Globally, progress on the SDGs have stalled, and even reversed due to the impacts of COVID-19. At the current pace few, if any, countries will meet the SDG goals by the 2030 deadline. To accelerate global investments and policy reform impacts, leaders must enable cities and subnational government to play a much larger role in goals from health to housing. Public, civic and private urban leaders, with the right resources, are able to respond quickly to the immediate needs of inhabitants. Cities are the perfect laboratories for adapting best practices and testing innovative ideas, iterating and scaling up successful programs, and sharing results among city networks. Global leaders, focused on the transformation of deeply entrenched 80-year-old post-WWII financial systems, are essentially trying to turn an aircraft carrier on a dime to address economic, social and climate crisis with new investment models. Meanwhile, cities, home to the majority of the world’s population, are expected to grow by about 2.3 billion people by mid-century.

The responsibility of cities leaders is to figure out ways to be responsive to both local social and economic crisis without leaving people behind. Cities are responsible for 80% of global GDP and over 70% of global CO2 emissions yet are also concentrating poverty and inequality: one in three urban residents lack access to basic services such as adequate housing, transport, water, sanitation, and electricity, and about 86% of city dwellers are exposed to unsafe air pollution. It follows that managing this rapid urbanization will be key to progress to meet the SDGs. It’s also one of the most complex challenges to face humankind, asking us to build dynamic partnerships and collaborate at unimaginable scales unimaginable to previous generations, even ones who went through world wars. As urban populations continue to rapidly increase in population and resource consumption, cities are uniquely able to drive a just transition to a more equal, inclusive, low carbon, resilient economy in balance with nature.

The case studies in this report demonstrate how the nimblest of cities are responding quickly to the impacts of urbanization, concentrated poverty, food isecurity, inequality, climate change and disaster risk with new and innovative partnerships and policies. As the High-Level Political Forum community looks at Goal 17 and Goals 11 this year, this report, with case studies from both the Guangzhou International Award for Urban Innovation and the WRI Ross Center Prize for Cities, reflects the true essence of that combination. With over 10,000 cities and millions of town along the urban-rural spectrum, the only way to flatten the SDG learning curve is to strengthen the networks on which cities depend. The faster people learn about potential solutions the faster they can implement them in their own communities and build “The Future We Want”.

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