2030 is getting closer. This is not the moment to give up.

Eleven years ago, the world made an extraordinary promise. End extreme poverty. Protect our planet. Make sure every child can go to school. Advance equality for women and girls. Build peaceful, just and inclusive societies. Leave no one behind. Seventeen Global Goals for a better world for people and planet. One shared deadline: 2030.

Today, that deadline feels very close. And if we’re being honest, the world is not where we hoped it would be. Conflict is destroying lives and reversing progress. Climate change is hitting communities around the world. Aid is being cut. Too many people are still living in poverty. Inequality remains profound. Some of the Global Goals are badly off track. Faced with all of that, giving up can start to sound like realism. It isn’t. We’ve been behind before. The history of human progress is not a story of the world setting targets and smoothly achieving them. It is messy. And some of the biggest breakthroughs have happened during periods of profound global turbulence.

The new Hope Report: The Next Era of Progress looks at some of the moments when humanity has made enormous leaps forward – including those that happened during times of profound change – and what they can teach us now.

The eradication of smallpox was achieved during the Cold War, when the world was divided by deep political and ideological tensions. Yet countries found common ground around a shared threat to human health. At the beginning of this century, HIV/AIDS was devastating communities around the world and life-saving treatment remained out of reach for millions.

Progress came when countries refused to accept a false choice between intellectual property and public health, agreeing that international intellectual property rules should not prevent governments from protecting public health. By finding ways to align private incentive with public good and make treatment more affordable and accessible, more than 30 million people today receive antiretroviral treatment. A generation ago, around one in three people lived in extreme poverty. That figure has fallen dramatically.

Problems that once appeared permanent turned out not to be. Not because the world was stable. Not because progress was inevitable. Because people acted.

The Goals were never a prediction

When 193 countries agreed the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, they weren’t predicting what the world would look like in 2030. They were deciding what it should look like. That distinction matters. The Goals are a promise to end poverty, reduce inequality, protect the planet and improve people’s lives. Their deadline was never a guarantee that progress would happen automatically.

And being off track doesn’t make the destination less important. A child doesn’t need education less because Goal 4 is off track. A woman doesn’t need access to healthcare less because progress towards Goal 3 has slowed. A family doesn’t need clean water less because 2030 is getting closer. If anything, falling behind makes the Goals more urgent.

Progress isn’t something that just happens

One lesson comes through again and again. Progress is made. It happens when communities organise and demand change. When governments make different choices. When science opens new possibilities. When money reaches solutions that work. When countries decide that some problems are simply too important to solve alone.

And sometimes it happens because rules that once seemed permanent are changed. That matters enormously for the Global Goals. Because the world of 2026 is not the world of 2015. The way countries cooperate is changing. Global power is shifting. Technology is transforming what is possible. Some institutions are struggling, while new alliances and forms of cooperation are emerging.
Cooperation does not stand still. It evolves. The question is not whether we can turn the clock back, It’s whether we can shape the cooperation emerging now to accelerate the progress we still need.

Four years still matter

There is a danger in deadlines. As they get closer, everything can start to become binary. Succeeded or failed. Achieved or missed. But human lives don’t work like that.

Every child who gets to go to school matters. Every preventable death prevented matters. Every family lifted out of poverty matters. Every tonne of carbon kept out of the atmosphere matters. Every law that expands somebody’s rights matters.

Progress doesn’t stop counting because a deadline is approaching. There are still four years until 2030. Four years to protect gains that took generations to achieve. Four years to accelerate solutions we already know work. Four years to change rules and systems that are holding progress back. And four years to build the foundations for everything that comes after. Because 2030 was never supposed to be the end of progress. It was a milestone on the way to the world we promised each other.

Choose hope

Hope doesn’t mean believing we’ll magically achieve every Global Goal by 2030. It means refusing to confuse being off track with being powerless. We know the world can change because we have already changed it. The question now is what we choose to protect, what we are prepared to change and how ambitious we are willing to be about what comes next. The clock is ticking. That’s not a reason to give up. It’s a reason to get moving.

Explore The Hope Report: The Next Era of Progress.

Author: Sabrina de Souza, Director of Policy, Advocacy and Campaigns, Project Everyone