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“Failure is not an option.” These were the foreboding words shared by UN Secretary-General António Guterres in Baku, Azerbaijan, to set the stage for COP29, the UN’s annual climate conference. (Whether Guterres knew he was quoting Arnold Schwarzenegger is anyone’s guess.) The climate summit’s last day is today, and for many people, it couldn’t come […]
Nutritious crops aren’t getting to the people who need nutrition most, even in one of the most fertile places on Earth: Indonesia. Exploring some of the forgotten foods from the country’s more than 17,000 islands, food entrepreneur Helianti Hillman explains why centering food policy on biodiversity, rather than monoculture, is the key to healthier people […]
Social sustainability ensures that societies are inclusive and equitable for everyone, now and in the future. For students, it means studying in an environment that reflects their values where diversity is celebrated, education empowers, and universities actively address global challenges like inequality and lack of representation. Imagine attending a university that supports gender parity, provides […]
On the Environment Variables podcast we co-produce with the Green Software Foundation, Chris was was recently joined by Tzviya Siegman, the new sustainability lead at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and Alexander Dawson, one of the key authors of the W3C Web Sustainability Guidelines, to talk about how they’ve developed, and where they’re going […]
Like many people, I ordered takeout pretty frequently during the pandemic’s early days to support restaurants in DC in lieu of going in person. Kevin and Harrison Kay did the same but also developed an idea for a new startup while ordering in. The two brothers are the founders of To Go Green, a self-proclaimed […]
Earlier this month the 2024 edition of the HTTP Archive’s Web Almanac was published – our industry’s bi-annual “State of the Web” report. This is the second edition with a chapter focussed on digital sustainability, and the second using our Green Domains dataset. In this post we share some of the key highlights and takeaways […]
The three most common criticisms of golf courses are that they’re elitist, wasteful of water, and destructive to wildlife habitats. In Los Cabos, where most courses cost upwards of $200 per round, and some more than double that, the charge of elitism is hard to refute. Very few locals can afford to play any of […]
For the 17th iteration of its Love & Design Competition, Times Square Arts partnered with The World Around and tasked designers with ideating an installation that “addresses through its own creation the lifecycle of materials that go into the making of the…spaces…around us.” Pernilla Ohrstedt Studio, a New York City–based practice, was selected for the […]
Amsterdam-based startup Sympower has secured €21mn as it looks to scale its grid-balancing technology. Sympower partners with businesses that use a large amount of electricity. It gains access to some of their energy assets and can turn them on and off when the grid requires balancing — a process called demand response. Sympower’s software platform […]
Devastating floods cause tragic casualties, widespread displacement and immense financial loss every year. To help governments, NGOs, global organizations and vulnerable communities take action, we’ve worked on breakthrough AI research to provide accurate flood information and bolster climate resiliency. Our team at Google Research has pioneered scalable global flood forecasting models, published in Nature, that […]