In 2005, Jeffrey Sachs published a book that shaped a generation of development professionals. “The End of Poverty” argues that ending extreme poverty is not a moral aspiration but a solvable engineering problem with a price tag. It reshaped institutions, careers—including mine—and the way people thought about what was actually possible. And it kept returning to two questions: Why is it so hard to do the right thing for the right reasons? And which institutions are equipped to do it?
Sachs is a professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia. Sitting in his classroom today, what strikes me is how these questions are still relevant. Twenty years ago, they mostly addressed aid budgets and governance in low-income countries. The world has since outgrown that frame and so have the questions. The climate crisis and a new geopolitical order have made them both bigger and more difficult to address than Sachs could have anticipated in 2005.
The change is not abstract. A parallel financial architecture has already emerged outside Bretton Woods, with new development banks, lending mechanisms and capital flowing in currencies aside from the dollar. The Security Council and the broader U.N. governance structure still reflect a balance of power that no longer exists, with whole regions of the Global South unrepresented and major economies sitting in roles designed for a world they have outgrown. And hovering above all of this is the climate emergency—the defining challenge of our generation, governed by a patchwork of treaties without an institution. Peace, poverty and climate continue to be discussed in separate rooms even though they have already merged in the world.
In Sachs’ framing, the conclusion that follows is not that these institutions have become obsolete. It is the opposite: in a world inching toward great power conflict and racing against a climate deadline, the need for institutions capable of coordinating a global response has never been greater. Without them, the question is not whether the U.N. matters—it is whether we can avoid a third world war and organize fast enough to meet the climate crisis at the speed it demands.
Our class recently visited the U.N. headquarters and met with deputy secretary-general Amina Mohammed. The visit made one thing concrete: the magnitude of what was assembled more than 80 years ago, in the rubble of World War II, by a generation that had every reason to give up but didn’t. If they could imagine and build that architecture under those conditions, the pessimism of our moment about what is possible begins to look less like realism and more like fatigue.
Between our classroom lectures and that visit, three lessons have stayed with me.
Reform must go deep. What the U.N. and other global institutions need is not managerial fine-tuning. It is a redesign that allows them to reflect today’s world and to respond to its actual agenda: peace, the elimination of poverty, and climate action as a single, integrated mandate; not three parallel tracks that occasionally meet at a summit. The question is not whether to reform; it is whether reform will be deep enough.
Climate action must be structural. It cannot continue to be treated as an incremental add-on inside an architecture designed for something else. The most striking sign of this gap is that the U.N. does not have an agency dedicated to climate change. The World Trade Organization exists for trade. The World Health Organization exists for health. The defining material challenge of this century is governed by a patchwork of treaties without an institution. The Bretton Woods system has begun to move on climate, but each step has come as a parallel program rather than a redesign of the core mandate. A world that needs to mobilize trillions of dollars for adaptation, mitigation and just transition cannot continue to treat climate finance as a window inside institutions that were designed for something else.
Imagination is part of reform. Sachs has proposed the idea of a U.N. campus in China, close to the frontier of green manufacturing, low-cost capital and large-scale deployment. The campus would convene the New Development Bank, Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the Belt and Road Initiative, and the legacy multilateral development banks around blended finance for the Global South. Whatever one thinks of the specific proposal, the boldness of it is the point. The institutions of the 20th century were also, in their moment, audacious proposals. We seem to have lost the muscle for that kind of imagination, and recovering it is part of what reform actually requires.
This semester has been, in its own way, as transformative as reading “The End of Poverty” was 20 years ago. In 2005, the dominant feeling was that we knew the answers and lacked the political will to act. Twenty years later, the answers are sharper. We know how much capital is needed, who can provide it and what the architecture must do. But the political will has not caught up, and the institutions designed to coordinate it have aged faster than the problems they were built to solve. The gap is not in our diagnosis. It is in our willingness to act collectively on what we already know, and in the courage to redesign the institutions that should be channeling that action. What I am taking from my time in the classroom and that U.N. visit is the recognition that transforming organizations is one of the few things humanity has, repeatedly, known how to do. The architecture is the part we can still change, and choosing to work on it is, for me, the most honest answer to the moment we are in.
Talita André holds a master’s degree in entrepreneurship and innovation from the University of São Paulo, and is currently pursuing an M.A. in Climate and Society at Columbia University. She has over 15 years of experience in philanthropy, impact investing and climate in Brazil.
Views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Columbia Climate School, Earth Institute or Columbia University.
