I arrived in New York for the 2026 High-Level Political Forum (HLPF) carrying a question I wasn't entirely sure I would be able to answer.

Against a backdrop of geopolitical uncertainty, economic pressures, accelerating climate impacts and uneven progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals, I wanted to listen carefully to the language being used by governments and institutions. Not simply to what was being affirmed formally, but to what might be changing underneath it.

Would I hear subtle indications of retreat?

I didn't expect countries to abandon the commitments they had made. My question was whether the scale of the obstacles was beginning to alter our expectations. Were ambitions becoming more qualified? Were we beginning to accommodate the possibility of doing less? As 2030 approached, were there signs that the difficulty of the journey was beginning to change the destination?

Over the days that followed, I listened for it.

I didn't hear it.

What I heard instead was something more nuanced — and, I think, more important. There was considerable realism about how difficult the road ahead has become. There was acknowledgement that progress has been uneven and that not every Goal may be achieved by 2030. But I did not hear that reality being used as an argument for lowering ambition.

I heard urgency.

The message repeated in different ways throughout the week was that this is the time to accelerate implementation: to remove bottlenecks, strengthen partnerships, localize action and turn commitments into outcomes.

One phrase stayed with me: the remaining years cannot become another “reporting cycle.” They need to become an “action cycle.” Another called on us to “remove bottlenecks, not ambitions.”

Those statements captured much of what I was hearing.

Early in HLPF, one speaker asked us to imagine looking back at this moment from the future.

What would we see?

Would this be the point at which we recognized the trajectory we were on and made the decisions necessary to change it?

That image stayed with me throughout the week.

Perhaps because I think of trajectory less as a straight line than as a course. When sailing, a relatively small change in heading made at the right moment can determine an entirely different place of arrival. But changing course requires first being honest about where you are, the conditions around you and where your present heading will take you.

There was little attempt at HLPF to disguise those conditions. Progress toward the SDGs is insufficient. Climate impacts are intensifying. Inequality persists. Housing and infrastructure pressures are growing. Conflict and displacement are affecting millions of people. Financial and institutional capacity is constrained in many places.

The current trajectory is not taking us where we need to go.

But that is different from accepting the trajectory as inevitable.

The question is what we change now.

Not someday. Now.

The Sustainable Development Goals were never intended simply as a set of global aspirations. They were intended to change outcomes. Increasingly, the challenge is translating that ambition into decisions about how we use land, where and how we build, how we invest in infrastructure, how people move, where housing is provided, how communities prepare for climate impacts, how natural systems are protected and restored, and how the benefits and burdens of development are shared.

For planners, this should sound familiar.

Implementation is where our profession lives.

It is also where systems meet one another. Housing cannot be separated from transportation. Infrastructure cannot be separated from land use. Climate resilience cannot be separated from how and where communities grow. Economic opportunity, health, inclusion, heritage and biodiversity all have spatial dimensions.

We often describe the answer as integration. Increasingly, I wonder whether what is required is something more.

Synthesis.

Integration can bring different systems, disciplines and perspectives together. Synthesis asks what new understanding and new possibilities emerge when we bring knowledge together in ways that change how we understand the problem itself.

That requires partnership, but genuine partnership asks more of us than assembling different perspectives around the same table. It asks us to layer knowledge, authority, experience and capacity — to learn from what becomes visible when one way of understanding a challenge encounters another.

I saw a powerful example of this during a roundtable on urban resilience.

Dr. Wafa Al-Daly, a planner from Yemen whose understanding of recovery is informed by lived experience, spoke about what it means to rebuild communities affected by disaster and conflict.

Her message was simple: we cannot focus only on rebuilding buildings. We have to rebuild people.

There is an important synthesis in that understanding. If we think about recovery primarily through the physical systems that have been damaged, rebuilding can become an exercise in reconstructing what was lost. But layer onto that the lived experience of people — displacement, trauma, disrupted relationships, lost livelihoods and the meaning attached to home and community — and our understanding of what needs to be rebuilt changes.

The knowledge does not simply sit alongside what we already knew. It changes what we see.

I have thought about that often since.

Our work can easily become a conversation about systems, frameworks, indicators, targets, infrastructure and physical development. All are necessary. But none is the reason we do the work.

People are.

And even that is not quite enough.

Human life does not exist apart from the natural world. The water we drink, the air we breathe, the food we grow, the ecosystems that regulate climate and support biodiversity — our lives depend upon a much larger web of life.

Perhaps this requires synthesis too: not people on one side and nature on the other, requiring us to find a balance between competing interests, but a deeper understanding that they are inseparable. When we understand that relationship differently, it changes what sustainable development asks of us.

It is about life — and how we care for that which life depends upon.

What became visible over those days in New York was the extraordinary volume of work already underway — across countries, cities, international institutions, professions, civil society and communities — to advance sustainable development and, particularly from where I was sitting, SDG 11.

This gave me clarity.

There is more happening than I had fully appreciated before I arrived. More partnerships. More tools. More knowledge being exchanged. More attention to implementation and localization. More people working, in different places and in different ways, on pieces of the same enormous challenge.

And still, it is not enough.

That is not a contradiction. It may be one of the most important things I brought home from HLPF.

Around the world, people and institutions are working to change our trajectory. We are learning as we go, adjusting our course as conditions change, refining what we do as evidence tells us what is working and what is not. Sometimes that means doing more. Sometimes it means doing something differently. And sometimes it means connecting knowledge, experience or action in ways we have not connected them before — allowing a new understanding to change what we thought the problem, or the solution, was.

That is part of the value of the SDG framework. It gives us a shared destination and a way to see how our individual efforts relate to something larger. It creates opportunities to learn across places, sectors and disciplines and to recognize connections that might otherwise remain unseen.

The image from those opening days of HLPF continues to stay with me: imagine ourselves in the future, looking back at this moment.

Perhaps we will see this not as the moment when we discovered we were on the wrong course, but as one of the moments when we understood more clearly the adjustments still required.

The sails are already up. We are moving. We are making adjustments individually and together. The work underway matters enormously.

But our present trajectory tells us that further adjustment is needed.

That is the significance of this moment.

We have the commitment. We have an extraordinary and growing body of work to build upon. And through the SDGs, we have both a shared destination and a framework for learning from one another, making new connections and continually refining our collective course.

The progress already achieved matters. Since 2015, nearly one billion more people have gained access to safely managed drinking water and 1.2 billion to safely managed sanitation (Sustainable Development Goal Report 2026 - Goal 6). And as Annalena Baerbock, President of the United Nations General Assembly, reminded us at HLPF, achieving even 80 per cent of the goal to end hunger would improve the lives of half a billion people.

Aki Temiseva, President and CEO of the United Nations Association in Canada, offered another reminder: “It always seems impossible until it’s done.”

Those messages stayed with me because they put the distance still to travel into perspective. Every bit of progress matters. Every action that moves us closer to the Sustainable Development Goals makes a difference, even when we fall short of where we intended to be. And those individual actions become cumulatively more powerful when they are connected to the efforts of others.

The task now is to use all of it — what we know, what we are learning, what is already working, and what we have not yet connected — to take us somewhere better.

There are strong headwinds. We know that.

But we are not sailing alone.

Across countries and communities, institutions and professions, people are working toward the shared destination set out in the Sustainable Development Goals. We can learn from one another, adjust as evidence tells us we must, and discover new possibilities by bringing together knowledge and experience in ways we have not before.

That may be what I heard most clearly at HLPF.

The obstacles were real and openly acknowledged. But I did not hear them being used as a reason to retreat from the destination. I heard people asking what more could be done, what could be done differently, and what might become possible if we worked differently together.

The headwinds may be strong, but so is the collective effort moving us forward.

As the international community now turns toward the United Nations General Assembly High-level Week (General Assembly High-level Week 2026), I will be listening again. Not simply for renewed commitments to the Sustainable Development Goals, but for how we intend to act on them — what we will do differently, what new connections we will make, and how we will strengthen the collective effort needed to change our trajectory.