Stockholm+50 side event with UN agencies

At the Stockholm+50 International Meeting, the UN Environment Management Group (EMG) organised a side event on 2 June 2022 featuring heads of UN agencies and conventions on "Accelerating integrated action for a healthy planet and prosperity for all - a dialogue with UN Heads of Agencies" to look at cross-agency collaboration in implementing the Sustainable Development Goals and convention actions on the ground. Twelve heads of agencies and convention secretariats made short presentations.

IEF President Arthur Dahl was then invited to comment, based on his participation for the Bahá'í International Community in the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, and his half-century career in intergovernmental organizations including coordination across the UN system. He suggested three essential needs for UN system integration:

1. UNEP has always had a catalytic and coordinating role, but the need now was to accept orchestration across the system, based on a holistic scientific assessment combining natural and social sciences to identify tipping points and to define strategies forward, and then to determine the role of each part of the UN system in implementation.

2. The UN needs the capacity, perhaps in the UN Environment Assembly, to adopt global legislation on actions necessary to stay within planetary limits, binding on governments and non-state actors alike, including multinational corporations and billionaires.

3. Once there is such a legislative capacity, it would be possible to replace the cumbersome process of negotiating and implementing many multilateral environmental agreements with coherent global legislation and enforcement, building on all the progress and lessons learned, but able to respond more rapidly to changing environmental situations and crises.

The EMG had prepared two UN system inputs to Stockholm+50. The first was the official UN report based on wide consultation: Delivering on the vision of the 1972 Stockholm Declaration and achieving the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development with The Summary for Policymakers. The International Environment Forum is acknowledged as one of the five non-UN agency contributors to the report.

The other paper gives the visions of heads of UN agencies: The Impact of the Stockholm Conference on the UN System: Reflections of 50 Years of Environmental Action. These are available on the EMG Stockholm+50 website: https://unemg.org/stockholm+50/.