The world really is too much with us.  After years of peace, prosperity and progress toward the Global Goals, challenges and setbacks are following one after another now. Mark Malloch Brown, one of the world’s experts on development, calls it a Tsunami of Crises. Covid-19 set this wave of trouble in motion. But now as…

Feeling distraught about the state of the world? This episode is for you. It turns out your pessimism is not evenly shared. Younger people, particularly younger people in the developing world, have a bright view of the future and expect their lives to be better than their parents. “This is the optimism of the tech…

The rich world placed a big bet on vaccines. But the flaw in that gamble became clear as a new variant spreads. The vaccine was never enough to stop the pandemic, Edie Lush points out in this episode, even if the world had enough vaccine. Most of the world did not have enough vaccine and…

The rich world placed a big bet on vaccines. But the flaw in that gamble became clear as a new variant spreads. The vaccine was never enough to stop the pandemic, Edie Lush points out in this episode, even if the world had enough vaccine. Most of the world did not have enough vaccine and…

Everyone seemed disappointed with the Glasgow climate summit. But maybe it was not as bad as it looked? That is the provocative insight of Isabel Hilton, an expert on both climate action and on one of the pivotal countries, China. Yes, it was “unhelpful,” as she put it, that India, with China’s backing, changed the…

The World Health Organization’s emergency committee on Covid-19 says that “analysis of the present situation and forecasting models indicate that the pandemic is far from finished.”  To curtail it, a “coordinated international response” is needed, reports Co-host Claudia Romo Edelman. “Where have I heard that before?” replied co-host Edie Lush. A coordinated response is exactly…

In this episode, taped live at the end of the United Nation’s General Assembly meeting, three experts face the challenge of making up ground lost to the pandemic. Measures of wealth, health, education and equity have all been set back. “The world has a lot of work to do,” said co-host Edie Lush. “The pandemic…

The pandemic and economic collapse dealt a severe blow to the progress that was being made toward eradicating extreme poverty, improving health and education, and reducing hunger and inequity. Those are the Sustainable Development Goals, aka the Global Goals, the World’s ‘to-do list’ for a better, fairer world by 2030. “A lot of of the…

Do you think Climate Change is something that will happen in the future? Or something that will happen somewhere else? Well, as Co-hosts Claudia Romo Edelman and Edie Lush, say: think again. The climate is warming and one of the predicted effects, extreme weather, is happening faster and more severely than climate scientists had forecast….