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.

Subsidiary bodies of the Convention on Biological Diversity will consider findings of the global midterm review of the Global Biodiversity Framework and give advice and recommendations to inform negotiations at COP 17 in Armenia.

Delegates faced the challenge of how the Basel Convention can meet growing, complex waste-related challenges such as trade in plastics, electronic waste (e-waste), batteries, and used textiles, while staying relevant to longstanding challenges such as ship recycling.