Suwon Mayor Lee Jae-jun: "Let's Work to Achieve the '2030 Sustainable Development Goals' Created by Citizens"

[Suwon Ilbo=Reporter Jung Jun-sung] Suwon Special Metropolitan Mayor Lee Jae-jun urged members of the Suwon Sustainable Development Council to "actively work toward achieving the '2030 Sustainable Development Goals' created by Suwon citizens."

The mayor made these remarks at a lecture titled "Vision and Tasks for a Sustainable Development Suwon Special Metropolitan City" at the '14th Members Workshop' held by the Suwon Sustainable Development Council on the 27th at the Suwon Convention Center. He added, "We promise to create a 'solid economic special metropolitan city,' a 'clean living special metropolitan city,' and a 'warm caring special metropolitan city' for sustainable development in Suwon," and said, "For sustainable development, we ask the members of the Sustainable Development Council to join forces."

Mayor Lee Jae-jun stated, "The climate crisis is a present reality, and responding to it through carbon neutrality is a task for all of us. On the 5th, we held the '2050 Carbon Neutrality Citizen Forum' and listened to citizens' suggestions for achieving carbon neutrality. We will gather citizen opinions and implement carbon neutrality policies that citizens can participate in," he said.

The workshop held today to strengthen the capacity of the 14th members of the Suwon Sustainable Development Council, appointed in February, for sustainable development implementation monitoring, proceeded with a lecture by Mayor Lee Jae-jun, a keynote lecture (What is Citizen-Participatory SDGs Implementation Monitoring?), and roundtable discussions.

SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) are 17 common objectives that the world must achieve by 2030, which were unanimously adopted by member states at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2015. Suwon City organized the 17 sustainable development goals adopted by the UN into 10 goals reflecting local conditions and citizen interest, and declared the "Suwon City 2030 Sustainable Development Goals" jointly with the public and private sectors in November 2017.

The "Suwon City 2030 Sustainable Development Goals" with a vision of "a sustainable city Suwon where humans and the environment coexist" comprises three major sectors—environment (bright and clean urban environment), economy (affluent shared livelihoods economy), and society (harmonious social community)—10 goals, 57 detailed tasks, and 111 evaluation indicators.

The city established evaluation indicators and promotion tasks to check the implementation status of the sustainable development goals, and approximately 150 citizens from all walks of life participating in the Suwon Sustainable Development Council hold meetings and discussions, communicate with Suwon city administrative departments, and check implementation status of the 111 evaluation indicators and approximately 100 promotion tasks every year.

Based on evaluation indicator statistical data provided by administrative departments and implementation results of promotion projects, the Suwon Sustainable Development Council conducts quantitative evaluation of evaluation indicators and qualitative evaluation of implementation projects by each of the 10 goal committees.

Meanwhile, the Suwon Sustainable Development Council is developing various projects to build public-private governance that allows government, civil society, and businesses to share and jointly implement the sustainable development goals. Citizen monitoring of Suwon city's sustainable development goals evaluation indicators and promotion projects is planned to be conducted.