26 October 2022

 

Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed,

Excellencies, Dear Friends,

Thank you for the opportunity to be with you, and to learning from you.

The Agenda 2030 was and is a vision of transformation.

This vision and this agenda needs peace. It has been created and designed for those conditions.

At the same time it has been designed to strengthen peace initiatives, as well. Now is the sad reality that we don’t have peace. The Agenda 2030 has been designed to avoid major future crisis. The sad reality that we have now, as the DSG mentioned, is cascading crisis more dangerous than at any time in the last couple of decades. However, it is still the best vision that we could have today.

So the task put forward what we wanted to achieve is still there, and we should not be dissuade because of the condition that the world is in.

Judging by what we heard from the leaders of the world in September we can clearly state that we entered a new era in the world, with serious risks for people and the planet and those risks are reinforcing each other. We still don’t have a name for this period of history, but we feel it.

We believe it may have started with the COVID pandemic when we were introduced to a prototype of the possible crises of the Anthropocene era.

If we understand it well, how it evolved, how it impacted our societies, how it impacted our economies, our financial institutions, we might be better equipped for the next wave of crisis. And unfortunately we see, as the DSG told us, one is imminent – the debt crisis. The other one – the food crisis – is just banging on the walls already. If you combine these two, that’s it.

We try to make a little bit of an analysis of the speeches of the leaders here in September and the most frequent repeated expressions were “Ukraine”, “development”, “climate”, “global challenges” “change”  “transformation” and “sustainability”.

By far the most repeated expressions are the most demanded actions from our Member States from our intuitions as well.

As Steve Jobs once said: “If you define the problem correctly, you almost have the solution.”

Our problem is: we are facing a systemic challenge. We cannot fix it piece by piece. We have to apply integrated solutions, systemic solutions. They require systemic solutions

Therefore, in the General Assembly, we try to cluster our activities during the GA77 to two avenues: crisis management and transformation.

Crisis management to make sure that we all survive in the forthcoming years, and transformation to make sure that all communities must survive and prosper between the next 10 and 15 years.

The SDG Summit and the 2023 Agenda is our guide.

We believe the SDG Summit in September 2023 will have the potential to answer these questions.

My strong hope is for that acceleration of the implementation both on the ground and of the level of the agency implementation, but we may need a little bit of self-reflection.

Because if we are honest, we see confusion. What we receive from Member States, what they give as a voluntary initiatives, the summary of those records indicate that almost everything is fine. Success story after success story. Which is very cheerful. I’m very glad to hear it.

But when I listen to scientists, and they tell us the global data, global figures, and we see the global tendencies, it is just not indicating that.

So probably the first big painful exercise will be to try to get an honest mirroring, an honest reflection of what we are facing at the local levels, national levels, international levels.

It should be a part of the negotiations for the SDG Summit and it should be part of our daily negotiations with each other.

There is another aspect that I would like to offer to your kind attention.

Do we have everything at hand that we need for implementation?

Not yet.

I would like to mention to you one among many others.

We created a vision but we haven’t created a methodology for that.

We know we are looking for systemic changes but basically we haven’t developed yet the method or methodology for measuring the systemic changes.

We measure now the stand-alone factors. We sometimes can compare, but we haven’t developed the methodology which is under the code name in the SDG Agenda – “Beyond the GDP”. Which is basically: let’s understand whether or not we are making progress for sustainability transformation. That methodology is still in the making.

It’s a recurring discussion among ourselves when we are trying to look into the crystal ball, and there is a good understanding that yes, the work is going on. The work is going on at the UN as well. But definitely it should be sped up.

If we want the SDG Summit to inform Member States, what are the side effects of our actions, what are the comprehensive results of our actions – positive or negative results, the pluses and minuses, and what is the overall balance that can inform us if we are making good on promises – this methodology should be sped up in development and made available as soon as possible.

Now I’m afraid it might not be complete by the Summit, but we should at least reach a certain level of comfort that it is coming, that it will be your disposal, it will be flexible enough, it will be explicable enough, in countries with very different conditions of development, very different conditions of environmental and other challenges, and different levels of influence.

If we have it, we would like to make it as a tool for planning, not so much retrospective – who is gold medal winner, who is the silver medal winner – but to make it as a tool for decision makers, as a political tool.

You may know that the two facilitators of the SDG Summit preparations have been nominated, Fergal Mythen, Permanent Representative of Ireland, and Alya Ahmed Saif Al-Thani, Permanent Representative of Qatar.

They will start their work very soon and my humble request to them was two-fold.

First and foremost, refrain from trying, producing a text from the very outset. Listen to the best expertise in the world. Listen to the data. Listen to the science. Look at more evidence to make sure that everybody has a modest picture of where we are now. What are the lessons learned from the near past? What might be the best ways ahead for the second half of the implementation starting with the SDG Summit?

When you feel in the room that there is a commonality of understanding of the challenges, then strike to identify what should be the exact outcomes of the SDG Summit.

The second what I asked from them along with many other co-facilitators, and we have 16 negotiating tracks, at least half of them are closely related to the SDG Summit or Our Common Agenda. Both the SDG Summit and Our Common Agenda are integrated agenda. They are having roughly the same shared vision of what we would like to see in this world and how we would like to see ourselves in this world.

There is always a danger when we start dividing the division of labour in the different negotiation tracks that you dismember the agenda.

I’m trying to use the General Committee as a coordinating body to make sure that all relevant negotiation tracks will be kept together, will go in harmony, will go in coordination and the strategic objectives should be basically the same. Within the sovereignty of co-facilitators, leaving that in-tact so they can design their daily work as they see fit.

We are pretty much relying, counting on your support. When the SDGs were created, that was a crucial moment that all UN agencies brought their inputs to the negotiation table without trying to influence reality.

You provided the basic inputs. The membership embraced it.

We need something similar.

We need all of you in the chamber.

We need your evidence in the chamber to be shared with the membership.

You know what we need and you see it on the ground. Capacity development, data and information, science, financing, and partnership.

Least but not least, to make sure that the UN 2023 Water Conference will be a success, the SDG Summit will be a success, we need some gamechangers. We need some issues that will really move the thinking and really move the agenda.

Yesterday we finished a two-day conference. We identified gamechangers. And I saw membership embrace it. Those gamechangers came mostly from you, from UN agencies, the science community and practitioners.

Yes, it will take a bit of time for full embracement of the membership to understand it and apply it.

But when we are at the point of implementing them into our deliberations, that will be a transformative moment.

We are very much counting on you.