The world is experiencing a historic convergence of increasing demand for natural resources from emerging economies, prices at record levels across various commodity groups, a downward trend in resource supply, serious trends of ecological instability, and the rise of inequality between those...

Two critical megatrends are of central importance in implementing the green economy agenda launched at the recent Rio+20 Summit on Sustainable Development: the rise of emerging economies across the South, and the global challenges of resource security and ecological change. At the converging...

The recently released Rural Poverty Report 2011 (IFAD, 2010) notes that some 1.4 billion people continue to live in extreme poverty, struggling to survive on less than US$1.25 a day and that more than two-thirds reside in rural areas of developing countries. That climate variability and change...

The focus of the development policy discourse now seems firmly fixed on ?inclusiveness?; as both process and outcome. This is clear from the focus of the UN Secretary General?s Agenda for 2011, the discussions at Davos in January 2011 and the focus of the 2011 UNDP Human Development Report on...

Human development in small island development states (SIDS) has been steady and measured as high. The Caribbean, on average, ranks higher than the Pacific on the Human Development Index (HDI): Barbados is ranked at 37, and St. Kitts and Nevis at 50, compared to Samoa at 94 and Fiji at 108 (UNDP,...