The opening
ECOSOC President Lok Bahadur Thapa declared the Forum open under the theme “Transformative, equitable, innovative and coordinated action for the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its Sustainable Development Goals for a sustainable future for all.” This year’s in-depth reviews cover SDGs 6, 7, 9, 11 and 17, and 36 countries present Voluntary National Reviews. With fewer than five years to 2030, Thapa framed the task as coherence and delivery, not another list of problems.
On the numbers, Li Junhua presented the Secretary-General’s 2026 progress report: just 36% of the 139 assessable SDG targets are on track or making moderate progress, and official development assistance fell 23% last year. For the full stocktake, see The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2026, launched the same day.
SDG 6 in focus
The first in-depth review took water and sanitation. The review’s framing figures were stark: by 2024, about 74% of people had safely managed drinking water and 58% safely managed sanitation, yet roughly 2.2 billion still lack safe drinking water and 3.5 billion lack safe sanitation. People in the least-developed countries are two to three times more likely to go without. The review’s blunt message was that the gap is investment and implementation, not knowledge.
The money problem
Saroj Kumar Jha of the World Bank made under-investment the center of the review: only about 0.5% of the average national budget is spent on water, and only about 2% of water-sector spending comes from the private sector. On a business-as-usual path, most sub-Saharan African countries would reach safely managed drinking water only after 2050, and safely managed sanitation in the 22nd century. He presented “Water Forward,” a World Bank commitment to reach 400 million people by 2030, which rises to more than 1 billion when nine other multilateral development banks join.
The warning and the human case
Kaveh Madani of the UNU Institute for Water, Environment and Health announced a report declaring that “the world has entered the era of global water bankruptcy.” Retno Marsudi, the Special Envoy on Water, argued the problem is speed and consistency of implementation, and noted that involving women in water governance can raise effectiveness several-fold. UN-Water used the session to launch the third edition of its SDG 6 Synthesis Report on Water and Sanitation, a system-wide contribution drawing on dozens of UN entities and international partners.
Why it matters for the SDGs
SDG 6 is a “super connector,” as the moderator put it, underpinning health (SDG 3), food (SDG 2), energy (SDG 7), cities (SDG 11) and climate (SDG 13); and the financing thread runs straight to SDG 17. The measurement angle SDGCounting watches: water is one of the better-measured goals, yet the review still turned on gaps in disaggregated data and in the bankable-project pipeline that finance depends on. The 2026 UN Water Conference (Abu Dhabi, December 2026) and the 2027 SDG Summit are the next milestones.
Watch & read
- UN Web TV, recording of the HLPF 2026 1st meeting (7 July 2026).
- The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2026, the full stocktake launched the same day.
- UN SDG 6 Synthesis Report on Water and Sanitation 2026 (UN-Water), our brief on the third edition launched at this session.
- Full HLPF 2026 coverage.
- HLPF 2026, official site.
Quotations are lightly edited from an automated (Otter.ai) transcript of the UN Web TV recording and should be read as close paraphrase; names and titles were reconciled to public records and reflect roles at the time.