“Failure will be Devastating” – An Interview with Secretary-General António Guterres

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres at the Columbia World Leaders Forum on Wednesday, December 2, 2020. U.N. photo.

António Guterres is the Secretary-General of the United Nations. Elected to succeed Ban Ki-moon in 2017, his tenure has been marked by the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Syria, and the battle against climate change, among other major international crises. Before taking the top job at the U.N., he served as the organization’s High Commissioner for Refugees and spent seven years as the Prime Minister of Portugal.

On December 2, hours after his speech at Columbia’s World Leaders Forum, I spoke to Mr. Guterres in an exclusive interview for the Columbia Political Review. We discussed the international response to COVID-19, the global battle against climate change, and how to shore up multilateralism, among other pressing topics.

Your speech this morning mostly focused on the dangers of climate change. Columbia has recently announced the launch of a new climate school, and climate issues are very important to our students here. What role do you see for universities and university students in the climate battle?

One of the key aspects of successfully fighting climate change is to make sure that science is respected, and a lot of universities have been essential in providing the adequate science that has allowed those who are committed to fighting to do it the right way. I do believe that universities have a double role: on one hand, to provide the science that is needed for us to be able to adopt the right strategies and the right measures and policies related to climate change; and secondly, to put pressure on governments, local authorities, and business to decarbonize for us to be able to reach the end of this century with not more than 1.5 degrees Celsius of temperature growth.

COP26, the next U.N. climate summit, will meet in Glasgow in less than a year. What are your hopes for the summit? Are there concrete measures you hope will come out of it?

I hope that even before the summit presents a so-called Nationally-Determined Contribution, in relation to climate action, that are in line with what the scientific community tells us, which means a reduction of emissions in the next decade corresponding to 45% of the levels that existed in 2010, and pointing to zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. As the flip-side, we hope that the COP will finally be able to come to an agreement on the implementation of Article 6 of the Paris Agreement (on carbon markets), and at the same time that there will be a strong impulse in relation to more ambition in finance, for the commitments made in Paris to be respected, and for a massive mobilization in both public and private funding. 

You have praised the European Union as being a model for climate measures, particularly its European Green Deal and Next Generation E.U. initiatives. Its member states, however, are among the world’s wealthiest countries, and the cost of the entire package comes to some €1.85 trillion. As you said in your speech earlier today, the world’s poorer countries are also the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. What can developing countries do to sustainably pursue a similar path? 

First of all, it’s very important what the European Union is doing in relation to its own efforts in mitigation, and its commitment to net-zero [emissions] and its measures to get there. But it’s also very important that all countries, including the European ones, are able to meet the commitments made in Paris, namely to mobilize $100 billion from public and private sources to support developing countries in both mitigation and adaptation. Developing countries must do as much as possible not to repeat the mistakes that developed countries have [made] in the past. It is necessary to bet on economic growth, on job creation, on energy being accessible to everybody, on [the] eradication of poverty. But today, it is proven that the most efficient and cheapest way is with a green strategy, is renewable energies, is not going on investing in what will be, in the near future, stranded assets in which a lot of money could be wasted today. So, developing countries must learn from the mistakes made in the past by developed countries and adopt a development strategy that is green and in line with the objectives of climate action. 

You began a recent article by declaring: “COVID-19 is a test of international cooperation—and it is a test the world is failing.” Despite some of the successes of the W.H.O.’s COVAX initiative, multiple countries have turned inwards, practicing a sort of “vaccine nationalism.” Is there a solution to this isolationism? In what way can the international community continue to encourage a joint handling of COVID-19 and future pandemics? 

If COVID-19 has taught us a lesson, it is that a world in disunity and largely in disarray, with each country having its own strategy without any effective coordination of the different actions to contain the pandemic, makes the virus move from east to west, from north to south, in a first wave, second wave, probably third wave. [This] means that approaches based on inward-looking visions by governments, or on populism, have largely failed. What we need is effective international cooperation, what we need is for the recommendations of the World Health Organization to be followed, and what we need is the capacity to mobilize now the resources to make sure that the vaccines that start becoming available will be treated as global public goods, for the globe, and accessible everywhere, because that is the only way to eradicate the disease. 

If, as you say, countries are failing to engage with one another properly on pandemic response, it does not augur well for the fight against climate change. How would you characterize the current level of climate cooperation among the international community? 

Well, we are still far from where we need to be, but I hope that we learn lessons from the failures of global disunity. The negative consequences that disunity caused, in relation to the containment of the pandemic, will force states to understand that it’s time to come together and to adopt a multilateral approach to climate action. If we do not learn our lesson from what has happened with Covid, [we] would be doing something very stupid. 

Technology and data have risen to prominence as the major national-security worry for many countries. A number of Western countries have banned Chinese telecoms firms from their networks, and the flow of data and technology between countries is increasingly constrained. The U.N. has recently launched a Cybersecurity and New Technologies programme: what effect do you hope this will have on the international cybersecurity landscape? 

This is something that, I believe, needs a very strong spirit of negotiation and compromise. There are conflicting interests, there are natural concerns in many countries about what other countries are doing. But my belief is that we cannot move to a world divided into two, with two economies, two dominant currencies, two internets, two competing strategies on artificial intelligence. I think we need to create conditions for compromise, for trust to be re-established, and for good practices to be followed, in order to be able to have a common commitment for the world to guarantee that [such] technologies become a force for good, and that their negative impacts can be avoided.

COVID-19 was only the latest salvo to batter international institutions, following the rise of a number of isolationist national leaders in recent years. This is coupled with structural problems: you recently said that the U.N.’s “present architecture is in many aspects outdated.” What reforms are needed to ensure that the organization remains effective and relevant despite the threats it faces?

Well, we have done a lot in order to increase the efficiency of the secretariat, in order to improve coordination between the different agencies, but there is a basic question of rigidly pushing up power within the international system. The institutions that we have, the U.N., the Bretton-Woods system, and others were made after the Second World War, and they correspond to the world at that time. If you look at the Security Council or the I.M.F. or the World Bank, if you look at the composition, the voting power, they correspond to a world that no longer exists. And so, it would be important for the international institutions to adapt, and to do the reforms necessary to reflect what the world is [like] today. 

More generally, in your view, how vulnerable are multilateral institutions at a time when globalization seems to be in reverse?  For our part, what can students do to help strengthen multilateralism?

Multilateral institutions are obviously vulnerable, in the sense that we do not have a global government system, and much less a democratic global government system. A lot of multilateral institutions have no real powers; they have the capacity to raise their voices, they have some convening capacity, but they have no real power. If you look at COVID-19, the World Health Organization could make recommendations to member states, but member states went on doing whatever they wanted. So, we need a multilateral vision that is more networked, more inclusive, to reflect the voices of society and the youth, [and] of the business community. We need a multilateral system that has teeth, and an appetite to bite whenever necessary in order to guarantee that we have a global governance that the challenges we face in today’s world require. I believe that the youth will have the capacity to avoid the mistakes of my generation, and will understand that either we are together, or—in a world in which the challenges are global—we will fail. Failure will be devastating for the planet.

Aditya Sharma is a senior editor at CPR and a senior in the Dual B.A. Program with SciencesPo, studying Political Science and English at the School of General Studies. Like the Secretary-General, he too likes multilateralism, green growth, and the E.U. In normal times, you’ll probably find him buying coffee in Butler. Talk to him about fiction, free speech, and politics in India, Britain, and Europe.