This article was originally published on Sustaining Capabilities. The modern age has been characterized by the skyrocketing use of a number of materials, including steel. Remarkable for its strength as well as its durability, steel is the key metal of industrialization — in 2014 steel production was almost 20 times…

This article was originally published on Sustaining Capabilities. In many ways, it feels like the world is changing faster than it ever has, yet measures of economic productivity have been growing more slowly than any time in the last 200 years. Productivity growth has been the main driver of historically-improving…

This article was originally published on Sustaining Capabilities. Humans have been changing the landscapes around them for millennia. Some began electively breeding crop varieties, grazing livestock, and clearing forests to do so as early as 3,000 years ago. The population was quite small then by today’s standards, but the amount…

This article was originally published on Sustaining Capabilities. Every summer, BP releases its annual benchmark publication, the Statistical Review of World Energy, which details trends in energy production and consumption over the course of the previous year. The report is backward-looking, so this year’s report includes data reflecting the impacts…

This article was originally published on Sustaining Capabilities. For millennia, there was very little change in the number of humans. While there is no way to be certain of exactly how many people there were in the distant past, researchers estimate that as few as 4m people lived on earth…

This article was originally published on Sustaining Capabilities. Biomass — the collective name for renewable materials derived from living organisms, including crops and agricultural residues, by-products from wood-processing industries like paper and construction, and gas from landfills and water treatment plants — is the oldest source of energy harnessed by…

This article was originally published on Sustaining Capabilities. The modern age has been characterized by the skyrocketing use of a number of materials, including concrete, the most widely-used construction material in the world. It is so ubiquitous today that it is both hard to imagine a world without it, and…

This article was originally published on Sustaining Capabilities. The world is awash in data like never before, which is a good thing for global development — there are increasing returns to both more information, and better linkages across information types and sources. Indeed, the plight of the world’s poorest has…

This article was originally published on Sustaining Capabilities. There is a profound shift taking place in the way the world produces and consumes energy — from sources with high power densities and high carbon intensities, toward low power densities and low carbon intensities. In order to achieve such a transition…