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FOUR YEARS FROM A DEADLINE, THE U.N. CONFRONTS A SOBERING TRUTH
DELEGATES filled the chamber during a session of the High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development at United Nations headquarters in New York in July. KIELAN SANTOS
U
By Troi Santos & Kielan Santos
NITED NATIONS, New York —Ministers read remarks that sounded drafted months in advance. Delegates huddled in the hallways over a disputed paragraph. That much about the 2026 High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development felt routine. What didn’t was the number that kept surfacing, in speech after speech, over the nine days the forum ran at United Nations headquarters in July: 36. That’s the share of measurable Sustainable Development Goal targets currently on track or making moderate progress, according to the annual Sustainable Development Goals Report released the morning the forum opened. Four years remain before the 2030 deadline governments set for themselves. Thirty-six percent is not a number anyone wanted to say out loud, but people kept saying it anyway. The Earth Negotiations Bulletin, which has chronicled these meetings for decades, summed up the week in a headline urging delegates to make these final years count. Less a slogan than a plea. It hovered over a ministerial segment billed, a little wistfully, as a future still theirs to shape. Lok Bahadur Thapa, the Nepalese diplomat serving as president of the Economic and Social Council, opened proceedings by describing the forum as the United Nations’ central venue for tracking progress on the 2030 Agenda — true since the thing was invented, but it landed differently this year, with the runway this short.
Each year the forum picks a handful of the seventeen goals for an in-depth review rather than auditing all of them at once. This time: clean water and sanitation, affordable and clean energy, industry and infrastructure, sustainable cities, and partnerships, the last of which gets reviewed annually because, as one delegate remarked during a coffee break, none of the other goals gets met without it. Thirty-six countries, Albania to Uruguay, walked the room through their national reviews, admitting setbacks as readily as they claimed wins. That brought the tally of such reviews, since the practice began in 2016, to 437 by 190 countries and the European Union. The Philippines wasn’t one of this year’s 36—it delivered its fourth national review the previous July—but its delegation showed up anyway, working the thematic sessions instead. During the energy review, Omyr Abdalla, a third secretary with the Philippine mission, laid out the country’s push to expand renewable power and reach isolated communities still waiting for reliable electricity,
then pressed wealthier nations for more predictable climate financing. A few days later, during the water session, Marion Reyes, a Philippine committee adviser, told the room that water security was fundamental to delivering the entire agenda, pointing to Manila’s investments in watershed protection and AI-assisted flood forecasting. The Philippines also chaired a session on middle-income counContinued on A2
At this year’s closing session on global development goals, diplomats fought fiercely over a single reference to fossil fuels, even as a starker number, just 36 percent of targets on track, and the voices missing from the room told a harder story about a world running out of time to keep a promise it made a decade ago.
DELEGATES listen from the floor of the General Assembly Hall as a speaker takes the podium during the High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development at United Nations headquarters. KIELAN SANTOS
PESO EXCHANGE RATES n US 61.4320 n JAPAN 0.3848 n UK 82.7366 n HK 7.8330 n CHINA 9.0973 n SINGAPORE 47.9488 n AUSTRALIA 43.1621 n EU 70.8065 n KOREA 0.0432 n SAUDI ARABIA 16.3614 Source: BSP (July 31, 2026)