This week the Fairtrade Foundation launched their campaign for global investment in sustainable small-scale agriculture with this food for thought: “Smallholders grow 70% of world’s food, so why are half the world’s hungriest people smallholder farmers?” Could it be because living off the produce of a small plot of land with low inputs and family labour […]

Public services are crucial not only for the individuals who depend on them, but for economic development. Businesses rely on roads, and schools, police and lawcourts, just as individuals do, but these things cost money. In a world of globally integrated businesses, internet commerce and intangible assets, taxation systems are becoming strained. Reforming international taxation […]

Equitable Access to Sustainable Development (EASD) was the dog that didn’t bark (much) in 2012. But I expect we will be hearing more from it in 2013. Mattia Romani, James Rydge and Nick Stern in their December 2012 paper ‘Recklessly slow or a rapid transition to a low-carbon economy? Time to decide’ set out why; We […]

This is a project idea I have been stewing for a little while. I aim to make it happen in 2013….. The broken dashboard Over the past ten years it has become an almost universal requirement for major global companies to measure and report on their carbon emissions. Data has mounted up, awards have been […]

I will be on BBC Breakfast Time tomorrow morning as spokeswoman (at least for the day) for an insta-campaign called Let Toys Be Toys. It started on a parenting website that I spend too much time on, where a group of mothers were talking about the division of toy shops, and the toy departments of […]

I have a guest blog post over at the Climate Development Knowledge Network, and one at Publish What You Fund (an organisation I am working with on climate finance transparency). Here is the CDKN article: One of the discussions least likely to make headlines at the COP18 Climate Summit in Doha this year is the plan […]

Have you ever wanted to see what the green house gas emissions of the top 500 companies in the world  look like? Well here you go: (This is based on companies that reported to the  Carbon Disclosure Project in 2011, click on the graphic to get a better look at in at IBM’s Many Eyes […]

I went to the excellent Breakthrough Capitalism  event yesterday, organised by the team from Volans and The Value Web. John Elkington opened by reminding us that sustainability, is not the same as CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility), or even its more strategic cousin CSV (‘Creating Shared Value’). It is fundamentally about how we unwind old business […]

International climate change talks are underway again in Bonn over the next two weeks. One of the key topics under discussion, as always,  is climate finance: how to mobilise and deploy money to accelerate the pace of change towards low-carbon development, and prevent the costs of adapting to climate change falling on the poorest. As […]