Police officers stand guard in downtown Shanghai. China’s pollution crisis has reached epic proportions, driven by the country’s relentless pursuit of economic growth.
Reuters/Aly Song
Jason Hickel, London School of Economics and Political Science
The pursuit of endless industrial growth is chewing through our living planet, producing poverty and threatening our existence. The new Sustainable Development Goals fail to deal with this.
One of the tenets that make universal health care effective is the provision of quality reproductive, maternal and newborn health that is accessible to the entire population.
Feisal Omar/Reuters
The concept of Universal Health Coverage is the new focus post-2015. If implemented properly, it could remedy some of the disparities in health care.
The gulf between the world’s poorest people and the rest of us is, if anything, widening despite global gains in lifting millions out of poverty.
Wikimedia Commons/hris1johnson
Despite progress in lifting people above poverty lines around the world, the picture is bleaker for people at the very bottom of the ladder. They have largely missed out on the gains of recent decades.
The MDG for eradicating poverty and hunger has been helped through new high-yielding varieties of rice (right) that can withstand drought in Africa.
Reuters/Erik de Castro
At the dawn of the 21st century, 189 UN member states adopted the Millennium Declaration as the first common framework for promoting global development, committing to eight goals (six covering health and…
Alternatives to GDP are already in use, but are yet to gain widespread acceptance.
Image sourced from www.shutterstock.com
“At present, we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it GDP.” — Paul Hawken Imagine if a corporation used Gross Domestic Product (GDP) accounting to do its books: it would be…
It should be possible to enjoy your holiday and give the planet a break.
lazyllama/Shutterstock
Australians love to travel. About 9 million Australians travelled overseas last year, 60% of them on holiday. For most tourists, sustainable development and climate change were probably not high on their…
Despite it being nearly six months after the Ebola outbreak was confirmed by the World Health Organisation (WHO), we are still hearing stories of severe shortage of gloves in health facilities in West…
Lower targets are easier to meet.
Gates Foundation/Flickr
During the United Nations General Assembly meetings this week, Ban Ki-Moon has convened a high-level side event on the Zero Hunger Challenge. This initiative by the UN Secretary-General bears the tag line…
With each week that passes, the Ebola crisis in West Africa deepens. And amid the horror, the fear and a public health response described by Medicine Sans Frontières as “lethally inadequate”, public health…
There’s little consensus on how to proceed after 2015.
EPA/Yonhap
Once hailed as “the world’s biggest promise”, the Millennium Development Goals, a 14-year-old series of commitments made by governments to tackle global poverty, will expire at the end of 2014. There is…
Nations of the world came together in 2000 to make a solemn commitment to humanity to combat tuberculosis (TB), HIV/AIDS and other devastating diseases. This pushed governments to set up aggressive public…
The Sustainable Development Goals will aim to tackle pollution as well as poverty.
Alex Proimos/Wikimedia Commons
Next year will be critical in environmental diplomacy. World governments will be negotiating important global agreements in two areas that will have a major impact on our well-being in coming decades…
In the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation annual letter, published recently, Bill Gates declared “by 2035, there will be almost no poor countries left in the world”. Pointing to the fact that during the…
Pakistani teenager Malala Yousafzai met with United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon at UN headquarters in New York to call for freedom for education for children globally.
EPA/Justin Lane
Pakistani teenager Malala Yousafzai, now recovered from serious injuries after the Taliban shot her last year, delivered a defiant speech to the United Nations General Assembly over the weekend. She called…
The world’s getting more crowded - how do we all get what we need while protecting the environment?
James Cridland
Global population trajectories put us at nine billion people by 2050. Our demand for natural resources, particularly water, food and energy, will only rise in the coming decades. With this in mind, how…