Guest Blog: The urgent need to reform global governance
By Arthur Lyon Dahl is President of the International Environment Forum, and a retired Deputy Assistant Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), with 50 years' international experience in environment and sustainability. He has recently been consultant to the World Bank on indicators of development, Senior Advisor to a project on values-based indicators of education for sustainable development, and Co-coordinator of the UNEP Major Groups & Stakeholders Advisory Group on International Environmental Governance. Today multilateralism is increasingly criticized, the UN is in financial crisis as governments fail to pay what they owe, and any suggestion that the UN might be reformed would be considered by most as hopelessly unrealistic. At the same time, the existential climate crisis is accelerating, biodiversity is collapsing around the world. the threat of a global pandemic seems ever more real, the financial system burdened with debt is agai...