2nd meeting - 2018 High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (2018 HLPF)

My name is Pinkus Tober-Lau from Germany, speaking on behalf of the UN Major Group for Children and Youth.

On the global trend, the recent Secretary General’s report indicates that we are far from being on track of actually achieving the 2030 Agenda by 2030. Worse than that, we have only 2 years ahead of us until 2020, when many targets are supposed to be achieved. The current discourse, approach, and paradigms continue to be proven inadequate to the current “changing world” as addressed in the HLPF mandate. This is a negative picture, but there are solutions. We just need to listen.

In order to create a resilient society, it is imperative to address explicit, implicit, and underlying economic, social, and environmental risks.

These underlying risk factors create obstacles. These obstacles prevent us from progressing towards effective and inclusive sustainable development. Addressing these risk factors requires us to see beyond economic growth. The economic system needs to view the economy as a subset of the environment and society, not the other way around. We have all seen the consequences when leaders do not take their responsibility in addressing underlying risk factors, such as how lack of inclusive governance has resulted in mistrust and fragility, later sparking violent conflict.

It is not too late to take responsibility when we face such negative consequences. At that point we all jointly have the responsibility to build back better - to build back better through inclusive and environmentally sustainable policies creating conditions for a long term sustainable and resilient society for all.

A resilient society is an inclusive society. Leaving no one behind not only has to be a main policy objective, but also a means for how we create policy.

With that in mind, we would like to point out the lack of age balance of the opening panel. This indicates that we are still far from where we want to be. We would like to urge member states to improve the age balance of panelists in order to have younger generations present and meaningfully engaged.

Finally, we have a question for you all - How do you concretely plan on addressing resilience in your implementation of the 2030 Agenda and ensure that it does not continue to fall in between the chairs of the humanitarian and development agendas?