About a decade ago, at a meeting of South African mayors convened by Lindiwe Hendricks, South Africa’s then-minister of water and environmental affairs, we predicted that an unprecedented water crisis would hit one of the country’s main cities within 15 years, unless water-management practices were improved significantly. That prediction has now come true, with Cape Town facing a shutdown of its piped water network.

When you look at your phone or tablet, what do you see? Pixels? Pictures? Digital distraction? I see data.

In low- and middle-income countries, insufficient access to medical care undermines health outcomes and disadvantages entire generations.

The poor don’t often decide elections in the advanced world, and yet they are being wooed heavily in Italy’s current electoral campaign.

In mid-2017, when a cholera outbreak in Somalia threatened to overwhelm local hospitals, health experts feared the worst.

When leaders from across the Euro-Atlantic region meet at the Munich Security Conference this week, the “win-lose” framework defining relations between Western countries and Russia will be entering its fifth year.

In 2014, the World Health Organization reported that drug resistance – especially resistance to antibiotics – is a growing threat to human health, food security, and “the achievements of modern medicine.”

Human nutrition is of increasing importance to science. Of course, centuries of scientific research have been devoted to ensuring that enough food is produced for growing populations.

In the early 1990s, at the dawn of the Internet era, an explosion in academic productivity seemed to be around the corner.

Urbanization has many advantages. By bringing people together physically, cities inspire innovation and fuel opportunity. They bring workers closer to jobs and facilitate the diffusion of arts and culture. But the benefits of urban life are often accompanied by costs.

The financial-services industry has been undergoing a revolution. But the driving force is not overhyped blockchain applications such as Bitcoin. It is a revolution built on artificial intelligence, big data, and the Internet of Things.

In public debates around the world, women’s empowerment is increasingly being recognized as a top priority.

In the first year of Donald Trump’s presidency, the damage wrought by his administration’s foreign policy fell well short of what had been feared.

As global economic growth picks up practically everywhere, oil producers are becoming increasingly hopeful that the recent impressive price recovery will continue. But, if those hopes are to be fulfilled, not only will producers have to control what they can (by maintaining production discipline); what lies beyond their control (output from shale and the value of the dollar) will also have to work in their favor.

Every year, the World Economic Forum publishes a Global Risks Report, which distills the views of experts and policymakers from around the world. This year, cybersecurity is high on the list of global concerns, as well it should be. In 2017, the world witnessed a continued escalation in cyber attacks and security breaches that affected all parts of society. There is no reason to believe 2018 will be different.

The President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev recently described 2017 as a year of recovery from the economic crisis for his country (President.az, January 10).

In the field of human development, the year that just ended was better than many predicted it would be. A decade after the Great Recession began, economic recovery continued in 2017, and progress was made on issues like poverty, education, and global warming.

The Global Partnership for Education, a worthy and capable initiative to promote education in 65 low-income countries, is having what the jargon of development assistance calls a “replenishment round,” meaning that it is asking donor governments to refill its coffers.

With climate change accelerating and its effects exacerbating other geopolitical and development crises, the role of environmental protection in preserving and improving human wellbeing has become starkly apparent.

Two years after the death of her husband, Valeria, a 67-year-old grandmother in San José, Costa Rica, lives alone.

Will 2018 be the year when the United Kingdom changes its mind about leaving the European Union? Conventional wisdom says that stopping Brexit is impossible.

See if you can guess the author of this quote: “The American Union feels itself to be a Nordic-German state and by no means an international porridge of peoples.

By now, cholera should be history. For decades, health officials have understood how to prevent the disease, doctors have known how to treat it, and development experts have recognized that with clean water and sanitation, outbreaks rarely become epidemics. Unfortunately, the world is not so simple and neat, and the nightmare of cholera persists.

Sofia Begum is a case study in the power of hope. Three months ago, armed vigilantes attacked the six-year-old’s village in Myanmar’s Rakhine State. Sofia saw neighbors killed, an uncle wounded by gunfire, and her home razed.

Plastics are among the most popular materials in use today.