admin January 22nd, 2012
Welcome to 2012. However, this year is unlikely to be better than 2011.
The thing about major disasters is that whilst we don’t know exactly where the next one is going to hit, we can be certain that there will be a next one – and even take some well-informed guesses about where it might hit.
admin January 17th, 2012
Early in February there’s a big change happening that could impact significantly on the way that development assistance is spent – and on the impact that it can have. The United States of America is changing its stance on procurement to allow US-donated funds to be spent on buying goods from developing countries. And it will no longer be insisting on that spend going to American companies
As with so many really important changes, it’s all in the small print – in this case pages 1396 to 1405 of Volume 77, Number 6 of the Federal Register. And what has happened is a revision of the S/O/N regulations that cover the ‘source’, ‘origin’ and ‘nationality’ of goods and services.
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.
admin March 2nd, 2011
DFID yesterday announced the results of its bilateral aid programme and the decision that has been made is that it will be focussing its money on 27 countries, many of them in East Africa. The review says that it wants to target support “where it will make the biggest difference and where the need is greatest”.
These 27 countries, according to DFID, account for three quarters of global maternal mortality and nearly three quarters of global malaria deaths. And seventeen of them are in Africa: Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda , Zambia and Zimbabwe.
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admin November 16th, 2010
So it would appear that it takes the inundation of 160,000 square kilometres of land, an estimated 1,600 deaths and 20 million people affected by flooding for Pakistan – a tiny emitter of greenhouse gases – to decide that it needs a climate change strategy to mitigate the effects of extreme weather events caused by global warming.
What, therefore, is it going to take for the major emitters of CO2 – China, the US, Russia, India, Japan and Germany in total tonnage rank – to do the same and really start to get to grips with the emissions that they are generating? After all, it is these emissions that are the root cause of the melting glaciers in the Hindu Kush. And it is the meltwater from these glaciers that, along with unusually high rainfall, caused the flooding.
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admin November 15th, 2010
Hypocrisy is deeply unattractive – especially when it comes in the form of calls by Northern countries for free trade to ‘help the poor’. Calls that totally ignore all of the restrictive trade practices that they themselves maintain in order to protect their voters/farmers/industries from competition from these same poor.
Take cotton. At the G20 meeting in Seoul just a week ago the UK and others called for a free trade area for Africa – in effect a merging of the existing three trade groups, EAC, ECOWAS and SADC.
admin August 30th, 2010
The eyes of the world, of course, are on Pakistan and the terrible damage and displacement that the floods there are causing. But in West Africa a crisis of similar proportions is affecting just as many people – but generating only a tiny percentage of the column inches (or the donor dollars) that accrue to Pakistan.
First, drought led to crop failures and the threat of famine – especially in Niger and Chad, where more than seven million people are affected. Now the drought has broken, but it has been replaced by torrential rain, which has created further problems by causing flooding and destroying crops.
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admin 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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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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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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