Today, 1.1 billion people lack access to electricity, while water stress affects more than 2 billion people. By 2030, the world will need 40 per cent more water and 50 per cent more energy. Climate change will exacerbate this stress even further. The...

UN DESA and UNDP conducted a training workshop on the Climate, Land, Energy and Water Systems (CLEWs) integrated analysis in La Paz, Bolivia from 16 to 20 April 2018. The Global CLEWS model provides useful insights about the relationships among water, energy, climate, and land and material use at the global scale. It was developed to inform Rio+20 discussions and will soon be upgraded to provide useful insights about the interlinkages among climate, land, materials, energy and water underlying the relationships among many of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Progressing towards the Sustainable Development Goals requires looking at synergies and trade-offs among different goals. Modelling is a great way to analyze and compare different scenarios.

Propelled by better health and education, lower vulnerability and an economic boom, Bangladesh, the largest least developed country (LDC) in terms of population and economic size, looks likely to leave the LDC category by 2024. For the first time, the country met the three criteria for graduation at the Committee for Development Policy (CDP) triennial review in March 2018. “Bangladesh has seen broad-based gains in health, education, infant mortality and life expectancy,” said Daniel Gay, Inter-Regional Adviser on LDCs in UN DESA’s Development Policy and Analysis Division. “These have in turn driven economic growth, and latterly reduced economic vulnerability, so it’s a real success story.”