Explore the vast range of titles available.

The Atlas of Sustainable Development Goals 2018 is a visual guide to the trends, challenges and measurement issues related to each of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. The Atlas features maps and data visualizations, primarily drawn from World Development Indicators (WDI) - the World Bank's compilation of internationally comparable statistics about global development and the quality of people's lives. Given the breadth and scope of the SDGs, the editors have been selective, emphasizing issues considered important by experts in the World Bank's Global Practices and Cross Cutting Solution Areas. Nevertheless, The Atlas aims to reflect the breadth of the Goals themselves and presents national and regional trends and snapshots of progress towards the UN's seventeen Sustainable Development Goals related to: poverty, hunger, health, education, gender, water, energy, jobs, infrastructure, inequalities, cities, consumption, climate, oceans, the environment, peace, institutions, and partnerships.

\"The Atlas of Sustainable Development Goals 2018 is built around World Development Indicators--the World Bank's compilation of statistics from over 200 economies about global development and the quality of people's lives. For each of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, selected indicators have been identified and visualized to anaylze trends and challenges, and to catalyze discussion on measurement issues.\" -- From back cover.

The Atlas of Sustainable Development Goals 2017 uses maps, charts and analysis to illustrate, trends, challenges and measurement issues related to each of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. The Atlas primarily draws on World Development Indicators (WDI) - the World Bank's compilation of internationally comparable statistics about global development and the quality of people's lives Given the breadth and scope of the SDGs, the editors have been selective, emphasizing issues considered important by experts in the World Bank's Global Practices and Cross Cutting Solution Areas. Nevertheless, The Atlas aims to reflect the breadth of the Goals themselves and presents national and regional trends and snapshots of progress towards the UN's seventeen Sustainable Development Goals: poverty, hunger, health, education, gender, water, energy, jobs, infrastructure, inequalities, cities, consumption, climate, oceans, the environment, peace, institutions, and partnerships. Between 1990 and 2013, nearly one billion people were raised out of extreme poverty. Its elimination is now a realistic prospect, although this will require both sustained growth and reduced inequality. Even then, gender inequalities continue to hold back human potential. Undernourishment and stunting have nearly halved since 1990, despite increasing food loss, while the burden of infectious disease has also declined. Access to water has expanded, but progress on sanitation has been slower. For too many people, access to healthcare and education still depends on personal financial means. To date the environmental cost of growth has been high. Accumulated damage to oceanic and terrestrial ecosystems is considerable. But hopeful signs exist: while greenhouse gas emissions are at record levels, so too is renewable energy investment. While physical infrastructure continues to expand, so too does population, so that urban housing and rural access to roads remain a challenge, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. Meanwhile the institutional infrastructure of development strengthens, with more reliable government budgeting and foreign direct investment recovering from a post-financial crisis decline. Official development assistance, however, continues to fall short of target levels.

The atlas uses maps, charts and analysis to illustrate, trends, challenges and measurement issues related to each of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. The Atlas primarily draws on World Development Indicators (WDI) - the World Bank's compilation of internationally comparable statistics about global development and the quality of people's lives Given the breadth and scope of the SDGs, the editors have been selective, emphasizing issues considered important by experts in the World Bank's Global Practices and Cross Cutting Solution Areas. Nevertheless, The Atlas aims to reflect the breadth of the Goals themselves and presents national and regional trends and snapshots of progress towards the UN's seventeen Sustainable Development Goals: poverty, hunger, health, education, gender, water, energy, jobs, infrastructure, inequalities, cities, consumption, climate, oceans, the environment, peace, institutions, and partnerships. Between 1990 and 2013, nearly one billion people were raised out of extreme poverty. Its elimination is now a realistic prospect, although this will require both sustained growth and reduced inequality. Even then, gender inequalities continue to hold back human potential. Undernourishment and stunting have nearly halved since 1990, despite increasing food loss, while the burden of infectious disease has also declined. Access to water has expanded, but progress on sanitation has been slower. For too many people, access to healthcare and education still depends on personal financial means. To date the environmental cost of growth has been high. Accumulated damage to oceanic and terrestrial ecosystems is considerable. But hopeful signs exist: while greenhouse gas emissions are at record levels, so too is renewable energy investment. While physical infrastructure continues to expand, so too does population, so that urban housing and rural access to roads remain a challenge, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. Meanwhile the institutional infrastructure of development strengthens, with more reliable government budgeting and foreign direct investment recovering from a post-financial crisis decline. Official development assistance, however, continues to fall short of target levels.

This study quantifies and maps the water footprint (WF) of humanity at a high spatial resolution. It reports on consumptive use of rainwater (green WF) and ground and surface water (blue WF) and volumes of water polluted (gray WF). Water footprints are estimated per nation from both a production and consumption perspective. International virtual water flows are estimated based on trade in agricultural and industrial commodities. The global annual average WF in the period 1996-2005 was 9,087 Gm³ /y (74% green, 11% blue, 15% gray). Agricultural production contributes 92%. About one-fifth of the global WF relates to production for export. The total volume of international virtual water flows related to trade in agricultural and industrial products was 2,320 Gm³ /y (68% green, 13% blue, 19% gray). The WF of the global average consumer was 1,385 m³ /y. The average consumer in the United States has a WF of 2,842 m³ /y, whereas the average citizens in China and India have WFs of 1,071 and 1,089 m³ /y, respectively. Consumption of cereal products gives the largest contribution to the WF of the average consumer (27%), followed by meat (22%) and milk products (7%). The volume and pattern of consumption and the WF per ton of product of the products consumed are the main factors determining the WF of a consumer. The study illustrates the global dimension of water consumption and pollution by showing that several countries heavily rely on foreign water resources and that many countries have significant impacts on water consumption and pollution elsewhere.

Efforts to establish the 2015 baseline and monitor early implementation of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) highlight both great potential for and threats to improving health by 2030. To fully deliver on the SDG aim of “leaving no one behind”, it is increasingly important to examine the health-related SDGs beyond national-level estimates. As part of the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2017 (GBD 2017), we measured progress on 41 of 52 health-related SDG indicators and estimated the health-related SDG index for 195 countries and territories for the period 1990–2017, projected indicators to 2030, and analysed global attainment. We measured progress on 41 health-related SDG indicators from 1990 to 2017, an increase of four indicators since GBD 2016 (new indicators were health worker density, sexual violence by non-intimate partners, population census status, and prevalence of physical and sexual violence [reported separately]). We also improved the measurement of several previously reported indicators. We constructed national-level estimates and, for a subset of health-related SDGs, examined indicator-level differences by sex and Socio-demographic Index (SDI) quintile. We also did subnational assessments of performance for selected countries. To construct the health-related SDG index, we transformed the value for each indicator on a scale of 0–100, with 0 as the 2·5th percentile and 100 as the 97·5th percentile of 1000 draws calculated from 1990 to 2030, and took the geometric mean of the scaled indicators by target. To generate projections through 2030, we used a forecasting framework that drew estimates from the broader GBD study and used weighted averages of indicator-specific and country-specific annualised rates of change from 1990 to 2017 to inform future estimates. We assessed attainment of indicators with defined targets in two ways: first, using mean values projected for 2030, and then using the probability of attainment in 2030 calculated from 1000 draws. We also did a global attainment analysis of the feasibility of attaining SDG targets on the basis of past trends. Using 2015 global averages of indicators with defined SDG targets, we calculated the global annualised rates of change required from 2015 to 2030 to meet these targets, and then identified in what percentiles the required global annualised rates of change fell in the distribution of country-level rates of change from 1990 to 2015. We took the mean of these global percentile values across indicators and applied the past rate of change at this mean global percentile to all health-related SDG indicators, irrespective of target definition, to estimate the equivalent 2030 global average value and percentage change from 2015 to 2030 for each indicator. The global median health-related SDG index in 2017 was 59·4 (IQR 35·4–67·3), ranging from a low of 11·6 (95% uncertainty interval 9·6–14·0) to a high of 84·9 (83·1–86·7). SDG index values in countries assessed at the subnational level varied substantially, particularly in China and India, although scores in Japan and the UK were more homogeneous. Indicators also varied by SDI quintile and sex, with males having worse outcomes than females for non-communicable disease (NCD) mortality, alcohol use, and smoking, among others. Most countries were projected to have a higher health-related SDG index in 2030 than in 2017, while country-level probabilities of attainment by 2030 varied widely by indicator. Under-5 mortality, neonatal mortality, maternal mortality ratio, and malaria indicators had the most countries with at least 95% probability of target attainment. Other indicators, including NCD mortality and suicide mortality, had no countries projected to meet corresponding SDG targets on the basis of projected mean values for 2030 but showed some probability of attainment by 2030. For some indicators, including child malnutrition, several infectious diseases, and most violence measures, the annualised rates of change required to meet SDG targets far exceeded the pace of progress achieved by any country in the recent past. We found that applying the mean global annualised rate of change to indicators without defined targets would equate to about 19% and 22% reductions in global smoking and alcohol consumption, respectively; a 47% decline in adolescent birth rates; and a more than 85% increase in health worker density per 1000 population by 2030. The GBD study offers a unique, robust platform for monitoring the health-related SDGs across demographic and geographic dimensions. Our findings underscore the importance of increased collection and analysis of disaggregated data and highlight where more deliberate design or targeting of interventions could accelerate progress in attaining the SDGs. Current projections show that many health-related SDG indicators, NCDs, NCD-related risks, and violence-related indicators will require a concerted shift away from what might have driven past gains—curative interventions in the case of NCDs—towards multisectoral, prevention-oriented policy action and investments to achieve SDG aims. Notably, several targets, if they are to be met by 2030, demand a pace of progress that no country has achieved in the recent past. The future is fundamentally uncertain, and no model can fully predict what breakthroughs or events might alter the course of the SDGs. What is clear is that our actions—or inaction—today will ultimately dictate how close the world, collectively, can get to leaving no one behind by 2030. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The current trajectory for crop yields is insufficient to nourish the world’s population by 2050 1 . Greater and more consistent crop production must be achieved against a backdrop of climatic stress that limits yields, owing to shifts in pests and pathogens, precipitation, heat-waves and other weather extremes. Here we consider the potential of plant sciences to address post-Green Revolution challenges in agriculture and explore emerging strategies for enhancing sustainable crop production and resilience in a changing climate. Accelerated crop improvement must leverage naturally evolved traits and transformative engineering driven by mechanistic understanding, to yield the resilient production systems that are needed to ensure future harvests. Genetic strategies for improving the yield and sustainability of agricultural crops, and the resilience of crops in the face of biotic and abiotic stresses contingent on projected climate change, are evaluated.

Rapid demographic ageing substantially affects socioeconomic development 1 – 4 and presents considerable challenges for food security and agricultural sustainability 5 – 8 , which have so far not been well understood. Here, by using data from more than 15,000 rural households with crops but no livestock across China, we show that rural population ageing reduced farm size by 4% through transferring cropland ownership and land abandonment (approximately 4 million hectares) in 2019, taking the population age structure in 1990 as a benchmark. These changes led to a reduction of agricultural inputs, including chemical fertilizers, manure and machinery, which decreased agricultural output and labour productivity by 5% and 4%, respectively, further lowering farmers’ income by 15%. Meanwhile, fertilizer loss increased by 3%, resulting in higher pollutant emissions to the environment. In new farming models, such as cooperative farming, farms tend to be larger and operated by younger farmers, who have a higher average education level, hence improving agricultural management. By encouraging the transition to new farming models, the negative consequences of ageing can be reversed. Agricultural input, farm size and farmer’s income would grow by approximately 14%, 20% and 26%, respectively, and fertilizer loss would reduce by 4% in 2100 compared with that in 2020. This suggests that management of rural ageing will contribute to a comprehensive transformation of smallholder farming to sustainable agriculture in China. Rural population ageing reduces the sustainability of smallholder farming in China, but the transition to a new farming model could reverse the negative effects of rural population ageing.

This paper proposes a green finance index that may help policymakers and investors take more favorable actions based on the development of green finance. After analysis and organization of the development process of green finance and related green finance and index concepts, this paper uses the improved fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method to construct a measurement model suitable for measuring the development level of green finance based on the principle of fuzzy mathematics. The index weight adopts the entropy method and improved Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) joint determination. At the same time, using the relevant statistical indicators of China's green credit from 2011 to 2019, and using the constructed model, the level of China's green finance development during this period was evaluated. Finally, the obtained data and classical gray model methods were used to predict China's green development level from 2020 to 2024. The research results show that: This model is a good measure of the level of development of green finance, and China's green finance index has generally shown a rapid growth trend over the past nine years, with the fastest growth rate between 2013 and 2014. From the perspective of the weight of each index affecting the green financial index, the weight of new energy, green transportation projects and new energy vehicles ranked in the top three, and the impact of these three indexes on China's green financial index is significant. In the future, China's green financial development level will continue to improve.