About this page
The Forum’s official programme is only part of what happens during HLPF. Around it run more than 200 side events, special events, forums and briefings, on-site, off-site and virtual. This page collects the 43 we covered, grouped by theme. It is a selection rather than the programme.
Not everything here is strictly a side event. The 43 also include press conferences and briefings, the Local and Regional Governments Forum, the Parliamentary Forum, the Goals Lounge conversations, and two meetings convened alongside the Forum rather than within it: the General Assembly’s stocktake of the Pact for the Future and the high-level meeting on critical energy transition minerals.
What the side events were for
The plenaries speak in commitments; the side events speak in numbers, methods and admissions. That is where the sharpest material of the fortnight came from. Germany volunteered that it ranks 5th of 167 on SDG performance and 149th of 167 on international spillovers, and said why the two are connected. Jamaica, which is not short of water, reported that it loses about 70% of what it treats, one of the worst rates of non-revenue water anywhere.
Jump to a theme
Water and sanitation (SDG 6)
SDG 6 was under in-depth review this year, and the side events are where the water numbers got taken apart: resilience rather than access, leakage rather than supply, and clinics rather than national averages.
SDG 6: well counted, off pace
UN-Water’s third synthesis report finds a decade of water progress running six to eight times too slow.
Read summary → 7 July · HLPF side eventWater at the heart of the Rio Conventions
Water links climate, biodiversity and desertification, yet each convention still counts it on a separate track.
Read summary → 9 July · HLPF side eventLaunching the Global WASH Sector Resilience Index
UNICEF’s new beta index asks whether water systems keep working under shock, not just how many people have access.
Read summary → 15 July · HLPF side eventWASH in health care facilities
A new General Assembly resolution makes monitoring a duty; practitioners warn national averages hide where clinics actually fail.
Read summary → 16 July · HLPF side eventFrom Scarcity to Security: the leak, not the plant
Jamaica is not short of water and loses about 70% of it. Malta fixed its leaks and could then defer building anything.
Read summary → 16 July · HLPF side eventWATERHer: the untapped resource is each other
In a room built to ask the world for funding, a former Curacao minister asked why small island states do not partner with one another.
Read summary →Energy (SDG 7)
The best-measured goal, off track on every target. These four sessions argue over what the SDG 7 scoreboard should count, and who gets to build it.
Implementing the Energy Decade Plan of Action
The best-measured SDG is off track on every target, and the count of people in the dark is rising. The bet now is on voluntary Energy Compacts, whose delivery is barely tracked.
Read summary → 10 July · HLPF side eventA new SDG 7 scoreboard, built outside the UN
GEIDCO’s crowded SDG 7 showcase produced one hard deliverable: its own Global Electricity Development Index, and a question about who gets to count.
Read summary → 14 July · UN high-level meetingCritical energy transition minerals
The UN’s just-transition plan for minerals is a traceability and data agenda; the meeting exposed how little it yet binds anyone.
Read summary → 14 July · HLPF side eventUnlocking capital for nuclear
The IAEA and World Bank call nuclear bankable for the developing world, then ask SDG 7’s scoreboard to count it.
Read summary →Industry, infrastructure and the science-policy gap (SDG 9)
SDG 9’s three pillars, plus the sessions on how evidence does or does not reach a decision: the investment ecosystem, what infrastructure is measured by, and why an action gap is not an evidence gap.
Science Day 2026
The International Science Council and UN DESA on an action gap rather than an evidence gap, and the impact data nobody collects.
Read summary → 9 July · HLPF side eventFinancing industrial and blue economy value chains
Tanzania, UNCDF and UNIDO on a $300 billion gap of architecture rather than ambition, and why informal firms are invisible, not unproductive.
Read summary → 9 July · HLPF special eventBridging systems, building trust
A UN DESA policy dialogue on the interlinkages: why spending a whole energy budget on energy captures only a fraction of its impact.
Read summary → 13 July · HLPF side eventInfrastructure in the CEI region: count the children, not the schools
Romania and the Central European Initiative. UNOPS names the binding constraint, and asks governments to report access rather than ribbon-cuttings.
Read summary → 14 July · HLPF side eventBridging science, policy and practice
A Japan-led panel proves synergy across climate, biodiversity and pollution case by case, then admits the systems that would count a co-benefit are still built one crisis at a time.
Read summary →Cities, housing and localization (SDG 11)
The SDG 11 review and the local-government track that shadows it: housing figures that swing by hundreds of millions, and close to 400 Voluntary Local Reviews still looking for a way into national reporting.
UN-Habitat on renewing commitments to sustainable cities
The SDG 11 synthesis report lands: progress that is neither fast enough nor equitable enough, and a housing crisis that is really a crisis of inequality.
Read summary → 10 July · Goals LoungeRestoring dignity: adequate housing for all
The global housing figures swing by hundreds of millions and homelessness goes barely counted, while grassroots women enumerate what official statistics miss.
Read summary → 13 July · HLPF side eventCities that work for people: who is the infrastructure for?
Canada, Germany and UNDRR on social policy and infrastructure. The head of UNDRR asks whose infrastructure is being built, and nobody in the room can measure the answer.
Read summary → 14 July · HLPF forumLocal and Regional Governments Forum
Ten years on, nearly 400 Voluntary Local Reviews exist. Making them count in national reporting and finance is the unfinished job.
Read summary → 15 July · HLPF special eventLocal2030 Coalition Special Event
Localization’s flagship session proposed the test that matters, whether local priorities reach national budgets, and never counted a single Voluntary Local Review.
Read summary →Partnerships, finance and the future of the Agenda (SDG 17)
The means of implementation, and the argument about what comes after 2030: philanthropy, business, parliaments, small island states and the Pact for the Future, all measured against a financing gap that did not move.
We the Peoples: shaping the future of the UN
Guterres and civil society on UN80 reform, and the argument that nobody measures the wars and pandemics that did not happen.
Read summary → 9 July · HLPF side eventState of SIDS report launch
The first State of SIDS report bets the islands’ case on value the finance system does not yet measure, and cannot yet finance.
Read summary → 10 July · HLPF side eventAdvancing inclusive prosperity through philanthropy
ESCAP and the Institute of Philanthropy on philanthropy as a complement to aid, not a substitute: its value is risk and trust, not the cheque.
Read summary → 14 July · General AssemblyTaking Stock of the Pact for the Future
A General Assembly stocktake, one year on, with no scorecard of its own, so the Pact gets measured by the SDGs it was meant to accelerate.
Read summary → 14 July · HLPF forumParliaments and the SDG audit
The IPU’s own survey found most legislatures on the sidelines of the reviews they are meant to scrutinise, and its keynote economist says the indicators are miscounting.
Read summary → 14 July · HLPF special eventSDG Global Business Forum
Business insisted its SDG impact must be measured, then showed how much of the measuring is still self-reported.
Read summary → 14 July · HLPF side eventFrom reviews to partnerships (SIDS)
Island states have turned the VNR into an SDG data backbone; the partnerships meant to act on it are still tracked on trust.
Read summary → 15 July · HLPF side eventThe post-2030 agenda and the future of global development
Russia asks the Forum to rethink the SDGs as a barometer rather than a manager; its own invited speakers answer “implement.”
Read summary →Data, AI and measurement
The home turf: what the SDG data system counts, what AI does to it, and what happens when a country turns its own number over to show the other side.
AI for social inclusion
UN DESA and the Philippines on why AI includes no one by default, and how who gets counted in the data decides who AI serves.
Read summary → 9 July · HLPF side eventDigitalization, statistics and AI
Singapore, Rwanda and Jamaica on making official data AI-ready, and why the SDG implementation gap is fundamentally a data gap.
Read summary → 10 July · HLPF side eventHumanity at the center: ethical AI and the water-energy-food nexus
UN University’s keynote: AI is a physical product with a water and carbon footprint the industry mostly does not measure.
Read summary → 13 July · Goals LoungeBeyond GDP: the metrics exist, the decisions have not moved
The 31-indicator dashboard is built. UNDP’s chief economist says he was naive to think better metrics would move capital markets. The session closest to why this site exists.
Read summary → 15 July · HLPF side eventThe AI divide everyone agreed on, and almost nobody measured
Six delegations agreed AI will widen global inequality, then described it almost entirely without indicators. The UNDP panellist named the missing anchor point herself.
Read summary → 16 July · HLPF side eventFrom Doha to Action: the league table rewards moving the harm offshore
Germany told the room it ranks 5th of 167 on the SDGs and 149th of 167 on spillovers, and explained why the two numbers are connected.
Read summary →Food and health
SOFI 2026 previewed twice before it existed, the food system that produced it, and the one health session that argued its own evidence is already settled.
Act, allocate, accelerate: SDG delivery through eye health
Antigua and Barbuda on eye health as a cross-cutting SDG multiplier, where the evidence is settled and the gap is financing and delivery.
Read summary → 14 July · HLPF special eventThe cost of a healthy diet (SOFI 2026)
A preview of SOFI 2026: a healthy diet now costs $4.28 a day, and the metric that says so is already contested.
Read summary → 14 July · HLPF side eventAgrifood systems in the just-in-case world
FAO, WFP, WMO and IFAD on a food crisis driven by fertilizer and energy, and the missing data to see the next one coming.
Read summary → 15 July · Press conferenceSOFI 2026 previewed before it exists
FAO’s chief economist briefs correspondents on a report that launches 21 July, and concedes its numbers stop before the shock now moving them.
Read summary →Who the reviews still miss
Five sessions convened by or about constituencies that the SDG reviews record as a paragraph rather than a pillar: cooperatives, women and youth, each arriving with the count the official system does not keep.
Cooperatives and the SDG data gap
A billion members, one in ten workers, and still largely absent from the reviews that score the 2030 Agenda.
Read summary → 6 July · HLPF side eventFrom Call to Count: gender and SDG 7
SDG 7 still has no gender indicator, yet the data to build one already sits in national surveys, uncounted.
Read summary → 14 July · HLPF side eventYouth 2030 progress report launch
The UN’s youth participation scorecard is climbing fast; the youth in the room asked whether being counted is the same as influence.
Read summary → 14 July · HLPF side eventFuture Makers: the youth voluntary review
Italy launches its first Youth Voluntary Review as the UN admits youth are still a paragraph, not a pillar, in most SDG reviews.
Read summary → 16 July · HLPF side eventSafe Cities at 15, indicted by the women it serves
A grassroots leader refused the testimony slot on offer and asked why the model’s unpaid paralegals subsidise it.
Read summary →The rest of the Forum
This page is one of three covering HLPF 2026. The other two:
High-Level Political Forum (HLPF) 2026
The Forum itself: the opening, the in-depth reviews of SDGs 6, 7, 9, 11 and 17, the Voluntary National Reviews, and the read on the fortnight.
Read coverage → 13–16 July · Ministerial segmentECOSOC Ministerial Segment 2026
The general debate, the Ministerial Declaration and ECOSOC’s own high-level segment, which sat a day longer than the Forum.
Read coverage →Watch & read
Side events are not all archived. Where a recording exists it sits on UN Web TV, and each summary above links to its own source.
- UN Web TV: the recordings the summaries above are drawn from.
- HLPF 2026 official site: the full side-event programme.