Category: World

It’s great to be here to talk about such a fascinating and transformational issue. Today you’ll hear from people who understand this better than I do.  It’s clear there are opportunities.  But I worry about the digital divide and whether AI will be utilised for the benefit of everyone. The decisions we make now will […]

Archaeologists have found something unexpected inside a 1,600-year-old Roman-era Egyptian mummy: a fragment of Homer’s Iliad. It wasn’t placed beside the body, but inside the mummy’s abdomen. But the real surprise isn’t just where the fragment was found. It’s how it got there. To understand, we must go back – to the Iliad itself, and […]

Good afternoon everyone and thank you for joining us today. It’s great to see such a fantastic group of partners and experts, representing governments, science, philanthropy, and frontline delivery. This is what the Global Partnerships Conference is all about – building new coalitions to tackle the biggest challenges we face. Humanitarian action will always be […]

The Department for Business and Trade (DBT) is responsible for licensing activity prohibited under the UK’s Russia trade sanctions. DBT has three licensing teams responsible for administering licences on behalf of the Secretary of State. The team you need to apply to is dependent on the activity you want to carry out. You can use […]

Who owns a swarm of bees? And what happens when they stray onto a neighbour’s land? In early medieval Ireland, such questions were addressed by a remarkable set of laws known as the Bechbretha, which set out the rights and responsibilities associated with beekeeping. Also known as bee-judgments, these laws formed part of the wider […]

In an update on the fast-developing situation in eastern DRC, World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that beyond the several dozen confirmed cases of infection, there are almost 600 suspected cases of Ebola Bundibugyo virus and 139 suspected deaths.  “We expect those numbers to keep increasing, given the amount of time the virus was […]

Thank you very much Charlotte and welcome back to the Global Partnerships Conference.  You came back – this is good! It must mean you had an okay time yesterday.   As Charlotte said, yesterday was – I found it – an amazing day, had many wonderful conversations.  And today is when we really get into it and […]

Lighting accounts for almost 8% of the world’s energy usage. It makes up around 10-20% of domestic energy bills, with an even higher proportion in commercial premises like offices. But it still has huge potential for improvement. Technological changes and management of consumer behaviour can greatly reduce energy consumption without sacrificing comfort – and even […]

As part-night lighting (i.e., turning off streetlights in the middle of the night) becomes more widespread among local authorities, three studies focusing, respectively, on robins, toads and bats show that, often, turning off the lights for a few hours is not enough to restore natural night. In terms of biodiversity, the challenge is not just […]

Thank you for having me.   What brings us together today is a simple idea – that development works best when people have power over the decisions that shape their lives.  As we have heard in the previous session, for decades, countries and communities have called to lead their own development, yet progress has been slow and uneven. This conference is a chance to change […]