admin November 27th, 2011
Two years ago the COP at Copenhagen was massive news with much made of the fact that this was probably the last opportunity to sort out a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol – which runs out at the end of 2012 and famously remains unsigned by the USA.
That opportunity, of course, came and went, as did COP16 at Cancun in Mexico and now we are on to COP17 in Durban, which opens tomorrow with expectations so low that they are practically invisible. One measure of the failure to get any successor to Kyoto is that no one now seems to expect that to happen.
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Tags: Brazil, Cancun, Climate change, Copenhagen, Drought, Durban, EU, Floods, Global warming, IIED, India, Japan, Kyoto Protocol, Mexico, UNFCCC, USA
admin November 9th, 2011
It’s not very often that a simple analogy can capture and dramatise a complex phenomenon. But we were offered one yesterday at PA International’s ‘Combating Malnutrition through Sustainable Interventions’ conference in Brussels.
Amir Mahmoud Abdulla, Chief Operating Officer of the World Food Programme, turned the dry statistic that 3.5 million children die each year from malnutrition into a gripping and moving story.
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Tags: Drought, Famine, natural disasters, WFP
admin November 7th, 2011
African countries prone to floods, droughts and cyclones – and that’s most of them – had another dose of bad news last week when the latest global carbon emissions data was released by the US Department of Energy.
Emissions in 2010 jumped by the biggest amount on record – so much for the fine words of the Copenhagen and Cancun summits.
This means that levels of greenhouse gases are higher than the worst-case scenario outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) just four years ago. And that means that the risk of extreme weather events has also risen. Since these extreme weather events disproportionately affect poorer countries in general and Africa in particular, the inability of the developed world – and that includes China and India who are now both major emitters – to reduce emissions has a direct effect on African lives and livelihoods.
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Tags: Cancun, Carbon emissions, China, Climate change, Copenhagen, cyclone, Drought, Floods, Global warming, India, IPCC, Kyoto Protocol, natural disasters, USA
admin November 4th, 2011
The 2011 version of the Human Development Index (HDI) has been released and it’s predictably bad news for Africa.
The bottom of the pile – the Low Human Development sector – is dominated by sub-Saharan African countries. Indeed, positions 159 – 187 in the table, the bottom twenty eight in the world, are all African with the exception of Afghanistan.
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Tags: Afghanistan, Botswana, Burundi, DRC, Egypt, Ethiopia, Haiti, HDI, Latin America, Mozambique, Niger, Norway