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Pictures of starving African children might lead you to think they don’t have electricity because they can’t afford it, but in most cases it’s not even an option. The geography of Africa makes it difficult to connect rural communities to the power grid, so less than 25% of Africans have access to electricity.

To be honest, most Africans don’t grow up depending on the number of gadgets we do. But without electricity, basic needs, such as heating and cooling of food, and lighting, have had to be powered using fuels that harm the environment. Burning wood and biomass are the most popular fuels for cooking in Africa, according to the UN’s “Human Development Report 2007/2008”(pdf), leading to tree felling and CO₂ emissions. Read on…

When a gang of ducks congregated in front of me at the edge of Lake Como in Lombardy, Italy, they must have been praying I’d throw them some pizza and not another plastic bottle to add to the collection bobbing between the lumps of natural and man-made waste.

I’m not saying Italy’s third-largest lake isn’t beautiful—George Clooney owns villas there for a reason—but there’s something wrong with the water: it’s green. The phosphates and nitrates from pollutants have caused an excessive growth of algae, a process called eutrophication. Ducks might enjoy the extra food, but decomposing algae remove oxygen from the water, which is detrimental to fish. Read on…

Bushfires in Victoria, an Australian state located in the southeast section of the country, killed 173 people and injured more than 400 in 2009. Those 400 fires—the worst on record—were blamed on prolonged drought and extreme temperatures caused by global warming. Southeastern Australia is one of the world’s most fire-prone areas, along with southern California and Mediterranean Europe. Read on…

Even though the fallout from Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station disaster has almost completely disappeared from the headlines, catastrophe-proof renewable energy continues to be thrust into the spotlight as a safe, long-term energy alternative. And, as if on cue, on the edge of the Arabian Desert, an experiment is unfolding with a grand vision for a clean-energy future: It’s called Masdar City and it seeks to be the most sustainable city in world history. Read on...

As my favorite two foods are pizza and ice cream, I walked around Italy drooling like a dog. Every two meters I’d find a gelaterie selling countless flavors of ice cream, sorbet, granita and frozen yogurt—in cones, cups and brioche rolls. But whenever I was tempted to skip to pudding first, I’d stumble across a pizzeria selling slices as big as my face for €2 and be ‘forced’ back into my sensible mains-before-pudding routine. Read on…