Executives International - “World Order in an Age of Uncertainty: Challenges and Opportunities for the UN and International Geneva”

Ladies and Gentlemen:

It is a pleasure to be with you this evening – thank you, Simon, for your kind invitation, and congratulations to all of you on Executives International’s Golden Jubilee.

Jubilees, anniversaries and the like are moments of celebration, and rightly so. Yet they are also moments of introspection, of reflection, of taking stock, and asking ourselves how things are going.

Tonight, we have come together to take stock on a rather grand scale – the global scale. A daunting task, but perhaps better manageable if we proceed methodically.

In the next quarter of an hour, before we open it up for discussion, I will go through two different interpretations of where we are in the world at this moment – you could call it the optimist view versus the pessimist’s view.

Equipped with that analysis, I will then connect these insights to the United Nations and finally, bring it home to Geneva to explore what our role and responsibility in all of this is.
Let me start with the pessimist’s view of the world.

Turn on the news, and there is plenty to make you despair. Images of human misery; poverty; violence; hatred; bigotry; racism – it can all seem overwhelming.

Then there are the larger, the global, the existential threats we face.

Above all, climate change. For all the threats we face, this is the one that will define the nature of this century more dramatically than all others.

Tonight, we are spending about one hour together. According to data from the World Bank and the World Wildlife Fund, in this single hour, four million tons of carbon dioxide will be emitted; 1,500 hectares of forests will be cut; and three species will go extinct. During this hour, the pollution that already resides in our atmosphere will trap as much heat as would be released by detonating over 16,600 Hiroshima class atomic bombs. All in just one hour.

The impact of all of this is clear and undeniable, as the latest report from the World Meteorological Organization just confirmed: 17 of the hottest years ever measured have been since 2001; the hottest of all were the last three years.

Millions of people and trillions of assets are at risk from extreme droughts, fires, floods, hurricanes, and rising seas. Climate change is a direct threat in itself and a multiplier of many other threats – from poverty to displacement to conflict.

What compounds the challenge is that all of the above – poverty, displacement, conflict – obstructs action to address climate change. You cannot ask people who are struggling to find enough to eat today to worry about what happens to the planet tomorrow. Worrying about climate change is a luxury many simply cannot afford.

Climate change threatens everyone, everywhere. We don’t have a plan B because there is no planet B. Yet it is those who have contributed the least to this threat that are living with the greatest damage, paying the highest costs, suffering the gravest loss.

This means inequality and climate change are mutually reinforcing. To resolve the latter, we cannot ignore the former.

Neither is happening at a fast-enough rate. In fact, it may even be going in reverse.

Last year, 82% of the wealth generated went to the world’s richest 1%, according to a new Oxfam report. The world created new billionaires at a rate of one every two days, nine tenth of them men. This huge increase could have ended global extreme poverty seven times over. Instead the nearly four billion people who make up the poorest half of the world saw no increase in their wealth. Entire regions and countries fail to catch up to the waves of progress, left behind in the Rust Belts of our world.

Inequality, catalysed by technological disruption that further tilts the distribution from labour to capital, is creating a dangerous seedbed for discontent. It frays our social fabric. It undermines trust in the institutions that govern our society, fanning the flames of populist outrage.

In fact, the rise of populism relies on this sense of crisis, of being left behind as faceless forces – imprecisely described as globalisation, liberalisation, or technological disruption – destroy a ‘glorious past’ that no one ever really experienced, but everyone now claims to remember.

It is true that in many developed economies, the United States and Western Europe in particular, the younger generation no longer expects to be better off than their parents. Having entered the job market in the wake of the Great Recession, Millennials on average earn less, own less, and face higher job insecurity than their baby-boomer parents.

But the question remains: were things really better in the past?
We can approach this question by way of a short hypothetical: If you had to choose one moment in history in which to be born, and you did not know in advance whether you were going to be male or female, which country you were going to be from, or what your status was, which time would you choose?

The answer is at the heart of what we can call the ‘optimist’s view’ of the world.

Why? Because you would have a hard time justifying choosing anything other than the present. Because if you chose today, in most places you would be less likely to be living in poverty; less likely to be illiterate; less likely to confront intolerance and oppression; and less likely to die of diseases or be killed in a war than at any time in human history.

Much of this incredible story of progress happened in the past seven decades.

With few exceptions, poverty has been reduced more in the last 50 years than in the previous 500 years. Data by the IMF shows that the average Chinese person is 10 times richer today than he or she was just five decades ago – and lives for 25 years longer.

90% of all scientists that ever lived are alive today and our scientific understanding of the world is more advanced today than it ever was. To understand the unprecedented pace of progress in our lifetime – just consider that your cellphone has more computing power than the Apollo space capsule that landed the first humans on the moon in 1969!

Meanwhile, you would have to go back hundreds of years to find a similar period of great power peace. According to data compiled by the Oxford economist Max Roser, the number of people who have died as a result of war, civil war, and, yes, terrorism, is down 50% this decade from the 1990s. It is down 75% from the preceding five decades, the decades of the Cold War, and it is, of course, down 99% from the decade before that, which is World War II.

Progress continues as we speak. I mentioned before how much harm we inflict on our planet in the span of just 60 minutes. But within that hour, it is also true that the number of people who live on less than $2 a day actually goes down by 9,000 every hour; that every hour, 12,500 people gain access to clean drinking water around the world.
So what are we to make of all this? You can paint a plausible picture of the world on the brink of collapse, but you can equally sketch out why we might just be living in the best of times.

I would draw three insights.

First, the challenges are real, existential, and among the most dangerous we ever faced. But they are all man-made. Nothing – not climate change, not technological disruption, not inequality – is independent of human action. We are the masters of our fate. Our actions matter.

And this means that secondly, we have the ability to resolve them. The point of the incredible stories of progress in our recent past is that we have reasons to be optimistic. Not blind optimism, but hard-earned optimism, rooted in very real progress.

Thirdly, any action to safeguard the good of the past and to resolve the challenges of the future must be global and universal. We simply cannot successfully deal with the multiplicity of challenges we face either sequentially or in isolation.
Geopolitically, the past couple of years are generally narrated as a breakdown of global collaboration. Tensions rose, conflicts deepened, protectionism resurfaced.

All true. But only part of the picture. Amidst the background noise of bellicose rhetoric, the 193 Member States of the United Nations actually agreed on something truly groundbreaking. Some two and a half years ago, they agreed the most ambitious development agenda in human history – the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

The 2030 Agenda is the logical, necessary conclusion from the three insights I just outlined – human agency, optimism, and universality.

The 2030 Agenda constitutes universal recognition that the challenges faced by any one of us may swiftly become crises faced by all – carbon emissions know no boundaries, distant conflicts lead to refugee flows and weak healthcare systems in a remote island state can lead to worldwide pandemics.

The 2030 Agenda grasps that these challenges cannot effectively be met by tinkering around the edges of economic, social and political governance, but require a fundamental shift in the dominant development model in all countries.

With 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs for short) and 169 specific targets, we have a detailed roadmap of what needs to be done.

They address everything from ending poverty (Goal 1) and achieving gender equality (Goal 5) to decent work and equitable economic growth (Goal 8) to the rule of law (Goal 16).

Achieving these goals would create a world that is comprehensively sustainable: socially fair; environmentally secure; economically prosperous; inclusive; and more predictable.

In a world where we achieve these goals, the pessimist’s view would become a quaint dystopian vision with little credibility.
So far so good. But, to recall the old English proverb that “the proof of the pudding is in the eating”, the obvious question is: How are we doing in our quest to make the 2030 Agenda a reality?

The answer is not clear-cut.

On the one hand, the ways in which the Agenda has become a common roadmap, the ways in which it has given new structure and direction to our work across disciplines and geographies has been nothing short of incredible. Just last month I attended the World Economic Forum in Davos. In previous years, you sometimes had political officials in one corner and industry executives in the other, exchanging pleasantries but really running on separate agendas. This time, however, the SDGs built a linguistic bridge, a shared language for all of us to really come together to meaningfully explore how to solve the challenges that affect us all.

There is, in short, a new spirit of collaboration and partnership that simply wasn’t there in the pre-2030 Agenda era.

On the other hand, this spirit of partnership still needs to embed itself more firmly in the structures and instruments we have to implement policy.

I am talking here also about the United Nations. The geopolitical landscape that gave rise to the UN has shifted in ways we are only beginning to understand. Just consider the distribution of power between then and now. What used to be a world defined by bipolar state superpower confrontation has morphed into something much more diffuse – the state’s monopoly on violence is challenged by non-state actors; cyberspace is mostly private property owned and operated by gigantic corporations; and even within governments, mayors can be as influential in making policy as prime ministers or presidents. In this polycentric system, the United Nations – still firmly built around the notion of nation-state sovereignty – has to become more nimble and open to retain its relevance.

Geneva, our European headquarters, is at the vanguard of that change. Geneva’s unique ecosystem fuels collaboration, innovation and the sharing of knowledge. The shores of Lake Geneva are home to over 100 international organizations, some 400 non-governmental organizations, representatives of 175 states, a vibrant private sector and world-class academic institutions. This proximity enables partnerships, whose impacts are felt across the world.
It has never been easier to get involved in our collective efforts to make the world a better place. It’s also never been more necessary.

Rights are universal; responsibility tracks power. This means that as individuals, small everyday actions can be meaningful; as businesses, the bar is higher. But the shift to sustainability is not only a moral imperative, it’s also increasingly a prerequisite for commercial success.

Businesses that put sustainability at the core of what they do outperform those that don’t. We have seen this on climate action, which influences 13 of the 17 SDGs: businesses that take action enjoy 18% higher returns on investment. And it is no wonder these firms outperform:

̶ They outperform because sustainability gives them the compass and perspective to take the long-term view.
̶ They outperform because sustainability connects them to the Zeitgeist.
̶ They outperform because – if they are innovative enough to go sustainable – they are nimble enough to navigate volatile, competitive markets.
̶ They outperform because they attract the best talent – or have you met a high-flying millennial who doesn’t care about sustainability?

You have a competitive advantage because you are right here, in the Lac Léman region. I can only encourage you to leverage the networks and partnerships that are available to you, to engage, to take ownership, and to show leadership.

The decades to come will test our civilization like no other. We are the first generation that can end extreme poverty and the last generation that can curb climate change.

We have the means and the skills to do so. But we can only hope for success if every single one of us contributes. That is what will make or break our whole endeavor.

Thank you.