Human Development Report 2020 – The next frontier: Human development and the Anthropocene

The United Nations Development Programme released its 30th annual Human Development Report, titled The next frontier: Human development and the Anthropocene, on December 15, 2020.It was written by the Human Development Report 2020 Team, with Pedro Conceição as its director and lead author (former director, Strategic Policy, at the Bureau for Policy and Programme Support, UNDP). Its Advisory Board was co-chaired by Tharman Shanmugaratnam (senior minister for Social Policies, Singapore, and chairman of the Monetary Authority of Singapore) and A. Michael Spence (American economist, professor and Nobel laureate).The report contains statistical tables from the Human Development Index (a composite index measuring performance in three basic dimensions of human development – longevity, education and income per capita), along with the Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index, the Gender Development Index, the Gender Inequality Index, and the Multidimensional Poverty Index, among others.The report emphasises the impact of human activity on the Earth’s geology and ecosystems. It comprises of seven chapters: Charting human development in the Anthropocene (Chapter 1); Unprecedented – the scope, scale and speed of human pressures on the planet (Chapter 2); Empowering people for equity, innovation and stewardship of nature (Chapter 3); Empowering people, unleashing transformation (Chapter 4); Shaping incentives to navigate the future (Chapter 5); Building nature-based human development (Chapter 6); and Towards a new generation of human development metrics for the Anthropocene (Chapter 7).