The final negotiations for the Future Summit, which will be held in 5 days and in which the heads of State will agree on reforms of the constituent elements of the global cooperation.
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The United Nations has called for this unique summit in view of the stark reality: global problems advance faster than the institutions designed to solve them.
We can see it everywhere we look: conflicts and atrocious acts of violence inflict terrible suffering, geopolitical divisions abound and inequality and injustice They are everywhere, eroding trust, aggravating resentment and fuelling populism and extremism. Traditional problems of poverty, hunger, discrimination, misogyny and racism are taking on new forms.
In this context, we face new and existential threats, from rampant climate chaos and environmental degradation to the development of technologies such as artificial intelligence in an ethical and legal vacuum.
The Summit of the Future The United Nations recognizes that it is within our power to solve all these problems. However, only world leaders can bring about the systemic modernization that is needed to achieve this. International decision-making is anachronistic. Many international institutions and tools are products of the 1940s, before globalization, decolonization, widespread recognition of universal human rights and gender equality, and also before space travel.not to mention cyberspace.
The victors of World War II still hold sway on the UN Security Council, while no African country has a permanent seat. On the other hand, the global financial architecture is extremely unfavourable to developing countries, since it fails to provide them with a safety net when they face difficulties, plunging them into debt and thus forcing them to stop investing in their people.
Furthermore, global institutions offer limited space to many of the major players in today’s world, from the civil society to the private sectorThe youth who will inherit the future are virtually invisible, and the interests of future generations are also not represented.
The idea is clear: we cannot create a future fit for our grandchildren with a system built for our grandparents. The Future Summit will be a good opportunity to rethink multilateral collaboration so that it is adapted to the 21st century.
One of the solutions we have proposed is the New Peace Agenda, which aims to modernize the international institutions and tools responsible for preventing and dealing with cease conflicts, including the Security Council. It calls for renewed efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction and for broadening the definition of security to include gender-based violence and gang violence.
We cannot create a future
suitable for our grandchildren with a system built for our grandparents
The New Agenda for Peace also takes into account security threats that may arise in the future, recognizing that methods of warfare are evolving and that we run the risk of new technologies being used as weapons. For example, we need a global agreement to outlaw lethal autonomous weapons systems, which can making life or death decisions without any form of human participation.
Global financial institutions must mirror the world today and be empowered to lead a better response to the challenges we face, including on debt, sustainable development and climate action. This means taking concrete steps to address unsustainable debt, increasing the lending capacity of multilateral development banks and changing their business model to give developing countries much greater access to private finance at affordable interest rates.
Without this financing, developing countries will not be able to address the greatest threat to our future: the climate crisis. They urgently need resources to stop using fossil fuels, which are destroying the planet, and switch to clean, renewable energy.
On the other hand, as world leaders stressed last year, reforming the global financial architecture is also key to making the progress desperately needed to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.
The Summit will focus on new technologies that have global impacts with a view to finding ways to close the digital divide and establish shared principles in pursuit of an open, free and secure digital future for all people.
Artificial intelligence is a revolutionary technology with applications and risks that we are only just beginning to understand. We have put forward concrete proposals for governments, together with technology companies, academia and civil society, to work on frameworks for managing the risks of AI and on monitoring and mitigating its harmful effects and sharing its benefits. AI governance cannot be left to the wealthiest, but must be a role for all countries, and the United Nations is determined to be the forum that brings together everyone’s efforts.
Human rights and gender equality are the common thread that links all these proposals. Global decision-making cannot be reformed if all human rights and cultural diversity are not respected in a way that ensures the full participation and leadership of women and girls. We demand renewed efforts to Eliminate historical barriers (legal, social and economic) that exclude women from power.
The peacemakers of the 1940s created institutions that helped prevent World War III and led many countries from colonization to independence, but they would not recognize the global landscape of today.
The Future Summit is an opportunity to build more effective and inclusive global cooperation institutions and tools, in line with the 21st century and the multipolar world in which we live.
I urge world leaders to seize it.
In search of a ‘Pact for the future’
The Summit’s objective is twofold: to accelerate efforts to meet existing international commitments and to take concrete steps to respond to new challenges and opportunities. This will be achieved through an action-oriented outcome document, called ‘Pact for the future’.
This agreement will be negotiated and endorsed by countries before and during this month’s Summit.
The objective coincides with that of numerous agreementsincluding the 2030 Agenda to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. The question is: how can we better cooperate to achieve these aspirations?
ANTÓNIO GUTERRES – SECRETARY GENERAL OF THE UNITED NATIONS
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