The United Nation’s Pact of the Future Promises Change

The United Nation’s Pact of the Future Promises Change

Elizabeth Denton

Staff Writer 

At the Summit of the Future on September 22, the United Nations (UN) adopted a pact that aims to save global cooperation, promote multilateralism, and fix global issues with a call to action for the nations to uphold their promises.

According to Reuters, the Pact for the Future includes an annex working toward a responsible and sustainable digital future, which was adopted without a vote. The agreement came after nine months of negotiations and pledged a new beginning in multilateralism. The Pact aims to ensure that the UN and other multilateral institutions can deliver a better future, dearly needed in the context of the ongoing wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan, along with lagging climate change mitigation, widespread national debt, and concerns over technology advancement without governance.

The Pact for the Future is a 42-page agreement that the UN Chief challenged leaders of the 193 UN member nations to turn into real action. The Pact was called by UN Secretary-General António Guterres and contains 56 actions on issues including eradicating poverty, mitigating climate change, achieving gender equality, promoting peace, protecting civilians, and reinvigorating the multilateral system, reports The Associated Press.

In the area of peace and security, the Pact is the most progressive and concrete commitment regarding Security Council reforms since the 1960s, the United Nations reports. It includes plans to improve the effectiveness of the Security Council and highlights addressing the under-representation of Africa as a priority. It is also the first multilateral recommitment to nuclear disarmament in over a decade with a clear commitment to eliminating nuclear weapons. In addition, the Pact has an agreement to strengthen international frameworks that govern outer space to prevent an outer space arms race and ensure all countries benefit from the safe and sustainable exploration of outer space. Even more, there are steps to avoid the weaponization and misuse of new technologies, especially in light of new advancements in artificial intelligence, and an affirmation that the laws of war should apply to new technologies.

Regarding sustainable development, the Pact is the UN’s most detailed agreement ever on the need to reform international financial architecture to better represent and serve developing countries. The Pact details the steps of this process by giving developing countries a greater say in the decisions of international financial institutions, mobilizing more financing to help developing countries meet their needs, reviewing the sovereign debt to ensure developing countries can borrow sustainably, and strengthening the global financial safety net through the International Monetary Fund and member states to protect all countries in the event of extreme financial and economic shocks.

The Pact promises to accelerate measures to address climate change through more finance to help countries adapt and invest in renewable energy, improving the measurement of human progress by going beyond GDP to capturing human and planetary well-being and sustainability, consider ways to introduce a global minimum level of taxation on high-net-worth individuals, and confirmation of the need to keep global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and transition away from fossil fuels to achieve net zero emissions by 2050.

The Pact has provisions to strengthen work on human rights, gender equality, and the empowerment of women. There is a clear call on the need to protect human rights defenders and strong signals on the importance of other stakeholders in global governance, including local and regional governments, civil society, the private sector, and more. Throughout the Pact there are provisions and annexes for follow-up action to ensure commitments are implemented.

It also has the first-ever Declaration on Future Generations, which contains concrete steps to take account of future generations in decision-making, including a possible envoy for future generations and a commitment to more meaningful opportunities for youth to participate in decisions that shape their lives, especially at the global level. It underlines the importance of protecting the environment, promoting equality, and ensuring long-term consequences are considered, reports United Nations News.

According to the Associated Press, the Pact commits world leaders to reform the 15-member security council to make it more reflective of today’s world by giving Africa, the Asia-Pacific region, and Latin America more representation on the council. The document also commits governments to removing legal, social, and economic barriers facing women and girls.

The Guardian reports that Russia, with the backing of Belarus, Nicaragua, Syria, North Korea, and Iran, attempted to defer on the grounds that the Pact represented Western interests. The Russian delegate said it would assert an amendment stating that the key issues addressed in the Pact are the subject of domestic jurisdiction in which the UN should not intervene. An overwhelming vote threw out Russia’s call for deferment and its amendment.

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