Our fragile world: Challenges, opportunities for Earth’s sustainable

-protracted warfare. In response to this steady rise in fragility, two recent reports examining the peace operations and peace architecture of the United Nations have called for a stronger focus on prevention, and for more comprehensive investments towards 'sustaining peace' in all development contexts, not only in the aftermath of conflict. Similarly, Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 16 in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development has woven democratic governance and peace-building targets into a single goal, recognizing here again the indivisible links between 'peaceful societies' and 'effective, accountable and inclusive institutions'. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) acknowledges that there is no single pathway to engineering resilience in the face of fragility, conflict and violence. Responding to today’s challenges, the UNDP Strategic Plan (2014-2017) calls for the seamless integration of democratic governance, conflict prevention and peacebuilding interventions. This integrated approach is applied across all settings: investments in human rights, the rule of law and ac-countable institutions are geared towards building social cohesion and preventing conflict, and vice versa, investments in social cohesion, national dialogue and mediation capacities lay the foundations for sustaining peace, even in seemingly peaceful settings.

United Nations system must pull together in a more integrated manner in the service of conflict prevention and peace. Conflict prevention and mediation must be brought back to the fore. The United Nations has not invested enough on addressing root causes of conflict. It must do that in partnership with others, while strengthening its own capacities to undertake prevention work, including through inclusive and equitable development and agree on innovative approaches that integrate conflict prevention, governance, development and human rights. Sustaining peace should be understood as encompassing not only efforts to prevent relapse into conflict but also to prevent lapse into conflict in the first place. When considering the peace and security activities of the United Nations, therefore, a strong emphasis must be placed on conflict prevention. Sustaining peace should be broadly understood as a goal and a process to build a common vision of a society, ensuring that the needs of all segments of the population are taken into account, which encompasses activities aimed at preventing the outbreak, escalation, continuation and recurrence of conflict, addressing root causes, assisting parties to conflict to end hostilities, ensuring national reconciliation and moving towards recovery, reconstruction and development.

The world is rapidly changing and the development sector must adapt along with it. Alongside extraordinary progress in poverty reduction and economic growth, new transnational threats and national vulnerabilities arise. Climate change and pandemic diseases like Ebola and COVID-19, growing disparities in wealth and political representation, urbanization, social unrest, and violent ex-tremism are all generating new challenges and stresses for governments, communities, civil society and other non-state actors. Many governments – whether affected by fragility and violent conflict or not – are struggling to deliver on their promises and to respond to rising expectations of a more educated and better informed population. The increasing gap between people’s expectations and institutional capacities to respond to them is generating new forms of instability, mistrust between governments and citizens and threatening hard-won development gains. Violent conflicts have become more complex and intractable and fueled by new drivers of violence such as radicalization and extremism.The recent reviews of the UN’s work in the area of peacekeeping and peacebuilding stress the need for a more preventive approach and a focus on 'sustaining peace' throughout rather than only restoring peace after war and violent conflict. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Develop-ment follows a similar approach as it calls for a specific Goal 16 on promoting just, peaceful and inclusive societies3. UNDP is committed to supporting states and societies worldwide to address these challenges.