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The world "is more coupled than we think"
Rania Al-Mashat, the Egyptian Minister of International Cooperation, tells GZERO's Tony Maciulis that the pandemic taught us how interconnected we truly are; no one nation can solve a problem as big as climate change, food insecurity, or geopolitical strife on its own. Al-Mashat makes the case for looking beyond the short term problems of inflation and toward longer-term solutions for the most pressing issues of our time.
In a conversation at the World Bank/IMF spring meetings in Washington, DC, she explains the key outcomes of last year's UN Climate Conference COP27, held in her home country, and what the road ahead looks like for climate financing and confronting the looming sovereign debt crisis.
Al-Mashat also states that in the coming months we will learn the new framework and path forward for the World Bank and IMF, institutions whose models have been both challenged and criticized during this historic period of global crises.
How to save our future from the crises we create
Who has the most at stake in making the world a better place? Young people.
After all, the decisions we make today affect their future more than any other age group.
“Not just the young people who make up half of the world's population today, but the 11 billion people who are yet to be born by the end of this century," asks UN Foundation President Elizabeth Cousens, "what are we leaving to them?”
In a GZERO World interview with Ian Bremmer, Cousens offers some thought on what the youth can do for global development based her experience working with young people.
Watch the GZERO World episode: Inequality isn't inevitable - if global communities cooperate
Food emergency: what to do when people are hungry now
On global issues, the international community must walk and chew gum at the same time. It needs to learn to deal with simultaneous crises that play off each other, says UN Foundation President Elizabeth Cousens.
That's why we dropped the ball on hunger.
Now the needs are huge and growing. We haven't seen a lot of images of starvation yet, but they are coming, Cousens tells Ian Bremmer on GZERO World.
"We have to be able to rise to this challenge, and see it as something that's in both our interest," she says, adding that “we have done heroic things before on the humanitarian front — it's not like we're not collectively capable."
Watch the GZERO World episode: Inequality isn't inevitable - if global communities cooperate
"We're in this together" — UN Foundation chief
Global development has been going backwards since even before the pandemic, and there's no end in sight.
Extreme poverty is now rising again, and fraught politics at every level is making it harder to fight inequality around the world.
But it's not an irreversible trend, UN Foundation President Elizabeth Cousens tells Ian Bremmer on GZERO World.
“The challenge of our times," she says, is "to re-galvanize that spirit of 'we're in it together' — [that] we have more in common than we have that divides us.“
Watch the GZERO World episode: Inequality isn't inevitable - if global communities cooperate
A Swiss police officer looks through a binocular to monitor the area during the World Economic Forum 2023 in Davos, Switzerland.
Davos 2023: Same, same, but different
Davos is back to being Davos in more ways than one. After two years of postponement due to the pandemic, and following a smaller, spring-ier version last May, the World Economic Forum is again booming. Organizers boast there are 2,700 leaders from both the public and private sectors in attendance from across at least 130 countries. And the weather feels like the Davos regular attendees remember: snowy, slippery streets, and sub-freezing temperatures.
But there are a few noticeable differences from years past. Thus far, only one leader of a G7 nation, Germany’s Olaf Scholz, is confirmed to attend. China’s Xi Jinping won’t be making the schlep to Switzerland, and neither will US President Joe Biden. By and large, the presence of big tech companies seems slightly subdued, and the word “crypto” isn’t being thrown around like rock salt on the streets this time. (Note: Apparently, actual rock salt is banned here – so you need to be Johnny Weir to cross the street.)
Nearly everyone we’ve talked to on the ground so far has found a way to slip the Forum’s central theme, “Cooperation in a Fragmented World,” into the conversation. That’s meant to conjure up public and private partnerships and the importance of multinational, multistakeholder approaches to what the WEF (and other big thinkers like Adam Tooze) have referred to as “the polycrisis,” a fancy geopolitical way of saying a ton of bad shit is happening to the world all at once.
There is another fragmentation on people’s minds beyond geopolitical divides: the widening inequality gap at a time when the cost of living continues to rise globally, and most indicators of human advancement and development have suffered serious setbacks over the last couple of years. Open questioning of the relevance of Davos, even over sips of free tea and coffee in lounges provided by the United Arab Emirates and India, is not uncommon.
On Monday, a headline from the Forum was a new “Chief Economists Outlook” report that found two-thirds of top economists believe there will be a global recession in 2023, and 91% expect weak or very weak growth for the U.S. this year.
Also, Oxfam released another side of the global story, called “Survival of the Richest,” detailing huge leaps in wealth made by the world’s richest people despite the economic downturn. A summary of the study stated, “During the pandemic and cost-of-living crisis years since 2020, $26 trillion (63 percent) of all new wealth was captured by the richest 1 percent, while $16 trillion (37 percent) went to the rest of the world put together.”
Spoiler alert: The timing was not coincidental.
Can an elite gathering in the Swiss Alps produce meaningful solutions that put societies back on track toward progress? It’s only Day One, so we will keep you posted.
Follow GZERO Media on Instagram for our coverage of the sights and sounds of Davos 2023.
- China is open for business: Chinese Vice Premier at Davos - GZERO Media ›
- US protectionism could trigger "war of subsidies" with Europe - GZERO Media ›
- Russia's tragic brutality and the humbling of the West - GZERO Media ›
- Davos 2023: We're in polycrisis - GZERO Media ›
- Demystifying Davos: Behind the scenes with GZERO & Microsoft - GZERO Media ›
- Podcast: Davos, meet humility: grappling with Russia & egregious violations of international law - GZERO Media ›
- Watch our Davos event on Jan. 18: Making AI Work for the World - GZERO Media ›
Microsoft president Brad Smith has a plan to meet the UN's goals
Thanks to the pandemic, we're way off from UN Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. But Microsoft President Brad Smith knows the way to get the job done.
In a Global Stage livestream conversation held at UN headquarters, Smith says he has deep faith in what he calls the "three-legged stool" of government, the private sector, and civil society.
If you build out all three, so the legs are strong, healthy, and know how to work together, then achieving the SDGs is not a pipe dream. It's not about more or less government, but rather about everyone being on the same page.
His plan: get businesses to innovate, NGOs to incubate, and governments to scale.
"We Didn't Get Lucky with Vaccines. We Got Smart," Says Brad Smith | Global Stage | GZERO Mediayoutu.be
- António Guterres exclusive interview | How a war-distracted world ... ›
- Shocks making it harder to meet Sustainable Development Goals ... ›
- Brad Smith: Russia's war in Ukraine started on Feb 23 in cyberspace ... ›
- "We're identifying new cyber threats and attacks every day ... ›
- Russia freezing out Ukrainian civilians because it can't beat military, says Microsoft's Brad Smith - GZERO Media ›
What the West is doing wrong in the world's biggest crises
To fix our broken international political system, we need a crisis. For instance, a pandemic, climate change, Big Tech having too much power, or a Russia invasion of Ukraine. But it must be a crisis that's so destructive it forces us to respond fast, and together — like World War II. That's the crisis that created the international system we have today, and kept the peace until now. On GZERO World, Ian Bremmer talks to Anne-Marie Slaughter, former US State Department official and now CEO of New America, and political scientist and Harvard professor Stephen Walt about the war and other crises.
Slaughter and Walt debate key issues such as the tough choices NATO faces on expanding to more countries but not Ukraine or other former Soviet republics, what we learned from the pandemic, and whether there are still reasons for hope in our current gloomy political environment. "If you're going to use a crisis effectively for change, you have to be able to have the right time horizon, the right group of countries, and a very specific set of goals," says Slaughter. But Walt believes we can't tackle all these crises at the same time — otherwise, at some point people will just throw up their hands and say it's just too hard.
For Walt, it was unfortunate to have "a lot of the wrong leaders in a lotta the wrong places at exactly the wrong time," which prevented for instance the US and China from coordinating a more effective global response to the pandemic.
Slaughter thinks we do have the ability to address many of the problems affecting the Global South because the most powerful countries are now all over the world. Many voices of people who need to be at the table — civic groups, CEOs, women, people of color — are not being heard.
Will the Ukraine War succeed where COVID failed?
Many of us thought the pandemic would shake up the "sclerosis" in deeply dysfunctional pre-COVID politics. It did not.
"We have to admit the pandemic wasn't a big enough crisis" to improve things like the US-China relationship or American political polarization, Eurasia Group & GZERO Media President Ian Bremmer said during a livestream discussion on equitable vaccine distribution hosted by GZERO Media in partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Will the potential for war with nuclear-armed Russia be big enough to create further global cooperation? Yes, but two things also come to mind.
First, Bremmer believes Russia's actions will likely strengthen trans-Atlantic cooperation beyond security, and that includes global health. Second, China.
Are we going to come out of this crisis with a China that the Americans and Europeans can work with?
And, if so, will that trust extend to global health, unlike what happened with COVID? Or will the war make Russia more integrated with China as a supplicant in a Cold War 2.0?