When Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University’s Earth Institute introduced himself to a crowd of about one thousand University community members in a dimmed Rackham Auditorium last night, he immediately let the audience know where his loyalties lie.

“I’m a Michigander through and through,” he said.

Sachs, who is the special advisor to United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and the president and co-founder of the Millennium Promise Alliance. He addressed the issue of global climate change during his talk yesterday, and called the debate over global warming "unintelligible and unimaginable" to the scientists who study the topic.

He was invited to the University by the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy in collaboration with the International Policy Center to give the 2010 Citigroup Foundation Lecture. The Citigroup Foundation established the lecture series in 2000 as part of an endowment to the Ford School.

Susan Collins, dean of the Ford School, told the crowd that Sachs’s ability “to infuse theoretical insight with practical engagement” made him an ideal candidate to deliver the lecture.

Sachs began his speech by discussing the lack of coverage that sustainability and conferences dealing with climate change issues receive in the media.

“How puzzling it is that as important as this issue is, the only time really its got notice in the United States in the recent months is to defeat (policymakers) who voted for doing something about it,” he said.

Sachs went on to explain that while elected officials can undermine environmental issues when it benefits them, the damage to the planet is real and ongoing.

“The climate does not really care about our politics, it’s not noticing,” he told the audience. “What it does care about is the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and those continue to rise fairly relentlessly.”

He said he is frustrated by the overall lack of importance given to environmental issues.

He gave the example of a time-specific goal detailed in 2002 to eliminate biodiversity loss by 2010. According to Sachs, “no one in the world knew anything” about this target.

“(This is an example of) how lightly we are proceeding in the most extraordinarily dangerous matter on the planet," he said. "And it’s not as if we’re taking calculated risks; we’re taking measures without the slightest interest in finding out what those risks might be."

Sachs then offered a definition of global sustainable development and explained why it poses such a challenge to policymakers.

“It is how to combine the economic aspirations of the planet ... with planetary sanity with respect to the earth’s ecosystems, the natural environment and the shared biodiversity on the planet,” he said.

Sachs said he defines global sustainable development as having three broad objectives, “maintaining growth, helping to rescue the poor and helping to save the planet from destruction.”

He explained that the multi-dimensional nature of the issue of sustainable development is what makes it so challenging for policymakers.

“We have a hard enough time in our country achieving any one goal, at least at this moment,” he said. “We’re certainly not very good at achieving multiple goals.”

In addition, Sachs noted that the human population and industry worldwide are growing at alarming rates, which are placing a strain on the environment.

“The boundary constraints are not second order concerns, they are not footnotes for completeness,” he said.