Lessons learned at Habitat III

The global development community officially has a new international agreement. A year after approving the Sustainable Development Goals and 10 months after ratifying an international climate accord, nearly 170 U.N. member states officially adopted a set of global guidelines for sustainable urban development known as the New Urban Agenda at the conclusion of the Habitat III summit in Quito, Ecuador.

In a rapidly urbanizing world that is expected to see the share of the world’s population living in urban areas grow from around 50 percent today to 70 percent by 2030, the New Urban Agenda represents a common understanding among countries that the sustainable development of cities and urban settlements will inevitably influence global development at large.

But unlike the 2030 development agenda with its 169 targets and the Paris agreement which holds countries accountable to a gradually stricter set of climate commitments, the parameters for pursuing the NUA are more loosely defined. The four-day, 40,000-person Habitat III gathering in the Ecuadorean capital was billed a forum for implementation — an opportunity for country leaders and development stakeholders to put forward proposals that support the “paradigm shift” of how cities are planned, or action plans to enact ambitious pledges such as ending poverty and hunger “in all its forms and dimensions” that the NUA commits to do.