By Tony Diggle
In Part 1 (Food & Futures issue, June 2024), I looked at how 75 years into the lifetime of the United Nations such a conference came to be proposed. In this Part 2, I shall consider the preparations for the Summit of the Future, what we are likely to see and what we need to see.
The Summit of the Future is scheduled for September, 2024, and the UN held the first informal consultations with member states appropriately, perhaps, on 14th February, 2023, St. Valentine’s Day.
Perhaps the most interesting contributions came from Stefan Löfven, former Prime Minister of Sweden, and a member of the High Level Advisory Board making proposals on effective multilateralism, both before and after the meeting.
He spoke of the need to speed up developments towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. The pathway to 2050 was still there. The problem was not a lack of resources, but how they were distributed. The Global Financial Architecture needed to be reformed: $50 trillion was needed by 2030. The roadblocks stopping technology transfer to developing countries needed to be removed. There needed to be a shift in mindsets, structures and systems and a trans-formational shift in the way we thought about investment in our collective future.
The Board’s Report, “A Breakthrough for People and Planet” was published in April, 2023 – the first element of the Pact for People and Planet recommended in the report was “A net-zero carbon pledge by 2050, with annual progress reports starting today” – and speaking at the Ministerial Meeting to plan the 2024 Summit held at the UN on September 21, 2023, Mr Löfven reiterated that the report had come up with “actionable solutions.”
Other preparatory documentation such as policy briefs and political declarations that emerged in 2023 took their cue very strongly from the Secretary-General’s originating report but were of their nature by and large exhortatory or statements of intent.
A global strategy and clear goals for achieving an equilibrium in mankind’s affairs by 2050 are needed. Key questions are what is going to come out of the Summit and what will eventually comprise the text of the Pact for the Future to be endorsed by it.
Unfortunately, the current geopolitical context does not augur well for much emerging next September. In 2022, against the backdrop of jostling power blocks, the world’s attention was grabbed by Russia’s attack on the Ukraine. As the year progressed, the consequences began to sink in. The collaboration that the world so desperately needed had been replaced by the weaponization of food, energy, critical raw materials, information, in short, everything on which we should be co-operating. Instead of mutually beneficial trade in necessities, dependency itself had been weaponized. A speaker at the ESPAS conference of that year suggested that we had entered “an era of permanent crisis.”
In October 2023, the world’s attention was grabbed again by the Hamas attacks on Israel from Gaza. Appalling as these conflicts are, arguably worse ones have taken place in the last few years in Ethiopia and the Sudan, which have received far less attention. There have been 17 coups or attempted coups in sub-Saharan Africa since the beginning of 2019. It is not the most auspicious setting.
WHAT ARE WE LIKELY TO SEE?
The first revision of the draft Pact for the Future was published on May 14, 2024, (the zero draft having been published in January). At the time of writing, this is the best indication of what we are likely to see. Here is a brief assessment of the main points that seemed to me to come out of it.
1. Governance: proposed reform of the UN’s principal organs
Reform of the Security Council to make it more representative is a priority for the Summit. However, initial proposals had not been published at the time of writing, and the tone of the revised pact is set by the paragraph which agrees to enhance ways in which the General Assembly can strengthen its co-ordination with the Security Council. While any attempt to reduce sclerosis at the top of the UN is to be welcomed, it would seem that progress here will be slow.
2. Multilateralism pushed forward
Global governance should include a diverse range of actors beyond states. There should be greater co-operation between the UN and regional, sub-regional and other organisations. There should be continuous and open channels of communication between UN intergovernmental bodies and civil society. The UN’s capabilities in strategic foresight should be enhanced. Developments such as these will enhance the “global collective intelligence system.”
3. Review of Development Finance and the International Financial Architecture
The Pact agrees to increase financial support for developing countries to deal with climate change including additional grant-based or highly concessional finance for both adaptation and mitigation. It will urgently reform the inequities in the international financial architecture. More significantly:
“We welcome the initiative to convene a biennial summit at the level of Heads of State and Government to strengthen existing and establish more systematic links between the United Nations and the international financial institutions.”
The importance of enhanced representation of all developing countries is stressed. Adequate volumes of capital to meet the SDGs must be mobilised. Multilateral development banks are called on to schedule general capital increases. Countries will be enabled to borrow with confidence, but not unsustainably, and allowed fair debt restructuring and debt relief. This is promising as far as it goes.
4. Conflict: Collective Security Arrangements
The Pact acknowledges the need to address the underlying drivers of violence and displacement and that climate impacts and environmental degradation can be among them. It suggests that the roles of preventive diplomacy and early-warning mechanisms are strengthened. It recognises the importance of peace building at a national level, and, for instance, has agreed to ensure adequate financing for African Union-led peace support operations. The most solid commitment is to conclude by 2026 a legally binding instrument to prohibit lethal autonomous weapons systems that select targets and apply force without human control. Again, this is promising.
5. Emergency Platform for Global Shocks
The High-Level Advisory Board’s report calls for a strengthening of governance for current and emerging transnational risks – including climate change, pandemics, biological weapons, artificial intelligence and transnational organised crime. Yet the Pact only requests the Secretary-General “to convene and operationalise emergency platforms in response to future complex global shocks” and to “ensure that an emergency platform would not be a standing institution or entity and would be convened for a finite period.” In an earlier section, the Pact only agrees to “address emerging and evolving biological risks through improving processes to anticipate, co-ordinate and prepare for such risks.” While a number of specific approaches to addressing “the risks posed by information communications technology and artificial intelligence,” are listed, given the more subtle threats posed by further developments associated with information technology, artificial intelligence and synthetic biology alone, stronger action would seem to be required to avoid being after the event.
6. General Line
The revised Pact does indeed have a more active tone than the original Pact (paragraphs tend to begin “we will”), with 52 actions heading the relevant sections. For example, Action 1 states, “We will take bold, ambitious, accelerated, just and transformative actions to realise the 2030 Agenda and leave no-one behind.” In addition to what has been discussed above, there are similar statements on migration and youth (of which more below). Yet it sometimes reads as though just stating authoritatively that “we will address all these problems” will result in timely solutions appearing. There is not enough on the “how.”
The Summit of the Future will run from September 20-23, 2024, and begin with two “Action Days.” Encouragingly, these will bring together representatives from member states including Heads of State and Ministers, civil society, the private sector, academia, local and regional authorities and other representatives. The Action Days are presented as an opportunity to elevate the voice of youth in the multilateral system – they are the people who will be living in it. The second day will focus on multistakeholder partnership and action hopefully leading to a multilateralism that is more inclusive and networked. The Summit proper will then run on the last two days.
WHAT DO WE NEED TO SEE?
1. A conscious global aim to reach an equilibrium in mankind’s affairs by 2050 and a conscious global realisation that it must be reached.
The sense of urgency beginning to be evident in the Pact must be built on with specific and practical action on the ground. In some areas, such as the climate, action must be taken now if there is to be any chance of an acceptable situation in 2050. Encouraging pronouncements of intent and purpose aren’t enough.
2. A change of mindset regarding acceptable economic growth is going to be necessary to achieve them.
The Pact rightly links financial reform to sustainable development. Economic growth for its own sake won’t do: we need to move beyond this concept everywhere. The focus needs to be on green growth – “a type of growth that has no negative impact on the environment.”
3. Publics worldwide must be engaged.
There needs to be a much better public debate through the mainstream media. In the developed world, the issues touched on above are in the public mind, but at the same time the public at large is not sufficiently engaged with them. People have got so used to the debate being couched in terms of “a higher material standard of living,” which must be delivered de rigueur that alternative modes of thought become blurred. There is no point in campaigning groups trying to raise awareness of climate change when everyone is aware of it already. In any case choices made at the individual level are often unimportant. The political classes must change the narrative and frame the discussion better.
4. The leadership necessary to engender all this must come to the fore.
“Quality leaders” need to come to the fore. These “quality leaders” need to have foresight as an attitude of mind, be able to confront their publics with the global issues we face and be able to carry them with them.
CONCLUSIONS
In one sense, what the Pact for the Future finally says is not the most important thing. Any text that has to accommodate not only every government in the world but also hundreds of other organisations is almost bound to be general and limited.
What matters far more is what catalyses between the very limited number of participants from governments and elsewhere during the four days of the actual event, and the real-world action that results from it.
In September 2022, on behalf of the international foresight community, a report from the Millennium Project, entitled “Five UN Foresight Elements of Our Common Agenda: Results of a Real-Time Delphi Study,” massively endorsed the foresight elements of “Our Common Agenda.” Among the points made were the following:
1. The Summit of the Future provided the opportunity to bring Heads of State together in informal off the record meetings with forward thinkers and innovators and try to “change [the] development models of leaders.”
2. The Summit could also be used to engage the general public worldwide. It could be broadcast live with commentators and futurists interpreting what was happening as if it was the Olympic Games.
These are the sorts of initiative that are required. The Summit needs a high profile, and subsequent activity must reflect what needs to happen to properly address the grave current planetary challenges.
The two hundred or so leaders of the world’s nation states need to bring to life another statement made by Mr Löfven at the 2023 Ministerial Meeting referred to above:
“We want [future generations] to read that we understood the serious situation and we acted accordingly and changed the path.”
Anyone with access to anyone participating in the summit should urge them to do their utmost to ensure that this happens.
Tony Diggle is an information science and management consultant based in London. He completed all the core modules in the MTech in Futures Studies at the University of Houston in 2009 and since 2008 has been an Associate of SAMI Consulting. He is a member of the UK Node of the Millennium Project and London Futurists. Since 2011, he has been a London Business Angel (now under Maven Capital Partners). He is also a playwright. Three of his plays have been published, and two have been produced on the London fringe. He writes in a personal capacity.
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