The US is Against the World on Sustainable Development

This piece originally appeared as Correspondence in Nature.

Read the accompanying working paper.

The US government has long dragged its feet on implementing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Since these goals were adopted in 2015, 190 of the 193 United Nations member states have put forward Voluntary National Reviews of their SDG programmes. The United States has not.

Now the US government has gone from silent neglect to explicit opposition: last month, it objected to a UN General Assembly resolution on the grounds that it supported the SDGs. A US president (Franklin Roosevelt) was among the founders of the UN. But of all the member states, the United States is now the least aligned with UN treaties, votes in the UN General Assembly and participation in UN organizations (see G. Lafortune and J. D. Sachs Asian Econ. Papers 23, 1–28; 2024).

The US government’s opposition to the SDGs and to the 2015 Paris climate
agreement comes as the climate crisis is worsening. US politics is now pitting the interests of the US super-rich and Big Oil against the interests of eight billion people and future generations. The world’s majority in favour of sustainable development must — and will — carry the day against a tiny group of super- wealthy and powerful US vested interests.