During HLPF 2024, GNDR is in New York representing civil society, advocating for our members’ call to action messages and supporting Sendai stakeholders in integrating disaster risk reduction into the sustainable development goals.
Becky Murphy, GNDR’s Policy Lead and Marcos Concepcion Raba, GNDR’s Executive Director, are in New York and will be sharing an HLPF GNDR members briefing throughout the week.
These are the key messages coming from the fourth day’s key sessions:
Thursday 11 July 2024
This is our last day at HLPF and so our last daily briefing from New York. HLPF continues next week and can be followed online through UN TV and the HLPF Website.
GNDR Official Side Event: Disasters in Development Progress: How Locally Led Anticipatory Actions Can Save Lives, Livelihoods, Resources, and Help Achieve Sustainable Development Goals
- We led an official side event both online and at the Bahai International Offices at the UN Plaza focused on locally led anticipatory action
- With Becky, our policy lead moderating and Marcos our ED sharing closing remarks, we were very lucky to have three GNDR members sharing their experience and recommendations
- José Ramón Ávila, executive secretary for the Regional Concertation for Risk Management, based in Honduras.
- Mary Githiomi Country Director, International Aid Services Kenya (IAS) Kenya and Chair of the Kenya For Resilience (K4R) Network
- Tanjir Hossain, Resilience Adviser, ActionAid International & Co Chair of the Sendai Framework Stakeholder Engagement Mechanism, based in Bangladesh
- We were also lucky to have speaker representation from UNDRR and member states. Sandra Amlang, Head of UNDRR’s Interagency Cooperation Unit, sharing an overview of UNDRR’s new introductory guide to anticipatory finance. Then, Kimberly Louis, Deputy Permanent Representative for Saint Lucia to the United Nations and board member of Risk-Informed Early Action Partnership (REAP), who shared a member state perspective and highlighted the importance of working together for a whole of society approach.
- This was also our main opportunity to share our GNDR member’s call to action messages. Here, Becky our policy lead unpacked our policy asks for HLPF; including:
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- Listen to the community, meaningfully including young people
- Meaningfully engage civil society in the monitoring and implementation of the SDGs
- Invest at the local level
- Empower women leaders at all levels
- Give specific attention to supporting risk informed development in fragile and conflict affected states
- Integrate inclusion across all levels of decision making
- Unfortunately, due to a security breach at the start of the side event, we had to lock the Zoom meeting so some members online may not have been able to join and we were not able to have an interactive discussion and Q&A. However, despite this, we had approximately 30 members online and 20 in the room. This included attracting a number of new GNDR members.
High level sessions
SDG 16 and interlinkages with other SDGs – Peace, justice and strong institutions
- At the midway point of the 2030 Agenda, progress towards achieving the SDGs is off track and SDG 16 is no exception.
- Lack of progress on Goal 16 affects the achievement of all the other SDGs, as peace, good governance and effective institutions, access to justice as well as freedom from fear and violence, are critical enablers of sustainable development.
- The session outlined the critical role of peace, justice, and strong institutions as foundational elements for achieving all SDGs.
- Violence and conflict not only prevents progress on the SDGs but also serves to undermine and destroy progress already made.
African countries, Least Developed Countries and Landlocked Developing Countries Building resilience and capacity in times of crises and transition
- African countries, least developed countries (LDCs), and landlocked developing countries (LLDCs) face unique challenges in their pursuit of sustainable development.
- These countries are particularly vulnerable to external shocks, such as economic crises, climate change, and public health emergencies.
- The COVID-19 pandemic further exposed the fragility of LDCs, with the World Bank estimating that an additional 32 million people in LDCs could be pushed into extreme poverty by 2030 due to the pandemic’s impact.
- Here, the session focused on raising awareness and understanding of the challenges and opportunities for building resilience and capacity in African countries.
Meeting with new UNDRR SRSG: Kamal Kishore
- Marcos and Becky met directly with the new UNDRR SRSG, Kamal Kishore in the afternoon. Here, Marcos and Becky re-intorduced GNDR to Kamal Kishore, shared our key strategic focus and outlined why it is so important for GNDR to have the space to convene and support civil society to be actively engaged in the implementation and monitoring of the Sendai framework at all levels. Here we asked Kamal Kishore his reflections, advice and expectations for the network going forward
- Kamal Kishore shared that he had very high expectations from our network and members. He called on us to create some energy and noise around the regional and global platforms coming up, to hold governments to account for the Sendai commitments and to take the space allocated to civil society. He shared the importance of the Views from the Frontline work and called on us to make sure we have a new large scale Views from the Frontline project going forward. He asked when he could meet the GNDR members, so watch this space as we support our members to find the space to meet directly with Kamal Kishore in the upcoming regional and global platforms
- We look forward to working with Kamal Kishore and his team going forward.
Watch this space! Whilst this is our last daily briefing from New York, you can still follow the discussions and sessions at HLPF through the HLPF website and UN TV live stream.
As ever, for any policy related questions please reach out to Becky Murphy, our head of policy at: rebecca.murphy@gndr.org