SWaCH is a finalist for the WRI Ross Prize for Cities. Pinky Sonawane spent her childhood gathering garbage on the streets of Pune, India. She’d join her mother in pulling plastic bottles, cans and cardboard from roadside dumpsters, selling ...

More than half the global population lacks access to safely managed sanitation services – 4.5 billion people. Every year, more than 340,000 children under the age of five die as a result of this problem. And we’re not solving it ...

Illegal. Criminal. A drag on the economy. These are just a few of the derisive labels that beleaguer urban informal workers, says Martha Chen, co-founder of and senior advisor to Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing. Informal workers – ...

Urbanization is changing the face of the planet – for better and for worse. City populations, GDP and investment are increasing exponentially. At the same time, carbon emissions are rising, more and more people are living in slums, and air pollution ...

The original version of this text appeared in the International Finance Corporation analysis, “Climate Investment Opportunities in Cities.” Air pollution is the world’s fourth-leading fatal health risk and the top environmental health risk. One in nine deaths globally are attributed ...

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest report on the prospects for staying under 1.5 degrees of warming is a call to action and a warning. The world is not on track to limit dangerous temperature rise and its follow-on ...