COVER STORY This issue: How the pandemic accelerated the digitization of everything. In March 2020, as businesses across the world sent nonessential workers home to slow the spread of the coronavirus, a 2.6 million-sq.-ft. General Motors plant in Kokomo, Ind., sat idle. At the same time, ventilators—the breathing machines essential to keeping critically ill COVID-19 patients alive—were in frighteningly short supply. And so within a week of pausing the plant’s operations, GM CEO Mary Barra launched it back into action, quickly transforming a dormant engineering building into an assembly line that delivered 30,000…To understand the world we live in, read TIME.
Dusk is falling in the Indian Capital, and the acrid smell of burning bodies fills the air. It’s the evening of April 26, and at a tiny crematorium in a Delhi suburb, seven funeral pyres are still burning. “I have lived here all my life and pass through this area twice a day”, says local resident Gaurav Singh. “I have never seen so many bodies burning together.” Scenes of mass death are now unavoidable in what’s often called the world’s largest democracy. Social media is filled with images of body bags and urgent requests for medical aid. Indians gasping for breath are being turned away from overwhelmed hospitals, sometimes simply because they don’t have lab reports confirming COVID-19 infection…
4 prescriptions for a more sustainable 2030. January brought the launch of TIME 2030, a decade-long reporting project spotlighting the ideas and innovations driving progress toward a more sustainable and equitable world. We convened a range of leaders from around the globe to help steer our coverage, and for this climate-focused issue, we invited four major thinkers on sustainability to join the 2030 committee: environmentalist Ma Jun; activist Vanessa Nakate, founder of Africa’s Rise Up climate movement; former EPA administrator Lisa P. Jackson; and corporate leader Paul Polman. Here, each offers a solution to a major problem we must solve before the end of the decade…
