Thank you. I am Anna from the Japan Youth Platform for Sustainability, speaking on behalf of the Major Group for Children and Youth.

National and international policies for means of implementation should seek to align macroeconomic frameworks. We must acknowledge that financing gaps most negatively affect the most marginalized. Although there is an emphasis on “leaving no one behind”, Financing for Development seems to leave all the “young” people behind.

Although we have the vision to put people and planet first in investing and financing the SDGs, a negative trend of a blind support for PPPs and blended finance in the context of no agreed international standards is creating a system where profits are privatized and costs are socialized.

Political actions must be delivered within a precise and transparent mechanism and take place in universal democratic spaces like the UN, and not invite only clubs of rich friends like the OECD. Despite the rhetoric on interlinkages across SDGs, we still hold an unsubstantiated expectation that more technology and financing alone will solve these issues.

We strongly suggest the following:

1. First: Address emerging issues at HLPF as mandated by 67/290. In the current global context, those are: austerity, universal basic income, ecological risk integration to sovereign credit, ecological tax reform, stranded assets, de-growth, and military expenditure.

2. Second: Set up maximum to minimum income ratios, to tackle inefficient, unsubstantiated income disparity.

3. Third: Under the Basel convention, Member States should add a clause to incorporate ‘ecologically sound’ banking practices, and facilitate a transition from fractional to full reserve banking.

4. Fourth: Impose caps on natural resource use, including the extraction of virgin resources, on a per capita basis, in accordance with global scale planetary boundaries and local bio-capacities.

5. Finally, Enhance domestic resource mobilization by improving government's’ ability to collect taxes from industries, like alcohol, sugar and tobacco corporations, whose products and practices impede and undermine sustainable development. Hence, we request a process to implement the Financial Transaction Tax (FTT).

Watch the discussion here.