UN Common Agenda
Dr. Jassim Taqui
DG Al-Bab Institute for Strategic
Studies
Islamabad, September 10, 2021: The UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres delivered the
following speech in the General Assembly:
On almost every front, our world is under enormous
stress.
We are not at ease with each other or our planet.
Covid-19 is a wake-up call – and we are oversleeping.
The pandemic has demonstrated our collective failure to come together and make joint decisions for the common good, even in the face of an immediate, life-threatening global emergency.
This paralysis extends far beyond COVID-19. From the climate crisis to our suicidal war on nature and the collapse of biodiversity, our global response has been too little, too late.
Unchecked inequality is undermining social cohesion, creating fragilities that affect us all. Technology is moving ahead without guard rails to protect us from its unforeseen consequences.
Global decision-making is fixed on immediate gain, ignoring the long-term consequences of decisions — or indecision.
Multilateral institutions have proven too weak and fragmented for today’s global challenges and risks.
As a result, we risk a future of serious instability and climate chaos.
Last year, in the Leaders’ Declaration marking the 75th Anniversary of the United Nations, you charged me with providing recommendations to advance Our Common Agenda, to address these challenges for global governance.
Today, after an in-depth process of consultation and reflection, I am presenting my response.
Excellencies,
In preparing this report, we built on a year-long global listening exercise. We engaged the Member States, thought leaders, young people, civil society, the United Nations system, and its many partners.
One message rang throughout our consultations: our world needs more, and better, multilateralism, based on deeper solidarity, to deal with the crises we face, and to reverse today’s dangerous trends.
There was broad recognition that we are at a pivotal
moment.
Business as usual could result in the breakdown of the global
order, into a world of perpetual crisis and winner-takes-all.
Or we could decide to change course, heralding a breakthrough to a
greener, better, safer future for all.
This report represents my vision, informed by your contributions,
for a path towards the breakthrough scenario.
Our Common Agenda is above all an agenda of action, designed to
strengthen and accelerate multilateral cooperation – particularly around the
2030 Agenda – and make a tangible difference to people’s lives.
And it is an agenda driven by solidarity – the principle of
working together, recognizing that we are bound to each other and that no
community or country, however powerful, can solve its challenges
alone.
Excellencies,
I will set out my vision for Our Common Agenda under four broad
headings: strengthening global governance; focusing on the future; renewing the
social contract, and ensuring a United Nations fit for a new
era.
First, the international community is manifestly failing to
protect our most precious global commons: the oceans, the atmosphere, outer
space, and the pristine wilderness of Antarctica. Nor is it delivering policies
to support peace, global health, the viability of our planet, and other
pressing needs.
In other words, multilateralism is failing its most basic
test.
The lack of a global response and vaccination program to end the
COVID-19 pandemic is a clear and tragic example.
The longer the virus circulates among billions of unvaccinated
people, the higher the risk that it will develop into more dangerous variants
that could rip through vaccinated and unvaccinated populations alike, with a
far higher fatality rate.
IMF recalls that investing $50 billion in vaccination now could
add an estimated $9 trillion to the global economy in the next four
years.
We need an immediate global vaccination plan, implemented by an
emergency Task Force made up of present and potential vaccine producers, the
World Health Organization, ACT-Accelerator partners, and international
financial institutions, to work with pharmaceutical companies to at least
double vaccine production and ensure that vaccines reach seventy percent of the
world’s population in the first half of 2022.
Likewise, the recommendations of the Independent Panel for
Pandemic Preparedness and Response must be a starting point for urgent reforms
to strengthen the global health architecture.
The World Health Organization must be empowered and funded
adequately so that it can play a leading role in coordinating emergency
response. Global health security and preparedness must be strengthened through
sustained political commitment and leadership at the highest level. Low- and
middle-income countries must be able to develop and access health
technologies.
Excellencies,
More broadly, we cannot afford to ignore the alarm sounded by the
pandemic and by galloping climate change. We must launch a new era of bold,
transformative policies across the board.
We must take our heads out of the sand and face up to future
health crises, financial shocks, and the triple planetary emergency of climate
change, biodiversity loss, and pollution.
We need a quantum leap to strengthen multilateralism and make it
fit for purpose.
One of the central recommendations of my report on Our Common
Agenda is that the world should come together to consider all these issues and
more at a high-level Summit of the Future.
This summit will aim to forge a new global consensus on what our
future should look like, and how we can secure it.
The summit should include a New Agenda for Peace, that takes a
more comprehensive, holistic view of global security.
The New Agenda for Peace could include measures to reduce
strategic risks from nuclear arms, cyberwarfare, and lethal autonomous weapons;
strengthen foresight of future risk and reshape responses to all forms of
violence, including by criminal groups, and in the home; investing in
prevention and peacebuilding by addressing the root causes of conflict;
increase support for regional initiatives that can fill critical gaps in the
global peace and security architecture, and put women and girls at the center
of security policy.
The Summit could also include tracks on sustainable development
and climate action beyond 2030; a Global Digital Compact to guarantee that new
technologies are a force for good; the peaceful and sustainable use of outer
space, the management of future shocks and crises, and more.
It should take account of today’s more complex context for global
governance, in which a range of State and non-State actors are participating in
open, transparent systems that draw on the capacities of all relevant
stakeholders.
Our goal should be a more inclusive and networked multilateralism,
to navigate this complex landscape and deliver effective solutions.
To support our collective efforts,
I will ask an Advisory Board led by eminent former heads of state
and government to identify global public goods and potentially other areas of
common interest where governance improvements are most needed and to propose
options for how this could be achieved.
The work starts now, and I hope for your future
engagement.
Excellencies,
The uneven recovery from the pandemic has exposed the deficiencies
in our global financial system.
In the next five years, according to the International Monetary
Fund, cumulative economic growth per capita in sub-Saharan Africa is projected
to be around one-quarter of the rate in the rest of the world.
This is intolerable.
Meanwhile, both public and private finance for climate action has
been insufficient for years, if not decades.
To tackle historic weaknesses and gaps, and integrate the global
financial system with other global priorities, I propose biennial Summits at
the level of Heads of States and Government, between G20 members, ECOSOC
members, the heads of International Financial Institutions, and the
Secretary-General of the United Nations.
The overriding aim of these summits would be to create a more
sustainable, inclusive, and resilient global economy, including fairer
multilateral systems to manage global trade and technological
development.
Issues for immediate consideration could include innovative
financing to address inequality and support sustainable development; an investment
boost to finance a green and just transition from fossil fuels; and a “last
mile alliance’ to reach that furthest behind, as part of efforts to achieve the
Sustainable Development Goals.
These biennial Summits would coordinate efforts to incentivize
inclusive and sustainable policies, across all systems, that enable countries
to offer basic services and social protection to their citizens.
They would tackle unfair and exploitative financial practices, and
resolve longstanding weaknesses in the international debt
architecture.
Governments should never again face a choice between serving their
people or servicing their debt.
These biennial Summits would also harness global financial
frameworks to move forward quickly and unequivocally on climate action and
biodiversity loss.
The Paris target is still within reach, but we need faster,
nimbler, more effective climate and environmental governance to limit global
heating and support countries most affected.
COP26 will be a vital forum to accelerate climate
action.
I intend to convene all stakeholders ahead of the first Global
Stocktake of the Paris Agreement in 2023 to consider further urgent
steps.
Member States are already preparing a strong post-2020
biodiversity framework, the 2021 Food Systems Summit, and the Stockholm + 50
summit on the environment next year.
I will do everything in my power to ensure that these platforms
will be a fundamental reset in our relationship with [nature].
Excellencies,
All these efforts and initiatives require economic analysis based
on today’s realities, rather than outdated ideas of economic
success.
We must correct a major blind spot in how we measure progress and
prosperity.
Gross Domestic Product, GDP, fails to account for the incalculable
social and environmental damage that may be caused by the pursuit of
profit.
My report calls for new metrics that value the life and wellbeing
of the many over short-term profit for the few.
Likewise, access to concessional finance should be based on
vulnerability to risks and shocks, not the outdated metric of GDP.
Excellencies,
The second element of my report is a new focus on the world’s
young people and future generations.
These two groups will inherit the consequences of our decisions –
but are barely represented at the global table of decisions.
I, therefore, intend to appoint a Special Envoy for Future
Generations, to give weight to the interests of those who will be born over the
coming century.
And a new United Nations Youth Office will upgrade engagement with
young people across all our work so that today’s young women and men can be
designers of their future.
My report proposes measures on education, skills training, and
lifelong learning, including a Transforming Education Summit next year, to
address the learning crisis and expand opportunities and hope for the world’s
1.8 billion young people.
But we must go further, to make full use of our unprecedented
capacity to predict and model the impact of policy decisions over
time.
I, therefore, intend to create a Futures Lab that will work with
governments, academia, civil society, the private sector, and others, bringing
together all our work around forecasting, megatrends, and
risks.
The Futures Lab will collect and analyze data, building on
existing mechanisms including the annual IMF early warning exercise, to issue
regular reports on megatrends and catastrophic risks.
To improve our preparedness for future shocks, my report
recommends an Emergency Platform that would be triggered automatically in
large-scale crises, bringing together leaders from the Member States, the
United Nations system, key country groupings, international financial
institutions, regional parties, and civil society and the private sector that
is required to cooperate together with research bodies and others.
I also believe we need an intergovernmental body that thinks
beyond immediate geopolitical dynamics to consider the interests of our entire
human family, present and future.
My report, therefore, proposes that the Member States consider
repurposing the Trusteeship Council, to make it into a deliberative platform on
behalf of succeeding generations.
I hope the Member States will also consider a Declaration on
Future Generations to support this work.
Unless we change course, we could bequeath to our children and
their children a barely habitable world.
You may have heard of the seven-generation principle, under which
some indigenous communities make decisions based on the generations from their
great-grandparents to their great-grandchildren. We have a lot to learn from
them.
Excellences,
Fourth and finally, the United Nations itself must adapt to
support the vision of Our Common Agenda.
The United Nations is the only institution with universal
convening power. Our Common Agenda must therefore include upgrading the United
Nations.
We need a UN 2.0 that can offer more relevant, system-wide,
multilateral, and multi-stakeholder solutions to the challenges of the 21st
century.
This transformation will be based on a quintet of cross-cutting
issues: data; digital innovation; strategic foresight; behavioral science; and
performance and results in orientation.
I will seek to re-establish the Secretary-General's Scientific
Advisory Board, to strengthen the role of the United Nations as a source of
reliable data and evidence.
And I will broaden participation through an annual meeting with
regional organizations, and a new Advisory Group on Local and Regional
Governments, as well as systematic engagement with cities, civil society,
parliaments, and the private sector.
All United Nations entities will be asked to establish a dedicated
focal point for civil society, to create greater space for civil society to
contribute at the country and global levels, and within all United Nations
networks and processes.
The Futures Lab, a repurposed Trusteeship Council, and my new
envoy for Future Generations will together ensure that the United Nations takes
far better account of the intergenerational impact of our work.
Our finances should be put on a firmer footing, and I invite the Member
States to consider my proposals in this regard.
As regards any decisions by the Member States to adopt the
intergovernmental organs to the needs and realities of today, including
reforming the Security Council, revitalizing the work of the General Assembly,
and strengthening ECOSOC, I stand ready to provide the necessary support.
Excellencies,
Global governance may sound lofty or abstract. It is not.
These decisions have life-or-death consequences for you and your
citizens, from the quality of the air we breathe to the chance to earn a living
wage and the risk of catching a deadly disease.
Multilateral action led by the United Nations has achieved an
enormous amount over the past 76 years, from preventing a third world war to
eradicating smallpox and mending the hole in the ozone layer.
My report must be a starting point for ideas and initiatives that
build on these achievements and take them further.
Some of my proposals can be taken forward by the United Nations
system. Others will require broader discussion and decisions by the Member
States.
I urge you all to act on your joint responsibility to ensure we
achieve the breakthrough we need.
The United Nations is an intergovernmental organization. Member
States will always be central to our collective ability to meet global
challenges, with unique responsibilities in the multilateral
system.
But solutions to today’s challenges also depend on action from
civil society, the private sector, and others, particularly young people, who
must be accountable for their commitments and have a meaningful role in
deliberations.
I look forward to hearing from you and your national leaders on
these proposals, during the General Debate and thereafter.
Excellences,
I am an engineer. I believe in the infinite capacity of the human
mind to solve problems.
When we work together, there is no limit to what we can
achieve.
My report on Our Common Agenda is a starting point. A starting
point for our joint efforts to improve global governance together, on
foundations of trust, solidarity, and human rights, to fulfill the hopes and
expectations of the people we serve.
Thank you.
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