14 reports in this theme, newest first.
The life-expectancy gap between developing and high-income countries fell from 25 years in 1960 to 8.4 today, but it closed four times faster before 2000 than since, and coverage growth has halved since 2015. Sri Lanka, Thailand and Viet Nam show good health at low cost, yet in the median low-income country governments spend $7 a person on health, households pay nearly half of all costs, and an essential package would cost 11% of GDP.
Every national architecture has a weak link: the median country's weakest function trails its average by 16 points, and decoupling, the most common gap, barely tracks income. In 2020–2023 national capacities explained almost none of the growth and inflation damage, but steering was the exception, associated with 62 fewer excess deaths per 100,000 and a 5.7-point smaller rise in hunger. Thin buffers leave 3.5 billion people relying on a global backstop that covers a fraction of need.
Closing every extreme-poverty gap with targeted transfers would add just 0.07% to global CO₂. Reaching the same goal through broad growth at today's carbon intensity would add about 100 times as much. Most countries escaped mass poverty at under 2 tonnes of CO₂ per person, and 44 developing countries with 4.2 billion people cut poverty and carbon intensity together after 2015. Explicit fossil-fuel subsidies of $725 billion a year are more than six times the extreme-poverty gap.
Development has been dismantling the slow crises: since the early 2000s child deaths fell in 98% of developing economies, emissions intensity in 88% and hunger in 76%. The fast systemic crises did not follow: debt service improved in only 31%, conflict in 39% and inflation in 46%, and income growth explains none of them. Beyond growth itself, only government effectiveness and clean water predict broad crisis reduction — and with convergence now stalled at 49% of economies, the missing floors are institutional.
Disasters, heat, pollution, violence and the climate damage locked in by each year's emissions already cost between 1.2 and 23.5 per cent of world output a year, depending on what is counted. Over 2025–2100 that adds up to hundreds of trillions to several quadrillion dollars, and prevention would cost a fraction of it.
Seventy-three countries are both highly vulnerable to shocks and poorly prepared to adapt, including 23 of the 24 low-income economies. Mapping the pressures converging on the world system against the adaptive capacity of 190 countries, and the financial buffers between them, shows where shocks become crises — with a country explorer built on the ND-GAIN index.
With the 2030 Agenda two-thirds spent, 36 per cent of assessable SDG targets are on track or moving moderately and 15 per cent have gone into reverse. The pattern beneath those numbers is not random, and it says a good deal about where the remaining effort should go.
Mobile payments connect households to pay-as-you-go solar, but digital collection alone does not make an energy portfolio bankable. This report examines the infrastructure, contract economics and financing structures that turn small payments into durable energy access.
Forecasts of fossil demand now disagree about the direction after 2030, which makes prediction a poor basis for policy. What is not in dispute is that resource revenue is becoming shorter-dated and more variable. That is an asset–liability problem, and it has four known treatments.
The case for investing in adaptation and mitigation together is physical and well established. The obstacle is not the argument but the cash flow: an avoided loss has no revenue line, so private capital funds about nine per cent of adaptation. This report sets out five instruments that convert avoided losses into something financeable, and how to use them without splitting the asset.
Every serious polycrisis strategy names the same four elements, and the list has never been the problem. The four differ in who captures their benefit and in whether anyone but the beneficiary can supply them — which determines the instrument that can deliver each, and explains why combined strategies underperform their parts.
Prevention is appraised against doing nothing. Its real alternative is emergency response — already being paid for, repeatedly, at surge prices, on crisis financing, leaving no asset and restoring the exposure that produced the loss. The obstacles are institutional, not economic.
Poor countries only began catching up with rich ones around 2000, and the resulting convergence runs at one to two per cent of the income gap a year. Climate hazard already destroys one to two per cent of output a year in low- and middle-income countries. Adaptation, read against convergence, is not insurance but growth-retention policy.
The resilience gap is usually described as a shortage of money. It is better understood as two gaps wearing one name — hard adaptation blocked at a capital gate, soft adaptation blocked at a delivery gate — and neither closes while both are treated as the first.