00:01Good day and greetings wherever you are. It gives me great pleasure to have been invited
00:09to present this keynote lecture as the 2026 SDG 11 champion. And what I intend to do is
00:19to share some insights on the current situation and my understanding and prospects for the
00:27future of sustainable cities, of climate resilience and inclusive urban development, as well as
00:33the importance of advancing SDG 11 through research, policy and collective action. By way of a start,
00:41it'll come as no surprise to everybody that we are currently at one of the most politically and
00:50dare one say in terms of security, perilous, dangerous moments in recent history, indeed,
00:59probably at any point since the end of the Cold War. And this is the result of the coming together,
01:07overlapping, interlocking of multiple challenges. The first one is that many societies are highly
01:16polarised, very much in internal opposition, and many conventional and traditional senses of
01:25social cohesion have been fracturing. This is related in part, but not in whole, to the persistence and
01:34indeed very often the widening of inequalities of wealth, of access to employment, and also to
01:43social and other forms of welfare and quality of life. That, in turn, feeds into political polarisation,
01:53which has fed what is quite often now referred to as culture wars, which take on overt political
02:01overtones and, in turn, reinforce that political and social polarisation. At a broader level of
02:11international geopolitics, we have fragmentation and the loss of the post-Cold War consensus that led to
02:20ideas of a rules-based order, where international agendas were globally agreed through the UN,
02:31such as the global social development agenda that was agreed in 2015 and 2016, and to which I'll return in
02:39a
02:39moment. And, crucially, the shifts and the conflicts, which are now taking multiple forms,
02:47again, often overlapping, interlocking, intersecting in different ways in different places. But these include
02:54what are now increasingly frequently referred to as resource wars, especially over fossil fuels, strategic
03:02minerals, such as rare earths, and increasingly also, particularly, but not exclusively, in arid and semi-arid areas,
03:11over access to and control over water resources. That then feeds again into the broader challenges, indeed, some of the
03:20other key wicked global challenges of climate change and broader environmental change of which scarcity or
03:30perceived scarcity of water and access to it is one. And we know that these are accelerating
03:36in terms of severity, in terms of the rate of change, and the frequency of extreme events.
03:43And whereas a few years ago, it was quite possible, indeed, it was very common for people to deny that
03:49this was today's issue. And yeah, we understand it'll be a problem for our children, our grandchildren.
03:55Now, it's a problem for all of us, everywhere, and the evidence is with us almost daily and weekly
04:02in many different parts of the world. So it is impossible for anybody to say that it's not an issue,
04:08and it doesn't affect them. So let's explore those dimensions in a little bit more detail before I,
04:17in the second half, explain what I think is going to happen, or could happen, and where we need to
04:24put
04:24our efforts in terms of promoting sustainability, resilience, and adaptive transformation.
04:33At one level, because of this churn, intellectual, political, social, that I've referred to, terms
04:41which originally had quite clear meanings, like sustainability and resilience, have somehow become
04:47hollowed out and become mere slogans. On the one hand, very often devalued as the greenwashing
04:54for corporate or indeed governmental business as usual practices. And those are very often then
05:03used by people to dismiss these as cynical ploys, and really as attempts not to change the status quo.
05:12On the other hand, of course, they're exploited by politicians too. But within the science and
05:18social scientific community, there is a series of quite well-defined and clearly expounded meanings
05:24that still have traction. And interestingly, in many of the discourses we're engaged in,
05:33in local government and central government, they too remain salient, sometimes admittedly being paid lip
05:41service, but at other times, they form the basis of an increasing number of embedded and statutory
05:50required policies. So the challenge then becomes how we actually move from a situation where many
05:57urban and regional metropolitan authorities have climate change, sustainability, resilience,
06:04other forms of related policies, but implementation lags rather far behind. And it's almost
06:11as if actually formulating and approving and adopting such policies has become the object of the
06:18exercise rather than actual implementation. But city governments and other stakeholders,
06:25and here I'm being very careful to try to avoid anthropomorphizing by using the term cities do this,
06:32that and the other, because cities after all are essentially inanimate, even if we think of them as
06:37complex organisms rather like ant colonies or something like that, they're often way ahead of national
06:45governments in terms of addressing the symptoms of unsustainability and vulnerability. And vulnerability
06:52in many respects is the sort of inverse of resilience, so the lack of resilience.
06:58On the other hand, fiscal, other resource constraints, inertia, political myopia, which I think of as
07:07comprising two closely related concepts, one of which is short-sightedness, and the other is short-termism,
07:17that classic political concern with the current electoral cycle and the next election or the next planning
07:24round, rather than building for the medium and the long term, which is really what sustainability and
07:29resilience requires. And sometimes it's also frankly fear. The fact that we cannot any longer deny the
07:39importance, the salience, the severity of climate and related environmental changes simply drives home to many
07:45people, the scared people, the scaredness factor, the overwhelming nature of the challenges we face on a
07:53time frame that is getting narrower and narrower, as IPCC and other reports constantly refer to it as
08:00the window of opportunity narrowing rapidly. But in order to do what is required is going to involve some
08:11substantial changes to lifestyles, ways of life, how we share and distribute resources, which in turn is part of
08:20that sort of fear factor. So against that potentially quite gloomy set of present conditions, if you like, how can
08:31we move
08:31forward? And as I've been honored by appointment as the SDG laureate this year and as honorary SDG 11 champion
08:46for the UK,
08:48I need to start there. The SDGs and particularly SDG 11 is the one addressing urban areas and the new
08:55urban agenda
08:56are two of the key pillars of that global sustainable development agenda that I referred to earlier that
09:03was adopted by the UN in 2015-16. So we've now had 10 or 11 years with all of these
09:10being implemented,
09:11very patchy, very variable levels of success at national, regional, local level within most countries,
09:17and certainly between countries and between world regions. I think it's probably fair to say that the
09:24first few years were marked by significant progress, the enthusiasm, the political will,
09:31apologies, but combination of the financial crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, and then the consequences of
09:41Russia's invasion of Ukraine in terms of impact on food prices and availability and fuel availability,
09:47and then most recently, the still ongoing conflict between US-Israel and Iran has done the same thing
09:56in terms of fertilizers, in terms of fossil fuels and all the rest. Since the midterm review of the SDGs
10:06in 2013,
10:09the UN and particularly UN Habitat as the agency responsible for SDG 11 and UN and the new urban agenda
10:17has been applying much more pressure, much more effort at political boosterism to try to include
10:25more resourcing, more political commitment. But as things stand, it's very unlikely that more than about
10:3335% or so of the targets across all 17 indicators will be met by 2030. And even then, almost
10:42certainly
10:42not worldwide, in many cases only in one or two world regions or certain sets of countries. The new urban
10:51agenda is in a similar position. That runs, of course, until 2036, so we still have a decade. But as
10:57I think
10:57most people now appreciate, the new urban agenda does not have its own monitoring and evaluation framework.
11:03For that, it relies on the SDGs. And that is a challenge for all the reasons that I've already rehearsed.
11:18The question, I suppose, that then arises with the SDGs expiring in 2030, just effectively three and a half,
11:30four years away, is whether they will be replaced by a successor set of targets and indicators,
11:40just as the SDGs replaced the Millennium Development Goals. But I think the world has changed. The global
11:47consensus that underpinned all of that in the Millennium Declaration and then again in 2015-16
11:54has now dissolved, fragmented, reverted into a much more regional focus and various other geopolitical
12:03blocks, that the likelihood of being able to agree a new global set is greatly reduced. Much more
12:11likely as things stand, and as I understand the talk behind the scenes, is that the SDGs might be
12:19extended by a number of years, or perhaps even more likely their number and the number of targets and
12:25indicators will be reduced in terms of apparently trying to make it a much more manageable set
12:31that will encourage countries to contribute over a longer period. But the fundamental point is that
12:38this whole apparatus, if you will, is voluntary. And as such, rather like the Paris Accord of the UN
12:47Framework Convention on Climate Change, it relies on goodwill, it relies on commitment by member states
12:53of the UN to do the business and that unfortunately in many cases is lacking.
12:59The second key part of moving forward is that strides, very real and tangible strides, are being
13:06made in urban areas of many parts of the world to promote sustainability and resilience. But in many cases,
13:14this is more incremental, sort of gradual reformist small steps than major step changes. And there's been an
13:22interesting debate in the academic and policy literature in the last few years about that, where
13:28many of us thought that actually reformism, incrementalism was never going to get us where
13:34we need to be, and that we needed much bigger transformative step changes. But I think in terms of
13:42working within existing governance arrangements and structures of government, many of them are now
13:49arguing that the only way they might be able to do this is indeed through a series of successive and
13:55well-ordered and organized incremental steps that at some unspecified point might cumulatively add up to
14:05something much more substantive that we might call adaptive transformation or indeed transformative adaptation.
14:15Thirdly, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, is producing, as many of you know,
14:22a special report on climate change in cities, of which I'm one of the lead authors, and that is due
14:28to go
14:29for government approval at the end of October this year and then to be published at the end of March
14:342027, next year. There is a lot of work reviewed in there, academic and other reports, international
14:42agencies, NGO, so-called grey literature, and all the rest. And one of the key things, in addition to
14:50what I've already spoken about that will be evident once it appears, is that we're moving and arguing
14:58strongly that we need to transcend that unfortunate dichotomy between mitigation and adaptation that
15:05has its roots way back in the Kyoto Protocol and that meaningful progress towards climate resilience requires
15:14mitigation and adaptation and adaptive transformation. Thirdly there, we're also moving
15:25beyond beyond what the sixth assessment report had as climate resilient development and applying it to
15:32the urban scale. Now, that is more complicated than it might seem at first because it's not simply
15:37a matter of downscaling from the national to the local because the nature of cities as these complex
15:44territorially based interdependent arrangements of institutions or assemblages, if you like, of institutions
15:54various stakeholders and so on makes it more complicated. But do watch this space because that will be one
15:59of the innovations you'll see in the report. So embedded in that, and this is really my final point, is
16:10not just
16:11progress towards those worthy goals and tackling the wicked issues of climate environmental change, but
16:19fundamental to doing that is tackling poverty and inequality and moving towards a much more
16:27just and equitable distribution of resources. And of course, that's also where one often finds resistance
16:34and inertia. But that is a normative point that goes back to the Brundtland Commission report in 1987
16:42and also notions that have been deep within urban planning traditions since probably the beginnings of the 20th
16:51century in terms, for example, of what the late John Friedman, one of the doyons of progressive urban
16:58urban planning called the good city. So on that much more optimistic note, watch the space.
17:05Hopefully we will achieve, if not the good city, then certainly far better cities by promoting the progressive
17:13notions that you will encounter when the special report on climate change in cities is published in March next year.
17:19Thank you very much.
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