The Spring Meetings of the World Bank Group and International Monetary Fund will feature discussions on creating markets for climate business, big data and the SDGs, among other topics.
Also on financing the SDGs, the UN Economic and Social Council’s (ECOSOC) Forum on Financing for Development Follow-up (FfD Forum) will convene immediately following the Spring Meetings.
On the final day of April, the 48th Sessions of the UNFCCC Subsidiary Bodies will open and will feature the first set of Talanoa Dialogues.
The Spring Meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank Group are an annual feature on the April agenda, and we expect that discussions at the 2018 event will frame discussions regarding finance for the coming months. Contributions to the first Talanoa Dialogue under the Paris Agreement on climate change are due in early April, and these ideas will seek to frame discussions at the UNFCCC intersessional meetings, which will open at the end of the month.
The Spring Meetings of the World Bank Group and International Monetary Fund will bring government and private sector officials to Washington, DC, US, for discussions on creating markets for climate business, big data and the SDGs. In addition, reports on the ‘World Economic Outlook’ and ‘Global Financial Stability Report’ (GFSR) will be addressed. As our summary of last April’s Spring Meetings indicates, this event provides a point during which discussions in the UN on SDG financing can be shared with the global finance community, and messages from the finance community can be incorporated into the SDG dialogue.
Also on financing the SDGs, the UN Economic and Social Council’s (ECOSOC) Forum on Financing for Development Follow-up (FfD Forum) will take place in New York following the conclusion of the Spring Meetings. The FfD Forum is called for in the outcome from the Third International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD3), which concluded with the adoption of the Addis Ababa Action Agenda (AAAA). We will also be watching the inaugural meeting of the International Network of Financial Centres for Sustainability, which aims to mobilize the resources and expertise of financial centers around the world to implement the Paris Agreement and the SDGs.
Negotiations on the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration and the Global Compact on Refugees will continue in April. As we watch these talks, we will be thinking about the juxtaposition of these negotiations in the same month as the annual NAP Expo, which will focus on the theme, ‘Advancing National Adaptation Plans,’ and Resilient Cities 2018, which focuses annually on urban resilience and adaptation. Also related to the issue of policy coherence, consultations on repositioning the UN Development System will take place during six meetings between 3-12 April.
A few other events we have our eye on relate to monitoring and accountability in the 2030 Agenda. The GIS for a Sustainable World Conference will consider how intelligent maps and apps can accelerate efforts to implement the SDGs. The seventh meeting of the UN Inter-agency and Expert Group on the SDG Indicators (IAEG-SDGs 7) will review proposals for additional indicators and discuss guidelines on data flows between the national and global levels.
On the final day of April, the 48th Sessions of the UNFCCC Subsidiary Bodies will open. A new element for this two-week event will be the first set of Talanoa Dialogues, during which working groups will share positive and challenging stories about where we are, where we want to go and how we can get there with regard to climate action. These discussions will be informed by global input that was offered prior to the 2 April deadline for submissions. A second round of input will be collected prior to 29 October 2018, as input to the Talanoa Dialogues during the Katowice Climate Change Conference in December 2018.
Lynn Wagner and Faye Leone