Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Oxford Mountain School.
My name is Charles Country. I'm the director, and I'm delighted to welcome you to what is going to be a really splendid event on the.
We are first going to have a talk by Achim Steiner and I can has an extraordinary CV.
He was a student here in Worcester and then amongst many things has been Secretary General of the World Commission on Dams,
Director General of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme.
And then this sounds a comedown,
but it actually is the most senior position administrator of the UN Development Programme and Vice Chair of the UN Sustainable Development Group.
Now, in between being head of you and EPA and you and DP, Achim was Director of the Oxford Martin School for far too short a period,
but during that, during that time in 2016, 2017, he did an enormous amount of good for the school, of which we are still hugely grateful.
So I come is going to talk first and then is going to be in conversation with Valerie Amos.
And Valerie has an equally astonishing CV.
She is a British Labour Party politician and diplomat, diplomat and is currently a member of the House of Lords,
Baroness Amos and Master of University College here in Oxford.
Previously, she's been Secretary of State for International Development,
and the Blair Government has been the British High Commissioner to Australia and Under-Secretary-General
for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordination at the UN and Vice Chancellor.
So as as well. So I'm going to invite I come on the stage and for the latter part of the of the event,
I'm going to hand over to my friend Andrew Thomson to chair and he is Professor of Global and Imperial History here,
and in the past has been the executive Chair of one of our research research councils,
the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and he did an astounding job in leading the JCR at the UK's Global Challenge Research Fund,
and we're delighted that he is one of the leaders of the Oxford Martin School programme in changing global orders so as not.
No more ado over to you. I can. Thank you so much, Charles, for this warm welcome.
And what a privilege to be back in this beautiful room, but also in the wonderful Oxford Martin School and and the University of Oxford.
And I'm very grateful that I can do so together with Professor Andrew Thompson,
who will also moderate our discussion that evening, particularly in the company of Baroness Valerie Amos, my dear friend Valerie,
who shares some of that journey of her life with my experience also of trying to be an advocate
for multilateralism in a time when we often feel like we're losing faith in multilateralism.
And so I want to thank, again the Oxford Martin School for giving me an opportunity to be here tonight.
And I want to warn you, perhaps a little bit I'm not trying to give you a traditional lecture this evening because frankly,
we live in a moment in time that is so disrupted and so distressed that I think simple answers to complex moments in history rarely land.
Well, my intention, my in this ends request to have a chance to share some ideas with you tonight therefore is more an exploration.
And it's an exploration that seeks to go deeper into the cause of a malaise that we often associate with institutions the United Nations government,
the Bretton Woods system. And you may pick whichever institution that in a sense has evolved over the last 30, 50 or 100 years in one form or another.
Is being questioned in today's world, whether by citizens, whether by the experts, by academics.
And therefore, let me also preface my remarks.
This is not an exploration in defence of any particular institution, but rather a plea to not get stuck with the symptoms play out,
but rather go into a deeper exploration of what is it that has led us to this moment.
And when I say this moment,
I in a way want to use the lens of security and insecurity as a way of reflecting on something that I think transcends institutional reform,
a particular environmental or social shock, and actually question a paradigm that has dominated the sense of security.
And the answer that leaders, governments, the powerful, give to citizens when they want to assure them about the perceived sense of insecurity.
And in particular, I want to question the established notion of national security.
And while the title, in a sense juxtaposition, sees two human security versus national security,
it is not so much the juxtaposition in a contradictory sense,
but rather trying to challenge a narrow definition of national security and all that it entails.
As a way of answering to the great challenges of our time.
And where better to do this? And in the Oxford Martin School that addresses itself to the great challenges of the 21st century.
And I will do, therefore, in my presentation tonight,
an attempt to try and quickly look through the lens of the Anthropocene at that
universal sustainability challenges that we face in this moment in history,
but also link it to the phenomena of inequality, of injustice, of the sense of unfairness that has become so pervasive in our societies.
So when the Anthropocene meets inequality, societies very quickly can fall apart.
And in so doing, I hope that I can sow the seeds of a conversation that that notion of human security,
which is less about territoriality but more of people and the planet,
and therefore the consequential implications of that for how we become more secure or less secure.
I think, at least in many respects, become fundamentally different in the options in the answers that this presents.
I'll quickly touch on three great transitions that I in my daily work as head of the United Nations Development Program,
have been observing for a number of years through the lens of energy transitions,
transitions in financing our financial system and also of technology and innovation,
and will end up in just providing a few directional shifts, I think,
in the way that if we were to embrace a broader perspective on how to make the world more secure,
what would be some of the pathways that we should pay more attention to?
So let me quickly move forward and say in 2022, the Collins dictionary deemed the word perma crisis word of the year.
And, you know, whether you call it perma crises, public crises, crises, insecurity.
What I want to focus on tonight is that we live in a moment in time when people across the world
have a greater sense of insecurity than at any time in which we have been able to cope with,
so to speak, to assess public opinion. And this is surprising.
In one sense because. Even before the pandemic.
That sense of insecurity, uncertainty about the future had already become very manifest in many countries across the world.
Develop developing industrialised small island developing states.
A growing sense of uncertainty about the future was beginning to define the perception of citizens,
whether it was about whether your children in the next generation would have the opportunities that you wanted them to have.
The things that you took for granted that things would always get better with every generation, which was really the post-war generation,
perception of progress suddenly was fundamentally questioned, and in many ways it was both a subjective.
Perception, but increasingly morphed also into a collective perception.
Look at the polarisation of societies.
Look at the new fringes, so to speak, in the political spectrum that have formed and then begun to take centre stage.
And in that context, very much the nation state, the sovereign state that is answerable to its citizens,
but actually increasingly contested also in its authority,
has become increasingly under pressure in explaining how it actually fulfils its fundamental duty to its citizens,
which is to not only make them more secure, but also enable them to thrive as citizens, as people, as the generation that lives.
And this is perhaps the strange thing. We are a generation that lives at the most extraordinary of times in terms of total wealth,
in monetary terms, higher today than ever in human history.
More technology, more science, higher life expectancy.
I'm describing to one of the elements of then delving into that notion of living in the age of the Anthropocene.
Some of you may still think this is a maybe, you know, concept that needs to mature.
To some, it's a geological era. To others, it's a philosophical discourse.
To me, it is a metaphor that I have gladly taken up,
because what is so powerful about applying this notion of moving from the Holocene
into the Anthropocene is in fact to realise that we live in a different reality.
Existentially speaking, humans today are increasingly defining how natural systems function,
our imprint and footprint on the planet within geological terms or in biosphere terms
and atmospheric terms is literally reached a level where we are the dominant species.
We are defining the future in planetary terms through the actions we collectively take and
through the lens of anybody who looks at that broader environmental spectrum of indicators,
whether it is our climate change, IPCC scenarios,
whether it is the planetary boundaries research, whether it is much of what the Oxford Mountain School has also curated over many years,
understanding environmental change within a both economic, ecological and societal context.
There is no question that we are driving ourselves at the moment to various points of, if you can call it collapse precipice crises,
but clearly a spectrum of unsustainability that has become increasingly existential,
not just hypothetical, not just a scientific or statistical phenomenon.
There are people today who are already abandoning their homes for perhaps hundreds, if not thousands of years because of sea level rise.
There are peoples across the world that live perhaps in these agricultural zones where
400 to 500 millimetres of rain a year is the bottom line to being able to survive there.
A 10 to 20% change means the end of your ability to survive as you have.
And then we have all the phenomena of natural disasters and the consequences that this entails in terms of human suffering,
loss of infrastructure and ultimately damage to our economies.
So living in the age of the Anthropocene, I think is today a way of understanding the magnitude,
the scale and the complexity of changes that we are causing to fundamental life support systems on the planet.
Now, much of this is neither new to you.
And some of you in this room are leading world experts on this.
So let me not dwell on this further.
What is the context between what you are researching and how people perceive their future to be defined by the knowledge
that we today throw into the arena of public debate and policymaking and when the Anthropocene meets inequality.
We suddenly begin to understand that in the way our societies respond to sometimes these very
fundamental changes in the environment actually is not necessarily a linear kind of model.
There are societies that survive extreme environmental shocks via droughts, floods,
earthquakes or other such phenomena and have developed such a resilience as a body politic or as a society that they can actually,
in a sense, work their way through that shock.
And then there are other societies that with the same maybe scale and nature of that shock begin to fall apart.
And go into crisis. And whether you look at it through the lens of sustainability or lack of sustainability,
environmental crisis or inequality, these two in many contexts heavily today coal crises.
Context, conflict countries. Are actually illustrations of convergence of these two phenomena.
And that's why I use the phrase When the Anthropocene meets inequality,
you suddenly get to not resilience anymore, being able to sustain us, but vulnerability.
And out of that moment, fear, insecurity.
And you in the piece Human Development Report a couple of years ago as part of our human security work,
also conducted a poll across the world to try and determine how deep is that sense of insecurity.
In six out of seven people responded that they actually felt insecure about the future.
Now what happens when you feel insecure? You become worried.
You develop fear out of fear. In a sense, begins to emerge.
A narrative of who is responsible for this? Who put me in this position.
And you have all been witness over the last few years about how polarisation,
populism and the kind of narratives about our society going the wrong direction have increasingly led to paralysis,
to conflict, and sometimes to extraordinary regression in even fundamental human rights being recognised.
Because suddenly there is a group of people that you blame for your condition.
Populism is extraordinary at feeding off fear.
In fact, it ferments fear, and by fermenting it, it actually thrives.
And I could not give you many examples, but often they are very subtle.
Again, I would say this is not only after COVID, it is not just now.
Think back, just five or six years, we had riots in Paris.
We had riots in the United States. We had riots in Hong Kong.
A bus ticket price rise in Chile led to the collapse of a political order, a constitutional crisis.
The religion in Paris again, seemingly on the back of a sensible climate related policy shift in taxation led to a rebellion.
Germany's political spectrum right now is falling apart over heating technology for housing.
What on earth is going on in our societies? Because of our ability to actually tackle these threats is increasingly compromised.
And I want to go back to that level of what the Anthropocene allows us to see,
which is a planetary community, a series of life support systems that are planetary in nature.
But the actions of one person, one nation, 1 billion people in one part of the world fundamentally effects.
You could say compromises the ability of 7 billion other people living all over the planet being changed and compromised.
And yet at this moment of understanding how we as a family of 8 billion people almost today in the world.
Are changing the future of what happens on the planet.
Our notion of how to respond to these threats is, I think, completely out of sync with the nature of what we now need to tackle.
Our response is still rooted in territoriality in that Westphalian notion and boundary.
And I were just talking about this of the sovereign state.
Even though there are so many who contest from within already the authority of that state in international relations, in multilateralism,
in addressing climate change, terrorism, cyber security, the nation state becomes the defining negotiating authority on behalf of citizens.
And understanding how that phenomenon of polarisation.
Polemics. Nationalism.
Is beginning to paralyse us in terms of actually being able to work with one another is in part derives from that notion of national security,
because what happens next is national security by definition implies that the enemy is outside.
That your threat is from the other, be it your neighbour, be it some other phenomenon called maybe globalisation.
You can choose many different narratives over the last few years in how we have conducted the discourse about threats to our future.
But national security. Define in a nutshell, in a narrow sense.
Has led us to a point where our ability to respond to the great threats to national security.
Ironically, of today, I'm missing the point. Climate change, pandemics and again here in the Oxford Martin School in the university,
a great deal of research about not only the medical scientific response to the pandemic,
but also what has the pandemic taught us about preparedness,
about how societies need to cooperate with one another in order to deal with that next pandemic.
Cyber threats. That universe of digitalisation, artificial intelligence connectivity has created entirely new threats.
We are struggling both at national level with regulation, but even more.
And what kind of cooperation platform will they use in a world where literally cyber threats could turn off an entire electricity grid?
Bringing the entire financial system to a halt in seconds.
That is the nature of the threats we are now facing. And I will mention also mass migration, not because migration itself is a threat.
But in order to address the drivers of migration and particularly mass migration.
We need to begin to recognise the scale at which we need to cooperate with one another as nations with very different means in a very unequal world,
in order to not let the symptom become the focus of political responses.
Migrants become the enemy rather than poverty being the thread that actually explains what is happening in our world.
Bad governance, which drives people out of their own country, becomes the explanation.
And yet what we focus on is declaring sometimes entire regions, entire continents as enemies to our future.
So instead of focusing on the threat scenario alone,
on declaring the enemy outside our countries and beginning to turn inwards with
the territoriality concept of national security becoming even more dominant again,
oddly enough, its borders, its walls, its in a sense, keeping people out or keeping threats outside of our country.
When really the great threats of our time. Require us to focus on collaboration, on identifying shared interests, despite our differences,
on looking at partnerships and ultimately being able and retaining the capacity to act globally.
So human security versus national security is, in the first instance, an attempt to challenge that notion of how we protect our security.
It puts people and planet at the centre of this narrative.
Instead of territoriality that you defend with armies. And let me be very clear here.
There are moments when the traditional concern of security and defence will still continue to be maybe a weapon of self-defence.
But look at how many theatres to use a military expression we deployed today,
a security and military approach to solve problems that have completely different origins and therefore are not solvable through that kind of defence.
Military Security Response. The failure in the Sahel of basically almost a decade of trying to deal with the disintegration of nation states,
but also the emergence of terrorist movements. We have spent billions in trying to support for the G5, the Sahel,
an alliance essentially a securitised response to a much deeper crisis in governance,
in the failure of the state and essentially in a region that economically is simply is not proposing any viable future to millions of people that.
But look at also some of the great powers. Some of the greatest powers in post Second World War history.
For all the expenditure that they have invested in armies and weaponry and modern defence systems.
When they actually go to war. How successful have they been?
Maybe sometimes it is the deterrence that is the most important part, but it certainly isn't the military mind.
And yet, I would argue that if you look at security and the way the concept of security has evolved over centuries,
and forgive me for giving you three abbreviations, but I tried to locate today's moment also in the traditional security paradigm.
So for the better part of probably a thousand years, we relied on military assured power.
Map. Looking at the territory, looking at standing up armies, defending,
using power to then extend territoriality, the empires, the conflicts that have happened.
Then comes the nuclear age and the famous mutually assured destruction becomes a driving paradigm in terms of thinking about security.
Not that we didn't have any wars since 1945, as many of you know better than anyone.
But that idea of deterrence, mutually assured destruction in the nuclear age literally dominated the way we looked at that
notion of security and securing national security for the better part of probably seven,
eight decades. What I would like to propose to you today is that even in this nuclear age,
we have certainly seen just in the last couple of years even that notion being put into question,
or you might say it was only rhetorical, but it is a threat.
In fact, just now there are threats of both, you know, targeting nuclear installations, not just in the Ukraine, for that matter.
Deploying weaponry in a nuclear age is suddenly considered by some to be a not impossible scenario.
But that's not my main preoccupation. What I would like to propose is we need to move from that military issue assured power scenario rooted
in territoriality and defence and even offensive expansion of territory through this age of nuclear,
mutually assured destruction. Thinking into one where we actually need to get to a mutually assured survival paradigm
in terms of security because that is the logical consequence of looking at our current,
let's say, state of geopolitics.
In the age of the Anthropocene and in the way that we can avoid making competition instead of cooperation, the driving force.
And look carefully at how competition has become.
The most polite version of dealing with rivalries among systems in the way that we
can not allow national interest to prevent us from identifying shared interests,
because also multilateralism, we very often expect to have shared norms in order to arrive at shared interests.
Let us be very realistic here. The United Nations does not exist because nations are united.
After 1945. It was a hyper pragmatic step to think about how do we create both space norms,
fora and platforms where we could intermediate between nation states that will have deep disagreements,
different norms, different interests, and build at least a critical mass of shared interests in order to avoid another cataclysmic world war.
Right now, much of what is defining the international discourse is not looking for shared interests.
It's looking for differences, for competition, for framing the other as the constraint to one's own future and success.
This is delusional. In the 21st century. And we need to have this discussion because we all become prisoners of this paradigm,
because it locks us in as nation states, as citizens, as economies.
And therefore, I want to plead with you that reframing that security paradigm is one way in which we need to re-examine what it is that defines,
let's say, the scope for shared interest, for collaboration and cooperation, despite our differences.
And I think this is not just hypothetical in here.
Just very briefly, a reference to three domains in which I have personally witnessed and observed this.
Look at the energy transition. For three decades.
We had to listen to experts, economists,
scientists and engineers that essentially we would stay with fossil fuels forever if not for the next 100 years.
And climate change, you know, being a threat, but it couldn't be addressed through a transition to cleaner energy.
And yet here we are. We are actually in the midst of an energy revolution.
And remarkably, I would still venture to say, as I did four or five years ago also in this hall here,
that for the first time in the last perhaps 500 years, humanity may actually move into an age of energy abundance.
And remember how many wars we have fought over securing our energy supplies over the last 100, 150 years.
And that energy revolution is happening and it is in part going to succeed or
fail based on whether it becomes something that everybody can participate in.
Because climate change will not be solvable if 2 to 3 billion people are locked into a fossil fuel age, energy,
infrastructure and economy by the other 3 to 4 billion people who are trying to move towards a low carbon and decarbonised energy future.
So collaboration is fundamental. And yet look at the contradiction that we are witnessing for over ten years now.
Copenhagen Climate cop promise of $100 billion in order to co-invest in the ability of poorer countries to transition faster.
Fast forward to 2023. We still haven't been able to mobilise $100 billion from the wealthiest nations of the world in order
to facilitate a more rapid transition amongst poorer countries who have very little responsibility.
You know, the arguments for climate change, and yet we are not capable of doing that.
This is, by the way, happening in a world that, as I said, the beginning is wealthier than ever before,
notwithstanding short term shocks and challenges that we face.
And let me just remind you that total wealth in the world today exceeds probably $450 trillion a year.
The ability for us to co-invest with one another,
and particularly for wealthier countries to co-invest in an accelerated energy transition in the global South,
for instance, on the continent like Africa, where there are now close to 1.4 billion people and 600 million still don't have access to electricity.
By mid-century, Africa may reach close to 2 billion people.
That means a billion more people one way or another are going to join the global energy matrix.
Not investing in that continent's ability against the backdrop of energy poverty, that crisis that again, has emerged as a major constraint.
Is, to put it very bluntly, self-defeating and foolish.
But that is, in financial terms, the metric of investing in one another that we face in climate change right now.
And I can take that discussion further through finance. The Global Debt Crisis.
I have been watching the G20 now through COVID, through the pandemic, through the last two years of,
you know, rapid increase in inflation rates, then interest rate hikes.
More and more developing countries.
And there are well over 50 developing nations right now that are either a step away or already in a situation of debt distress.
Now to the big finance ministers of the world.
Those are countries that are not necessarily material to the macro fiscal stability or prudential stability of our financial system.
They are developing country economies. They don't register on the global GDP.
But you know that 40% of the world's poorest people live in these 52 countries.
Should we then be surprised if they suddenly, out of sheer despair and the need to survive,
give up or become radicalised or look for other places in which they can actually look for a livelihood and to survive.
These decisions are connected. So once again, we need to go beyond just the reform of, you know, international financial institutions.
We need to go to the core question of how do we incentivise a financial system that transacts a wealth of $450 trillion?
In actually having that wealth deployed towards securing the future rather than as it so often does today, locking in the past in the present.
This is an existential contradiction in the way our financial markets in the current regulatory environment.
Actually function. The story is always much more complex.
I don't have time for that because I want to come to an end. Just the last example.
Technology. Innovation. The age of digitalisation.
Do we really think out competing one another on the digital curve of development futures is a wise strategy.
You win the Peace. Human Development Board of three years ago identified climate change and digitalisation as this two
single most important variables that will define whether inequality increases or inequality decreases.
Digitalisation is going to change every aspect of development.
And we are already witnessing it right now.
Add to that air quantum computing, that whole universe that is opening up will change every single citizen's life.
The more we neglect helping developing countries to be on that bus of digitalisation,
both in terms of building digital ecosystems, but also capacity skills,
the entrepreneurial infrastructure to be able to partake in this so that school
leavers are digitally literate today and can actually make digitalisation work,
perhaps even as a pivot to faster development. How are we going to secure that if essentially we are now talking about.
A rivalry between systems. We are going to have two Internets. Are we going to have two fundamental charters of human rights and data protection?
Is the future. As the Secretary-General said a few years ago in his address to the General Assembly,
really one of two systems defining everything that happens with something that could be unifying to the world, convergence instead of divergence.
That is at the heart of understanding why human security opens up a broader lens on how to think about our future.
Not to let a narrow definition of national security lock us into responses that
actually are at the heart of much of what we're seeing unravel today around the world.
The narrative is not a zero sum game of the future.
And one of the problems that we also in the United Nations and Valerie, you were one's emergency relief coordinator.
We are bound by our mandates to often bring to the world bad news.
But where we perhaps are going wrong is that we are not resetting the narrative in terms of it's not a zero sum game.
But there are opportunities.
And there are extraordinary opportunities that also emerge out of these fundamental transitions that we have to pass through.
Our ability to leverage that entire wealth that I refer to in securing our future is not some remote prospect.
Otherwise, we wouldn't already have countries like Kenya, Uruguay and others who today produce over 90% of their electricity with renewables.
Why did they succeed? There are divisions in the positive sense that should teach us a lot more about what is possible
and challenge the orthodoxy of the current geopolitical narrative that defines the future.
Essentially only in a box where if one wins, the other one has to lose.
That equation is going to make that Anthropocene scenario worse.
And perhaps most concerning to me,
it will actually make us lose this extraordinary opportunity of living in an age of extraordinary possibility of opportunity.
As I say, 30 to 40 years from now, energy abundance.
We could eradicate poverty on our planet with just $37 billion of targeted investments.
This is what McKinsey has just published. You can go to many other reports and.
The capacity to mobilise wealth, knowledge, science, technology through a different paradigm of shaping the future,
I think is going to be fundamental to a more secure world and ultimately our ability to live together with perhaps soon 10
billion people on this planet without actually destroying the very foundations that we need in order to thrive and survive.
Thank you so much. Thank you very much, Kim.
I have been reminded before doing anything else to tell you that you're all on Candid Camera.
In other words, your we're being recorded and this is all live streamed.
You will all get the opportunity to ask some questions in 10 minutes.
But beforehand, I think I will perhaps restrict myself to two questions for each of you.
And the first is more related to your career trajectories.
And then the second, I want to come back to the talk. I can you just talked about the importance of mobilising not just science, but, you know,
the whole knowledge base and technology in terms of the future of human security.
You've obviously, as Charles said, both spent quite a lot of time in senior roles in the UN following.
You also had a very senior role in the UK government as Secretary of State for International Development.
But you've also spent a lot of time, perhaps, you know, less commonly in leadership roles in higher education.
So as and now, you know, you were here for a year. What people in the audience might not know is that you've both taken a really
strong personal interest in improving the cooperation between those two worlds.
You were both great champions of that Global Challenges Research Fund that Charles generously referred to.
And so the first question is, is why do you think that it's so important for research to inform public debate and public policy?
And based on your experience of working both in international organisations on higher education,
what sort of things do you think could be done to improve the interface arrangement staff?
Well, first of all, thank you. You've given us a lot to think about.
I think we we accept that. Policy can be informed by research.
We accept it very easily in the sciences. I think we accept it much less easily when we look at arts, humanities and social sciences.
And it's partly because I think that in academia there's a kind of sense that we don't want to be led by a political agenda.
But the reality is that, I mean, and you talked about the work we did together on Global challenges.
I mean, that really forced collaboration between UK universities and universities in the Global South.
We were trying to think, you know, how we could work collaboratively, collaboratively on the big global challenges.
And, you know, for example, if as a world we said there are five big things that we really,
really want to address through a policy and academic lens, we would be doing the world a huge favour.
I mean, when I think about when I was Secretary of State for International Development, you know,
the UK very much was at the centre of thought leadership on development issues and much of the research,
the collaboration that went on across the world to help to shape our policy.
And we've seen many examples since then, but we have lost that cutting edge and I would like to see that restored.
And it's partly about evidence and data, but it's also partly about history.
You know, I remember all the time, you know, I lived through a moment in government, which was around Iraq,
and people kept saying, if you'd only looked at the history, we would never have been up where we are today.
So I think learning there's crucial learning about how that learning informs what we do in the future.
I think I can. I'm.
I can only agree with how Valerie just ended up in one of the discussions that Andrew and I have had over the last couple of years,
and that has become even more central to my appreciation of the importance of research, which is different from, you know, developing a policy.
Ideally, policy development is informed by research,
but I have been intrigued by this phenomenon I just described whose the $100 billion in climate change.
What explains the sheer. Inability of people to make the right decision at a moment when everything is telling you that this is the way to go forward.
And so I went back a little and I share this with a few.
And so I started asking myself, were there instances in history that I can remember or understand?
Where decisions were taken that went against this cynical notion that, you know,
countries only act in their self-interest and the public will not support a government that invests in good things to do.
And, you know, it took me back to the Marshall Plan. I asked myself what happened at that moment when the United States its president.
At a moment where really it had just gone through the Second World War, lost thousands of its citizens.
The public sentiment towards Europe and Germany certainly was not one of suddenly saying, let's have a marshall Plan.
And, you know, it is interesting because this is remarkable.
I mean, literally a US president persuaded.
His taxpayers that they should invest $136 billion that was in today's money,
the equivalent sum that America invests in the reconstruction of Europe within a couple of years,
or having fought the most brutal world war with Germany.
Now, those are moments that we need to understand better, because this argument and I come back to were, you know,
having studied economics at Oxford also, I spend quite a number of years trying to rediscover my faith in economics,
not because of what I was taught here, but rather in trying to understand how does economics become so orthodox sometimes
that it is able to lock down the most common sense and logic of decisions?
You know, the pandemic taught us a lot, certainly the laws of gravity about deficits, about what governments could deploy, just went poof.
And did our societies implode? I mean, our economies on their knees will not, because we invested hopefully a lot of it sensibly in coping with COVID.
And there are other examples. I mean, unification of Germany.
The total investment by West German taxpayers over a period of roughly 25 years in unification,
ie helping that other part of Germany become integral to a unified Germany was $1 trillion.
Roughly $1 trillion. You know what our total aid budget is in today's world,
but the wealthiest part of the world invests in essentially co-investing in the development of others.
It's somewhere around 170, $180 billion a year.
So one country in unification capable of mobilising $1,000,000,000,000 and yet the entire world not.
And that's where I think the relationship with research and universities and academia becomes so important because you can sometimes remind us of,
you know, really by studying very carefully in the social sciences why certain things happened,
and then all the way to obviously the frontlines of technology and science that become the enablers of a different.
Age of possibility. And where there's the vaccines now, whether it's digital technology, whether it's photovoltaics.
And the list is endless. And so for me, particularly and I want to pay credit to James Martin,
because I think in the way Charles said he conceived of this school embedded in the university, full of brilliant research.
And yet so often, if you don't bring that research together and you don't make it relevant to the social and economic realities of the day.
Some of the most brilliant research may only stay in a laboratory or end up only benefiting some.
My daily work as head of humanity is all about inclusion and in a sense,
avoiding governments falling into the trap of leaving too many behind and therefore exclusion.
And this is relevant to thinking about how technology works, as to how we build social safety nets or we invest in education.
Right. Can I? Because I think it's really about how interconnectedness and interdisciplinarity connects with political leadership.
Marshall Plan would not have happened. Without strong political leadership.
So you need this. It's that connectivity between those three things.
I think I'm just going to restrict myself to one question about the talk and I'm going to open it up.
And I mean, in summary, you talked about an unprecedented moment in human history.
Human activity being the dominant force shaping the planet, race against time, the need for systemic and transformational change.
I think what I'd like to press you on a little bit, both of you, is how is the climate crisis going to require the UN to change?
Not a allow that answer. But if we just think of the different ways the U.N. is going to get challenged in terms of you alluded to,
a lot of them came mobilising the necessary levels of funding which are going to allow developing countries to transform their energy usage,
decarbonise their economies, deal with resulting shocks in some ways.
And these events are with us now. They're not in the future, I think 2022, 81 water related weather and climate disasters in Asia alone.
You also referred, at least in passing, to a UN architecture with a pillar of the UN, which is the product of a post 1945 world.
Is the UN configured now in a way that it will need to be configured to respond to this climate crisis?
And then just thinking a little bit about both of your worlds of running specialised agencies that are
going to have to have the agility to move from prevention to mitigation to resilience to rehabilitation,
recovery all the way back again. Is the UN ready?
Let's start this time. Till I write that you can you can then provide a real perspective.
Let me begin by saying the United Nations is not, in a sense, an entity in its own right.
We often think of the United Nations, you know, the headquarters in New York of UNDP or the W.H.O.
We always have to remember that in its existence it is actually a federation of member states.
And this is not an excuse, but it is in part an explanation as to why the UN cannot act in its own right to a,
let's say, conclusion that would sanction the country.
We have created some very few and tenuous moments when the UN can actually sanction the Security Council being,
in a sense, the forum within which that is to happen.
But, you know, everybody stares at the Security Council and concludes that the UN is useless because there is no consensus in the Security Council.
But what you see in the Security Council is live drama, it's reality TV and we don't recognise it.
We think somehow this is another universe and the UN is some sort of empowered saviour.
No, it's not.
It is a tenuous attempt to try and create a place and a space within which we can continue to transact our differences without resorting to guns,
bombs, missiles and ultimately the risk of nuclear war.
And so I often argue that. The UN on the climate change issue has been remarkable in what it has actually done,
because while every country has approached the climate change issue from its narrow self-interest,
it was the United Nations over 30 years ago that established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,
creating the space within which scientists,
many of whom from this university, could actually bring the science without being censored, controlled or otherwise influenced.
And remember, science does get influenced by government or constrained to a global public audience.
Over 30 years, the IPCC has allowed us to understand the full magnitude of what increasingly detailed
steps we were learning about the nature of climate change and what we could do about it.
Then we established a framework convention. Many people think it is a setback.
You know, watching every year this drama play out.
But if we didn't have that, imagine would you be better off because right now, every country, once a year,
in the glaring light of public attention, actually has to explain what it is doing or not doing.
None of this is panacea. But the UN is trying to do the maximum it can to advance action on climate change.
But here I go back to my talk.
If the paradigm with which we approach those negotiations is defined by national narrow self-interest, then national security.
And therefore the inability to even invest a little bit in one another's accelerate ability to advance who is actually at fault here.
And that is not to negate the fact that the architecture.
Of the United Nations as it exists today, is a post-Cold War product.
It was a completely different era. So there is a need for significant and fundamental reform in the U.N., but form follows function.
Let's agree on what we need the U.N. for in the 21st century,
and then let's reorganise it around those needs rather than do what is so often the default solution.
Let's try and reform a little bit the institution. In the absence of going to the fundamental question of what legitimises,
the institution authorises that institution and therefore drives that institution.
Yeah. I mean I would I it's it's hugely bureaucratic and difficult to get things done, but you can get things done.
And I think that we have to remember that, you know, it's an important place where you can convene.
It is a place where if you have courage as an individual or as a group of individuals, you can make change happen.
I always say to people, you know, if you're going to make a difference in the UN,
the first question you should ask is where is the rule that says, I can't do this because somebody will always tell you you can't do it.
But it's a rules based organisation. So is there a rule that says if there isn't actually you can work together with people to make it happen?
You know, we look to the UN to be a kind of moral compass for the world.
It's not a road we can actually take on because as the King says, you know, this is a 190 member states and,
you know, with no difference in power between them and with the ability to stop things happening.
And we focus on the stop things happening rather than focus on, you know, where can we work with agility?
What are the examples of things where different organisations of the members of
the United Nations are working well in the country and making a difference?
How can we use those examples to make change elsewhere?
So it's almost a stealth agenda as opposed to the agenda that we see when we look at the UN and we look at the UN,
It's always about the political framework and yet the kinds of things that Akeem is talking about,
climate change and everything else require a very different kind of approach.
So we're going to open up to Q&A now, and we've got 20 minutes on the show to the question is the more you can ask and the.
Thank you very much, Andrew Hurrell. The Anthropocene meets inequality and you talked on inequality and we could talk much more on inequality.
But just on the other side, surely one of the great long term changes has been the decline of political inequality,
in the sense the capacity of a small group of Western countries to run the world, The decline in coercive military forces.
You talked about the. The diffusion of political mobilisation.
Again, some of the examples you gave, even the distribution globally of different patterns of wealth.
All of that sort of points inequality in a different direction.
And I wonder if you could say a little bit more about that, how the Anthropocene Meets Inequality Meets Changing Patterns of equality.
You would like to start with that. Thanks to everyone.
I can only say absolutely. I mean, I think embedded in what I tried to sort of put a first focus on is also this changing
nature in which we often refer to it as geopolitics and the emergence of China.
You know, the the decline of old although traditional colonial powers with all the systems of influence, the emergence of new elites.
Also, it's, you know, in the digital age, we have seen an entirely new class of entrepreneurs emerge,
including in some of the countries that traditionally would have always been seen as followers and latecomers to technology frontiers.
Digital has created extraordinary rupture here.
But I think in some ways the risk that we face is that even in that changing pattern of inequality.
If you take just a US-China relationship today.
I'm on both sides of that relationship.
There are those who are trying to invest in. A model of cooperation and coexistence despite different systems.
And in both of these countries, there are strong political forces.
I actually believe that the other can never be a partner and therefore distance, boundaries, borders, rupture becomes a discourse.
And this is a contest, maybe boundary. You might also, you know, with your experience of this first hand comment on this.
So I think to me, the fact that, you know, wealth distribution, industrialisation,
etc. have shifted does not in itself necessarily change the nature of the risk we have to deal with.
In some ways it has compounded it. I mean, I'm I'm normally a very optimistic person, but I have to say that when I look around the world and look at,
for example, the changing patterns of, well, I mean, what always strikes me is in whose hands?
And actually, yes, we have more wealth, but actually a lot more of it is concentrated in fewer hands than in more hands.
And I think that this creates that deepening inequality, I think has led to so much of what we're seeing today.
And in a way, you know,
I feel very strongly that we we could almost have predicted the collapse of
liberal democracy when you looked at not only those changing patterns of wealth,
but also the ways in which, you know, power and influence are being exercised across the world and linked to that,
the ways in which the kind of threats and fears that you talked about how those in the hands of particular
political players have been used as a way of actually increasing that sense of powerlessness across the world.
So on the one hand, while I want to be optimistic and I and while, you know,
I very much look to the kinds of social movements that we are seeing as a way of, you know, pushing a kind of different form of political power,
I do look around at, you know, what is happening in certain regions, the way that they engage with each other,
the kind of polarisation that we're seeing in regions across the world.
And then you talk about, you know, China USA.
I do worry about what is the next phase of this going to be under the pressure?
In the course of the last few years, we've done quite a lot of work together on international humanitarian response.
What do you see the scope being for our less northern and Western dominated system in the part of the UN that you were responsible for?
Well, it's something that when I was at the UN, we we started to work on a lot.
Actually, that work has continued, but it was challenging because the sense of, you know, what are the values that determined humanitarian action,
how those values were being challenged by new actors coming out of countries like Turkey, the UAE and others, you know.
It was about redefining not just the narrative, but the way in which we were doing humanitarian response.
So you have to be prepared to be to have a degree of humility and to be challenged, which we are not necessarily prepared to do.
And I think we have seen, particularly in the context of humanitarian action and some of the crises we've seen within humanitarian organisations,
you know, things, sexual exploitation, for example,
these these are challenges that have come about partly because in my view,
we have seen ourselves as the only people who can be arbiters of a particular kind of way of doing humanitarian response.
So we have to be open to to challenge, but we also have to be open to new players to be first in the back of the room.
If we've got a question for towards the back, just the gentleman on the edge of the row there.
Thank you so much. I just wanted to ask, how do we take care about vested interest?
Because we have these massive, massive economic systems that are entrenched around energy, around the military, as you suggested.
And how do we must have political will within our society to do that whilst
countering hostile actors who spring at every opportunity they see us being weak?
Thank you. Can I just touch on something that I think is extremely important and what you raised and you spoke about social movements such as now.
I think to me, one of the interesting phenomena that I have observed, you know, in many different countries is that we go through cycles sometimes a,
let's say, progressive agenda that addresses inequality or discrimination or exclusion organises from the ground up.
Social movements don't come from the top down.
They are an expression of citizenry, of engagement, of caring about things.
And, you know, don't fall for this. Hanging over our youth as too cynical.
Nowadays all they do is look at their, you know, smartphone and live in that, you know, stratosphere of the social networks.
You know, just look at the last few years when young people have led extraordinary movements.
But it's a greater great Attenberg, you know, a 14 year old girl with a poster touched a nerve that got millions of young women and girls energised,
not because they emulated Greta Thunberg, but because they suddenly felt empowered to do something.
Look at Sudan, who led the revolution there, which has so tragically become yet again undermined by old forces.
It was young women and youth and, you know, in the Arab Spring, in many parts of that region, young people were leading movements for change.
What I think has become a problem is that in the public policy discourse, we've always had vested interests and power structures, political economy.
I don't need to tell you about this, but you know, from revolutions to social movements,
change has always become possible when societies get organised, even in the most repressive regimes.
And I think what I am observing right now is that, let's say on some of the issues that in the 1970s,
eighties, nineties became rallying cries for reform, progressive legislation.
I think there is to some extent a loss of momentum.
And this became to me particularly clear if you go back for a moment to the United States when you look at how the right,
so to speak in politics spent ten years organising a grassroots.
Conquest of the Republican Party. You begin to understand how it pays off to organise at the grassroots level.
The fascinating story of that neighbourhood Republican Party committee that became the focus of a
very organised effort of getting people elected that would take a far more radical agenda forward.
And within ten years, that neighbourhood committee that the party structures and the powerful didn't even really have on their radar.
Those are, you know, the citizens out there, the Republican Party in the neighbourhood.
You started seeing, you know, one level after another being taken over, electing the next level of officials.
Until you have a Republican Party today that is actually in an existential crisis by virtue of the competing narratives.
And I think in many countries we have underestimated how, again, fed by fear and then nationalism and the narrative of the enemy,
we have actually fuelled the ability in a way for another kind of movement to organise itself.
Now you could say it's just conspiracy to talk in those terms, but I think there are lessons to be learned here.
So my point, very simple.
I think we have to invest again in having citizens believe that they can make a difference and to invest themselves in the political process.
That is how you ultimately, I think, tackle vested interests,
maybe sometimes the hypocritical nature of politics and people also regain some confidence that principles matter.
And you spoke about the United Nations.
I want to remind you also the charter and the Declaration of Human Rights have in part become so devalued or contested,
not because there are many citizens on the planet who would disagree with what was
written in the charter then or what is enshrined in the Declaration of Human Rights.
It is through decades of double standards of hypocrisy and selective application that the very body that is meant to transact on those treaties,
conventions, charters, has become compromised because in the way that it has tried to exercise its
collective custodianship has resulted in sometimes very contradictory outcomes.
I think there's also something about pace and and and speed.
So, you know, we have seen increasingly examples, including here in the UK, where the people are ahead of the curve.
We saw it in relation to Ukraine, for example,
where the government was basically saying said things about refugee flows and
then had to change their minds because of the force of the feeling of people.
Doesn't happen on everything.
But I think what we haven't quite worked out is how the people can then stay in control of that because it becomes co-opted,
because the government wants to stay in power and in charge.
You talked about how it can become co-opted on the right.
It can also become co-opted on on the left.
And so the big challenge for us, I think, is how as radical movements or whatever we want to call it,
how can we maintain that pace and force the kind of transformation that we're wanting to see?
When you have a whole kind of state machinery which is trying to stop that happening.
Charles, I think you had a question from someone outside of the room. Yes.
This is a question from an online person, an online audience.
Just go. Tie my paraphrase slightly and he or she refers back to the fact that we're unable to do a
modern Marshall Plan for climate and the sovereign debt crises in Africa at the moment.
And the question is, is the issue the way we're organising our international financial system?
And if it is, what needs to be changed? Well, many of you will have followed the fact that the World Bank has a new president,
that the IMF has also, you know, a very inspiring leader in Kristalina Georgieva.
And, you know, we, I think at the moment are homing in on our international financial institutions,
in part because there is a great expectation that they can be key to addressing some of these international financing challenges we face.
And that I think we have also seen that in the absence perhaps, and this is where it gets more complicated.
The international financial institutions, whether it's multilateral development banks,
the IMF in their totality, represent a fraction of our international financial system of our global economy.
And I sometimes I'm a bit concerned when you're trying to solve a problem on a scale that far exceeds those institutions financial scope,
such as climate change or poverty reduction, that we have a tendency to default into institutional reform.
Let's all get the World Bank and the multilateral development banks reformed.
The reality right now is that Larry Summers in indexing produced this estimate for the G-20
that we would need around $3 trillion a year to be able to get back on course with this,
to use the sustainable dividend goals in the Paris Agreement.
And before you get a heart attack, it's not $3 trillion of obviously the taxpayers money.
2 trillion mobilised from within countries and economies, 1 trillion mobilised through international co-investment, including private sector.
And when you set that against, first of all, the initial evolution road map for the World Bank,
that leveraging their balance sheet or optimising the leverage as it is called,
they would be able to mobilise an additional 50 billion over ten years with age bunkers.
The new President's plan now the bank is projecting maybe an additional 150 billion over ten years.
And you put these two figures next to each other. I don't have to say anything more.
They are an integral part of the tool kit we have. They are not in themselves The answer to how do we get $450 trillion?
Increasingly invested in the future and in transition rather than in rent seeking economies and cementing and calcifying the economy of yesterday in.
Forgive me, this is a debate that we have to have right now on the back of this extraordinary
moment when oil and gas companies are generating profits without precedent almost.
What is the greatest risk to action on climate change is that they rapidly investors
in precisely the same energy system that will lock us in for the next 30 years.
Just go and take a look at what Exxon and now Shell and BP surprise are actually investing in exploration.
In fossil fuels while downscaling their investments in renewable and even walking away from the net zero commitments.
This is happening as we speak live in the last few weeks in the year 2023, with all the data that we've just had.
Never mind the fact that as you have read also,
Exxon already 30 years ago was producing models that the IPCC took another ten years to be allowed to make public.
So I think we do need to think very carefully about how narrowly defined the scope for action.
I think we do need to rely on the MGP. So I welcome very much how the President of the World Bank and shareholders and of other multilateral
developments are actually trying to increase the volume of concessional finance and lending.
But since they actually are leveraging private capital markets,
the next thing you should also have a look at is how much interest are they
actually charging because concessional finance can mean paying eight interest,
8% interest. Right now if you borrow from the IMF in your most distressed financial moment.
We have embedded in that the just energy transition partnerships,
this idea that in some key countries the wealthier nations will now invest in order to help them phase out coal quicker South Africa,
Indonesia, Vietnam, etc. You suddenly realise when.
Yes, it may be rational to take advantage of this concessional finance.
It is a lower cost of capital. But you're actually asking developing countries yet again to borrow more money in
order to do things faster that they have not been the principal drivers of causing.
So are we.
I was surprised that we are heading towards a cop in Dubai right now that is not only distressed and under stress because of larger geopolitical.
Tensions. But because the contradictions in the way that we were able to leverage and mobilise finance simply do not add up,
particularly for the developing world.
And that's where I think we do need to think very carefully about maximising the role of the multilateral the World Bank's, the World Bank.
But not losing sight of the fact that it is the financial markets, the capital markets,
the people who decide that Africa is not the place they want to invest in.
That is where we need to start changing things, because otherwise we will stay with this phenomenon where Africa last year.
It's not the figure behind the cover that I'm getting right, but some are wrong.
Around 2.5% of total investments in renewables actually landed on the African continent.
This is absurd. When you have a billion people soon being in a position where they only have access to
electricity through fossil fuel or pivot towards a renewable energy infrastructure.
I go back to my kind of old fashioned self in relation to this because the structure of a global economy has changed.
I mean, that Keynes talked about that very clearly. You know, of course we want markets and competition.
But we are seeing, you know, obscene levels of money being made in certain industries.
And we have to think about, you know, do we think that's acceptable in our world going forward?
You know, we're not going to have the equivalent of, you know,
a different kind of Marshall Plan for climate if we don't look at structuring the resourcing of that climate plan in a different kind of way.
It's a great challenge to finish with, as far as I'm aware.
Professor Godfrey isn't of Swiss nationality. But he does hold us to Swiss standards of time.
So we are going to have to wrap up. I think we would have been very fortunate just to have one of you on the stage tonight.
It almost feels slightly greedy to have had both. Yeah, but could we express our appreciation for.