admin February 17th, 2012
Just over a year ago the whole world was fearful of war, death and displacement in Sudan. The referendum in early January had gone off remarkably smoothly and the South was set to secede, but still there was fear of war at any time between January and July – when South Sudan was due to become Africa’s newest state.
All of that went off pretty smoothly, with limited disruption. The world breathed a sigh of relief. But now the border tensions between Sudan and South Sudan, not to mention the troubled question of oil, has seen war break out, with heavy fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North in South Kordofan and Blue Nile states that has driven more than 130,000 Sudanese refugees into Ethiopia and South Sudan.
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Tags: Blue Nile, Ethiopia, Famine, Sahel, Somalia, South Kordofan, South Sudan, Sudan, UN, UNHCR
admin January 25th, 2012
Another famine is looming in Africa’s Sahel region – the third drought in the area in the last 10 years. And the big question facing the international community is whether the lessons of not responding soon enough to the drought in the Horn will be learned – and acted upon – here.
We know already that the European Union has taken a lead. And DFID has announced that it is sending therapeutic food to help 68,000 children in Chad, Mali and Niger, three of the countries worst affected by poor harvests.
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Tags: CERF, Chad, DFID, Drought, Ethiopia, EU, Famine, Kenya, Mali, natural disasters, Niger, Sahel, Somalia, UNICEF, WFP
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.
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Tags: Burkina Faso, Chad, Disaster Risk Reduction, Drought, EU, Floods, Global warming, Japan, LSE, Mali, Mauritania, natural disasters, Niger, Nigeria, Sahel, Thailand, World Bank
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
