This year’s High Level Political Forum (HLPF) on Sustainable Development took place in New York from 10 to 19 July. SDSN Germany was part of the German delegation on site and organised two events.
©SDSN Germany. From left: Oliver Hasenkamp (DGVN), Fidelis Stehle (Youth Delegate for Sustainable Development), Rainer Kern (Representative of the Mayor of Mannheim), Leida Rijnhout (World Fair Trade Organization), Fenna Timsi (Youth Delegate for Sustainable Development) and Aleyda Ferreyra (UNDP) .
This year is a special one for the 2030 Agenda: adopted by the UN in 2015, 2023 marks the midpoint of implementation – but currently only about 12 percent of the SDGs are on track to be achieved by 2030. The dramatic nature of the situation was defining the discussion for the HLPF, entitled „Accelerating the recovery from the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) and the full implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development at all levels.“
On 13 July SDSN Germany organised an official side event entitled „Spillover effects, sustainable supply chains and SDG 9“ in partnership with the member organisation VENRO (Association for Development Policy and Humanitarian Aid of German Non-Governmental Organisations), SDSN UK, UNIDO (United Nations Industrial Development Organization), and the Permanent Mission of Ethiopia to the United Nations. The event focused on negative spillover effects and the challenges in designing sustainable supply chains faced by governments, businesses and other social actors. During the panel discussion, it became clear that negative spillover effects can only be reduced by taking into account the different perspectives of the countries concerned, policy-coherent governance strategies, solutions to the data problem as well as global dialogues and multilateral partnerships.
The second side event was entitled „Laws for Sustainability – Empowering Parliaments to Push the SDG Implementation“ and addressed the question of how the SDGs, whose success depends on voluntary commitments by individual states, can be made more binding and how parliaments can be better involved in implementation in their essential democratic function. The SDSN Germany partners German Forum on Environment and Development, the German Society for the United Nations (DGVN) and the Youth Delegates for Sustainable Development were also present in the consortium.
SDSN Germany thanks all panellists and partners for the important and rich discussions as well as the joint organisation, and will continue to work on both important event topics.
A detailed report of the event „Spillover effects, sustainable supply chains and SDG 9“ will be available here soon: Events – SDSN Germany.
