Ardern is clear-eyed about what a prime minister of New Zealand, a country with a population of under five million, can achieve on the world stage. “We’re small,” she says, “but we do our bit by standing up for what we believe in.” She points to New Zealand’s long-standing nuclear-free policy as an example and wants to apply that same moral leadership to action on climate change. “We’re surrounded by island nations who will feel the brunt of climate change. So I see us as having a responsibility.” Of course New Zealand is a tiny contributor, overall, to the warming planet—and yet carbon-heavy industries like farming, horticulture, and forestry are the country’s biggest businesses. Ardern is ready to take those sectors on. “The most difficult thing for us to do is to mitigate and offset our agricultural emissions,” she says. “If we find a way to do that, then we’re showing other countries how to do it too.”

That Ardern has such a specific vision for what needs to be done is all the more remarkable when you consider that high office was very much thrust upon her. “Jacinda had an astonishing rise,” says Bryce Edwards, a political commentator for the New Zealand Herald. In July of last year, Andrew Little, the leader of the Labour Party (repeatedly described to me as “a good bloke” but “gray”), realized there was no way Labour was going to take the majority away from the right-leaning Nationals in the September election. Not with him at the helm, anyway. On July 26 he sat down with Ardern, who had by then been in parliament just shy of a decade, and proposed she take over. So loyal she still regularly texts with childhood friends, Ardern told Little he should “stick it out.” But Little’s mind was made up. Six days later he resigned, and Ardern was tasked with the impossible: to win an election already under way and in which her party’s approval rating languished in the mid-20s.

Another, human complication was that Ardern didn’t want the job. Not yet. She was from a close-knit Mormon family (part of a sizable Mormon community on New Zealand’s North Island), and she wanted to start a family of her own with Gayford. In fact, she and Gayford had been planning to seek medical assistance to conceive­—something they had been told would likely be needed. Then, three weeks after her come-from-behind election, they discovered that nature had intervened. “It was a Friday night,” Ardern says on the phone the day her pregnancy news breaks. “Clarke and I just laughed about it because there was now literally nothing that could happen to me that would make this year bigger.” She adds, “But I’m not the first woman in the world to multitask.” Ardern announced on Twitter that she would continue as PM (after six weeks of maternity leave) and that Gayford, in addition to his unofficial “first man of fishing” title, would assume full-time stay-at-home dad responsibilities. This came as a delightful surprise to New Zealanders. As one popular tweet put it, referring to the Maori name for the country, “[it’s] another chance for Aotearoa to show the world what the future can look like.”