Supporting the implementation of the New Urban Agenda: Pro-poor Local Approaches for Sustainable Urban Waste Management

The objective of the side event is to highlight the value of multi-stakeholder, pro-poor, inclusive, and integrated solutionsto urban waste management, and their contributions to broader sustainable urban development objectives. The event will present the key lessons from Waste Concern and ESCAP's implementation of nine low-cost Integrated Resource Recovery Centers (IRRCs) in seven cities in six developing countries in the Asia-Pacific region, and hold discussions on the sustainable development co-benefits and replication potential of decentralized and inclusive approaches to enhanced urban resource efficiency and waste-to-resource recovery. The event will have short presentation/s from ESCAP and Waste Concern, followed by a panel discussion. ESCAP and Waste Concern are also expected to launch a report on sustainable development benefits of IRRCs.

Participation in the side event will includelocal and national government representatives, civil society organizations, waste picker's associations, urban sustainability practitioners, and number of regional thematic experts and specialists from international development partners.

This side event will contribute to the advancement of the New Urban Agenda (NUA) and the localization of 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in Asia and the Pacific by:

• Sharing implementation experiences and lessons learned from ESCAP IRRC project cities, partners, and stakeholders in different countries, as well as highlighting the IRRCs' benefits and contributions to boarder sustainable urban development;

• Identifying opportunities for financial and technical capacity building support for local governments to replicate and scale-up decentralized urban waste management solutions, such as the IRRC, as well as to integrate these solutions into local and national plans and programmes for sustainable development; and

• Arriving at a set of recommendations for national and local policymakers on effective strategies and actions for sustainable urban waste management, aligned with relevant Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)and transformative actions of the NUA.