By Ladislav Charouz and Kareff Rafisura* BANGKOK | 2 November 2024 (IDN) — Despite offering a range of opportunities, urbanisation poses a set of unique challenges to sustainable development. The rapid expansion of cities often results in the growth of informal settlements, with East and South-East Asia being home to 370 million people living in […]
UN’s Lagging Development Goals Need a Sense of Urgency
By Simone Galimberti* KATHMANDU, Nepal | 6 March 2024 (IDN)—The latest Asia Pacific Forum on Sustainable Development (APFSD) was recently launched in Bangkok. As usual, it was a mix of official interventions by ministries from the whole region and a wide-ranging array of exciting side events organized mainly by civil society in partnership with United […]
U.S. Cuts African Trade Benefits, Hurting the Poor
By Lisa Vives, Global Information Network NEW YORK | 12 February 2024 (IDN) — A trade preference program that lets African countries export products to the U.S. tariff-free has been suspended for Ethiopia, Mali and Guinea. President Joe Biden ended the benefit over alleged violations of human rights violations. “The Biden-Harris Administration is deeply concerned […]
Are Small Modular Reactors Harbingers of Nuclear Renaissance?
By Leonam dos Santos Guimarâes *The writer is a nuclear and naval engineer (Ph.D.) and a member of the Brazilian National Academy of Engineering. CEO of Eletronuclear S.A. Coordinator, Brazilian Navy Nuclear Propulsion Program. RIO DE JANEIRO | 17 December 2023 (IDN) — The new generation of small modular reactors (SMR) is expected to provide […]
How to Survive the Big Tech?
By Azu Ishiekwene The writer is the Managing Director/Editor-in-Chief of LEADERSHIP newspaper based in Abuja, Nigeria. “Every morning a lion wakes up, it knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve to death…It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle, you better be running”. — First used […]
UN Pleads for Bringing Industry and Sustainability Together
By Ramesh Jaura BERLIN | NEW YORK, 8 April 2023 (IDN) — Sustainable industrial transformation is essential to close the widening development gap between countries, meet climate targets and achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), also known as the Global Goals. The United Nations adopted 17 SDGs with 169 targets in 2015 as a universal […]
Africa: Industrialization Trapped in Limbo Despite All Efforts
By Jeffrey Moyo HARARE, Zimbabwe (IDN) — Jobless and weighed down by idleness, 53-year-old Jasper Mhandu, in the Zimbabwean capital, now has to spend time sited at a street corner chatting with gangs of drug-taking jobless youths in Highfield, a poor income suburb here. Mhandu used to work for a clothing factory that shut its […]
AfDB and OECD Join Hands for Low-Carbon Transition in Africa
By Jaya Ramachandran PARIS (IDN) — The African Development Bank (AfDB) and the OECD Development Centre are joining hands efforts to implement the Equitable Framework and Finance for Extractive-based Countries in Transition (EFFECT), which was launched on November 15 at COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt.
Global Forum Explores Circular Electronics
By Reinhard Jacobsen VIENNA (IDN) — How to enhance decision-making for sustainable e-waste management systems while fostering cooperation at the national, regional and global levels? This was the theme of a four-day event, which over 340 participants and a wide range of international experts explored from May 23 to 26. [E-waste are discarded products or […]
Dirty Coal to Replace Africa’s ‘Fancy Blue Diamond’ As Part of a New Initiative
By Lisa Vives, Global Information Network NEW YORK | GABORONE (IDN) — There may be a lump of coal in Botswana’s Christmas stocking if the southern African country goes through with plans to wind down its famed diamond industry and replace it with unsustainable dirty coal. President Mokgweetsi Masisi, at the Investing in African Mining […]