It is critical to design our Covid-19 recovery for green challenges

Heading the UN gave me a new perspective on the world. In a short time, I saw glaciers melting in Antarctica, devastating floods in Thailand and Pakistan, the 2011 tsunami in Japan and Hurricane Sandy in America. In September 2011, I met a young boy in the South Pacific island of Kiribati who could not sleep because he was worried that the rising sea would destroy his home.

I learnt that the biggest challenges humanity faces are interlinked. I saw that surviving and emerging from a crisis depends upon our...