Commentary

Every year I do this teaching, I am given cause to reflect on Richard Feynman’s advice: to really understand something, teach it. Though some questions come up time and again, every year there are a few I’d never heard before, every year an argument or an example that is new to me. Teaching older st...

Without a workforce that can meet the demand of the green transition, countries will struggle to meet their ambitious climate goals.

It almost didn’t happen, but at the eleventh hour, negotiators at COP29 in Baku were able to finalise an agreement that wealthy countries would provide at least $300 billion annually to developing countries by 2035. On the face of it, a tripling of the previous $100 billion goal sounds impressive. A...

2024 has been a great year so far for getting lead (pb) on the international agenda, with the launch by USAID and UNICEF of the Partnership for a Lead-Free Future. But only a brief passing mention to 7 percent of global GDP in a set of UN documents on chemical regulation suggests that we still have ...

This week, President-elect Trump said he would impose a 25 percent tariff on all goods coming from Mexico and Canada, effectively disregarding the North American free trade agreement (USMCA) that he made a priority to renegotiate in his first term. The USMCA has a review clause where the three count...

My colleagues and I are preparing a series of blogs on the Biden administration’s global development agenda over the past 3 ½ years, with analysis on how the next Trump administration could affect its legacy. For the second piece in this series, we look at the outgoing administration’s record on hea...

There is a broad consensus that achieving the SDGs and addressing the costs of climate change in developing countries will require substantial financial resources. In this blog post, we argue that while mobilizing additional financing is challenging, effectively absorbing and utilizing these additio...