WUF 11

With more than 17,000 people attending the World Urban Forum 11 in Katowice, Poland, and another 6,200 joining sessions online, a successful conference has come to an end on 30 June 2022 calling for urgent urban action. The enthusiasm generated by participants throughout WUF11 was however balanced by warnings that there should be no further delays in taking urgent action to deliver sustainable urbanization, given the multiple crises confronting our cities in the world. 

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Addressing the closing ceremony, Maimunah Mohd Sharif, Executive Director of UN-Habitat, said: “The climate emergency, pandemics, the housing crisis, violence and conflict, all converge in cities. If we want to transform to a better urban future, we will have to increasingly deal with urban crises. We have no excuse not to be prepared.”

Urban Pathways partners contributed actively to more than 10 events and overall to the debate on urban climate action while emphasizing the need for low carbon basic services. This included the organization of a training event on “Urban Air Management” that inspired collaboration and innovation on the question on how to drive actions to improve air quality and its impact on human health in cities. In this session, various cities and partners showcased their efforts on air quality monitoring using sensor technology and innovations with big data.  

Another session on 30 June 2022, organized by Urban Pathways, focused on “the Transformative Power of Urban Living Labs” and introduced the newly established Urban Living Lab Center, as a collaborating center of UN-Habitat. This side event provided insights on innovative solutions that help fostering the transition towards low-carbon urban development and showcased city level demonstrations to test different types of innovative solutions. The Living Labs presented were Paris (France) on the 15-minute neighborhood, Belo Horizonte (Brazil) on integrated Ecozones, Nairobi (Kenya) on pedestrianization and Jakarta on neighborhood upgrading (Indonesia).

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The conference culminated in a set of Katowice Declared Actions which will take the sustainable development agenda forward to the Twelfth Session of the World Urban Forum in Cairo, Egypt in January 2024.

In her concluding remarks, Ms. Sharif reiterated that “we don’t have much time to achieve the Sustainable Development Goal targets of 2030. We have only 7.5 years, 90 months or 2,742 days left to implement the New Urban Agenda in order to achieve the SDGs. The time to act is now.”

Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezoPzTt4aB4

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