HLPF 2022 Online Side Event. The interlinked global crises from an Arab perspective: Systemic failures and its implications on social justice in the region.

The new generation Doha Programme of Action for the Least Developed Countries for the Decade 2022-2031 (DPoA) was adopted by the first part of the Fifth United Nations Conference on the Least Developed Countries (LDC5) on 17 March, at the UN headquarters in New York.

The adoption of the DPoA was overdue as the LDC5 Conference, scheduled to take place in January 2022 in Doha, Qatar, was postponed due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Litmus test of international co-operation

One of the global processes falling prey to the Omicron variant of the Covid virus was the fifth UN Conference on the Least Developed countries, originally scheduled for the end of January in Doha, Qatar. It has been replaced with a meeting in New York on 17 March 2022 for the adoption of the Doha Programme of Action (DPoA); a full meeting will be held in March 2023, where governments will gather with stakeholders “to build new plans and partnerships for the delivery of the DPoA over the following decade”. The LDC conferences and programmes of action have a long history of marking the state of global solidarity with countries most in need of co-operation and of the underlying root-causes for global inequalities.

A recent United Nations paper ("The least developed countries need a new generation of international support measures to face the development challenges of the 2020s", United Nations Conference on Trade and Development - UNCTAD, Policy Brief No. 97) stresses that the least developed countries (LDCs) need a new generation of international support measures to face the development challenges of the 2020s.

The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), in a policy brief issued in February, pointed out that "beset by long-standing structural weaknesses, shortcomings in international support and widening inequalities within and among all countries, [LDCs] have to confront new or intensifying problems worsened by the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) crisis, climate change, the rapidly evolving character of globalisation and the new technological realities of the digital age".

"How can the world organize an equitable energy transition away of fossil fuels when it can’t properly organize a global vaccination campaign?" asked Social Watch coordinator Roberto Bissio during a consultation on the Social Summit 2025 proposed by UN Secretary General António Guterres.

"The social justice goals are to be achieved in simultaneous with those of environmental justice. What are the vested interests that don’t let it happen? Are we going to tackle them, or will they be sitting with their victims at the table and be whitewashed, pink-washed and greenwashed so they donate a tiny part of their profits to pretend to solve the problem they created?" he added. The debate was held on February 4, 2022, co-organized by Club of Club de Madrid (CdM) and the Southern Voice network. Read his intervention below, and the pdf version is here.

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