Inputs to the Outcome Document

This policy brief advocates for a human rights enhancing approach to financing for sustainable development, emphasizing environmental action that prioritizes vulnerable communities. It calls for mobilizing resources to address historical inequities, ensuring meaningful participation in financing decisions, and implementing safeguards to prevent human rights violations. It recommends reshaping international financial architecture to prioritize concessional financing for those most affected by environmental harm and establishing mechanisms for direct and equitable access to climate finance.

This policy brief argues that the international financial architecture requires a radical transformation to resume progress and advance on human rights, including the right to development, climate action and the commitments outlined in the 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development. There is a need for a multilateral legal framework on sovereign debt, grounded in international human rights principles and standards, where all creditors, including private creditors participate on an equal footing to ensure a fair and effective resolution of debt crisis.

Reducing poverty, ending hunger and fulfilling the 2030 Agenda is possible by increasing targeted investments where they are needed the most. Increased financing for food systems as key accelerators to achieve the SDGs is needed along with better targeting of vulnerable groups, including rural communities, small-scale producers (especially women and youth) and Indigenous Peoples to leave no one behind. Recommendations include increasing ODA for sustainable food systems, climate adaptation and rural development, strengthening PDBs and MDBs, leveraging remittances, and rechanneling SDRs to mobilize grater investments for sustainable food systems, rural development and climate adaptation.

Scaling up public and private investments in sustainable industrialization is a key to closing the SDG financing gap in developing countries. This UNIDO policy brief discusses how modern SDG-oriented industrial policies, complemented by innovative financing mechanisms and capacity-building, can play an important role in directing financing towards strategic investments and sectors, thus accelerating progress towards the SDGs.

Keeping Global Financing Promises: Advancing Development, Human Rights, and International Cooperation