Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus held a meeting with Portugal’s president Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, on occasion of the Sustainability and Society Forum held in Porto on May 12.

The forum brings together global leaders to debate ideas, mobilize energy and create policies to build a sustainable and inclusive future for all. President de Sousa inaugurated the forum in Porto, according to a press release.

The Portuguese president focused his discussion with Yunus on working towards a world without poverty and how economic policies can be designed to address the issue.

Yunus emphasized on the concepts and institutions which must be changed to make poverty a history. ‘Present economic system creates poverty and cannot prevent it. Poverty is not created by the people; it is created by the economic system we built,’ he told the Portuguese president.

The Nobel laureate was the keynote speaker at the forum addressing the topic, ‘Targets and Policies towards a Sustainable Europe’, alongside the president of Portugal.

Yunus spoke about the need to build a new economic system with human values at the centre and elaborated his vision of a world of three zeroes: zero global warming, zero wealth concentration to end poverty, and zero unemployment to unleash entrepreneurship in all, said the release.

‘The world is currently on a suicidal path fuelled by our profit-centered and greed-based civilization. The ship of the existing civilization is sinking fast. We must build a ship of new civilization and jump into it to save human existence on the planet,’ Yunus said.

‘We don’t have centuries to make this change; we are left with only a few decades. We have to act superfast,’ the Nobel laureate said.