The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Paris Agreement are intrinsically linked, and one cannot be achieved without the other. In the same spirit, the Secretary-General in a recent address on his 2023 priorities stressed that “Climate action is the 21st century’s greatest opportunity to drive forward all the Sustainable Development Goals.” As such, maximizing on the interlinkages between the 2030 Agenda and the Paris Agreement by leveraging climate action and SDG synergies has the potential of achieving both agendas faster, while ensuring a just and equitable future.

Integrated planning, coherent policies, and economic stimulus investments designed to meet both the SDGs and climate challenges can generate significant co-benefits and speed up progress. Research has shown that aligning actions on climate and SDGs globally can yield up to US$26 trillion before 2030 in economic gains, produce over 65 million new green jobs, and save approximately 7 million premature deaths per year. With concerted and coordinated global public and private collaborative efforts, achievement of all SDGs can be advanced, trade-offs avoided, and social disparities reduced.

FOURTH GLOBAL CONFERENCE ON CLIMATE AND SDG SYNERGIES

The Fourth Global Climate and SDG Synergy Conference is convened by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The Conference is conducted in association with the 2023 HLPF. It thus also provides delegations the opportunity to reflect their on-going review of progress on achieving the SDGs, notably SDGs 6, 7, 9, 11, and 17, in a wider context of the multiple interlinkages between these goals and global climate action. The Conference will take stock of progress on synergistic action at all levels. It will also shed light on some of key findings and messages from the work of the Expert Group on Climate and SDG Synergies. More specifically, the Fourth Global Conference on Climate and SDD Synergies will deliver:

• A forward-looking summary, with a set of key recommendations for enhancing synergistic implementation of the SDGs and climate action at the political level as well as practical levels.
• A set of empirical evidence on climate action and the SDGs co-benefits, including how various stakeholders are progressing in delivering jointly on these two agendas and transitioning towards just, equitable, and climate compatible pathways.