admin November 12th, 2010
In a boost for disaster preparedness spending, a new report by the World Bank and the United Nations declares that, “prevention pays but you do not always have to pay more for prevention”.
The report, ‘Natural Hazards, UNnatural Disasters – The Economics of Effective Prevention’, is targeted directly at the world’s finance ministers, who ultimately hold the purse strings, it suggests that annual global losses from natural disasters could triple to $185 billion by the end of this century, even without calculating the impact of climate change.
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Tags: Benin, Climate change, Drought, earthquake, Floods, natural disasters, UN, World Bank
admin September 30th, 2010
Last week, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the $60 million launch of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, a public-private partnership that says that it will save lives, improve livelihoods, empower women and combat climate change by creating a thriving global market for clean and efficient household cooking solutions.
Indoor cooking on rough and ready stoves, or using three stones on which a pan is balanced, is practised by an estimated three billion people around the world, and is a major cause of death as a result of the indoor air pollution (IAP) that comes from the particulates released by the wood or other biomass that is burned on these stoves.
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Tags: Envirofit International, Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, Shell, Shell Foundation, Sir John Holmes, UN
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 Now the drought has broken, but it has been replaced by torrential rain, which has created further problems by causing flooding and destroying crops.
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Tags: Chad, China, Drought, Floods, natural disasters, Niger, OCHA, Pakistan, UN
admin August 19th, 2010
Today, August 19th, is the first World Humanitarian Day, nominated by the UN to honour all those humanitarian workers who had lost their lives in the cause of duty and in the promotion of the humanitarian cause.
Sadly, the day itself is marked by one of the world’s largest-ever natural disasters in Pakistan where it is highly likely that more humanitarian workers will lose their lives in the service of others.
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Tags: natural disasters, Pakistan, UN
admin July 21st, 2010
One Brit, Baroness Amos, is about to take over from another, Sir John Holmes as the head of OCHA. Her full title will be Under Secretary-General in charge of the Office of the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs. She moves to the UN from what sounds a much more comfortable role as British high commissioner to Australia. She spent four years in Tony Blair’s cabinet between 2003 and 2007, first as leader of the House of Lords and then as international development secretary in charge of DFID.
IRIN News, which is an OCHA project, has polled a number of NGOs and NGO networks to draw up a list of tasks for her once she takes over. Here’s a digested version of the list recommended:
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Tags: Baroness Amos, OCHA, Sir John Holmes, UN
admin July 19th, 2010
Total humanitarian aid worldwide fell by 11% to $15.1 billion in 2009 according to a new analysis of the available data by Global Humanitarian Assistance, a monitoring service provided by Development Initiatives. The 2008 total was $16.9 billion, a record high. But 2009’s total was the second highest on record.
Humanitarian aid from donors reporting to the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) has grown massively through the 2000s, from $5.5 billion in 2000 to an estimated $13.3 billion in 2009 – a growth of 142% across the decade.
The DAC represents the OECD countries and speaks for well over 90% of all humanitarian aid. But overall 112 countries gave humanitarian aid in 2009 – many of them being recipients as well as donors.
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Tags: Africa, Asia, Humanitarian assistance, NGOs, Red Cross, UN
admin June 18th, 2010
It’s almost exactly a month since this blog first wrote about the impending famine in West Africa and the aid agencies on the ground there have been predicting it for some months more. But in a classic example of the way that emergencies are handled, the world is only now beginning to see that something is going wrong there and it is already too late.
Credit: Cristina Vazquez Moreno/Oxfam
Malik Allaouna, regional emergency manager for Save the Children in West and Central Africa, told Reuters Alertnet, “The problem is that we are already too late. If you get the funds today, you don’t get the food in country for two to three months”. Ten million people across the Sahel – primarily in Niger and Chad – are at risk, and the signs of that risk have been there for as long as eight months.
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Tags: Chad, natural disasters, Niger, OCHA, Oxfam, Save the Children, UN, WFP
admin May 20th, 2010
The situation in Somalia seems to be going from worse to even worse. According to a recent UN report, 3.4 million Somalis – 43 percent of the population – need humanitarian assistance, including some 1.4 million within Somalia displaced by fighting. This infighting between Islamist insurgent groups Al-Shabab and Hisbul Islam and the transitional government further weakens a country that has been without an effective government since 1991.
Over the past few weeks: UNHCR has appealed for an additional $60m for IDPs within Somalia as well as those refugees now in neighbouring countries; a UN committee has said that as much as half of the food aid sent to the country via the World Food Programme (WFP) is diverted corruptly; and the breakaway enclave of Somaliland has finally set June 26th as its long-delayed presidential election date, which will probably be a further step in the break-up of the country.
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Tags: African Union, Djibouti, Ethiopia, IDPs, Kenya, Somalia, Somaliland, UN, UNHCR, WFP
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 May 17th, 2010
Whilst East Africa faces natural disaster in the form of floods, West Africa is facing starvation and famine as a result of the irregularity of the rains in 2009. So irregular were the rains, that there was flooding in some countries and drought in others.
Credit: Cristina Vazquez Moreno/Oxfam
This led to a severe lack of pasture, water and a poor harvest. The worst affected country now, according to Oxfam, is Niger where 8 million people are at risk. An additional 2 million people are also threatened in Chad and a substantial number of people are expected to be affected in Mali in the coming months. Parts of Nigeria and Burkina Faso are also at risk.
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Tags: Burkina Faso, Chad, Drought, EU, Human Development Index, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, UN
