COVID-19 is a global menace, but its impact falls heaviest on the most vulnerable. In the world’s poorest states, the pandemic-induced recession threatens to throw decades of development into reverse and place hundreds of millions in desperate circumstances. Last week, the United Nations released its Global Humanitarian Overview, outlining the additional devastation in store if the multilateral system fails to close the yawning gap between urgent humanitarian needs and funds available to meet them. In other words, the list of global challenges the incoming Biden administration will face just got longer. For the world’s poorest nations, the main threat is [...]
Over the past four years, America’s relationship with the United Nations underwent a dramatic shift, as the U.S. undermined, withdrew from or threatened withdrawal from some of the most important multilateral organizations, processes and accords. These include the Iran nuclear deal, the Paris climate agreement, the U.N. Human Rights Council, the World Health Organization and the World Trade Organization, to name a few. But it isn’t just America that drew away from multilateralism. Major and middle powers around the world have distanced themselves from multilateral institutions to embrace more naked forms of nationalism. This has led to greater risks of [...]
Joe Biden’s appointment of John Kerry as his special envoy for climate change signals the U.S. president-elect’s determination to place the fight against global warming, at long last, at the center of U.S. foreign and national security policy. His efforts to save the global environment should not stop there, however. Beyond climate change, the planet is experiencing a historically unprecedented collapse in biodiversity, undermining the countless benefits humanity gets from nature. To slow this disastrous loss of species and ecosystems, the incoming administration should spearhead a multilateral effort to reverse the multiple drivers of global ecological degradation, which go well [...]
