A little over a year ago, the global community proposed an ambitious new set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to protect the environment and enhance human well-being. Three months later, the United Nations Conference on Climate Change, CoP21 in Paris, announced equally ambitious new targets for action on climate change. Such bold commitments have been facilitated by development trends in several emerging economies. India, for one, has made truly astonishing gains: the World Bank reports that in over just seven years, from 2004 to 2011, the number of Indian citizens living in acute poverty fell from 426 million to 263 million, a reduction in the proportion of the population in poverty from 38% to <22%.