brand has recently taken the spotlight on the fashion scene. The crocodile leather handbags, sold by the popular South African brand “Okapi” and priced about 120,000 yen, were sold out just hours after going on sale. Hanneli Rupert, the founder and owner of Okapi, told that they have actually become a true luxury brand by ensuring the traceability of our raw materials in an interview by Forbes. She also stated that the crocodile leather is a by-product of other products and not involved in the destruction of nature. Traceability is essential to creating a sustainable society, which is the goal of the SDGs, as well as one of the requirements for improving product competitiveness.

Honma Gyogyo, a fishery company operating in Muroran city in Hokkaido, stands out as having Japan’s first comprehensive fishery product traceability system which enables information about their fishery products to be traced from the sea to the consumers. The company has about 50 employees. It has four Danish seine trawlers with a capacity of 140 tons to catch Alaskan pollock and generates about 1.5 billion yen in annual sales.

Japan hosts its first ever G20 Summit and Ministerial Meetings in 2019, a decade after the 1st meeting on the 2008 financial crisis. Japanese PM announced that Japan is determined to lead global economic growth by promoting free trade and innovation, achieving both economic growth and reduction of disparities, and contributing to the development agenda and other global issues with the SDGs at its core, incluring quality infrastructure, global health, climate change, ocean plastic waste, digital economy, aging and diversified society, etc., and through these efforts, Japan seeks to realize and promote a free and open, inclusive and sustainable, “human-centered future society.”

G20 Summit and 8 Ministerial Meetings are, at the same time, perfect opportunities for people from all over the world to see and experience not only a newly revitalized and transforming Japan but also the wide-ranging appeal of the various regions that will host these consequential discussions.

and research institutions worldwide are constantly adding to the stock of knowledge. The information uploaded in the world wide web or shared through social networks is growing exponentially, while smartphones and other connected devices are generating trillions of data ready to be analyzed by ever smarter algorithms. Better knowledge and more information should enable us to solve many of the problems we are facing. The potential for a bright future in the digital age is enormous. However, seen from a liberal and humanitarian perspective, there are also fundamental risks. Connectivity increases interdependence. We concede control over our lives. Our wellbeing is increasingly determined by decisions made by others. This loss of control is further aggravated by our growing ignorance. Our cognitive abilities have long since been unable to keep pace with the growth of knowledge and information. We know less and less about the world we live in—a truth we tend to ignore, because it can be frightening.

opportunities are growing as the industrial experience has brought down the costs of electricity from renewables. In the 20th century, resource depletion and greenhouse gas emissions appeared to set energy constraints on global human development. Today, the dramatic reduction of costs has made renewable electricity generation as the lowest cost source of new electricity in most parts of the world, in a growing number of places without subsidies.

Still, we may fail to utilize these opportunities at sufficient speed to avoid the risks of unmanageable rate of climate change. In order to succeed a combination of intelligent and determined political and industrial leadership is desired.

Opportunities are illustrated by the rapid development of solar and wind electricity in the United States, and even larger capacity installations in China. The economic competitiveness developments are also visible in Europe were in 2017, the first commitments by large power producing companies to deliver electricity from off-shore wind without subsidies off the German and later Dutch North-sea coast-lines. This achievement was possible after years of developments involving subsidies from governments, and development efforts by suppliers of power plants.

research institutes and think tanks already contribute to the fields of foreign policy, economic policy or environmental policy in Germany. Issues related to new technologies, however, lack comparable expert organizations. The Berlin based Stiftung Neue Verantwortung (SNV) fills this gap in the landscape of German institutes and think tanks. Our work ranges from cybersecurity and cyber-diplomacy to questions regarding the impact of technologies on the future of work. We study the challenges associated with a data-driven economy, examine the tension between digital rights and national security, and develop new ideas how digital technologies can foster the transition to green energy. And we investigate how artificial intelligence has emerged as a key technology that poses new challenges for international cooperation and competition.

The field of technology does not only need new think tanks with specialized expertise but also a new model for think tanks. We live in an era of rapid technological change. The Internet and digital technologies challenge governments around the globe in fundamental ways. Today new digital products and services can be rolled out instantly to billions of users around the globe. Whether it is the emergence of crypto-currencies, digital disinformation or new cybersecurity risks, governments are struggling to quickly grasp the implications of new technologies in order to harness its opportunities and address the risks.

changing world needs a new kind of leadership. Globally-minded, ethical, strong leadership. Leadership that harnesses the power of diversity and thrives in complexity. Leadership that speaks to and includes the younger generation. Leadership as compassionate as it is courageous. This is what we foster at UWC.

UWC (United World Colleges) is a global movement with the mission to unite people, nations and cultures for peace and a sustainable future. We recognise that our goal – a more peaceful, just and sustainable world – is an aspirational one. But since our founding in 1962 we have had a transformative impact on 60,000 UWC graduates from 160 countries simply by deploying what our late Honorary President Nelson Mandela called the most powerful weapon to change the world: education.

There are 18 UWC schools and colleges and dozens of UWC short educational programmes worldwide. Each serves as an incubator for the next generation of global leadership. Many of our alumni lead in their respective fields: science and technology (there are two UWC astronauts), business (from CEOs of Fortune 500 companies to some of the most innovative start-up founders) and politics (currently, Canada’s Chrystia Freeland and Sierra Leone’s David Sengeh are among our graduates).

Our Role in Society

like to say that we owe our entire existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains, but with climate change bringing more frequent droughts, the adage is wearing worryingly thin.

In many African countries, where millions rely on small-scale, rain-fed agriculture, water scarcity has led to more “bust” than “boom” for food production in recent years.

With the continent facing the greatest impact of rising temperatures worldwide, Africa’s vulnerability and capacity to adapt to more extreme weather should be a global concern, but especially so for its close neighbors, donors, and principal trading partners in Europe.

After Africa Climate Week took place in Ghana last month (March 18-22), climate adaptation in agriculture should be high on the agenda and Europe should be watching closely for several reasons.

will remember last summer—not only in Switzerland, but also in large swathes across the rest of Europe, as well as in North America and Asia. Multiple places around the world experienced heat so severe that people died of heatstroke, power generation had to be curtailed, rails and roads started to melt, and forests went up in flames. What was truly sobering about this heatwave was that it affected not only one area, such as the Mediterranean region, but several across the temperate zones and the Arctic simultaneously.

ETH researchers have concluded that the only explanation of why heat affected so many areas over several months is anthropogenic climate change. These are the findings of the recent study that ETH climate researcher Martha Vogel presented today at the European Geosciences Union press conference in Vienna. The paper resulting from this study is currently in review for an academic publication.

is being felt on climate change. Schoolchildren are striking, there are protests in the streets, and politicians across the world, including the UK, are pushing to call climate change a national emergency.

A cruel irony is that climate change will not be felt equally by all—those who have contributed the least to rising temperatures are set to suffer the most.

The world’s poorest economies are largely dependent on agriculture—which not only provides employment for millions of the rural poor, but produces the food required for rapidly growing populations. Climate change is however projected to have stark impacts on crop yields in these regions. The majority of areas growing the staple crop maize in Africa are predicted to suffer yield reductions between 12-40 per cent, while millet and sorghum yields are predicted to decline between 10 and 15 per cent respectively.

The World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) is reimagining the future of education in a changing world. A global initiative that brings together decision makers, teachers, and educational experts in an effort to tackle the world’s evolving educational challenges, WISE sees advancements in education as key for addressing global issues including poverty, skills gaps, inequality, and conflict.

Investments in transport, electricity and piped water can reduce women’s unpaid work, free their time and connect them to health services, jobs and markets with long-term economic benefits. The ILO estimates that in developing countries, limited access to and safety of transportation is the single greatest obstacle to women’s participation in the labour market, reducing it by as much as 16.5 percentage points. Online services and digital infrastructure are also important.

is a complex and challenging task. How do you create effective new medicines without adverse side effects to address the world’s most pressing health issues? Medical chemists have to consider an array of interactions: drugs interact with cells and organs in the human body in many ways, and these often differ widely from one patient to another. While iterative, often automated, testing methods in the lab have yielded numerous potential starting points for drug development, there are limitations when it comes to designing and selecting the most promising drug candidates. The drug designer must choose from an estimated 1060 druglike molecules that could—only theoretically—be synthesized. What’s more, it takes years of on-the-job-training to become a knowledgeable expert in medicinal chemistry.

Designing ideal drugs is a complex task. This is where artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning could come in. Deploying AI to assist chemists in the drug design process holds promise for making better decisions: It is much more efficient than the human mind when it comes to sieving through “big” data, AI generates reproducible results and supports the discovery process by considering many project targets in parallel.

The aftershocks of 2008 are still being felt today. The Financial Times recently wrote about the brewing worry over modern capitalism in the minds of many top American CEOs. Already in 2011, Dominic Barton, global managing partner emeritus of McKinsey, warned in the Harvard Business Review that business leaders could reform capitalism themselves or have it reformed for them “through political measures and the pressures of an angry public.”

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report has been the latest of many wake-up calls on the need to rapidly decarbonise our economies. None of the countries that make up the G20 group of major world economies is on course to adequately reduce climate change, with 82% of the bloc’s energy supply still coming from fossil fuels. In the fight against Green House Gas (GHG) emissions and climate change, coal for power generation has been the primary target. So much so that it has been impossible to give technologies like Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) a real go because they have been branded as “coal friendly” despite the fact that they could – in time – lead to facilitating truly carbon neutral or even carbon positive economies. What is more, although the end of “King Coal” has been forecasted for decades, yet global coal demand grew by 1% in 2017 to 7585 Mt -according to the IEA- with 2018 following quite closely.

Coal will be here for the foreseeable future
Coal was branded the number one enemy of the fight against climate change decades ago. Policy, environmental activism and public perception have focused on coal for power generation. Despite all these concerted efforts, coal still represents 37% of the energy mix across the world. Whilst Europe has a clear pathway to removing coal from power generation by 2040, it will still play a significant role in other parts of the globe, with 24 countries responsible for 50% of CO2 emissions clearly highlighting the role of coal in their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) during COP21. These agreements will be re-opened in 2020, but, in the meantime, coal remains very much part of the energy mix and of manufacturing processes globally.

It is an amazing feat that Mr. Maduro and his cronies continue to survive the upheaval in Venezuela given the lack of food, water, electricity, medicine, safety, and security. However, we must realize that this is not solely a Venezuelan problem; it has now mushroomed into a hemispheric crisis affecting its closest neighbor—Colombia.

The most pressing crisis is the large exodus of Venezuelans leaving—approximately 3-4 million as of April 2019—a bona fide diaspora unprecedented in the Latin America region. What is unique about this Venezuelan crisis is that Latin Americans throughout their shared history have been accustomed to leaving their homelands in pursuit of economic opportunity northbound or across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe, not absorbing immigrants from their own continent. In short, Latin Americans exit their countries, not absorb permanent entrants to their respective countries.