We’ve been living in serious debt: not just financial but ecological too. Essentially we’ve been subsidising the American Dream lifestyle and consumption patterns that are far beyond our actual means. That’s why the Green New Deal suggesting joined-up policies to address the ‘triple crunch’ of 1)credit,  2)climate change and 3)oil prices is such an important [...]

I confess, I’m getting super excited about this product. Five years since the concept was first floated, its makers, One Laptop Per Child, are into a fourth generation of prototypes, renamed the ‘XO’, and gearing up for mass production.
Here are my favourite features:
(a) Access to knowledge. I believe that every single problem you can think [...]

The majority of the world’s designers focus all their efforts on developing products and services exclusively for the richest 10% of the world’s customers. Nothing less than a revolution in design is needed to reach the other 90%.”
—Dr. Paul Polak, International Development Enterprises
If I were in New York, I’d love to stop by the Cooper-Hewitt [...]

WaterHealth is leading ‘A Blue Revolution’, with a mission to provide safe water to the poorest communities. It also invests in health and hygiene education programs to help combat waterborne diseases in the communities it serves.
For me, the most interesting thing is that they intend to make a profit doing this. Their focus is [...]

Media-savvy Richard Branson seems to have caught on to the green agenda, and he sounds quite serious: ‘going green makes smart business sense‘. His latest company, Virgin Fuels, is investing heavily in carbon efficient alternatives to oil, such as biofuels. If the oil price stays high, investing in biofuels should produce good returns - [...]

Around 20% of the world’s population still lack access to clean drinking water, and around 2 million children die every year because of water-related diseases. It’s an issue that deeply concerns me, and so I was very interested to come across the LifeStraw at the Dubai Humanitarian Aid Conference (DIHAD) a few weeks back. [...]

Apparently, we know less about the world than chimpanzees. Since chimps are not biased by old news and assumptions about the state of the world, at least they have a 50/50 shot at the right answers…
Professor Hans Rosling is a statistics guru, and founder of Gapminder, a non-profit that brings vital global data to [...]