Sustainable production and consumption matter immensely to the people I meet every day as head of the International Trade Centre, which works with small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to help them boost growth and job creation by improving their competitiveness and connecting to international markets.

Governments around the world are looking for economic growth and job creation. African economies are no exception, with increasing recognition that growth has to be built on a more diversified economic structure in order to make a lasting contribution to development.

We often run the risk, when discussing women empowerment, to think that this is about women talking about women with other women, but this is not the point.

Governments everywhere have ministries dedicated to women's affairs. I know of only one with a Ministry for Women Empowerment: Indonesia. Charged with the 'realization of gender equality and justice' together with children's well-being, the ministry frames gender equality as a matter of justice.

All our environmental problems become easier to solve with fewer people and harder - and ultimately impossible to solve - with ever more people.

The irony here is this administration is spending more money on climate change research and development than any administration in all the rest of the industrialized world combined.

Often times when you face such an overwhelming challenge as global climate change, it can be somewhat daunting - it's kind of like trying to lose weight, which I know something about.

This is a truth that should be repeated like a mantra: to have any chance of a ful - filling life, we require not only clean air and a steady climate, but also an abundance of meadows and woodlands, rivers and oceans, teeming with life and the mass existence of other living creatures.