Who cares about the future? Our children do — and they need our help

The world faces a seemingly endless list of crises, from the war in Ukraine to the COVID-19 pandemic, from climate change to technological and economical upheavals. Taken together, they present us with one fundamental question: what world will we hand to our children?

The shorthand for these simultaneous, cascading problems is “polycrisis.” UNICEF’s recent 2023 Global Outlook report, which we worked on in partnership, defines polycrisis as “multiple near-simultaneous shocks, with strong interdependencies among them, taking place in an ever-more integrated world.” The term frames both the sweep and magnitude of the numerous shocks facing the world and was featured at this year’s Davos summit. It is a concept that helps makes sense of the many challenges facing the world’s youth and children.

Over the past few years, COVID, the war in Ukraine and economic turbulence have swept away decades of progress on child poverty. As UNICEF’s report states, one in four children will live in poverty this year, and across lower and middle-income countries, two-thirds of children do not receive a sufficiently diverse diet to grow and develop to their full potential. Meanwhile, the percentage of 10-year-olds in lower-income countries who could not read and understand a simple text rose 13 points, from 57 percent to 70 percent by 2022. These education losses risk losing $21 trillion in current and future earnings — equivalent to roughly 22 percent of today’s total global GDP.

Long-term threats such as climate change intersect with near-term challenges in ways that compound and multiply their harms. Take food security. In 2022, the war in Ukraine cut wheat exports from one of the world’s granaries and sharply increased gas and oil prices. Food prices around the world shot up, pushing the Food and Agriculture Organization’s food price index to its highest-ever recording. These shocks hit a world already beset by climate-driven disruptions such as severe drought and flooding, which have reduced the global food system’s resilience. All of this has significantly increased risks of child malnutrition.

Not all crises turn into opportunities. The suffering children endure due to shocks such as COVID-19 or the war in Ukraine will be difficult, if not impossible, to reverse. From unnecessary hardship due to poverty and malnutrition to poor educational outcomes and prospects for gainful employment, children’s futures depend on how we tackle the combined problems we have created.

We cannot address the challenges facing children today through a single solution. We need to change how we approach all the world’s problems — all at once.

An effective, coherent approach must first invest in foresight capabilities and anticipatory governance — that is, the tools that allow governments and other institutions to forecast, assess and manage risks on the horizon and beyond it. Anticipating, monitoring and preparing for another global pandemic such as an H5N1-derived bird flu is a good example. Such a pandemic could easily be more deadly than COVID-19. We must be better prepared than we were in 2020 when COVID-19 brought the world to its knees.

We must also incorporate young people’s voices into preparing for the future. Unfortunately, few governments and institutions are doing this kind of foresight-centric work. (UNICEF is an exception; the 2023 Global Outlook included insights from a cohort of Youth Foresight Fellows.)

A coherent approach also would rethink how we manage public goods such as food systems and health infrastructure, and revisit the ways international institutions govern those goods. A timely example concerns the relationship between the world’s food systems and hard security concerns. The war in Ukraine, which directly contributed to food price shocks around the world in 2022, revealed how vulnerable the global food system is to geopolitical disruption. It also showed that existing institutions are ill equipped to resolve such intersectional problems. The grain deal between Ukraine and Russia that allows Ukrainian wheat to be exported via the Black Sea was a highly welcome ad hoc negotiation. The next crisis could trigger massive global suffering and would require a similar solution. Still, we need standing systems to set the norms, processes and governance architectures to address problems on such a scale.

These tasks will be difficult. Each requires a consensus within and across governments, multilateral institutions and non-state actors including corporations, philanthropies and non-profit organizations. It will require creative approaches to address global threats, and it will take involvement from young people. But above all, it will demand that older generations acknowledge that neglecting to overcome the polycrisis would be a profound moral failure, consigning the world’s children and youth to a bleak future.

We owe it to them to act in the here and now. 

Peter Engelke is a resident senior fellow with the Strategic Foresight Initiative at the Atlantic Council.

Jasmina Byrne is chief of foresight and policy in UNICEF Innocenti – Global Office of Research and Foresight.