San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
U.N. chief: World is at a ‘pivotal moment’
UNITED NATIONS — U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres issued a dire warning that the world is moving in the wrong direction and faces “a pivotal moment” where continuing business as usual could lead to a breakdown of global order and a future of perpetual crisis. Changing course could signal a breakthrough to a greener and safer future, he said.
The U.N. chief said the world’s nations and people must reverse today’s dangerous trends and choose “the breakthrough scenario.”
The world is under “enormous stress” on almost every front, he said, and the COVID-19 pandemic was a wake-up call demonstrating the failure of nations to come together and take joint decisions to help all people in the face of a
global life-threatening emergency.
Guterres said this “paralysis” extends far beyond COVID-19 to the failures to tackle the climate crisis and “our suicidal war on nature and the collapse of biodiversity,” the “unchecked inequality” undermining the cohesion of societies, and technology’s advances “without guardrails to protect us from its unforeseen consequences.”
In other signs of a more chaotic and insecure world, he pointed to rising poverty, hunger and gender inequality after decades of decline, the extreme risk to human life and the planet from nuclear war and a climate breakdown, and the inequality, discrimination and injustice bringing people into the streets to protest “while conspiracy theories and lies fuel deep divisions within societies.”
In a horizon-scanning report presented to the General Assembly and at a news conference Friday, Guterres said his vision for the “breakthrough scenario” to a greener and safer world is driven by “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.”
The report — “Our Common Agenda” — is a response to last year’s declaration by world leaders on the 75th anniversary of the United Nations and the request from the assembly’s 193 member nations for the U.N. chief to make recommendations to address the challenges for global governance.
What’s needed, Guterres said, is not new multilateral bureaucracies but more effective multilateral institutions including a United Nations “2.0” more relevant to the 21st century.
“And we need multilateralism with teeth,” he said.
The report would also consider a New Agenda for Peace including measures to reduce strategic risks from nuclear weapons, cyber warfare and lethal autonomous weapons, which Guterres called one of humanity’s most destabilizing inventions.
Saying much of the world’s unease is rooted in poverty and growing inequality, Guterres noted that the 10 richest men saw their combined wealth increase by half a trillion dollars since the COVID-19 pandemic began while 55 percent of the world’s population, or 4 billion people, “are one step away from destitution, with no social protection whatsoever.”
To address the threats to social stability, the U.N. chief recommended a series of measures “to provide universal health coverage, education, housing, decent work and income protection for everyone, everywhere.”
The secretary-general also proposed global action to tackle disinformation and conspiracy theories and promote facts, science and “integrity” in public discourse.
“We must make lying wrong again,” Guterres said.