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 December 7th, 2011
European Commissioner Kristalina Georgieva warned yesterday that the Sahel region of West Africa was in danger of slipping into famine and that help should be provided now – indeed it was already being provided by the EU.
She said that it was not only ethically and morally right to send aid now, before things reached crisis point, but also cheaper in the long run as disaster risk reduction (DRR) is dramatically more cost-effective than responding to disasters.
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.
admin May 17th, 2011
If news had just emerged from your department that the costs of two aircraft carriers had risen from £4bn in 2007 to £5bn in 2010 and £7bn now, I guess you would also be casting around for other budgets to savage.
Especially when it also turns out that the planes to go on one of these carriers will not be available until three years after the ship itself goes into service.
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admin April 19th, 2011
Extreme weather events continue to hit Africa, with more than eight million people affected by drought in East Africa and 60,000 displaced by floods in Southern Africa, floods that are not likely to dissipate for up to six months. Both are said to be tail-end effects of the latest La Nina – which should start to fade in May this year.
Drought, food shortage and water shortage follow on from the failure of the rains in late 2010 across Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and the Karamoja region in Uganda. The UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) is reporting that the drought has led to substantial harvest failure, deteriorating pasture conditions, decreased water availability and livestock losses. Lack of access to affected areas, high food prices, human and livestock diseases and the ongoing insurgency in Somalia are all exacerbating the situation.
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 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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admin April 20th, 2010
Volumes of aid donated by the rich countries to the poor grew in 2009 according to an OECD report published last week and donors are expected to meet their own aid targets in 2010, but are still falling well short of targets set by the UN.
OECD figures show that the total net official development assistance (ODA) from the donors in the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) rose 0.7% in real terms, but the rise was 6.8% once debt relief, a volatile item, is excluded. OECD Secretary General, Angel Gurría, urged donors to keep the momentum going in future years saying, “This is a vital investment with big returns for the world as a whole”.
Of course, there is considerable doubt over whether this is really as good a thing as one might think. Sub-Saharan Africa has been getting poorer for the past 30 years despite the injection of billions of dollars of aid – not all of which has ended up benefiting the poor, and plenty of which has benefited the bank accounts of the powerful.
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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.