This video shows Augusto Lopez-Claros delivering a speech entitled “An Emerging Global Governance Architecture” at the 4th International Digital Security Forum (IDSF) held in Vienna on 6 June 2025.

Professor Lopez-Claros is the Executive Director and Chair of the Global Governance Forum. He has published several books on global governance reform and is currently spearheading the Global Governance Forum’s drafting of a Second United Nations Charter.

The full text of the speech is available below the video.

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Text of speech

Good morning. It’s a pleasure to be with you today. I am very grateful to the organizers for the invitation given to me and the opportunity to talk to you on a subject that is very dear to my heart, which is the whole issue of the kinds of changes that we need to do to our global governance architecture in order to create a context for international cooperation that will allow us to solve or address many of the serious problems that we confront today. If I were to make a list of what I consider to be the most important global catastrophic risks facing humanity, there are three or four that come immediately to mind, and I’m sure that as I share them with you just very briefly, you will make your own mental list, and it’s quite conceivable that you might be broadly in agreement.

Climate change

But it seems to me that one of the issues which remains largely unresolved is what is happening on the climate change side. We have a context for cooperation embedded in the Paris Agreement of 2015, and it is evident already that that agreement is not working. As much as one might have celebrated in 2015 the recognition by close to 200 states that we have a serious problem, it needs to be confronted, we need to do something about it, The context and the details of that agreement are unfortunately highly inadequate. And within a short time after the agreement, the scientific community already was saying this is not sufficient. The commitments made for reducing emissions are voluntary.

There are no penalties for those countries that do not abide by their commitments. In fact, the commitments don’t even add up. If every country were to do all the things that they have promised that they will do, we are still going to see an increase in temperature above two degrees centigrade with respect to the pre-industrial period. So here we have a mechanism that is simply not working. And as a result of that, emissions have continued to rise. And I don’t think I will surprise anybody in this room if I tell you that the scientists are saying that coming our way in the next few years, not to say decades, we’re going to have all kinds of climate-induced calamities that are going to bring a great deal of suffering, needless suffering, to humanity.

Security

So that’s one issue that deeply worries me. Second one that comes to mind is the whole question of what is happening on the security side. You see increasing evidence of rising militarism. You see growing geopolitical tensions between the major powers. You know that the last remaining major agreement that involves an element of restraint when it comes to weapons is the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

That agreement is, I don’t want to say dead, but is moribund. The countries, the nuclear powers, committed themselves to a process of disarmament. They committed themselves to eliminate their arsenals. In fact, over the last several decades, but especially I would say over the last 10 years, we’re going in exactly the opposite direction. countries are invested more heavily to modernize their weapons systems, to add to their arsenals. China has already declared that they would like to reach parity with the United States, with Russia. And there you go. We have a very unsettled situation. Taboos have been broken.

In the Cold War, it used to be the case that the major powers, especially the Soviet Union and the United States, would never… threaten the use of weapons. That taboo has been broken already several times over the last three years in the context of the Ukraine conflict. So that is very perturbing because, of course, as you well know, and this has been heavily researched and studied, the consequences of a nuclear exchange, say, between India and Pakistan, would not be limited to India and Pakistan. They would be global in nature.

And in fact, there is a very rich literature that elucidates the humanitarian consequences of a nuclear war, even a limited nuclear war. So that is very perturbing. And that, again, as with climate change, it reflects the flaws in our system of international cooperation. We don’t have the institutions, we don’t have the mechanisms to allow countries to cooperate in a way that actually addresses these problems.

Poverty and inequality

Third example. I am an economist. I spent a good deal of my, a good chunk of my career working at the IMF and at the World Bank. During my last job at the World Bank, I was director of one of the research groups at the bank. I am very perturbed by what is happening on the poverty side and on the inequality side. On the poverty side, for many, many decades, actually since 1990, economists like myself were celebrating the fact that we were making persistent, consistent, but gradual success in reducing extreme poverty. But then in 2020, we had COVID.

And for the first time in 30 years, there was a reversal of this trend reduction in poverty. And then, of course, a couple of years later, we had Ukraine war, Russian unprovoked aggression of Ukraine. And that led to increases in food prices and disruptions to international trade and so on. So the point is that today, the World Bank has essentially said that the SDG number one, Sustainable Development Goal number one, which is the elimination of extreme poverty by 2030, is out of reach. Now, you might say, okay, fine, we’ll make it by 2035. That’s not the point. The point is that the definition used by the World Bank for extreme poverty is an extremely austere definition.

On that definition, we have something like 700 million people today who are extremely poor, but these people live on the edge of survival. They don’t have access to electricity. They don’t have access to to the basic services that would give you a life that is not demoralizing and degrading. You would not wish your worst enemy to be extremely poor according to the definition of the World Bank. If you use a definition that is more reasonable, that is not so austere, in other words, not $2.15 of daily income, which is the definition used by the World Bank, but if you move that poverty line to something like $7, which I think is more plausible, 48% of the world’s population is poor. So we have an unresolved poverty problem, and this is not just an issue of ethics. And I say this conscious that I am standing in Vienna, a beautiful city of a high income country where extreme poverty does not exist.

No, the point is that poverty and especially inequality are beginning to mutate into a problem that is not just economic, it’s not just humanitarian, it is becoming a political problem as well. Because it is undermining the basis of democracy. It is giving rise to populisms. It is giving power to the demagogues who come in and say, vote for me because I will solve your problems, which of course is never the case. They have no idea how to solve these problems. So these are unresolved issues which need to be confronted.

Global financial architecture

And perhaps the last one that I will mention is the whole question of our global financial architecture. You know that in 2008 we had a major, major crisis. Vulnerabilities in our global financial system led to near collapse of the global economy. Luckily, and I use the word luckily in quotes, there were all kinds of interventions by global financial institutions, by the central banks, including the Federal Reserve, and we got out of that crisis relatively quickly, but at a very high cost. And what is the high cost? That debt levels, public debt levels, are sky high today in a way that they weren’t back in 2008. So we have had a price to pay. All of the interventions, the bailing out of the banks, the provisions and subsidies which were given to the populations of many countries in 2020 because of COVID, which I supported.

I think it was the humane thing to do for governments to come in and protect the populations from further calamity, but the point is that in 2025, we stand in terms of our public indebtedness, and I’m not talking about the small developing countries, which have a serious debt problem but have no systemic implications for the global financial system. No, I’m talking about the big economies in the world. They have much reduced fiscal space. And I really worry that if we have another crisis like 2008 or like 2020 with COVID, another global systemic crisis to our financial system, Our ability to respond to those crises in a way that protects the population, in a way that brings the system back into stability is going to be much, much more reduced. That is a vulnerability. I don’t want to bore you or scare you with a long list of all the problems, all the things that are wrong in the world today.

The question is, what to do? how does one, what is the appropriate response to these kinds of risks? We cannot ignore them and unfortunately many of our governments are not paying enough attention to these risks. It is one of the flaws of our current political systems. The politicians everywhere, they focus on the short term. They don’t worry about the repercussions of climate change at 10 or 15 years from now because they say to themselves, maybe not publicly, but inside their own heads, they say, well, let my successors, let the next president or prime minister 10 years from now worry about these issues because the voters are not going to vote on these issues today and I’d like to win the next election.

So we have this flaw which the system is, it works in a way that does not allow us to address these long-term issues in a context of cooperation. So what are some of the things that we could sort of do to begin to create a context for much stronger international cooperation because I think, I hope you will agree with me, that all these problems that I have mentioned, they do not admit solution outside of a context of much stronger international cooperation.

So one project in which the Global Governance Forum has been involved for the last several years As we convene in 2022 a group of leading experts to begin to think about what could be a reasonable pathway to bringing to the table, bringing to member states of the United Nations proposals for amending or modernizing our global governance architecture.

Of course, the answer to this question is multiple, and I could spend the next 60 minutes, but I will not, because I’m respectful of the clock here in front of me, which says that I have eight minutes. So here is an eight-minute summary. One way to do this is to go back to the last time that we made a serious attempt to actually modernize our global governance architecture, and that was in 1945 at the San Francisco Conference that delivered the United Nations Charter and the United Nations Organization and all the agencies that have been created at that time and subsequently to deal or to create a context for international cooperation. That charter is in fact What’s the nicest way to characterize it? It is essentially old. It has never been amended. You know, when President Truman closed the San Francisco Conference on June 26, 1945, nearly 80 years ago, in fact, on June 26, I’m speaking at an event in San Francisco, California, commemorating that conference. On June 26, President Truman said, this charter…

I don’t have it in front of me. This charter is going to be a living instrument, a living document. It will be amended and modernized as conditions in the world change. It seemed like an eminently reasonable thing to say. In fact, he compared the charter to the US Constitution, and he said the US Constitution has been amended multiple times to reflect changing conditions. This principle, that institutions have to adapt themselves to changing world circumstances, to you, to me, to all the people in this room, it just seems so reasonable, so plausible. And yet, we haven’t done it. Back in 1931, even before the United Nations was created, this principle was laid out in a very short, very eloquent sentence, which I will share with you. This was done by the head of what today would be called a civil society organization, the Baha’i community. It was a religious organization, but very much on the forefront of these debates about international cooperation. And he said the following, the fundamental cause of world unrest, this is 1931, we’re in the middle of the global depression, the Great Depression.

Is our failure to adjust our system of economic and political institutions to the imperative needs of a rapidly evolving age? Again, Truman said exactly the same thing 14 years later in San Francisco. Institutions need to adapt. If they don’t, they fail to deliver. And that is unfortunately what is happening with the UN system today. The UN Charter is 80 years old. The UN Charter is pre-nuclear. It is pre-climate. It is pre-digital, to come back to the theme of your conference. And so this group of experts that we convened three years ago has been working on a revision of the UN Charter. My luggage didn’t come in. This is the point of my presentation where I was supposed to show you a copy of this revised UN Charter. Philip has seen it. I don’t have one to show. But it is available on the homepage of the Global Governance Forum website. So please go and look at it, download it, read it. It is a fascinating document. So in this document, we are basically saying, let’s bring the UN system into the 21st century.

Amending the UN Charter

And believe it or not, the UN Charter of 1945 actually has an article in it which opens the door. It creates the opportunity for amending the Charter. And here there is a fascinating little story which I have the time to tell you because it’ll take me 30 seconds. In San Francisco, there was a group of 17 countries led by New Zealand and Mexico and several other countries from all over the world, particularly Latin America, I’m proud to say, which objected violently to the veto in the Security Council. They basically said, no way, we’re not going to sign this document because the veto isn’t just, you know, sort of according to the conventional imagination, you know, the Russian foreign minister saying, Nyet! as he did in February of 2022 after the invasion of Ukraine. No, the veto actually exempts the five permanent members of the Security Council from the principles and the obligations of the Charter. The United Nations is a club in which the rules apply to 188 countries, mine included, and Austria as well, but they don’t apply to the other countries because they can exempt themselves from it through the veto.

Would you join an organization that operated under that principle? No way, you wouldn’t do that. You would say, well, that is an insult to my self-respect, and yet that is what came out of San Francisco. So at San Francisco, to placate those 17 countries so that they could sign and endorse and the conference wouldn’t collapse, they introduced an article in the Charter, the famous Article 109, which says that within a 10-year period, we can have a review conference to reexamine the UN Charter. And in the halls of San Francisco, the countries were told, don’t worry. By 1955, the veto will be gone.

But today, you know, it’s the price we have to pay to get the Soviets on board, to get the US Senate to approve the Charter because the Charter is an international treaty and we need two-thirds of the Senate because that’s what the US Constitution says. Okay, so 1955 comes and nothing happens. Why? Because by 1955, everybody has forgotten about the UN Charter. In 1955, we’re in the middle of the Cold War.

The Soviets, the Americans, they are in a process of an arms race, right? So that was that. But today, in 2025, against the background of these global catastrophic risks, we, the Global Governance Forum, and another partner organization, the UN Charter Review Coalition, we are working together to essentially persuade member states to trigger Article 109 and call for a review conference. That call, that initiative cannot be vetoed. The Russians and the Americans and the Chinese may not like it, they cannot veto it, because that article was introduced to placate the members who were opposed to the veto.

So that’s the beauty of it. Now, you might say, well, but in this international climate, what are the chances that the member states of the UN will want to do that? So let me give you just two anecdotes. 53 seconds, I can do it!

First anecdote, on March 19 of this year, a couple of months ago, we invited UN missions in New York to come and meet with us so that we could brief them on the second charter, the second United Nations charter, what it is, what are the contents, what are we proposing by the way of reforms. And just a few days before the meeting, we were thinking to ourselves, wow, is anybody going to show up to this meeting?

Well, 27 missions showed up. Your country’s representative was there. Germany, Norway, South Africa, Brazil. I don’t have the time to give you the full list. And we had such a wonderful conversation. You know why? Because while 10 years ago, five years ago, three years ago, countries would have said, no, this is utopian, and we’re not ready for this, and geopolitics is too toxic. This time around, there was a great willingness to basically say, yes, we need to have that conversation. The world is under threat. If we don’t have that conversation, we run the risk that we are going to run into a brick wall, and we’re going to have to amend our global governance architecture in a post-crisis environment where it will be infinitely more difficult and infinitely more complicated.

We don’t want to strengthen international confrontation after World War III. I think you will agree with that, right? So we need to do it now, right? And unfortunately, I don’t have time for my second example, but I gave you the better one of the two.

Thank you so much.