Beyond 2030: The Transition To Abundance Needs Managing

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A Policy Paper prepared for the Office of the United Nations Secretary-General

Basis of this Paper

This paper is presented by the World Academy of Art and Science, in partnership with Force for Good and its affiliate the Institute for Strategic Intelligence and Intervention (ISII). It draws on six years of dedicated research and economic modelling by Force for Good; its figures are the program’s own considered position, not an independently-arrived-at consensus, offered as one substantive input for the post-2030 strategy. The paper is broadly based on the Force for Good 2026 annual report issued around UNGA in September 2026.

Abstract

The Sustainable Development Goals are the most ambitious agenda ever adopted to raise all of humanity, yet on current trends they will fall well short: only 17-20% of targets are on track, and 74 of 193 countries have stalled or regressed since 2015.¹ The shortfall is not capital, but of needs that the markets do not see as investible: US$484 trillion output exists, but the conditions to channel them to development needs have not been built.²

A technology-driven “Systems Age”—in which systemic technologies restructure economic and institutional systems, not merely process information—is arriving regardless of the Goals’ fate. Existing solutions could advance c.90% of SDG targets, unlocking US$15 trillion a year in market opportunities.^{3, 4, 5} At conservative real growth rates of 3.15%, consistent with long term rates, the economy would reach a US$350 trillion economy by 2060 (in constant 2025 dollars); at the post-war Golden Age pace (4.7-4.9%) ⁶, ⁷ it would reach US$591-631 trillion by 2060 (see Appendix A). Today, six systemic technologies—artificial intelligence, quantum computing, gene editing, fusion, nanotechnology and extended reality—have the potential to drive such wealth creation.

These changes can lift all of humanity.⁸ However, left unmanaged, these gains will concentrate rather than spread, repeating the pattern in which the top 1% have captured most new wealth since the 1990s. This shortfall sits inside a wider polycrisis, compounded by a metacrisis, which is central to why the Goals have stalled, with conflict at its highest level since 1946.

This paper draws on six years of research work and modelling by Force for Good and its affiliate, ISII, on a single question, what it will take to level up the world using and transforming global systems of capital, thereby closing the SDG gap. The paper argues the real ‘Beyond 2030’ question is not whether the Goals are met by a fixed date, or whether a new program similar to the SDGs should be launched, but whether the abundance that is materializing can be inclusively generated and shared. It sets out the levers to build an inclusive architecture.

1. Introduction

A decade ago, 193 Member States adopted the 2030 Agenda as the most ambitious shared framework for human progress ever agreed. That promise is now due, and it will not be met as designed. This is not cause to abandon the aspiration; it is cause for candour about where things stand.

Three things are converging. First, a civilizational transition from the Industrial Age to the Systems Age—an era of transformative systemic technologies that converge and create new solutions beyond any individual technology generated by man is unfolding, where the much talked about Information Age is merely a staging post. Currently, it follows the pattern of concentration rather than diffusion of wealth creation of earlier waves of economic and technological change, with the top 1% capturing 38% of new global wealth since the mid-1990s against 2% for the bottom half.⁹ Second, the binding constraint on the Goals is not capital supply, it is the demand side; needs and environments have not been structured such that capital and industry can flow into them, further disincentivized by outsized returns in mature markets.¹⁰ Third, closing the gap requires technology and solutions sharing at scale.¹¹, ¹² Importantly, capital flows only where the destination conditions determining risk and return make it rational to do so.

This paper examines how far the Goals are likely to get by 2030; the gaps that will remain; why they have not been closed; the solutions required; the conditions for success; the future arriving regardless of that shortfall, and what it will take to share it; the solutions required; and the conditions for success.

2. Likely SDG Progress to 2030 and the Gaps Remaining to be Addressed

Since 2015, the SDGs have delivered real gains on the fundamentals: electricity now reaches 92% of people worldwide, internet access rose from 40% to 74%, nearly a billion gained safe drinking water, 1.2 billion gained sanitation access, and for the first time over half the world has some social protection coverage.¹³, ¹⁴ However, on current trends the Agenda will be substantially unmet. Only 17% of the 169 targets are on track by the Sustainable Development Report’s measure,¹⁵ or 20% by the UN’s own SDG Report; almost half are rated substantially insufficient and 18% have regressed since 2015.¹⁶ None of the seventeen goals as a whole is on track for 2030.¹⁷ Progress is concentrated in mobile and internet access and child mortality; the world is losing ground on health, press freedom, corruption and biodiversity.¹⁸

The pattern is one of divergence. In 2024, 74 of 193 countries either stalled or regressed across the cumulative indicators; for 152 countries, the decade after 2015 delivered less progress than the decade before it.¹⁹ Western Europe, Japan and Canada dominate the top of the rankings; Yemen, Somalia, Chad, the Central African Republic and South Sudan sit at the bottom, with Ukraine’s war reversing fifteen years of poverty reduction²⁰ and Gaza’s development set back by as much as 69 years.²¹ At current rates, no major economy would complete the SDGs this century: Germany and France would cross 95% only by 2100, China and the United States would not until the middle of the next century, India around 2200.²², ²³

Three gaps can be expected to remain beyond 2030. Firstly, on human needs: over 700 million people in extreme poverty,²⁴ 673 million facing hunger in 2024,²⁵ 2.2 billion without safely managed water,²⁶ nearly 3 billion offline.²⁷ Secondly, on climate: emissions reached a record 37.8 gigatons in 2024,²⁸ warming has already reached 1.55°C,²⁹ and the IPCC trajectory points to 2.5-3.0°C this century;³⁰ clean-tech investment, though now ahead of fossil-fuel investment for the first time, remains short of the US$4.5 trillion a year net zero requires.³¹ Thirdly, underneath both sits a financing gap that keeps widening: US$17-19 trillion a year, (a comprehensive measure covering UNCTAD’s base SDG cost for developing countries of US$2.9-4.7 trillion, climate mitigation of US$4.5-5.3 trillion, housing and financial inclusion of US$5.6 trillion, and the compounding cost of prior underfunding of US$2.3-3.0 trillion; see Force for Good, 2025a, pp. 73-74), or US$92-112 trillion cumulatively to 2030, against a US$152-184 trillion.³² Blended finance from multilateral development banks covered barely 0.1% of that gap in 2024,³³ evidence less of a shortage of capital than of how little of it reaches the need. Part of the problem is architectural: a proliferation of MDBs with overlapping mandates and inconsistent requirements burdens the borrowers they exist to serve.

3. Why the Goals have not been Achieved

The shortfall in achieving the SDG mission sits inside a wider polycrisis (environmental, geopolitical, technological and social crises compounding each other) and a metacrisis, where governance and leadership are too weak or misaligned to fix the problems they generate.³⁴ And it is unfolding in a world far removed from the one in which the Goals were designed. Prevailing SDG and GDP-based performance indicators were not designed to capture the kind of human-centered, systemic progress a ‘Beyond 2030’ agenda is concerned with, prompting calls for a human-centric blueprint that reimagines development and economic performance indicators around human needs directly, rather than around goal-by-goal completion rates.³⁵

2015 was a high point of multilateral agreement: 193 states adopting a single framework in the same year as the Paris Agreement. A decade on, the world has moved the other way. UN Security Council vetoes have nearly tripled since 2015.³⁶ The COP process is criticized as having not succeeded in unlocking the solutions and capital required.³⁷, ³⁸ The Fourth Financing for Development Conference produced a path to US$4 trillion in extra funding that stopped short of binding commitment.³⁹ In 2025 as the United States reprioritized away from the 2030 Agenda,⁴⁰ FFD4, with c.US$9.4 billion cuts in aid, ending 80% of USAID programs,⁴¹ and exited the WHO⁴² and UNESCO, the UN found it harder to mobilize to meet the shortfalls in the goals. Other blocs may well now emerge to address the gaps, for example, BRICS+⁴³ (accounting for 44% of world GDP on a purchasing-power basis, 56% of global population and 43% of oil production)⁴⁴ is thought to be a potential significant organizing bloc. Such changes shift away from the single order the 2030 Agenda assumed. Realignment and recalibration by states is best read as a response to a genuine shift in relative economic and technological power, and to a perceived inequity in the post-war order’s distribution of voice and advantage, rather than as a simple lapse in goodwill or governance capacity. A ‘Beyond 2030’ agenda will need to be designed to operate within this competitive landscape as a durable feature of the environment, rather than premised on its reversal.

This is not principally a failure of the owners of capital. More could certainly be done with the capital already available, but the shortfall does not lie predominantly on the supply side. The deepest failure is on the demand side. Global liquid wealth is roughly US$484 trillion; total assets approach US$700 trillion.⁴⁵ The money exists, both as stock and flow. What does not exist at scale for that money to flow is a demand side with the risk, legal, regulatory and liquidity conditions that allow for institutional capital, industrial partners and technology providers to invest at scale as they do in other parts of the world. Financial mandates, for pensions, insurance and savings, remain calibrated to the risk-return profile of advanced economies. Nature, governance and social externalities remain unpriced across roughly US$130 trillion of equity and US$140 trillion of debt markets.⁴⁶ Fossil-fuel subsidies, now US$7.4 trillion a year on a combined explicit-and-implicit basis, still dwarf the finance reaching the clean energy transition.⁴⁷ That blended finance covers a tiny fraction of the funding gap, is not, at root, a private-sector supply-side problem, since public balance sheets in major economies do not hold sufficient surplus capital to match private capital at the scale required.

Two further failures compound this. Rising inequality has become a driver of the political backlash against collective action: since the mid-1990s the share of the wealth of the top 1% has materially grown relative to the bottom half,⁴⁸ in parallel to a decline in global freedom now in its twentieth consecutive year and rising populism.⁴⁹ Left unaddressed, this is also the default trend the technological abundance would extend. The institutions built to manage all this were designed for a more unified world: the UN, the World Bank and the wider development model have adapted only marginally while the world fragmented around them.⁵⁰ The system increasingly cannot act, because it rests on a single brittle premise, that everything requires everyone.⁵¹ The same fragmentation shows in the return of force as an ordinary instrument of policy: the INF Treaty is defunct, New START has been suspended, and 2025 recorded 65 active conflicts, the most since data collection began in 1946, including eight direct state-to-state conflicts, twice the 2024 figure and also a post-1946 record.⁵²

This is the transition described above, and its risks to equitable inclusion are already visible. Global trade has fallen from 61% of world GDP in 2008 to under 57% in 2024;⁵³ technology now accounts for 26-30% of global equity value, concentrated in a handful of firms.⁵⁴, ⁵⁵ Digital infrastructure and AI-enabled education let states leapfrog industrialization altogether. States that do not build their own digital and energy capacity, and do not secure a stake in frontier technology on their own terms, risk a new dependency on platforms, standards and compute they do not control: the same asymmetry that development was meant to end.

4. The Future Beyond the Goals

“Abundance,” here, denotes wealth at multiples of current levels, not incremental growth. Capital already exceeds current need several times over, and output is on course to multiply again within a generation.

Global liquid wealth stands at roughly $484 trillion and annual world output at US$114 trillion; between them, more than sufficient to close a $17-19 trillion annual SDG financing gap, provided the conditions exist for capital to flow to where it is needed. The technology wave now converging is projected to roughly triple global output by 2060 and grow again several-fold by 2080. Even the paper’s central case, deliberately built on trend-consistent growth rates rather than an optimistic scenario, implies a global economy three times its current size within a single generation—a multiple, not a margin, on top of capital that is already more than sufficient for the needs it is meant to meet. It is this combination, surplus capital now and a further multiplication of output to come, that constitutes abundance in the sense used throughout: not the end of scarcity as a condition, but wealth at a scale where the binding constraint has shifted from production to distribution.

The technology to close most of the shortfall already exists and requires no further breakthrough. Nine proven, tech-enabled solutions, from AI-enhanced connectivity to digital financial inclusion and telehealth, could on their own advance close to 90% of SDG targets, unlocking an estimated US$15 trillion in annual market opportunity concentrated specifically in the developing world, with 29 countries each offering incremental opportunities above US$100 billion. This sizing is this program’s own bottom-up modelling; where independent third-party estimates exist, as with Sachs et al.,⁵⁶ they are cited alongside for triangulation rather than substitution (Appendix B). The largest single categories are food systems
(US$3.2 trillion), climate, biodiversity and pollution (US$2.4 trillion), gender equality (US$2.4 trillion) and inclusive digitization (US$2.1 trillion).⁵⁷ AI is already giving elected officials and policymakers practical tools to target climate action locally, from Climate TRACE’s tracking of over 745 million emissions and pollution sources⁵⁸ to Climate Policy Radar’s multilingual guide to climate and nature law.⁵⁹

Behind this sits a second, larger wave. Of the technologies making it possible, six function as systemic: artificial intelligence, quantum computing, gene editing, fusion energy, nanotechnology and extended reality, meaning they do not merely improve productivity but have the capacity to restructure entire economic and institutional systems (ISII, 2026).⁶⁰ Three are already scaling (AI, gene editing, extended reality); three await further breakthroughs (quantum computing, fusion, nanotechnology). What makes this convergence a source of abundance, rather than six separate lines of progress, is that it is multiplicative, not additive. Outputs from one technology increasingly become inputs to the others, so that a gain in one, materials science, genomics, energy or compute, accelerates the rest. Discovery, testing and deployment collapse into a continuous process rather than decades of sequential advances. Together with a further set of near-term technologies, they are projected to add US$61 trillion in economic value by 2030, over half of it from AI, IoT, robotics and renewables alone.⁶¹, ⁶² This is contested ground: the United States leads commercialization and value capture, China is an ever-closing second with its strengths in early-stage research and industrial scale, and Europe forms a potential third player but today lacks the dynamics required for strategic positioning.⁶³ Whoever masters this convergence first seems best positioned to set the terms on which everyone else arrives at it.

On a managed path, the prize is large enough to matter to everyone: global GDP could reach US$350 trillion by 2060, even at historic growth rates of 3.1%, and US$591-631 trillion if technology brings the growth rates (4.7-4.9%) of the last century’s Golden Age (see Appendix A), large enough to raise all of humanity, but only if the gains are shared rather than captured by a few. The alternative, the same analysis warns, is a path where power concentrates in the one or two states that control the critical technologies first, extending rather than closing the divide the Goals exist to close. The size of that divide matters as much as its existence: a widening gap between rising expectations and delivered outcomes is itself a driver of turbulence, independent of absolute living standards.⁶⁴ That risk operates at two levels, not one. Between states, it is a contest over which economy leads. Within states, it is the concentration already visible in the current economy, which an unmanaged technology wave extends rather than interrupts it. Which path will be the one ahead is not fixed by the technology; it is fixed by the agreements forged in the interval between now and then, which is the subject of this paper.

This US$350 trillion figure is a deliberately conservative case, not an optimistic one. It implies a compound annual real growth rate of only around 3.1-3.2% between 2025 and 2060, close to the ordinary post-1980 global growth trend and well below what sustained technological transitions have produced historically. The full range, from US$237 trillion at sustained industrial-era pace to US$591-631 trillion at the post-war Golden Age rate, is set out in Appendix A. On the same modelling, if modest growth continues beyond 2060, global GDP approaches US$1 quadrillion by 2080, the pre-requisite is that the transition is managed in an orderly way without destructive conflicts and dislocations.

5. What Solutions are Required

The solution follows from the diagnosis: capital does not flow to needs, it flows to solutions, and solutions only reach a country once it is investable. The mechanism is therefore sequential: reform makes countries investable, solutions and technology then deploy together, and capital follows. Institutions are not a further step in that chain but the enabling layer that lets the rest function. Strategic levers are identified that have the potential to deliver this across four layers, capital, technology, delivery capacity and institutions, weighted toward capital, where the financing gap is largest. These levers, including the World Investment Plan below, are this program’s own recommended architecture; they are offered to the Secretary-General as one considered position to be tested against, and triangulated with, the other inputs to the post-2030 strategy, not as a settled or independently-arrived-at consensus.

CAPITAL

I. Capital deployment at scale to follow themes and solutions. A World Investment Plan that converts the SDGs and the Paris Agreement into a concrete asset pipeline: US$123 trillion across ten themes for Phase I (2026-2035), and a further US$85 trillion for Phase II (2036-2050) to complete the transition to net zero. This is the demand-side answer: it does the work of structuring needs into assets that can actually be financed, rather than adding another estimate of what is owed. Table 1 sets out the cumulative build by theme. The plan only extends climate mitigation into a costed 2050 figure; the other nine themes are quantified to 2035 only, since the report does not size their post-2035 requirements.

Table 1: The World Investment Plan, cumulative investment by theme,
2035 and 2050 (Force for Good, 2025a).

*Only climate mitigation is costed to 2050 (US$142 trillion). Phase I (US$123 trillion to 2035) plus Phase II climate spend (US$85 trillion, 2036-2050) gives the combined US$208 trillion cited in the text.

Our research indicates that some 72% of Phase I assets carry a full commercial return—c.50% in purely private projects and 22% provide a discounted commercial return as the private share within public-private partnerships—and a further 26% as the public contribution within those partnerships carry a lower return, and 2% in pure public goods are not directly financially remunerative.

Executed, Phase I alone could add US$177-215 trillion to global GDP over the decade based on fiscal-multiplier ranges of 1.4-1.75× applied sector by sector to developing- and developed-market shares of each investment theme (see Force for Good, 2025a, Appendix 3(iv), drawing on IMF, ODI and UCL multiplier literature). Adding Phase II’s climate-only spend gives a combined US$208 trillion to 2050, at roughly 9% of GDP a year in the first decade, falling to 3% thereafter: enough to fund the full development agenda in Table 1 to 2035 and complete the net-zero transition by 2050, though not a total for all ten themes on the same 2050 horizon.

II. A new global financial compact. Many developing countries look too risky for private investment today, even if they have sound projects. The issue is often at state level not project level. A Bretton Woods-style compact is required to re-price sovereign risk and build the national systems of enterprise that make a wider range of countries investable on commercial terms: the supply-side condition that lets capital follow the pipeline once it exists, rather than default to markets already served (Force for Good, 2025a). The barriers to capital flow are specific: currency mismatch, absent local capital markets, weak contract enforcement, ticket sizes below pension-fund thresholds, and perceived sovereign risk that exceeds actual default experience. Capital and technology both stall where a country lacks the institutional foundations, financial architecture, human capital and governance to absorb them coherently, the demand-side fix at country level introduced at the start of this section.

Left unaddressed, this is not only a poorer-country problem: capital misallocated at this scale resurfaces as instability in richer economies too, in the same way earlier debt and financial crises spread well beyond their point of origin. The precedent is the point: 1944’s Bretton Woods was itself a response to comparable disruption,⁶⁵ and a comparable act of design would address closing the gap between capital and risk at this point of time. This compact must include a dedicated, country-by-country readiness program that builds institutional foundations, financial architecture, human capital and governance in concert, converting needs into investable pipelines; this requires the building of systems of enterprise nation by nation.

III. A fair-pricing system for all assets. Today, only a subset of assets is priced. The true cost of environmental, governance and social costs are not priced into equity and debt markets, so returns do not reflect real impact; rather, they discount externalized harm.⁶⁶ Pricing the use of resources and their externalities, positive or negative, has the potential to change the value of decisions. Embedding externalities into financial reporting standards, starting with the ISSB framework, had been adopted by 21 jurisdictions as of January 2026, with a further 16 planning to align (S&P Global Sustainable1, 2026).⁶⁷ A full and fair accounting of externalities would reshape investment calculations and redirect capital at scale; markets would substitute for institutional agreement.

TECHNOLOGY

IV. A technology compact for mass inclusion with protection. A compact for technology inclusion that spreads access to the Fourth Industrial Revolution’s core technologies, with fair terms of trade, protected data rights and shared AI and digital-trade standards. The scale on offer is real: a coherent set of technology-enabled solutions, deployed worldwide, could advance close to 90% of SDG targets, with the climate and energy transition alone closing up to 15% of the funding gap and AI-enabled universal connectivity a further 14%.⁶⁸ For most countries this means strategic technology partnerships rather than competing at the frontier: alliances that reduce dependency on any one ecosystem and secure a stake in the system rather than mere consumption of it. This outcome is not automatic. Economic inequality has grown sharply since the mid-1990s, and a Fourth Industrial Revolution deployed on the same terms risks reproducing that concentration or advancing it, and at greater speed, rather than correcting. Securing broad-based gains requires that technology-inclusion agreements, explicit terms on data ownership, local equity participation and skills transfer, rather than assuming that diffusion alone will distribute the benefits evenly. Either would still require a guarantor, which would likely need to be a multilateral institution. Proven solutions are required to be deployed at national scale, rather than piloted at the margins, through a dedicated delivery capability that moves them across borders within years, not decades, building on the frugal, modular innovations already scaling within the Global South.

INSTITUTIONS

V. Institutional re-architecture for an uncertain transition. The answer is not a single reform but a redesign of how consensus is organized, differentiated into three tiers: universal, non-negotiable standards at the level of values (human rights, dignity, the renunciation of force); coalitions that act on shared interests at the level of action (climate, security, health, trade), without waiting for the slowest party; and authority drawn from beyond governments alone at the level of legitimacy (civil society, cities, the private sector, affected communities).⁶⁹ More structural proposals, including a directly representative World Parliament, sit at the ambitious end of this same logic, and remain worth serious consideration. Capital and technology reform will not hold without institutional re-architecture. Critically, institutions built for a single, unified system cannot address issues at the speed at which they now arise.

Cross-cutting enabling condition: building global conscious awareness at scale. The levers above assume the will to share follows once mechanisms are aligned. That assumption has not been proven in the SDG experience to date. Indeed, shared awareness is under direct attack: the same information architecture that can build cross-population understanding is equally capable of fragmenting it through mis- and disinformation, and any program to address this must be built with that vulnerability in mind from the outset, not treated as a separate problem for another day. A Peace, Compassion and Reconciliation Corps or initiative at scale could be a scalable global way to build conscious awareness. Precedents include the Peace Corps (245,000 volunteers across 144 countries since 1961), India’s National Service Scheme (4 million volunteers) and the Commonwealth’s exchange programs. Such programs are required at global, cross-population scale, designed for the specific purpose of building shared awareness between those positioned to capture the coming wave of abundance and those least able to.

The UN is the most trusted organization in the world. In a fracturing world, it still remains trusted. The Secretary-General has called for the UN’s reform to shape it for such a world, recognizing that the Security Council veto reform sits at its center, that also needs to change given it undermines any wider redesign’s credibility while five states retain unilateral blocking power.

Applying the thinking above on institutional change to the UN, the redesign of the UN would play out on three further, complementary dimensions. In its mode of operation, the UN becomes a system of systems, a mobiliser of mobilisers and convenor of convenors, coordinating structures, funds and information rather than commanding them directly and awaiting full consensus at any level. In its design, it would need to be rebuilt as a complex adaptive, anti-fragile system rather than a traditional hierarchical one. And at the human level, it would reach beyond governments into the populations of the world, mobilizing them directly rather than only through states,⁷⁰ building peaceful, compassionate engagement alongside mobilizing solutions, technology and funds. Similar principles would apply to the World Bank, whose role would move toward preparing countries to establish systems of enterprise and structuring investable pipelines, while NGOs and civil society would contribute as delivery and problem-solving partners.

6. The Conditions for Success

The record since COP26 is a caution against assuming execution is immune to external political, security and economic changes. Glasgow produced pledges of US$130 trillion in assets through GFANZ, but the coalition has since unraveled: the Net Zero Insurance Alliance dissolved after half its members left, the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative suspended activity after the departure of leading members, and the Net Zero Banking Alliance is being restructured after all six of the largest US banks withdrew.⁷¹, ⁷² Scale is also a live constraint: China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the largest development program running today, has mobilized roughly US$1.3 trillion since 2013,⁷³ a little over 1% of the volume the World Investment Plan requires. The difference is structural: GFANZ pledges were voluntary and enforceable only by reputational pressure, while the World Investment Plan structures commercially-returning assets were market discipline binds capital to delivery. A performing pipeline generates returns that make exit costly. Delivering at this scale nonetheless rests on conditions that are specific.

• A coalition that does not wait for any one nation. The dependence on universal agreement needs to be removed. A tight multi-coalition multilateralism is required instead: binding agreements between willing states and institutions, each offering returns substantial enough that joining does not require any one state to move first.
• Systems of Enterprise first. Capital cannot arrive before a country can provide the conditions for success. Readiness must precede or run alongside capital deployment, not follow it. Get the order wrong, and money arrives faster than the capacity to use it, doing as much damage as no money at all.
• Continuity across political cycles. Phase I and Phase II run to 2035 and 2050, well beyond any single government’s term. Commitments that do not survive a change of government do not survive at all.
• No active (prolonged) war. War reverses development instantly, as Ukraine, Gaza and the 2025 Iran-Israel war show. No capital pipeline or readiness program outruns a country at war. This is the hardest condition to guarantee, and the rules-based order it depends on is already fraying.
• Plan for mass global scale of solution delivery. Finance follows commercial solutions, solutions not capital need to lead. The level of change requires a scale that is roughly a hundred times any development program yet attempted. Resource and staff it at that scale from day one. Treated as an incremental add-on to existing development finance, this would be a fundamental design failure.
• Early wins, so coalitions survive. Coalitions of the willing only grow if the first movers succeed visibly. Without it, the wave of change does not continue, as the post-COP26 experience showed.
• Markets based design. Commitments are unenforceable in a world that is focused on commercial outcomes to justify investment, and only market returns seem to be able to bind capital and solutions to delivery. Systemic market architecture, including fair pricing of assets as discussed above, is a critical success factor.
• Catalytic action.A handful of practical first steps would build conviction: 2027-2030 delivery plans per lever, a range of partners—nations, companies, research institutions—ready to launch the initiative. The design question is whether to launch simultaneous initiatives in a change architecture or sequence them.

7. Conclusions

The world built the most ambitious shared agenda in its history and will not deliver it as designed. That is the starting point, but it is not the real story. The technology and solutions to close most of what remains already exist.

The answer is not more funding, it is the implementation of changes that mobilize systems of capital, technology and institutions, and raise global conscious awareness. Such a program needs to treat the coming wave of systemic technologies as the mechanism to build markets rather than a series of shortfalls to be financed. Change cannot wait on institutional reform; coalitions need to move ahead of consensus, and markets need to enforce delivery.

An era of abundance is already with us and economic inequality is growing alongside it. This is a dangerous scenario for all involved. The choices made in this transition between eras, whose focus is not 2030, will decide whether the next civilizational epoch is the most inclusive in human history or the most divided and whether it is safely traversed. That is the case for re-architecting the world system now, and this is our response to the Secretary-General’s call for what comes after the Goals. This paper is offered in that spirit, as an additional perspective to synthesize alongside commissioned inputs.

APPENDIX A: GROWTH-RATE SCENARIOS TO 2060

The US$350 trillion GDP estimate used is one point on a wide range of plausible growth trajectories. The table below sets this figure against a series of historically grounded growth rates, from the modest pace of the early Industrial Revolution through to the fastest sustained period of global growth on record, to show where this paper’s central case sits within that range.

All projections apply a constant annual real growth rate to a 2025 base of US$118 trillion and are therefore expressed in constant 2025 US dollars; they are illustrative sensitivities, not independent forecasts. Because the historical rates drawn on (from the Maddison Project Database and standard economic-history estimates) are real rates, the resulting figures are real: at 2% annual inflation the US$350 trillion central case would correspond to roughly US$700 trillion in nominal 2060 terms. Rows 2-4 of the table below apply historical per-capita growth rates to aggregate GDP; they are indicative of pace rather than direct aggregate equivalents.

Table A1: Illustrative GDP-by-2060 outcomes under a range of historically grounded real growth rates, in constant 2025 US dollars, against a 2025 base of US$118.35 trillion. Report’s calculations; historical rates drawn from the Maddison Project Database (2023) and standard economic-history estimates.

The Golden Age (1950-73) real growth rate is commonly cited as 4.9%, typically traced to Maddison’s original benchmark GDP levels in 1990 Geary-Khamis dollars. Recalculating the same period directly from the continuous Maddison Project Database 2023 series in 2021 international-$ (Bolt & van Zanden, 2024; Roser et al., 2023) gives 4.7%. The gap reflects the price basis used, not a disagreement over the underlying history. This paper reports the resulting range rather than a single point estimate.

The paper’s central case therefore sits toward the conservative end of the plausible range: it assumes a rate of change closer to ordinary historical trend growth than to the acceleration a genuine civilizational transition, on the scale of the Industrial Revolution, might be expected to produce. Reaching the higher end of this range—or the further acceleration towards US$1 quadrillion by 2080, implies real growth of approximately 2.3-2.7% p.a. over 2060-2080 from the US$591-631T 2060 base, below this paper’s own 3.15% central case and the post-1980 global average, consistent with “modest” continued growth rather than a further acceleration.

This appendix is reproduced from the Force for Good report, 2026.

APPENDIX B: EVIDENTIAL BASIS FOR KEY FIGURES

This appendix summarizes the derivation of the headline figures used in the body of this paper, with pointers to the full methodology in the source reports.

B1. The US$17-19 trillion annual SDG financing gap

This figure is a comprehensive, “fully-loaded” measure assembled from four components: (1) a base cost of US$2.9-4.7 trillion for selected SDGs in developing countries excluding climate mitigation, drawing on UNCTAD and IMF estimates; (2) US$4.5-5.3 trillion for climate change mitigation (IRENA and McKinsey); (3) US$5.6 trillion for housing and financial inclusion; and (4) US$2.3-3.0 trillion in compounding cost-of-inaction. The canonical UNCTAD figure of approximately US$4 trillion covers only the first component. Full methodology: Force for Good (2025a), pp. 73-74.

B2. The US$15 trillion annual market opportunity

Bottom-up, country-by-country estimate using UNCTAD costing data for seven transformative categories mapped to 13 of 17 SDGs, crossed with SDG achievement scores from the Sustainable Development Report 2024. Full methodology: Force for Good (2025b), Appendix 1.

B3. The US$61 trillion in technology-driven economic value by 2030

Sum of estimated 2030 macroeconomic impact across 19 core technologies: AI (US$16.5tn), IoT (US$9.1tn), robotics (US$6.8tn), renewables (US$5.2tn) and 15 others. Third-party industry projections, not the program’s own modelling. Full breakdown: Force for Good (2025b), Figures 23-24.

B4. The US$350 trillion GDP projection for 2060

Constant 2025 US dollars, 3.15% compound annual real growth from US$118.35tn base. Conditional on managed transition. All WIP figures adjusted to 2025 constant dollars using World Bank/Cleveland Fed inflation data and PPP at country level. Source: Force for Good (2025a), p. 50 and methodology annex pp. 145-146.

B5. The 98%/72% commercial-return profile

49% purely private projects, 22% private share within PPPs, 26% public contribution within PPPs, 2% pure public goods. Source: Force for Good (2025a), p. 23.

B6. The US$177-215 trillion GDP impact of Phase I

Fiscal-multiplier ranges of 1.4-1.75× applied sector by sector (developing vs developed markets, illustrative 50/50 split). Low = US$177tn, mid = US$193tn, high = US$215tn. Literature: Izquierdo et al. (2019, IMF), Raga (2022, ODI), Deleidi et al. (2019, UCL), Hanushek & Woessmann (2020, 2024). Full table: Force for Good (2025a), Appendix 3(iv).

B7. The US$484 trillion in global liquid wealth

Stock figure: households’ liquid assets, governments’ financial assets, corporate financial assets. Excludes illiquid wealth (housing, land). Distinct from the annual flow of GDP (US$114tn) and gross fixed capital formation (~US$29tn/yr). The binding constraint is not the stock or the flow but the absence of investible demand-side conditions. Source: Force for Good (2025a), p. 84 and data notes p. 158.

Notes

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