Climate change is "the greatest challenge to sustainable development" and threatens to "render many parts of the globe uninhabitable"
By Ellen Wulfhorst
NEW YORK, July 9 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Relentless global warming threatens the potential success of a sweeping set of goals established by the United Nations to tackle inequality, conflict and other ills, officials said on Tuesday.
Climate change imperils food supplies, water and places where people live, endangering the U.N. plan to address these world problems by 2030, according to a report by U.N. officials.
Member nations of the U.N. unanimously adopted 17 global development goals in 2015, setting out a wide-ranging "to-do" list tackling such vexing issues as conflict, hunger, land degradation, gender inequality and climate change.
The latest report, which called climate change "the greatest challenge to sustainable development," came as diplomatic, business and other officials gathered for a high-level U.N. forum to take stock of the goals' progress.
"The most urgent area for action is climate change," said Liu Zhenmin, U.N. Under-Secretary General for Economic and Social Affairs, in the report.
"The compounded effects will be catastrophic and irreversible," he said, listing increased extreme weather events, more severe natural disasters and land degradation.
"These effects, which will render many parts of the globe uninhabitable, will affect the poor the most."
Progress has been made on lowering child mortality, boosting immunization rates and global access to electricity, the report said.
Yet extreme poverty, hunger and inequality remain hugely problematic, and more than half of school-age children showed "shockingly low proficiency rates" in reading and math, it said. Two-thirds of those children were in school.
Human trafficking rates nearly doubled from an average 150 detected victims per country in 2010 to 254 in 2016.
But it was unclear how much of the increase reflected improved reporting systems versus an increase in trafficking, said Francesca Perucci of the U.N.'s statistics division, who worked on the report.
"It's hard to exactly distinguish the two," she said at a launch of the report.
But climate change remained paramount.
Greenhouse gases have continued to climb, and "climate change is occurring much faster than anticipated," the report said.
At this week's goals summit, 47 countries were expected to present voluntary progress reviews. Almost 100 other countries and four cities including New York have done so.
Earlier U.N. reports said the goals were threatened by the persistence of violence, conflict and lack of private investment. Outside assessments have also cited nationalism, protectionism and insufficient funding.
The cost of implementing the global goals has been estimated at $3 trillion a year.
(Reporting by Ellen Wulfhorst, Editing by Chris Michaud
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