Two questions are being asked with increasing frequency both in India and around the world. Is our pattern of economic growth sustainable? And fair? It is clear that a new approach is required for human development and societal progress in order to mitigate the prevalent risks to the environment and social harmony. Dennis J. Snower, President ... Read more

New Work Works with Markus Vaeth talked about the Global Solutions Initiative and Sustainable Accounting of Wealth together with Katharina Lima de Miranda and Christoph Podewils, Global Solutions Initiative. (Available in German)

In view of the G20 summit on October 30 and 31, 2021, the G20 engagement groups are gradually publishing their communiqués with their proposals and recommendations for the G20 member countries these days. We are documenting the final documents of these working groups. Urban 20 Urban 20 is a city diplomacy initiative that brings together ... Read more

Closing remarks by Global Solution Initiatives Managing Director, Susanne Staufer and Program Director, Dennis Görlich.

There is a lot at stake during this transitional year. The Italian G20 Summit in October and the run-up to it, either raises the intensity and shifts the focus of the public governance discourse, or the world will muddle forward on incrementalist change which is a business-as-usual scenario. None of us involved in this Global ... Read more

The wealth of our societies is typically described in terms of economic growth, production and income. Yet, people would probably name good health as their most important goal, particularly under the current pandemic circumstances. Economic prosperity is intrinsically dependent on public health. Investments in healthcare and R&D, as well as in other social and health-promoting ... Read more

To reach the temperature targets of the Paris Agreement, the global economy needs to quickly move towards net-zero emissions and major economies including the EU, the US and China have committed themselves to such ambitious targets. There is a large consensus among economics and climate policy experts that carbon pricing should play a central role ... Read more

Achieving the SDGs has become even harder amid the pandemic. The Covid-19 shock has eradicated past achievements and made financial resources much scarcer. Covid measures have led to rising debt levels around the world, impeding the fight against poverty, the long-term strengthening of health systems and SDG achievement in general. Refinancing debt on capital markets ... Read more

The Covid-19 pandemic has put the spotlight on inequalities and vulnerabilities in our societies. Infection rates and risks, deaths, income losses, educational deficits resulting from school closures, and many more – all these consequences from the pandemic were distributed very unequally across societies. It turned out that our societies and economies were not resilient, inclusive ... Read more

The challenge is how to keep the world together in a single international community rather than end up with a bipolar global order, divided by ideological systemic competition, dual digital systems, and conflicting military-security tensions forcing other countries to choose sides. The US and China, so far, are facing off, confronting each other and clarifying ... Read more

The Implementers’ Forum brings stakeholders from business and civil society together to collect and discuss new challenges, solutions, and best practices to implement corporate digital responsibility.

Antonio Guterres, Secretary-General, United Nations and Martin Schulz, President, Friedrich Ebert Foundation discussing the pandemic as a global problem, addressing global vaccine strategy and its fairness throughout the world.

Welfare states can buffer economic hardship – their primary function is to provide a public safety net in times of individual crisis and to enable people to overcome the crisis through activation. Thus, if done right, welfare states support solidarity and empowerment. In normal times, welfare states deal with individual volatility resulting from impacts of ... Read more

Following the large increase in the number of refugees and other migrants arriving in Europe in 2015–16, the European Union concluded a ‘migration deal’ with Turkey in 2016. As a result, the number of irregular migrants crossing the Aegean Sea dropped drastically. At the same time, the humanitarian emergency in Greek refugee camps and the ... Read more

Comprehensive, balanced, and mutually beneficial partnerships with countries of origin and transit are fundamental prerequisites for sustainably managing migration flows to the EU. The European Commission’s New Pact on Migration and Asylum proposes a range of measures to achieve effective cooperation with non-EU countries. Developing channels for legal migration as well as complementary pathways for ... Read more

Not only the fair distribution of vaccines against the coronavirus is currently a central challenge of the international community. Also, the establishment of effective and resilient public health systems including skilled personnel, disease prevention and monitoring, and access to treatments remain important for global health and pandemic preparedness. The Covid-19 pandemic has shown the aggravating ... Read more

Election corruption, police brutality, political turmoil, tax breaks for the wealthy, unequal educational access, wage inequality, disinformation perpetrated by the media, and more. Events of the last few years have demonstrated that society’s institutions are in dire shape. Institutional failure is occurring because these institutions, from local to global, were made for a world that ... Read more

Digital divides take many different forms. Digital infrastructure and the skills to make use of digital technologies are not equally distributed across the globe, hence creating a divide with regard to the opportunities to actually make use of digital technologies. The COVID-19 pandemic and the necessity to learn and work from home has highlighted the ... Read more

COVID-19 is a global challenge that can therefore only be solved globally. While the debate in the European Union has focused heavily on local and regional vaccine distribution, an essential key in winning the fight against the pandemic has been overlooked: we need a global vaccination strategy and global equitable access to a vaccine. At ... Read more

Many transactions in the digital economy involve barter: consumers of digital services get many digital services for free (or under-priced) and in return have personal information about themselves collected – for free. However, it is often completely non-transparent to the user, which data is collected and what it is used for. In fact, personal data ... Read more

Our current measures of progress are primarily financial and short-term. Macro-level reporting has had a particular emphasis on GDP and corporate reporting has largely been focused on shareholder value. In the context of broader social objectives, our current approaches to reporting are neither sufficient nor effective. While there has been a proliferation of standards and ... Read more

Infrastructure plays a key role in supporting the recoupling of economic prosperity with social and environmental prosperity. This requires long-term investment in social infrastructure, including education, health and housing, as well as investments into infrastructure that supports a reduction of the environmental footprints. The Covid-19 crisis affects the global economy largely through and within interconnected ... Read more

Our economy should serve human needs. For that, it must not be entirely geared towards economic progress but has to improve social progress and environmental sustainability as well. This is the vision of a recoupled economy: where social, economic and environmental prosperity grow together and not apart. Achieving a recoupled economy requires complementary action in ... Read more

The session is moderated by Professor Ilona Kickbusch, a member of the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board (GPMB) – which had initially proposed a framework for pandemic preparedness. A high-level representative of the European Union explains the initial intention of the proposal and where exactly it stands now, also the World Health Organization (WHO) defines how ... Read more

German Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel and Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi addressing the Global Solutions community with an opening keynote and engaging in a moderated dialogue.

The current healthcare systems tend to be based predominantly on a sick-care model, the system is essentially one that waits until we have fallen ill. We face unprecedented challenges with global staff shortages predicted to be 18m by 2030 (BMJ). Healthcare costs have been rapidly rising over the past few decades. This unsustainable demand and ... Read more

Keynote by Sri Mulyani Indrawati, Indonesian Minister of Finance

The economic transformation needed to recouple economic growth with social prosperity and environmental sustainability will require a significant amount of financial resources. These financial needs come against the background of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has triggered massive fiscal spending for supporting the economy and improving public health. Central banks have created very large amounts of ... Read more

The Young Global Changers are students, young academics, young professionals, entrepreneurs and young non-profit leaders from around the world who are developing and implementing ideas to bring about positive change, whether at the global, regional or local level. In this session, we will present four different projects by Young Global Changers from four different parts ... Read more

Digital technologies are indispensable to achieving sustainable development goals and reducing carbon emissions in many sectors. Yet, computer systems themselves have an immense energy requirement for their countless devices, data centres, applications and global networks. With Covid-19 the shift to digital in living, learning and earning is bringing us closer to the time when digitization ... Read more

The United Nations Secretary General’s High-Level Panel (UNHLP) on Women’s Economic Empowerment (WEE) was established by then-UNSDG Ban Ki-moon in 2016 “to address the specific economic issues that affect women and to support the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its promise to leave no one behind.” His successor, António Guterres has ... Read more

“Biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation are currently among the top threats facing humanity.” This is how last year’s UN Summit on Biodiversity describes the urgency of stopping biodiversity loss, noting the detrimental impact on food security, water supplies and also human health. The causes for the rapid loss of biodiversity are diverse, including agricultural expansion, ... Read more

A talk between Isabel Schnabel (European Central Bank, Frankfurt) & Laurence Tubiana (ECF and Key Architect of the Paris Agreement)

As the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic persist, the urgency and magnitude of the decarbonisation challenge cannot be overlooked. Within the context of the ‘Great Realignment, the 2020s must be the pivotal decade for climate action. While the global response to the pandemic has brought an abrupt decrease in global emissions in 2020, the data ... Read more

Resource extraction and consumption is expected to double by 2060, driven by global population and GDP growth. Such a development trajectory will accelerate environmental degradation and biodiversity loss while exposing the shortcomings of our linear ‘take, make, dispose’ model of production and consumption. A circular economy, as a means to decouple economic growth from resource ... Read more

Our culture, norms and values from the offline, real world oftentimes do not translate into the online world, which is by nature remote and lacks actual physical encounters. Online platforms provide a space in which individual opinions can be easily published and receive traction. This becomes problematic if these opinions are misleading or malicious, especially ... Read more

Our global rulebook of trade is outdated. It does not accommodate geopolitical power shifts, it is unfit to cope with the rapid internationalization of state-owned enterprises, it has little to say on the challenges brought about by the digitalization of business models and it is often seen as hindering rather than promoting the ecological transformation ... Read more

The last few years have been marked by a growing geostrategic rivalry between China and the United States. At the same time, a shift from a rules-based to a more power-based international order has taken place. This becomes evident in the increasing usage of economic instruments such as trade policy or technology and industrial policy ... Read more

Migration is a structural and multifaceted phenomenon. It poses challenges and presents opportunities in contexts of origin as well as the destination. It puts to test multilateral coordination. The pandemic, by exacerbating underlying social and economic challenges, generates additional implications for migration trends and governance. These are just some of the reasons why migration must ... Read more

It is often heard: Global problems, such as climate change or the fight against Covid-19, require global cooperation. The cross-border nature and sheer scope of the problems require global collective action. Yet, cooperation often does not go beyond words. What is often highlighted instead are systemic differences, bilateral approaches to cooperation, and the malfunctioning of ... Read more

The economic system that uplifted society coming out of World War II has, with the aid of a massive disruption in technology, also created significant income and wealth disparities, a lack of trust in institutions, growing populism and social unrest. Youth are among those who have often been locked out of the benefits of the ... Read more

Designing out waste and pollution through the gradual closing of loops in global production chains is an important requirement for achieving the Sustainable Agenda and Paris Agreement climate goals and for halting the degradation of our biodiversity. A worldwide shift to a circular economy in all value chains, regions and cities is of central importance ... Read more

The global system is focused on economic growth, with social prosperity and environmental sustainability as subsidiaries and derivative to economic growth. The transformational change needed to realign the political, economic and social systems, focusing on the wellbeing of people and the planet, requires a broad coalition of actors – actors from politics, business and society ... Read more

What began as a global health crisis in 2020 developed into an economic one, resulting in widespread business failures and social and political upheaval. Poor, marginalised, and vulnerable communities, as well as their workforces, have been disproportionately affected, and while vaccines are allowing many countries to begin reopening borders, economies, and activities, the emerging economic ... Read more

Enabling and accelerating the net zero transition can only be achieved by recognising intangibles as the assets that underpin value creation in today’s economy. New breakthrough innovations in economics and accounting make this possible. These assets are people and relationships, networks and innovation. They are not fixed assets. They are intangible, not tangible. Currently, accounting ... Read more

Inequality between regions is an important driver of the decoupling of economic and social prosperity. Economic prosperity is increasingly spatially concentrated, while left-behind regions struggle with poverty, bad education, inferior health, political extremism. The COVID-19 pandemic disruptions have created new spaces for change, as citizens and decision-makers around the globe are looking for recovery options. ... Read more

Not only the fair distribution of vaccines against the coronavirus is currently a central challenge of the international community. Also, the establishment of effective and resilient public health systems including skilled personnel, disease prevention and monitoring, and access to treatments remain important for global health and pandemic preparedness. The Covid-19 pandemic has shown the aggravating ... Read more

The COVID-19 pandemic has put a spotlight on how interdependent the world has become: the virus has spread across the world in no time, has brought economies down and global debt levels up. It has shown how fragile many achievements are: inequalities were exposed and trust in government was eroded as individual freedom was constrained. ... Read more

The Italian G20 Presidency comes at a critical time in the history of the G20. Collective action across the G20 and beyond is required to promote recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic, both in terms of global health and economic prosperity. Furthermore, this recovery needs to be environmentally sustainable and socially inclusive. Never before has the ... Read more