A series of unprecedented crises, most notably the Covid-19 outbreak, pushed humanity’s progress back five years and fueled a wave of global uncertainty, according to a UN report released Thursday.

The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) said the Human Development Index has dropped in two consecutive years, 2020 and 2021, for the first time since its founding 30 years ago.

This index measures the life expectancy, education level and life parameter of countries.

“This means we will die sooner, we are less educated, our incomes are falling,” UNDP director Achim Steiner told AFP.

“With just under three parameters, you can get an idea of ​​why so many people are starting to feel hopeless, frustrated, worried about the future,” he explained.

In the report, “Uncertain times, unstable lives,” the Development Index has advanced sustainably for years, but it started to decline in 2020 and continues to fall in 2021, “deleting the achievements of the previous five years,” says the report.

The document cites the covid-19 pandemic as one of the main causes of the worldwide decline, in addition to the political, economic and environmental crises that did not give a few populations time to recover.

“We’ve had disasters before. We’ve had conflicts before. But the consolidation of what we’re facing now is a major setback for human development,” Steiner said.

The decline is global and affects more than 90% of the world’s countries, according to the study.

Switzerland, Norway and Iceland top the Human Development list, while South Sudan, Chad and Niger are at the bottom.

And while some countries are beginning to recover from the pandemic, many countries in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and the Caribbean had not yet recovered when a new crisis emerged: the war in Ukraine.

‘Unprecedented’

While the consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in terms of food and energy security have not been calculated in this year’s index so far, “the outlook for 2022 is undoubtedly bleak,” said Steiner.

One factor that has contributed significantly to the recent decline in the Human Development Index is the global decline in life expectancy, which fell from 73 years in 2019 to 71.4 years in 2021.

Pedro Conceição, the report’s lead author, described the drop as an “unprecedented shock”, noting that some countries, including the United States, recorded a two-year or more decline.

The report also describes how transformative forces such as climate change, globalization and political polarization present a complex level of uncertainty “unprecedented in human history”, causing growing feelings of insecurity.

“People have lost trust in each other,” Steiner said.

“Apart from institutions, our neighbor now becomes the greatest threat, sometimes literally speaking from the community or between nations globally. It is something that paralyzes us.”

“We can’t go with the playbook of the last century,” said Steiner, who preferred to focus on economic transformation rather than relying on growth as a panacea.

“Clearly, the transformations we need now require us to adopt the benchmarks of the future: lower carbon emissions, less inequality, more sustainability.”

The report is on a positive note and states that progress can be made by focusing on three main areas: investments in renewable energy and preparedness for future epidemics, insurance to absorb impacts, and innovations to strengthen capacity to deal with future crises.

Steiner also called for reversing the recent downward trend in development aid to the most vulnerable countries.

The UNDP director said it would be a “grave mistake” to continue down this path and “underestimated the impact on our ability to work together as nations”.