 Hi everybody and welcome to our session on championing social justice. I will be your moderator for the session. My name is Laura Wyman Powers and I am the head of impact at Echoing Green, which is an early stage global social innovation fund based in New York. Today's conversation is extremely timely. We are at a moment of reckoning globally as we face two major international pandemics. The COVID-19 pandemic has had profound public health and economic implications for societies globally. It's also highlighted and exacerbated a different sort of pandemic the pre existing systemic racism and inequities and inequalities across our societies. COVID-19 has disproportionately affected black and indigenous communities and other marginalized and vulnerable communities around the world. And in addition, the killing of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis accelerated one of the largest social movements in recent memory as protests emerged in over 2000 cities across 60 countries internationally in support of black lives matter. We're at a moment where there is palpable restlessness for change for fairer post pandemic futures. We're going back to normal is not an option. We need not to rebuild our systems but to fundamentally reimagine them. Several stakeholders working towards the sustainable development goals are wrestling with the intersection between social justice and social impacts and asking questions such as how to activate the right levers of change internally. How we think about a social justice imperative as part of core business and how to build targeted and inclusive partnerships with marginalized communities to elevate their voices and experiences and build their power. The concept of justice belongs not only in SDG 16 achieving the SDGs will require recognizing systemic inequities and championing a justice agenda across all the SDGs. Before we dive in I also want to mention that we'll have a live graphic scriber joining us who will be documenting the conversation so we'll get to see how that turns out in the end. Now I'm going to briefly introduce our panelists and then we'll dive into our conversation. So with us today we have anger Anderson under secretary general of the United Nations and executive director of the UN environment program. Previously anger was director general of the International Union for the conservation of nature and has held roles at the World Bank and the United Nations. We have Mina mashecki senior advisor on trade ESG emerging markets and technology at Rock Creek. She's also an associate professor at Shanghai University of international business and economics. And prior to joining Rock Creek she led the division of international trade and headed the trade negotiations and commercial diplomacy environment and climate change at the UN conference on trade and development. Third panelist is Melanie Schultz van Hagen CEO of the Porticus Foundation. She's previously state secretary for transport and water management the minister of infrastructure and environment and has held other positions for the Netherlands. With previous experience with the UN World Bank and in the private sector. So let us dive right in. Our first question for our three panelists are the SDGs fit for purpose as a framework for companies institutions and governments to address the root causes of systemic and inequalities and social injustices. And if not, what's needed. Ingrid you want to kick us off. And thank you for inviting and it's a real pleasure to be together with these distinguished ladies here so thank you very much. And thank you very much Nora for facilitating us look. I, I, you know, my on ramp on surprisingly will be on justice and injustice and social inequity and environment right and sit as a head of the United Nations environment program and I will say that we still have that roadmap. The SDGs that address social injustices and systemic inequalities, but we are really unpacked each of the SDGs and understood fully what actually that roadmap looks like. Because we still have a long way in achieving them and you did a very nice introduction precisely on this. We look at the specifics of the SDGs over 90% of the goals and targets on the SDGs correspond to human rights obligations. And I would say that social justice and equality issues underpin all of these, if not all the SDGs. Now, if we look at the Secretary General's report that he issued on how we're doing on the SDGs he issued that to the high level political forum in July. It wasn't as much progress as we would like to see. We've seen some progress on energy and, and child mortality and good, you know, we like, but progress has stalled on important issues like hunger climate change and equality inequality right. So, and then along comes COVID as you rightly said and pushed us much further back and it lays bare, these super profound inequalities that exist amongst countries within countries and within races and or folks that are discriminated against in anyone setting on And so that's sort of the bigger picture here. So I would still say yes the SDGs are there as a as a map, but we have a long way to go to understand that and as for companies I think companies as a long long way to journey, because they haven't really done to grapple with, with maybe climate, maybe just their CO2 footprint maybe that's as far as they could get, or maybe just the carbon the actual hydrocarbon element in an investable, in an investable right. So there's a long way to go to really embrace all of this. Some companies have done or attempting to and Bravo to them. But let me stop here so I can also hear from my fellow panelists here. Thanks. Mina, do you want to jump in? Mina, you're on mute. As instructed. There you go. Okay, great. So thank you so much for inviting the rock group and name on unfortunately our founder and CEO couldn't be here so I'm trying to fill in her place. Having worked on the SDGs and before that on MDGs and trade and development and ensuring inclusiveness. I had of course followed the whole development of the SDGs and contributed to it in terms of trade. And as was mentioned by the progress has been very slow and I think the two progress reports we got from the UN Secretary General points out that despite some progress, it has been slow and even in some cases, there has been a reversal. So that's very much of concern, but as a roadmap, as was mentioned, it's, you know, actually the development component for the whole world. What's new with it, of course, is, as you all know, that it's not just for developing countries, whereas MDGs was more, you know, focus of how to help the developing countries. This is really a global agenda for all countries, all companies and all governments. And therefore, in that sense, I think it has made a huge progress in changing the mindset. But the goals, of course, have not been implemented in an ambitious way, neither by governments nor by companies. And I think the NGOs have been very concerned about this and the civil society that things have been working in silos, you know, even the goals have been looked at in silos and not in terms of interlinkages and looking at them as the, you know, their interrelationship with just doing one without doing all of them together really doesn't achieve a deep impact. And I think what is important is that companies have really adopted this. I see more and more, you know, companies don't say something out there. They just don't like putting, they do put this, you know, the colorful thing on their, on themselves and they embrace that, but they also little by little have come on board, and many of them are trying to make impact and change and of course, you know, there is a collaboration, like RCG or a group collaborates with a network of companies with UNPRI with WEF, of course, IFC World Bank. So we we think that the only way to implement is collaboration. And this collaboration has to be strengthened. And, of course, COVID-19 has in a way broken down also a little bit this collaboration weakened it because we all talk on Zoom, but we don't have the human contact and the depth of collaboration has been a little bit slowed down. And I think a little bit we have moved again to the more selfish agenda, you know, from this very proactive and ambitious agenda. We are all in countries and in even companies trying to survive in this very, very difficult environment of COVID. So therefore, I think that it's absolutely relevant. It's fit for purpose. But the key is to have joint efforts, joint up thinking, collaboration and see the interrelationship between the goals, and also realize that COVID-19 has really driven back the implementation of people and reversed many situations. Like, for example, if we look at SDG-1 we see before COVID-19 projections suggested that 6% of global population still be living in extreme poverty in 2013. Now an estimated, I mean, a large number of millions of people have fallen back, and especially in sub-Saharan Africa. And additional people are millions are living in extreme poverty. So, you know, we see that on the first most important goal, actually there has been a lot of negative influence with the global economic recession, the fact that people are more looking unilaterally than globally and multilaterally. And this has driven that back. We see hunger, again, you know, disruption and 121 million more people could be pushed back to brink of starvation. We see on gender equality, you know, RCG has very much focuses on investing on through the gender lens and we devote 2.5 billion to women managers. So we are very much focused on the gender lens. And we see in gender equality, you know, domestic violence has increased, women have lost jobs because they're in the informal sector. And also, basically, women also, when we look at unemployment, we see that they're much lower in terms of higher, they have higher unemployment than male unemployment. And so this is a major concern to us, this backtracking on many of the goals. And that just, just completing this with saying that, you know, trillions, about three trillions are just needed for emerging markets to be able to survive. So thank you very much. So I'm, I'm given what the first two pianists have shared on this notion that we're backtracking in many cases. I'm curious, Melanie, your take on the question of the SCGs as being the roadmap for this next phase. Well, it's always easy to have a call to action, but really coming to action is much more difficult. And I would never change the SCG framework would watch your question because I know as a former politician how much negotiation there has been about the SCG So never change your word because then it all starts over again. But most important now is when we want to come to action is to build our ecosystems. So let me tell you five sentences about Porticus or Porticus is a is a private family philanthropy. We work for a family that has been entrepreneurial for many, many years. And they are so they have done so for 180 years now and we're active in 90 countries with approximately 1000 partners. What is important for us is that all those partners have wonderful ideas. But if you convene them, bring them together you even maximize the impact of what you want to achieve. And so we try to do that, but more often we also try to support alliances. So to get that ecosystem there that is really going to implement the actions from the SCGs. For example, I had a call learning call this morning with the global commons alliance. This is a very large alliance of different organizations. It's more a network of networks that are really involved in creating science, science based targets for the SCGs. So they there are businesses in their social entrepreneurs, media, scientific institutes, philanthropies. It's really, really wonderful to see that if you will join and be very practical that you can cut a lot done. Because at the end when this network comes out then governments also will be very much interested in implementing it. Another example is yesterday during also during WEF the COVID alliance for social entrepreneurs was for social enterprises was launched and the idea about that is that there are different organizations that help social enterprises because they often have the solution for larger societal issues. But now, especially now during COVID, of course, the social entrepreneurs are present. So it's important to support them and to be sure that they survive and that we also amplify an injector voices into the bigger debate. So again, creating those alliances creating an ecosystem is very, very important. And this is the ecosystem itself and then also looking at the actions we also need to look at how to transform the more technical approaches that we often see also into more social political solutions for change. I have to look a lot to tell about that also but maybe that will also be part of the next part of the conversation. Thank you, Melanie. So, you know, the environment has has come up as an example a couple times, and I think it can be a useful analogy, you know, I think with climate change we've made some progress in terms of how institutions in particular are moving of their responsibility, moving from offsetting the negative impacts, such as buying carbon offsets to avoiding the negative impacts in the first place not engaging in that harmful behavior. We obviously have a ways to go but I think the conversation has evolved a lot over the last few years. I'm curious what you all are seeing in your institution and in your peers, kind of those that you either are in alliances with or partner with. When it comes to justice, are we seeing that same mindset shift, moving from offsetting negative impacts to actually avoiding them in the first place or maybe even proactively promoting justice internally and externally. Go in the same order, anyone can jump in. Inger, go ahead. So, I should be unmuted now. Okay, thank you very much. Now, I think, I mean, the bottom line here is that, you know, there is, I'm going to go back to the UN for obvious reasons, and to the universal declaration on human rights, because we there is a fundamental right and thus justice comes into the picture to the right to life, the right to health, the right to food, the right to water, the right to sanitation. Each of these are assumed to be given. And when we begin to mess with environments such a way that they're not given, we have to understand that environment and human rights somehow, these two, these two small streams meet in a river. And here, then there is the sense that protection on human rights helps to protect the environment, and therefore helps to deliver justice, right? When you have firm human rights in place, chances are that you also have enhanced rights on the environmental side. And I think the UN Office of the Commission on Human Rights have highlighted this many, many times. It's interesting to understand that 150 countries have in their constitution or in their legislation or in some sort of body of law enshrined this right to a healthy environment. And that's really important, or in agreements that they have signed somehow with others. The trouble is, I'd say, that not everybody's living up to that, right? So they may have these very fine words in jurisprudence or in the constitutions. So from our side, we're doing all we can to support this dimension. And I think we just heard, and it was Melanie was talking about some degree of regression, right? We have scenes in countries regressing at the time of COVID, right? So some of these established rights or established practices, there's been a backslide. And that's very unfortunate. We don't want to see lowering of standards, all of that stuff. We do want to see that being strengthened. On the other hand, you have seen countries where they've strengthened. And we are saying, right now, we are pouring these billions of dollars, trillions, actually, into our economies, right? And this is our money. This is our taxpayer's money. So these funds cannot go to fund dirty and gray. You know, a continuation of the status quo. It must be now because we will hopefully not see another time when that amount of public money is going into essentially private sector. And I get it. It's important. It's, it's critical to sustain. But then let us make sure that they're green strings attacks. Let us make sure that we're investing in green R&D. Let us make sure that we have those kind of benchmarks for where this money is going. Just to give you an example, Republic of Korea, they put 100 billion out. There's lots of green strings attached. Or if you want to go to a poorer countries, Pakistan, 40, 50 million into what planting trees because it creates jobs, but also is really good. Kenya, I think was around 20 million into protecting forests and the conservancies that normally is where tourism would be generated and therefore money in local people's pockets, but preserving this. And I could go on. So we are seeing some very positive moves in the pandemic times, but it's not enough. So this idea therefore you speak on justice and understanding that the rights and the rights that we assume are embedded and enshrined and inalienable. They become, we can risk that they can become undermined if we're not mindful that environment forms part of that conversation. And, and the more awareness that you and others can create around this, the better it is because young people need to demand it. And it needs to be part and parcel of that conversation of the rights that we have and the expectations we have of our policy makers. I love this phrase green strings. It makes me wonder what the equivalent of justice strings are that could be attached moving forward. Mina or Melanie do you want to chime in on this question. Yeah, I just want to point out, of course, you know, our human rights and the Declaration Universal Declaration are very key. But then we see even developed countries and even the most developed United States or China has benefited from, you know, a miracle of development. And they're actually in practice, not implementing the human rights declaration. So signature is very easy to UN PRI to, you know, SDGs and to human rights but in practical terms, and we see in practice, like black lives matters and has brought up the fact that, you know, this has not been internalized fully. Human Rights Commission most of the time focuses on like developing countries, African countries, you know, all those who actually, I mean, there are deep reasons why they don't implement sometimes it's economic reasons, educational reasons, of course. But most developed countries, that means they're really, you know, in terms of financing and implementing human rights, they shouldn't have any problem, but they have deep ingrained racism and injustices and they don't face it. But first you have to recognize this fact that racism exists, injustice exists, and then once you recognize that, and you share this experience that is very painful, then you should find action oriented, you know, and very comprehensive programs to deal with this issue of social justice and human rights. But then also there's the problem that businesses and governments, you know, you cannot just do, you know, programs for externally, okay, like we invest in firms and we expect their carbon emissions go down or whatever, or they have equality and gender dimensions ingrained in them. We have to implement it internally in our own organization. So let's say UN should internally implement gender lens and ensure that, you know, in all dimensions, equality in terms of salaries, promotions, in terms of actually we saw you in General Assembly opening 50, you know, main leaders talked first, so you didn't see for the first day any woman. So I'm just giving it as an example that, you know, if you want to ensure social justice equality, and you need to implement it internally yourself and be a model, you know, all organizations, all companies need to be a model. I love that sort of distinction or addition of the difference between rights and justice. They're both important, they're not the same. Melanie. Yeah, so, so within part because we've always been focusing on addressing injustices and giving a voice to minorities, but we also focus, for example, on climate issues and, and there you see that most of them are there's a technical approach. And what is interesting to see is how you can bring this justice approach in there is something that Ingers also saying, and, for example, we worked on deforestation, but if you looked at the problem then you saw that one of the things we need is to do is also work with the indignation and give them an alternative for another economic model. So we, we train them, school them, show them how to grow a kind berries, for example, to have an alternative to what they were doing before that. And if you would just look at legislation or compensation or technical rules, you would exclude this group and bring them in an even better position, saddle position. So this is an example or another one is is in Europe, when you see that lots of political leaders are telling people that there needs to be climate transformation that they need to use electrical cars that they subsidize those cars that they need to go to climate neutral homes or whatever, you see that there's a group of people who is not able to make that transformation and those are the ones that are poor and vulnerable. And so it's, it's having those challenges on a political level needs also not only to have a technical solution, also a social solution for those who need to make that transformation too. If you don't do so, I'm very, very worried that all those people are going to vote for people who deny that there's climate change because the problems are too big for them to handle. So this is also something that we try to do is by creating citizen assemblies where people can also be part of the discussion on climate change. So there, yeah, my, my, my, my main point is that we need now to go from the call to action to really action so let's join all those groups where it really happens. I love that move from the call to action to action itself. That's a great note to end on. So thank you so much to anger me now Melanie for these really thoughtful answers. We're getting to see the results of our wivescribing now I love this very adorable monsters in the middle. Just a final note that the forums platform for global public goods will serve as a hub for collective action at the intersection of social justice and the SDGs. Accelerating policy innovation and action through the uplink COVID social justice challenge and cohorts, enabling industry communities of action defining and mainstreaming social justice with social impact and supporting inclusion of social and racial justice leaders into SDG action. So hopefully we can keep the conversation going there and just a final big thank you to our panelists and our live scriber I think there are a lot of really insightful and important points that came out over the course of the conversation. And this is a conversation that I think is only going to come more and more to the forefront in the coming months and years so thank you again to anger Mina and melody and thanks for everyone who tuned into the conversation to listen.