By Chelsea Feinstein.

Political activist Colombe Cahen-Salvador argued that the United Nations impacts everyone, and argued for reforms to help the institution tackle global problems like climate change as part of the Stanley P. Stone Distinguished Lecture Series at the College of General Studies on Feb. 5.

The annual lecture series, endowed in 1990 by alumnus Stanley P. Stone, brings notable, inspiring speakers to the CGS, inviting the CGS and BU community to broaden their educational experience.

Cahen-Salvador’s talk, Transforming the United Nations to Confront the Climate Crisis, focused on the role individuals can and should have in the organization’s future.

“For the next hour, I want to show you that the United Nations is actually about you. It’s not something grand and distanced, it’s something that will impact your life…It will shape it, it will impact it, and it will determine whether you have a healthy future,” Cahen-Salvador said.

“So in turn the question is whether you want to shape it, whether you want to impact, whether you want to get power in order to ensure that the United Nations leaves you a world that is worth living in, that you can be proud of, whether the great powers of this world want it or not,” she added.

Cahen-Salvador is doing her own part to help shape the future of the United Nations. She is currently running to be the next UN Secretary-General. Cahen-Salvador is the co-founder of Atlas, a global movement uniting people for humanity’s survival, with over 25,000 members in 134 countries.

She said she is running to push the organization to change its status quo so that it can better meet the challenges facing the world.

“I think that if we mobilize enough people, if we shake it up enough, if we upset them enough, they will be left with no choice but to actually try to change the United Nations, to fix those broken systems, to enable people like you to take power,” she said.

In particular, she focused on climate change as a classic example of a problem that could not be solved without global cooperation.

“While impacts of global challenges like climate are local, are felt in your communities, will impact your communities differently, will impact you personally differently, they cannot be solved at the local level only,” she said. “You absolutely need global cooperation to stop the worst from happening.”

In light of the United States’ recent withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, an international treaty that aimed to combat climate change, Cahen-Salvador recommended a two-pronged approach to continue the fight – that other countries take action to fund the climate transition, and that the UN undergo reforms to better equip it to handle problems of this scale. She recommended making the UN more democratic to earn people’s trust, better funding it, and creating accountability mechanisms to give it the power it needs to create change.

“We need a United Nations that actually functions, that actually represents us, that has our trust,” she said.

While she acknowledged that the organization is far from perfect, Cahen-Salvador remained hopeful that it could be reformed, and insisted that it was necessary to work to do so.

“I think that the UN is a dream worth fighting for,” she said. “I think that it’s messed up. I think it’s unfair. I think it’s undemocratic. I think it’s corrupt sometimes. I think we don’t have a say. I think that unless we change it, it will get much worse.”

She challenged students to take action in their own lives to push the UN to better serve the world, and recommended joining protest movements as a key source of action.