Stone Professor of International Trade Jeffrey D. Sachs ’76 will advise the United Nations on research aimed at significantly decreasing world poverty, disease and preventable death by 2015.

Sachs, who also directs Harvard’s Center for International Development (CID), was appointed by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan as Special Adviser on the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals for a one-year term that began Feb. 1.

The goals—eight major long-term initiatives on concerns like health, the environment and poverty were formulated by over 160 countries in September of 2000.

By 2015, the U.N. aims to halve the number of people who earn less than a dollar a day, are hungry or cannot access safe drinking water.

The goals also pledge that the U.N. will work to provide early education to children of both genders, reduce deaths in childbirth by three quarters, reduce deaths of children under the age of five by two thirds, and halt and begin to reverse the spread of AIDS, malaria and other diseases—all by 2015.

The eighth major goal is to improve the lives of 100 million “slum dwellers” by 2020.

While agreeing that the goals are ambitious, Sachs called them “exciting for that reason” and “achievable.”

“The amazing thing about the time we’re living in is that there really has been a lot of economic progress in a lot of the world,” he said.

He said that efforts by developed nations as well as new technological and scientific breakthroughs could allow the U.N. to achieve its goals.

“There’s a part of the world that is in an absolutely desperate condition where people are literally dying every day,” Sachs said. “The fact that the rich have gotten so rich makes it possible to actually help [poor countries] solve their problems and make a real historic breakthrough.”

Sachs will advise the U.N. and specifically the U.N. Development Program (UNDP), the organization that coordinates different U.N. departments’ efforts on the Millenium goals. He will organize worldwide research efforts to see how the U.N. can best achieve those goals, U.N. spokesperson Farhan Haq said.

Sachs’ current appointment is for one year, but he said that building and maintaining a network of researchers would probably be a multi-year effort.

Sachs said much of the project’s potential for success rests on the willingness of richer, industrialized nations like the United States to contribute to the initiatives the researchers propose.

“The very disconcerting problem has been that a lot of the rich world has really neglected the problems of the poor countries, so there’s no guarantee that the partnership for rich and poor will actually be put togehter,” he said.

Sachs previously chaired the World Health Organization’s Commission on Macroeconomics and Health, which reported in December on how best to reduce disease in developing nations.