What trends will shape 2025?

2024 was a year of significant transitions – characterised by rapid technological progress, shifting geopolitical landscapes, and ongoing crises and conflicts. In this final episode of the year, we reflect on its defining moments and look ahead to the key trends likely to shape 2025.

As the world becomes increasingly multipolar, the shift towards a more balanced global power structure brings both new perspectives and opportunities for collaboration. But this transition also presents challenges, with competing interests potentially impeding global cooperation. The redistribution of power may also deepen economic inequality and instability, and shift priorities in unexpected ways.

In the face of these changes, leading commentators give their take on what to expect from the year ahead.

Guests

• Sara Pantuliano (host), Chief Executive, ODI Global
• Jeremy Bowen, International Editor of BBC News
• Bright Simons, Visiting Senior Fellow, ODI Global and President of mPedigree
• Linda Yueh, Fellow in Economics, University of Oxford
  
  

Related resources

• Rising China-US tensions fuel global economic slowdown ahead of Trump’s inauguration (Insight, ODI Global)
  
  
• Tens of thousands of people forcibly disappeared: will the international community step up for Syrians? (Insight, ODI Global)
  
  
• Holding states to account: do humanitarians undermine civil society? (Insight, ODI Global)
  
  
• Europe and the new world order: an updated approach to foreign engagement (Briefing paper, ODI Global)
  
  
• Will China’s influence in Africa’s AI revolution undermine its sovereignty? (Insight, ODI Global)
  
  
• The environmental risks of generative AI: why better global governance is urgently needed (Insight, ODI Global)

Transcript

00:10 - Sara Pantuliano  (Host) 

Welcome to today's episode of Think Change. I'm Sara Pantuliano. As a tradition of our end of year episode, today we wrap up 2024 and we look ahead to the opportunities and challenges of 2025. While 2024 has truly been marked by defining moments, it's been a super year for elections. We saw nearly half of the world's population head to the poll and really reshaping the global political landscape.

00:37 

Wars in Ukraine, in Gaza, in Sudan and now this new transition in Damascus underscored the fragility of international stability and the severity of humanitarian crisis. Global economic challenges, including rising inflation and debt crisis, brought resilience into sharper focus and, at the same time, we've seen breakthroughs in renewable energy, in AI, that have spurred innovation while driving critical debates on regulation and equity. So, as we step into 2025, the stakes are incredibly high. We have newly elected governments that are settling into power and surely the focus will shift to delivering on campaign promises and, in some cases, to increase protectionist tendencies, especially in Europe and the US. It is also said to be a pivotal year to tackle global challenges, particularly around climate action. That will be marked by the five-year ratchet mechanism of the Paris Agreement, alongside efforts to address economic recovery, tech regulation and geopolitical shifts. 

01:43 

To delve deeper into what 2025 has in store. I'm joined today by three well-seasoned experts Jeremy Bowen, International Editor of BBC News. Bright Simmons, Visiting Senior Fellow at ODI Global and President of MPDegree, a social enterprise initiative. And Linda Yu, Fellow in Economics at Oxford University, Associate Fellow at Chatham House and former advisor to the World Bank. Well, let's get started. Let me ask all of you very quickly if you had to sum up in just one word what 2024 was, what would it be?

02:18 - Jeremy Bowen  (Guest) 

Three words chaos and Confusion. 

02:21 - Sara Pantuliano  (Host) 

Right, that's allowed, Linda?   

02:26 - Linda Yueh  (Guest) 

Change 

02:28 - Sara Pantuliano  (Host) 

And Bright? ,  

02:29 - Bright Simons  (Guest) 

Anti-climax

02:32 - Sara Pantuliano  (Host) 

And I would say fractured, because for me, 2024 really brought a bit like you know, Jeremy says a lot of you know, brought out a lot of the fissures, both in terms of, you know, internally societal and in terms of geopolitics. Jeremy, let me actually ask you first, as we turn to 2025, you joined the BBC in 1984. And since then you've reported from some of the world's most dangerous places and this year you've been on the ground in both Ukraine and in the Middle East. You're joining us from Lebanon. Today You're heading into Damascus. How do you see the current crisis in Ukraine, in Gaza, sudan and, of course, the transition in Syria evolving 2025? And what geopolitical flashpoints do you think we should be watching closely in 2025? 

03:19 - Jeremy Bowen  (Guest) 

Well, we need to be watching all the places you've just mentioned, and I think that what we're seeing, too, is the fact that there isn't really a very coherent international order at the moment. The one that the world has had for a long time has developed various fractures and difficulties and I mean and there are quite a lot of them you can look at it from different, different angles. There are quite a lot of them and you can look at it from different angles. But the fractures and difficulties that have been created mean that people want different things and they're not getting them.  

03:57 

If you look at the crisis of democracy, the way that democracy isn't delivering in the eyes of some voters who fall prey to easy blandishments and promises prey to, you know, easy blandishments and promises.  

04:09 

If you look at the way that the big western powers still talk about the rules-based international order when actually they are either breaking rules themselves or turning a blind eye when their friends do that, and it's hard to argue at times with the view of a lot of people who aren't in that sort of Western, rather smug consensus about the rules-based international order that actually what it really is is our rules for us and for our friends are not rules for you, or maybe they're rules that we apply to you and we don't apply to ourselves. So the lack of consistency, I mean that's a real thing that needs to be that that is actually weakening and debilitating international institutes institutions, I should say, and also the discourse between, between nations and and power blocks. So I think what we're seeing is, you know, is an increasingly, as you said, fractured world, and I don't see anybody there with the plaster of Paris and the external fixation or whatever that's required to mend those fractures. In fact, you can see fractures getting worse.  

05:25 - Sara Pantuliano  (Host) 

Yeah, totally. We've heard that over and over again over the podcast, and what you say in terms of what people have referred to as double standards has been a constant refrain when we've had guests talking about the challenges of the rules-based order, but just generally the challenges of trying to tackle any of the global challenges. It all goes back to the rules that the West has set for others and not following itself. And on that, Linda, coming to you, in November, president-elect Trump announced plans to impose new tariffs on Canada, Mexico, on China, even before taking office. And so, given this backdrop and all the ongoing challenges like inflation and debt crisis, what do you see in terms of the most significant economic trends shaping 2025 and what impact will they have on the global economic landscape?  

06:19 - Linda Yueh  (Guest) 

Yeah, big question. So I think the reason I chose change as my word is because what we saw is people going to the polls, as we said, in over, well, half the world's, over half the world's population had some form of election. And what was striking was, in all of the elections in advanced economies, I believe, the incumbent party lost voting share, so they lost votes. So, in that sense, change and a breakdown of the economic consensus. In other words, what the status quo was, people just voted against that and it's a trend that's been continuing for some time.  

07:07 

And, yes, I think the um you know, the us election is a manifestation um of that um, the biden administration will give way to a second trump administration and I think what's?  

07:22 

There's a lot of things which underlie this, but for for the global economy, it means that the I would say, acceleration of policies which were really about, if I just put it simply, the US-China power competition.

07:40 

I think that will continue and it's going to be more volatile because if we look at the first Trump administration tariffs, investment restrictions we've seen that through the Biden administration as well, but the speed of deployment by President Trump in his first administration was certainly fast. It's very unlike normal policy where there's a lot of trailing, there's a lot of discussion or expectations. It kind of just happens, and I think the volatility is what we would expect in 2025. So the economic impact may not be as bad as the headline tariffs, because apparently everything is a negotiation, but undoubtedly we're in a period where I think economic activity was just turning a corner in the world and with interest rates coming down, inflation getting back to what it was before actually, to be honest, before the pandemic, so I think any degree of additional trade frictions is going to be challenging in 2025. That being said, I think the overall trajectory for the global economy is one of recovery. So I think the broader context is still. You know, for a lot of people the cost of living crisis is still very real.

09:09 

But with, you know, interest rates moving into more, less restrictive, more neutral territory. That is going to help quite a lot of people around the world and obviously the US sets the interest rate for lots of developing countries markets because of the link of the dollar in the exchange rate. So it's going to be what is that phrase? It's going to be interesting. 

09:31 - Sara Pantuliano  (Host) 

It will certainly be interesting. You mentioned China. How do you see the West relationship with China evolving, particularly in light of the growing innovation capabilities of China? 

09:44 - Linda Yueh  (Guest) 

the growing innovation capabilities of China. So I think we're going to have a heightened period of US-China tensions, which is fundamentally not really about trade, or, you know, it is about trade, but it's not just about trade and it's not just about technology. It is what the IR specialist called the era of great power competition. It is really about power. So if China is competitive in an area where the US, in particular, wants to win, I think you would expect that to be a focal point of competition and there'll be more, I would say, investment restrictions, because the feeling of the US and Europe is that you know, china subsidizes and therefore its innovations are not competitive in the market sense. So I think we should expect to see more of that. I think for a lot of expect to see more of that. 

10:48 

I think for a lot of countries that are not US and China and, to some extent, europe, I think it just creates a very challenging environment, because the more that there's tension between these two biggest markets and two biggest economies in the world, the harder it is for other countries to, for instance, participate in global value chains. Will that be disrupted? Where should they be? You know, where should they be focused in terms of their markets and there could be tariffs that come through.

11:15 

And then, in a broader sense, I think the, you know, the fragmenting of the global system means that, on some issues, the fragmenting of the global system means that on some issues, countries are going to struggle to align themselves, you know, with one side or the other, and they may want to do so on some issues and not on some other issues. So we are very far from a world of multilateralism where there's a global rules-based system and you have essentially everyone working towards one, you know well-functioning market with healthy competition. That is not the era in which we are currently operating and I don't think this is going to be the era that. That will not be the era that we operate in for some years to come, even beyond the Trump administration, because this is inherently about power. 

12:05 - Sara Pantuliano  (Host) 

Jeremy and Bright, I'd like to hear your reflections as well on where you see the economy going next year. 

12:11 - Bright Simons  (Guest) 

I guess I mean. First of all, I have to say, while I agree with most of the sentiments that have been shared and most of the pessimism that is on display, we still have to remember, though, that much of this is based on using a 1990s reference, because if you go back a little bit to the 70s and the 80s, everything we are talking about was worse. So my view of the matter is that, yes, there are fractures, but primarily it's because the 90s was such an interesting period China joined the WTO, a lot of these Washington consensus type things, global debt relief, all of those things set up a high bar for multilateralism, which, in my view, was a bit unrealistic to assume that that will mark the entire coming century. On my word, which is, you know, the anti-climax and here now I align more closely with Jeremy and with Linda I feel that there was a sense among global activists, particular society activists, that we were getting towards a certain high point of multilateralism with a new quantified global, a collective quantified goal on climate finance that we thought was going to hit the trillions Didn't happen. 

13:23 

We, you know, there was this view among those that are pushing for a multipolar world, that the axis of resistance that Iran is building will somehow redefine the Middle East. That didn't happen, as you've seen, with Assad fleeing into Russia. So there's been a lot of certain expectations in respect of transformations in the world order that just haven't panned out in the last year, and some of those are pretty seminal in character. That is why I chose the anti-climax word. 

13:55 - Jeremy Bowen  (Guest) 

If I can just add on the subject of economics and prosperity, of course it affects the way that people behave, the satisfaction they get from the systems in which they live. You know, it's well documented the way Americans are very concerned about the fact that kids aren't going to be as well off in many cases than they are. All around the world, people worry that their kids aren't going to be able to afford an apartment to buy or even a house until they're in their 40s. I mean, when I was in my 20s, everybody I knew, even if they weren't earning very much, was able to buy a little flat somewhere, and it's just not the case anymore. Of course it affects the way people respond, then, to politics. I mean here in the Middle East, where I am. 

14:42 

One of the big motivations back in 2011, the year of the Arab uprisings, was the fact that, while the national cake of most of the countries outside the oil producing nations, of course, was either stagnating or getting smaller, populations were rising and individuals were getting much, a much smaller slice, or sometimes no slice at all, or sometimes no slice at all, and when people get desperate, that puts them into the streets. It kills the fear that they often have of repressive regimes because they think what on earth is there to lose. And if I just touch on the very good point that Linda made about power, yeah, these things are about power, and I mean what we're seeing now in the Middle East with the you know, the spectacular collapse of the Assad regime. I do not believe anybody was anything other than astonished by the speed in which it collapsed. So where does that leave us? The fact is is that here, particularly in the Middle East, and because of the importance of Syria, the place where it is geographically, the connections it has with its neighbors change there, can affect not just its neighbors but go further as well. 

15:55 

And there was mentioned just now of the so-called axis of resistance. 

16:00 

The whole I mean this is one of the most profound changes we're seeing at the moment is the way that Iran's entire strategy for defending itself, for pushing against its enemies, for being aggressive that's particularly the view, of course, of the Americans in the West and the Israelis was based on this so-called axis of resistance, a network of allies and cronies that they had built up over the course of well 40 odd years and in no time at all that is now hit, to use a nautical saying, it's hit below the waterline, and not just, first of all, the way that the Israelis said about Hezbollah in Lebanon, but the way, now that Iran has lost its land route to Hezbollah and therefore to the borders of Israel, and so the Iranians are now having to have a big rethink.  

16:56 

Will they talk to Trump? Will Trump talk to them? Or will they go down the road of leaping further into the nuclear option? They have enriched their uranium close to a place where they don't have to take many more steps to make it into a nuclear device. There are loads of ifs and what ifs, and we don't know what's coming about next year, and they have been absolutely now, I'd say, in this part of the world particularly.  

17:25 - Bright Simons  (Guest) 

They've been doubled and trebled by the collapse of the Assad regime and the way that that is going to play out over the next year or so not to not to preempt the next half of the discussion about 2025, but there is a silver lining, which is that it makes lebanon much more tameable, um in respect of power. On the other hand, my view is, what is different from the 70s and 80s, even the early 90 90s, is, with less of an interest among you know, countercultural forces, counter-establishment forces to overthrow the whole system. If you think of the anti-globalization movement, acac and all of these groups that used to camp outside World Trade Organization and World Economic Forum meetings, trying to burn it all down, outside World Trade Organization and World Economic Forum meetings, trying to burn it all down, far fewer of those kinds of global anti-establishment movements exist now. It's quite surprising how all of that has dissipated. Now what we get are movements asking for more democracy.  

18:22 - Sara Pantuliano  (Host) 

Jeremy, how do you see this reshaping of global alliances in 2025? Because clearly we're seeing movements on all sorts of levels.  

18:31 - Jeremy Bowen  (Guest) 

Well, if we're going to talk about alliances, let's talk about the alliance that always calls itself the most successful military alliance ever NATO. Nato is going to have to think very hard about what happens with Ukraine, with President Trump coming in. The whole question about is it possible to have any kind of a deal with Trump that doesn't actually translate into defeat for Ukraine in some to some degree or another, which, by extension, would be a defeat for NATO, I would argue, because NATO has been doing everything, bar doing the fighting itself, to try to keep the Ukrainians afloat, in terms of providing weapons, in terms of providing training, in terms of providing political support. They have led the charge on all of that, and Ukraine and, of course, the presence and pressure of Trump have also served to illustrate. Of course, the presence and pressure of Trump have also served to illustrate once again the you know one inherent weakness in NATO, which I think Trump is a lot of people in Europe would say this Trump has got a fair point on, which is the fact that a lot of European countries have been, they've been thinking, well, the Americans are going to spend the money.  

19:47 

Why the hell should we do it? They've been thinking well, the Americans are going to spend the money, why the hell should we do it? Well, european countries, I think, will probably have to think of trying to come up with some options about what if the Americans do pull away from it. What if Trump decides that Article 5, unless that Article 5 is not an immutable commitment to help out any other member-  

20:07 - Sara Pantuliano  (Host) 

he's been hinting to that, in fact. Yeah, I mean. So here's an example commitment to help out any other member. 

20:16 - Jeremy Bowen  (Guest) 

? Things go quiet for a little while. And then what if the Russians push out of their enclave Kaliningrad on the Baltic? It's only a little bit. They take only a little bit of Lithuania. It's just a slice of Lithuania, just a corridor to Russia. Is that an Article 5 infringement? Lithuania is a member of NATO. They would certainly say it was. Would President Trump? Is it worth going to war with Russia, risking a nuclear holocaust, just for a miserable strip of land in Eastern Europe? I mean, these are the questions they need to work out because they might become very real. 

20:56 - Sara Pantuliano  (Host) 

Bright, I want to come to issues around technology, because you're a leading voice in showcasing how technology can actually help us tackle a number of challenges, especially in Africa and with technology being such a driver of economic opportunity, what role do you see it playing in addressing some of the most pressing challenges in 2025? Can you give us some examples? 

21:23 - Bright Simons  (Guest) 

So in African tech we are now in an era that I call peak fintech, which is that we are grappling with the end stage, or rather, shall I say the anti-climax again, of the fintech boom. And it's also quite clear that e-commerce has failed its promise and was heavily hyped. Promise and was heavily hyped. Even the Pan-African payment platform called the PAPS, that was supposed to be this transformative initiative around integrating different payment systems across the continent, did not really see the success that was anticipated for it. But I do see a number of important opportunities, some of them with caveats or caveats. I think green tech is about to begin a significant wave and I see that wave crystallizing and consolidating around e-mobility, electronic mobility applications, particularly two-wheelers and three-wheelers. So here you don't need extensive charging infrastructure because I see those applications occurring within a commercial context, particularly in urban logistics, and also you're going to see mobile charging infrastructure begin to develop. So some of these incredible adaptations of the standard Western approach. Then there are two areas which a lot of us saw as particularly fascinating and there were hopes that they're lot of people saw as particularly fascinating and, you know, there were hopes that they're going to move into a crescendo phase, that is, artificial intelligence and genomics and biotech. They haven't moved as rapidly as we thought, particularly because, in the case of biotech, the post-pandemic adjustments, which a lot of people thought was going to lead to massive amounts of money going to preventing the next pandemic, and therefore a lot of African startups and African research labs were pushing themselves to receive a lot of money from global foundations and, like that didn't pan out. What is happening, though, is that most of the companies are shifting into the area of disease diagnostics, disease screening, reproductive healthcare, in the area of genetic testing, so they are finding commercial applications, which, therefore, is allowing investors to continue to put money into genomics and biotech. 

23:35 

We've seen also work that is going on in the agricultural sector, where biogenomics for plants is becoming interesting. Of course, there are a lot of concerns about GMOs, but there are subsidiary applications that do not attract the same degree of anxiety as full-blown genetic modified organisms, and we're going to see some of that build up for food security purposes and the like. In respect of artificial intelligence, it's unlikely that we're going to see big African models pop up that will challenge Claude and Gemini and Chad, gpt and the like. What we will see, though, is a lot more enterprise-based applications. So, essentially, african corporations begin to use AI to improve efficiencies and a lot of small startups, small consulting startups, helping them to achieve this. So we're going to see a boom of small scale model trainers, model owners, people that help you hone your model to your specific use context in your application and your application environment, and that is going to be really transformative in African enterprise. So these are key trends that we see shaping up in the coming year and then building up in the next decade.  

24:42 - Sara Pantuliano  (Host) 

Thanks, Bright. Linda, another area of transformation that we can anticipate for 2025 is also linked to technology and is the impact that it can have on reshaping the traditional financial system, particularly through the use of digital currencies, including central bank digital currencies, CBDCs and decentralized finance, or DeFi as it's called. But what impact do you think these innovations can have on financial inclusion in particular, especially in regions that have very limited access to banking services? 

25:15 - Linda Yueh  (Guest) 

I think that fintech generally can have a huge impact on not just financial inclusion but on prosperity. So, if you just take M-Pesa in Kenya as one example, of course it's now become a neobank, but it started off as a way of just taking savings which people had, but they didn't have a bank account, and translating that into funds via their mobile phone so that they could use those funds. So, for economists like me, it's a translation of savings into investment, which is absolutely crucial for growth, and some interesting research finds that it's actually raised the overall productivity of Kenya so it's called total factor productivity by improving financial inclusion. Obviously, m-pesa was also formed between Safaricom and Vodafone, and so it's a partnership, but it's one in which private companies wouldn't do this unless they thought it was commercially attractive. And that's actually the great thing about financial inclusion, which is you have these entrepreneurs. You have even established companies seeing this as a real opportunity, companies seeing this as a real opportunity. So I think, looking at 2025, the support of the incoming US administration for digital assets I think that's already been reflected in some of the market movements, certainly. 

26:41 

So you mentioned central bank digital currencies. China has one, and the debate around central bank digital currencies is whether or not this is just an alternative form of fiat money in digital form, or is it really a digital currency in the sense of there is a need and then therefore you have the central bank stepping in to provide it? I think that is an open debate. But, in general, defi, what we continue call dissecting you know the value chain, so they're taking bits and pieces, but whether or not that improves financial inclusion, I think that's probably yet to be seen, because most of these, for instance, digital assets, they are growing, especially in countries with less developed financial systems, because there is a greater need, but we don't yet have the evidence, like what I just described for M-Pesa, to really assess, you know, whether or not this is taking market share from existing banks or is it really promoting financial inclusion. 

28:11 

I would separate this from neobanks, so Nubank, for instance, in Brazil. Some of these neobanks actually are promoting financial inclusion because they're giving banking services via cheaper mode of delivery, which is via a phone, an app, rather than having to, you know, deliver using traditional infrastructure. But I think for digital assets as a universe, there's a lot of possibilities, a lot of promise, but I think we will still need to see. But the one area I will say one of the most developed areas of fintech is payments. So FX, for instance via WISE and financial, taking out the banks and actually doing direct transfers of foreign exchange Remittances, are a massive source of funding for a lot of countries. Reducing the cost of that that is surely good for people and for growth. 

29:04 - Sara Pantuliano  (Host) 

Well, thank you so much. We need to wrap up, but I just want to ask all of you if you had to choose one word to describe what you think 2025 will represent, what would it be and why?  

29:17 - Bright Simons  (Guest) 

Tondros, I feel that, like I said, the anti-climax that we've seen with some of the key trends that many people thought about coming to a head and unfortunately did not really come to a head, mean we have this long drawn out, especially in the areas that matter to me. So think about replenishment of global funds, Think about new sources of climate finance, Think about the areas around security in the Middle East and security in Eastern Europe. I think all of these things are going to drag out very ponderously throughout the year with very little room for any true transformative kind of you know step change.  

29:57 - Jeremy Bowen  (Guest) 

Well, look, let's try and get away from the absolute negativity, because that is easy to find. Let's say, opportunity. It doesn't have to go wrong. Syria doesn't have to go wrong. Syria doesn't have to become a new Iraq. It doesn't have to become the next Libya. I think, though, for that to happen, even if Syrians decide they have a way of creating a political process, they're powerful neighbors who have a lot of their own interests, a lot of skin in the game themselves. I'm talking about Turkey, I'm talking about Israel. I'm talking about the fact that Russians are still in the country, certainly at the time that we're talking. I'm talking about the Americans. They're still there. What are the Emiratis going to do? They're rich, they're highly capable. What do the Saudis think about this?  

30:48 

One of the tragedies Syria has had since the uprisings of 2011 turned into a civil war, when the Assad regime, you know, fired, decided to kill its own people in the streets, the Syrians in the streets. One of the problems has been it's not really been up to the Syrians. One of the problems has been it's not really been up to the syrians. They have not been the, the, the, the directors of their own fate, because more powerful countries have intervened in all kinds of different ways and different levels. And you know, 10 years ago I used to use the phrase it was a mini world war when I was reporting from damascus because so many countries plus international jihadi groups and so on at the time had their fingers in in in the place. And you know, if they go back to that again, not good. Uh, so you know, but let's say opportunity, let's say it might might. Well, I hope it does, because my goodness, they've suffered enough.  

31:47 - Sara Pantuliano  (Host) 

Linda?

31:50 - Linda Yueh  (Guest) 

My word is adaptation. So if I think about the strands of our conversation, I think one of the challenges of living in a world in which, in my area, the economic consensus has shifted is you have to adapt to what the new consensus is without quite knowing what the new consensus is, because we've seen from the elections this year that you know there are areas in which government policy does need to change and they need to adapt. So governments, I think, need to respond, but I think each of us also need to adapt. So if I think about, you know, the US-China era of great power competition, historically, the height of the Cold War in the post-war period was the last big great power competition era between the US and the Soviet Union.  

32:49 

In the second area we're talking about, in terms of technology, I would also use the need to adapt as to describe how we should think about 2025, because there's an explosion of use cases for generative AI.  

33:04 

There's also just a massive amount, as we've already said, around digitalization, basically what I call the digitalization of everything. That is about adapting to new, disruptive forms of technology and trying to work out how we can deploy it for good and to minimize a lot of the negative aspects which come from a rapid change in any area, but certainly technology, privacy, for instance. And then, finally, we haven't talked much about it, but I think one of the big challenges and we have touched on COP one of the big challenges for global public goods and this does affect a lot of countries, wherever you are is we have to think about adaptation finance. So the whole area of the green transition is about adapting to a world in which you're probably not going to get delivery on all the promises that are made. So how can we think about using adaptation finance or blended finance or other ways of making sure that global public goods remains, you know, a focus and can be delivered? So for me, I could go on, but basically, adaptation to me is the word for 2025. 

34:20 - Bright Simons  (Guest) 

I think it's important to remember that during Trump's first term, we do have some measure of the way he thinks about these things. Often, his rhetoric and his actions don't always converge, and so it's not entirely the case that we can assume that as soon as Trump comes, metal goes up in flames. 

34:41 - Sara Pantuliano  (Host) 

That's true, and the inconsistency of these positions was something that guests on the podcast we released after the US elections were commenting on. That's true, and the inconsistency of these positions was something that guests on the podcast we released after the US elections were commenting on. That's very much what they're expecting. This inconsistency in the positions is what we can expect. Thank you, jeremy, linda and Bright, for such a thought-provoking discussion. 

35:02 

It's clear that 2025 presents both significant challenges but also exciting opportunities across geopolitical, economic, social and other dimensions. We are navigating an increasingly multipolar world that offers the potential of a more balanced power structure, but also poses risks of further fragmentation and growing inequality. I mean these challenges. There is reason for optimism, especially when it comes to advances in technology, in AI, digital finance, renewable energy, as we've heard in the conversation today. That's all for this episode. Thank you very much to all of our listeners for being part of our journey in 2024. Before we go, we'd love to hear from you to help shape the future of the Think Change podcast. Share your thoughts by completing a short survey that is linked in our show notes. Your feedback does matter and, from all of us on the podcast team, we wish you and your family a very happy new year. We can't wait to share more with you in 2025. Until next year, thank you for listening.