In June 2023, the SDSN partnered with the Penn Institute for Urban Research at the University of Pennsylvania to establish a Global Commission for Urban SDG Finance. 

The Commission, co-chaired by SDSN President, Jeffrey Sachs; Anne Hidalgo, Mayor of Paris, France; and Eduardo Paes, Mayor of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, is comprised of over 20 mayors, finance and urban experts, and scholars to analyze barriers to urban SDG finance, evaluate existing proposals to improve access to urban finance, and develop new strategies and mechanisms to better align the Global Financial Architecture (GFA) with urban needs. The Commission will deliver several outputs in late 2023 and early 2024 to shape the global discussion on urban SDG finance at the international level. 

Learn more here.

From 2014-2017, the USA Sustainable Cities Initiative (USA-SCI) supported SDG achievement strategies in three US cities by building on ongoing municipal sustainable development planning efforts. New York (New York), Baltimore (Maryland), and San José (California) are global pioneers – the first to develop SDG-based city-level development strategies that have served as models for cities worldwide.

City-university collaboration is an integral part of achieving SDGs in American cities in the long term. In the first phase of the USA-SCI, SDSN collaborated with leading academic institutions – including Columbia University, University of Baltimore, University of Maryland, San Jose State University, and Stanford University – to support the technical process of developing long-term SDG-based strategies in each city. 

The project included:

• Inclusive dialogues, across communities, on the relevance of the SDG process and how SDGs can be made responsive to city-level development challenges and opportunities
• The articulation of clear and compelling goals, specific to the city, yet aligned with the global SDGs, covering poverty, jobs, security, education, health, housing, infrastructure, low-carbon energy and environmental protection
• Exercises into how to operationalize the goals, through carefully developed targets and indicators
• Identification of good practices and encouragement of their scale-up
• An “SDG recommendations report” for two pilot cities, outlining how the city’s sustainability efforts align with the SDGs, and offering next steps for achievement. Reports for Baltimore and San Jose were completed in December 2016
• A chapter on the design process behind the OneNYC sustainability plan and how that aligned with Agenda 2030 – to be published in the forthcoming book entitled Smart(er) NYC (Columbia University Press, 2017).

Efforts in the three cities have served to demonstrate what is possible with localizing the SDGs. Many tools and resources developed through this partnership can be used as models in other cities that wish to join the SDG effort. See below for examples and a template of SDG mapping in each city.

• SDG Mapping Worksheet Template
• Baltimore SDG Mapping Worksheet
• New York City SDG Mapping Worksheet
• San José SDG Mapping Worksheet

The Local Data Action Solutions Initiative (LDA-SI) is a crossover project between SDSN's USA-Sustainable Cities Initiative (USA-SCI) and TReNDS. It aims to create a library of case studies and technical knowledge documenting how to engage with and monitor the SDGs at city and regional levels. Knowledge is curated in consultation with city staff, technical partners, and other stakeholders. There are four focus themes:

1. Indicator Localization: What functional and feasible sub-national data indicators can promote SDG action and achievement?
2. Data Platforms: Identifying data dashboard models to provide granular data on SDG or SDG-aligned indicators.
3. Third-Party Data: Filling sub-national data system gaps with third-party data, such as citizen-generated or telecommunications data.
4. National-Local Data Integration: What are methods for aligning and integrating national and sub-national SDG reporting systems?

The Rio Sustainable Cities Initiative recognizes that comprehensive sustainable urban development necessitates local and national cooperation. Holistic planning cannot be confined to local boundaries. This is particularly important as cities strive to achieve the urban sustainable development goal (SDG 11), to make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.

Launched by SDSN Brazil and GIZ, the Solution Initiative “Sustainable Development of Metropolitan Regions”, aims to work with key stakeholders across the Rio de Janeiro Metropolitan Area (RJMA) and other metropolitan regions throughout Brazil, to examine possible solutions for local implementation of the SDGs, through inclusive dialogue, establishing metropolitan cooperation structures, and supporting contextualized monitoring of the SDGs.

The goal is to translate the global SDGs in local action, clearly demonstrating the process of localizing the SDGs, aligning the monitoring and review framework to local structures, as well as systematizing local findings in a comparative framework.

The Solutions Initiative has helped to spark an important discussion in Brazil between different levels of government on how to achieve sustainable development. These discussions have explored metropolitan governance structures (both formal and informal) as a fundamental base for SDG implementation, and the localization of SDG monitoring in metropolitan regions, focusing on how to institutionalize the SDGs into existing planning frameworks, the role of civil society in monitoring, and the use of data and indices to monitor progress towards the SDGs.

Results of the Solutions Initiative are being recorded in a manual, being developed in partnership with Casa Fluminense, a local Rio-based NGO. The manual aims to use the Rio de Janeiro Metropolitan Area as a practical example to illustrate how the process of local SDG contextualization, data gathering, and monitoring can be systematized. The Solutions Initiative aims to serve as inspiration to other metropolitan regions throughout Latin America and the world facing similar problems, by disseminating lessons learned from the Brazilian context.