COVER STORY This issue: TIME 2030. Thirty-six hundred days sounds like a lot. It’s roughly the number remaining until the year 2030 comes to a close and, with it, a decade likely to determine whether the planet will remain fit for human habitation. The search for a path to a sustainable and equitable world has already begun, and we will spend many of the days ahead marking its progress. Welcome to TIME 2030…To understand the world we live in, read TIME.

Biden Inherits a China policy with strings attached. Donald Trump has left Joe Biden with plenty of knots to untie. For foreign policy, the most important of these is the increasingly complicated and contentious relationship with China, and of all the subjects on which Washington and Beijing are at odds, the most intractable is Taiwan. On Jan. 9, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo sprang a surprise to both Biden and China’s President Xi Jinping by announcing that the U.S. will drop self-imposed restrictions on how its government and military interact with Taiwan…

Can Japan Safely Mount the Games this Summer? Even the best-laid plans were no match for 2020. When TIME sat down with Yuriko Koike in late 2019, Tokyo’s governor was exuberant in anticipation of the approaching Olympic and Paralympic Games. She capped our interview in the city’s hulking Metropolitan Government Building with an impromptu tour of the rooftop viewing gallery, where tourists browsed caps and tees emblazoned with the Tokyo 2020 emblem…