How agriculture can be intensified in Africa without causing harm
Sustainable agriculture is a popular concept. It’s warmly embraced as a guiding light for the future of food production. But there is still a great deal of disagreement about what the concept actually means and entails. There is broad agreement about what sustainable agriculture’s main aim shou…
Revisiting the Journey to the Sustainable Development Goals
It’s been almost one year since heads of state and government adopted ‘Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’ – the ambitious agenda which contains 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) and 169 targets during a special session of the UN General Assembly on 25 Septembe…
How Climate Change Could Jam The World’s Ocean Circulation
Susan Lozier is having a busy year. From May to September, her oceanographic team is making five research cruises across the North Atlantic, hauling up dozens of moored instruments that track currents far beneath the surface. The data they retrieve will be the first complete set documenting how Nort…
Students Speak: peace can guarantee sustainable development
War and violence cost the global economy $13.6tn (£10.2tn) in 2015, according to the annual global peace index. Terrorism is at a record high and the effects of conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa have been felt far beyond the region. Worldwide, a record 65 million people were fo…
10 Years of Fighting Pirates in Asia
This year marks the 10th anniversary of the establishment of the Regional Cooperation Agreement on Combating Piracy and Armed Robbery against Ships in Asia (ReCAAP) Information Sharing Center (ISC) in Singapore. In those ten years, ReCAAP ISC has grown into a true multilateral organization comp…
‘Time for a policy reset’: Taking a closer look at recent African economic trends
Commentary around recent developments in the economies of sub-Saharan Africa has centered on a trifecta of threats: low commodity prices, China’s slowdown, and the rising cost of external borrowing. The region’s robust growth over 2000-2014, analysts say, is slowing down. Commodity exporters in part…
KPA Navy Upgrades in the East Sea
Although international attention has focused on continued developments in North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs, commercial satellite imagery indicates that Pyongyang is also improving its conventional military forces. Notably, serious resources have been channeled into upgrading the …
Belt and Road can help promote sustainability
During a recent series of talks with academics and analysts on the prospects for the G20 Leaders Summit in Hangzhou on Sept 4 and 5, Fredrik Erixon, director of the European Center for International Political Economy (ECIPE), made two points that impressed me. One was his view on the status quo of t…
Prometheus-bound: An end to nuclear explosive tests
Myth has it that Prometheus stole fire from the Gods and brought it down from Mount Olympus to Earth for the betterment of humankind. Another, more deadly type of fire was brought to the world on 16 July 1945 when the first nuclear explosive device was detonated at the Alamogordo Test Range in…
Former Australian PM Kevin Rudd: How to Fix the United Nations
The UN is still important, but it needs to be reformed for a new age In an age of a fracturing political support for the European Union, the re-birth of American isolationism, the growing international political confidence on the parts of both Russia and China, the daily threat of violent jihadism a…