https://www.ipinst.org/2025/04/the-declaration-on-future-generations-mov...
On September 22, 2024, the United Nations adopted the Declaration on Future Generations (DFG) as one of the three main outcome documents emanating from the Summit of the Future. The DFG offers a new lens through which to view pressing global issues and provokes change and acceleration toward future-oriented solutions beyond immediate, short-term goals. It urges governments to conduct policy and decision making by not only assessing current needs but also taking into account how current actions will impact future generations.
In adopting the DFG, member states committed to leveraging science, data, statistics, and strategic foresight to ensure long-term thinking and planning and to develop and implement sustainable practices and institutional reforms necessary to ensure evidence-based decision making, while also making governance more anticipatory, adaptive, and responsive to future opportunities, risks, and challenges. The DFG also called for “enhancing cooperation with stakeholders, including civil society, academia, the scientific and technological community, and the private sector, and encouraging intergenerational partnerships by promoting a whole-of-society approach to share best practices and develop innovative, long-term, and forward-thinking ideas to safeguard the needs and interests of future generations.”
This event explored several approaches proposed or actually taken by governments including the “Design for the Future” movement, ombuds or ministers for future generations, and tabletop and computer-based modeling.
The roundtable discussion featured speakers including: the American novelist and renowned science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, author of The Ministry for the Future; H.E. Brian Wallace, Permanent Representative of Jamaica to the United Nations; and H.E. Lise Gregoire-van Haaren, Permanent Representative of the Kingdom of the Netherlands to the United Nations.
