Eleven of the world’s leading accountancy and financial bodies have written to the UK government urging the country to take more action to achieve United Nations sustainable goals by 2030.
In an open letter the group highlighted that the UK is not close to meeting the goals – which include focuses on areas like education, infrastructure, employment, tackling climate change and halting biodiversity loss – despite being at the halfway point to the 2030 deadline.
The open letter comes as the UK is preparing for the 78th UN General Assembly, the finance leaders wrote that “The science shows us that, not only are we failing to collectively tackle the climate and nature crises, but inequalities are also growing at an alarming rate.”
“This isn’t just a crisis of people and planet, it’s a crisis of our economies and our global financial system.”
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It continued: “The recent UN Sustainability Development Goals Progress Report warns that the world is on track to meet just 12% of the SDG targets by 2030, while headway on more than 50% of he targets is weak and 30% have stalled or gone into reverse.”
“These include critical global targets on poverty, hunger and climate. In the UK we are on course to meet only 17% of our targets, but it is developing countries that are bearing the brunt of our collective failure”.
ICAEW chief executive Michael Izza added: “The UN report shows we are nowhere near halfway to achieving the SDGs by the 2030 deadline, which is not only a crisis in the making for people and planet, but also for our economies and global financial ecosystems”.
He continued: “As accounting and finance professionals working across all areas of the economy, we know first hand the costs of inaction to the business and organisations we lead and advise, so we urge the government to take steps to put us back on track.”
“We are ready to use our skills and implement the changes needed to drive progress.”
