In most regions of the world, over 70 percent of freshwater is used for agriculture. By 2050, feeding a planet of 9 billion people will require an estimated 50 percent increase in agricultural production and a 15 percent increase in water withdrawals.
Over the last 25 years Brazil lost around half a million square kilometers of forest - around the same area that China gained. Since 1990, the growing demand for forest products and for agricultural land has contributed to an average annual loss of 50,000 square kilometers of forest globally - an area the size of Costa Rica. Read more in "Five forest figures for the International Day of Forests."
As we mark International Women’s day, I’ve been considering how laws often apply differently to men and women. When they work well, laws ensure greater gender equality, offer protection against child marriage and domestic violence, and open up economic opportunities for women and girls.
A new policy paper from the Women, Business and The Law team discusses laws that protect women from violence. Child marriage is one of the first issues they address - . Even where the legal age of marriage is 18 or above, many countries allow countries allow girls to be married earlier with parental consent.
And 17 economies have a different legal age of marriage for boys than for girls. Where this is the case, girls are allowed to get married at a younger age:
Access to information and communication channels empowers women. In 13 countries, women access the internet at a higher rate than men. But this figure represents only one fifth of countries with data - in most the world, women are less likely to be internet users regardless of a country's region or income group.
And if you plot all the countries with available data, we see that in the majority of cases, internet use is lower among women than men.
Nearly one-quarter of the world's mammal species are known to be globally threatened or extinct. Indonesia is currently home to the greatest number of threatened species of mammals in the world. These are species that are classified as critically endangered, endangered or vulnerable according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
Edutainment, or the use of mass media entertainment to educate people, can promote positive behavior change. An experimental study in Nigeria finds that young people who watched the MTV Shuga drama series were twice as likely to get an HIV test, and half as likely to have multiple concurrent sexual partners. Chlamydia infections also dropped by 58% among women who watched the show.
Read more about the evaluation of the MTV Shuga Soap Opera.
While aquaculture, or fish farming, has grown in recent years, the global marine catch has stagnated since the early 1990s. Almost 90 percent of marine fisheries assessed by the FAO were considered fully-fished or over-fished in 2013. A new report (PDF 2.1MB) estimates that the sector could generate an additional $83 billion in net annual benefits if it moved to a more optimal level of fishing, while improving the size, quality and sustainability of fish harvest.
Read more in "The Sunken Billions Revisited : Progress and Challenges in Global Marine Fisheries"
The typical household in many African cities cannot afford public transport fares. According to a new report, public transport in Sub-Saharan Africa's major cities is dominated by informal minibuses, and is expensive relative to household budgets making it largely unaffordable on a daily basis, especially for the poorest.
Read more in the new report "Africa’s Cities - Opening Doors to the World"
Latin American and the Caribbean accounts for only 8 percent of the world’s population, but for 37 percent of the world’s homicides. Eight out of the 10 most violent countries in the world are in the region, where there were an average of 24 homicides per 100,000 people per year in 2012. Read more in "Stop the Violence in Latin America"
The answer put forward by World Development Report (WDR) 2017 is better governance – the ways in which governments and citizens work together to design and implement policies.
The report is a detailed exploration of a complex topic. I won’t be able to do it justice in a short blog – I’d encourage you to download the report and summary here.
What I will do though, is pull out a few of the charts and ideas I found most striking while reading through it – have a look below and let us know what you think.
Constitutions – fundamental principles or laws governing countries – have proliferated since the late 18th century. The growing numbers, especially since the 1940s, correspond to the postcolonial increase in the number of independent states, and more recently the breakup of the Soviet Union.
… but they are often replaced or amended
– the average lifespan of a constitution is 19 years, and in Latin America and eastern Europe it is a mere eight years.