The 2024 UN political declaration: first hard targets
On 26 September 2024, at only the second UN General Assembly high-level meeting ever devoted to AMR, world leaders adopted a political declaration containing — for the first time — concrete global targets:
The declaration also commits countries to meaningfully reduce antimicrobial use in agriculture, strengthen surveillance and infection prevention, and establish an independent panel to track evidence and progress — loosely modelled on the IPCC's role for climate change.
The machinery behind the targets
WHO Global Action Plan (2015)
The foundational blueprint. It set five pillars — awareness, surveillance, infection prevention, optimised antimicrobial use, and sustainable investment in new tools — and required every country to write a national action plan. Most countries now have one; the persistent weakness is that many plans are unfunded and unimplemented, which is exactly what the 2024 “funded plans” target attacks.
GLASS: measuring the problem (2015)
WHO's Global Antimicrobial Resistance and Use Surveillance System collects standardised resistance and consumption data from well over 100 countries, turning anecdotes into trend lines. Surveillance is the unglamorous backbone of the response: without it, no one knows which drugs still work where, or whether policies are succeeding.
AWaRe: a traffic-light system for antibiotics
WHO classifies antibiotics into Access (first-choice, narrow-spectrum drugs that should be widely available), Watch (broader-spectrum drugs to use more selectively), and Reserve (last-resort drugs to protect fiercely). The global target that at least 70% of human antibiotic consumption should be Access-group drugs gives every health system a simple, measurable stewardship goal.
One Health: joining up humans, animals and environment
Because resistance circulates freely between people, animals, food and ecosystems, four multilateral agencies — WHO, FAO (food and agriculture), WOAH (animal health) and UNEP (environment) — now coordinate as the “Quadripartite”. Concrete wins on the agriculture side include the EU's bans on growth promoters (2006) and routine preventive farm use (2022), and falling farm antibiotic sales in Europe; the challenge is extending this to the fast-growing livestock economies of Asia, Africa and the Americas.
Money for new weapons
Because the commercial market for antibiotics is broken (see Causes), a patchwork of public and philanthropic mechanisms now funds development:
- CARB-X — a public-private partnership funding early-stage antibiotic, vaccine and diagnostic candidates worldwide.
- GARDP — the Global Antibiotic Research and Development Partnership, developing treatments for drug-resistant infections and ensuring poorer countries can access them.
- AMR Action Fund — a ~$1 billion industry-backed fund aiming to bring 2–4 new antibiotics to patients by 2030 by rescuing late-stage candidates.
- Pull incentives — the UK now pays companies a fixed annual “subscription” for access to important new antibiotics, decoupling revenue from sales volume; similar proposals (such as the PASTEUR Act in the US) would reward developers for a drug's value rather than its use.
Honest scorecard: what's working, what isn't
- AMR now has global political visibility, hard targets and a measurement system — none of which existed a decade ago.
- High-income countries have cut farm antibiotic use substantially; childhood AMR deaths have halved since 1990 as vaccines and sanitation spread.
- New funding mechanisms have kept a fragile pipeline alive.
- Most national action plans remain underfunded, especially where the burden is highest.
- The $100M catalytic fund and 10% mortality-reduction target are modest against the scale of the problem — and deaths are currently trending up, not down.
- Access remains the twin crisis: more people still die from lacking effective antibiotics than from resistant infections in much of the world.
Sources for this page
- UN General Assembly, “Political Declaration of the High-level Meeting on Antimicrobial Resistance”, September 2024 — un.org
- WHO, “World leaders commit to decisive action on antimicrobial resistance”, 26 September 2024 — who.int/news
- Health Policy Watch, “World Leaders Approve Milestone Commitment To Reduce Deaths From Antibiotic Resistance By 10% By 2030”, 2024 — healthpolicy-watch.news
- WHO, “Global Action Plan on AMR” (2015), “GLASS reports”, “AWaRe classification” — who.int
- CARB-X (carb-x.org), GARDP (gardp.org), AMR Action Fund (amractionfund.com)