By Simon Jessop and David Latona
SEVILLE (Reuters) -A once-in-a-decade summit kicked off in Seville on Monday as global leaders face mounting pressure to accelerate progress on poverty reduction, climate change and sustainable development goals that are increasingly at risk of falling short.
The U.N. chief, Antonio Guterres, said the event aimed “to repair and rev up” a system of cooperation where “trust is fraying and multilateralism is strained.”
While more than 50 world leaders were due to attend, a notable absentee was U.S. President Donald Trump, after the world’s biggest economy pulled out of the event and refused to back a plan of action hammered out over the last year.
“The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development — our global promise to transform our world for a better, fairer future — is in danger,” Guterres told the opening conference session, as the region sweltered under a heat wave.
“The Sevilla Commitment document is a global promise to fix how the world supports countries as they climb the development ladder,” he said, even as many richer nations make deep cuts to development aid.
With two-thirds of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals lagging, more than $4 trillion a year in funding was needed, and the world’s financial system needed to be retooled even more quickly to make it happen.
As well as helping countries raise more tax to spend on development, Guterres said reform of world development banks needed to be stepped up so they could lend more and draw in private capital.
Tied to that was a need to reform the world’s credit rating system to be fairer to developing countries as they attempt to invest in projects that will improve their risk ratings over time.
“Countries need — and deserve — a system that lowers borrowing costs, enables fair and timely debt restructuring, and prevents debt crises in the first place,” Guterres said, citing a plan to create a single debt registry for transparency, and efforts to lower the cost of capital through debt swaps.
(Reporting by Simon Jessop; Editing by Bernadette Baum)
