Madam Executive Secretary,
Distinguished delegates,
Ladies and gentlemen,
Let me first thank you, Madam Executive Secretary, Dear Olga, for the continuing cooperation of the ECE with DESA on supporting countries in their preparations of the voluntary national reviews. This collaboration is critical as it helps countries to connect different levels from subnational, to national, to regional to global. This helps to accelerate the implementation of the 2030 Agenda in the Decade of Action and Delivery and to recover from the pandemic.
I would also like to commend the nine countries from this region that will be presenting the VNRs at this year’s High-level political forum on sustainable development. This is a great success as your region has achieved almost universal VNR presentation. Most of you are coming for the second or third time with only one country presenting its first VNR.
We all know that COVID-19 has exposed weaknesses of the health and other socio-economic and governance systems both at national, regional and global levels. It has halted or reversed the progress on many SDG areas. It has also exacerbated the inequalities that exist within and among countries. It has also shown how our imbalanced attitude towards nature has given rise to zoonotic diseases.
We have a development framework for recovering from the pandemic. It is the 2030 Agenda and the principle to leave no one behind. We have to define accelerated actions that can be implemented as part of our response to COVID-19 and put us on track to realize the vision of the 2030 Agenda.
The ECE regional forum on sustainable development is a unique platform for exchanging and learning from each other. It will enrich the discussions at the HLPF.
Your VNRs this year are especially important as they can show which policies you are undertaking to recover from COVID-19 and how these policies are conducive to the implementation of the 2030 Agenda. You can showcase what kind of impact your policies are having on the implementation of the 2030 Agenda and how they assist the recovery from the pandemic. You all have valuable experiences and lessons learned to share.
We understand that you are still combatting the pandemic and sometimes only starting the recovery phase and that data showing progress might be a challenge for you. But even initial findings are helpful.
Data would be also important especially as most of you are coming for second and third time to present a VNR. It would be instrumental in showing progress from your previous VNR and the impact of the measures you presented at the time.
Let me briefly refer to the voluntary local reviews (VLRs) conducted by many cities and regions. Those are not directly mandated by the 2030 Agenda, but we believe that they can be a very useful tool for localization of the SDGs as well as for VNR preparations.
Looking ahead, it could be also useful to you to prepare a national roadmap of presentations of VNRs until 2030 and link them to your most important national policy milestones in the implementation of the 2030 Agenda.
To underline these important points, we updated Secretary-General’s voluntary common reporting guidelines in February this year.
This workshop will address many of the issues I have just elaborated on and I am sure that your sharing of your respective experiences will enrich your VNR preparations and your implementation of the SDGs I wish you a successful workshop and good luck with your presentations at the 2021 HLPF.
Thank you.