The coming UN Summit of the Future is meant to bolster the Sustainable Development Goals and related needs.

By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson

See also:
IPA’s Congress Countdown: The 1,000 Actions Campaign for the SDGs
The UN’s Melissa Fleming to Speak in Mexico at IPA’s Publishers Congress

Fleming Is a Keynote Speaker at IPA’s Publishers Congress

As the United Nations prepares for the formal opening of its 79th General Assembly on Tuesday (September 10) in New York City, many will be looking ahead to the high-level General Debate dates of September 24 to 30. But prior to that period, an inaugural Summit of the Future will be operating, from September 20 to 23.

Based in discussions that began in 2020, the high-level Summit of the Future, which is to include an action-oriented document called the Pact for the Future, is an attempt “to accelerate efforts to meet our existing international commitments.”

The sweeping Summit of the Future’s presentations and debates—intended to reveal “a vision of the future for global cooperation”—will be keyed on five areas:

• Sustainable development and financing
• Peace and security
• A digital future for all
• Youth and future generations
• Global governance

Publishing Perspectives readers will remember that one of the most anticipated moments of the upcoming 34th International Publishers Congress from the International Publishers Association (IPA) at Guadalajara is to be a keynote address from Melissa Fleming, the United Nations’ under-secretary-general for global communications, on December 5.

By the time of the IPA’s congress in Mexico, Fleming may be able to report on guidance gleaned from—and stakeholders’ reactions to—the Summit of the Future.

“Most social media channels have designed algorithms that actually favor content that generates outrage over trusted information and facts.”Melissa Fleming, UN under-secretary-general

She’ll perhaps be able to approach her comments at Guadalajara with a sense for a pathway forward—or at least a map of the hurdles ahead. Of primary interest will be the most popularly visible elements of those “existing international commitments” the summit will have examined: the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The SDGs now are understood to be facing profound challenges in meeting their achievement goals by 2030. In June, the journal Nature published a forceful argument that “The world should redouble its efforts on the SDGs, not abandon them. Here’s how to progress the United Nations’ agenda toward 2050.”

A part of that article indicated that, “No nation is doing enough for the world to achieve all 17 Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. Globally, just 20 percent of targets are on track.”

Actually, that figure may be high: The 2024 Sustainable Development Goals Report from the UN itself indicates that only 17 percent of of the SDG targets are on track for 2030.

And if you’re new to the UN’s first-of-its-kind Summit of the Future, ask yourself what impediments and conditions exist today that weren’t in place in 2012 when the SDGs were created at the UN Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio. That, in essence, is where the Summit of the Future starts.

‘The Impact of Disinformation and Hate Speech’

In many ways essential to the outlook for all the SDGs—and fundamental to a successful framework in the Summit of the Future—is a vexing issue that in Melissa Fleming’s purview is top-of-mind: disinformation and misinformation.

“It’s a phenomenon that we at the UN have been concerned about for many years now,” Fleming says. “We’ve been seeing the impact of disinformation and hate speech—the two are linked because hate speech is disinformation, depending on the context.”

Prior to her current role and her decade at the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Fleming was a journalist, one who worked with Radio Free Europe. Her career path now makes her keenly sensitive to how pervasive disinformation can be—the weaponizing of lies to destroy progress, faith, and trust between peoples and nations. We ask her in our interview to give us her take on what she calls an “infodemic.”

“We’ve seen it destabilizing fragile societies,” she says. “We’ve seen it targeting ethnic groups and being used to other those people—people who a certain group in power might be trying to drive out of the country, for example, or to generate hatred toward those ‘others’ to justify the actions” of those in power. As an example, she points to how Myanmar military personnel used Facebook posts to target the mostly Muslim Rohingya population, here described in The New York Times by Paul Mozur.

“What we’ve seen,” Fleming says, “is an information environment that has become more conducive to the spread of bad and harmful information by bad actors who are using the ease of the tools of social media to weaponize their goals, and it’s unfortunate that we have platforms that are not living up to their own standards of human rights.”

She points to how during COVID-19, “our UNICEF people who had been showing up to provide childhood vaccines to people who used to be welcoming” were suddenly greeted with suspicion and hostility by locals who were repeating anti-vaccination conspiracy-theory tropes, “disinformation being produced in Tennessee or California.”

A ‘Blueprint for Making the World Better’

Fleming is a warm, sunny personality. In conversation, you see the years of professionalism that make it possible for her to move in a flash from a smiling, relaxed welcome to a brow-furrowing dedication to long-knotted problems. That grace in her conversational agility belies the daunting scale of the task that she and her team are assessing in the run-up to the Summit of the Future.

The United States, in which the General Assembly and the Secretariat are seated, is of course a nation closely attuned to the dangers of disinformation.

On Wednesday (September 4), the White House announced new criminal charges, sanctions, and Internet domain seizures relative to alleged Kremlin-led efforts to influence the November US elections. As John E. Herbst wrote at the nonpartisan Atlantic Council, “There are times when the US government is able to marshal its formidable resources and, in a comprehensive and effective manner, address a serious challenge. Today, the Biden administration provided a welcome example of that as the Justice, Treasury, and State departments, working also with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), took decisive steps.”

Fleming and her associates, however, operate far beyond the realm of the States and its intense political season: the General Assembly comprises 193 member states.

That’s a fact of international life that makes Fleming immediately conversant with some of the nuances of the International Publishers Association’s work with 101 member-associations in 81 world publishing markets. Delegates to the Publishers Congress in one of the soaring theaters of Guadalajara’s El Conjunto Santander de Arte Escénicas will immediately sense her fluency in the arena of multinational interests and many of the concerns around the quality of information that world publishing itself faces.

“Most social media channels have designed algorithms,” she says, “that actually favor content that generates outrage over trusted information and facts. While very difficult to measure and to prove, what we’ve seen in multiple focus situations across UN staffers working in difficult parts of the field—our climate teams who are trying to promote climate science and action; our human-rights colleagues concerned about rising hate speech, misogyny, racism—we see growing alarm that as the UN is trying to work to make the world a better place, across the world, they’re having to do so in a toxic information environment where it’s much more difficult to bring people onboard.”

And that brings us back to the status of the Sustainable Development Goals.

The SDGs, Fleming says, are “the blueprint for making the world better.” Far beyond the most commonly promoted of the concerns addressed by the 17 goals—No. 13, climate action—the goals also address gender equality; affordable and clean energy; “decent work and economic growth”; “life below water”; “life on land”; clean water and sanitation; and more.

“To achieve these goals,” Fleming says, “you need to have people on board, and they need to trust you, and they need to trust the information that they’re receiving.”

And as she points out, the rise of various social media through which disinformation often travels, has played a part in a decline in traditional media which have seen their financial models undercut. And that, of course, means that independent public-interest media are being compromised in their ability to do their jobs.

In short, the messages are ready to go, helping to shore up the SDGs and other important initiatives, but the media are awash in powerful rip tides of disinformation.

How, then, does the world sustain its drive for Sustainable Goals?

“This is something that I’ve worked on for about two years as a result of global consultations with UN colleagues, with governments, with academics, with fact-checkers, with journalists,” Fleming says, “and I’ve concluded that this would be the way forward if we wanted to fix our information ecosystem—to take measures to rebalance and basically ensure that people have access to trusted information and that they’re able to express themselves freely and safely.”

The world publishing industry has an important role to play here, Fleming says.

A Macmillan author herself—A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea: One Refugee’s Incredible Story of Love, Loss, and Survival was published by Flatiron Books in 2017—she’s aware of the IPA-UN partnership, of course, in its fast-growing SDG Publishers Compact, now with more than 300 signatories, and the 1000 Actions for a Sustainable Future campaign just opened by the IPA to support the UN’s own 1 Million Actions for Our Common Future. By the time Publishing Perspectives had written a first article on the 1,000 Actions campaign, close to 150 such initiatives had been logged into the program.

She also appreciates some recent books that she has found are addressing the most critical issues she recognizes in the “infodemic” debate. At our request, she lists these:

• The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World by Max Fisher (Hachette Book Group / Little, Brown, 2022)
•  How To Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future by Maria Ressa (HarperCollins, 2022)
• The Death of Truth: How Social Media and the Internet Gave Snake Oil Salesmen and Demagogues the Weapons They Needed to Destroy Trust and Polarize the World—and What We Can Do by Steven Brill (Penguin Random House / Knopf, 2024)
• Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality by Renée DiResta (Hachette Book Group / Public Affairs, 2024)
• Attack From Within: How Disinformation Is Sabotaging America by Barbara McQuade (Seven Stories Press, 2024)

The Summit of the Future: ‘Not Separate From the SDGs’

In looking ahead to the coming Summit of the Future, developed at the direction of UN secretary-general António Guterres, Fleming points out that the digital divide will be addressed in a part of the program called the Global Digital Compact, which is understood to be an enabling project for the SDGs as well as a concept, as she puts it, that “people should everywhere have access to the same kind of tools that everybody else does.

“The Summit of the Future is looking at the international finance system that was designed right after World War II [1944] as the Bretton Woods system. We say this needs to be revamped.”Melissa Fleming, UN under-secretary-general

“But we’re saying also,” she points out, “that we need to do much more to educate the people who are already online, who are so susceptible to disinformation. And with AI, it’s much more difficult to discern what’s actual, what’s real and what’s fake.”

In short, many questions need answers, and a lot now is riding on what can be done in the Summit of the Future.

“It’s designed to address some of these issues that weren’t there when the SDGs were being negotiated,” Fleming says.

“Climate change was definitely an issue, but it wasn’t as acute at that time. Now, it’s very acute. We need rapid transition to renewable energy. For that, we need huge investment. And we have big developing countries at the precipice. ‘Do I develop? I need energy. Can I get the financing I need to invest in renewables at a price that I can afford? Or should I just continue with coal, which is the short-term solution but is going to continue to pollute?’

“That’s where many big developing countries are. The Summit of the Future is looking at the international finance system that was designed right after World War II [1944] as the Bretton Woods system. We say this needs to be revamped. And there’s a huge push by developing countries to have this happen so that countries can get more affordable loans. If they could get some debt relief, they could invest more in the SDGs. All of this is linked to the multilateral system.

“And that,” says Melissa Fleming, “is why the Summit of the Future isn’t separate from the Sustainable Development Goals.”

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• The IPA’s International Publishers Congress is being produced by the Cámara Nacional de la Industria Editorial Mexicana (CANIEM), led by IPA past president Hugo Setzer, and by the Association of American Publishers, led by president and CEO Maria A. Pallante.
• Registration and information can be found here.

More from Publishing Perspectives on the International Publishers Association is here, more on the IPA’s biennial International Publishers Congress series is here, and more on the UN Sustainable Development Goals and related programs and initiatives in book publishing is here.

Publishing Perspectives is the International Publishers Association’s world media partner.

Porter Anderson is the former Creative Advisor and Multi-Media Manager to the UN’s World Food Programme, posted to Rome HQ.