admin June 9th, 2010
Water is one of the planet’s great Commons, and ‘Tackling the World Water Crisis’, which is available here is the latest contribution to a rapidly growing literature looking at the threat of water shortages as the world’s population grows and our water use grows exponentially.
Published by the Foreign Policy Centre, it is a collection of articles by politicians such as new Foreign Secretary William Hague and EU foreign minister Baroness Catherine Ashton, journalists from the BBC and the Financial Times, leaders of NGOs like ActionAid and WWF-UK, plus assorted academics and think-tank heads.
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Tags: ActionAid, Bangladesh, BBC, China, Climate change, Financial Times, Ganges, Global warming, Himalaya, India, Mekong, natural disasters, Nile, Peru, Sahel, WWF, Yemen
admin May 26th, 2010
That is the rallying cry sounded by Muhammad Yunus, founder of Grameen Bank, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize 2006 and creator of microfinance, speaking at the London School of Economics (LSE) last night.
Yunus’s new (well, relatively new) idea is that social businesses, run for selfless reasons on a non-profit basis, have massive potential to solve the problems that we see in the world. “We don’t have to wait for governments or NGOs to solve the problems that we see around us, we can do this ourselves via social businesses,” says Yunus. “We all have the capacity to change the world”.
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Tags: Adidas, Bangladesh, BASF, Danone, GE, Grameen, LSE, Muhammad Yunus, Veolia
admin May 24th, 2010
The problems of managing the waters of the Nile, which we wrote about here recently pale into insignificance when you consider the problems of managing the waters that flow down from Hindu-Kush Himalaya region (HKH). Advance Aid was at the House of Lords in London last week for the launch of a report on the waters of the HKH titled ‘The Waters of the Third Pole: Sources of threat, sources of survival’.
One fifth of humanity is sustained by the waters that flow down from the HKH, including some or all of the populations of the most populous countries on earth – Bangladesh, China, India and Pakistan. And it is the source of ten major Asian river systems, including the Ganges, Brahmaputra, Yangtze, Mekong and Yellow rivers. As the report says, these drainage basins are “one of the world’s most complex and intensive risk hotspots. This water system could be involved in future crises concerning dams, river diversions, floods, water shortages and contamination”.
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Tags: Bangladesh, China, Climate change, Drought, Floods, Global warming, Himalaya, India, Kings College London, natural disasters, Pakistan, UCL
admin January 10th, 2010
Excuse the tabloid style headline on this post, but when an eminent academic economist produces evidence that, despite the influx of billions of dollars of aid – some of which, of course, flowed out just as quickly to Swiss bank accounts – sub-Saharan Africa has gone backwards over the period 1970-2000 it merits a ‘shock horror’ type of response.
Not that sub-Saharan Africa is alone amongst poor regions in getting poorer. Or that, here at Advance Aid, we are that surprised, pushing as we are the view that ‘Trade not Aid’ is the answer to getting real development moving in Africa.
The analysis has been carried out by Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta, Frank Ramsey Professor of Economics and Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge and has been recently published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society under the title ‘Nature’s role in sustaining economic development’. Interested readers can download a copy of the full paper here. It’s well worth a read.
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Tags: Bangladesh, China, Human Development Index, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sub-Saharan Africa, Sustainable development, Trade not Aid
admin November 22nd, 2009
Residents of Cumbria, in the north west of the UK, will not need reminding that “once in a thousand years” events can happen – as the Daily Telegraph reported just yesterday.
So it’s worth paying attention, at this time of UK flooding, to a report from the Center for Global Development (CGD) produced this September. The snappily entitled ‘Climate Change and the Future Impacts of Storm-Surge Disasters in Developing Countries’ can be found here but the core of their findings is that there are millions of people living in costal cities in developing countries who are highly vulnerable to “once in a hundred years” storm surge events brought on by rises in sea level (caused largely by melting glaciers and ice caps) linked to rising sea temperatures which increase the likelihood of storms.
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Tags: Abidjan, Alexandria, Bangladesh, Dakar, Egypt, Floods, Global warming, Lagos, Luanda, Manila, Monrovia, Myanmar, Nigeria, Storm