A world bursting at the seams

New York

As I ascend the solemn steps of Columbia University’s Low Memorial Library, a Parthenon transplanted to Broadway, the early spring snow crunches underfoot and the woes of Africa and the developing world seem very distant. Yet that is what I am here to discuss with Professor Jeffrey Sachs, director of the university’s Earth Institute and this year’s Reith Lecturer.

For his five Radio 4 programmes, the first of which was broadcast this week, Sachs has chosen the title ‘Bursting at the Seams’, which is how he sees the 21st-century world and its afflictions: extreme poverty, environmental crisis, terrorism, disease, bad governance.

A youthful 52, with a distinctive thatch of dark hair, Sachs is an energetic and affable conversationalist, infectiously urgent in manner rather than preachy. ‘In a world of 6.6 billion people rising to perhaps nine billion or more by mid-century,’ he tells me, ‘with the profound environmental stresses that we have, with the massive shifts of geopolitics, the rise of Asia, the relative decline of Europe and the North Atlantic, the big relative changes of demographic patterns both within our countries and across countries, we are facing a set of very deep challenges that could really send the world right off the rails — or that could, if handled properly, actually leverage into a world of true sustainable development.