One of the world's greatest economists and the author of the New York Times bestseller The End of Poverty offers an urgently needed assessment of the environmental degradation,rapid population growth, and extreme poverty that threaten global peace and prosperity. Common Wealth provides a set of practical solutions based on a new economic paradigm for our crowded planet.

In Common Wealth, Jeffrey Sachs shows us tbat we need a new economic paradigm--global, inclusive, cooperative, environmentally aware, and science based--because we are running up against the realities of a crowded planet. The alternative is a series of cascading threats to global well-being, all of which are solvable but potentially disastrous if left unattended. Prosperity must be maintained through new strategies for sustainable development that complement market forces, spread sustainable technologies, stabilize the global population,and enable the billion poorest people to escape from the trap of extreme poverty. The seemingly "soft issues" of the environment, public health, population growth, and extreme poverty will become the hard issues of geopolitics in coming years. Indeed, these issues will become key determinants of and peace.

The very idea of nations that scramble for global power, natural resources, and international markets is passd, and must be replaced by a new era of global cooperation around shared goals of sustainable development. Though we live in a time when confidence in global cooperation is at a low ebb, experience teaches us that it has repeatedly succeeded in the past. Now the capacity to deliver sustainable prosperity to all is greater than ever before if governments, businesses, and civil societies throughout the world coalesce around the goals that humanity adopted at the start of the new millennium,goals that Jeffrey Sachs calls our Millennium Promises.

Foreword

PART ONE

 New Economics for the Twenty-first Century

 1. Common Challenges, Common Wealth

 2. Our Crowded Planet

PART TWO

 Environmental Sustainability

 3. The Anthropocene

 4. Global Solutions to Climate Change

 5. Securing Our Water Needs

 6. A Home for All Species

PART THREE

The Demographic Challenge

 7. Global Population Dynamics

 8. Completing the Demographic Transition

Prosperity for All

 9. The Strategy of Economic Development

 10. Ending Poverty Traps

 11. Economic Security in a Changing World

PART FIVE

 Global Problem Solving

 12. Rethinking Foreign Policy

 13. Achieving Global Goals

 14. The Power of One

Acknowledgments

List of Acronyms

Notes

References

Index