 For the world's poorest people, each day is a crisis of finding work, enough to eat, and safety. And these are continuing crises. The UN's Sustainable Development Goals attempt to address the continuing crises of poverty, hunger, and disease. Yet even for those who have escaped poverty traps, they may face other challenges related, for instance, to living in fragile states. Challenges of weak governance and lack of respect for human rights. Wars, pandemics, and natural disasters can sometimes be predicted, but we very rarely know the time and the scale. Even for crises that we've seen coming for a long time, such as climate change, the international community has been slow to act. The world was expecting innovation and technology progress would solve the crisis. That has not so far been taking place. The crises of the future can come in many different shapes. Nobody can predict the future, but there are many things that we can still do now. By 2050, there will be 2.5 billion people in Africa. Nigeria's population will be bigger than that of the US. If the world has not gotten development in Africa right, we will see hundreds of millions of people without jobs, without decent living standards. This will dwarf the present refugee crisis that we see in Europe. Such threats could also become opportunities. This demographic burden could become a demographic dividend if this growing population could be put to good use in productive jobs. That would increase growth. That would increase welfare to the benefit of all. The world has responded to crises before, since the Second World War, and the Millennium Development Goals initiated much more progress. So we're seeing success, but no success is irreversible. Crises don't respect national borders. Attention to unexpected crises can draw resources and attention away from continuing crises. The UNU-Wider Conference in September 2016, responding to crises, will consider the continuing crises of the world, of poverty, of hunger, new crises of refugees, humanitarian disaster and war, and it will look at the future crises that may be coming at us. Getting the facts right about these three types of crises is one necessary step in formulating appropriate policy responses. Those responding to crises – governments, international agencies, NGOs, civil society, private citizens – can respond in multiple ways. And it's our hope that with conferences like this one, we can help decision makers to make fewer bad choices and more good ones.