The P4G Summit was a successful start – now the hard work begins (commenting live on TV2 News)

20 October 2018

The inaugural P4G Summit came to an end on Saturday with a grand award ceremony focussing on partnerships for the SDGs. I had the pleasure of live-commenting the show from TV2 News’ studio as well as setting the scene for the entire summit early Friday morning with the same broadcaster.

The P4G – or Partnering for Green Growth and the Global Goals 2030 – is a Denmark sponsored international organisation headquartered at the World Resources Institute in Washington. The organisation aims to facilitate and financially support public-private partnerships with a positive impact on the SDGs and the summit was hosted in Copenhagen by the Danish PM, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, and the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs with more than 700 participants incl. heads of states, CEOs, and civil society leader from all over the world.

The way of thinking sustainable development that P4G is based upon is in my view very sound and has the potential to generate lasting and business-driven solutions the climate change and other key environmental issues, which was also reflected in the success of this inaugural summit.

For instance, one of the award winners was a partnership between the Chinese E-commerce giant Alibaba that had joined forces with NGOs and cities in China to reuse parcels and thereby reduce plastic waste. Currently, the project takes back one million parcels – though with Alibaba sending of more than 16 billion parcels annually in China, the scaling potential is considerable.

With this promising start to the P4G, which was only just established last year, the organisation faces hard work in continuously supporting the selected partnerships to ensure they scale and making sure learnings are disseminated, while also identifying new partnership for their funnel.

I look forward to following P4G closely in the coming time with high hopes that we will see a significant impact from its activities.