By Javier Surasky-
The Summit
of the Future is just around the corner. Negotiations to agree on the texts of
the documents it should adopt (the Pact for the Future, the Declaration on
Future Generations, and the Global Digital Compact) remain unresolved. We
observe that each co-facilitator proposal for a possible text for each document
is followed by a note explaining that the silence has been broken.
The current
landscape is complicated: last-minute negotiations, co-facilitators losing
patience, cross-accusations over the lack of progress, miracles that don't
happen, and the growing idea that the Summit of the Future may end up being a
UN failure at the most inopportune moment, with direct impacts on two critical
elements for building strong multilateralism: the de facto abandonment of the
course towards the SDGs and the inability to begin designing a future that we
urgently need to create.
Requiem for the "2030 Agenda project"
With a
Summit of the Future that fails to produce concrete and ambitious results, the
SDGs will have ceased to have real meaning. I'm not talking about the
possibility of achieving the SDGs but about the very project that these goals
represent.
When the
2030 Agenda was adopted in 2015, no reasonably informed person expected that by
the end of 2030, all the goals and targets established therein would have been
achieved. It would have required such a profound cultural and political change
that it was unimaginable to accomplish in 15 years.
Those of us
who defended the 2030 Agenda and its objectives from the beginning and sought
to make it an ambitious document during the negotiations did not do so,
thinking of pursuing utopias, which can be necessary and even essential on
certain occasions. Instead, we hoped the Agenda could mark a shared and clear
direction for the world. I always considered it more important for the SDGs to
set the world on a specific path than for them to be effectively achieved. The
world was, and is, so far off the path of solidarity, respect for nature,
equity, and dignity for all who inhabit the planet. Simply putting it on the
road towards these ideals would have been an enormous achievement of the 2030
Agenda.
The already
known failures in implementing the SDGs globally are the best evidence that
what has failed is precisely that—the project—beyond the established short- or
medium-term objectives.
The Summit
of the Future, and especially the Pact for the Future, represent the
opportunity to show that we have learned something during these years of
pandemics, wars, increasing visibility of climate change impacts, and
successive and overlapping global crises that do not cease.
Despite
this, observing the debates and the inability to adopt concrete steps that lead
to the necessary changes to respond to our current common challenges, we are
facing the most incapable generation of world leaders in history.
"Leaders" who, despite having the scientific information on what
needs to be done and the resources to do it, continue to opt for the most
brutal inaction, wrapped up in international squabbles representing their small
and myopic worlds.
Without a
solid and action-oriented Pact for the Future, the message will be that there
is no direction towards the project that the 2030 Agenda represented nor
genuine interest in establishing one.
Artificial intelligence, human foolishness
What will
have a more substantial impact on our future, AI or human foolishness? While
much is debated about the former, little is said about the latter, which, in my
opinion, will carry more weight. As evidence of this, debates emerge around the
Declaration on Future Generations and, especially, around the Global Digital
Compact, the documents with the most decisive future orientation that have been
negotiated at the United Nations for a long time.
Regarding
the first of these, a third content revision was put under a silence procedure
on August 16, and notes
of disagreement on all its parts, including the preamble and the
"guiding principles," were received. Member States presented observations in over 30
paragraphs, including in 10 of the 13 commitments contained in the
Declaration's draft, affecting issues such as ending structural inequities,
adopting policies to achieve gender equity, protecting the rights of Indigenous
peoples, adopting sustainable economic growth strategies that combat poverty,
and prioritize actions to address critical environmental challenges, among
others.
Most
worrisome, the wording of the Declaration shows a lack of precision regarding
measures to be adopted, which translates into disagreement on how to include
commitments posed in general terms.
Focusing on
the Global Digital Compact, its fourth revision was put under a silence
procedure on August 27, and three days later, the co-facilitators announced
that multiple States had broken the silence on more than 20 paragraphs. The
states that have expressed the most objections have been Syria, Iran, Russia,
Venezuela, Nicaragua, and India. The question of whether or not to incorporate
language around the possibility of applying unilateral coercive measures has
been inserted into this document and presents a major problem for the
co-facilitators who, as with the Declaration on Future Generations, cannot
overcome general statements, lacking essential elements that would allow their
subsequent transformation into concrete actions.
There will
be no shortage of those who will soon speak of the UN's inability to achieve
results, its inefficiency, and its bureaucracy tied to past times. However, we
should remember that the UN is and will always be what its member states allow
it to be. No more and no less, and today, incapable of transforming the
present, world leaders also appear overwhelmed by the task of laying the
foundations to imagine a different future.
Santiago
Ramón y Cajal (1852-1934), one of the fathers of what we now call neuroscience,
is attributed with saying that "infinite classes of fools are known; the
most deplorable is that of the chatterboxes determined to demonstrate that they
have talent," a group that is growing on social networks, but also among
government offices where decisions are made that are building our shared
future.
