24 October 2011: The Executive Board of the UN Development Programme (UNDP), the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) and the UN Office for Project Services (UNOPS) convened informal consultations to provide its second briefing on UNDP’s preparation for the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD, or Rio+20).
The informal consultations took place at UN Headquarters in New York, US, on 24 October 2011. Olav Kjorven, Director of UNDP’s Bureau for Development Policy (BDP), detailed UNDP’s submission to the UNCSD Compilation Document, as well as its work at international, regional and country levels to prepare for the Conference.
Kjorven said that in UNDP’s view, Rio should shift the global development trajectory to one of growth that does not “continue to assault our planet” and that no longer views humanity as “alien conquerers” of the earth, but as part of it. The test of all decisions emerging from the Conference, he said, must be integration of the three pillars of sustainable development.
On a “pro-poor” green economy, he said, UNDP aims to play a catalytic role in two areas: greening the supply chains of export commodities in developing countries; and expanding access to sustainable energy. Kjorven expressed the hope that the UN Secretary-General’s initiative on Sustainable Energy for All (SE4ALL) would lead to a “major breakthrough” at Rio+20. He said UNDP’s resident coordinator (RC) system was poised to work with any government interested in scaling up, and stressed the importance of off-grid, decentralized solutions.
On the institutional framework for sustainable development (IFSD), Kjorven said the discussion should be pursued at country level and in the 2012 Quadrennial Comprehensive Policy Review (QCPR). UNDP’s view was that a high-level, intergovernmental body must be mandated to work across the entire UN system, including with the international financial institutions (IFIs), to connect bodies and issues that do not currently interact. Such a “sustainable development council” could be modeled on the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) and its Universal Periodic Review (UPR) mechanism. Kjorven also highlighted the sustainability framework developed by the Environment Management Group (EMG) for UN entities to adapt for their own uses.
Kjorven echoed Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s call, issued on 20 October 2011, for a “new generation of sustainable development goals to pick up where the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) leave off.” He suggested that Rio+20 could establish a road map to guide the process of developing such Goals, and said it was also crucial to fulfill the MDGs by 2015. Finally, Kjorven said, UNDP hopes that Rio will initiate an end to the practice of measuring progress in terms of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and that proposals for a “National Sustainable Development Product” could be considered by the UN Statistical Commission in 2014 and feed into the discussion on the post-2015 development agenda.
In addition to its own submission to the UNCSD Compilation Document, UNDP also is contributing to joint submissions from the UN Development Group (UNDG), EMG, and the UN Systems High-level Committee on Programmes (HLCP). [IISD RS Sources]