Li Yong
In September 2019, the international community committed to step up its drive toward the
achievement of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. As a result, the year 2020 is supposed to usher in the beginning of a Decade for Action to enable the acceleration of sustainable solutions to the world’s biggest challenges, aligned to the 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs). With the onset of COVID-19, these challenges have been amplified. The world is tackling a global health crisis that is destabilising the global economy and posing a massive threat to humanity. Progress made on the SDGs
is being reversed. The United Nations has estimated that 60 million more people are now living in extreme poverty than before the crisis. Up to half the global workforce, 1.6 billion people, are without livelihoods, with a loss of $8.5 trillion in global output. These estimates come on the back of slow growth in key economic sectors before the crisis. In 2019, manufacturing output grew only 1.5 percent from 2018, the slowest year-on-year growth since 2012.
There is also a declining trend in the share of manufacturing employment in total employment and industry needs to significantly reduce greenhouse gases to meet the goals of the 2030 Agenda and Paris Agreement. Small and medium-sized enterprises that at the end of 2019 accounted for 70 percent of employment and were seen as businesses that have the propensity to drive innovation are now particularly challenged. In the wake of the crisis, the concerns of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), the specialised agency of the United Nations that promotes industrial development, are focused on the three main pillars of the global economy: demand, supply and finance. UNIDO analyses show that many otherwise healthy companies are at serious risk of being
unable to resume their business operations after the crisis and jobs and incomes could be permanently lost, making global recovery more difficult.
