Editor’s Note: Alice McCarthy is a young expert in the Global Governance Innovation Network, a senior at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs, and a member of the team behind the Coalition for the UN We Need’s 2026 Global Futures Forum. This commentary is part of the GGIN’s Next Generation Experts series, which aims to elevate youth research and writing. Alice McCarthy’s interest and research center on UN reform, multilateral governance, and post-conflict reconstruction.

By: Richard Ponzio, Senior Fellow and Director, Global Governance, Justice & Security Program

The United Nations defines future generations as those who don’t yet exist and will inherit the planet. Future-generations thinking asks governments to weigh those interests in today’s decisions, through long-term planning, foresight, and assessing intergenerational impacts. The Declaration on Future Generations, adopted alongside the Pact for the Future in September 2024, was intended to embed that approach in policymaking. Yet the UN’s own implementation tracker reports that the appointment of a Special Envoy for Future Generations is “temporarily on hold,” pending Member State decisions under the UN80 Initiative. A post designed to fight short-termism has been shelved for short-term budgetary reasons.

World leaders adopted three instruments at the September 2024 Summit of the Future: The Pact for the Future, the Global Digital Compact, and the Declaration on Future Generations. Two of the three instruments now have institutions or processes dedicated to their implementation, while the Declaration on Future Generations has none. The Pact found its delivery vehicle in UN80, the reform initiative Secretary-General António Guterres launched in March 2025: endorsed without a vote by all 193 UN Member States, monitored by a Member State working group, and driven by the Under-Secretary-General for Policy. The Global Digital Compact produced the Office for Digital and Emerging Technologies (ODET), giving the UN a dedicated office to coordinate digital cooperation and support implementation. The Compact has also produced the Global Dialogue on AI Governance, supported by ODET and the Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for Digital and Emerging Technologies. The Declaration, by contrast, proposed that Member States “take note of” the Secretary-General’s proposal for a Special Envoy, with a review meeting scheduled for the General Assembly’s eighty-third session, in 2028.

A Voluntary Commitment Needs an Institutional Advocate 

In October 2024, weeks after the Summit, the UN announced at the Hamburg Sustainability Conference that the Secretary-General would appoint an Envoy for Future Generations, prompting debate over who may fill the role. By July 2025, the Executive Office of the Secretary-General had completed terms of reference and budget proposals for the post. The UN was simultaneously preparing for major budget and staffing reductions: the revised program budget for the UN Secretariat proposed a 9% reduction in resources and 21% reduction in posts for 2026. The UN General Assembly’s budget committee had already pared back funding, approving barely a third of the Secretary-General’s budget request for Pact for the Future implementation and the UN budgetary committee had declined to fund the envoy post at all.

This post is vital as the Declaration on Future Generations is a political commitment, not a legally binding instrument. Its implementation depends on Member States and the UN system turning broad commitments into policy and practice, and the Declaration requires the Secretary-General to report on that progress ahead of a high-level review in 2028. An envoy could provide the institutional capacity to support that process: tracking implementation, identifying gaps, elevating long-term impacts in policymaking, and keeping future generations on the agenda between formal reviews. Future generations cannot lobby, vote, or fund pressure campaigns. Without an advocate, the 2028 review risks arriving with nothing to assess, and today’s short-termism will fall on the people the Declaration was written to protect.

Pathways toward an Envoy for Future Generations 

The fiscal objection is understandable. Creating a new senior post while the UN cuts almost a fifth of its positions is difficult to justify and an envoy cannot conjure resources or compel governments to act. But it is not a choice between a fully funded USG or nothing. Lower-cost models could provide the core functions of the mandate without creating a new senior post.

Double-Hat the Mandate 

The envoy could sit with a senior official already in post, most naturally Guy Ryder, the Under-Secretary-General for Policy, whose office announced the appointment in Hamburg. Ryder’s existing UN80 responsibilities will strike some as disqualifying as he may have little room for an additional mandate. However, UN80 is precisely where long-term considerations are most needed, and an envoy placed inside it would carry more weight than one commenting from outside, as well as complementing the UN80’s own logic of consolidating mandates rather than multiplying them.

Let a Coalition of the Willing Pay 

The UN routinely accepts seconded personnel and voluntary funding for defined functions. This agenda has a natural donor base: the governments that have already built future generations institutions at home. Wales appointed a statutory Future Generations Commissioner under its 2015 Act; Hungary maintains an “Ombudsman for Future Generations”; Finland’s parliament runs a standing “Committee for the Future”; Germany’s constitutional court struck down climate legislation in 2021 for shifting emission burdens onto the young. Each of these government bodies faces the same problem. The gravest threats to their future citizens, whether that be climate, technology, or pandemics, are set beyond their borders, requiring governance in international forums where future generations lack formal representation. For these governments, funding the UN envoy is the international extension of commitments they have already made to their own people. The Netherlands, which helped negotiate the Declaration and has championed the envoy from the start, could be a willing convener.

Donor-funded posts are nothing new at the UN. Since 1961, governments have financed fixed-term professional positions across the system through the Associate Experts and Junior Professional Officer programmes. The same model could fund the envoy and a small support cell initially, and the 2028 review could decide whether to move the post into the regular budget. Civil society could also multiply the investment. The youth and future-generations networks that campaigned for the Declaration already convene, research, and advocate at no cost to the UN, an envoy would give their work a fixed point in the system. While donor-funded posts raise dependency concerns, an arrangement expiring in 2028 unless Member States vote to renew it makes donors transitional financiers, not permanent controllers.

A New Secretary General to Champion the Cause 

Third is to hand the decision to the next Secretary-General. Guterres leaves office at the end of December 2026, and the candidates to succeed him have made renewed trust in the UN a defining theme of their campaigns. Trust is rebuilt by keeping promises. Delivered through either route above, the appointment of an envoy for Future Generations would demand relatively little from a stretched budget and would say a great deal. It would signal leadership oriented to the future rather than consumed by inherited crises, proving Summit commitments can outlast administrations that made them, and putting a voice for future generations permanently at the table. 

Every UN debate that matters, on climate, technology, and the shape of the organization itself, allocates burdens to people who are not in the room. An envoy cannot cast votes for the unborn, but it can make sure no decision gets made blind to what it will cost them; and an institution able to show that it serves those who come after it makes the strongest case for its own future. Member States signed the Declaration as the Summit’s soft annex, its costs appearing deferred, but deferred costs are the Declaration’s whole concern: stopping today’s decisions charging the people of tomorrow. If UN80 means its promise that “every mandate, dollar and decision” will deliver greater impact, that standard must include impact on those not yet here to feel it. The UN Charter opens with a promise “to save succeeding generations.” An envoy for future generations could carry that promise forward. With future generations’ fate at stake, a position that’s “temporarily on hold” is not enough.