In light of the global financial crisis, the world needs a ‘new deal' for sustainable development, tackling both poverty and climate needs.

Speaking at the annual session of the executive board of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), UNDP Administrator and former Prime Minister of New Zealand Helen Clark, said that it was currently a difficult time to pursue a mission of development as the world faced its "deepest global economic recession" in decades. "Alas," she said, "those least responsible for the crisis stand to bear the brunt of its impact" in the long term. Clark is a.

While some progress had been made towards providing poverty relief to the world's poorest countries, the near-global recession was exacerbating the stress that many were experiencing owing to high food and energy prices. This had increased the number of people living in extreme poverty to 200-million in the last three years, said Clark.

Simultaneously, the world faced the major challenge of climate change, related to current "unsustainable use of natural resources," she said. It was also the world's poorest that bear the brunt of climate change.

It was "critical to draw the work being done on addressing the climate change challenge into the centre of the way in which we think about development," she said. The outcome to be finalised at the climate talks in Copenhagen later this year, where a follow-up to the Kyoto Protocol will be decided, must be a "development deal" too, she said.

The "global problems" of poverty and climate change "reflect our interdependence, and they require global solutions". This was why the world needed a "multilateral system" reflecting the realities of the 21st century, she said.

It was for this reason that Clark suggested a new, interrelated approach to global planning, incorporating both poverty relief and solutions to climate change. Out of the crisis, came the "opportunity... to innovate," she said.

This system would help to deliver improved living standards for the world's most vulnerable, as well as ensure that this group's voice was heard in decision-making processes.

This was because, Clark explained, the long-term effects of the global economic crisis on poor nations, could be much more devastating than its effect on developed countries.

Many fear that this could "reverse the gains" which had been made towards meeting the UN's Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

The MDGs - which range from halving extreme poverty to halting the spread of HIV/Aids by 2015 - form a blueprint agreed to by all countries and leading development institutions. According to the UN's website, the MDGs had so far "stimulated unprecedented efforts to meet the needs of the world's poorest".

While some countries in sub-Saharan Africa were expected to meet some of the MDGs, they were unlikely to achieve them all by 2015. As a result of the global economic crisis, Clark estimated that around three-quarters of sub-Saharan countries could see an increase in the number of people living in extreme poverty this year.

For this reason, stressed Clark, "the UNDP must step up its work this year to support developing countries [in] achieving an outcome at Copenhagen in December which was consistent with designing a sustainable path out of poverty and for achieving the MDGs."