The past and future of global change – Max's slides for his talk at the UN

Last Friday I gave a talk to the United Nation’s Executive Committee. In this short article I wanted to make my slides publicly available.

The Executive Committee is a group of heads of several departments across the UN system – UNDP, WHO, and many others – and it is chaired by UN Secretary-General António Guterres. They had asked me to speak about the large global trends that change the world and I presented last Friday morning at the UN headquarter in New York.

Or open the slides in a new tab.

As always with our work, the slides are free for everyone to use in any way. After clicking on the full-screen icon in the bottom right the lecture notes will disappear, that is the view that I use when giving a talk.

At the beginning of my talk I asked why it is that we are not aware of how the world is changing and presented some of the evidence for this fact. Then I showed how very rapidly the world is actually changing but that this rapid change is in fact still far too slow if we want to reach the Sustainable Development Goals that the UN set themselves for 2030.

After this disappointing finding I outlined some of the important trends that we can benefit from if we want to achieve our development goals, and finally how we can use statistics as a tool for social change to put pressure on governments and those in power to keep them accountable for the development goals we agreed upon.