Tetsunari Iida has a radical but straightforward idea — that Japan can go 100% renewable. He has been anti-nuclear and pro-renewable energy for decades. In order to take this idea forward he was ...

Recently the Government of Ecuador and the United Nations signed a landmark legally binding deal to preserve the country’s oil rich Yasuni National Park. As part of the pact, economically rich nations ...

Jared Diamond famously stated that “the biggest problems facing the world today are not at all beyond our control, rather they are all of our own making, and entirely in our power to deal with” when ...

It is not all that long ago when we began using so many electrical appliances in everyday life. Japan’s first “pulsator-type” washing machine, a prototype of current models, reached the market in 1953 ...

“Fiddling while Rome burns” may seem a stale analogy, but when talking of “green growth” and “green economy” (GGE, for short), it is appropriate. Despite assertions to the contrary, the only thing ...

As production (real GDP) grows, its marginal utility declines, because we satisfy our most important needs first. Likewise, the marginal disutilitiy inflicted by growth increases, because as the ...

Globally today, we are witnessing an “inexorable intensification of violence” in the world’s armed conflicts. The result is that there are currently 59.5 million refugees worldwide. And among that ...

The world has to reach ‘carbon neutrality’ by 2070 to avoid busting our ‘carbon budget’ and seeing global warming of more than 2°C, a new UN report warns. That’s the internationally agreed limit above ...

With the topic of peak global oil production moving more into the mainstream, you have perhaps heard of the Canadian oil sands. There, huge tracts of remote forested land are strip-mined to obtain a ...

Of all the efforts to improve China’s environment, there are probably none as arcane and potentially important as the statistical re-evaluation being pioneered by Niu Wenyuan. This senior economist ...

It is peculiar to live in a world where hunger is an endemic problem for half the planet while diet books are best sellers in the other half. This point is often lost in the broader bundle of jargon ...

With a population of five million crammed on a landmass of just 715 square kilometres, the tiny republic of Singapore has been forced to expand upwards, building high-rise residential complexes to ...