Brussels, 09/06/2015 (Agence Europe) - There is no shortage in the G7's ambitions for sustainable development, which it flagged up at the end of the Elmau summit on Monday 8 June: to eradicate hunger in 15 years, to create an international mechanism to fight pandemics better, and to promote the empowerment of women across the world.
The leaders of the world's seven most powerful nations (France, Germany, Italy, the UK, Canada, the USA and Japan) took the commitment to work on the adoption - in New York in September - of “an ambitious, people-centred, planet-sensitive and universally applicable post-2015 Agenda for Sustainable Development”. And to help foster this new transformative agenda, the G7 has committed to “significant measures on global health, food security, climate and marine protection, sustainable supply chains and women's economic empowerment”.
It is in this way that they hope to: - bring an additional 500 million people out of hunger and malnutrition in developing countries by 2030 (there are currently a billion people who cannot feed themselves adequately, even if “216 million people have been delivered from hunger since 1990”, according to FAO Director General José Graziano da Silva); - increase the number of women and young girls who have access to education and vocational training by a third by 2030 (in relation to an unchanged political backdrop); - continue to take action to encourage access to quality jobs for women and to reduce the gender gap in workforce participation by 25% in the G7 countries by 2025.
Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel, who was chairing the G7 summit, told press that she will organise a conference in September on women in the developing countries and industrialised countries.
Re-affirming its commitment to take ambitious action to improve resource efficiency, the G7 announced the creation of a forum - The G7 Alliance on Resource Efficiency - which will cooperate with industry to encourage the exchange of experience and the creation of information networks on a voluntary basis. The G7 also committed to making the fight against marine waste a priority, and to take action against this scourge. All these commitments, set out in a final statement, align well with the commitments taken on the climate and the success of COP 21 in Paris at the end of the year (see EUROPE 11329).
According to the FAO, thanks to the global effort for achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDG), 72 countries out of 129 have managed to bring the number of people suffering from hunger to below 5% and out of these 72 countries, 29 have also achieved the most demanding goal of reducing by half the number of people suffering from hunger by 2015. (Aminata Niang)