An earlier issue of WellBeing News explored the shifting historical baselines phenomenon. This phenomenon illustrates the tendency of ecologists to use recent wildlife population numbers as the baseline for their studies, even though the recent wildlife population may be much lower than the population 50...
The UN World Tourism Agency published a report in 2015 on the importance of wildlife tourism to national economies in Africa. About half of global wildlife tourism involves a visit to an African country, resulting in 6 million tourists a year visiting Sub-Saharan Africa (about...
The total global catch of wild fish increased from 31 million metric tons in 1950 to a high of 130 million metric tons in 1996 before falling back to 109 million metric tons in 2010. However, from 1950 onwards, 366 of 1,519 fisheries collapsed (defined...
The Center for Large Landscape Conservation (CLLC) is working to mainstream connectivity conservation solutions around the world that save biodiversity, increase resilience to climate change, and safeguard human health. To this end, CLLC supports the new IUCN Guidelines and the operations of the Connectivity Conservation...
Sustainability has become a popular term encompassing the notion that we need to promote and pursue policies that will allow future generations of humans to live and benefit from the wealth provided by the Earth. In 2015, the United Nations (UN) adopted the 2030 Agenda...
For those interested in data and understanding current global challenges but who have not yet visited the website, Our World in Data, we would strongly urge spending some time browsing the site. This January a new article appeared addressing the very confusing issue of the...
Since 2015, the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have served as a framework for a holistic approach to development that recognizes the need to incorporate non-economic measures of growth and human well-being. The SDG guidelines are a bold attempt to accomplish some of the most...
The theme of the Third African Animal Welfare conference was the connection between the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Animal Welfare. Dr. Andrew Rowan was asked to give a presentation that addressed how the SDGs intersected with global animal welfare. There are seventeen SDGs...
On July 11, World Population Day, the Margaret Pyke Trust launched the Thriving Together campaign, supported by over 150 organizations (from United Nations (UN) agencies and large NGOs like The Nature Conservancy to smaller organizations such as WellBeing International). The Trust and its partners are...
At the end of 2018, Great Britain’s Royal Statistical Society selected a “plastic fact” – that 90.5% of all plastics ever made have never been recycled – as its Statistic of the Year. This statistic is taken from a paper Roland Geyer and colleagues published...
