The upcoming Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD4), in Seville, Spain from June 30 – July 3, 2025, should send a message of hope that humanity's global goals to end poverty and contain the climate emergency are within reach. Key reforms to the International Financial Architecture – the system of public and private finance that channels the world's savings to the world's investments – 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 Seville 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 United Nations can excuse itself from 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 Seville. First, UN member states must adequately finance the UN system itself. The overall cost of UN operations is a paltry sum – just US$46 billion in 2023 (the year of most recent data) compared with US$2.4 trillion spent worldwide on the military that year. The United States paid US$13 billion towards UN operations in 2023, compared with US$916 billion on military outlays. The UN budget must be met in full, and indeed increased. Efficiencies in UN operations are to be welcomed, but cutting UN budgets at a time of pervasive conflicts, human displacements, climate disasters, epidemic diseases, and other crises is unacceptable.

Second, UN member states must increase their official financing of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the lead-up to 2030, including providing debt relief as needed to create the fiscal space to achieve them. Since 2016, SDG financing from official sources has received 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, and 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 bear the responsibility for filling the funds they have designated for these purposes, including the Adaptation Fund, the Loss and Damage 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 savings flow to countries with the highest investment returns and the highest growth prospects – which are the world's poorer countries. This is not the case today. The international financial markets are led by faulty regulations and policies to favor countries that use the major international currencies, notably the US dollar and the euro, as well as countries already favored by the US Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank. The rest of the world, especially poorer countries, is 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 the World Bank also fail to recognize the crucial positive role of long-term debt financing for development, instead favoring a debt sustainability system that discourages or even bars the long-term financing of infrastructure and human capital in poorer countries.

We call for a bold outcome that has four parts. First, the core outcome document from FfD4 should express the consensus of UN member states, if not necessarily their 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 the global sustainability frameworks and agreements (Agenda 2030, the Sustainable Development Goals, the Paris Climate Agreement, and the Montreal-Kunming Biodiversity Framework) and the overarching principles of sustainable development, distributive and reparative justice, common but differentiated responsibilities, and collective responsibility for the UN system, and commit to fixing the global financial architecture to ensure the financing needed for sustainable development.

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

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.

Fourth, there should be a clear list of specific action items that can be reported to the world in clear and unmistakable terms, along 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 Loss and Damage Fund, with clear assessments by country and new revenues raised via international taxes (e.g. on international shipping, aviation, and greenhouse emissions) and other agreed means; (4) clear steps to reform the regulation of private capital markets, including revamping the credit rating system and the IMF-World Bank Debt Sustainability Framework to increase capital flows to high-return investments in low-income countries, with a commitment to report back to the UN General Assembly on these measures in 2026.

Agenda 2030 and the Paris Climate Agreement further the common good of humanity, and humanity and the United Nations member states must actively work towards achieving them. Yet less than 20 percent 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 at a time when unilateral actions by individual states can cause irreparable damage for the present and future generations of all humanity.

The world is also beset by violent conflicts that claim innocent lives 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 and in partnership with the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network.

The job of finance is to bring the fruits of technological advances to benefit all of humanity, including our impoverished brothers and sisters in conflict zones and places hard hit by the ravages of high-intensity tropical cyclones, droughts, floods, heatwaves and forest fires that are occurring with increasing frequency as the result of human-induced climate change. We have powerful tools at our disposal – zero-carbon energy, open-source AI, precision agriculture, biodiversity conservation. We must 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 can channel the world's savings not only to high-income countries that are already prosperous, but even more to the world's poorer countries, which have the potential for rapid "catch-up" economic advancement. We note with satisfaction that today's emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) routinely achieve faster economic growth than do high-income countries, a process that economists call "economic convergence". Indeed, the poorer a country is today, the greater its growth potential and the higher the return on investment. With properly functioning international financial markets associated with key institutional reforms within emerging economies to reduce investment risks andthe higher the return on investment. With properly functioning international financial markets associated with key institutional reforms within emerging economies to reduce investment risks and to channel investments towards economic, social, and environmental priorities, the stream of annual global savings – roughly US$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 most reliably high return on the planet comes from investing in the health and education of a young child in a low-income country in Africa, Asia, Oceania, or Latin America and the Caribbean. Education not only fosters dignity, fulfillment, and wellbeing, but also delivers remarkable and reliable economic benefits; leading economists to describe healthcare, nutrition, and education as investments in human capital. Such investments have a huge financial payoff with perhaps a 20 percent compound annual return when they are broad-based and of good quality.

The most pressing practical challenge is to enable such investments even in impoverished areas where governments currently lack the revenue 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, allowing governments to ensure that all children receive the start in life they need and are enabled to achieve higher earnings in the future, so creating the very means for countries to repay international debts. For the millions of out-of-school, poor children living in middle-income countries, domestic financing and accountable governance can ensure that even the poorest within these societies have access to health, nutrition, and quality education.

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 innovative Chinese 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 awarded to British and British-Canadian scientists celebrated breakthroughs in protein folding and machine learning, offering prospects for drug development and other stunning breakthroughs that could benefit human health and global prosperity. We are aware that advances in technology can be used for good or ill, but we emphasize their potential to enhance human wellbeing and advance the SDGs. We call on governments and policymakers to collaborate with scholars and civil society to establish legal, regulatory, and ethical frameworks to direct innovations towards the common good. We call on FfD4 to adopt measures to ensure that these new technologies are accessible to all parts of the planet, to rich and poor alike.

We emphasize, therefore, that the most important practical problem facing UN members at FfD4 is how to enable the vast US$30 trillion pool of world savings to flow in much larger amounts to where they are most in need: to low-income and lower-middle income countries and those 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 global savings flow to EMDEs with long maturities and low capital costs, are aligned to their investment needs, and have realistic timelines for long-term convergent growth in these 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 have long maturities (such as 40 years) and low interest rates that properly reflect the high returns of education and therefore the true "bankability" of the loans.

We call on the UN member states meeting in Seville 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 their debts fall due not in the immediate future but in 30–40 years: a 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), the 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 true debt challenge is not the absolute scale of the debt, but rather its terms. Until now, the international financial system has burdened developing country borrowers with subjective risk assessments of their international borrowing capacities that are not aligned with the underlying economic fundamentals of emerging economies. The essential fact is that poorer countries offer higher growth potential and higher returns on capital than rich countries. Capital should flow to these countries. Instead, they are condemned by short-term and short-sighted analyses from credit rating agencies and the Bretton Woods institutions. As a result, they pay exorbitant yields and are pushed to accept 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 to 10 years. The grave structural problem is that refinancing debts is rarely routine. Financial markets are inherently unstable and prone to self-fulfilling panics and 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 one falls due. The obvious and crucial remedy is to match the time horizon of the loan with a realistic horizon for long-term economic growth (especially considering that the returns on investments in human capital 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 investments in their 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 that today's poorer countries have very high growth potential and high investment returns. Indeed, their potential economic growth and return on investment are far higher than in high-income countries.

We therefore call on the IMF and the World Bank in their Debt Sustainability Framework (DSF), and to the credit rating agencies, to revamp their methodologies to take account of: the high potential growth of poorer countries if they can access the necessary financing for development; the maturity structure of loans (awarding higher credit ratings and debt-sustainability assessments to long-term loans); the quality of a 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 on the foreign policy considerations of one or another major power. Financing needs should be calibrated on the basis of integrated assessments that consider economic, social, and environmental needs and objectives.

One immediate change in the methodology used by credit rating agencies that is both urgent and will greatly enhance 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 this doctrine, no private-sector borrower can be accorded a credit rating higher than their country's sovereign credit rating. This methodology makes no analytical sense and is a shorthand of the credit rating agencies. Many private-sector borrowers are plainly in a position to service their debts, whether or not their government is experiencing debt distress. A private-sector borrower may have sufficient collateral, liquidity, or a dedicated flow of revenue in the foreign currency to render it a low credit risk, independent of conditions facing its government. Historical data confirms the high credit performance of multilateral development banks (MDBs) and other development finance institutions in their private-sector operations.

In addition to preferring long-term loan maturities, there are additional solutions for short-term maturities. First, to the maximum extent possible, countries should borrow in their 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 that 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 term (in 10 to 20 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 unions require considerable support through the economic, fiscal, and political integration of their members. Monetary unions (such as the euro) facilitate borrowing in a country's own currency and would enable their central banks to serve as lenders of last resort.

The IMF and many other multilateral financial institutions also need to reform their governance to give due weight to developing countries. To take one example, the IMF currently allocates only 17 percent of voting power to the 10 BRICS countries, even though these countries account for 27 percent of global output measured at market prices, 39 percent of global output measured at purchasing-power prices, and 46 percent of the world's 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 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 is that the scale of overall MDB financing today is only a 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 bases; new capital increases, either across the board of member states or from willing members only in the case of opposition from one or another member state; and co-financing of non-sovereign loans by private-sector institutional investors such as ILX, which creatively draws in pension fund capital in partnership with MDB financing, benefitting from the MDBs' status as international financial institutions.

We note as well the importance of new private credit managers in mobilizing private-sector financing for EMDEs, either through standalone private financing or blended financing in cooperation with MDBs. We also note that large-scale infrastructure investment initiatives – such as China's Belt and Road Initiative or Europe's 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, to enable sophisticated borrowing strategies with improved bankability of projects and lower capital costs.

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.

In addition to massively scaling-up long-term loans at low interest rates to the EMDEs (both through direct funding from capital markets and through MDBs) there is a need to fund global public goods that are not suitable for loan or equity financing. These include providing social assistance to the poorest of the poor, funding UN institutions, and protecting 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 has never reached the global commitment of 0.7 percent of donor nations' gross national income (GNI), an objective 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 Earth's physical systems), and intergenerational justice (respecting the pressing needs of today's young people and future generations).

The high-income UN member states must not be allowed to falter in the pursuit of justice. Because traditional ODA is being cut or even phased out by some countries, economic justice should be achieved not through voluntary ODA but through compulsory assessments from UN member states, including the implementation of international taxes on maritime shipping, global aviation and greenhouse gas emissions. Taxing the greenhouse gas emissions of high-income countries would combine the multiple dimensions of justice (distributive, reparative, and intergenerational) with practical resource mobilization to help poorer and more vulnerable countries undertake effective climate action. Such global taxation should aim, in the first instance, to bring in 0.1 percent of global GDP, or roughly US$100 billion per year, rising to perhaps 1 percent 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.

In addressing poverty, the most important ethical principle is to co-create solutions: 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 – moving from poverty to sustenance, from barren lands to flourishing food production. Smallholder farmers in rural areas constitute roughly three-quarters of those living in extreme income poverty and over 83 percent of multidimensionally poor people. They can best be supported in their livelihoods and wellbeing by programs that raise farm outputs and incomes: those championed by the Food and Agriculture Organization, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, the World Food Programme, and related agencies.

Corporations can also 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 a trillion dollars annually in managed assets, reflecting a vast desire for social and environmental impact among consumers and investors that can be tapped for the common good. Greater transparency and disclosure by companies would aid consumers in making the ethical choices they desire to pursue. Similarly, accurate data on multidimensional poverty and other development challenges will enable more people to respond more effectively to their ethical motivations.

Global financing is a vital instrument of empowerment, but it never stands alone. Economic convergence also depends on proper management by and within the borrowing countries. As economists say, convergence is "conditional" on effective governance in the borrowing countries. We therefore call for intensive skills training in lower-income countries to empower governments to plan effectively 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 call for the formation of a Borrowers Club of Nations, to work alongside the Creditors Clubs, to foster appropriate domestic institutions, fiscal rules, and regulatory practices to achieve long-term sustainable development. We also call for precise and quantified metrics – on the costs of capital, the maturity of loans, returns on equity, performance on the SDGs, and multi-dimensional poverty – so that commitments are tested rigorously against real actions. In addition, states must act in accordance with the 2030 Agenda (paragraph 30) and refrain from promulgating and applying unilateral economic, financial, or trade measures that could undermine the abilities of other countries to invest in and cooperate for sustainable development.

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

Second, UN member states must increase their official financing of the Sustainable Development Goals in the lead-up to 2030, including providing debt relief as needed to create the fiscal space to achieve them. Since 2016, SDG financing from official sources has received 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, as well as delaying critical increases in IMF quotas and SDR allocations. And creditor nations 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.

Third, UN member states must increase their financing of the global commons: 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. High-income countries bear the responsibility for filling the funds they have designated for these purposes, including the Adaptation Fund, the Loss and Damage Fund, the Green Climate Fund, and others.

Fourth, UN member states must agree on critical reforms of the international financial markets to ensure that the world's savings flow to countries with the highest investment returns and the highest growth prospects – which are the poorer countries. This is not the case today. The international financial markets are led by faulty regulations and policies to favor countries that use the major international currencies, notably the US dollar and the euro, as well as countries already favored by the US Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank. The rest of the world, especially the poorer countries, is 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 the World Bank also fail to recognize the crucial positive role of long-term debt financing for development, instead favoring a debt sustainability system that discourages or even bars the long-term financing of infrastructure and human capital in poorer countries.

We call for a bold outcome that has four parts. First, the core outcome document from FfD4 should express the consensus of UN member states, if not necessarily their 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 the global sustainability frameworks and agreements (Agenda 2030, the Sustainable Development Goals, the Paris Climate Agreement, and the Montreal-Kunming Biodiversity Framework) and the overarching principles of sustainable development, distributive and reparative justice, common but differentiated responsibilities, and collective responsibility for the UN system, and commit to fixing the global financial architecture to ensure the financing needed for sustainable development.

Second, there should be room for reservations by individual states, to enable them to express their concerns without blocking the actions of the consensus of member states. No single state or small number of states should impede actions supported by the majority of UN members, representing a majority of the world's population.

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 efforts. Leaders of positive and dynamic change must be encouraged, supported, and championed in the outcome at Seville.

Fourth, there should be a clear list of specific action items that can be reported to the world in clear and unmistakable terms, along 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 Loss and Damage Fund, with clear assessments by country and new revenues raised via international taxes (e.g. on international shipping, aviation, and greenhouse emissions) and other agreed means; (4) clear steps to reform the regulation of private capital markets, including revamping the credit rating system and the IMF-World Bank Debt Sustainability Framework to increase capital flows to high-return investments in low-income countries, with a commitment to report back to the UN General Assembly on these measures in 2026.

Our message is one of hope. Though we are beset by the polycrisis of conflict, environment, polarization, and deprivation, we are also empowered with breathtaking new technologies and 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 restore the world's hope, by mobilizing 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 Seville not only with words but with a decisive mobilization of financial resources for sustainable development. And as always, the 2000+ universities in the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network pledge their best efforts to support governments, business, and civil society to build the future we need and want.