At a recent meeting for the launch of a new World Bank report on air pollution, held in Kathmandu, Pema Gyamtsho, director general of ICIMOD, asked by a show of hands how many people in the room actually saw the peak of Mount Everest on their way to Nepal’s capital.
In his masterful polemic, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, the American journalist Anand Giridharadas takes a close look at how charitable giving by billionaires impedes rather than helps reform.
As the Covid-19 pandemic wreaked havoc worldwide in 2020, scientists scrambled to produce vaccines. Millions of lives were lost, even though the existence of coronaviruses – the class to which the virus causing Covid-19 belongs – was well known.
Nigeria’s President Bola Ahmed Tinubu announced a new ministerial portfolio in August: Marine and Blue Economy.
Viewed from the Voyager 1 space probe as it passed beyond the edge of the solar system, Earth and Venus might not look too different – same diameter, similar mass and distance from the Sun.
Andrew J Constable, University of Tasmania and Jess Melbourne-Thomas, CSIRO While the Southern Ocean around Antarctica has been warming for decades, the annual extent of winter sea ice seemed relatively stable – compared to the Arctic. In some areas Antarctic sea ice was even increasing. That was until 2016, when
Three-quarters of annual rain in the Himalayas arrives in the monsoon season from June to September. Within this rainy period are sudden and extremely intense cloudbursts, which often “pop” over a relatively small area (akin to a cloud bursting open like a balloon). As climate change is making these
Like most people, Mark Noort reacted with horror to images last month of devastating floods in Libya. Unlike most others, Noort had a professional reason to follow the drama. An expert in Earth observation technology, he took part in a research project that used EU funding to set up a
Three decades ago, Professor Martine Vrijheid was investigating the prevalence of birth defects near hazardous waste sites across Europe as part of her PhD work. She found that there was indeed an increased risk close to dumps. Her study, done at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in
Abstract Dependency theory exposed the silencing of the exploitative historical relation between core and periphery to explain the underdevelopment of countries in Latin America. The attrition of US hegemony after the cold war and subsequent developments of new economic models masquerading as inclusive created theoretical ambiguity among the proponents of
