New York City Water Week Event: The SDG 6 Research and Innovation Marathon Relay

This event will take place over a 24-hour period from March 20^th through the 21^st, 2023. The relay will start at the ASRC and end at The Roosevelt House, NY.

The 17 Sustainable Development Goals serve as the blueprint for advancing human well-being while preserving the environment. One of the main problems in achieving SDG6 on water and related SDGs is that although water crosses all aspects of life, it’s science, management and understanding has become “sectionalized”. To overcome this, there is a need to capture ideas that make water a core aspect of everybody’s day-to-day business.

Sectors such as agriculture, health and energy have a major impact on the use and quality of water. Universities can join hands ina dialogue with governmental, civil society and business stakeholders to improve this situation. Together this alliance encompasses a large diversity of perspectives and uses knowledge from a broad set of scientific disciplines.

The topic of the upcoming 2023 World Water Day, which coincides with the UN 2023 Water Conference, will be on “Partnerships”; what better moment is there to increase the awareness of the value of water and explore innovative ways through which this partnership can contribute to further improve this?

The international dialogue will be staged as a relay marathon around the planet. Its focus will be on:

·The research and innovations that are needed to improve the five pillars of the SDG 6 acceleration framework. What research is needed to accelerate, for example, the financing of the water sector, its governance, capacity development, its links to environmental stewardship, and more.

How does it work?

The event will start on March 20th at 12:00pm in New York at the ASRC, while broadcast via Zoom, and continue online around the world until the final discussion session at 11:00am March 21st.

All participating institutes will be organized in region and time zone groupings. In these groups a central hub will lead the debate. The central group hub passes the debate on to the next central group hub. All sessions will take place in Zoom and are open to participants from the two time zones.

After 9 sessions and 24 hours, there will be a final synthesis/closing session at the Roosevelt House in NY from 2:00pm-4:00pm EST on March 21st. All outcomes of the marathon will be shared here and then transferred to the main UN event that will start at noon on March 22nd.