Solutions to Address Global Turbulence
March 15, 2026 – 9:30 am to 1:30 pm | Baku, Azerbaijan
Concept Note for Nizami Ganjavi International Center (NGIC) — WAAS Side Event at GBF2026
The sources of global turbulence were examined and debated during a series of conferences in 2025 beginning with a side event at GBF2025 organized by WAAS, NGIC and F4G, a WAAS-ASU one-day meeting, and a four-day WAAS@65 conference in partnership with NGIC, F4G, UNESCO-MOST Bridges, AE4RIA, ASU, COR, GPOC, EASA, EXTRA, SDSN, BSUN, GSI, GPEN, IACP, WUC and Millennium Project.
Following up on the examination of the sources of turbulence, the GBF2026 side event will focus on the development of solutions under three interdependent themes: Peace, Prosperity, Freedom and Human Security, and four essential issues. Each issue will seek to develop solutions identified during the events of 2025. The side event will be divided into four 50-minute sessions.
Theme I: Peace
1. Promoting Global Leadership: The unprecedented speed and increasing complexity of global social transition exceeds the understanding, policies and expertise of prevailing theory and strategy in academia and government at the local, national and global levels. This session will explore the questions: What do today’s leaders need to better understand the highly complex factors generating global turbulence and the strategies needed to enable leaders to cope with the bewildering array of interconnected challenges confronting nation-states and people of the world? What type of leadership education do we need to prepare future leaders? This session will be of great relevance to former national leaders who can reflect on the misconceptions and errors now being committed by current world leaders.
Theme II: Prosperity
Focusing specifically on strategies to promote global security, sustainable development, economic transformation. Solutions for discussion:
2. Financing human security and sustainable development: Global wealth totals nearly US$700 trillion. This session will explore strategies to mobilize far greater capital for climate change management, essential infrastructure, healthcare, education, digital connectivity, affordable housing, food systems and financial inclusion, as well as accelerated application of catalytic technologies, reform of the global financial system, and systemic change of capitalism into a change agent to meet the world’s needs, based on research published in the Force for Good Report The World Investment Plan: Building the Transition to a Secure, Sustainable and Superior Future. This session will promote awareness of the choices available to direct a much larger portion of global capital to meet urgent needs.
3. Global Solutions to Raise the World’s Platform, the UN SDGs: Technology is now a defining driver of global progress and turbulence. UNTFHS, WAAS, F4G & the Consumer Technology Association partnership under the UN Human Security for All (HS4A) program has reframed technology as the eighth dimension of human security. Research demonstrates innovation can be closely aligned with peace, inclusion & sustainability and that exponential technological power can promote human values, ethics, wellbeing and sustainability for the whole world. Solutions are now available to transform the Sustainable Development crisis into opportunity. This session will examine nine transformative, scalable solution areas that together could advance nearly 90% of global SDG targets, if deployed worldwide. Based on research published in the F4G Report Technology as a Force for Good released and presented at CES2025.
Theme III: Freedom & Human Security
4. Threats and Opportunities in the Age of AI: The Power of Cognitive Systems and the Potential of Symbiotic Systems:Managing the civilizational shift posed by AI will determine whether AI becomes humanity’s greatest tool or its greatest risk as the world shifts towards a more secure, sustainable and superior future for all. New technologies are concentrating power and value into a new form of digital colonialism that controls people by the shaping and control of information, attention, and human behavior leading to a cognitive and technological battle for supremacy among nation states. A research paper now in press “Rising Age of Cognitive Empires: Colonizing the Mind” by Ketan Patel.
Used correctly, AI can also significantly enhance human intelligence, rationality, decision-making and education by generating transdisciplinary perspectives, identifying intellectual biases, promoting rationality, improving decision-making, and placing affordable, world-class higher education at the fingertips of all human beings who seek it.
