On July 16, 2018 GRP convened the side event, Building Resilience: Evidence and Action, at the UN High Level Political Forum.
The meeting was opened by UK’s UN Permanent Representative, Karen Pierce, who underlined the moral imperative to tackle climate change and that unless action was taken global poverty would increase. Johan Rockström (SRC Executive Director) via video addressed the need for a transformative agenda to build resilience. Monique Barbut (UNCCD Executive Secretary) spoke to the scale of this challenge, while Belay Begashaw (Director General of SDG Center for Africa) and Seth Schultz (President of Urban breakthroughs, Special Advisor to Global Covenant of Mayors on Science and Innovation, and Co-Founder of the Coalition for Urban Transitions) addressed the evidence on why action is urgent to tackle these issues. All of the panelist, then discussed the actions that can be taken to build resilience.
The three main messages from the meeting were:
1) The scale of the challenge is large and the evidence shows that action is urgent if we are to maintain current development gains and to achieve the SDGs.
2) There are already solutions in both the public and private sectors to build resilience, but we must move from incremental change to exponential and transformative change.
3) We have a year of opportunity to start realizing the substantive and transformation action to build resilience. Most immediately there is the Global Climate Action Summit in California where non-state actors can set out their plans on building resilience, high level events on resilience at COP24, and developing significant actions and commitments for the UN Secretary General’s 2019 Climate Summit where resilience is one of the main themes.
Sally Taylor (Head of Climate and Environment, UK Department for Int. Development – DFID) concluded the meeting saying the UK was very pleased to be working with UN Development Programme (UNDP) to champion resilience at the Secretary General’s 2019 Climate Summit, and that UK was looking forward to working with partners on developing bold actions for the Summit.
The full event report can be found here.
Documentation for event: Why Building Resilience is Critical for the SDGs