Relicanthus sp.—a new species from a new order of Cnidaria collected at 4,100 meters in the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone (CCZ) that lives on sponge stalks attached to nodules. Image courtesy of Craig Smith and Diva Amon, ABYSSLINE Project.

🦑 The race to write the rulebook for mining the ocean floor. Deep-sea mining in international waters remains off-limits. But with efforts now underway to turn draft regulation into law and growing demand for mineral-rich technologies, scientists and environmentalists are raising the alarm over the future of this still little-known and unexplored ecosystem.

🔗 G-7 coordination seen as ‘missing piece’ for sustainable finance. While many individual countries have developed their own sustainable finance policies, global standards and intergovernmental dialogue remains “a missing piece of the jigsaw", says the UN-backed Principles for Responsible Investment, the world's biggest sustainable investment body.

🌳 Companies’ deforestation promises fall short. Hundreds of big companies pledged to stop deforestation by 2020, but only four truly followed through, according to a report out last week from CDP, a nonprofit that tracks corporate commitments. The report shows the need for increased action in the seven key commodities that drive the most agricultural deforestation globally: timber products, palm oil, soy, cattle products, rubber, cocoa and coffee.

How much economic growth is necessary to reduce global poverty substantially? The total size of the global economy would need to be more than five-times larger than currently to substantially decrease global poverty, according to estimates by Our World in Data founder and director Max Roser. Adjusted for the purchasing power in each country, 85 per cent of the world population live on less than $30 per day. For global poverty to decline substantially, economies that are home to the poorest billions of people need to grow, he says in this blog post in which he works through different scenarios to achieve this.

📍 29 March | High-level panel on environment, trade and sustainability. Co-hosted by the Permanent Mission of Barbados and the Permanent Mission of the Maldives in Geneva, this panel aims at discussing critical issues faced by small island developing states. Speakers include WTO chief Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala.

📍 30 March | Sustainable and just economies This interactive session draws on research from International Geneva to explore how to build sustainable and just economies, providing evidence-based recommendations for policymakers.