I am Jeffrey Sachs, Professor and Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. I’ll be teaching a free online class on sustainable development starting this month. Ask me anything!
Hi, I'm Jeffrey Sachs. I've been a professor for the past three decades, at Harvard and Columbia, as well as the Special Advisor on the Millennium Development Goals to UN Secretaries General Kofi Annan and Ban Ki-moon. I've traveled to more than 125 countries and seen extreme poverty and impacts of climate change firsthand. Our generation can indeed end the ancient scourge of extreme poverty. Yet it can also destroy the earth¹s life-support system through human-induced environmental devastation.
By necessity, then, we have entered The Age of Sustainable Development, an era in which we must have economic growth that is socially inclusive and environmentally sustainable. So I am enormously excited to be launching a free, global, online university course by the same name on January 21, 2014. (Those interested in joining the course can register https://www.coursera.org/course/susdev) I hope that people all over the world will join the course and then join the generation-long quest to achieve sustainable development.
I'll be available for the next 90 minutes, so please ask me anything
My Proof: https://twitter.com/JeffDSachs/status/423485514230939648
EDIT:
Great to chat with all of you. I'm afraid that I'm going to have to close the convo on my side (as it's geting a bit late in Moscow). Your questions and observations are absolutely terrific. We'll continue, with a discussion board on the Coursera Website and with more Reddit sessions during the semester. Keep the great questions flowing!
Best to all of you. And see you in class!
Prof. Jeffrey Sachs