Interview: Business must play a role in sustainable development: UN

Lifting people out of poverty to achieve the United Nations updated Sustainable Development Goals is as much a responsibility to businesses as it is the governments' if lessons from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)are to be learned, a UN official said Thursday.

"Every country which has successfully implemented the MDGs, the experience shows... people, communities, organisations, as well as the government and partners (worked) together," UN resident coordinator for Papua New Guinea (PNG) Roy Trivedy said in an interview with Xinhua.

PNG is unable to achieve many of the MDGs to improve health and education in a bid to reduce poverty. The updated Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), announced in September 2015 may be a further challenge.

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) recently downgraded its growth forecast for the pacific nation to 4.3 percent in 2016, less than half of 2015 and 2.4 percent in 2017 from weak commodity prices and the effects of El Nino.

The fiscal situation is much worse, with the International Monetary Fund figures showing the nation's debt worse than officially acknowledged, approximately 56 percent of GDP than the expected 35 percent GDP as stipulated in the 2016 budget, if debt in state-owned corporations and the UBS loan servicing that paid for the nation's 10 percent stake in Oil Search is taken into account.

Though measures have been undertaken to help mitigate PNG's current fiscal crisis, concerns remain over the longer-term poverty reduction, health and education goals which cannot be achieved without sustainable, inclusive growth.

Trivedy argued that this is where opportunities lay for business, especially given developments in the digital space allowing leapfrog technologies to be utilized by developing economies in the quest to use constrained resources more defiantly.

"In a country as PNG with 8 million-plus people, there is actually a huge potential market," Trivedy said.

"(It) is ultimately beneficial not only for those business investors, but also for the country and the planet," Trivedy said.

For example, the Chinese Embassy has been working with the United Nations in PNG in an effort to implement the Baidu Recycle mobile app that monetises the safe collection and disposal of electronic waste, Trivedy said.

Electronic waste is becoming a significant environmental issue as the Asia-Pacific middle class begins to boom.

The innovative recycling app, developed at the UNDP-Baidu Big Data Joint Laboratory in China, on average has led to the safe disposal of 5,900 electronic items per month since launched in August 2014.

"If you look across all the islands of PNG, the waste, the plastics and so on end up on all the beaches," Trivedy said.

"If we can bring some of that expertise into PNG in a trilateral sort of arrangement... we can really provide good solutions, some real practical solutions to problems PNG and many pacific islands face." Endit