Eleven years ago, at the Millennium Summit at United Nations headquarters in New York, the leaders of the world agreed to a plan meant to spur efforts to help the globe's poorest.

This blueprint involved a series of benchmarks – Millennium Development Goals – to measure the progress of developing nations on poverty, hunger, primary education, and so forth. The point was to rally international efforts to try to bring a better life to those who most needed it by 2015.

We are right on the equator, and Speke, Moebius, Elena, Savoia and Moore, the five great glaciers of the the Rwenzori, the Mountains of the Moon, glint in the bright Ugandan sun. Usually lost in the mists that cloak these peaks up to 5,100 metres high, the glaciers are the only major ones left of the 43 that were mapped and named in 1906. Then, the ice covered 7.5 square kilometres, now it is thought to cover less than one.

U.S. sets record with a dozen billion-dollar weather disasters in one year

November and the September-November autumn season were warmer than average across the contiguous U.S., according to scientists at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) in Asheville, N.C. Precipitation totals across the country were also above average during November, but near the long-term average for the autumn season.

A new group of innovative non-governmental organisations are springing up in the wake of disasters around the world, driven by complex data analysis and backed by telecom brands

Signing up refugees via mobile phone, Kakuma refugee camp, Kenya

When a massive earthquake hit Haiti in January 2010, the United Nations found that data collected through mobile telephones was crucial to delivering its relief programmes in the region.

The global output of heat-trapping carbon dioxide has jumped by a record amount, according to the US department of energy, a sign of how feeble the world's efforts are at slowing man-made global warming.

The figures for 2010 mean that levels of greenhouse gases are higher than the worst case scenario outlined by climate experts just four years ago.

"The more we talk about the need to control emissions, the more they are growing," said John Reilly, the co-director of MIT's Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change.