admin July 29th, 2010
Opinion is growing that a La Niña phenomenon has officially arrived and this means that disaster response teams probably need to brace themselves for heavier monsoons, bigger and more frequent hurricanes, and angrier cyclones.
“There is global consensus that we are at the beginning of a La Niña, but we cannot pronounce the intensity of the event yet – we have to wait for it to evolve,” Rupa Kumar Kolli, Chief of the World Climate Applications and Services Division at the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) told IRIN News.
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Tags: Afghanistan, Australia, Climate change, DRC, Floods, IDPs, Indonesia, Kenya, Madagascar, Malaysia, Mexico, Mozambique, NASA, Pakistan, Red Crescent, Red Cross, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, WMO
admin June 26th, 2010
Five of the ten countries in the world with the least secure supplies of water are in Africa. And Africa has the unpleasant honour of taking the top four places in a new report, ‘Water Security Risk Index’ published this week by Maplecroft, a firm specialising in corporate risk intelligence.
The top ten countries with the least secure supplies of water – shown in dark blue on the map below - are 1. Somalia, 2. Mauritania, 3. Sudan, 4. Niger, 5. Iraq, 6. Uzbekistan, 7. Pakistan, 8. Egypt, 9. Turkmenistan and 10. Syria.
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Tags: Brazil, Climate change, Drought, Egypt, Ethiopia, Floods, Global warming, Himalaya, Iceland, India, Iraq, Mauretania, New Zealand, Niger, Nile, Norway, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Turkmenistan, UK, Uzbekistan
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 May 19th, 2010
At the end of 2009 an astonishing 27.1 million people around the world were displaced within their own countries by conflict or violence – the highest number since these records began in the mid 1990s. This is the conclusion of the annual report from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC).
Since 1997 the number of internally displaced people (IDPs) has grown from 17 million to more than 27 million. Over the same period, the number of refugees has remained fairly stable, fluctuating between 13 and 16 million.
Africa now has 11.6 million of the total 27 million IDPs (43%), and nearly seven million people globally were newly displaced in 2009, many more than in previous years.
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Tags: Climate change, Colombia, DRC, Ethiopia, IDMC, IDPs, OCHA, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, UN
admin April 22nd, 2010
We’ve commented on this before, but the quick blast of publicity that accompanies the largest emergencies all too quickly fades – but the emergencies themselves don’t go away. This week we are reminded that there are hundreds of thousands of people, millions even, who are still suffering from emergencies that the general public – and even Western governments – have long forgotten.
Oxfam is drawing attention to north-west Pakistan where, it says, “Nearly a year since more than three million people were displaced by military operations in north-west Pakistan, the crisis is far from over. More than 1.3 million people are displaced, dependant on emergency relief to survive, yet funding for the emergency response is drying up.”
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Tags: International Rescue Committee, Kenya, Oxfam, Pakistan, Refugees, Somalia, UN
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 January 19th, 2010
Advance Aid is indebted to work that MapAction has done for it in the course of last year. And so it is a pleasure to be able to report that MapAction has sprung into action (if you’ll forgive the pun) in Haiti.
Having accurate and up-to-date maps of disaster-hit areas is crucially important for humanitarian response teams and MapAction – itself an NGO staffed largely by volunteers – had ten deployments in 2009.
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Tags: earthquake, Floods, Haiti, Indonesia, Kenya, MapAction, natural disasters, Pakistan, Sri Lanka
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 23rd, 2009
Civilians attacked, bombed, and cut off from aid in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), along with stagnant funding for treating HIV/AIDS and ongoing neglect of other diseases, were among the worst emergencies in 2009, the international medical humanitarian organization Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) reported today in its annual list of the Top Ten humanitarian crises.
The list, the twelfth that MSF has produced, is drawn from its operational activities in close to 70 countries, where the organization’s medical teams witnessed some of the worst humanitarian conditions.
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Tags: Afghanistan, Civil War, DRC, Pakistan, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Sudan, War, Yemen