Muscat – Oman and the GCC countries fare well in the newly released Human Development Report, titled Uncertain Times, Unsettled Lives: Shaping our Future in a Transforming World, launched on Thursday by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

However, the report finds that for the first time in the 32 years that UNDP has been calculating it, the Human Development Index (HDI), which measures a nation’s health, education and standard of living, has declined globally for two years in a row. Human development has fallen back to its 2016 levels, reversing much of the progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals.

The sultanate is ranked 54th globally, with a score of 0.816 points, down from 0.827 in 2020 and a fall of three ranks since 2015. In the GCC, UAE is the highest ranked country at 26th globally, followed by Bahrain and Saudi Arabia at 35th, Qatar at 42nd, and Kuwait at 50th.

In the Arab world, Algeria is ranked 91st, Egypt and Tunisia at 97, and Jordan at 106, among others.
‘The world is lurching from crisis to crisis, trapped in a cycle of firefighting and unable to tackle the roots of the troubles that confront us. Without a sharp change of course, we may be heading towards even more deprivations and injustices,’ UNDP warned.

The latest report argues that layers of uncertainty are stacking up and interacting to unsettle life in unprecedented ways. ‘The last two years have had a devastating impact for billions of people around the world, when crises like COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine hit back-to-back, and interacted with sweeping social and economic shifts, dangerous planetary changes, and massive increases in polarisation.’

The reversal is nearly universal as over 90 per cent of countries registered a decline in their HDI score in either 2020 or 2021 and more than 40 per cent declined in both years, signalling that the crisis is still deepening for many, it added.

While some countries are beginning to get back on their feet, recovery is uneven and partial, further widening inequalities in human development. Latin America, the Caribbean, Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia have been hit particularly hard.

“The world is scrambling to respond to back-to-back crises. We have seen with the cost of living and energy crises that, while it is tempting to focus on quick fixes like subsidising fossil fuels, immediate relief tactics are delaying the long-term systemic changes we must make,” said Achim Steiner, UNDP administrator.

“We are collectively paralysed in making these changes. In a world defined by uncertainty, we need a renewed sense of global solidarity to tackle our interconnected, common challenges.”