Innovation & technology

With general elections looming, national parties are setting out their competing visions for boosting India’s economy. Much of this agenda includes increasing farmers’ incomes. The agricultural sector is vital, and it is clear that reforming agricultural markets and setting up electronic mandis (e-mandis) would make a significant difference.

Around the world, ever more countries and regions are promising to stop emitting carbon dioxide sometime in the future. The European Union is winning plaudits from green activists for aiming to be “carbon neutral” by 2050. Cities from Adelaide to Boston to Rio de Janeiro are announcing similar goals, with Copenhagen saying it will get there already in 2025.

One of the most overlooked development success stories right now is that the population without access to electricity has fallen below 1 billion for the first time since records began. New data from the International Energy Agency (IEA) shows that in 2017, 120 million people gained access to electricity, meaning more people today have access to electricity than ever before.

The latest global climate summit in Poland has generated familiar predictions of doom and disaster from environmental activists. Climate change seems to freeze our capacity for critical thinking: we are too eager to believe the problem is far worse than science shows, and – conversely – that our solutions are far easier than reality dictates.

Christiana Figueres, the former United Nations official responsible for the 2015 Paris climate agreement, has a startling vision for restaurants of the future: anyone who wants a steak should be banished. “How about restaurants in 10-15 years start treating carnivores the same way that smokers are treated?” Figueres suggested during a recent conference. “If they want to eat meat, they can do it outside the restaurant.”

Three years have passed since world leaders adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development with 169 targets that must be reached to transform the planet. We are one-fifth of our way towards 2030, but miles behind on achieving the lofty goals to reduce poverty, increase prosperity, protect the planet and advance peace.

With input from more than 400 experts from government, international organisations, scholars, and intellectuals, the Bangladesh Priorities project helped identify 76 investments that would help achieve the nation's goals under the 7th Five Year Plan.

Global leaders recently swept into New York for the United Nations General Assembly, trailed by thousands of media, activists and protestors. During the high-level get-together, two very different meetings held at the exactly same time revealed much about their priorities—and their flawed approach to the planet’s biggest problems.

Scientists are describing it as the final call: the most extensive warning yet on the risks of rising global temperatures. The Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change report earlier this week predicted that global temperatures were set to rise to 3 degrees above pre-industrial levels - the IPCC says urgent and drastic action is imperative to keep the rise at one and a half degrees or less. 

The global economy must be transformed immediately to avoid catastrophic climate damage, a new United Nations report declares. Climate economist William Nordhaus has been made a Nobel laureate. The events are being reported as two parts of the same story, but they reveal the contradictions inherent in climate policy—and why economics matters more than ever.