The world faces a protracted period of weak economic growth that will undermine progress on sustainable development, the UN has warned, as it urged countries to raise investment to tackle the climate emergency.

Its annual assessment of the state of the global economy presents a sombre outlook for growth as countries grapple with the impact of higher borrowing costs, geopolitical tensions and heightened risk of climate disasters.

The largest 

It takes money to make money. There is hardly a better example of this than the French billionaire Francoise Bettencourt Meyers.

In late December, she broke through the $100-billion threshold and became the first woman to ever amass so much wealth, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. In 2023, she added $28.6 billion (€26.1 billion) on top of the billions she already had.

Slick ads like to portray the future of transportation as clean and quiet. They show cars that gently purr, without emitting harmful emissions, along almost empty roads through unspoiled nature, with their occupants on their way to work or to shop in clean cities without traffic jams.

The reality, of course, is somewhat different, as traffic jams, noise and the stench of exhaust fumes are, in fact, ubiquitous in Germany.