Cities play an important role in the successful implementation of the UN Sustainable Development Goals and cities around the world are joining the global movement of voluntarily reporting on the progress of the SDGs and the UN 2030 Agenda. UBC TALKS dived into the in-depth discussions on this. The webinar explored how to get started with the Voluntary Local Review (VLR) process, presented advice from the European Commission Joint Reserach Centre and shared experiences from the UBC cities of Helsinki, Umeå and Turku.
Experiences from UBC member cities and the European Handbook for SDG voluntary local reviews were discussed
Our first presenter, Laura Uuttu-Deschryvere from the City of Helsinki presented how the city joined the Voluntary Local Review movement. Helsinki is among the pioneers in the movement and Ms Uuttu-Deschryvere introduced useful advice on how to get started with the VLR process and gave insight on what Helsinki learned from its first round of reporting.
We were delighted to have Alice Siragusa from the European Commission Joint Research Centre join our UBC TALKS. She presented the recently published European Handbook for SDG Voluntary Local Reviews, which guides European cities in adapting the SDG framework to their context. Ms Siragusa provided practical examples from the handbook and presented how the handbook offers support to the cities with the reporting process.
In the next presentation Annika Dalén from the municipality of Umeå presented how they work with the SDGs locally and also introduced briefly the national level reporting on the progress of the 2030 Agenda.
Our last speaker, Anna Bertoft from the city of Turku, presented each step that led to the city’s first Voluntary Local Review, starting from why the city decided to join the movement to sharing what are the goals in this for the city. She emphasized that the process of conducting a VLR is extensive and requires plenty of time and planning and highlighted the importance of a comprehensive plan.
Find full recording of the webinar and all the presentations.
Questions and Answers to our speakers
After the presentations a Q+A session was organized and some of the questions directed to the panelists could not be addressed during the webinar due to time constraints. Here are brief answers to the questions that were not addressed.
A question for the European Commission Joint Reseacrh Centre: How to compare cities in Europe that are so different?
Ms Alice Siragusa: Of course every cities is different from the other. The goal of the VLRs should not be to have a ranking based on specific goal or indicators, but to measure the achievement, gaps and performance of single cities, allowing to compare themselves with peers or with cities that start from similar situations.
Using a common framework would allow to quantify cities' contribution to the achievement of the SDGs and to assess the effectiveness of urban policies and actions at national or European Level. Moreover, having harmonised dataset at national or European level allow cities with limited resources to have a backbone set of indicators to start to work with.
A question for the European Commission Joint Reseacrh Centre: Is there or will there be a digital tool for European cities to report to?
Ms Alice Siragusa: At the current stage, only some countries have started to make available indicators at subnational or city level on their online platform (e.g. Germany, Sweden), but in many case these do not cover all SDGs or they include few indicators per goal. The JRC is working on the integration of local dataset in our Urban Data Platform that already includes indicators from different sources and at different geographical units.
A question for the City of Turku. How have you used the results from the first VLR report?
Ms Anna Bertoft: The first VLR review process has just ended in Turku (7/2020) and now we have a picture of the city’s starting point and the biggest areas for development in the context of sustainable development.
In order to implement the Agenda 2030 and SDGs even better they should be part of the policymaking, city strategy, programmes and plans, budgeting, reporting and monitoring process in the city. SDG’s has not been used as the basis for the city’s current strategy, programmes and plans. When the city strategy or other guiding documents are being revised in the near future we can take this context into account. We also need to choose appropriate indicators for sustainable development and include them in the strategy reporting and monitoring process. In the future, the City can also more easily review and select the measures that are most effective. We should also decide the level for each indicator so that we know when the city has reached the goal. Measuring sustainable development and verifying progress at city level is challenging because cities and their operating environments are different and comparable data is not always available.
For all this to happen we must communicate and raise awareness, both inside the city organization and to all our stakeholders. We must make sure that the development becomes more visible to citizens, business life, organizations, other cities, government and other interest groups. It is important to engage all stakeholders, together we have a chance to steer the course of development in a more sustainable direction.
The next steps for the city:
- to implement sustainable development into the City Strategy and other documents that guide the city’s operations;
- to choose appropriate indicators for continuous and systematic monitoring of the progress;
- to communicate and raise awareness, both inside the city organization and also to the stakeholders;
- to engage all stakeholders.