Insights: WRI's Blog

The UN set a global goal to cut food loss and waste in half by 2030. Alarming figures show just how big of a challenge remains.

Nearly a third of all food produced in the world goes uneaten each year -- an amount that costs the global economy $940 billion and emits 8% of planet-warming greenhouse gases. At the same time, 1 in 9 people is undernourished.

At the start of this new decade, American cities, states and businesses have already come a long way on the road to cutting greenhouse gas emissions to help tackle the climate crisis:

Statistics on global water challenges are daunting: 3 billion people don’t have basic handwashing facilities. A quarter of the world’s population live in countries facing extremely high water stress. There are more than 500 dead zones — areas of the ocean without enough oxygen for most marine life to survive — from untreated wastewater.

A version of this post originally appeared in China Daily on Jan.16,2020.

How can the world nutritiously feed nearly 10 billion people by 2050, in a way that supports rural development and tackles climate change? This is one of the great challenges of the first half of this century. The World Resources Report Creating a Sustainable Food Future introduced a menu of solutions to address this challenge. Reducing food loss and waste are an important part of this strategy.

When people talk about climate change, the planet-warming gas that invariably comes to mind is carbon dioxide. 。

Australia’s bush fires are the worst in the country’s recorded history. Already, millions of acres have burned, creating dangerous levels of air pollution, displacing nearly 90,000 people and killing a billion animals. Global Forest Watch Fires sheds light on what’s happening in Australia and the impacts fires could have

As the world turns attention to the UN climate meetings this week, news from China has captured global headlines: From January 2018 to June 2019, the country added 43 gigawatts (GW) of net new coal power capacity to its existing 1,000 GW coal fleet, while the rest of the world collectively reduced coal capacity by 8 GW. During the same period, China installed 85 GW of solar and wind power generation capacity. And from 2005-2018, China reduced its carbon intensity by 45.8% and increased its non-fossil fuels to 14.3% of its total primary energy mix.

If China is meeting its stated energy targets and has a goal to peak carbon emissions in 2030, is this success?

Not exactly – it depends on the timeline.

Even beyond the global urgency of achieving dramatic greenhouse gas emissions reductions, China must also consider if its current pathway is the most economically efficient and sustainable option for its own longer-term development. The continued expansion of coal in the short-term undercuts its aspiration to be an “ecological civilization” and increases the economic costs of China’s energy economy over the coming decades.