Away from the space race, a second contest was under way in the 1960s: a battle to pioneer super-fast passenger aircraft operating at velocities in excess of the speed of sound. Concorde, a collaboration between
Aadhaar is the world’s largest biometric identification system. Introduced in 2009, its roots go back a decade earlier to 1999, when issuing identification documents to citizens in areas near India’s frontiers was one of the
Adopted in 2015 by the UN General Assembly, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) comprise 17 inter-linked targets for the world that are intended to be achieved by 2030 as a "blueprint to achieve a better
The rapid increases in agricultural production and efficiency achieved through a series of research technology transfer projects in the 1950s and 1960s have been variously called the ‘Green Revolution’ or the ‘Third Agricultural Revolution’, and
Planting trees is increasingly fashionable among policymakers, not least as a way to counter the climate-changing effects of carbon entering the atmosphere. The largest reforestation programme in the world is the Grain for Green program,
"The dilemma between being sustainable and making a profit has ceased to exist in many cases," says Joaquim Levy. “And those who do not exploit this will take losses.” Levy has spent a life at
Russia took an early lead in the ‘space race’ with its ‘Sputnik moment’ in 1957, the first successful launch of an earth-orbiting artificial satellite. Four years later, Yuri Gagarin became the first astronaut to journey
London used to be famous for air pollution so bad that people could scarcely see outside in the middle of the day. But the public's tolerance for this unhealthy environment ended with "Great Smog" of
The 1992 Earth Summit in Rio was a breakthrough moment for international governmental efforts to tackle global warming—though as climate change deals continue to do, it fell well short of what was needed. The UN
The environmental catastrophe caused by oil spilled when the Exxon Valdez tanker hit a reef in Alaska's Prince William Sound on March 24th 1989 inspired a pioneering effort in private-sector led environmental policymaking. A newly