Bridging Systems, Building Trust: Advancing Water, Energy, Innovation and Sustainable Cities through Coordinated Policy Actions A UN DESA Global Policy Dialogue.

Hello, from the United Nations headquarters in New York, and welcome to this global policy dialogue on bridging systems, building trust, advancing water, energy, innovation and sustainable cities through coordinated policy actions.
My name is Robin Farzad.
I'm host Public Radio Pol disclosure.
I'm honed to be moderating today, and we're delighted to have you with us in person, online, through the Zooms, audio, however you like it.
We're during the UN, we're meeting during the UN high level political forum, the Central United Nations platform for viewing progress on the 2030 agenda and the sustainable development goals.
And our conversation comes at a particularly timely moment.
With the release this week of the latest sustainable development goals Report from our host today, the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, the report offers a new assessment of where the world stands with less than five years remaining until 2030.
Today, we'll explore how more coordinated policies can help accelerate progress across the SDGs under review at this year's HLPF from water and energy to innovation and sustainable cities and how we can put people, inclusion and trust at the heart of those efforts.
We also want this to be a truly interactive conversation.
So throughout the event, we'll be inviting you to share your views through our slido polls and to submit questions for our panelists.
Thank you for joining us from wherever you are in the world, and we have an in person audience here in New York and many people joining us online via Zoom, UN web TV, and Facebook.
Welcome.
We're glad that you're part of this conversation.
We would like to thank the UN Peace and Development Trust Fund for making this event possible.
And a few notes before we start.
If you are watching us on Zoom, multilingual captions are available.
You just have to click on the captioning icon at the bottom of your screen and select the language you like.
I'd also like to welcome and thank our international sign interpreters for bringing this important session to a wider audience.
This is an interactive session.
We'd love your input in our polls today.
We'll use the Slido platform for our polls and for our audience questions.
You can submit your questions there and update your favorite questions as well.
Head to lid forward slash dgs.
That's Sam David Gregory Samuel, or go to slido.com and insert the hashtag dgs in one word.
We're also putting the link in the chat right here.
Let's start by testing out Slido by voting in our first poll.
I'd like to ask you Which factor is most essential for accelerating progress on the SDGs? Political leadership, public trust, financing, innovation, partnerships, or something else? And while you're voting, I'd like to introduce you to our first speaker, Mr.
Lee in Noa, the UN Under Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs, for his opening remarks.
Mr.
Lee, the floor is yours.
Thank you.
Thank you, moderator, dear colleagues and friends, good afternoon.
Welcome to today's UN Global policy Dialogue.
It is so great to meet some old friends and meet some news new faces.
Well, thank you for joining us this afternoon, both here in the United Nations headquarters or online from around the world.
Well, just now, as the moderator mentioned that with just four years remaining to achieve the sustainable development goals, we face a critical moment.
The actions we take today were determined not only if we achieve the goals altogether, but whether we strengthen the trust, solidarity, and cooperation to sustain progress beyond 2030.
This year's high level political forum actually focuses on five interconnected goals, water, energy, innovation, sustainable cities, and partnerships.
Together, they remind us that sustainable development cannot be achieved in sis.
The Tu progress always demands that all sectors, stakeholders, communities, and people have a voice in the conversation and in the discussion.
Governments cannot deliver the 2030 agenda alone, neither for the United Nations.
Meaningful progress depends on effective collaboration across countries, industries, and communities.
That's why the meaningful dialogues like this matters while the high level political forum convened the international community here in New York, but our policy dialogue this afternoon extends that conversation to the rest of the world.
Throughout the hybrid introductive format, participants everywhere can engage directly with the leading experts and also with the young representatives.
Building trust begins always from where listening.
By embracing different perspectives and working together across the disciplines and borders, we can develop the integrated solutions that improve the people's lives and accelerate the progress across the SDGs.
I encourage you all to actively participate in today's discussion and pose your questions to the experts and to the youth representatives, and then help to build the partnerships and policy solutions we urgently need, which you a very productive and inspiring dialogue.
Thank you.
Us, before moving to our first panel, let's see how our audience voted in that first poll and find out which factor you think is most essential for accelerating progress on the SDGs.
If I can see closely, by far, we see that partnerships, if I 33% came in.
The leading thing, political leadership is tracking at 30% and partnerships is at 30% percent.
Financing is at about 20 or 19%.
This is real time.
I encourage you to go in and slido at SDGS to look at it, but it still remains partnerships with something else and innovation at the bottom, and it's going to keep updating.
For those joining now, I welcome you, indeed, and you can go to slido.com and use the hashtag SDGs to take part.
I'm going to go straight into the second poll, which relates to our first panel on people centered pathways to SDG six and SDG seven, water, energy and social inclusion.
I'm going to ask the question first and then introduce the panel while you are voting.
Which action would have the greatest impact on improving people's lives over the next decade? Is it universal access to safe drinking water, universal access to affordable and clean energy, better water and energy infrastructure, stronger governance and institutions, greater investment in local communities, or something else? And with that, I want to introduce you to our panelists for this conversation related to SDG six for Clean and Affordable Energy and SDG seven for Clean Water and Sanitation, two of the goals and focus at our forum this week.
I'm happy to be joined in person by Adoyan Adei, Executive Director of Green Growth Africa.
He's also co chair of the independent Group of scientists preparing the adrenial Global Sustainable Development Report coming out next year.
Seated next to him is David Smith, Director of the Center for Environmental Management at the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica.
He's also a member of the UN High level Advisory Board on Economic and Social Affairs, HLAB for short.
And Avery Wallace, communications and operations manager for NYCH two a water conservation nonprofit here in New York and joining us virtually Olsa Person, strategic advisor and researcher at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Climate Action.
She is also chair of the Swedish Climate Policy Council and a member of the HLAB.
She joins from Stockholm.
Welcome.
Thank you so much, everyone, for being here.
I want to go back to take a quick look at the poll votes.
Poll two before we move on.
In the lead is better Water and energy infrastructure at about 42% tracking right now.
And second to that is universal access to safe drinking water, stronger governance and institutions coming in third and greater investment in local communities fourth.
And behind that, universal access to affordable and clean energy.
With that, I want to open it up.
Let's bring our audience in the discussion right now.
And thank you so much for sharing knowledge with this.
I want to ask you for starters, Aoyan.
You know, we were talking offline about the huge explosion in solar.
Surely, you have a great story about the nexus of solar and water, how that power, like the superpowers unite, especially in developing economies for breakthrough developments.
Thank you so much.
Your Excellency, distinguished guests.
It's a privilege and honor for me to be here.
Indeed, the potential for solar energy and water, particularly when they are integrated cannot be overemphasized.
I think the question for me would be, what will energy enable and what will water make possible? When we look at the development dynamics and look at various variables that we can invest in, what should inform what variables we should invest in, should look at what each of these elements and pillars of development will enable.
I believe strongly that energy will have a lot to do with even providing water, for instance, to education, to health.
And more importantly, I realize that with my experience across developing countries on energy issues, I realize that often politicians and policymakers often assume that when you provide water or energy, for instance, it will automatically drive sustained development.
And I put it this way.
So when you go to a village and you provide renewable energy, for instance, are you expecting there will be economic development, there will be jobs creation.
But how does that happen? The woman has electricity access, but who provides the money for us to buy new equipment that are electrified that can scale up our productivity.
Whereas, we assume that electricity access will help improve education outcomes.
But that students in the village only has lighting to read more, who provides the computer, Therefore, this highlight very critically, and when we take a look at it across different sectors, I like the need for coordinated investment.
Oftentimes, I see that we are not maximizing the impact of the investment we are making per sector because we are working mono sector and stand approach.
When we have spent $100 billion, for instance, on energy projects, possibly we may just need to spend $100,000 to incentivize something, maybe through soft loans for those women to improve their businesses.
Probably we need just to a little investment more on education, on health, things like that, that will incentivize the outcomes we're looking at.
Overall, I would say that energy, for instance, particularly, is not an end in itself.
It's it's a goal that helps to enable other goals.
And we cannot assume that meeting an energy target will automatically drive us to achieve sustainable development goals.
Thank you.
David, I'd like to ask, it's no secret that climate change is making water security increasingly unpredictable.
Whether you talk about Miami, my hometown where you just were.
You could be in Bangladesh.
You could have been in New York and superstorm Sandy, saltwater intrusion and the like.
How can countries at every level, strengthen resilience while ensuring the most vulnerable communities are not left behind? I think it's very important to remember what my colleague just said.
It's not just the thing that you're providing the energy or the water.
You've got to think upstream, you've got to think downstream.
So with water, if you're going to provide water, that's great.
It's very important to provide the pipes and the access.
It's as important, if not more important to protect the watershed that the water is coming from.
And it may not even be your watershed.
I have friends in Brazil who are always teasing me and reminding me that the rain that falls in the Caribbean comes from the Amazon.
So I personally have a stake in whether or not people are allowed to cut the Amazon down to do whatever they want with it, whether it be raising more beef, cattle, or anything else, that will affect my life and the affect the life of the other 40 million people living in the Caribbean.
So we've got to look upstream.
We've got to manage systems as systems.
And bear in mind as well, sometimes there's stuff which we have no control over drought.
Did you collect enough water beforehand? Did you start preparing for drought? Because sometimes it may not be that you didn't take care of the watershed.
It might be that El Nino came, or it might be that dust came from the western coast of Africa where you come from, and decided to take a trip to the Caribbean and sit there, and we end up with drought and we end up with all kinds of problems.
So we've got to think all the way back and put systems in place to deal with all those eventualities, and that's going to cost a bit more than we thought the first time.
Avery, I'd love to ask you as a former New Yorker to, what surprises people kind of at the door knocking level at the local grassroots level, the most about water security in New York? I mean, it's something you just take for granted, the great tap water here that makes world class bagels, but a lot of people don't realize how much raw sewage goes into the East River and the Hudson, rainstorms, how much of we just had on the show, the former head of the MTA, how much of that has to be drained constantly because of the natural watershed that is Manhattan today that goes back out into the rivers.
Give me some anecdotes.
Well, thank you for having me today.
It is quite an awesome responsibility to represent New York City local organizations in New York City.
Like you said, we are incredibly lucky.
In New York City, we have a very reliable and clean source of drinking water.
Because it's so reliable, I think that's why oftentimes people know so little about it.
I think the resources we know the most about are the ones that we have the least of.
So I would say, and you mentioned the sewage as well.
I think not only is important to know where your water comes from, but where it goes, New York City has combined sewage overflow, which means if it rains enough, the rainwater and your sewage is going into the rivers.
I think our organization focuses on teaching about where it comes from.
What surprises we work primarily with students.
So we're doing public school students grades two through 12.
What surprises the kids the most is our drinking water comes from, in many cases, over 100 miles away.
We used to get our drinking water from within the city, so people know Central Park Reservoir.
We currently consume enough water in the city to empty the reservoir every single day, Central Park Reservoir.
So We are getting our water from these amazing sources.
And I think for the kids, the most surprising part is it takes three days for the water to get to us on average.
Our my favorite fact to share with the kids is the size of the aqueducts that bring the water here.
It's big enough to fit a school bus through, which is a unit that they can really relate to.
Um, But, yeah, I think New York City is an interesting case about trying to get people interested in water because, like I said, we have such a good source of it.
We had our first drought warning in 20 years in 2024.
I do think that that was an opportunity for people to learn a lot about our drinking water, and I hope that people can continue that interest without having to have that scarcity make them interested.
And that's something that we try to do at our organization too.
Also, if I could bring you in from across the pond, all across the pond.
What practical changes would you say help governments move from this siloed minded this siloed decision making to genuinely integrated policy when it comes to water and energy? Thank you.
I'm pleased to join you online.
Well, I think that's the million dollar question, how to achieve integration and coordination in important policy decisions and investments.
I think from research, we actually looked at this just when all the SEGs were agreed, what can help policymakers construct really integrated policies? I think we found four dimensions and they have actually been very much confirmed to me also interacting with policymakers since.
But we saw that these four dimensions.
One was a normative dimensions, so really having clear political vision, leadership that we do want to achieve both good water outcomes, good energy outcomes, good community outcomes all at once, and also having the courage to sometimes making difficult trade offs.
Sometimes you can't achieve all goals at once.
A second dimension is organization.
And so this would typically be setting up more cross departmental working groups or task forces ensuring to have both the energy experts and the water experts.
That's only the first step, though, and it's very important to also ensure that these different functions in government also have the legal mandate to really work for integrated outcomes and also to have the right incentives in place.
So what are the performance indicators, for example, that they are evaluated against? A third dimension is about procedures, how these government functions make decisions, what safeguards are in place.
We have, of course, the very traditional type of environmental impact assessment where we can look at water impacts from big energy investments, for example.
And I think the challenge historically has been to try to do these impact assessments at a more strategic level, earlier in the decision making process and also not going looking at the project by project, but really looking at the cumulative impact on, for example, water availability from multiple energy projects and vice versa.
The fourth and final dimension, and here I think research, academia has a big role to play.
A supporting decision makers is what we call a learning dimension.
So this is more over time, establishing epistemic community that really learns about all the interdependencies, all the interactions, and also all the smart solutions that do achieve multiple goals.
And this can be done through developing analytical and modeling tools, for example, working together with technical experts in government to find these very good solutions.
But it's also actually meetings like the HLPF and reports like the global Sustainable Development Report that tries to synthesize good practices.
How do we integrate policies? So I think that's a start, at least, four key dimensions for good policy integration.
O.
There's a question that came in over the transom from Hong Kong that I'd like to pose to our panelists should countries come together to discuss a potential standard on microplastics? That's something that keeps me up at night when I think about potable water and how pervasive it is and how it's everybody's problem, and yet it's no one's problem.
Jump in.
There are meetings going on about microplastics.
They're characterized, I think by the fact that they're going very slowly, unfortunately.
I don't think that the public fully understands how bad the problem is.
Scientists have found microplastics in the bloodstream of unborn children.
The only way it got there was that their mother ingested microplastics and it went across the placenta.
If we are at that stage, surely we should be a lot more concerned and alarmed about microplastics and regulating them than we are, it seems.
I mean, we already know it's part of our diet because we put it in feed the fish with it and then eat the fish afterwards.
But we really aren't moving nearly as fast as we should be on this one.
The answer would be, of course.
I mean, as David said in the beginning, also, our water is their water.
It's all part of one cycle, and it is something that absolutely needs to be global partnership on that.
And yeah, I mean, David said a lot of it is pervasive.
And not only is it damaging to humans, it's damaging to all different trophic levels of marine organisms as well as land organisms.
And I think to me, that's an easy yes, I would say.
Okay.
Okay.
All right.
Thank you.
For me, I think that a lot needs to be done to accelerate.
My word here will be acceleration.
We're already in the right direction in terms of putting the framework around it within the US system, but I think we need to really accelerate the progress towards reaching a milestone that will drive change.
But I'll say again, why you check some countries, you see that companies that produce these plastics are already taking initiatives on their own.
Why you check The same companies in other countries, everything goes.
The difference is not the companies.
The difference are the policies and laws in within different countries.
So I think the countries on their hand could take action even at this point while the global framework is still being developed.
Thank you.
A more whimsical question.
If suddenly, you know, what would you do with $100 million to spend on this? I know that, you know, you and David were saying that you could at a much different level downstream affect a person's lives if, for example, the women breadwinners in the house are involved, the incentive structure is completely different from building, large scale investment.
So have some fun with that.
Where would you get most bang for the $100 million buck right now in terms of the topic of this afternoon? So for me, For me, what would help my decision making on where to put $100 million will be to ask, what will energy enable? What will water make possible? Oftentimes, the answer is not straightforward.
It's not the same thing in different villages, in different towns, in different countries.
It depends on the different parameters within those different contexts.
But again, I would say, because my background is in energy, I realize from science, from research I've done to realize that when you have $100 million, for energy project and you spend 100% of it on energy variables, you are not likely going to achieve more than 40% of the impact of that font because of things I've mentioned earlier, you need to incentivize the areas.
We call them complementary actions.
Without them, all that you achieve with energy investment are just way fire impact.
Of course, the guys can stay outside in the night because there is lightning now.
But what happens to the economy for energy to drive economy, there has to be complementary actions in those various sectors, that is the various SDGs.
So A speaks more into coordinated and integrated action.
Thank you.
I want to bring it on our online forum, if I can, and I encourage you to go there on the Slido template on SDGS.
There's a question that came in through Jacqueline in USA, what role do you see for tech innovation in improving animal welfare while promoting sustainable development, I wildlife monitoring or humane agriculture? One of the the need to be able to monitor and figure out where the wildlife is and how well it's doing.
One of the things that we can do now is to analyze the DNA in the streams that flow through the places where you find animals, and that helps you to understand what's there and also the numbers of the people who are there.
I also have colleagues at the university who are doing the same thing in the coastal environment.
So monitoring is absolutely critical.
You got to know what's there and whether it's doing better or worse so you can know where to put your efforts in terms of protection and so on.
So that's definitely one useful thing.
Making access to data free and open would be also very useful.
A lot of countries which have a lot more wildlife and a lot more rare and endangered wildlife have less money.
And so their ability to monitor is compromised because they don't have access to the data.
So finding ways of being able to make sure that they get access and the data are free and open would be excellent so that we could at least monitor and then start putting money into figuring out how people can manage land better so that the animals and plants as well are less in a better situation.
Osa, this is a composite of some questions that we have online, but from your vantage point, what is holding back an espousal of more sustainable energy solutions in the United States? We have an administration here that wanted to maybe throw some sand in the gears after there was some progress, but you're still seeing the adoption of EVs at a certain pace.
You're still seeing distributed or rooftop solar.
It has its escape velocity.
A little bit in the United States, but impressively, to my mind, in developing economies, you go to Pakistan, you go to Sub Saharan Africa.
It's become kind of a solution that you just opt in.
It's like the cellphone, where we were waiting for so long for wired landlines to take over as a sign of, you know, human development, cellphone technology disrupted everything, included banking.
I know that's a long winded way of asking you, but what are you wishing for to kind of accelerate that tipping point? You just mentioned that actually the word tipping point, I think is critical here and it's something that we looked at also when developing the last global sustainable development report evaluating the SDGs.
I mean, you're right.
I think solar power, renewable energy more broadly, it's just commercially, common sense now.
You don't really need as much of a policy framework anymore.
But importantly, what led to this point when actually solar power is so cost competitive, it is through innovation funding and through a policy framework, a combination of carbon pricing, subsidies for solar, et cetera I think the story that we see now of solar, it's not a story of saying, we don't need active public policy.
It's rather, this is the result of effective and, um, impactful climate and energy policies that created this cost parity.
And as a follow up to any of you, is there a technology, it was a great economist package on solar and solar is tipping point, Sosa mentioned, a couple of years ago, that that makes potentially pipe dreams and desalination and other things actually real within the next five to ten years.
Are there, you know, a sense maybe David has something on that wish list.
If we do hit that solar, if it's so flooded with this technology, if it's so presentable and it follows its own Moore's law acceleration, what is the crossover into water, for example, or water accessibility, potable water, agricultural water, other water sources that we didn't consider before? There's a couple of things.
I remember going to Stony Brook University a couple of years ago and they had this beautiful device.
It was on the back of a trailer.
Big solar panels, which you lifted up.
And then when you lifted up the solar panels, it ran a system that did two things.
One is it charged a bunch of batteries that you could then take to somebody's house and give them a battery so they could run their light through the night, charge some cell phones, run a fridge or something like that.
And the other thing it did was it purified water, and they had done very, very good advances in filters that could literally, he said to me, not quite yet seawater, but really horrible stuff, full of bacteria and everything else, they could make that good for drinking off that solar power.
Now, if you can do that in remote communities, then you're starting to build the quality of life tremendously because then you can provide people with light, you can provide them with water, you can start saying goodbye to those horrendous waterborne diseases which are still affecting a lot of people.
That would be a heck of a way forward.
And these are cost effective.
I would say that they need to be invested in by governments if people can't afford them.
That's the role of government, surely.
If government can't do that, then you need a new government.
Again, from our online Q&A, how affordable and clean energy being implemented? How are they being implemented while keeping costs low for people, especially those who live below the standard of living, the standard of poverty? Again, this inclusion.
Again, I'm reminded of how unthinkable it would have been for people, say in Sub Saharan Africa to bank on their old Nokia phones, right? How do you doing? Jump in.
I think that's actually connected to what David just mentioned.
Whereas, when we talk about innovation, particular energy issues, we're majly focused on technology, and by the way, I'm an engineer, but now wei standing.
At this point, I remember my first step into the energy world was based on a statement made sometimes in 2010 by my lecturer at the university.
He said, Based on the technology available as of that time, the energy solar radiation we get, I mean, the radiation we get from solar systems can actually for 1 hour can power the global energy need for one year.
Can you say that again? As of that time, he said, based on the available technology as of that time, talking about 2010, the radiation we get from solar energy for 1 hour can power the global energy need for one year.
So the question, and if you look at it 2000-10 and now, lots improvement.
So I think the question is not technology.
I think a lot of the question is about the financial innovations.
Um, solar is almost everywhere in many countries and all that.
But the issue is, how are people able to afford it, which brings the issue of inclusion.
Now, I think, and a lot of the issues around acquisition of solar and inclusion has to do with the initial cost.
Let's get it right.
Solar is not more expensive than the conventional energy system.
It's only that most of the costs, whereas the foresee one is over time, most of the cost is upfront.
What we need to do, the problem we need to solve is how to address the innovation that addresses the high initial cost of solar energy system.
And there are a lot of innovations around that.
There are build and people that build, for instance, in Niger solar energy system, companies that build solar energy systems in your house, and then you pay a store you pay utility bill on time, and then you take it over for the time.
You know, there are a lot of innovations around that.
I believe that the inclusion question around solar energy system has to do with solving the high initial cost barrier at the onset.
Go ahead.
Trump in Avery.
I would also just say that I think in the US, especially we have all of the solutions.
We actually know how to be combating all of these things.
It's just about giving them the attention.
I think that does come a lot from our political leaders.
And, I mean, it's about subsidies as well.
If we're talking about affordability of renewable energy, there's a reason why gas is cheaper, and that's because of subsidies.
Like that I think comes down to what is our government caring about? Which? It's about what are we forcing them to care about as well to the power that we can? I have that? Not to make this very US centric, but I'm sure you're all being asked to chime in on the opportunity and the hazard of data centers, right? Energy intensive, increasingly downstream, water intensive.
It's become a big wedge issue in the United States in Virginia, New York, in terms of accessibility, equity.
If the free market was just allowed to go run amok, these hyperscalers, these massively capitalized firms would just be buying up swaths of arable land and putting these power hungry facilities on them.
It's going abroad.
It has to.
David, are glad it's happening in the United States and not in our own countries because the amount of external cost is just too much for many places.
There's an obvious need to increase the efficiency of the technology.
At the moment, it's a bit wasteful, and I think more and more you need to look at improving it rather than spreading it out.
I worry, though, that the flip side of that when we talk about equity and whatnot is exploitations of countries that are unable to correctly price a hectare of arable land.
I mean, you brought up the beef and the Amazon, that it's low hanging fruit to be able to go into a nation and build something like this and provision northern Europe or other places that are closer to it.
I'll say every new technology will, first of all, bring about increased inequality because the innovation is, first of all, coming from the country, and then most likely it's going to spread in that country before it goes to others.
If we say we want to because of that, we limit some of those innovations, we'll be limiting ourselves.
So for any technology that probably comes up as an innovation, I believe they should be supported.
Even if it's domicide in one country interim, where mechanisms and systems have been developed to be able to spread them to other countries.
When solar energy system started getting attention around the world, I mean, it was nowhere in Africa.
Today, my two offices in Nigeria are 100% powered by solar energy and not even connected to the grid.
So I believe that we should support the just like David mentioned, the scaling the improvement of technologies and particularly on the efficiencies.
And then as we make efforts at a global level to develop frameworks to support the extension of those technology and adoption in other countries.
Thank you.
Asa, would you like to jump in from your vantage point? Yes, I think, I mean, the issue of data centers is very high on the agenda also in the part of the world where I am.
So I know local governments here in Sweden are approached by multiple data center providers each week.
And I think it's an issue of we need to reduce the information asymmetry on how to develop these data centers in a more sustainable way and how to increase the efficiency, as David pointed out, We also need a very fast learning curve on the side of the commissioning of these centers and permitting of these centers.
Ultimately, though, it's also an issue of political leadership and actually having a vision of what do we know, for example, in the electricity needs of these centers.
If we go for these big centers, what other sort of decarbonization, electrification investments are they going to perhaps prevent or delay.
For example, in Sweden, we have now a situation of, should we prioritize electricity for these fossil free steel production projects or data centers.
So political leadership, I think is needed, but also a lot of fast learning on the side of local governments actually giving permits to these data centers.
Thanks.
Thank you, Osa, Avery Addoyan, David, I learned a lot from this, and I could keep going on and on and on.
I would love to buttonhole you after this and pick your brains, but thank you so much for this panel.
As we transition to our second panel, this one on Innovating for sustainable cities and inclusive growth, advancing SDG nine and SDG 11, let me ask you, our audience one more poll question related to our next panel.
Again, go to slido.com and enter hashtag SDGs, Susan David Gregory Susan.
Question is what will matter most for sustainable cities by 2030? Better public transport, affordable housing, digital innovation, green infrastructure, stronger community participation, or something else.
And while you're voting, let's take a look at this video from UN DESA on how this moment at HLPF can be a moment of hope.
With only four years So if you can't hear the video in the room, but you can read the transcript.
All right.
A, spotlight hope and inspire action.
Follow the conversation.
Let's deliver better.
Let's deliver together for a sustainable future for all.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I sound like Max Hedrom testing.
Okay.
Now, without ado, let's meet our guest experts for the second panel on investing, innovating for sustainable cities and inclusive growth, advancing SDG nine and SDG 11.
I'm delighted to welcome onstage with me now on Fu, Professor of Technology and International Development and incoming head of the Department of International Development at the University of Oxford.
She's also a member of the UN High levell Advisory Board on Economic and Social Affairs, HLAB.
Leonard Kova, system developer at the Zimbabwe National Statistics Agency, IMStat.
Caleb Lee is the inaugural youth coordinator of the New York City Department of Education's Global Leaders Academy and Global Advocacy Officer of the Youth Publications and Socioeconomic Forum.
Davirsari, advocacy and research intern at Civicus, Yaka Wilson, Executive Director of Black Sisters in STEM, an organization that seeks to encourage Black women in science and engineering.
And just in the nick of time, Clav Gate.
He is Executive Secretary for UN Economic Commission for Africa.
Thank you, panelists for joining us.
For hao Lan, innovation is often associated with really the cutting edge, the bleeding edge technology, but it's also about people.
How can cities build and deploy innovation ecosystems that leave nobody behind? Thank you.
So an innovation system that leaves nobody behind is an innovation system centered on people and also an inclusive and sustainability oriented innovation system.
So in an innovation ecosystem, we have the government, the industry, and also the universities, the public sector, as well as civil servants and the citizens, people in the city.
So to build an innovation system that leaves no one behind, we need to mobilize and coordinate all these players, you know, to work towards a shared goal.
Technological progress, economic growth that leaves no one behind.
And therefore, we need to treat it as a system and also, you know, through coordinate policies to reinforce to coordinate the forces and also reinforce each other rather than going to the different direction.
And also an innovation system that leaves no one behind a system that not only serves the elites and the rich people, but also, you know, the rest of the society really puts the rest of the society in the center.
So therefore, the youth, the poor people, and the women, they should really empower them and help them to grow.
And how to build such kind of innovation system.
Let me give an example that from my own experience, there is a city called Hangzhou, which is one of the most beautiful city in China, but it's not my hometown, so I don't have any bias.
So I talk about this city.
And this city, of course, is famous not only because the West Lake, but also it's the hometown for Alibaba, for Desk, for UTR.
So for all these high tech companies, and this city the city mayor said, we are creating a city that, you know, is aspiring for young people.
So young people would like to come home for young people.
So that's their slogan.
It's their vision of this city.
So if you go to that city, some districts or, you know, some government provide housing in campus, we see a lot of young people come from all over the country, not only in that city, they attract people to there.
How do they try to do this? They say, we are they don't say we are a very capable government.
They say, we are a garden type government.
So grow the garden, you know, diversity and provide the environment.
You give the water and sunshine, but they don't use kind of, you know, strong hands to manage it.
So you need me.
We are here, you don't need me, we disappear.
So that's the city government.
What they do in addition to this cheap houses to young people to graduate and grants to young people too.
And also, you know, if you bring your family, young young kids, also provide school, provide assistance to all these.
So if you are a university graduates, so there is an online system.
You claim your house allowance or various allowance every month automatically.
So you don't need to, you know, like, to go to government offices to try to get it.
It's effortless to do all this.
So From housing to transportation, you know, to children's education, all those aspects, they provide, you know, support to young people and see where they are most difficult and try to support that.
Of course, they provide a clean environment and also very important they support entrepreneurship.
Support entrepreneurship.
So for young people, they can start their business.
They grow there.
They not only, you know, attract to Hangzhou, they stay there are retained and grow there.
So Of course, this needs not only technological innovation or very social innovation, financial innovation, as mentioned.
So they provide, you know, the high tech startups with no physical kind of collateral to borrow money.
They provide loans or support based on their intellectual property.
And so they need those financial innovations.
Even the insurance company come in to provide insurance to the financial institutions who provide loans or equity.
So it's all the kind of coordinated efforts, social innovation policy innovation together with technological innovation to create an inclusive city.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Clara, I'd like to ask you, I'm thinking about some of the mega cities in Sub San Africa and Northern Africa.
I mean, Cairo, Lagos, Kinshasa.
The growth has been just breathtaking, and they seem to just break any law of kind of economic physics, if there is such a thing.
Is it inevitable that you'll see rampant inequality, unequal access to potable water, foodstuffs, you know, running toilets, sanitation as this happened, or is there any way of getting ahead of it right now? Yeah.
I believe my colleague I was very much busy reasoning, but understanding where Africa stands in this kind of situation.
And one of the most important things is really how to organize our cities.
I'm sure you've been to so many cities, and some of them you can hardly drive.
You prefer walking.
If you look at your environment around, you'll get scared.
If you see the growth of slums and informal settlements, it is so scary.
And that's why we have to look at it differently.
Usually towns, cities, what we call secondary cities, satellite cities, whatever the name you can call them, they are supposed to be poles of development.
And now countries are realizing that this actually can become sources of growth for the countries, but depending on how you organize them.
And the first thing first is a master plan for the cities.
The master plan gives you the whole entire picture of what needs to be done.
Where do we put schools, where do we put the health centers, and other services that are needed? How about the water? The sanitation, the electricity.
And when I say sanitation, I mean solid waste and liquid waste.
And in terms of liquid waste, you don't have any other mechanism except a centralized sewage system or semi centralized sewage system because they are so big that the way you do it, it has to be underground.
And also, you have the mixed housing because these days, you cannot afford people living on one side and offices and other trading centers are on the other side.
It has to be mixed.
That's why any office, you'd have office on top, you have residential, you have, you know, shopping mall below you, and so forth.
So the way you organize it, the green areas, the light industries, as I mentioned, the transportation, the whole entire banking system, and all the other services that are needed, there has to be that kind of master plan.
And also, then the issue is you have so many people parked in one small place.
If you go to the rural areas where there is big space, very few people, compare them with people who are crowded in one area.
And to do that, if you don't have really a plan to be able to address those kind of issues, because on this one here, for example, if you take housing, you have high end, you have affordable housing, you have social housing, you have informal settlements, you have slums.
Now, if you can improve those people at the bottom, those who are in slums, informal settlements, the income goes up.
And this is where the money is.
And once you do that, they are the ones who consume.
They are the ones who spend money for any consumables that you can imagine, and that's how the economy grows.
And that's where it also the more they get money, the more they attract more demands, more services, and more this and that.
So the mass comes first, the wiring, the electric wiring, the potable water, the sewerage, or afterwards, right? Do you move out of the slums.
It's something you can go to South America, you can go to all across Africa, the invasion slums, the things that happen where the governments just tolerate it.
They realize it's a fact of life.
You see it in Brazil, you see it in other nations.
But at some point, you have to bring on formal utilities, right? And that either bond issuance or something else to No specialize that.
Yeah.
The first thing before when you talk about the other services, there are those basic minimum access to water, access to electricity or other services that you can use.
The access to sanitation.
If you don't have it, it creates a lot of haze problems and other things.
So there are some basic minimum before you go to the luxury areas can I get really high end places? Can I buy land? Can I buy there are certain things of housing and other things that are necessary.
Those that should come first.
And then others you can build on those.
You can even reach the level whereby you can say, as a city, we want to attract so many conferences coming to our own country and all that, that is okay.
But take care of the ordinary people, their life, where they live, and what they need to survive first.
And then you can build others and improve.
And by doing that, you're also improving their financial capacity for them to afford anything that you are doing and also to participate in the normal life and making sure that actually, because they are all crowded, the environment issue is taken into account because if you don't, it's not sustainable.
And that's why it is very, very important for us to look at it as really a source of development that you need.
That's where most people with minor.
They don't go and live in the rural areas.
They want to be in the cities.
But what kind of city is it that we're building for them? What kind of services, what kind of facilities, what kind of, you know, industries that would be necessary that are right, including those service industries that are very, very important.
So that's what I just wanted to add.
But it is very important to take care of the human beings first.
I want to bring Caleb into that conversation, you know, springboarding on this.
If you could redesign one aspect of city life from all the various cities that you visited, right? That would help give that next generation better opportunities.
What would be one lever that you could pull.
Thank you for giving, before I start my remarks, I'd like to thank Ariel and the entire TSA and the Global Leaders Academy for giving this amazing opportunity to be with such a high level panel.
Now, to answer your question, so when I was in my freshman year of high school, I built something called the City Youth Network, where we partnered up with public institutions and institutions in both the public and private sector, tons of companies through my connections when I was in my low income after school program, the Boom of New York.
So, civil community based organizations are so important, right? But also just connections I made through working and through interning and through volunteering.
However, the City Youth network failed because many institutions were unwilling to work with a freshman in high school, you know, simply put it.
Um, But if I was an adult and if I was coming, like, from an institution, an institutional backing, like the Boys of New York or any of the other programs and big organizations out there, I would be seen differently, right? And in my sophomore year of high school, I was introduced to the civil society space within the UN system, the major group of children and youth, which is a centralized space where young people from all around the world can meaningfully participate in the UN.
However, there was a gap in the involvement of people in this very host city.
Not a lot of not many young New Yorkers knew it was possible to participate in the UN, the Global Leaders Academy, as well as the New York City juniors Ambassadors Program run by the Mayor's Office for International Affairs are amazing programs, but it's really mostly about learning and building projects where, you know, um, where we're looking at how the SDGs can be implemented back in their own communities, but not exactly about how like, we have an amazing civil society participation right here.
And so I wanted to bring young New Yorkers into this space, not just through SDG implementation in their communities, but also to talk about it and learn about how other countries and other organizations are doing it out there.
So I built the youth publications and socioeconomic forum, and I've dedicated myself to bridging that immerse opportunity gap in our city by leveraging New York's diversity to ensure that young people from every background, you know, we're so diverse in the city to have a seat at this global table.
And we've brought over like 150 young New Yorkers to over 25 UN processes, and we're creating a centralized pathway gaining recognition for young New Yorkers to meaningfully participate in the UN.
So It's all about centralized this centralized network of opportunities for young people in the city.
We have Wall Street.
We have the UN.
We have so many companies and public institutions out there that are willing to support young people as long as we have the institutions that are backing us up.
Um, And so every city should have, like, a centralized, accessible ecosystem where young people are discovering internships, public meetings, mentorships, volunteer opportunities, and civic engagement in one single place.
I'm trying to build that.
In my high school.
We have an internship coordinator, but, you know, it would be wonderful if parents, if alumni, students can always be talking about those opportunities and sharing that in one single place.
I want to ask the Mia, specifically, how do you bring women into this? It's an intimidating area when you talk about technology, engineering, math, some of these other things that historically, you know, young girls have self excluded.
Okay.
Thank you so much for the question and thank you so much for having me here, and I'm so grateful.
I also thank the Lord for this opportunity.
That is such a great question, and I think the question actually goes back to what is the purpose of a woman and what can a woman do? When you look out throughout the world and you look out through media and the cultures within the locales that women are being raised, the possibility for women is being truncated in her household.
It's being truncated when she's on Instagram.
It's being truncated when she's talking to a dean, me myself, even as my father was a mathematician, I went to one of the top universities in this nation.
I had multiple people tell me that I should look towards another major that would be more suited for someone like me.
And so this is not much about self exclusion, as it is a grown issue within our culture and it's perpetuated through our media.
When you even look at the statistics, many people will be surprised to know that Black women enter into the STEM at the same rate as any other gender or racial group.
The problem is, do they stay? And what is kicking them out? It's the microaggressions.
It's the macroaggressions, it's the lack of systems they have and support they have to even be able to afford school.
The number one issue for Black women leaving college is a financial issue.
And we're not talking about $20,000.
We're talking about $1,000, $200, $500 to actually sign up for classes this semester.
And so when we want to really think about inclusion, I want us to also ask ourselves and then look at the systems that are continuing to disenfranchise women and inhibit women from the natural capabilities that any human has to be brilliant.
Feedback on that with indigenous people.
They have to have buy in, as well.
If you're coming into areas and trying to educate people and trying to incorporate people and not seem like you're presumptuous or just imposing something, but actually trying to get buy in.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
I'm really grateful to be here.
Thank you, Ty and Tessa.
I'm here representing Civicus, but I come from an indigenous community in Indonesia.
I was born and grew up in Indonesia, and my community population is less than 3% indonia, so I'm really, really grateful to be here.
To answer to your question, if I may, Mr.
Moderator, I would like to ask all of the audience here, if you are under the age of 30, please raise your hand.
Now, stay.
If you're under the age of 30 and a woman, please raise your hand.
Even better, if you're under the age of 30, a woman and come from a minority background, whether it's indigenous, ethnic, religious, minorities, genders, and et cetera.
All right.
So I want to I would like to ask everyone to look across the room, right? Look at everyone in this room and ask yourself this, am I representing the group that is the most affected with this issue, right, whether it's technology, whether it's innovation, whether it's education, gender rights and all that.
Like, you have to look at every time you enter a room, especially at the UN events, look at everyone around you and ask yourself this, am I representing the voices that are being forgotten? We always talk about this jargon, leave no one behind.
But then sometimes when we entered the room, we get so excited.
Oh, my God, I am at the UN.
But then at the same time, you forgot that these voices that should be represented at the UN is not present.
So to answer to your question earlier about indigenous person and especially from a youth perspective, right? When we talk about technologies, obviously, the young groups are the most affected, and the young groups will be at the center of this conversation will be making policy decisions.
But even now, we are not seeing that many young people sitting at the table and being part of the decision making processes.
And this is something that I would really like to reiterate to every room that I go to, I always ask, where is the young person, right? As an indigenous youth person, The most important thing is always protecting civic space because civic space is really important.
That's where the conversations happen.
That's where indigenous peoples come to talk to civil society, come talk to the international organization, come talk to the government.
And since they are the most affected communities, they're able to bring that demands.
And that's the question that I want to leave here with our panelists and also our audience is that where is that demand going to lead us to? Is it going to be forgotten? Is it going to be left in this room, or is it going to turn into a real policy decisions that will make them.
So I hope that answers your question.
Leonard, if I can bring you in, I'm fascinated by how digitized data collection is making an impact here.
As I saw that, you know, farmers in many countries, when they're approached with, you know, almost magical, mystical meteorological data that will help them with crop yields and predicting rain flows and labor and where certain, you know, boots on the ground should be.
What are the real time impacts right now in terms of sustainability in the developing economies digitized data collection.
Thank you so much.
Thank you for the opportunity.
My name is Leonard Karo from Zimbabwe, particularly from Zimbabwe National Statistics Agency.
So mostly we work with these data collection systems.
Talking from African perspective, particularly in Zimbabwe, data is no longer a tool for reporting.
It's no longer that gone are the days.
Data is a foundation of better governance.
Better decision making and better lives.
So from ZoomStat level, from the national statistics level, we are trying by every means to witness the data transformation, whereby we are now introducing digital transformation in data collection, data analyzing, data dissemination.
A practical example that we gave is we are now developing systems which can bring local authorities together, whereby we are saying we are trying to localize the data collection process, and we are building systems for local authority where they include all the institute, including the government department at local authority level, private organization development partners, and others at local level.
I What are we trying to say? We are trying to open the gaps that we think our data is in SDG level.
Those gaps are not being noticed because some gaps are silent, especially in cities.
And also, data cannot lie.
So we are trying to bring out all the gaps whereby local authorities, local government can now see where the gaps are, where the groups are not being saved from the initiatives that they are doing, from everything or even the investment that they are doing.
Where the shortage of schools, shortage of clinics, where people or young people lack job opportunities or employment opportunities.
We are more vulnerable groups in the communities.
So those are the areas that we are trying to do.
Also, we are taking cognizance of data disaggregation because we are trying to open all the avenues that we think if we can disaggregate, we can make better decisions by location, by disability, by age, all those ones can help us to make data driven decisions.
Also, young people, this is the point, again, I want to emphasize on young people.
We need to include young people they are not only the beneficiaries of digital transformation, but they are the drivers of digital transformation.
Whereby we are saying we need to include them across Africa, young people are building applications, they're analyzing data.
They are bringing out some innovation that is driving the decision making.
So we need to include young people as much as possible.
Of course, challenge remains the likes of in most of the cities, challenge remains like connectivity gaps.
Uh, financial shortages and the likes.
And I think government departments and other developers should come into play whereby they should invest in those so that we can include young people and try to bring all those challenges that can help everyone.
Also, partnership.
We need to partner with development partners, other agencies, and of course, the young groups, youth groups can bring change to the communities if you include them.
I Let me conclude by this statement.
Better data better digital data leads to better decision.
Better decision leads to better savings.
And Be cities create better lives for everyone.
Together, we want to involve everyone leaving no one behind is SDG driving too.
Thank you so much.
Thank you, Leonard.
Great.
Salon, I have a question for you.
Smart Cities get thrown around a lot, but the bar real time is being lifted in terms of what AI first time I think we mentioned it today does in terms of tracking wastewater, for example, for viral loads or subway lights, bringing traffic down, real time pollen or pollution levels.
Regale us with some of the stuff you're seeing now at that intersection of this artificial intelligence hive mind and sustainability or smoother flowing smart cities.
So, exactly.
I think AI can play a very useful tool, effective tool.
In supporting building the sustainable smart cities.
Now, kind of Internet of things or AI driven smart city, you know, in terms of many not only smart cities, smart home, you know, control the use of energy and also, you know, the effective use of water.
And so from families to districts to cities, and AI can help to make our our production and life activities more efficient, more environment friendly, resource effective and also more inclusive.
I have been thinking, you know, about today's topic about sustainable cities.
Actually, industrialization urbanization are very important paths to development, and the cities really is the right level, you know, for us to policies to act on.
So it's a very important topic today.
And first is today, we have so many youth, and they talked about the role of youth can play in building the smart cities in digital transformation in use of AI.
This is a sector that youth is the main driver force.
And also, you know, Why I think a city build a city that aspired to use this very effective policy tool in all countries is create an environment that's clean, they would like to stay with affordable water, energy, transportation, good education and healthcare system, and the job opportunities for them to grow with all these all the cities in the world, when the mayors, the government thinking about this, bring all the policies which, you know, can help to achieve this goal.
And then we will have a prosperous, sustainable city that, you know, that we're looking forward and partnership.
Also, many of the audiences suggest partnership, very important.
Let me first about China.
In China, there are a lot of city pairs.
You see the western cities and the coastal region cities, they are pairs like Shanghai is a pair of Wu in Xinjiang and Guangdong have a pair with a city like in Tibet and in various and they have to, you know, in partnership in terms of financial resources and knowledge and skills, technologies, also marketing resources, they have to work in pairs.
So I think that could be something, you know, also for us to think about.
North, South, and we have sister cities, et cetera, and also within the country at the city level.
I think, you know, partnership between cities could also be something for us to think about.
Clover.
Clover, just out of curiosity, I wonder what it is doing with solar and solar distribution.
If people are opting out of a notoriously unreliable grid in a place like South Africa or Nigeria or other parts of the subcontinent, what on the back end does artificial intelligence do in terms of connecting people, connecting individuals who are effectively their own source of power? I'd love to know.
I think before I come to power, I just wanted to say that when our colleagues say that the people below the age of 30 should raise up their hands, I was wondering whether I should raise up my hand that what was happening.
And I just remembered because you're talking about, first of all, before I come to that, on technology, when they say young people, this is extremely, extremely important.
For some of you who are old, I don't know if you can compete with your kids in terms of the AI, in terms of the technology.
We all know that.
We had the first experience when the computer started and all that.
And in my previous job when I was in my country, Wanda, and we started now schools, I mean, laptops in schools.
We had an experiment of one laptop per child and working with MIT with Professor ***** Ponte.
So we distributed them After one week, the kids were far ahead with their teachers.
So we had to secretly bring the teachers to the training centers and teaching them over the weekend so they can cope with the kids over the week.
Technology goes with the young people.
Really have to accept it and they are born in a different age from ours, we can talk, but for them, they act and they move very fast when it comes to technology.
Now when it comes to energy, maybe I can go deep taking the example of Africa.
In Africa, we are talking about green energy.
But even before the green energy, there was no energy at all because 600 million Africans do not have access to energy.
And then you look at the potential.
On solar, we have the largest potential for solar.
And then we have the largest hydro.
I'm sure you've heard about the Inger Dam and others.
Now, we have geothermal, we have wind, we have everything that is needed.
The problem had been actually the investment that is needed.
I was from Minister of Finance, I was the Minister of infrastructure.
And one of them was actually energy.
And for energy, one of the things which I was introducing, which by now maybe it is under consideration was solar.
We had solar because in the rural areas, you cannot put the grid.
The grid is put into the urban areas where people can afford to do that.
But when it comes to solar and what our colleague mentioned that initially the battery was the most expensive to store the electricity.
The battery was? The battery.
Yes.
And also for the battery, when you connect solar to the main grid, it creates instability.
And we had not figured out on how to address that issue.
I was working with the World Bank.
We had looked at so many experiments from Brazil to Zambia, to everywhere, and we are seeing problems.
We're also looking at the floating solar and then the rooftop Sra.
And we are now offering the rooftop SRA for anyone who has iron sheets on their own houses so that we can say, okay, you can use this one here, but if you have excess, we are ready to buy it and also put it in the grid to work out a mechanism on how to do that.
So now the issue there are two things.
One is how to do the investment at scale.
And on the African continent, what we are offering and now at the Economic Commission for Africa is looking at it from the regional perspective, the regional power pools, so that if you are West Africa is a West Africa power pool.
Whatever you produce, you can sell it so that it can incentivize investors to say, if I put that sorry? I'm sorry.
Which begs the question? It's like it blew right into the question of the audience member, is where do you draw the line at private capital formation and kind of a public responsibility, right? You want to offer superior rate of returns on large scale investment, but at what point does it turn into exploitation or profiteering? I know that's an internal question, but there is one thing.
There is the government usually what they do is the transmission lines.
And then you have the financing arrangement that provides incentives for the people, the power purchase agreement.
If it is 25 years to 30 years, they know they are going to invest and recoup their profits for a long term.
And that's what really attracts the private sector to invest in the production, and the government can invest in the transmission lines, substations, and also access to that.
So the incentives that you provide, now, in addition to that, you can yes invest.
But if it is a small market, some people with large amount of money, they weren't scare.
And that's what we are looking at it at the regional level.
Like, for example, SD, South African development, community, which is quite big, so many countries.
And if you know that you have that market, you know that actually you can invest heavily, knowing that you're going to get the return on that one.
And that's what we are trying to really also extend the people.
And this one here, the potential is there, the raw materials are there.
The risk is now how to invest.
And then the perception of risk, of course, which you are dealing with.
And solar is something very important because an urban, in rural, you can come up with different models on how to do that.
Yeah.
Thank you, Clover.
Which begs the question.
I'm getting this from the community Q&A.
How do we guard water and arable land supplies against extraction by wealthy firms who externalize costs slash dump problems on local people? Jump in there.
Thank you for the question.
I think that's a really, really important question.
One of the idea under international law is what is called free prior and informed consent.
That is a consent that is protected under international law under international human rights law.
When we talk about and when we deal with corporations, especially extractive industries, they often come to indigenous lands, they come to local communities lands, and they do the consent and they talk to indigenous leaders, but they're sometimes like these indigenous leaders, they are also not part of the most affected group, which is women and young young girls as well.
So the free prior informed consent is basically an idea where indigenous peoples have to be consulted before development programs are being implemented.
And when we talk about consent, it is not a one time thing.
It is a continuous effort.
And sometimes a lot of these efforts are forgotten.
Development programs being implemented and they say, Hey, it's a ticking box exercise, right? We already talked to indigenous communities.
We already talked to the minority groups there, and they said, Yeah, go ahead.
But sometimes the attractive industry, they expand their business, and they are driven by profit.
When they are driven by profit, they expand their business and they want to take more lands, they want to take more areas to give them this resources, and then to sell them and without actually giving back to the community.
This is a very important So this is a very important issue that I want to highlight, is that what is consent and who is giving this consent, and who is these people that are being consulted to? And who are the people that are talking to the indigenous people? Are these people experts? Are these people government people? Is are these people civil society? So these are the questions that I would like to pose to this audience and also take it home with you and ask this question again, not only instructive industries, but also other industries as well, which are driven by profit, by corporations, and where they go to the cities, they would go to these areas, especially remote areas with very rich resources, right? And ask yourself again, do we have this conversation with the right people? Is there young women and girls being consulted about these development programs? And that also entails to the SDG implementation as well, where we talk to these people and ask yourself again this question, where is the young women and girls? Before we move to closing comments, I'd like to recap the results from poll three, if you can bring them up.
And I am not a young person, unfortunately, my vision is not.
The question just to recap is Thank you, Clover.
Thank you.
The question is, which principle do you think should be at the core of the next global development framework? And green infrastructure is at the lead with about 46% affordable housing clocked in at 34%, stronger community participation at 15%, better public transport at 5%, digital innovation and something else.
Wrap out the bottom.
Great starting point for the conversation.
I really thank all these panels for a fascinating conversation.
Again, I could have gone on and on and on with you.
I have so many questions.
Thank you for your time.
We'll have to leave it there.
But before we close our event, I'd like to pass the floor to Assistant Secretary-General for policy coordination, Buck Sen Chair, for closing reflection on these fantastic discussions.
Over to you, ASG.
Thank you so much, moderator.
I feel, you know, privileged that I got some of your very, very rich discussion.
So distinguished panelists and ladies and gentlemen in the room, and also all of you that have been following this very rich, very interesting discussion online.
I think the discussions today are really shown both the complexity of the challenges that we have before us, as well as the importance of bringing in different perspectives to address them.
I noticed that you had talked about partnership and you had talked about bringing in different groups, and I think this discussion has really proven the value of doing that.
You may have seen that earlier this week we released the Sustainable Development Goals Report for 2026, and that report delivers a clear message that progress is real, but unfortunately, it remains too slow and it's uneven.
You might have seen, but I'll recap very briefly that what it says is only about 36% of SDG targets with available trend data are on track or are making moderate progress.
Nearly half are moving too slowly, while 15% have fallen below the baseline, so going backwards.
So those numbers are sobering, but they don't really tell the whole story because there is really good progress that we need to note.
Since 2015, nearly 1 billion people have gained access to safely managed drinking water.
Electricity reaches 92% of the world's population, with one third coming from renewable sources, and Internet access has increased 40-74%.
So those achievements remind us of something very, very important, which is that progress is possible.
It is possible when political will is matched by investment, by innovation, and by international cooperation.
And when we have all that in place, we can really transform people's lives.
And the discussion today has really reinforced that message.
Water, energy, innovation, sustainable cities all deeply interconnected, and progress in one area can unlock progress in others.
But realizing that potential requires us to break down silos, to listen to different perspectives, and to ensure that policies are designed around the needs and experiences of people.
That sounds self evident, but in reality, many of us have seen that it isn't always that way.
Trust is built when people see that institutions can deliver integrated solutions to the challenges they face in their daily lives.
Now what we need to do is to move with greater speed, greater scale, and greater ambition.
With only about four years remaining until 2030, We don't need to search for an entirely new path because we have a lot of evidence of what works, and we've heard some good examples in the discussion here today.
We have better data, we have greater knowledge than ever before, and we have those examples of progress from communities and from countries around the world.
So what we need is that collective will to act.
And that means returning the sustainable development goals to the center of global decision making, strengthening the international cooperation that we need to turn those commitments into tangible results.
Today's dialogue has been part of that effort.
By bringing together experts, young people, other participants from around the world, we are strengthening the exchange of ideas and perspectives that can lead to better policies and better outcomes.
So, dear friends, let's leave today's discussion not only with a clear understanding of the challenges ahead, but also with that renewed determination to act together and to act now because the gains that we have made and that we have heard about today are real.
The gaps that remain are stark, and the choices that we make now will shape the lives of generations to come.
So with that, I thank you.
Thank you so much, ASG San Chair.
Many thanks to our panelists.
I'm richer for the experience and I hope that you enjoyed it.
I hope you could feel that I wanted to continue with you.
We have to stay on the clock and many thanks too to our audience for your participation.
I learned so much about these SDGs in focus, and I hope you did as well.
A reminder that the latest SDG progress report is out now.
You can track how the world is doing on each of the 17 goals and see where we need more action.
Find that at un.org slash dos.
Finally, the high level political forum on sustainable development continues through July 15th with many more sessions on water and energy and innovation.
Follow that on UN webTV and by visiting un.org slash dosA.
If you're on Zoom, you'll see an exit survey pop up shortly, and we'd love for you to fill that in.
We'd appreciate your feedback as it helps us plan future events, and a big thank you to our colleagues at UNDSA for their coordination and the Department of Global Communications for their online production.
This brings us to the end of our time together.
I and Richard, for the experience, have a wonderful rest of the night depending on where you are in the world.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Appreciate it.