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URGENT ACTIONS FOR

A MORE SECURE WORLD

from the WHAT NEXT FOR THE UN? Building a More Secure World festival
As individuals, we should​​
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  1. Share solutions to problems with our local communities (such as Zimbabwe friendship benches to address depression) and voice our priorities to decision-makers;
     

  2. Know our (and others’) human rights - such as for healthcare - and how to lobby for them with decision makers;
     

  3. Join local, national or global movements to help fight injustices (such as in the food system);
     

  4. Remember the potentially powerful role of Creativity in learning about needs and creating change;
     

  5. Decide what it is important to us to demand (such as a framework for digital regulation) and join with others to achieve it, holding the powerful to account;
     

  6. Whenever involved in negotiations, seek to ensure clear understanding of each other’s positions;
     

  7. Lobby our representatives (like MPs and Ministers) to commit to ambitious international actions (such as: supporting Countdown to Midnight to ensure more ambitious Nationally Determined Contributions ahead of the Glasgow Climate COP in 2021; and engaging in the implementation of frameworks such as GDPR in the EU that will protect users);
     

  8. Support ethical and sustainable practice by businesses (such as boycotting fast fashion);
     

  9. Learn to cook with plant-based whole foods, utilise food ‘waste’, and eat seasonally;
     

  10. Adopt Personal Carbon Budgets – whereby we each individually ration our carbon emissions;
     

  11. Support and Invest in local businesses.

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Communities should​​
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  1. Share best practice with other communities (such as in addressing health needs) and learn what works for others;
     

  2. Recognise the needs of diverse populations (such as in medical education and healthcare);
     

  3. Encourage collaboration within communities (such as in establishing and protecting green spaces);
     

  4. Encourage imaginative initiatives, by setting aside funds for community events and solutions (such as for environmental issues);
     

  5. Work together to address important issues locally (such as: creating Local Green New Deals to green communities by a certain date; establishing local schemes for growing, sharing and composting food). This could involve local government, planners, businesses, schools, shops and other community groups;
     

  6. Encourage dialogue to understand the needs of particular sectors (like youth or migrants) and how to meet them (such as in types of jobs and the employment support needed);
     

  7. Respond to coordinated activity – led by local politicians and university students – by joining key campaigns (such as the #ICANSAVE My City campaign, moving public opinion towards support for the ratification of the 2017 UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons);
     

  8. Normalise mental health concerns;
     

  9. Organise local food-sharing events to explore the cultural importance of food in the community, and collaboratively identify culturally appropriate changes that members can make to address the food system’s wider issues in health, sustainability, and accessibility;
     

  10. Reduce carbon emissions and work towards going carbon-neutral (such as for local institutions and businesses);
     

  11. Give local support to agro-forestry and ways of managing farms so that they nurture and protect local wildlife;
     

  12. Become a Transition Community – and set goals for the community to achieve sustainability within a milestoned time table;
     

  13. Establish local financial markets that are community owned;
     

  14. Mobilise the private sector to do work governments are failing to do to create integration (such as raising capital);
     

  15. Address abusive online behaviour (such as racism, sexism hate speech, misinformation), implementing reporting mechanisms over these issues in the digital spaces.

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Nations should​
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  1. Think long-term in public services (such as health);
     

  2. Use digital tech to support rather than replace existing public services (such as health services);
     

  3. Contribute to – and learn from – the sharing of best practices and capacity-building (such as in health care and food policies) between nations;
     

  4. Invest in equitable public services (such as in health and education systems);
     

  5. Ensure that education systems include, in their core, key contemporary challenges (such as physical and mental health issues, food systems. dietary health, Education for Sustainable Development(ESD), digital literacy, dangers of AI and misuse of data);
     

  6. Set up a national, public and transparent ledger of all national and subnational government debt issues, contractual obligations, and revenue-sharing agreements, to improve the accountability and governance around public debt;
     

  7. Reinforce and restate national commitment to the UN Refugee Convention, and the Protocol which updated it (such as in health care and education);
     

  8. Encourage city leaders in richer countries to embrace the Smart Sustainable Cities project and similar initiatives and to share their experience with disadvantaged cities;
     

  9. Ensure that minorities are fully represented in all civic reviews;
     

  10. Adopt a whole-government food policy framework that supports sustainable food production, healthy diets, food waste-reduction, agricultural diversification, small-scale producers, high trade standards, and a just transition for food system actors;
     

  11. Create national programmes of rewilding (incentivised by environmental grants);
     

  12. Use subsidies to support the movement towards a green economy, phasing out all non-green subsidies as quickly as possible;
     

  13. Implement a ‘Just and Fair Transition to a Green Economy’: establish plans to remove all fossil-fuel powered cars from our roads by 2030; impose punitive taxes on carbon emissions; and plan to criminalise the production, sale, and use of fossil fuels by 2035;
     

  14. Implement a national ‘transition service’ in the Swedish model, which provides – to those made redundant – coaching and support through sectoral job security councils;
     

  15. Include women (in post-conflict communities and in fragile states) in all conflict resolution and civic management training programmes, as they have shown they are ‘forces for peace’;
     

  16. Hold companies housed on their territory to account, keeping Big Tech from becoming monopolies more powerful than States by making and implementing regulations;
     

  17. Work towards a universally accepted normative framework concerning digital regulations and commit to providing binding enforcement mechanisms.

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The UN  & International Organisations should​
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  1. Identify and seek to combat root causes of problems globally (such as the causes of ill health);
     

  2. Encourage projects (such as in health) to be community-led;
     

  3. Establish global reward and recognition schemes to incentivise change (such as food system transparency) and embed the SDGs in economic systems (such as the food system);
     

  4. For issues requiring social transformation (such as food) work with all members of civil society, particularly marginalised groups, to build a social revolution that promotes shared ownership and responsibility;
     

  5. Create a “We the Peoples….” citizen-led, digital UN operating through international citizens’ assemblies, giving a voice to the voiceless;
     

  6. Expand accountability mechanisms to defend International Human Rights;
     

  7. Ensure youth is represented even in the highest fora, despite local and national cultural obstructions;
     

  8. Adopt multi-stakeholder approaches to new challenges (such as digital issues) gathering various actors (such as companies, civil society, NGOs and human rights watchdogs);
     

  9. Encourage negotiators (international and inter-personal) to show evidence of their understanding of each other’s position, and share publicly evidence to that effect;
     

  10. Share best practices through capacity-building among nations and empower international organisations, through funding, to tackle new and emerging issues (such as creating safe and secure global digital architecture while bridging the digital divide);
     

  11. Agree a UN Convention on Pandemics, that

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  1. Expands the Responsibility to Protect to epidemics;

  2. Obliges each nation-state to prevent the spread of communicable diseases (to safeguard its own residents, as well as the populations of other countries);

  3. Reinforces and reforms the WHO to provide it with tools to lead on proactive monitoring and intervention to halt potential pandemics, as well as to coordinate pandemic responses;

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   12. Recognise ecocide as an international crime;

 

   13. Encourage nations to undertake capacity development to raise awareness of conflict prevention and peacebuilding in education institutions and other civic society settings;

   14. Encourage media regulatory reform where it promotes post-conflict peace settlements and their implementation, and which denies access to those using the media for non-inclusive factionalism;

   15. Continue to provide expertise and funding through programs pertaining to current digital trends and threats and dedicate more resources and means to Special Rapporteurs on digital issues (Privacy, Human Rights, Promotion of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression);

   16. Promote a new Universal Declaration of Digital Rights.

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24th October, 2020

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