia-Pacific region needs to accelerate progress to achieve any of the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals. The region is not on track to achieve any of the 17 SDGs. Six years after its adoption, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development slips further and further out of the region’s reach, as the COVID-19 pandemic has slowed progress towards the SDGs and climate change has exacerbated development challenges. The current pace of progress indicates that the horizon for achieving the goals has slipped further away, to 2065, compared to a horizon of 2052 that was estimated in 2017.
2. Lack of data remains a challenge to measure progress of the implementation of the 2030 Agenda and impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on sustainable development. Data availability has improved significantly since 2017 when, for the first time in 2021, more than half of the 231 Sustainable Development Goals indicators have sufficient data to measure progress. Yet 34% of the Sustainable Development Goal targets still cannot be measured. Large data gaps include those related to gender equality (Goal 5), life below water (Goal 14) and peace, justice and strong institutions (Goal 16). The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on development in the region has been significant, even though one of the challenges of identifying the impact is the lack of data for many of SDG indicators, particularly for the environment-related Goals. Thus, while data availability marks that for the first time more than half of the 231 Sustainable Development Goal indicators have sufficient data in Asia and the Pacific, large data gaps exist, hindering evidence-based monitoring and planning.
3. Nevertheless, two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, it is clear that the lives of people continue to be disrupted as the pandemic has hindered sustainable development efforts globally and in Asia and the Pacific. The pandemic has disrupted economic growth and exacerbated inequalities and threatens to reverse the development gains of recent years as the pandemic has resulted in a global decline in human development and a rise in extreme poverty for the first time in a generation. Even though the full impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the implementation of the SDGs will take some time to manifest themselves, the most recent projections indicate that an additional 89 million people in the Asia-Pacific region are estimated to have been pushed back into extreme poverty, according to the $1.9 per day threshold. Estimates suggest that the figure would rise to 158 million and 172 million if $3.20 and $5.50 per day thresholds are used. Using the $5.50 threshold, Asia-Pacific’s share in the global poverty headcount reached about 60 per cent, which is almost proportional to its population share in the world, even before COVID-19. The situation is even bleaker when indicators of multidimensional poverty are considered. The COVID-19 pandemic has contributed to a steep decline in human development for the first time since 1990.
4. The impact of the pandemic on Sustainable Development Goal 4 has been significant. The education sector was one of the worst-hit as a result of policies to close schools before other areas of the economy. While there have been benefits to the accelerating digital transformation of the education sector, there is rising concern that long-term closures of educational institutions and the inadequate reach and quality of remote learning could lead to lower skill levels and productivity among future employees and affect output and growth for years to come. More schools in the region were closed as of September 2021 compared to February 2021, with closures in South Asia increased from 18 to 25 per cent, and in East Asia and the Pacific from 6 to 21 per cent. An estimated 12 million children from pre-primary to university level could drop out of school in South and West Asia.
5. The unprecedented disruption to education systems has amplified the education challenges the most marginalized and vulnerable groups face. For example, school closures and remote learning access has disproportionately impacted female students. Girls were shown to be more likely than boys to experience mental health issues and stress from online schooling. More than 1.2 million girls from pre-primary to upper secondary level may drop out or may not have access to schooling in the region due to the pandemic’s socioeconomic impacts, including the need to generate income and increased household and childcare responsibilities. Further, many poorer countries did not provide specific support to disadvantaged learners, such as learners with disabilities, in their technology responses to COVID-19.
6. Addressing gender inequality is critical to achieving many of the Sustainable Development Goals and requires ambitious policies across many areas, including education, health, social protection, economic growth, the environment and beyond. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated many of the social and economic inequalities women and girls have long faced. For one, the pandemic has had a particularly significant impact on employment for women. This has been especially pronounced in the manufacturing and hospitality services sectors where women make up the major share of employees in many countries of the region, especially least developed countries. Women were also disproportionately affected within the informal economy. Two-thirds of women are employed informally in the Solomon Islands, with female-headed households experiencing a 52 per cent fall in household incomes compared with a 39 per cent drop for male-headed households. Such informal workers not only lost jobs but had no access to any forms of social protection. Furthermore, the increase in unpaid care and domestic work also falls primarily on women, who face more significant losses of paid working hours than their male counterparts.
7. The pandemic has also had significant health impacts on women. Access to healthcare declined in the past two years for all groups, and particularly women were often unable to access the health and medical services they needed due to lockdown, limited access, and contracting the virus. In many countries women were also at greater risk of contracting the virus itself as they were overrepresented among frontline healthcare workers—94 per cent of nurses and 90 per cent of community health workers in Bangladesh are female. Violence against women and girls, including domestic violence, child marriage and associated teen pregnancy, has also increased dramatically during the pandemic. Reports of domestic violence increased by approximately 43 per cent in Malaysia and by 34 per cent in Singapore. An estimated 61,000 additional girls are at risk of child marriage in the region, and an additional 118,000 girls are at risk of adolescent pregnancy.
8. While in the initial phase of the pandemic, some temporary reduction of environmental pressure was observed, owing mainly to reduced economic activity, lockdown measures and associated reductions in energy use, transport and manufacturing, these environmental gains were short lived. The pandemic also created a small window for fish stocks to recover in the Pacific due to the global slowdown of the commercial fishing industry, access restrictions and closed ports, which contributed to a decline in active fishing vessels. However, the production of hazardous and plastic waste—particularly medical waste—increased significantly during the pandemic as demand soared for personal protective equipment and single-use plastic to minimize the spread of infections. Much of this single-use plastic and hazardous waste ended up in rivers and oceans.
9. With economic recovery, pollution has in many cases returned to pre-pandemic levels especially for greenhouse gas emissions. The region remains off-track on Sustainable Development Goals 14 and 15 and other environment-related Goals and targets. More than 40 per cent of coral reefs and 60 per cent of coastal mangroves already have been lost. While the number and sizes of protected areas have increased, 75 per cent of biodiversity remains unprotected. Biodiversity loss, deforestation, and forest and land degradation continue to be a major problem, with the region accounting for 10.6 per cent of the world’s total natural forest loss for agricultural purposes from 2000 to 2015.
