Financing for Development: Statement of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network

May 12, 2025

By SDSN

Download the full statement.

Executive Summary

The upcoming Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD4, in Sevilla, Spain) during June 30-July 3, 2025, should send forth the message of hope that humanity’s global goals to end poverty and contain the climate emergency are within reach. Key reforms of the International Financial Architecture – the system of public and private finance that channels the world’s saving to the world’s investment – should be adopted at this conference to bring these vital objectives within reach. As the United Nations member states pledged in Agenda 2030, let us leave no one behind.

The UN member states meeting in Sevilla have a responsibility not only to their own citizens but to all of humanity. Member states must act together in partnership and good faith for the common good of humanity. No single member state of the UN can excuse itself of the responsibility to contribute fairly and adequately to the provision of global public goods and services. High-income member states have a special responsibility, both as a matter of distributive justice – that the rich not leave the poor behind – and as a matter of reparative justice – that those countries that contributed most to greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental harms in the past must do the most to curb their emissions in the future and to compensate the other countries for the damages their past actions have caused. No individual member state can shirk the demands of justice.

There are four categories of public goods that must be addressed in Sevilla. First, the UN member states must adequately finance the UN system itself. This overall UN cost of operations is a paltry sum – just $46 billion in 2023 (the year of most recent data) compared with $2.4 trillion spent worldwide on the military that year. The United States paid $13 billion of UN operations compared with $916 billion spent by the US on military outlays. The UN budget must be met in full, and indeed increased. Efficiencies in UN operations are to be welcome but cutting UN budgets at a time of pervasive conflicts, human displacements, climate disasters, epidemic diseases, and other disasters is unacceptable.

Second, UN member states must increase their official financing of the Sustainable Development Goals in the lead-up to 2030, including debt relief as needed to create the fiscal space to achieve the SDGs. Since 2016, SDG financing from official sources has gotten remarkably short shrift. The high-income countries have delayed critical capital increases at the World Bank and other multilateral development banks, even though the SDG financing gap is large and well documented. These countries have delayed critical increases in International Monetary Fund quotas and Special Drawing Rights allocations.

Third, UN member states must increase their financing of the global commons, including the biodiversity of the world’s tropical rainforests, the marine life of the oceans, and the protection of the atmosphere, freshwater, soils, coastlines, wetlands, and other ecosystems from transboundary pollution and global-scale degradation. The high-income countries have the responsibility to fill the funds they have designated for these purposes, including the Adaptation Fund, the Losses and Damages Fund, the Green Climate Fund, and others.

Fourth, UN member states must agree on critical reforms of the international financial markets to ensure that world saving flows to the countries with the highest investment returns and the highest growth prospects – which are the poorer countries in the world. This is not the case today. The international financial markets are led by faulty regulations and policies to favor the countries using the major international currencies, notably the US dollar and Euro, and the countries favored by the US Federal Reserve and European Central Bank. The rest of the world, especially the poorer countries, are largely cut off from international capital by low credit ratings that punish poor countries as a matter of formula rather than economic logic, and by a maze of unilateral economic sanctions imposed by the key-currency countries. The IMF and World Bank also fail to recognize the crucial positive role of long-term debt financing of development by a debt sustainability system that discourages or even bars the long-term financing of infrastructure and human capital in the poorer countries.

We call for a bold outcome that has four parts. First, the core outcome document from FfD4 should express the consensus of the UN member states, but not necessarily unanimity. No single state, or small group of states, should block the collective will of the UN member states. The core outcome document should strongly reaffirm Agenda 2030, the Sustainable Development Goals, the Paris Climate Agreement, the Montreal-Kunming Biodiversity Framework; the overarching principles of sustainable development, distributive and reparative justice, common but differentiated responsibilities, and collective responsibility for the UN system; and the commitment to fix the Global Financial Architecture to ensure the financing needed for sustainable development.

Second, there should be room for reservations by individual states, to enable those states to express their concerns without blocking the actions of the consensus of member states. No single member state or small number of member states should impede actions supported by most of the UN member states with most of the world population.

Fourth, there should be a clear list of specific action items that can be reported to the world in clear and unmistakable terms, with timelines and measurements for accountability. The highest priorities include: (1) full funding of the UN system; (2) substantial increases in official funding by the World Bank, multilateral development banks, and the International Monetary Fund, backed as necessary by capital increases at these institutions, and debt relief as needed to increase vital fiscal space; (3) funding of the institutions established to protect the global commons, including the Global Environmental Facility, the Adaptation Fund, and the Losses and Damages Fund, with clear assessments by country and with new revenues raised by international taxes (e.g. on international shipping, aviation, and greenhouse emissions) and by other agreed means; (4) clear steps to reform the regulation of the private capital markets, including a revamping of the credit rating system and the IMF-World Bank Debt Sustainability Framework, to increase the flows of capital to high-return investments in low-income countries, with reporting back to the UN General Assembly on such measures in 2026.

Statement of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network on the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development*

Agenda 2030 and the Paris Climate Agreement are for the common good of humanity, and humanity, and the United Nations member states must work towards them. Yet fewer than 20% of the SDG targets are on track to be achieved by 2030 and the climate crisis is rapidly worsening. No UN member state can exempt itself from this work, particularly in a time where unilateral actions by individual member states can create irreparable damage for the present and future generations of all of humanity.

The world is also beset by violent conflicts that claim innocent victims and threaten global survival. We must redouble our efforts towards peace and ensure for all people the material conditions of survival and dignity that are necessary for peace. We align ourselves with the Alliance for Peace adopted in Gernika, Spain under the auspices of the UN Alliance of Civilizations, with the partnership of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network.

Sustainable development is a high-return activity

The job of finance is to bring the fruits of these technological advances to the benefit of all of humanity, including to our impoverished brothers and sisters in conflict zones and places hard hit by the ravages of high-intensity tropical cyclones, droughts, floods, heat waves and forest fires that arrive with ever-greater frequency as the result of human-induced climate change. We have powerful solutions – zero-carbon energy, open-source AI, precision agriculture, biodiversity conservation – if we undertake the needed investments to bring these solutions to bear at the global scale.

There is more good news for finance: economic development is a high-return activity. This means that properly designed financial markets will channel the world’s saving not only to the high-income countries that are already prosperous, but even more to the world’s poorer countries, which have the prospect of rapid “catching up” economic advancement. We note with satisfaction that today’s emerging and developing economies (EMDEs) routinely achieve faster economic growth than the high-income countries, a process that economists call “economic convergence.” Indeed, the poorer the country today, the greater is the growth potential and the higher is the return on investment. With properly functioning international financial markets, and with key institutional reforms within the emerging economies to reduce investment risks and direct investments to economic, social, and environmental priorities, the pool of annual world saving – roughly $30 trillion per year – will flow in a vast and rising current to meet the needs and fulfill the potential of the poorest countries.

In addition to investing in the planet’s environmental sustainability, the highest reliable return on the planet is investing in the health and education of a young child in a low-income country in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, Oceania, or Asia. Education not only brings dignity, fulfillment, and wellbeing, but also remarkable and reliable economic benefit, leading economists to describe healthcare, nutrition and education as investments in human capital. Such investments have a huge financial payoff, perhaps 20 percent compound annual return, when they are broad-based and good quality.

The most important practical challenge is to enable such investments even in impoverished places today where governments lack the current revenues to provide health services, nutritional supplementation, and quality schooling, for all children. We recall with alarm, sadness, and determination that some 250 million children are out of school because of the poverty of their societies, an estimated 733 million people struggle with chronic hunger, and roughly a third of humanity cannot afford a healthy diet. Sound international finance could and would channel long-term grants and loans to the poorest nations, to enable governments to ensure all children the start in life that they need and thereby enable these children to earn high remuneration in the future, providing the very means to repay the international loans. For the millions of out-of-school poor children living in middle-income countries, both domestic finance and accountable governance can ensure that the poor within middle-income societies are also afforded access to health, nutrition, and quality education.

The potential of cutting-edge technologies to advance sustainable development

This past year has brought us new fruits of human ingenuity. DeepSeek, an ingenious AI engine devised by young Chinese engineers, building on the ingenuity of AI pioneers, offers a powerful low-cost, open-source AI system that can benefit humanity. BYD, another Chinese innovative company, unveiled a system that charges electric vehicles in just five minutes, bringing the dream of convenient, low-cost and zero-emission mobility within reach. The 2024 Nobel prizes in Chemistry and Physics to British and British-Canadian scientists celebrated breakthroughs in protein folding and machine learning that offer the prospects of drug development and other stunning breakthroughs for the benefit of human health and global prosperity. We are aware that advances in technology can be used for good or ill, but we emphasize the potential of the new advanced technologies to increase human wellbeing and advance the SDGs. We call on governments and policymakers to collaborate with scholars and civil society to create legal, regulatory, and ethical frameworks to direct innovations to the common good. We call on FfD4 to adopt measures to ensure that the new technologies are within reach of all parts of the planet, rich and poor alike.

Reforming the International Financial Architecture

Scaling-up affordable and long-term financing

We emphasize, therefore, the most important practical problem facing the UN member states at FfD4 is to enable the vast $30 trillion pool of world saving to flow in much larger amounts to the countries that are most in need: the low-income and lower-middle income countries and countries most vulnerable to global environmental shocks – and to the poorest people within all countries. For that, we must reform the International Financial Architecture. As a practical matter, the International Financial Architecture should ensure that world saving flows to the EMDEs with long maturities and low costs of capital aligned to the investment needs and realistic timing of long-term convergent growth in those countries.

Financing for economic development is within reach, but the timeline of development must be understood and respected by the international financial system. A 3-year-old child in Uganda today – if suitably enabled, empowered, and financed – will graduate university in 20 years. She will then work for another 20 years to reap the returns on her education, a period long enough to pay income taxes that repay the costs of her education. Uganda can therefore prudently borrow to finance the education of its children, to be repaid out of their bountiful future earnings, if the loans are at long maturities, such as 40 years, and at low interest rates that properly reflect the high returns to education and therefore the true “bankability” of the loans.

We call on the UN member states meeting in Sevilla to redesign the International Financial Architecture in accord with the high potential and realistic timeline of economic convergence. For impoverished nations struggling under the weight of unsustainable debt and burdensome debt servicing, we call for Debt Relief consistent with the Jubilee Year. Debt relief should entail at the least a restructuring of the outstanding debts of heavily burdened countries so that the debts fall due not in the immediate future but in 30-40 years – the realistic timeline that aligns with future economic growth. We also call on creditor governments to swap outstanding debts for investments in climate safety (debt-for-climate swaps), protection of biodiversity (debt-for nature swaps), and education (debt-for-education swaps) in line with Pope Francis’s declaration of 2025 as a Jubilee Year:

If we really wish to prepare a path to peace in our world, let us commit ourselves to remedying the remote causes of injustice, settling unjust and unpayable debts, and feeding the hungry.

We note that in most cases the debt challenge is not the absolute scale of the debt, but rather the terms of the debt. Until now, the international financial system burdens the developing country borrowers with subjective risk assessments on their international borrowing that are not aligned with the underlying economic fundamentals of the emerging economies. The essential fact is that the poorer countries have higher growth potential and higher returns to capital than the rich countries. Capital should flow to these countries. Instead, they are condemned by short-term and short-sighted analyses by the credit rating agencies and the Bretton Woods institutions. As a result, they pay exorbitant yields and are pushed to short maturities on their market borrowing.

One consequence is what economists call “self-fulfilling panics.” Since the maturities are short, the debts must be refinanced every 5-10 years. The grave structural problem is that refinancing debts is rarely routine. Financial markets are inherently unstable, prone to self-fulfilling panics and financial crises within the domestic banking sector, in the international inter-bank market, and in the global bond refinance market. When a government borrows at 7 years in the Eurobond market, it may not be able to float new bonds when the existing 7-year bond falls due. The obvious and crucial remedy is to match the time horizon of the borrowing with the realistic time horizon of long-term economic growth (especially considering that the returns on human capital investments typically require 20 to 40 years to come to fruition).

The EMDEs suffer mightily from inaccurate and unjust credit ratings that attribute extreme and largely self-fulfilling risks to the investments in these countries. The simple fact is that the EMDEs are good credit prospects, if the financing program is well designed (with long maturities and affordable yields); the national economy is well managed (fiscal rules and sound debt management systems); the investment program is well targeted to infrastructure, human capital, and business development; and LLR services are available. In such circumstances, the overriding truth is today’s poorer countries have a very high growth potential and high investment returns. Indeed, potential economic growth and the returns to investment are far higher than in the high-income countries.

We therefore call on the IMF and World Bank, in their Debt Sustainability Framework (DSF), and the Credit Rating Agencies (CRAs) in their credit ratings, to revamp their methodologies to take into account: the high potential growth of poorer countries if they have access to the necessary financing for development; the maturity structure of the loans (giving higher credit ratings and debt-sustainability assessments to long-term loans); the quality of country’s debt management systems; the presence of a domestic and/or international lender of last resort; and the uses of the external financing, recognizing the growth-creating benefits of high-return investments in human capital and physical infrastructure. Official financing should be accorded based on growth potential, good governance, and financing needs, not based on the foreign policy considerations of one or another major power. Financing needs should be calibrated based on 9 integrated assessments that consider economic, social, and environmental needs and objectives.

One immediate change in CRA methodology that is both urgent and greatly enhancing of global growth and economic efficiency is to end the practice of “sovereign ceilings” on the credit ratings of private-sector entities in the EMDEs. According to the doctrine of sovereign ceilings, no private-sector borrower can be accorded a higher credit rating than the sovereign. This methodology makes no analytical sense and is a shorthand of the CRAs. Many private sector borrowers are plainly in a position to service their debts whether or not the sovereign is experiencing debt distress. The private-sector borrower may have collateral, liquidity, or a dedicated flow of revenues in the foreign currency that render it a low credit risk independent of conditions facing the sovereign. Historical data confirms this high credit performance of the multilateral development banks (MDBs) and other development finance institutions (DFIs) in their private sector operations.

Central banks and monetary unions

In addition to long-term maturities on borrowing, there are additional solutions to short-term maturities. First, to the maximum extent, countries should borrow in their own national currencies, so that their own central banks can provide Lender of Last Resort (LLR) assistance if the international financial market plunges into yet another financial panic. Even if the country’s borrowing is in a foreign currency, the central bank of the foreign currency (i.e., the US Federal Reserve in the case of dollar-denominated borrowing) should provide currency swaps to the central bank of the indebted country to break a self-fulfilling panic. In effect, the Federal Reserve would fulfill the vital function of (International) Lender of Last Resort (ILLR).

A third approach, first proposed in 1944 by the economist John Maynard Keynes, is for the IMF to be empowered to serve as the ILLR, utilizing a greatly expanded Special Drawing Rights (SDR) allocation as the IMF’s operating instrument. All these solutions may be bolstered in the intermediate run (in ten to twenty years) by the emergence of new monetary unions in the major regional economic groups, including the African Union, Mercosur, ASEAN, the Arab League, the Eurasian Economic Union, and others, recognizing that monetary union require considerable support through economic, fiscal, and political integration of their members. Monetary unions (such as the Euro) could facilitate borrowing in their own currency and would enable the central banks of the new monetary unions to serve as lenders of last resort.

The Governance of multilateral financial Institutions

The IMF and many other multilateral financial institutions also need to reform their governance to give due weight to the developing countries. To take one example, the IMF currently gives only 17 percent of the voting power to the ten BRICS countries, though these countries account for 27 percent of world output measured at market prices, 39 percent of world output measured at purchasing-power prices, and 46 percent of world population.

We also note with urgency the powerful case for greatly scaling up the flow of new lending by the multilateral development banks (MDBs), including the World Bank and the regional development banks. MDB lending has an outstanding long-term track record, reflecting the financial expertise of the MDBs and the Preferred Creditor Treatment (PCT) accorded to MDB financing. The problem today is that the scale of overall MDB financing is a small fraction of what is needed to achieve our global goals. MDB financing can and should be bolstered in several ways: higher leverage on the MDBs’ current capital base; new capital increases, either across the board of the MDB owners, or by the willing members of the banks in the case of opposition by one or another member government; and co-financing of the MDB non-sovereign loans by private-sector institutional investors such as ILX, which creatively draw in pension fund capital in partnership with MDB financing, benefitting from the MDB status as International Financial Institutions (IFIs).

We note as well the importance of new Private Credit Managers in mobilizing private-sector financing for the EMDEs, either in stand-alone private financing or in blended financing with the MDBs. We also note that large-scale infrastructure investment initiatives – such as the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative and the European Global Gateway – can accelerate connectivity across people and nations. Borrowing countries too can create new national and multilateral institutions, including national development banks and sovereign wealth funds, that enable sophisticated borrowing strategies with improved bankability of projects and lower costs of capital.

Partnerships among MDBs but also with PDBs, for instance as part of the Financing in Common Initiative (FICs), can help accelerate the convergence towards shared standards and best practices, and to support banks’ commitments to shift their strategies towards achieving the SDGs.

Financing Global Public Goods

In addition to the massive scale up of long-term loans at low interest costs to the EMDEs, both through direct funding from capital markets and through the MDBs, there is a need to finance Global Public Goods that are not amenable to loan or equity financing. Some of these global public goods include: social assistance to the poorest of the poor, funding of UN institutions, and protection of the global commons (oceans, the atmosphere, tropical forests, space, endangered species, and critical biomes).

The world has long called for Official Development Assistance (ODA) for such purposes, yet ODA never reached the global commitment of 0.7 percent of GNI of the donor nations, as adopted by the UN General Assembly back in 1971. Today, however, ODA is collapsing, in a veritable free fall, undermined by political populism and shortsightedness in which donor governments fail to recognize their moral and legal responsibilities. ODA, after all, reflects a combination of distributive justice (ensuring that no one is left behind), reparative justice (repaying debts owed for past harms, whether from slavery, imperialism, the emissions of climate-changing greenhouse gases, or other harms to the Earth’s physical systems), and inter-generational justice (respecting the pressing needs of today’s young people and of future generations).

The high-income UN member states must not be allowed to flag in the pursuit of justice. Because traditional ODA is being cut or even phased out by some countries, economic justice should be met not by voluntary ODA but rather by compulsory assessments of UN member states, including the implementation of international taxes on maritime shipping, global aviation and greenhouse gas emissions. We note that taxing the greenhouse gas emissions of the high-income countries would combine the multiple dimensions of justice (distributive, reparative, and intergenerational) with the practical resource mobilization to help poorer and more vulnerable countries to undertake effective climate action. Such global taxation should aim, in the first instance, for 0.1% of global GDP, or roughly $100 billion per year, with the global taxation rising to perhaps 1% of global GDP by 2040. All countries should cooperate to crack down on tax evasion and other financial crimes. To add another practical target to the global commitment to a sustainable planet, we urge sovereign wealth funds to allocate a meaningful portion of their vast resources directly to investments in environmental sustainability.

Addressing Multidimensional Poverty

In addressing the poor, the most important ethical principle is to co-create solutions with the poor: we should act with the poor, not merely for the poor. Or as the World Health Organization has powerfully stated, “Nothing for us without us.”

Acting with the poor, small miracles can occur, from poverty to sustenance, from barren lands to flourishing food production. Smallholder farmers in rural areas constitute roughly three-fourths of those living in extreme income poverty – and over 83% multidimensionally poor people. They can best be supported in their livelihoods and wellbeing by programs that raise farmer outputs and incomes, in programs championed by the Food and Agriculture Organization, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, World Food Program, and related agencies.

Corporations too can play a decisive role, by designing their core business strategies to empower the poorest of the poor, as workers, consumers, and citizens. Impact finance amounts to around 1 trillion dollars in managed assets, indicating that there is a vast desire for social and environmental impact by consumers and investors that can be tapped for the common good. More information and disclosure by companies would aid consumers in making the ethical choices they desire to pursue. Similarly, accurate data on multidimensional poverty and other challenges of development will enable more people to respond more effectively to their ethical motivations.

Effective governance

Global financing is a vital instrument of empowerment, but it never stands alone. Economic convergence depends on the proper management by and within the borrowing countries as well. As economists say, convergence is “conditional” on effective governance in the borrowing countries. We therefore urge intensive skill training in lower-income countries to empower governments to plan for their long-term development, manage fiscal policy and international indebtedness, fight corruption, and implement public investment plans and public services with diligence and excellence. We urge the formation of a Borrowers Club of Nations, alongside the Creditors Clubs, to foster the proper domestic institutions, fiscal rules, and regulatory practices, to achieve long-term sustainable development. We also call for precise and quantified metrics – on the cost of capital, the maturity of loans, the returns on equity, and the performance on the SDGs and multi-dimensional poverty – so that commitments are tested rigorously against real action. In addition, Nation States should act according to the 2030 Agenda (paragraph 30) and refrain from promulgating and applying any unilateral economic, financial or trade measures which can undermine other countries’ ability to invest in and cooperate for sustainable development.

The Action Agenda at FfD4

There are four action priorities for FfD4. First, the UN member states must adequately finance the UN system itself. This overall UN cost of operations is a paltry sum – just $46 billion in 2023 (the year of most recent data) compared with $2.4 trillion spent worldwide on the military that year. The United States paid $13 billion of UN operations compared with $916 billion spent by the US on military outlays. The UN budget must be met in full, and indeed increased. Efficiencies in UN operations are to be welcome but cutting UN budgets at a time of pervasive conflicts, human displacements, climate disasters, epidemic diseases, and other disasters is unacceptable.

Second, UN member states must increase their official financing of the Sustainable Development Goals in the lead-up to 2030, including debt relief as needed to create the fiscal space to achieve the SDGs. Since 2016, SDG financing from official sources has gotten remarkably short shrift. The high-income countries have delayed critical capital increases at the World Bank and other multilateral development banks, even though the SDG financing gap is large and well documented. These countries have delayed critical increases in IMF quotas and SDR allocations. And the creditor nations of the poorer countries have failed to establish fair and equitable standards of debt restructuring to prevent poor and vulnerable countries from being strangled by debt servicing exacerbated by short and insufficient maturities of the debts.

Fourth, UN member states must agree on critical reforms of the international financial markets to ensure that world saving flows to the countries with the highest investment returns and the highest growth prospects – which are the poorer countries in the world. This is not the case today. The international financial markets are rigged by regulations and policies to favor the countries using the major international currencies, notably the US dollar and Euro, and the countries favored by the US Fed and European Central Bank. The rest of the world, especially the poorer countries, are largely cut off from international capital by low credit ratings that punish poor countries as a matter of formula rather than economic logic, and by a maze of unilateral economic sanctions imposed by the key-currency countries. The IMF and World Bank also fail to recognize the crucial positive role of long-term debt financing of development by a debt sustainability system that discourages or even bars the long-term financing of infrastructure and human capital in the poorer countries.

We call for a bold outcome that has four parts. First, the core outcome document should express the consensus of the UN member states, but not necessarily unanimity. No single state, or small group of states, should block the collective will of the UN member states. The core outcome document should strongly reaffirm Agenda 2030, the Sustainable Development Goals, the Paris Climate Agreement, the Montreal-Kunming Biodiversity Framework; the overarching principles of sustainable development, distributive and reparative justice, common but differentiated responsibilities, and collective responsibility for the UN system; and the commitment to fix the Global Financial Architecture to ensure the financing needed for sustainable development.

Third, there should be room for high-ambition initiatives by “coalitions of the willing.” FfD4 should encourage and welcome bold actions by individual regions or groups of nations that in turn inspire other nations and regions to raise their ambitions as well. Even as some countries, businesses, and even philanthropies step back from Sustainable Development, others all over the world are stepping up their effort. The leaders of positive and dynamic change must be encouraged, supported, and championed in the outcome at Sevilla.

Fourth, there should be a clear list of specific action items that can be reported to the world in clear and unmistakable terms, with timelines and measurements for accountability. The highest priorities include: (1) full funding of the UN system; (2) substantial increases in official funding by the World Bank, multilateral development banks, and the International Monetary Fund, backed as necessary by capital increases at these institutions, and debt relief as needed to increase vital fiscal space; (3) proper funding of the institutions established to protect the global commons, including the Global Environmental Facility, the Adaptation Fund, and the Losses and Damages Fund, with clear assessments by country and with new revenues raised by international taxes (e.g. on international shipping, aviation, and greenhouse emissions) and by other agreed means; (4) clear steps to reform the regulation of the private capital markets, including a revamping of the credit rating system and the IMF-World Bank Debt Sustainability Framework, to increase the flows of capital to high-return investments in low-income countries, with reporting back to the UN General Assembly on such measures in 2026.

Message of Hope in the Memory of Pope Francis

Our message is one of hope. Though we are beset by the poly-crisis of conflict, environment, polarization, and deprivation, we are also endowed with breathtaking new technologies and with global goals that inspire and impel humanity to build the future we want. We give our gratitude to the late Pope Francis for declaring 2025 to be a Jubilee Year and a year of great hope. The fourth Financing for Development conference can redeem the world’s hopes by mobilizing the nations committed to global peace, wellbeing, and sustainable development. Even if there is no unanimity, we urge a strong declaration with the backing of most of the UN member states so that we will move onward from Sevilla not only with words but with a decisive mobilization of financial resources for sustainable development. As always, the 2000+ universities in the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network pledge our best efforts to support governments, business, and civil society to build the future we need and want.

*A previous version of this statement was adopted by the Fraternal Economy program of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. The SDSN dedicates this statement to the memory of Pope Francis, a towering champion of the poor, the planet, and sustainable human development. This statement will be included as part of the upcoming Sustainable Development Report 2025.