New and innovative ways to meet the Sustainable Development Goals – The Global Festival of Action in Bonn

The Global Festival of Action for Sustainable Development has started today in Bonn and will run until March 23. The second edition of the Festival will bring together a wide array of actors and organizations, the international event provides a dynamic and interactive space to showcase the latest innovations, tools and approaches to SDG implementation.

At the opening ceremony, high level speakers from all over the world and different contexts welcomed the Festival’s high number of participants, who had travelled to Bonn from around 150 countries.

Mitchell Toomey, Director of the SDG Action Campaign, opened the ceremony by underscoring the special character of the event, which is not an ordinary conference, but a festival driven by and reliant on every single participant’s actions.

In a video-message, UN Deputy-Secretary-General Amina Mohammed expressed her pleasure to see the network grow, a network that has developed throughout the last years around the realization of the 2030 Agenda.

The Executive Secretary of the United Nations Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Patricia Espinosa, underlined how the planning process leading to the 2030 Agenda that she had been involved in two years ago, was based on the idea that development and environmental protection need to be thought of as one.

Festival participants also had the chance to play Go Goals! – the SDG board game developed by the UN Regional Information Centre in Brussels.

The Global Festival of Action is an unconventional conference on sustainable development and is first and foremost characterized by its openness and inclusiveness.

With a focus on the five key issues of innovation, citizen engagement, communication, mobilization and multi-stakeholder engagement, the Festival focus is on the question of how to best put into action the SDGs’ vision of a sustainable world.

The first day of the Festival was filled with various activities, workshops and panel discussions on subjects as “How to communicate the SDGs” or “How to engage high level of state in their implementation?” In the evening, the first ever SDG Action Awards Ceremony took place, where among 48 finalists and eight winners were honoured.

The international event is organized every year by the UN SDG Action Campaign, which is a special initiative of the UN-Secretary General. Administered by the UN Development Programme (UNDP), its mandate is to support the UN system-wide and its Member States on advocacy and public engagement in the SDG implementation.

• www.globalfestivalofaction.org
• www.sdgactioncampaign.org