News stories by Matthew O. Berger, page 4

Beyond Copenhagen and Cancún, a different climate debate has been brewing. The outcome of this debate, however, will affect far more than the climate, and that is precisely why it is so contentious.

Speaking ahead of next week's World Bank and IMF annual meetings here, World Bank President Robert Zoellick critiqued both development economics generally and the lack of transparency of his own institution.

Although the world will miss the 2010 deadline for universal access to HIV treatment, some countries, notably in sub- Saharan Africa, have made real strides forward, three United Nations agencies reported Tuesday.

Meeting the growing demand for energy in the U.S., even through sustainable means, could entail greater threats to the environment, new research shows.

While global food prices declined for the first half of this year, they have spiked in recent months, according to a new World Bank publication, and this volatility could in turn push up the local food prices of the world's poorest and most malnourished countries.

When, following months of hype, ministers and negotiating teams arrived in Copenhagen last December for a summit on climate change, the expectations for what could be accomplished were unrealistic and made the successes that did occur seem less important than they were, says the climate chief of Mexico, which will host this year’s successor to the Copenhagen summit.

Ten years after setting the goal of halving the proportion of people suffering from poverty and hunger by 2015, only mixed success can be found for the U.N.'s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and the degree of success is dependent not only on what country is examined but which evaluation is used.

With the Millennium Development Goals review summit just one week away, the World Bank is the latest international player to announce its strategy to help achieve those goals by their 2015 deadline.

All eight of the U.N.'s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are critical to development, but numbers four and five on child and maternal health are the real priority areas for this year. That was the main takeaway from a series of briefings with U.N., NGO and country officials in which IPS participated this week.

A focus on the children at the very bottom of the economic ladder is the most effective and efficient way to help children and communities in need, concludes a new report from the United Nations children's agency UNICEF released Tuesday.