What will it take to create a more sustainable world?
Six trillion dollars per year over the next decade, according to the United Nations (UN)footnote1.
It will also take a concentrated effort across every constituency to lift 800 million people out of poverty and provide 1.8 billion people access to sanitation, among other challenges. To help frame the challenge and organize the response, the United Nations has identified 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and their estimated cost. The SDGs are a roadmap of sorts, providing direction on what the biggest issues facing society are, and what is needed to solve them.
More than half of the funding needed is already flowing from governments and philanthropic organizations toward projects identified by the SDGs. But, there’s still roughly a $2.5 trillion gap. The reality, according to Alicia Seiger, managing director of the Stanford University Sustainable Finance Initiative, is, “Global-scale challenges require investment that exceeds public coffers.”