The millions of dollars spent globally on technology to catalog species may actually be pushing out the people we rely upon: taxonomists and systematists.

Researchers estimate that about $90 trillion will need to be spent globally by 2030 on building and updating infrastructure.

Last year, western Europe accounted for less than a quarter of the $68 billion spent globally on cloud-computing services, according to technology research consultancy Gartner.

I think the total amount of money being spent globally on vaccine development right now is on the order of 30 to 40 billion.

This compares poorly with the US, which is thought to have generated 85 per cent of the $8 billion spent globally on e-commerce in 1997.