Nations. United.
Multilateral organizations and international governance forums, particularly the United Nations, are crucial in addressing global challenges and fostering international cooperation.
They play a vital role in managing global risk, such as pandemics, conflict and insecurity, and natural disasters. They facilitate coordinated responses and support countries fulfill their responsibilities to manage global risk and disasters.
In an interconnected world facing complex risk, advocacy at the multilateral level can improve disaster risk management – from local to global disasters – and develop new norms for countries to follow in their own national policy.
In September 2026, Global Shield published Governance of Complex Global Shocks, a new Position Paper examining the structural gaps in the UN’s current crisis architecture and setting out recommendations for the Secretary-General, UN entities, Member States, and civil society as the leadership transition approaches. Alongside the paper, we launched a dedicated campaign website tracking this action through the transition, including a Member State support tracker.
The Pact for the Future is a transformational agreement on how the United Nations intends to reform itself for future challenges, warning that “we are confronted by rising catastrophic and existential risks… If we do not change course, we risk tipping into a future of persistent crisis and breakdown.”
Member states recognized “the need for a more coherent, cooperative, coordinated and multidimensional international response to complex global shocks and the central role of the United Nations,” and requested that the UN Secretary-General consider ways to strengthen this coordination. Global Shield continues to engage stakeholders on this action, building on our earlier advocacy for the “emergency platforms” concept.
Existential and global catastrophic risk is appearing as a major consideration in a range of new surveys, polls, analyses, and reports on global risk. These reports are being conducted by a wide range of governmental and non-government organizations, including the UN, which will release a Global Risk Report in early 2025.
Global Shield believes that global risk reports, especially the UN Global Risk Report, must consider the growing global catastrophic risk from all hazards. Policymakers must acknowledge and understand the insights from these reports, compare the results to their own risk and capability assessments, and resolve critical policy gaps.
As a result, Global Shield is taking a number of steps over 2024, including convening a diverse group of organizations that produce these risk reports, developing policy reports on how to translate global risk reports into action, and conducting public and policy engagement around the integration of global catastrophic risk into the “global risk” report ecosystem.
