High-income countries trying to reach net-zero targets are confronting the fact that existing environmental regulations make it harder to build low-carbon infrastructure. Lobbying groups in the US, for example, are using regulatory tools to block geothermal, solar, and wind facilities. Providing sub...

Climate change is a worldwide and potentially centuries-long event, but it is precipitating thousands of local and short-term crises that demand response. That means it is urgent to move away from thinking about climate change as “distant and unimportant” or “distant and universally existential” tow...

At some point in the next couple of years, the UK is going to have an election. Before then, political parties are going to be working up their election manifestos. In an attempt to save them time, here's a draft section on international cooperation for them to cut-and-paste.

Global gatherings from Addis Ababa to Glasgow are setting targets from climate through health and education to energy and transport that call for a lot of investment for sustainable development. But how much you can afford to invest depends on how much you’re paying for it. And that’s where the simp...

The first age of pandemics followed in the wake of farming, cities and trade, because infections leverage proximity and numbers to survive and evolve. After millennia of mass mortality, followed by two centuries of progress against plagues driven by sanitary and medical revolutions, will we allow a ...

Based on UN projections from the period 2015 to 2050, Rebekah Smith and Farah Hani have calculated that prime working-age populations of OECD countries will shrink by more than 92 million people while there will be nearly 1.4 billion new working-age people in developing countries. This note updates ...

Most differences in global aid allocation cannot be explained using our measures of need, humanitarian demand, capacity and donor relations in a simple linear regression model.