We have all the tools and resources to solve our shared challenges.ĭetermination is in the DNA of our United Nations – summoning us with the first words of the Charter: With important new agreements on safeguarding biodiversity … on protecting the high seas … on climate loss and damage … on the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment. Over the past year, we have shown the promise of multilateral action. Leaders have a responsibility to achieve compromise in building a common future of peace and prosperity for our common good. Our world needs statesmanship, not gamesmanship and gridlock.Īs I told the G20, it is time for a global compromise. In the face of all these challenges and more, compromise has become a dirty word. The alternative to reform is further fragmentation.Īt the same time, divides are also widening within countries.ĭemocracy is under threat. I know there are many competing interests and agendas.īut the alternative to reform is not the status quo. It means redesigning the international financial architecture so that it becomes truly universal and serves as a global safety net for developing countries in trouble. That means reforming the Security Council in line with the world of today. It is high time to renew multilateral institutions based on 21st century economic and political realities – rooted in equity, solidarity and universality and anchored in the principles of the United Nations Charter and international law. We are inching ever closer to a Great Fracture in economic and financial systems and trade relations one that threatens a single, open internet with diverging strategies on technology and artificial intelligence and potentially clashing security frameworks. Instead of solving problems, they risk becoming part of the problem.ĭivides among economic and military powers.ĭivides between North and South, East and West. We cannot effectively address problems as they are if institutions do not reflect the world as it is. They reflect the political and economic realities of 1945, when many countries in this Assembly Hall were still under colonial domination. Look no further than the United Nations Security Council and the Bretton Woods system. But it lacked robust multilateral institutions and the result was World War I.Ī multipolar world needs strong and effective multilateral institutions. It brings new opportunities for justice and balance in international relations.īut multipolarity alone cannot guarantee peace.Īt the beginning of the 20th century, Europe had numerous powers. Now we are rapidly moving towards a multipolar world. We confront a host of existential threats – from the climate crisis to disruptive technologies – and we do so at a time of chaotic transition.įor much of the Cold War, international relations were largely seen through the prism of two superpowers. The people of Derna lived and died in the epicentre of that indifference – as the skies unleashed 100 times the monthly rainfall in 24 hours … as dams broke after years of war and neglect … as everything they knew was wiped off the map.Įven now, as we speak, bodies are washing ashore from the same Mediterranean Sea where billionaires sunbathe on their super yachts.ĭerna is a sad snapshot of the state of our world – the flood of inequity, of injustice, of inability to confront the challenges in our midst.Īnd we seem incapable of coming together to respond. Victims of leaders – near and far – who failed to find a way to peace. Thousands of people in Derna, Libya lost their lives in epic, unprecedented flooding. Just nine days ago, many of the world’s challenges coalesced in an awful hellscape. President of the General Assembly, Excellencies, Ladies and gentlemen, SECRETARY-GENERAL'S ADDRESS TO THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY
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