July 29th, 2010
Opinion is growing that a La Niña phenomenon has officially arrived and this means that disaster response teams probably need to brace themselves for heavier monsoons, bigger and more frequent hurricanes, and angrier cyclones.
“There is global consensus that we are at the beginning of a La Niña, but we cannot pronounce the intensity of the event yet – we have to wait for it to evolve,” Rupa Kumar Kolli, Chief of the World Climate Applications and Services Division at the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) told IRIN News.
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Tags: Afghanistan, Australia, Climate change, DRC, Floods, IDPs, Indonesia, Kenya, Madagascar, Malaysia, Mexico, Mozambique, NASA, Pakistan, Red Crescent, Red Cross, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, WMO
July 21st, 2010
One Brit, Baroness Amos, is about to take over from another, Sir John Holmes as the head of OCHA. Her full title will be Under Secretary-General in charge of the Office of the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs. She moves to the UN from what sounds a much more comfortable role as British high commissioner to Australia. She spent four years in Tony Blair’s cabinet between 2003 and 2007, first as leader of the House of Lords and then as international development secretary in charge of DFID.
IRIN News, which is an OCHA project, has polled a number of NGOs and NGO networks to draw up a list of tasks for her once she takes over. Here’s a digested version of the list recommended:
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Tags: Baroness Amos, OCHA, Sir John Holmes, UN
July 19th, 2010
Total humanitarian aid worldwide was $15.1 billion in 2009 according to a new report by Global Humanitarian Assistance. In Part 1 we looked at how much was given. In this part we are going to look at where the money goes.
By region, in 2008, it went largely to Africa (52% – $5.9 billion) and Asia (42% – $4.8 billion). And six of the top ten recipient countries in 2008 were African – Sudan (first place), Ethiopia (fourth), Somalia (fifth), DRC (sixth), Zimbabwe (ninth) and Kenya (tenth). Even tenth placed Kenya received $304 million. Sudan got $1.4 billion.
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Tags: Africa, Asia, DRC, Ethiopia, Haiti, Kenya, NGOs, Red Cross, Somalia, Sudan, Zimbabwe
July 19th, 2010
Total humanitarian aid worldwide fell by 11% to $15.1 billion in 2009 according to a new analysis of the available data by Global Humanitarian Assistance, a monitoring service provided by Development Initiatives. The 2008 total was $16.9 billion, a record high. But 2009’s total was the second highest on record.
Humanitarian aid from donors reporting to the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) has grown massively through the 2000s, from $5.5 billion in 2000 to an estimated $13.3 billion in 2009 – a growth of 142% across the decade.
The DAC represents the OECD countries and speaks for well over 90% of all humanitarian aid. But overall 112 countries gave humanitarian aid in 2009 – many of them being recipients as well as donors.
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Tags: Africa, Asia, Humanitarian assistance, NGOs, Red Cross, UN
July 16th, 2010
There have been two interesting developments in the past few days relating to the new UK government’s thinking on disasters and disaster relief.
On Wednesday the Financial Times’s Westminster blog speculated that Lord (Paddy) Ashdown was to be appointed by incoming DFID minister Andrew Mitchell to a new humanitarian role as Chair of the Emergency Response Review – and that appointment was confirmed later in the day. And on Thursday DFID itself announced a major tender to review both its humanitarian policy and its delivery.
The review of humanitarian funding has been widely expected. And, according to the FT blog, “It will involve looking at how UK emergency aid is functioning and how it could be improved.” Not before time, many involved in the provision of emergency relief would argue.
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Tags: Bosnia, DFID, Lord Paddy Ashdown
June 29th, 2010
The number of natural disasters around the world fell year-on-year in 2009 according to the Annual Disaster Statistical Review 2009 produced by CRED (Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters). And it also fell below the 2000-08 average.
But CRED, which is a World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Centre, warns that although the upward trend in disaster occurrence has stabilized in 2009 it is not possible to identify a trend from this fact: “In general, a high variation exists in the reported number of deaths and victims from one year to the next. This is mostly due to single disaster events that cause a tremendous human impact.” In 2009 there were no events like the 2002 drought in India (300 million victims), the 2004 Tsunami (226,408 deaths across 12 countries) or cyclone Nargis, which hit Myanmar in 2008 causing 138,366 deaths.
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Tags: China, CRED, cyclone, Drought, earthquake, Floods, Global warming, India, Indian Ocean Tsunami, Myanmar, natural disasters, Storm, WHO
June 28th, 2010
The G8 and the G20 met late last week, and over the weekend, in Canada and issued the usual self-congratulatory communiqués – you can read the G20 one here. Some sample quotes from the G8 include, “We have refocused the G8 on its strengths: development, peace and of course global security challenges.” And, “The G8 has committed an additional $5 billion over the next five years…bringing the total to $7.3 billion on the Muskoka Initiative on Maternal, Newborn and Child Health.”
There is clearly a conflict (pun intended) between the ‘strength’ of peace and the ‘strength’ of global security challenges. And there is no explanation of what the ‘additional $5 billion’ is additional to.
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Tags: Canada, G20, G8, Oxfam
June 26th, 2010
Five of the ten countries in the world with the least secure supplies of water are in Africa. And Africa has the unpleasant honour of taking the top four places in a new report, ‘Water Security Risk Index’ published this week by Maplecroft, a firm specialising in corporate risk intelligence.
The top ten countries with the least secure supplies of water – shown in dark blue on the map below - are 1. Somalia, 2. Mauritania, 3. Sudan, 4. Niger, 5. Iraq, 6. Uzbekistan, 7. Pakistan, 8. Egypt, 9. Turkmenistan and 10. Syria.
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Tags: Brazil, Climate change, Drought, Egypt, Ethiopia, Floods, Global warming, Himalaya, Iceland, India, Iraq, Mauretania, New Zealand, Niger, Nile, Norway, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Turkmenistan, UK, Uzbekistan
June 25th, 2010
If you keep your eyes open for these things, around the world there are regular small-scale disasters that show the impacts of global warming and climate change. Here in the UK it can be something as simple (as apparently silly?) as drought orders being applied for in north-west England just a few months after catastrophic floods.
On a larger scale, north-eastern Brazil has been hit by torrential floods which have left more than 40,000 people without shelter following the bursting of a river dam.
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Tags: Brazil, Climate change, Drought, Floods, Global warming, Mozambique, UK
June 21st, 2010
As famine closes in on Chad and Niger (and Save the Children says that nearly 400,000 children under the age of five in Niger are facing starvation) ActionAid is asking whether the G8 countries have made good on promises made last year to give $22 billion to help small farmers in developing countries.
Key to this proposal was that the money should go not in emergency food aid, or in aid to boost production of cash crops for export, but to help smallholder farmers. The importance of smallholders is that they grow food to feed themselves and their families, with surpluses generally sold in local markets. So this is an important step towards increasing food security and self-sufficiency in food at the local level in developing countries.
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Tags: ActionAid, Australia, Chad, EU, Famine, G8, Germany, Italy, Japan, natural disasters, Niger, Save the Children, Spain