News

From the Guatemalan town painting itself in bright colours to Norway’s 10-year plan to banish belching exhaust fumes, the London Design Biennale is celebrating ideas that put a smile on everyone’s face

The American economy is not paying off for most Americans.

Bhutan is something of an enigma to the outside world.Since the early 1970s the small landlocked country has shunned traditional measures of development and instead focussed on the happiness of its people.

Is growth making us happy?

Forget the GDP, it’s time for our leaders to pay attention to metrics that matter.

According to the WWF, we’re living off 1.6 Earths’ worth of resources.

With US President Donald Trump’s walkout of the Paris Deal, the agreement that aims to keep planetary warming by 2030 below the 2°C rise ceiling, the debate about sustainable development has gained increased traction, with advocates directly contradicting the president and saying it could generate millions of jobs. In this new development model, the United States, by hewing to outdated legacy technologies, risks being left behind.

The wide scope of GDP's remit is best described by the most recent effort articulated in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal agenda, where in order to describe a comprehensive notion of development, we have articulated 17 goals with 169 targets and over 200 statistical indicators. The measurement protocol is considered by all experts, to be a work in progress and these are challenges which official statisticians and development scientists are engaging in.

Leading thinkers – including Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, associate editor of the World Happiness Report; Mo Gawdat, Google [X] Chief Business Officer and author of “Solve for Happy”; Silvia Garcia, former director of Coca-Cola’s Happiness Institute; and Nancy Etcoff, who teaches the ‘Science of Happiness’ at Harvard Medical School – to analyze the latest discoveries from happiness science and what it means for businesses and individuals alike

While improving economic welfare is often necessary for improving the wellbeing of humans, it is certainly not sufficient. The optimal condition is to translate economic wellbeing into the wellbeing of humans.

An updated notion of development should embrace a global outlook and focus on structural imbalances in the world's economy and distributional inequalities that impose acute poverty to certain societies.

Given the state of the degradation caused by activities mostly from factories and industries, it is highly important that a lot needs to be done on how best to improve the environment in order to render more sense to the idea of sustainable development.

The President of the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) told the body’s special meeting today that infrastructure, industrialization and innovation are essential in global efforts to eradicate poverty as they enable growth and sustainable development.

What role does happiness play in the labor market?

By delving into water and air quality, agriculture, biodiversity, fisheries and forests, the EPI is able to create a vivid picture of the environmental issues the world is facing today, and which countries are doing the most to combat them. Here are some of the most surprising findings.