For the built environment, the end of the SDG decade is a moment of reckoning — or opportunity, depending on what we do next. When the UN adopted the SDGs in 2015, they gave the world a shared language for action, shaping research agendas, policy frameworks, investment decisions, and the programs of conferences like this one. But their limitations surfaced early: a list of goals rather than a coherent system, difficult to apply at the scale of a building, a neighbourhood, or a city — and increasingly co-opted as a carbon accounting exercise while broader sustainability ambitions quietly narrowed.

Progress has been made, but it has been uneven and fragile. Political will has faltered in some places. Key international initiatives have lost government backing. Meanwhile, circularity, regenerative design, and planetary boundaries frameworks compete for attention, promising transformation but risking further

fragmentation of effort. The UN's own Pact for the Future1 signals that the post-2030 agenda is already moving onto the multilateral table — the question is what the built environment community will bring to it. This roundtable brings together leading voices from research, policy, and practice — spanning the Global North

and Global South — to ask the hard questions directly: Have the SDGs driven enough change? How do we preserve what has worked while fixing what hasn't? Could a next generation of goals evolve into a genuine, interconnected system — one that explicitly links built environment actions to both an improved SDG architecture and to emerging frameworks like the "safe and just" operating space? Or is a more fundamental rethink needed?

There are no pre-packaged answers here. The session is designed as an open, generative conversation — and your voice is part of it.

You can contribute before the session, too. Until 10 June, share your view on one priority research and innovation topic, and one policy or practice topic, that could truly propel the transition toward a more sustainable built environment2.

The agenda for the next decade is still being written — and this is one of the rooms where it starts. Join us.

Co-chaired by Prof Holger Wallbaum (Chalmers University, SE) and Prof Greg Foliente (University of Melbourne, AU and De La Salle University, PH)

1 UN Pact for the Future, https://www.un.org/en/summit-of-the-future/pact-for-the-future

2 Pre-conference contribution survey form: https://bit.ly/SDG-SBE-Next-Form