Negotiators at UNCCD COP 17 will consider a wide array of decisions on enhancing efforts to address desertification, land degradation and drought.

Committing to make the final years of the 2030 Agenda count, participants at the HLPF showed the Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals have delivered meaningful progress—though uneven and backsliding in some quarters.

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.