Norway thanks Kenya for convening this important meeting. And we thank the briefers for their valuable inputs.
Colleagues,
We all know that ending conflict, building peace, and preventing future crises is intrinsically linked to support for sustainable development. We have heard this reiterated today. Yet, significant gaps in our actions still remain. In this regard, I would like to make three main points:
First, we must have a greater focus on prevention and preventive diplomacy. Well-timed prevention measures can help at critical moments when societies stand at the brink of conflict, or risk lapsing back into it. We know preventive efforts pay for themselves tenfold.
Prevention includes UN mechanisms like Special Envoys of the Secretary-General, and Special Political Missions that are on the frontlines of preventive diplomacy. We must support and reinforce their efforts.
Prevention also includes long-term investments in human rights, in early warning mechanisms, in climate change adaptation, in transitional justice, social cohesion, and in socio-economic development.
These are all rightly part of the SDG agenda, demonstrating the link between peace, stabilisation, and sustainable development.
Investing in the RC system, and in Peace and Development Advisers, ensures that the UN Country Team’s efforts to realise the SDGs also pay peace dividends.
Enhanced collaboration of the Security Council with the Peacebuilding Commission, ECOSOC and the Human Rights Council can also be fruitful- as well as regular informal briefings by the secretariat to Council members – such as the one organized by Norway and UAE in October for the E10.
Second, let me highlight the importance of the humanitarian-development-peace nexus. Collaboration, coherence and complementarity across sectors and organizations is a must for achieving both peace and development. This also includes enhancing UN partnerships with regional organizations such as the African Union- as well as the private sector and civil society actors.
In Somalia for example we have seen how recurrent drought and humanitarian crisis drives radicalisation and conflict.
Climate security and resilience, food security, access to school and education, and gender sensitive approaches interlink. Therefore, only through coordinated action across the nexus can lasting results be achieved.
Third, we need to ensure that adequate, predictable, and flexible financing accompany our words. For the nexus in particular, donors can create more incentives for our partners to move beyond institutional silos and deliver results together.
As a long-standing and large contributor to the UN, Norway is working to increase its own flexibility and risk tolerance in development financing- including on pressing topics such as climate change and food security. And we encourage other Member States to do the same.
Colleagues,
We have already created together the tools with which to do better. So let us use them.