António Guterres, the United Nations Secretary-General, told leaders of the world's largest emerging economies on Sunday that the institutions built after the Second World War can no longer be reconciled with today's balance of power. Addressing the eighteenth BRICS summit in New Delhi, he said the UN Security Council and the Bretton Woods financial system needed fundamental restructuring to reflect a world that has moved on from 1945.

The summit, hosted by India, brought together leaders from Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, along with a growing list of nations that have joined the bloc in recent years. Also present were the heads of the World Health Organization and the World Trade Organization, underlining the summit's ambition to speak for a wider constituency of the Global South rather than the five founding members alone.

Guterres told the gathering that its very composition illustrated the argument he was making. "Today's economic, demographic and geopolitical realities are not those of 1945," he said. "Our institutional structures must reflect it." He added that the world was "increasingly moving towards a multipolar world," a shift he described as one to be welcomed rather than resisted, provided it was accompanied by genuine reform of bodies including the Security Council.

He set out four priorities under what he called an agenda for inclusive global growth: finance, technology, climate and peace.

On finance, Guterres said developing nations required a substantial increase in international support to meet the Sustainable Development Goals. He called on multilateral development banks to become larger, more efficient and more willing to take risks in support of poorer countries, arguing that existing lending capacity fell well short of what was needed.

Turning to artificial intelligence, he warned that the technology's benefits remained heavily concentrated. Control of the most powerful systems, he said, sat with a small number of companies based in a handful of countries. Left unaddressed, he argued, this concentration threatened to widen existing inequalities in income, opportunity, security and national sovereignty.

His most forceful remarks came on climate change. He pointed to extreme heat, glacier melt, wildfires and flooding as previews of worse to come, and warned that an intensified El Niño pattern would add further strain as the world edges towards the 1.5 degree threshold above pre-industrial levels. He called on wealthy nations to meet financial commitments already made, including the 300 billion dollar annual climate finance pledge, a tripling of adaptation funding and expanded support for loss and damage. He was equally direct on the extraction of critical minerals in developing regions, telling the summit that the practice amounted to plunder and had to stop.

On peace and security, Guterres referred to the conflicts in Gaza, the wider Middle East, Ukraine and Sudan. He called on all states to observe the principles of the UN Charter, citing sovereign equality, territorial integrity and the peaceful settlement of disputes as obligations that could not be treated selectively.

In his closing remarks, Guterres framed institutional reform as a shared undertaking rather than a concession to be extracted from Western powers. He said that as the world moved irreversibly towards multipolarity, all countries carried responsibility for strengthening a multilateral system capable of delivering for everyone, with a reformed United Nations at its centre.

The remarks come as India, this year's BRICS chair, continues to press for a permanent seat on an expanded Security Council, a campaign that has drawn support from several other members of the bloc. Guterres has raised similar themes at other gatherings this year, including a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation earlier this month, suggesting the case for institutional reform will remain a consistent theme of his remaining months in office. His second term as Secretary-General ends in December.

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