Global Shield has published “Governance of Complex Global Shocks: Preparing the UN multilateral system for the next complex global shock”, our new Position Paper on Action 54 of the UN Pact for the Future, a commitment already made that deserves delivery: 193 governments recognized the need for a more coherent, cooperative, coordinated, and multidimensional international response to complex global shocks, and the central role of the UN. Regardless of who is elected as the next Secretary-General, they will inherit a UN system with no standing mechanism to respond when a shock cuts across every sector at once.
Alongside the paper, we have launched a new campaign website with curated resources, where you can track that commitment through important milestones, like the Secretary-General transition and EOSG’s consultation with Member States on ways to strengthen the United Nations System’s approach to Complex Global Shocks.
Global risk is intensifying: the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2026 finds 57% of leaders expect a turbulent or stormy world within a decade, and the UN’s own Global Risk Report (2025) identifies 11 risks that are both the most severe and the ones multilateral institutions are least prepared for.
Complex global shocks are distinct from ordinary crises: they are systemic and cascading, overwhelming, hitting a significant share of the global population at once and, especially, the most vulnerable, and compounding, each one draining the capital available for the next.
The UN has crisis machinery, but it is built one hazard at a time. It runs dedicated crisis systems, such as for humanitarian and health emergencies, but the response for a complex global shock would not sit neatly in the existing mechanisms; none is mandated to coordinate across all of them at once.
Four structural gaps explain why: a Warning Gap (risk monitoring is siloed by agency), a Mandate Gap (no standing mechanism holds authority spanning sectors), a Financial Incentive Gap (81 to 83% of UN funding is earmarked, rewarding silos over coordination), and a Capacity Gap (bound by national sovereignty and uneven state capacity).
Action 54 is one of the few genuinely concrete, actionable commitments to come out of the Pact for the Future. It represents a concrete opportunity for the UN system. As the Secretary-General transition approaches, Global Shield will keep tracking this process and pressing for a UN system that’s ready before the next shock, not after.
