Mikhail Gorbachev’s commitment to the environment was ahead of its time

After stepping down as Soviet leader he devoted himself to the most urgent task facing humanity today'

When Mikhail Gorbachev introduced reforms permitting greater freedom of speech in the 1980s, one of the first things Soviet citizens begin to speak out about was their anger over the pollution spewed out by the country's biggest and oldest factories.

It prompted his administration to shut down 1,300 of the most polluting factories, he said in an interview with US National Public Radio in 2000, but it also helped crystallise a commitment to environmental causes that put him well ahead of his time and made him an outlier among other former global leaders.