Where are we at with the New Urban Agenda’s progress? We have “enough declarations, we need action and commitments”
Close to 25 years after it was first held, the World Urban Forum 12 (WUF12), held in Cairo, Egypt, drew record attendance, with some 25,000 people attending in person and a total of 63,000 people attending the sessions virtually. This record number of attendees, despite the forum being held in between two major global events – the Summit of the Future, held in September, and the Climate COP, held in November – serves as a testament to the importance of urban environments to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Current housing crisis, the SDG financing gap, and climate conversations at WUF12
Conversations at WUF12 were structured around six high-level topics, all of which speak to today’s most pertinent urban issues. The current global housing crisis was naturally a key topic that was extensively discussed throughout the forum. With up to three billion people affected, including 318 million people who are homeless, the scale of this problem is immense. With rising land costs, as well as climate change, further exacerbating this issue, addressing this crisis will require significant action, including the construction of nearly 900,000 homes annually through 2030.
The challenge of financing the SDGs, particularly with respect to affordable housing, was another important issue raised during the forum. During one of the sessions, one of the panellists shared that the annual financing and investment gap for the SDGs currently stands at USD 2.5 – 4 trillion/ year, with others sharing the principles for unlocking additional financing to support sustainable development. This includes building cities’ fiscal and financial capacity, better preparation for infrastructure projects, evidence-based decision-making to optimise cities’ financial resources, and expanding the use of property taxes to invest in habitable land, among other approaches.
Regarding climate change, conversations around dialogue 2: cities and the climate crisis revolve around the need for both global and local action. About 70% of cities worldwide are already impacted by climate change. Across all sessions, there was a general understanding that we have gone past the 1.5-degree goal set in the Paris Agreement and that there is now a need to discuss and invest in climate adaptation alongside climate change mitigation. Many of the discussions re-emphasised how low- and middle-income countries are particularly vulnerable to climate change and that stakeholders, including the private sector should work to address this jointly. Yet, considering how WBA finds that less than 40% of the world’s 300 largest Urban companies that operate in low- and middle-income countries provide evidence of conducting disaster risk assessments, it is hard to imagine that the private sector will be able to make targeted investments to address this issue soon.
The lack of clarity on accountabilities of companies in urban development
Given one of WUF12’s four themes #itallstartstogether, the forum placed the need for “partnerships to achieve the SDGs” at the centre of its sessions. Localisation of the SDGs to make sustainable development more responsive to communities’ needs and empowering local stakeholders to act was another key piece of the discussion. In alignment with its theme, stakeholders attending the forum came from academia, civil society actors, UN agencies, and governments. Yet, it was notable that this year’s WUF also drew considerable attendance from businesses. As the Executive Director for UN-Habitat noted in her opening speech on the first day of WUF: “12 percent of this year’s WUF attendants came from the private sector…” and throughout the sessions within the forum, there were also quite a few acknowledgments on the importance of private sector actors in addressing the cross-cutting challenges that cities are facing today.
However, despite significant participation from companies and continued recognition of the significance of their role in achieving the SDGs, relatively little discussion has been held about companies’ direct accountability in many issues discussed in the forum. There were exceptions, of course, with speakers such as David Harvey from Urban Front highlighting the need to “organise against the billionaire class that views housing as an investment opportunity… rather than a social provision for those who desperately need it at a reasonable cost”. Yet, many of the discussions happening in the forum regarding getting private actors involved remain focused on private actors’ roles as investors. Rarely, if ever, did speakers in the sessions we attended refer to the responsibilities of corporations in helping cities create sustainable urban environments as an ‘accountability’. The few that did mention the term ‘accountability’ of businesses do so very briefly, with the term itself being used to refer to different things across different contexts.
This inconsistency highlights a concerning gap in defining corporate accountability, particularly given the scale of their influence and the findings from our first iteration of the Urban Benchmark. For example, our research reveals that 300 of the world’s largest influential companies in the urban sector alone (i.e., real estate, construction & engineering, utilities, and intra-urban transport) are providing services to an estimated 2.5 billion people globally. On the issue of affordability, the 2024 Urban benchmark found that 75% of companies assessed under the 2024 Urban benchmark was found to have failed to report, plan, or take any actions to address this concern, despite these companies dominating the market for housing and being the primary provider for transportation and utility services in their respective contexts. Companies’ inaction or lack of clear understanding of accountabilities could, therefore, limit our progress in addressing many of the issues discussed in WUF12.
Clarification on the accountabilities of companies and suggested next steps
In retrospect, one possible reason for the lack of clarity in companies’ accountabilities in urban development discussions is likely caused by their accountabilities not yet defined in current global agreements, other than the acknowledgment of their importance. To provide a concrete example, Target 15 of the Kunming-Montreal Biodiversity Framework explicitly mandates governments to create a regulatory environment that encourages and enables businesses to “assess, disclose and reduce biodiversity-related risks and negative impacts.” Point (a) of this agreement further defines this as “regularly monitor, assess, and transparently disclose their risks, dependencies, and impacts on biodiversity….”.
While the result of WBA’s 2024 Nature benchmark indicates that companies are still struggling to understand what ‘dependencies and impacts on biodiversity’ meant, such a statement in a global agreement could motivate companies and governments to jointly think and hopefully define a metric to measure companies’ progress towards reducing their impact on nature eventually. Such a joint process will help create concerted actions between companies and other stakeholder groups as we advance while also making sure that investments, partnerships, or any other forms of engagement between cities and businesses are ‘landing right’ and truly benefiting the most vulnerable urban population.
The urgency of the situation cannot be overstated for individuals still struggling to buy their first homes, living in slums, or displaced by conflict or natural disasters. So, if we acknowledge that businesses could play a role in addressing many of the challenges that we are facing in today’s urban environments, it will be important to clarify our expectations of them.
In the meantime, there are several tangible actions that businesses must take to move this discussion forward while still working on sustainability goals. These include conducting a materiality assessment to identify their most significant sustainability risks, focusing on improving performance, and transparently reporting their impact on both people and the environment while also disclosing their data at both the corporate and country levels. At the same time, governments and regulators must enforce clearer space for uniformity and comparability in sustainability disclosures while making sure that standards are grounded in local realities.
These actions would enable local stakeholders to contextualise companies’ sustainability data and consider what this means in terms of the accountability of their private sector counterparts in their respective contexts. In doing so, we would better position ourselves to understand and discuss what companies’ accountabilities ought to be in the next WUF13 to be held in Baku, Azerbaijan.
