Meet the new crisis, same as the old crisis
At the same time as the UN’s legitimacy is being called into question, AI raises the urgent need for global cooperation. Barry Johnston, Purpose Union’s Founding Partner, reflects on his attendance at the 81st UN General Assembly (UNGA) in New York.
Last year, Donald Trump’s influence hung over the UN General Assembly and New York Climate Week like a big, orange cloud. For those concerned with matters of peace, justice and ecological preservation, the deep gravitational pull of his opposing politics felt inescapable. This year, his presence barely registered apart from in the Manhattan traffic. Events - Iran, extreme climate weather and the dizzying ascent of AI’s capabilities - seem to have overtaken the man who likes to set the pace of geopolitics.
The most telling moment was the appearance of Sam Altman of OpenAI and Dario Amodei of Anthropic discussing AI safety before the UN Security Council. What Trump described last week as a “hoax”, the world’s leaders saw fit this week to elevate to the centre of global governance.
Altman described a choice between “a new renaissance of creativity and discovery” and “upheaval and disarray”. Whatever their motives, it is striking that leaders of companies building this technology came to the UN to argue for international cooperation. At a moment when the institution faces fierce criticism and much naval gazing about its own status, they had helped make the case for why we still need it.
Winning back trust
Technology and ecology are outpacing our politics. The UN now warns that global warming is likely to exceed 1.5°C in the next few years. Extreme heat is already putting workers, health services and infrastructure under strain. AI, meanwhile, promises extraordinary benefits while raising questions about security, control and the resources needed to power it. Governments can act within their borders, but neither set of risks will stay there.
Across side events on security, water and philanthropy, I heard versions of the same challenge. How do you win back enough trust to act together?
On security, ministers argued that climate change and nature loss belong in national risk assessments, alongside threats governments are more accustomed to planning for. Their concern was practical. Heat, crop failures and water shortages can destabilise communities and send shocks through supply chains. But cooperation between countries depends on sharing analysis and accepting that a problem beginning elsewhere can quickly become your own.
At a water investment roundtable, the question was closer to home. How do you bring investors, utilities and communities together around projects that make sense for an entire river basin? Money and promising technology are only part of the answer. A pilot may never be adopted, and a technically sound scheme may face opposition if the public is brought in after the decisions have been made.
The AI funding boom
Philanthropy discussions exposed another trust gap. Huge new resources are anticipated to flow into funding due to the AI boom. New donors need confidence to start giving without spending months or years devising the perfect strategy or reinventing great work already being done. Organisations doing the work need funders to trust them with flexible support over years, rather than repeatedly asking them to prove immediate, attributable results.
Shared due diligence could help money move faster and patient funding would give it a better chance of achieving something lasting. At the core of achieving this is the accountability and feedback loop provided by incorporating beneficiary groups from the outset.
The path to repair
It wasn’t all doom and gloom. In our new crises, some see the path to repair. One state senator from the US described neighbours who had scarcely known one another coming together to help. They learned each other’s names, found out who needed what, and kept those connections after the immediate danger had passed.
It was a reminder that people can build lasting relationships when they recognise how much they depend on one another. As shocks become more frequent, we may all need to get to know and trust our neighbours better - across the street and across borders.
All these conversations are happening at a moment when the UN must choose a successor to the current Secretary General, António Guterres. The organisation’s failures and its strained finances were on show this week. But so too were the urgency of its mission and its mandate. In the same chambers where the AI executives spoke, nations have confronted nuclear threats, negotiated responses to conflict and set the course for global climate cooperation.
The new leader will need to reform. But in doing so, they should look back as well as forward for answers.
