We all have to acknowledge a simple fact: Africa is growing.

Coming from a smaller nation in Central Europe, I have learned pretty soon how important are agreed rules, cooperation, respect for partners and, most of all, willingness to listen and find common solutions.

U.N. employees, including senior leadership, should be selected based on merit and competence while continuing endeavors to achieve gender parity and geographical balance.

I'm a career diplomat. I spent 30 years as a diplomat, out of which seven years as foreign minister. I've always believed in the United Nations as a centre of multilateralism and multilateral diplomacy.

Here on Earth, we've found organisms that thrive in environmental conditions we would have once thought uninhabitable. The presence of these extremophiles suggests that life could potentially take hold on worlds other than our own.

Environmental problems cannot be resolved here the way they are resolved in other countries. I heard that 80 per cent of the environmental problems in the U.S. are solved in court. That can't happen here.

Deliberately modifying the earth's atmosphere would be a desperate gamble with significant risks. Yet the more likely climate change is to cause devastation, the more attractive even the most perilous attempts to mitigate those changes will become.

Election days come and go. But the struggle of the people to create a government which represents all of us and not just the one percent - a government based on the principles of economic, social, racial and environmental justice - that struggle continues.