Ministers of the environment, heads of UN organizations, and lead negotiators called for focusing on scaling up implementation, underscoring that complex global challenges “must be met with cooperation, compromise, and collective action.” Nine thematic roundtable sessions explored cross-cutting implementation issues at the local, regional, and global levels.

The highlight of the Hamburg Sustainability Conference was the launch of the South-North Commission on Development, a new independent initiative to explore how international cooperation and multilateral institutions should evolve in an increasingly multipolar world.

In sharing the latest science on agriculture and food systems to give targeted inputs to the IPCC’s Seventh Assessment Report, experts urged moving beyond simply identifying adaptation options and focusing also on adaptation effectiveness, residual risks, adaptation limits, and the cost of inaction.