Still on track to the SDGs? Civil society shares perspectives ahead of the SDG Summit
On 05 September 2019 in Brussels was held a lunch briefing for Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and advisors in preparation of the forthcoming United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Summit in New York, United States.
The SDG Summit will take place on 24 and 25 September 2019, with Heads of State and Government gathering at the United Nations Headquarters in New York to follow-up and comprehensively review progress in the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The event is the first UN summit on the SDGs since the adoption of the 2030 Agenda in September 2015.
The briefing, organized by the European Environmental Bureau in the framework of SDG Watch Europe advocacy work, and to which SOLIDAR actively participated, served to inform MEPs on civil society perspectives into the SDG Summit; to share civil society views on the implementation of SDGs, including by presenting SDG Watch Europe’s two latest shadow reports; and to identify concrete proposals for the reform of the United Nations High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF).
As part of the panel, SOLIDAR presented the SDG 10 report entitled “Falling through the cracks. Exposing inequality in the European Union and beyond” produced by the pan-European project Make Europe Sustainable for All in close collaboration with SDG Watch Europe, and aiming at analyzing the different dimensions of inequality that exist and persist across the European Union with striking data at national and EU level, accompanied with concrete policy recommendations to EU policy-makers to reverse the negative trends and effectively address inequality to ensure a just transition towards human well-being within the planet’s ecological limits, and to leave no one behind.
Following the discussion around the reform of the United Nations High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF), the different civil society organizations present at the meeting highlighted to need to have a more transparent and accountable process, leaving more space to CSOs to actively participate to such process; as well as extending time allocated to the Voluntary National Review (VNR) as key element for a through and detailed assessment of the state of implementation of SDGs in each Member State.
