27 February 2023
Good afternoon, dear friends,
Thank you, Madame Director-General, for your warm welcome to Geneva and for organizing this Town Hall.
So much honour to have the opportunity to be with you and to share some ideas and to listen to you.
Basically – I am here to learn.
I am here to learn from your reflections on some issues that are of common interest.
But before jumping into the middle, let me introduce to you three colleagues of mine, who are not only working day and night for me, but in many cases, they are key persons with our inter-connections with civil society organisations and science-based organisations.
- The Deputy Chief of my Cabinet is Fernando Andres Marani
- Behind me, Fernando de la Mora, who is leading our Human Rights and Humanitarian team
- And in each and every big organization and country, what counts is what is understood. And to help our messages made understandable is Iseult Mc Nulty from our Media and Communications team.
So, I am greatly honoured to have this opportunity with you, particularly in this city, where 160 years ago, the ideas of Henri Dunant sparked the creation of the ICRC and the Geneva Declaration.
And I heard that you are a very vibrant community, and I am expecting this energy to filling this huge room today as well.
The opportunities, what we need to grab all in times of crisis, are huge.
And the responsibilities, what we all, jointly, have to fill in, are also huge.
We are, in my understanding, in a new chapter of history.
It has started probably with the COVID crisis, it unfolded in the years of the COVID crisis, and it is being unfolded as we speak today.
It is marked and characterised by a net of interlocking challenges. Some of them are stemming from the very old, traditional, sometimes reinterpreted geopolitical divides in the world that will stay with us for many years to come, I’m afraid.
And the other types of challenges, [indecipherable] challenges we are facing, are challenges related to the non-sustainable way of life we have created on this earth.
These two big sets of crises unfortunately did not stay separated, they started interlocking, they started reinforcing each other.
And therefore, we have the most complex, most dangerous, deepest, and most far-reaching set of crises humanity has ever faced in the last 40 to 50 years at least.
It is, in my understanding, what we are in is the prototype of the Anthropocene era crisis.
It means that if we do not understand the root causes, the nature of these crises, we are doomed to stay within these crises, and have it repeated many times in the years to come.
Here comes your rule: without you, the Agenda 2030 on Sustainable Development and the Paris Agreement on climate change, and the Addis Ababa Action Agenda on financing the sustainability transformation could not have come together.
We need your encouragements, we need your inputs, and need your participation in addressing today’s crises as well.
Governments do not have a monopoly on wisdom. No one has a monopoly on wisdom.
We need CSOs, we need science, academia, and we need people with practice on board when we short-term or long-term decisions.
You have to be one of the very influential decision-shapers, and in fact, you have a powerful influence.
I see it in New York on a daily basis.
For many years, it has been a debate whether or not CSO could be let into the room.
Whether or not CSO should have a voice.
Sometimes we still have that debate, but in practice, and to my joy, the real debate is not about that.
In most cases, the NGOs and CSOs are there. The real debate is whether or not we all can have an integrated approach, a strategic view, and if we represent a particular issue, which happens with NGOs, if that particular issue can be placed into a larger, integrated agenda.
And I have to thank you particularly, that you are an exemplary representative of those who have the least voice, the marginalized communities or persons in our societies.
And you are also the beacon of accountability.
We, Member States, at the UN are not always the best examples of accountability.
We need pressure. We need questions. We need counterquestions. And we need to be reminded what has been agreed upon a year ago, 5 years ago or 10 years ago.
We need your regular engagement, and we need your regular contributions.
That is what we are now doing in the General Assembly in New York, and that is what we are trying to do through my office, on our own as well.
The colleagues who you see here are one of those organising the regular Town Hall meetings with CSOs. The next one will be in April if I am not mistaken, and if you can, please join us. We need you on board.
But let me also mention you what kind of work we are within in the GA.
What is the environment your views, your suggestions and your notions will lend?
In order to address the short-term aspects of the crises and the long-term aspects of the crises, we have launched 16 negotiating processes in the GA.
It is almost unprecedented. It is really stretching the abilities of the Member States and the Permanent Representations to attend, to learn form or to influence the parallel 16 negotiating processes.
All of them are some kind of preparations for either Summit meeting or some very crucial Declaration, document, result to be presented to the world.
The next one ahead of us, the 17th, on top of the 16, will be the first UN comprehensive Summit on Water from 22 to 24 of March.
It is the first since 1977.
There hasn’t been any similar enterprise under the UN umbrella for almost 50 years.
It might be a wide-ranging issue why there hasn’t been one, but the most important: we are in the middle of the water crisis.
Countries are being seriously undermined, communities are falling and if we don’t change the course of events, countries will fall in the years to come, and that is not something that we could afford.
This March Water Conference should bring the Paris moment of Water action, and that is our intention.
On the 24th of March, I hope we’ll be in the position to tell the world that we understand the challenges, we see the game changers, we see the actors, we see the means, we see the science, and we see the goals.
And there will be a mechanism for follow-up, and a mechanism for evaluation, and validation of the implementation.
As a preparation for that, with your societies, your organisations, we held a two-day preparatory conference in late October, where 1,200 CSOs and science-based organisations came to New York.
We asked them “Please bring your concerns, your solutions, with particular attention to the game-changers”, and they did so.
If I would only take these 10 of these game-changers, what the CSOs and the science community brought to us, it would already change the world.
And, the big conference is still ahead of us, so I am very much hopeful.
And, many many thanks for you, to those who contributed to the October brainstorming, and many thanks to you who might be in the position to join us in March.
But beyond the Water Conference, the biggest enterprise of the year is the SDG Summit and the preparatory SDG negotiations.
In 2015, as you know much better than many others do, we agreed on the Agenda 2030, with 17 SDGs in the middle.
We are halfway through the period assigned for the implementation.
But we are not halfway through in the actual implementation of the SDGs.
On many instances, we are backtracking so much that in some cases, we are further away from the goals today than we were in 2015.
So, there is a need to give a very honest account to ourselves, by September, and before September hopefully.
Acknowledging what has been done, what has not been achieved, why and what should be changed.
It will not be an easy exercise and I would like to encourage you to please help Member States. They will need the right questions, they will need the right support and information, they will need the right encouragement from your side.
Some other big undertaking in the GA in the forthcoming couple of months that will involve quite a lot of NGO activities will be the Summit of the Future, which will be a Ministerial Stop in September 2023, and a Summit Meeting in September 2024.
We are working on a Declaration on future generations that I hopefully, we can see an almost fully prepared version by September 2023.
We are working on a Digital Compact, which you may ask – why? the GA is a political organisation, what does that have to do with digital issues?
You may agree that the future of this Earth will be sustainable, or there will be no future.
If we accept that the future should be sustainable, then we also have to accept that it should be based on nature-based solutions, digital solutions, and socially-minded solutions.
But for that, we need to agree what kind of challenges, and opportunities we see in the digital development. How are we going to overcome the digital divide? And the digital gaps in this world? And what role will the digital development have in the sustainability transformation of our countries in the years to come?
I asked all co-facilitators and co-chairs of the 16 negotiating processes to start their processes with you.
Refraining from any kind of formal negotiations, but going to create a common knowledge base.
Common knowledge base among Member States, enriched by your knowledge, your experience and your approach.
If we see the problems, the challenges, roughly in the same mirror, it may give us a better chance, a better basis of where to embark from, and it will be easier to identify what should be achieved. What might be realistically our goals? And what should be avoided?
So, the more evidence-based we can make these negotiations, the better will be the outcome.
Therefore, my plea to you as well: Please bring your knowledge, bring your expertise, based on evidence and based on an integrated approach.
As I mentioned in the beginning, the more we can place the single issues into the big picture, the better it will work.
This year, we plan to be in a year of transformation.
It is not the single year of transformation, but it should be a year of a large, long-standing transformation. We have no more time to lose.
We have to make significant leapfrogging on a number of issues, we can come back to some of them if you are interested, but we need to march in the same direction.
We need to have everybody on board, and we need to have all hands on deck.
Let me reaffirm my commitment to the ongoing dialogue and partnership with CSOs, and the momentum that we are going to create, shall be a shared momentum, and it should come now.
It should not be slow. It should be right now.
And I am very happy to be here with you, I am very happy to learn from you about your concerns, your concerns and your plans.
Thank you very much.
