Side-event at the 2021 High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development
Date and time: July 9, 2021. 7:30AM-9AM (New York, Washington) / 7:30PM-9PM (Manila) / 5:30AM-7AM (Managua) / 2:30PM-4PM (Nairobi)
Register: https://bit.ly/RecoveryOrTransformation

The COVID-19 pandemic is an unprecedented global health crisis with impacts on economies and sustainable development of countries, especially in the global South. Climate change is also making its impact felt, and its effects are becoming more catastrophic every year. Climate-induced resource shortages and widespread poverty are also fueling the escalation of conflict and fragility in many parts of the world. COVID-19 has made the situation worse, making ambitious actions to tackle the COVID recovery agenda, conflicts and the climate emergency ever more urgent and critical.

COVID-19 has rightly taken the main agenda of development cooperation. As countries emerge from lockdowns, there is a strong push to reinforce, in the name of “recovery”, fossil-fuel based, extractivist, profit-oriented, and corporate-led models of growth and development. If left unchallenged, such paradigms will further heighten the vulnerability of peoples’ and communities, particularly in the global South, to economic meltdowns, pandemics, climate disasters, conflict, and militarism. What are the imperatives for tilting the balance to ensure that the crises instead bring forth the needed transformative measures and reforms to support fossil-fuel free, equitable, inclusive, sustainable, peaceful and just future? How should global development cooperation in response to the COVID-19 crisis contribute to enabling countries’ fulfillment of their commitments under the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the Paris Climate Agreement, and similar global frameworks and pacts?

Speakers will include Jahangir Masum of Coastal Development Partnership (Bangladesh), Maria Jennifer Haygood-Guste of Council for People’s Development and Governance (Philippines), Georgina Munoz Pavon of Reality of Aid Network and RENICC (Nicaragua), Firas Jaber of Al-Marsad (Palestine), and Mariam Al Jaajaa, Arab Group for the Protection of Nature  (Palestine). #