Can we shape the trends of our times - and beyond?
With crises multiplying in type, scope and size seemingly by the day, it’s abundantly clear that we live in unpredictable VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) times.
In such environments, of course, information and misinformation multiply exponentially, with past trends being weak predictors of the future. But despite all the noise, we’d do well to pay attention to the steady signals about key threats to our world that have been intensifying for decades now, which we ignore literally at our peril.
I’m reminded of this reading a new publication prepared by economists from across the United Nations under the leadership of its Department for Economic and Social Affairs. Published in time for the UN’s 75th birthday, Shaping the Trends of Our Time identifies and address key forces shaping our world today : so-called “megatrends” or global, sustained forces that impact every aspect of our economies, societies, cultures and personal lives.
The report focuses on five megatrends: #climatechange; #demographic shifts, particularly #ageing; #urbanization; the emergence of #digitaltechnologies in the fourth industrial revolution; and #inequalities. Why these? While most correlate to specific Sustainable Development Goals, - technological innovation (#SDG9) inequalities (#SDG10), urbanization (#SDG11), climate change (#SDG13) – there are pronounced interlinkages among them and across the entire set of SDGs, which amplifies their potential to accelerate progress towards the 2030 Agenda or to act as major bottlenecks to its achievement.
The report acknowledges many other major trends (such as conflict). But this and previous reports represent a steady drumbeat of evidence about the forces shaping development prospects for the nations of the world, and indeed, the very future of our planet. (Two previous @UN publications that are worth revisiting, in my opinion: Global Trends: Challenges and Opportunities in the Implementation of the SDGs (2017) and the Global Sustainable Development Report: The Future is Now: Science for Achieving Sustainable Development (2019) .
The reports point out that these trends - however volatile and complex, however pervasive and seemingly irrevocable - result from human activity. And so, “they can be influenced by human decisions and policies, their impacts attenuated or accentuated, their energy redirected. Some megatrends are manifestations of human progress – such as technological innovations, urbanization or demographic trends. Others are consequences of policy deficiencies so longstanding that the megatrend has assumed a life of its own, as with climate change and inequalities.”
There's also no ambiguity about the policy pathways that the nations of the world should adopt. Indeed, in 2015, world leaders were very clear . Their adoption of the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals was a bold declaration (by consensus!) of what it would take to transform our world into one that is just, inclusive and sustainable world that leaves no one behind.
A recent stock-take shows that we are not on the right trajectory to achieve the SDGs – but we could be. Listen to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres during the “SDG Moment” at the United Nations General Assembly last week: reflecting on a world shaken to the core by the #COVID19 pandemic, he reiterated the need for a “path that brings health to all, revives economies, brings people in from the margins of society and builds long-term resilience, sustainability, opportunity and peace,” a “swift and just transition to inclusive, low‑carbon, resilient economies.”
But, he concluded, this will happen only when the “public appetite for change is matched with political will and smart policy choices.“
In 1945, following the greatest international crisis of their time, world leaders chose global cooperation and created the United Nations to help guarantee a better, safer future. Seventy-five years later, in a world bewildered by multiple, blistering crises, world leaders must purposefully recommit to the #2030Agenda. Only then can we nourish the model of global cooperation needed to help us to help navigate more deliberately through our VUCA world towards the future we want - for ourselves, our children and our planet.
