Why this session matters to us
“Synergy” is the word HLPF 2026 reached for whenever it wanted to say that the crises are connected. Climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution are one problem, the argument goes, so fund and govern them as one problem and every dollar buys more. This Japan-led side event was the most organized version of that case at the Forum, and it came with an evidence artifact: the Asia-Pacific Synergies Report, launched weeks earlier in Bangkok by ESCAP, UNEP, the Asian Development Bank and IGES with Japanese support.
For a project about how the UN counts, the interesting question was never whether synergy is real. It is whether a government can actually count one, the way it counts GDP or a deficit, and use the number to make a decision. On that, the session was more honest than its title. The case for synergy is now a stack of documented examples. The systems that would let a finance or planning ministry measure a co-benefit as routine are, on the panel’s own account, still built one crisis at a time.
From modelled potential to documented cases
Eric Zusman of IGES framed the report as a deliberate move away from the academic literature, which he said has grown fast but stayed abstract, heavy on “modeling of the potential for synergies, as opposed to highlighting concrete cases that demonstrate how to achieve synergies.” The report’s answer is bulk evidence: more than 140 documented case studies from across the region (36 examined in depth), spanning, on Zusman’s count, 29 countries and roughly 90% of the Asia-Pacific population. Its starting chart, he noted, puts the region’s current trajectory decades behind, reaching the SDGs some 32 years late.
The report organizes the work around four entry points (health-centred climate action, nature-positive solutions, the circular economy, and cities as delivery platforms) and four enablers (finance, governance, regional cooperation, and data). One of its six closing recommendations is squarely a measurement recommendation, and it is the one SDGCounting will hold the process to.
That is the tell. Synergy currently lives in case studies, which persuade, and not in indicators, which govern. Until a co-benefit shows up in the numbers a ministry is judged against, it is a story about a village in the compendium, not a line in a budget.
One investment, three benefits
The clearest example of counting a synergy came from the Asian Development Bank. Yoko Watanabe, its Director for Environment, walked through a solar-diesel hybrid programme across 160 islands in the Maldives, part-funded through Japan’s Joint Crediting Mechanism, and tallied the result as three measured outcomes from a single investment: diesel use for power generation down by 28%, cleaner air and lower respiratory risk, and, in one island, some 28,000 people benefiting from the improved air. The figures are ADB’s own.
Watanabe’s wider point was that this only scales if the finance is built for it. She pointed to ADB’s Nature Solutions Finance Hub, which she said is targeting 5 billion dollars in blended sovereign and private capital, with about a billion already in the pipeline. The synergy, in other words, is not just an environmental fact. It is an accounting choice about which benefits you agree to count before you sign.
Counting two crises at once
The sharpest measurement contribution of the hour came from the floor, from Sabina Alkire of the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, and it is the purest illustration of what “synergy” looks like when you actually measure it. Her instrument, the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index run with UNDP, already counts overlapping deprivations that strike the same household at once. Its 2025 edition then overlaid a fourth crisis the panel had left out, poverty, onto the three it kept talking about.
Of roughly 1.1 billion people living in acute multidimensional poverty, she reported, about 887 million, nearly 80%, are exposed to at least one climate hazard (extreme heat, drought, flood or air pollution) in the same place and time as their poverty; some 651 million face two or more, and 309 million face three or four. Those are the published headline figures of the Global MPI 2025, and they make the case for integration better than any appeal to it: the synergy is only visible because someone measured two things on the same map at the same time.
The fragmentation is in the plumbing
If the evidence for synergy is settled, the panel was unusually candid that the machinery to act on it is not, and that a good part of the machinery is measurement. Bernadia Irawati Tjandradewi of UCLG ASPAC, describing what cities actually need to plan across sectors, landed on the plainest data wish of the session.
The closing intervention, from UN DESA’s Bahareh Seyedi, named the problem directly. The obstacle, she argued, is no longer understanding that the crises interlock; it is that our systems still do not.
Her example was telling for a measurement site: in HLPF meetings, she said, few colleagues know what an NBSAP is, and in biodiversity rooms, few know what a VNR is. The instruments through which countries report their climate, nature and development progress are, quite literally, spoken in separate languages. Armenia’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Robert Abisoghomonyan, incoming host of the biodiversity COP in Yerevan this October, made the same point at the level of the treaties themselves, warning that “decisions adopted during one COP can contradict, or even worse, can affect the decisions adopted during the other COPs,” and offering Armenia’s own alignment of its national biodiversity plan with its climate plan as a partial fix.
The United Arab Emirates, represented by Hanan Ahli of its Federal Competitiveness and Statistics Centre, put the constructive version of the ambition on the table: moving national reporting “from periodic reporting towards more continuous adaptive policy making,” and closing with the line that could have retitled the session.
Our read
This was the third HLPF 2026 session in a week to arrive at the same diagnosis from a different door. Science Day called it an action gap rather than an evidence gap; Bridging Systems, Building Trust broke integration into four things a government can build. This side event supplies the missing artifact, a report that proves synergy with 140-odd worked examples, and then, honestly, admits the examples are not yet a system. The two moments where a synergy was genuinely counted, ADB’s three-benefit tally and Alkire’s poverty-climate overlay, both required someone to decide, in advance, to measure more than one thing at once. Nothing in the standard SDG or treaty reporting makes that the default. Until it does, “synergy” will keep being the most agreed-upon word at the Forum and the least operational one.
Why it matters for the SDGs
Synergy sits underneath the goals rather than inside one, but it lands hardest on SDG 17 (means of implementation, data, and follow-up and review), and it ties together SDG 13 (climate), SDGs 14 and 15 (biodiversity and life on land), SDG 12 (the circular economy and pollution at source), SDG 11 (cities) and, through Alkire’s overlay, SDG 1 (poverty). The measurement implication is uncomfortable and familiar: the indicator framework scores goals one at a time, which is exactly the siloing the panel spent an hour diagnosing. It also lands against a hard backdrop. Of the 139 SDG targets with trend data, the Sustainable Development Goals Report 2026 found just 36% on track or moving moderately, 49% too slow, and 15% below their 2015 baseline. If synergy is the acceleration strategy, the systems that count it are the thing that has to be built first.
Watch & read
- Asia-Pacific Synergies Report: Advancing Synergistic Solutions to the Triple Planetary Crisis and the SDGs (ESCAP, UNEP, ADB; IGES secretariat), launched at the Seventh Global Conference on Climate and SDG Synergies (Bangkok, 29 to 30 June 2026).
- Global Multidimensional Poverty Index 2025: Overlapping Hardships (OPHI and UNDP), the poverty-and-climate overlay Sabina Alkire cited.
- The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2026 · UN DESA on Climate and SDG synergies.
- Sibling coverage from the same Forum: Science Day 2026 and Bridging Systems, Building Trust · Full HLPF 2026 coverage.
Quotations are lightly edited from an automated (Otter.ai) transcript of the UN Web TV recording and should be read as close paraphrase. Two contributors are cited by role or institution. Figures are as speakers and their institutions reported them and were not independently reconciled beyond the published reports named above.