Today, more than half of the world's population lives in cities. In the next 30 years, over one billion people are expected to become urban dwellers. This rapid growth in urbanization poses a great challenge for the future cities when it comes to housing, employment, education, mobility, urban...

Imagine an asteroid is headed towards Earth. Every evening, you turn on the television and watch experts explain its course towards Earth. Every night, before you go to sleep, you check to see if you can identify it on the night sky. For each day, you learn more and more...

The timing of Hurricane Sandy is thought provoking. One week before the election, nature gives the world -- and especially the U.S. -- a wake-up call of epic dimensions. While for the last couple of months being bombarded with information about the presidential debates -- we had given up on...

The U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio can be the take-off for the next industrial revolution driven by business and civil society. The conference can mark a change in leadership from a political top down process to a bottom up movement.

On the 20th of June, the U.N....

It's Sunday. It's raining outside and you have nothing planned for the day. You fix yourself a cup of coffee or tea and curl up in your favorite chair excited to get some reading done. Which book do you pick up? The newest crime novel? The biography of Steve Jobs?...

If there were ever a right time and a good reason for a global youth movement -- that time would be now. The politicians have yet again proven their failure to govern and to take responsibility for the younger and next generations. While independent institutions like the OECD, the IEA,...

Imagine a world where you can live your life to the fullest. Where quality of life is what matters. A desirable place. A place you would want to go if you knew about it. Sustainia is the new sustainable world where applied green technology and sustainable solutions are well established...

The message from last Climate Week in New York was tepid. On the downside it was very much a déjà vu of what we have been hearing for years and thus just another confirmation of the current deadlock, which currently marks the climate challenge: It's getting worse, but...

What do successful coaches do, when defeat threatens? They take a time out. For long, both football and basketball coaches have had great success turning critical situations and impending defeats into great victories by taking a timeout -- at the exact right moment. The timeout has proved itself winning strategy.

We know it is dangerous to cross a red light, so we wait until it turns green. We do not go out sailing when the weather forecast promises a great storm. We accept it when a doctor tells us to take medicine to prevent hypertension. We do not drink the...

Last week, the Economist's front page stated that we have entered into the Anthropocene age: the age of man -- scientists now agree that the human race "has become a force of nature reshaping the planet on a geological scale." The article argued that the human race is...

London, Bangkok, Cairo, and Venice would be critically endangered. So would Miami, Florida and New York. A 1.5 meters rise in global sea level would cause a massive flooding of the globe. This immense rise in sea level is at our doorstep. It could be 1 meter, 1.5 meters, 5...

If your electrician tells you that there is a 30 percent risk that your house will set on fire if you do not change your cables, would you call another electrician? If the next electrician confirms the 30 percent risk, would you hire a third, fourth or fifth electrician in...

Since the old economy broke down in 2008, presidents, prime ministers and mayors have been promising their electorate "green" or "sustainable growth" -- and that is good news. In order to confront "the epidemic" of global warming and shape a safe economic future, we need to combine green and growth....

Every minute, 15 children die from drinking dirty water. Every time you eat a hamburger, you consume 2400 liters of the planet's fresh water resources -- that is the amount of water needed to produce one hamburger. Today poor people are dying from lack of water, while rich...

We are all becoming Chinese farmers. Gao Jitian, a farmer in eastern China's Shandong Province, is about to lose her entire crop due to drought. Gao lives in Nanyang village of Linyi City in southeastern Shandong, one of China's major grain-growing regions parched by the lingering drought.

The world is facing an escalating global epidemic. Today, it claims 350,000 deaths per year and in 2030 the annual death toll will be approaching one million -- the majority of them will be children. In addition, the epidemic will lead to dramatic changes in the living conditions for whole...