Opening Remarks for the United Nations Pre-Summit of the Future Dialogue

Mr. Christopher Hui Ching-yu, GBS, JP, Secretary for Financial Services and the Treasury, The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China, 

Excellency Mr. Zhang Yu, the Convenor of the Joint Council and Director of the Steering Committee of the International Cooperation Center, 

Excellency Mr. Lim Lork Piseth, Secretary of State, Ministry of Commerce, Royal Government of Cambodia,

Excellencies, 

Distinguished guests, 

Colleagues and friends, 

I would like to thank the Financial Services and the Treasury Bureau of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China, for co-hosting this Dialogue with the United Nations in China. I first met with Mr. Hui in June, where we agreed to co-organize a pre-Summit of the Future event in August in Hong Kong, to explore the intersections of climate change, artificial intelligence (AI) and health, in driving meaningful change and building a sustainable, inclusive future for all. 

I thank you all for joining us, including those who travelled to Hong Kong for this event – your commitment to multilateralism and multilateral institutions, including the UN, is imperative as we are faced with interrelated, global challenges. 

Over the previous months, the UN in China has convened a series of the pre-Summit of the Future events, across many of the key workstreams of the Summit, including: Sustainable Development and Financing for Development; Science, Technology and Innovation and Digital Cooperation; Youth and Future Generations; and Global Governance. 

Today’s event aims to explore the interrelationship between climate change, public health and AI and seeks to identify concrete ways in which we can leverage the interlinkages between these areas to create accelerated progress.  It adds to the efforts of the UN in China, in collaboration with our partners, to provide country perspectives to the preparation for the Summit – a once-in-a-generation-opportunity to reinvigorate multilateralism, address gaps in global governance, and reaffirm existing commitments, including to the SDGs and the UN Charter. 

Hong Kong’s role as a global hum of innovation, technology and finance makes it the ideal place to host this event. According to the data from The Hong Kong Trade Development Council (HKTDC), Hong Kong’s innovation and technology sector, in combination with its Shenzhen and Guangzhou counterparts (the Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Guangzhou science and technology cluster) was ranked as the world’s second-best in terms of performance by the Global Innovation Index 2023. 

Biotechnology, artificial intelligence (AI), smart city and financial technologies (fintech) have been identified as the four key areas for Hong Kong’s innovation and technology (I&T) industry. 

Hong Kong’s commitment to sustainable development, as demonstrated by its Climate Action Plan 2050, should also be commended. In it, Hong Kong lays out a plan to achieve carbon neutrality before 2050 and this highlights how seriously it is taking the increasingly severe impacts of climate change.

Excellencies,

Ladies and gentlemen, 

The UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres stressed that “Halfway to the deadline for the 2030 Agenda, we are leaving more than half the world behind. We have stalled or gone into reverse on more than 30 percent of the SDGs,” “Unless we act now, the 2030 Agenda will become an epitaph for a world that might have been.” 

In his address to the General Assembly in September 2023, he further reiterated that “Global challenges are mounting”, and that “We confront a host of existential threats – from the climate crisis to disruptive technologies – and we do so at a time of chaotic transition.” 

In China, guided by the UN Sustainable Development Cooperation Framework 2021 to 2025, we continue to support China with its domestic development aspirations, as the country accelerates its transition towards high-quality and green development. In the meantime, we are continuing our efforts to support our Chinese counterparts to align China’s initiatives, such as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Global Development Initiative (GDI), with the 2030 Agenda and other international agendas, norms and standards. We recently co-created the China-Africa-UN Transformative Partnership Initiative (TPI) to support countries in Africa, to implement outcomes from the Forum of China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), and, for the first time in the FOCAC’s 20 years’ history, the UN in China was invited, as a strategic partner, to provide technical expertise, networks and platforms, at the request of the African co-chair to FOCAC, Senegal.

I hope we will be able to expand these platforms and continue our engagement with those present today to translate our commitments and agreements into concrete actions, through strategic and catalytic investments to accelerate sustainable development progress. 

I would like to stress three key words: partnerships, platforms and persistence. We need to forge and consolidate partnerships with as many stakeholders as possible – Member States, international organizations, academia, foundations and the private sector, to achieve what once was thought of as impossible. We need to create and provide platforms to convene stakeholders, and leverage ideas, expertise and resources effectively, like what we do with the TPI. And we need to be persistent – here I would like to quote H.E. President Xi Jinping of the People’s Republic of China, that “The road ahead is long; striving is the only way forward. We have strived, broken through brambles and thorns, and crossed ten thousand rivers and thousands of mountains.”

I hope today’s event will provide a platform for all of you to share your viewpoints on issues related to the intersection of climate change, public health and artificial intelligence along with scaling up investments for a sustainable future, as we continue our efforts to prepare for the Summit.  The floor is yours, partners and stakeholders of the United Nations.

Thank you.