The impact of the pandemic on the achievement of the SDGs

Two years and a half after the pandemic started, and now that our lifestyles are looking pretty much as they were before, it is time to look back and see what has happened, how much this virus has affected the planet, what have been the real effects on a global level. Has the pandemic jeopardised the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals?

The answer is definitely yes. It has shaken the progress we have made so far.

2020 started off strongly. It was a very round number. Ten years remained until 2030. The decade of action. Ten years ahead to work hard, but together, to achieve the SDG targets.

We were in the midst of a boom in clusters, in public-private partnerships. SDG events were everywhere in every big city in the world. Networking around them was the bread and butter of those of us involved in social responsibility.

We were constantly seeking and formalising partnerships. We were happy with what we had done over the past five years, but we knew that partnerships were the key. And we were looking for synergies, between companies and projects, between projects and organisations. We knew that only together we could reach 2030 with dignity.

But a butterfly was fluttering in China even before we celebrated the arrival of 2020. And once again, we were bold. We were not too worried. A Chinese virus...how many viruses are out there that don't keep the West awake at night? But you know, when a butterfly's wings flap on the other side of the world...

When we started to hear more and more about this new disease everywhere, some expert voices assured that it would not reach us. Again, an "us" and a "them". Well, you know the rest, it came.

It came and 2020 became a nightmare for many of us. It was the year in which we unlearned many things and learned many others. It was the year of big lessons, sometimes as a slap in the face. The year in which many realities and beliefs fell away, the year in which we saw large companies close, the year in which we saw massive layoffs of people with a lot of experience and an excellent professional career, we saw how everyone's plans were ruined, cancelled, postponed without a date, we saw how the whole social order changed. We could no longer accompany our elders with the aim of protecting them, we could no longer enjoy sharing with others, we had to avoid it. We had to stop our children from playing in playgrounds where other children had been, we had to avoid visiting our families. We learned that tomorrow is fuzzy. We learned to be entrepreneurial, to reinvent ourselves, to create from scratch. We saw lives snuffed out, too many, sadly. In 2020, a nightmare began and we are finding it harder than expected to get out of it.

"What an exaggeration! It's no big deal", some of us may think. "It's all over now. We have now reached a very acceptable level of normality. No masks in many places, vaccinations are widespread, life is back to the way it was in 2019! We are back to filling restaurants, stadiums, we are back to organising events, to going out, to seeing all kinds of people, to greeting each other with two kisses".

Well, it's not that simple. Let's think globally, let's think about all the lives that inhabit this planet. Our fellow human beings, our race, our species. Our brothers and sisters, our children, our future. Here we find a serious problem.

Without doing any analysis, we can imagine that as a consequence of Covid-19 poverty has increased, we can suspect that the number of children in the world going to school has decreased, we can imagine that the level of stress and violence in households has increased as a consequence, first of the various lockdowns, and then of the worsening economic and savings capacity.

But these are only intuitions, suspicions. No data to back it up. We will look for data, numbers, references. We will analyse what has actually happened.

And what about the oceans?, has the pandemic affected them? What about the cities?, are they now more sustainable after having lived through so many confinements and different measures to limit movement?

Here begins a series of articles in which we will analyse, one by one, how the SDG targets were in 2019 and how they are now. We will look at the forecast. We have eight years to go until 2030. Will we get there with our homework done?