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 March 25th, 2010
There’s a brand new database and website that has just been launched that tracks who has given what aid to whom over the period 1945-2009. AidData says that it “attempts to capture the universe of development finance, increase the value of data by providing more descriptive information about development activities, provide data in an accessible format, and strengthen efforts to improve donor and recipient strategic planning and coordination”.
The project has captured details of nearly one million development finance ‘flows’ covering $1.9 trillion. It is getting institutional support from the College of William and Mary, Brigham Young University, and the Development Gateway Foundation and claims that, “We currently have the most comprehensive database on development finance, but have plenty of additional work to do. Better data will help increase aid targeting and coordination, and it will enable better measurement and evaluation of aid effectiveness.” You can go there and search yourself, with the data set that you select available for download as a CSV file.
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Tags: Aid, Belgium, China, Kenya, Liechtenstein, UNDP, United States
admin March 3rd, 2010
The first nine weeks of 2010 would appear to have brought an intensive run of earthquakes around the world – from Haiti in January to Chile in March, but with other significant quakes so far this year in the Philippines, Kyrgyzstan, Japan, the China/Russia/North Korea border and Afghanistan/NW Pakistan. All of these measured more than 5 on the Richter Scale.
But there are smaller quakes all over the globe, all the time. The US Geological Survey (USGS) has a real-time map here showing the latest earthquakes in the world over the past seven days. The current total, at the time of writing, is 366. For the past seven days.
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Tags: Afghanistan, Chile, China, CRED, Drought, earthquake, Floods, Haiti, Japan, Kyrgyzstan, natural disasters, North Korea, OCHA, Pakistan, Philippines, Russia, Storm, tsunami, USGS
admin February 15th, 2010
Everyone involved in humanitarian or development work has a pretty good idea of why disasters in general and earthquakes in particular wreak more damage in some countries than in others. Disasters hit poor countries harder because of the usual development litany: poverty; shanty towns thrown up on marginal land with little or no foundations; poor or non-existent building codes; corruption allowing developers to get round such regulations as do exist; limited state services to respond after the event.
But we are indebted to BBC News which yesterday published a fairly detailed comparison of the China (May 2008), Italy (April 2009) and Haiti (Jan 2010) quakes.
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Tags: China, earthquake, Haiti, Italy, natural disasters
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 December 19th, 2009
The failure of COP15 at Copenhagen was sadly both predictable and predicted. And it clearly was a failure, whatever spin is being put upon it by the UN or Northern governments.
And how ironic that within two months of Commons specialist Elinor Ostrom being awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in Oslo that Copenhagen should be the scene of such a catastrophic example of the Tragedy of the Commons.
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Tags: China, Climate change, Copenhagen, Maldives, Ostrom, Tragedy of the Commons, UN
admin December 15th, 2009
The map below, published last week, is from the Global Climate Risk Index 2009 (CRI), produced by Germanwatch and re-insurance giants Munich Re. Taken at face value it appears to show that the continent with the lowest climate risk in the world is Africa.
Asia has the highest risk, with China and India at the forefront, but even Europe is shown to be at greater climate risk than Africa. Only Mozambique and Madagascar appear within the top 50 countries in the world.
But, as in so many things statistical, all is not as it seems.
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Tags: China, Climate change, cyclone, Floods, Global warming, Mozambique, Munich Re, Myanmar, Storm, USA
admin December 1st, 2009
The Conference of the Parties (COP), which is due to start in Copenhagen next Monday (Dec 7th), is said by many to be the most important international meeting EVER. It’s especially important for the developing countries – many of them in Africa – that suffer most from the effects of global warming.
This is COP15, signifying that it is the fifteenth annual meeting to take place since the agreement of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) at the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit in June 1992. [Before you start to do the maths, the first COP took place in 1995 in Berlin].
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Tags: Afghanistan, Canada, China, Climate change, Copenhagen, Doha Round, Global warming, Iraq, Kyoto Protocol, Somalia, United States, WTO, Zimbabwe
admin November 11th, 2009
We’ve written here before about the role that planning, data analysis and prediction can play in reducing the impact of natural disasters.
The EM-DAT database (a WHO initiative) is a huge repository of information about disasters that has been built up over more than 40 years, and Advance Aid has already been mining this data to help develop its business plan – if you can use historical data to predict where disasters are most likely to happen, you can certainly fine-tune your pre-positioning and warehousing strategy.
Now SciDevNet has produced a whole section of its website devoted to covering “Remote Sensing for Natural Disasters” .
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Tags: Algeria, Brazil, China, EM-DAT, India, Nigeria, Thailand, Vietnam, WHO
admin September 25th, 2009
The numbers of people displaced around the world – either by natural disasters or by man-made disasters like wars – is mind-boggling.
And whilst our attention here in the North is grabbed from time to time by a particularly newsworthy disaster, which affects a particularly large number of people, the scale of the ongoing displacements is what should be being noted.
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Tags: China, IDMC, natural disasters, OCHA