World Cities Day 2022: Act Local to Go Global

A recording of these remarks can be found on YouTube and Tencent Video

Excellencies,

Distinguished Guests,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Greetings.

I am pleased to address you today, to celebrate Urban October 2022. SDG 11, "to make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable" elevates sustainable urbanization as a key priority for global development.

The United Nations is committed to engaging all stakeholders and cities to improve the lives of their inhabitants. The global need is even greater in these turbulent times, when the international community is confronting interlinked challenges including the COVID-19 pandemic, the climate emergency, geopolitical instabilities, and regional development disparities.

In the message of the UN Secretary-General António Guterres for this year’s World Cities Day, he noted that “across a range of critical goals — from poverty and hunger to gender equality and education — we are not seeing progress, but backsliding. The consequences are dramatic:  escalating climate chaos, growing poverty, rising inequalities and more.  We must change course — and we can.”

Over the past decades, tremendous progress in urbanization and industrialization has improved the quality of life for hundreds of millions of people in China and across the world.

However, progress comes with challenges. Urban centres everywhere are suffering from inequalities and vulnerabilities that have grown with the global crises of the past several years. A lack of affordable housing, environmental degradation, polluted air, high energy prices—challenges often driven by antiquated policies that singularly favour business and revenue without adequate consideration for social and environmental impacts—are persistent problems.

As Mahatma Gandhi said, “the true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members”. The priority for any responsible government is to ensure the quality of life for all its citizens, to make cities more child-friendly and suitable for the elderly, to make them more accessible for persons with disabilities, to make them greener, to make them healthier.

The UN in China has worked closely with the Government of China to promote the development of sustainable urbanization and housing, a critical area of collaboration given China’s rapid urban expansion.

Since 1992, UN-Habitat has engaged in China under a Framework of Cooperation with the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development. Under this cooperation, in the past five years, 16 municipalities in China have joined 24 UN-Habitat projects and initiatives, implementing key projects such as UN-Habitat China Future Cities Council (CFCC), Sustainable Urban Planning Programme for China, and People-Oriented Urban Public Programme in China (PO-UPS). As the result, the UN’s projects contributed to the expansion of protected areas and natural reserves and strengthened the capacities of biodiversity and habitat across 13 provinces in China in 2021.

Ladies and Gentlemen, we must all continue to take meaningful collaborative action in this area and, to do so, we must understand which approaches and projects have been effective in empowering local and regional governments to engage in responsible urban development. We must work to adapt and multiply these models to create global change. This is the hard but critical work before you today and that all of us must continue moving forwards.  

This is because transformative policies and innovative solutions implemented today, for cities to transition to renewable energy, set credible net-zero targets, and build climate-resilient infrastructure, will save lives and livelihoods everywhere tomorrow.

The UN will continue to support China in its efforts to accelerate progress toward SDG 11 at home, as well as abroad, through its South-South Cooperation efforts, working jointly toward a more sustainable, inclusive and resilient world for all.