Kofi Annan: Vote, make some noise and use your power as a consumer

How can ordinary citizens help bring about the change we need and encourage our leaders to actually lead on issues from drugs to climate change?

What does the illegal drugs trade have in common with the death toll from the Ebola epidemic? Or our collective failure so far to address climate change (the climate agreement in Paris marks the beginning, not the end, of the road) or the security council's inability to stop the violence in Syria and Iraq? In each case - as with so many other crises in our world - they have at their heart a lack of political will and a failure of leadership. Narrow, short-term self-interests have overshadowed the understanding of how, in a truly global world, interdependent are our destinies.

Look at Ebola. We have known about the disease and the terrible risks it could pose for 40 years, yet we did not take effective action. Only when the death toll was mounting, borders were closing and there were fears of a global epidemic did we mobilise the resources needed.