The Asia-Europe Environment Forum (ENVforum) contributed to two back-to-back high-profile events centred on Sustainable Development.
The first annual Sustainable Development Transition Forum (SDTF) and the Sustainable Development Planning Network for Asia and the Pacific (SDplanNet-AP) took place in Incheon, Republic of Korea on 7-11 April 2014. The United Nations Office for Sustainable Development (UNOSD) in Korea, and the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES) requested the participation of the ENVforum team in light of its innovative research and its established capacity-building record concerning the formulation and implementation of the objectives of Sustainable Development Goals.
Both of these events convened approximately 60 government planners, policy-makers and experts to advance a community of practice and create a knowledge base and a capacity building agenda for good practices in national and sub-national strategy-making. This effort was designed to begin preparing countries for delivering the post 2015 development agenda and implementing the future sustainable development goals (SDGs).
In particular, the SDTF included the science-policy-practice interface for ensuring transition towards sustainability, and the facilitation of partnerships and communities of practice to advance sustainability strategy-making and implementation; a topic on which the ENVforum has conducted intensive research. Concurrently, participants reviewed evidence of impact and charted new and improved pathways for implementation. The SDplanNet featured instead a training day on key competencies for sustainable development and explored practices for implementation and analysis of the current policy context.
The ENVforum is proud to have taken part in this initiative, where it presented the first of three parts of its most recent publication “Sustainable Development Goals and Indicators for a Small Planet” first published in 2013. This report proposes a methodology to formulate a set of SDGs for Asia and Europe. Furthermore, it contains 1) an independently developed set of indicators to track the implementation progress of specific policies towards sustainable development and 2) recommendations on sustainable development priorities with examples drawn from selected ASEM countries.
The link to the SDTF webpage is available here.
