Many nations are engaged in ambitious urban planning endeavors and the creation of new capital cities. Nusantara, Indonesia, is the latest in a series of modern cities that have sprung up across Asia.
In recent years, public-private partnerships (PPPs) have spread rapidly. While usually profitable for the private partners, PPPs have generally not served the longer-term public interest.
At the entrance to the municipality of Paraíso, in the southeastern Mexican state of Tabasco, there is a traffic circle that displays three things that are emblematic of the area: crabs, pelicans and mangroves.
“We are under extreme stress about skyrocketing prices of essential edible commodities and the cost of gas and electricity. The situation is becoming worse because every day. We must pay more for wheat flour, sugar, tea, milk, oil, etc.,” Azizullah Khan, a civil servant, says.
The world is now half way to 2030 but the ambitious goals agreed in 2015 including the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are under threat, action is urgently needed.
When the heads of state of all United Nations members spoke in front of the UN General Assembly last week, a number of African leaders were not able to attend, having been removed from office in military-led coups.
When the UN’s 193 member states reviewed the current status of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger by 2030, the verdict was mostly failures—and with little or no successes.
The hunger/poverty nexus was best characterized by Alvaro Lario, President of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), who warned last week that under current trends, 575 million people will still be living in extreme poverty in 2030—and as many people suffering from hunger by 2030 as in 2015 (600 million people).
What does transformative and sweeping really mean in the overarching efforts to achieve the Agenda 2030?
With the conclusion of the second edition of the SDG Summit, it is time for stocktaking on what was agreed at the United Nations HQ in New York this week. At the core of the Summit were not the several
Leaders’ Dialogues that, as important as it can be to have heads of state and government reflecting on the Agenda, are just talking shops without any practical implications.
In Bolivia, more and more women have gone from being homemakers or street vendors to joining the noisy world of engines, their hands now covered in grease after learning that special touch to make a car work. But they frequently have to put up with machismo or sexism, injustice and mistrust of their skills with tools.
French oil and gas giant TotalEnergies and China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) are moving with pace in the development of oil and gas projects with a potential investment portfolio estimated at more than USD 15 billion. IPS looks at the project's human rights record for the compensation of affected communities.
Despite the dominance of the “
Big Three” cereal crops and a steady rise in meat consumption, an overlooked food sector is projected to become ever more central to Africa’s food security and rural economic growth between now and 2050.
The growing and changing material requirements for new technologies have triggered natural resource scrambles for strategic minerals, generating dangerous rivalries fought out in the global South.
It’s a year since a photo of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini – bruised and in a coma she would never recover from after being arrested by the morality police for her supposedly improperly worn hijab – went viral, sending people onto the streets.
In today's increasingly interconnected world, marked by grave economic, environmental, and security crises that transcend global boundaries, it's abundantly clear that our interdependence is an undeniable reality.
The reuse of treated wastewater in vulnerable rural areas of Chile's arid north is emerging as a new resource for the inhabitants of this long, narrow South American country.
Experts at the Africa Food Systems Forum (AGRF) in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, have called on African governments to make and review existing policies to protect the processing and agro-industrialisation of locally produced agricultural products.
Courage, sadness and impotence are expressed by Mayan indigenous activist Sara López when she talks about the Mayan Train (TM), the Mexican government's biggest infrastructure project, which will cross the town where she lives and many others in the Yucatan Peninsula.
The commodity boom early this century was mainly driven by mineral prices. Yet, mining’s contribution to developing countries’ revenue has been modest, largely due to massive tax evasion and avoidance.
In the wake of the recent Africa Climate Summit, which convened in Nairobi from September 4-6, 2023, the world’s attention was drawn to the pressing challenges facing the African continent as it grapples with the
devastating effects of climate change.
While climate change is relentlessly progressing, threatening life on earth, world leaders continue to meet while planning for a future where this immense menace to human existence remains a minor item on the agenda.
Twenty years ago this month, a colleague saved me from a likely gruesome death. He insisted I stay in his Baghdad office of the World Food Programme (WFP) for a hot drink. “You can't leave us without trying the tea I made for you! The best in Iraq.”