cardiovascular diseases, cancers, chronic respiratory diseases and diabetes (the four NCDs causing the most deaths), and mental illness. Some targets could be based on the World Health Assembly resolution of a 25 percent reduction in deaths due to these four NCDs by 2025. Other targets could be aimed at reducing morbidity and disability from NCDs (including mental illness) at all ages, and reducing the prevalence of related risk factors. Universal health coverage and access is put forward as a key contribution by the health sector to achieving health goals and targets and to improving health more broadly. It is also a desirable goal, because people have a right to access a health system that prevents and treats illness effectively and affordably within their homes and their communities, with referral to clinics and hospitals when required. Implementation of the health goal will require sustainable and predictable financing, improved global governance and a review of the current global health architecture.
Requirements for successful implementation
Regarding the means of implementation, the consultation called for new forms of accountability to be an integral part of the next development framework, including those which allow greater citizen participation, ownership and influence. There were calls for special attention to be paid to mechanisms for engaging and empowering adolescents, to increase their capabilities to take on their own health development as they enter adulthood, especially regarding healthy sexual and reproductive health practices and avoidance of risks for NCDs. There were also calls for strengthening national health information systems, civil registration and improving the availability of disaggregated statistics. The importance of long-term, predictable and sustainable financing from domestic as well as international resources was stressed, and there were calls for experimenting with new innovative financing mechanisms such as a financial transactions tax. Improved
accountability is needed to avoid transparency of resource usage, and inefficient use of available resources. New partnerships should be explored, including with the private sector, which could be stimulated to invest more in public health and held to account for any activities which cause harm to health. Finally, a review of the global health architecture is required, and a new framework which would allow more interaction and cooperation between the many programmes, funds and agencies involved in health and development, and which would reduce the risk of duplicative use of resources.
Water Achieving water security for all: an expanded and deeper agenda
To articulate the complex nature of water security and to show how a new framework could complete the unfinished business of development, the Water thematic consultation went beyond demanding toilets and taps for billions of
Japanese drums ensemble Todoroki Wadaiko of Germany at the opening of the High-Level Meeting on Water in The Hague, March 2013 ( Photo: IISD/Earth Negotiations Bulletin)
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