‘Eat Less Meat” is the typical headline used to present a new United Nations report on climate change released Thursday. The report correctly points to the need to improve global food systems, but pundits are fixating on the supposed need for people in rich countries to change their dining habits radically. This is an ineffective and unachievable policy response.

A year ahead of the US presidential election, exaggeration about global warming is greater than ever. While some politicians continue (incorrectly) to insist it’s made up, far more insist (also incorrectly) that we face an imminent climate crisis threatening civilization.

Around the world, we’re being told to stop eating meat. Headlines, think tanks and activists all ask us to change our diet to combat climate change. The Washington D.C.-based World Resource Institute suggests that resource management will require Americans to cut their average consumption of beef by about 40%, and scientists from the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom just claimed that “a typical summer barbecue for four people releases more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than an 80 mile car journey." One of the professors points out that “the production of a 100g medium-...

This year, the world will spend $US162 billion ($230bn) subsidising renewable energy, propping up inefficient industries and supporting middle-class homeowners to erect solar panels, according to the International Energy Agency. In addition, the Paris Agreement on climate change will cost the world from $US1 trillion to $US2 trillion a year by 2030. Astonishingly, neither of these hugely expensive policies will have any measurable impact on temperatures by the end of the century. Climate campaigners want to convince us that not only should we maintain these staggering costs, but that we...

The renowned naturalist and climate change campaigner Sir David Attenborough believes governments should face a reckoning for their failure to tackle global warming. Speaking recently about the US and Australia, he expressed a hope that the electorate would vote out governments who are not taking the climate seriously enough. The problem for Sir David and other campaigners is that, far from punishing politicians who pledge to scrap expensive climate policies, voters in Australia just backed them

t’s easy to think of starvation as a challenge that entered the rich world’s consciousness in the 1980s and was largely solved through charity rock concerts. True, the world has made huge progress in combating mass starvation over the past 30 years, largely as a result of improved agricultural practices. Yet, globally, food deprivation still claims a child’s life every three seconds. A new report from the United Nations warns that the number of hungry people worldwide increased for a third consecutive year in 2018, and now exceeds 820 million. And some two billion people – over one-quarter of...

The Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) scheme is one of the world’s largest programmes for early childhood care and development. Now, a new study suggests that nutrition and health counselling delivered under the programme’s auspices is one of the best possible investments that can be made by any government. This timely, non-partisan report is by India Consensus, a partnership between Tata Trusts and Copenhagen Consensus, which has undertaken a first-of-its-kind analysis of 100 government programmes. These were identified by NITI Aayog for their role in supporting India’s efforts to...

Transparency, fair competition and accountability are three defining features of an efficient public procurement system. Until 2011, the Bangladesh procurement process was paper-based and plagued by corruption and malpractices. Short bidding periods, nondisclosure of the selection criteria, pre-tender negotiation with bidders were some of the defining features of guiding Bangladesh’s public procurement activities. Although the World Bank recommended introducing e-Government Procurement (e-GP) system in 2002, it was not until the current government’s Digital Bangladesh agenda that gave fresh...

Increasing access to justice at the grassroot level can directly protect human rights of the rural poor. It is estimated that nearly 4 billion poor around the world cannot access the protection of the law and justice system. A study by the Hague Institute for Innovation of Law (HiiL) and BRAC Human Rights and Legal Aid Services found that on average, 31 million people, mostly belonging to rural areas, experience legal problems every year.