Human Interest

Marketplace® is your liaison between economics and life. Noted for timely, relevant and accessible coverage of business news across both audio and digital platforms, Marketplace programs are heard by more than 14 million weekly listeners. This makes the Marketplace portfolio the most widely heard business or economic programming in the country.

Sara Menker quit a career in commodities trading to figure out how the global value chain of agriculture works. Her discoveries have led to some startling predictions: "We could have a tipping point in global food and agriculture if surging demand surpasses the agricultural system's structural capacity to produce food," she says. "People could starve and governments may fall." Menker's models predict that this scenario could happen in a decade -- that the world could be short 214 trillion calories per year by 2027. She offers a vision of this impossible world as well as some steps we can take today to avoid it.

Naturalist says experience making second series of BBC show revealed devastating threat posed to oceans by plastic

The real cause of our environmental crisis is captalism, says the Guardian writer George Monbiot

A new gold rush is targeting rich ores on the ocean floor containing valuable metals needed for smartphones and green technologies, but also hosting exotic ecosystems

India’s population and emissions are rising fast, and its ability to tackle poverty without massive fossil fuel use will decide the fate of the planet

Discover how much WATER we EAT every day

His sequel to The Blue Planet will focus not only on the marvels of sea life but also the threats to it. The naturalist explains why plastic pollution, climate change and overpopulation are problems too urgent to be left to ecologists

The world affairs series returns for a new run, starting in Indonesia, home to the planet's most polluted river and a textile industry supplying some of th

Overview of the importance of water systems and the challenges of providing enough safe water for the Earth's population

How many people still drink dirty water, or go to the toilet in the open? We’ve used new data to track global progress on the millennium development goals. Hover or click on countries for more detailed information