Global Solution Networks Blog
Recent articles and research reports
GSNs at Work—Accion Center for Financial Inclusion
The Center for Financial...
The Cities Season
School is out, summer holidays are just getting...
GSNs at Work—The Sierra Club
The Sierra Club...
2015 UN Time for Global Action for People and Planet Summit—Networks Taking Action on the Sustainable Development Goals
Four dynamic networks are guiding the...
Reading the Faces of the Poor
One of the UN's MDGs (Millennium Development Goals) of 2000 was to eradicate extreme poverty by 2015, yet one in six people are still surviving on a dollar a day. Or less. Striking photos by the Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist Renee C. Byer have been collected...
Networked Solutions for the UN Sustainable Development Goals
Collaborative Consensus Building for...
Designing the Urban Commons
The exhibition on display at the London School of Economics Atrium Gallery this month showcases the stimulating and challenging entries in the 2015 competition "Designing the Urban Commons." The competition, presented by Theatrum Mundi, a network of urbanists...
COP21 may be a “Corporate” COP? Has corporate captured climate policy-making?
The fossil fuel industry is actively and aggressively lobbying national governments and funding international meetings in an effort to interfere with the development of climate policy. Delegates from industry groups are being given preferential access to delegates at...
Sustainability means more, more and more…
A new report by the Environmental Defense Fund, "The Potential for Global Fish Recovery," shows that effective management of global fisheries doesn't require a reduction in fishing per se, and, in fact, can result in both more food resources and better ocean health....
All Your Clothes Are Made With Exploited Labor
Verité, an operational and delivery network, has studied the issues of human trafficking and labor exploitation in order to combat abuses across sectors and industries. A company that prides itself on its social awareness and concern for both its employees and the...
Seawater into Drinking Water—Can it save California?
During the California drought of the 1980s Santa Barbara built a desalinization plant to provide drinking water to the city. The plant, which only ran for six weeks after it was completed in 1992, is being reopened. The plant comes with concerns about the economic and...
Poorest nations, as well as richest, must act to alleviate poverty
As world leaders prepare for a development finance summit in Addis Ababa in July, and anticipate new development goals for later this year, a new report has been released by One.org calling for increased commitment to aid from the richest nations, and spending by the...
The Copenhagen Theory of Change and Climate Clubs—ending the “free ride”
Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel prize in 2009 in part for her observation that communities can solve the "crisis of the commons," the problems caused by some people taking a "free ride" on the benefits of common resources at the expense of the future of the community....
New Research: Global Diseases, Collective Solutions
Networking in the New Epidemic Age Environmental disruption, mass urbanization and the runaway globalization of trade and transport have created ideal conditions for infectious diseases to emerge and spread around the world. Rapid spill-overs from local into regional...
The Internet Mapmakers
The crowdsourced information field of "crisis mapping" makes a critical difference in the ability of response teams to reach and help victims of disaster. OpenStreetMap and their Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) were instrumental in Haiti after the 2010...
EU struggles to manage volume of refugees crossing the Mediterranean
The wars of the Middle East have created a wave of refugees and migrants in numbers that have not been seen since the end of WWII. The mass migration has created a tightrope for European leaders. Cutbacks in Italian rescue operations were made as a deterrent to the...
Farm-to-Plate Food Security UN topic on World Health Day
Local outbreaks of food-borne disease can quickly become an international emergency. Robust safety systems are needed to drive action to safeguard against contamination through the production system from farm to table. As part of the World Health Day activities, the...
Driving Financial Inclusion at 4G Speed
Financial services providers serving the bottom-of-the-pyramid are using data analytics to pioneer new products. Traditional people- and paper-based paradigms are awkward and expensive. New data from social networks and mobile use promise better results at lower...