Not Just AI and Climate—Inequality Also an 'Existential' Threat That Demands Global Cooperation: UN Chief

High-level meetings at the United Nations General Assembly are set to begin next week, and they come at a time when the threats to humanity posed by the climate emergency and artificial intelligence have never been clearer.

Those crises demand that policymakers work together to prevent catastrophic, permanent planetary heating and the creation of "runaway" AI technology, suggested UN Secretary-General António Guterres on Wednesday, but he emphasized that another pernicious, destructive problem cannot be overlooked.

Guterres also named "the intolerable deepening of inequalities" as another "existential threat" that leaders must address at the upcoming meetings.

Earlier this year, the anti-poverty group Oxfam International released a report showing that combined billionaire wealth stood at $18.2 trillion in 2025, having risen from $3.6 trillion in 2009.

At the same time, the number of food-insecure people on Earth shot up to 2.2 billion in 2024, rising from 1.5 billion a decade earlier.

"Nearly half of the world lives in poverty while a select few continue to gain extreme wealth and power," said Oxfam at the time. "The amount of wealth owned by the poorest half of the world is less than the amount owned by just the 12 richest billionaires. This extreme concentration of wealth isn’t just making life less affordable for most of us, it’s creating harmful divisions. Billionaires, corporations, and politicians are taking away people’s basic ability to make choices about their futures and suppressing dissenting voices."

An analysis focused on wealth inequality in the US by the Center for American Progress (CAP) this week also showed that the gap between the ultrarich and the rest of the American public has gotten significantly wider in less than two years since President Donald Trump was reelected, with hundreds of billions of dollars in financial backing from billionaires including tech CEO Elon Musk.

"Since Trump took office, the ultrawealthy (top 0.1%) gained more than 8,000 times as much wealth per household as those in the bottom half of the wealth distribution," said CAP. "To provide an example of the extremity and exponential nature of wealth inequality in the United States, the 10 wealthiest Americans alone saw their real fortunes grow by a combined $259 billion over the same period, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index—about $26 billion per person, or 22 million times more than the bottom half’s $1,200 per household."

Economic experts have found that the growing inequality crisis is entirely solvable. As Common Dreams reported last year, research from the European Union Tax Observatory found that a global 2% minimum tax on billionaire wealth "would generate about $250 billion in tax revenue—from just 3,000 individuals," raising about $50 billion in Europe alone.

In 2024, finance ministers at a meeting of the Group of 20 in Rio de Janeiro agreed on the need to tax the richest people in the world at a higher rate to address persistent and worsening economic inequality.

As Common Dreams reported Tuesday, a study published in The Lancet found that the global inequality that's been worsened by Trump's foreign aid cuts could be addressed by a 3% wealth tax—raising a small amount of money compared to the total wealth of the world's richest people, but enough to save 29.5 million lives over the next four years.

Climate campaigners in Africa, who have demanded an end to French company Total Energies' East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP), agreed with Guterres' point that "climate, inequality, and international cooperation are inseparable."

"People living along EACOP's path," said the group Stop EACOP, "are the first to bear the environmental and economic costs of decisions made far from their communities."