Development Goals. End poverty, zero hunger, or  wellbeing for all at all ages, to name just a few.  

But these can seem pretty impossible  for some people to achieve.  

So how do you galvanise people towards  goals that seem so unattainable?

It's very ambitious, but it is very exciting,  and it did take four years for us to shape. And  

that's because we really have a conversation with  the world about what does it take for a country  

to go from a trajectory of abject poverty and  poor human development indices to one where there  

is the prosperity and peace and respect for human  rights? How do we how we put all that together?

What's your assessment of where we are, as  a result of this past year with a pandemic,  

and the very disparate impact  that's had on different communities?

When we launched the decade, we were off track  to achieving the SDGs. And so what we did find  

ourselves doing was treating development as an  emergency, taking the framework of the SDGs and  

saying, this needs to be put on steroids. And we  need to move this fast to the right investments.  

And really, the new angle itself  came together, but so did the world.  

There is a silver lining and Covid,  and that is that we are all conscious  

about having to make investments today that  could actually help us to recover better.

When you think about the range of sustainability  initiatives across IKEA, they're so wide ranging. 

What's the criteria for determining  which ones you will pursue?

It's basically starting with that you need  to measure your carbon footprint and know  

the impact that you have across  your value chain. Secondly,  

I would say it's about going for the  actions that has the biggest impact.

Why is cross sector collaboration so  important for moving the needle on this?

What we stand before is actually a transformation  of society at large, the infrastructure of  

mobility, of energy, of consumption. And thereby,  each one of us will be slightly too small to take  

the lead in every topic. So, we need to work  in between competitors. We need to work in  

value chains, from end to end. And we need to  work together with governments in order to make  

sure we have speed in incentivising the right  investments and behaviours that we need to see.

Do you think there's going to be a different  view of innovation? Because, traditionally,  

innovation by companies is something that you'd  want to keep for yourself as a competitive edge,  

but in sustainability, it seems like if we  actually want to move the world, we should be  

sharing every sustainability innovation  that we can find as broadly as possible.

I think so. I think before we were thinking,  how do we protect the uniqueness of a company  

by locking others out of it? I think now  we protect our companies by having speed,  

we protect our companies by being relevant  for our customers and coworkers, and thereby,  

to work in your own funnel and not collaborate  with others, will also have a price to pay.

Climate action today as a very real ask of global  leaders, because the change that is happening as  

a result of climate, not just the disasters that  we're seeing that ever more frequent and harsh,  

but in fact that the recovery  is so much more difficult.  

And so we've got to put investments in  to prevent, to adapt, and, of course,  

really huge investments and mitigation to  get those targets that we would like by 2050.