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How the United Nations is leading the world’s next moonshot | Jeffrey Sachs

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Jeffrey Sachs: When I was a kid the greatest thing imaginable for me was the moonshot. President John F. Kennedy said to the U.S. Congress in May 1961, “I believe this country should commit itself to the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” Well, how cool was that? And President Kennedy’s vision not only rallied the country but was fulfilled when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon in the summer of 1969.
In our time we’ve had a different kind of moonshot in my opinion, and that is the moonshot to make our world safe, fair and sustainable. And Kofi Annan, then Secretary-General of the United Nations in the year 2000, a great man, at the start of the new millennium said to the world leaders, “Let’s also take a goal, a goal to fight global poverty and wrestle it down to size.” And he put on the agenda of the world the Millennium Development Goals. These were adopted in a summit of the heads of state in the year 2000, and they said “Let’s get extreme poverty, the kind of poverty that kills, let’s get that down at least by half by the year 2015.”
Well, despite all the noise in the world, and the uncaring and the distractions and the confusion and the war in Iraq and all the rest, there was some focus finally on this kind of moonshot in our time of fighting extreme poverty and major initiatives were undertaken. For example, establishing the global fund to fight AIDS, TB and malaria and those diseases started to really get under control for the first time; big successes, even in a distracted and confused world.
Well, fast-forward 12 years after those Millennium Development Goals were adopted to 2012, yet again world leaders came together on the anniversary of the Earth Summit, which had been a 1992 meeting, to try to tackle climate change, environmental crisis, and so on in Rio de Janeiro. Twenty years later when governments got together again they looked and they said “We’re not doing very well. Climate change is running out of control, we’re destroying other species, we’re chopping down the Amazon. You look around, we’ve got serious problems.”
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