Bonn’s UN Campus provides to all these organizations ideal working conditions and an environment rich in synergies. A special advantage is the close neighborhood to the World Conference Center Bonn and to many important partners and points of contact. This offers an excellent environment for cooperative action, quick communication and interaction among UN organizations, federal ministries and federal superior authorities, the roughly 150 non-governmental organizations, Bonn-based research institutes and the resident economic global players. With their topics and their competence, they all determine the city’s profile as an international location. Collaboration and dialogue on issues of sustainable and humane development among this diversity of actors in Bonn have turned the city into a hub for sustainability.

NGOs of international scope do not only include German organizations engaging in international issues and activities, but also approximately twenty international non-governmental organizations which have established their headquarters in Bonn since 1990. Examples of resident organizations include:

• The Bonn International Centre for Conversion (BICC) commits itself to the conversion of resources formerly used for military ends into resources for civil purposes, performing vital work in areas of crisis    www.bicc.de (opens in a new tab)
• The International Paralympic Committee (IPC) has been coordinating the Paralympics, the Olympics for people with disabilities, from Bonn since the fall of 1999,  www.ipc.org (opens in a new tab)
• Fair Trade Labelling Organisations International (FLO) coordinates and supports the work of the national Transfair Organisations   www.fairtrade.net (opens in a new tab)
• The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) is an international NGO working towards worldwide sustainable forest management by means of forest certification on the basis of comparable Standards   www.fsc.org (opens in a new tab)
• The Right Livelihood College, in cooperation with the awardees of the so-called Alternative Nobel Prize, offers an innovative location for education and research in the field of sustainability   www.rlc-bonn.de (opens in a new tab)
• ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability is a network of more than 1,700 cities, municipalities and regions around the world that work together to implement Agenda 2030 at local level   https://iclei.org/ (opens in a new tab)

The foundations for Bonn's current international profile were laid in the Berlin/Bonn Act of April 26, 1994, which established its expansion as a location for development policy, national, international and supranational institutions as a central task. The German location for international relations was upgraded by the establishment of important institutions for development policy. With its Bonn headquarters, the German Society for International Cooperation (GIZ) is the largest of the 150 governmental, parastatal, church and private institutions that promote development globally in Bonn. 

One of the most important new establishments in recent years is the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), which opened a site in Bonn in 2021. Up to 150 employees will work here in the medium term. ECMWF is a scientific world leader in global numerical weather prediction and climatology and a central component of the European infrastructure for weather forecasting and climate research. 

Conference activities in Bonn are equally geared towards themes of global sustainability. Germany’s United Nations City provides new platforms to constructive dialogue at national, international and supranational level. Time and again, fresh momentum emanates from Bonn and its actors on the road towards worldwide sustainable development. Whether climate, desertification, water, soil, gender equality, biodiversity or early warning – Bonn has developed into a competence center for environment and development issues and policies.

As a conference venue, Bonn has been able to prove its competence and experience many times over. Not only the successful 23rd World Climate Conference in 2017, but also the regularly held "Bonn Climate Talks" put Bonn at the center of the international climate process. In addition, there are further international conferences, such as the annual Global Media Forum of Deutsche Welle, which takes place in Bonn, or the successful "Resilient Cities" series, which is now continued under the title “Daring Cities”, as an important conference for cities on their sustainability pathway. In its new role as the German city of the United Nations and a place for international dialogue on future issues, Bonn became also known through the Climate Summits in 1999 and 2001, the Afghanistan Talks on Petersberg near Bonn in 2001 and 2002, the International Freshwater Conference in 2001, the International Conference for Renewable Energies in 2004, the International Early Warning Conference in 2006, the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in 2008 and the Conference for Non-Governmental Organizations of the United Nations Department for Public Information (DPI/NGO) in 2011. The UNESCO World Heritage Committee met in Bonn in 2015. Since 2017, the Global Festival of Action of the Global Campaign for Sustainable Development Goals has also been held annually.

Bonn's central theme is sustainability - and the city is walking its talk - for the people of Bonn as well as through its international commitment.

Sustainability and Agenda 2030 form the basis for urban action. The City of Bonn's   sustainability strategy adopted in February 2019 brings together projects, programs and plans in six central fields of action to form an urban agenda for sustainable action. Based on the holistic sustainability approach of Agenda 2030, the strategy also includes municipal fields of action that have not yet been explicitly considered in the context of sustainability, such as the topic of social participation and gender equality. The other thematic fields are  Mobility, Climate and Energy, Natural Resources and Environment, Work and Economy, and Global Responsibility and One World. A great deal of civil-society engagement in all subject areas supports progress in the municipal fields of action.

Internationally, Bonn is involved, for example, in city networks such as ICLEI Local Governments for Sustainability or in the Climate Alliance of Cities. On a thematic level, Bonn works together with other cities, networks and UN institutions to address the major concerns of sustainability. Bonn is also breaking new ground in municipal cooperation with sustainability-oriented project partnerships. Bonn is currently working with Bukhara (Uzbekistan), Cape Coast (Ghana), Chengdu (PR China), Minsk (Belarus), La Paz (Bolivia) and Ulan Bator (Mongolia). The focus is on joint projects and the exchange of experience, especially on environmental and development issues as well as collaboration under specific climate partnerships. The City of Bonn's commitment to promoting sustainable development is further strengthened by the Council Decision of February 25, 2016, to support the 2030 Agenda of the United Nations and the sustainable development goals contained therein. Bonn therefore not only has the role of a location, but is itself an actor for sustainability.

The Bonn Region of Science and Humanities also has an international character, mainly due to institutions from science and research as well as science organizations with strong international exchange such as the German Research Foundation (DFG), the German Rectors' Conference (HRK), the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (AvH). The German Development Institute (DIE) operates at the interface between research and development cooperation. The Bonn International Centre for Conflict Studies (BICC) is the only non-university institute of peace and conflict research in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.

In September 2018, the University of Bonn was successful in winning six - also internationally positioned - clusters of excellence. In July 2019, it was then awarded the title of "University of Excellence" and has thus established itself among the strongest research universities in Germany. In the future, the university's scientific networks all over the world as well as the topics of equal opportunities, diversity, sustainability and family-friendly study and working conditions are to be expanded even further.

The University of Bonn is placing a strong focus with the Internationalization Strategy 2020: a comprehensive strategic internationalization is planned that will involve all areas of the University of Bonn. Overarching goals include establishing its top position in research in international comparison, further structural and content-related internationalization of studies and teaching, and the expansion of strategic partnerships for research, studies and teaching. In order to achieve these goals, the University of Bonn promotes, for example, the expansion of global cooperation for international profile building, including with universities in the so-called Global South, with its own funding line.

In order to better network science and international institutions, the city and the University of Bonn signed the Memorandum of Understanding in 2018, in which the intensive cooperation was recorded and strategic fields of action were defined. These range thematically from internationality, UN and sustainability issues to urban development and knowledge and technology transfer and are supervised by the city's Science Department. The aim is for the city and the university to support each other in internationalization projects in order to benefit even more from their internationality and their involvement in global challenges.

Networks such as BION, the interdisciplinary association of internationally oriented biodiversity research in Bonn, or the Bonn Network for Disaster Risk Reduction and Management, build further bridges to the fields of work of the United Nations. In order to further expand cooperation between the University of Bonn and its faculties as well as ZEF, DIE, BICC, UNU-EHS and the Bonn-Rhine-Sieg University of Applied Sciences, these institutions founded the Bonn Alliance for Sustainability Research at the World Climate Conference in Bonn on November 15, 2017. The regional research alliance aims to further strengthen research in the field of sustainable development and global change. It contributes to the closer interlinking and expansion of the interdisciplinary competence in this field that exists in Bonn. To this end, the Innovation Campus (ICB) was established at the University of Bonn, which bundles the top scientific competencies in sustainability research available in Bonn and, with new components, expands them into a unique global science center. The Innovation Campus Bonn's research is focused on three areas: Digitization and artificial intelligence, mobility and migration, and bioeconomy. It offers a platform for experts who bring together their different ideas, expertise and perspectives on specific topics to work on sustainability issues across different disciplines. One example: The United Nations University - Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS) and the German Development Institute (DIE) organize workshops on the interactions between climate change and migration under the umbrella of the Innovation Campus Bonn to discuss political challenges and find solutions.

In order to optimize cooperation with the new location of the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, the University of Bonn, the University of Cologne and Forschungszentrum Jülich have founded a joint Center for Earth System Observation and Computational Analysis (CESOC) in fall 2020. This will create an internationally visible focal point in the Rhineland to globally observe and comprehensively understand the Earth system and predict changes.

The international location and the Bonn international dialogue platform are therefore no empty words. As one of the most important European science regions, Bonn is well on the way to becoming, together with a variety of internationally active partners, a German center of excellence for sustainable topics that will determine our future. 25 years of UN Bonn – that means many successful steps towards a sustainable future and, above all, many strong alliances for this global goal!