Convened by the UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) in partnership with the African Development Bank (AfDB), the African Union Commission (AUC), and the Pan-African Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA) from 5-7 September 2025, CCDA-XIII was held on the theme, ‘Empowering Africa’s Climate Action with Science, Finance, and Just Transition.’ Its outcome document calls for urgent action and scaled-up investment to advance Africa’s climate agenda along the priority areas of adaptation and loss and damage, science and data, climate finance, just transitions, ecosystems, and African leadership.

Africa is not waiting to be acted upon, We should shape our destiny, leveraging our resources, and bring solutions to the world.

Heatwaves, heavy rains, wildfires, droughts… As unprecedented climate disasters become a daily occurrence, South Korea is facing a crucial decision in responding to the climate crisis. Our country will soon decide how much greenhouse gases (GHGs) we will cumulatively emit by 2050, the target year for carbon neutrality. At this critical juncture, a historic event has occurred that timely shifts the direction of the global response to the climate crisis. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued an advisory opinion on the obligations of States in respect of climate change at the request of the UN General Assembly (UNGA).

The ICJ stated that the discretion of States in determining their nationally determined contributions (NDCs) is limited by international law. If a country fails to do its utmost to ensure its NDC represents the highest possible ambition, it may be committing an internationally wrongful act. A country that commits an internationally wrongful act may be held legally responsible to provide restitution or compensation to countries affected by the climate crisis. So, how is the discretion of States in determining their NDCs limited?

The ICJ determined that the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C, as decided by the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UNFCCC, is a “scientifically based consensus target.” The NDCs, determined by each country, must collectively achieve the 1.5°C goal. According to the first Global Stocktake (GST) conducted in 2023, the world must reduce net GHG emissions by 60% by 2035 compared to 2019 to achieve the 1.5°C goal. The ICJ stated that the NDC of each country must consider the GST results.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), climate change is impacting human health by threatening clean air, safe drinking water, nutritious food supply, and safe shelter, jeopardizing decades of progress. Approximately 250,000 additional deaths are expected to occur annually from climate change-induced malnutrition, malaria, diarrhoea, and heat stress, with the direct damage costs to health estimated at between USD 2 billion and 4 billion per year by 2030.

The World Bank describes climate change as “a global health emergency.” While its impacts affect everyone, the most vulnerable groups include women, children, older adults, displaced persons, people with pre-existing health conditions, and those living in poverty.

In its recent advisory opinion spelling out countries’ obligations with respect to climate change, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) linked climate change-related environmental degradation with human rights, “with health as an important consideration.” As one of the SDG Knowledge Hub’s guest authors recently highlighted, the ruling “has profound implications for health-based litigation moving forward” as “health is no longer just a co-benefit of climate action but a core legal concern.”

AGG has proposed a sensitization approach and mechanism, an Online Course: Embedding Health in Climate Negotiations. Collaborating with Apolitical, a specialist training provider to governments, has made available a new climate negotiations and health online training resource. The course reflects the latest developments in multilateral discussions, acknowledging the growing recognition of climate change as “the greatest health threat facing humanity.”

Funded by Wellcome and produced by Apolitical, the course aims to foster an understanding of the links between climate change and health by identifying where and how to incorporate health into climate negotiations and policymaking to ensure people’s health is protected as the climate changes.

By the end of this course, participants are expected to be able to:

Explain how climate change and health are connected, including how health is reflected in the UNFCCC process and how climate change and health are connected in different jurisdictions;

Discuss existing initiatives for embedding health into the climate negotiations;

Investigate specific entry points for embedding health in climate negotiations; and

Identify practical steps that can be taken to make a difference within specific areas of influence.

The course will also offer participants an opportunity to join an online community of learners to help connect with others around the world who are working on similar issues.

People, Planet, and Partnership:

The Heart of 2030

Through partnerships, research, and youth engagement, AGG is rebuilding trust in global cooperation to achieve the SDGs before 2030.

This manuscript is inspired and triggered by the decade long question how to accelerate progress during the final five years of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

This piece of literature will highlight events that occurred during 2025, including the Ocean Conference, the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FFD4), the UN Food Systems Summit Stocktake, and upcoming gatherings for the Second World Summit for Social Development and UN Climate Change Conference, as evidence of the possibilities and opportunities to move forward. It will also emphasize the role of indigenous communities and inclusivity for moving toward the 2030. It is considered to be a beacon of hope that a time capsule focused on current global challenges – from plastic pollution to marine environment destruction–would not be understood by children opening it in 2030.

Even though we have a long way to go, there are signs of hope: At AGG we’re emphasizing on the importance of attention to meeting commitments on loss and damage, fair energy transitions, restoration of ecosystems, and development that makes space for voices that are often ignored. These successes are the result of deliberate decisions and the interconnectedness of the SDGs offers an answer for how to speed up progress, given that the further we get on each SDG, the easier it is to achieve other SDGs. We focus on the importance of action to reform the global financial architecture, take climate action, prepare for technological transformation, and make peace a priority. Working tirelessly to fulfill the SDGs, we fully comprehend that the implementation gap is a gap of political will and resources rather than a gap of solutions.

Sitting at the mouth of the Atlantic Ocean, we realize how the ocean is adefining feature of our country, its economy, and cultures. We called for implementation of the Agreement on Marine Biological Diversity of Areas beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) and returning to the drawing board to build a treaty to end global plastic pollution. Climate change is an outsized challenge and therefore we highlighted the ways in which multilateralism is building momentum toward sustainable strategies to better protect and use the ocean.

Outlined and underscored the importance of reasserting multilateralism, the most fundamental ingredient for achieving the 2030 agenda is the political will of all fields of endeavors. We highlighted our obligation to articulate fundamental principles of sovereignty, territorial integrity, and the dignity of individuals and communities, also emphasizing the importance of taking ownership of the solutions to climate change. As an SDG Advocate, AGG can’t stress enough the importance of equality, inclusiveness, reduction of poverty, gender equality, and addressing the impacts of climate change to achieve our collective goals. We emphasized the importance of creating safe spaces, ensuring access to education and communication technologies, and building financial agencies conducting financial literacy programs, and community ownership.

Symposiums and workshops will be created representing youths, businesses, women, and various international organizations to discuss ways in which networked multilateralism where all stakeholders will contribute to the SDGs that will support our efforts in the coming five years, route to 2030. This organization was founded on the nurture that the private sector partnering with local communities would act where governments could not. Underscoring that we all have agency and citing the risks of inertia, we exhorted all participants not to wait for politicians or governments to act on access to water, education, and other goals.

We’re living in disorderly times and we should acknowledge that current geopolitics are tricky, that’s why we underscored the importance of reaffirming the “social” as the center of development strategies, specially the various Youth Organizations. The voices of the youth are being prioritized in the 2030 agenda. Young people should remember their lived experience is their expertise and they should not wait to be given permission to use their voices.

The SDGs as the best international framework we have for development, and multilateralism is working every day, and we called on stakeholders to “double down” on their efforts to achieve the Goals.

At AGG we’ve dedicated and invested myriads of resources and expertise in to research projects and development, that’s how we know what works and what doesn’t, which means we are not suffering from a scarcity of ideas. We just need to ensure there is a sense of urgency to what we do and to focus on implementation at scale. We hope that participants in our programs and services would take the momentum from our event into other events during the high-level campaign.

Where Ancestral Wisdom Meets Modern Science

As the clock to 2030 ticks, AGG calls for ecological multilateralism — uniting science, tradition, and cooperation to protect our shared home.

Each day we’re getting closer and closer to our doom and we’re still heedless. “Are we part nature or just mere withnesses?” This is the billion dollars question that ushered us in to the threshold half a decade before 2030.

AGG underscored its holistic approach towards biodiversity conservation, and among suggestions for strengthening biosphere reserves, calling for strengthened international cooperation to protect our shared home, Earth. All things arise in unison, we urged all stakeholders to understand and respect the fundamental bond between humans and the living world. We reaffirmed all international treaties commitment to combating environmental deregulation and protecting biodiversity, by placing ecological multilateralism at the heart of its work.

Only by deepening our knowledge can we change our behavior, that’s the reason at AGG we encouraged the traditional knowledge systems of nomadic pastoralists and rural communities are a source of inspiration to develop modern solutions for living in harmony with nature. We emphasized the benefits of developing biosphere reserves, including as a platform for international cooperation. Pointing to biosphere reserves’ contributions to sustainable development by connecting global policy agendas with local and regional actions.

Regarding the importance of science-based management for protected areas, the need for mutual learning and technology sharing for improving governance is at all time high. As the saying goes, “if you are alone, you can only achieve so much – if we all come together, we can achieve a lot.” Looking ahead, we need to scale up impact and deepen integration as priorities for the next half a decade. By AGG highlighting its vision, for a world where humans understand their shared future on a finite planet, and acknowledge their interdependence with non-human life. There should be more interlinkages between the MAB Programme and relevant work programmes under related organizations, as well as how the HSAP’s priorities and objectives align with their institutional strategies for biodiversity, climate change, and sustainable development.

We advocate for even more interactive discussions addressing synergies with other biodiversity-related conventions and international organizations, including advances in enhancing the quality of the WNBR, and contributions to: biodiversity conservation and climate adaptation; sustainable development; knowledge generation; and policy integration. Among key issues threatening biosphere reserves, also human activities such as land-use change, and lamented the lack of a unified monitoring system, which hinders data sharing among stakeholders and biosphere reserve managers.

Among other things, AGG is bound to create more opportunities for collaboration at different levels of governance; pointed to the contribution of biosphere reserves to many of the GBF targets; we called for focus on the MAB Programme’s work on youth and culture; and noted the role of biosphere reserves as pilots for evaluating nature-based solutions, reaching climate change adaptation goals, and providing knowledge for global assessments. Persistently converged on the importance of transboundary collaboration in contributing to peace and security for all people and living things.