Hello, welcome to visit Shanghai Forum
Former Under-Secretary-General and High Representative for Disarmament Affairs of United Nations
Good morning distinguished guests. Lately, lots of talks and policy debates are ongoing about how to manage, how to cope with the looming trade war; following the return of President Trump, how to end the Russian-Ukrainian War, and another war between Israel, Palestine, and other countries in the Middle East and so on. The list is long and gets longer. And I'm afraid these debates will continue to consume most of our attention in the coming days. But today, I want all of us to take a step back, because I don't want to lose sight of the much bigger picture, but much more troubling, which concerns the very survival of all of us, the whole humanity. That's why I chose the topic as Global Crisis and Planetary Governance.
I asked AI to give us the image of humanity standing at an inflection point. Depending on the action or lack of it, humanity will go on the good route, peace, like heaven on the left or peril, like hell on the right side. Why I’m saying this? This is not just my personal view. We are facing triple global crisis. And this is the view represented by Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Scientists, including Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein realized unexpected, terrible consequences of their invention: atomic bombs, and out of deep reflection about the repercussions they caused. They created the Bulletin in 1947. And every year, they announced how close humanity is to midnight, doomsday, manmade catastrophe. The clock started 7 minutes to midnight. And in the wake of the Korean War and in the wake of the successful explosion of the hydrogen bombs, the clock moved to 2 minutes. And thanks to the end of Cold War, the clock moved to 17 minutes. But for the last 7 years, the clock moved to 2 minutes, then 100 seconds, 90 seconds. And this year, 89 seconds, but not much attention is being paid to the warning that these renowned scientists have issued. And we are now facing not only a perfect storm of existential threats. That's why nuclear scientist moved the clock closest ever to midnight.
And then, as Prime Minister Hatoyama just said, the global governance system, multilateralism is in deep stress. And also global leadership is not going up to catch up with the needs, but going back. Existential threats, the first of course is that the specter of nuclear winter is back in the wake of the Russian-Ukrainian War. Climate crisis is intensifying and the unknown consequences of uncontrolled technology, particularly when human control is getting lost. Nuclear winter, I don't need any further explanation, we have to do our best to prevent this from happening. Thanks to the efforts after the end of the Cold War, the number of nuclear weapons have decreased from 64,000 to 12,500. So far so good. But now we are at the crossroads: will the number go towards nuclear zero, or will it increase again?
In last 100 years, temperature rise is not gradual, but spiking due to human activities. And CO₂ concentration in atmosphere has already reached 420 ppm. This means 1.5C° increase has already been crossed, because the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015 set 1.5 C° as the red line, but it has already collapsed. Daily average has collapsed last July, and the monthly average kept being broken since then. And then yearly average has already crossed. And still, CO₂ concentration is not going down. It’s going up. So very soon 2.0C° threshold will be broken very soon. Nobody knows how soon it will come. And it is not only CO₂, but also methane is being melted. And it is much worse than CO₂. The time for us to talk about global warming is gone. We have to talk about global boiling and global heating. And this means sea level rise. Most of the cities in Korea and Japan will be flooded. I always thought Korea and Japan are full of mountains. But the problem is, our cities are lying low in the valleys. And of course, megacities along the coastline, including Shanghai, unfortunately will also be flooded. If icebergs in the arctic get melted, then it will weaken the warm current going upward. Then this means soon Europe and North America will get frozen.
The third existential threat is risks of artificial intelligence when we lose human control. Of course Nobody knows when age of AI will arrive how soon. And then also already, AI technology can be combined with emerging biotech. And also, then it may make it easier for malicious sectors, including terrorist to get access to biochemical weapons. And this is a little scary map, which shows how war fighting strategy is being evolved. The first is centaur warfighting. Centaur is a mythical figure in Greek mythology. The body is machine, but the brain is still human. It's okay, because human control is there. Then it moves to mosaic warfare. Humans and machines fight together, but with the human still in control. The third is minotaur warfare. It is scarier because the body is a human, but the brain is machine or animal. And this is happening already in Russia-Ukraine warfare. The last stage, if machine is allowed to be part of command and control of strategic weapons, including particular nuclear, we call it the singleton moment. We have to do everything to avoid this, and we need global cooperation to avoid this.
Now I’m going to talk about challenges to global governance. The first is duality of technology. Throughout human history, technology is being used for dual purposes, good purposes, but also malicious purposes, including war fighting. And the very duality of technology requires humanity to act together to minimize the risks. But having global normative standards to do that is an appeal task because of the global governance crisis we are facing. We have to ensure the benign development of technology while minimizing risks. And for that, least common denominator of norms is required. Unfortunately, multilateralism doesn't work at the time when we need it most. United nations, the symbol of universal multilateralism is under severe stress. I would say maybe severe is not enough for it, maybe great or hyper stress. And unilateralism and bilateralism are taking over multilateralism as a means of managing international relations. And also, we have to think hard how international community can fill the void left by retreating global leadership, including particular, by the US. It means we have to change paradigm of our thinking, doing, and acting. And we have to move aboard from local, national, global and even planetary consciousness. And the previous axiom of the first stage of globalization is thinking globally while still acting locally. But this is not enough to deal with the impending existential threats. We have to acting globally while still thinking locally. And also our academic paradigm must be shifted from the growth-oriented to the sustainability-oriented.
We tend to think of human world as everything on the planet. But we are wrong. We recognize that we survive and thrive thanks to the nature. So we have to think of also natural world as well. We have to transform our thinking by linking human world and natural world into planetary world. Otherwise, we cannot solve the problems. There are 17 sustainable development goals. Seventeen goals mean we have 17 sustainability crises. And to solve that, we need 5 Ps: people; the planet; partnership; and also we have to seek peace, not only among humans, but also seek peace with the nature; and prosperity with the nature. So, human in the loop is not enough. We have to take the nature in the loop, SDGs are the effort to identify problems, but also solutions with 5 Ps. Unfortunately, for the last 10 years, implementation is not going forward. We have 17 goals, 169 targets. Each goal has about ten targets. The most significant targets we are going backwards, include climate change. And so now is the time we have to think harder about what we'll do after SDG implementation is done in 5 years. So we have to think now about what post-SDG agenda should look like.
The next part I want to talk about is the way forward. First of all, as I said, our concept of peace must be enlarged. Absence of war is not enough. We have to seek comprehensive peace with equity and justice included. And also, it will not be just human peace, but also peace with the nature. And even we have to think about cosmic peace. Here are the two conditions. We need global leadership by the governments. Any normative standards and any governance system cannot be done without the leadership of governments. But it will not be enough because it has to be supported by global citizenship of all of us. Civil society and businesses must be involved.
Now I will talk about tasks for planetary governance. This is much easier said than done, because we have two structural divides between the Global South and North: those who are more advanced and less developed, those who have technologies and those who don't have technologies. That's the first divide. The second divide is maybe more serious, because it is between the Global East, and the Global West value divide, about which values we have to put higher than other values. And planetary governance must be based on collaborative sovereignty. Here. I stress collaboration toward cooperation, rather than confrontation. Major power rivalry will continue. And we have to assume that competition is likely to get intensified on all fronts. But major powers have a responsibility, shared responsibility to manage their competition responsibly and peacefully, to ensure competition doesn't slide into confrontation. So we have to put collaborative sovereignty and human sovereignty in front and center. And multilateralism must be revitalized. But I think it will be multilayered, depending on the issue areas. We have different layers of multilateral, unilateral, plurilateral, regional, sub-regional, global, depending on the nature of the issues we are going to handle. And still, we need global leadership from the governments, but they need help. That's why global public and private partnership matters. And intellectuals, academia, including Fudan University, Chey Institute, has to help governments find common ground for cooperation and fuel the growing deficit in the global public goods. And businesses have to implement data-friendly, ESG-based solutions.
And this job, I know it's an appeal task, but I firmly believe we owe our efforts not only to ourselves, but to our succeeding generations, we have to save the humanity from intensifying existential threats and save the planet, not only for humans, but for all living things on the earth. Failure is not an option. And I don't see any other pathway forward except global cooperation to tackle these issues. I believe, if governments, businesses and private citizens work together, then we can try to do something. So I hope we can be realistic in our diagnosis of the problems. But let us be optimistic in our pursuit of our journey forward for the future, safe, secure, and sustainable for all. Thank you so much for your attention.
