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 January 17th, 2012
Early in February there’s a big change happening that could impact significantly on the way that development assistance is spent – and on the impact that it can have. The United States of America is changing its stance on procurement to allow US-donated funds to be spent on buying goods from developing countries. And it will no longer be insisting on that spend going to American companies
As with so many really important changes, it’s all in the small print – in this case pages 1396 to 1405 of Volume 77, Number 6 of the Federal Register. And what has happened is a revision of the S/O/N regulations that cover the ‘source’, ‘origin’ and ‘nationality’ of goods and services.
admin December 8th, 2011
As EU commissioner Georgieva was speaking about the growing frequency and intensity of natural disasters – and linking them explicitly to climate change – the world’s leaders were, in effect, agreeing to do nothing about said climate change at COP 17 in Durban.
Of course, they wouldn’t put it like that, they’re all being very reasonable whilst at the same time doing what they perceive to be their jobs in representing their national interests.
admin December 3rd, 2011
Good news for sub-Saharan Africa – it’s not as corrupt as some other parts of the world according to the latest Corruption Perceptions Index produced by Transparency International (TI). Although there’s still quite a lot of work to be done if you have a look at the colourful map on page four of the TI report.
Unlike the recently-published 2011 version of the Human Development Index, in which the bottom places were packed with sub-Saharan African countries – and Afghanistan – there are a mere four African countries in the bottom ten of this global table. Somalia comes equal bottom with North Korea, and the other African countries in the Highly Corrupt group are Sudan, Equatorial Guinea and Burundi.
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 November 7th, 2011
African countries prone to floods, droughts and cyclones – and that’s most of them – had another dose of bad news last week when the latest global carbon emissions data was released by the US Department of Energy.
Emissions in 2010 jumped by the biggest amount on record – so much for the fine words of the Copenhagen and Cancun summits.
This means that levels of greenhouse gases are higher than the worst-case scenario outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) just four years ago. And that means that the risk of extreme weather events has also risen. Since these extreme weather events disproportionately affect poorer countries in general and Africa in particular, the inability of the developed world – and that includes China and India who are now both major emitters – to reduce emissions has a direct effect on African lives and livelihoods.
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.
Continue Reading »
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.
Continue Reading »
admin November 15th, 2010
Hypocrisy is deeply unattractive – especially when it comes in the form of calls by Northern countries for free trade to ‘help the poor’. Calls that totally ignore all of the restrictive trade practices that they themselves maintain in order to protect their voters/farmers/industries from competition from these same poor.
Take cotton. At the G20 meeting in Seoul just a week ago the UK and others called for a free trade area for Africa – in effect a merging of the existing three trade groups, EAC, ECOWAS and SADC.
admin May 29th, 2010
For the third year in a row, David Dickie, CEO of Advance Aid, is going to be speaking at the Aid and International Development Forum in Washington in July.
He is part of a panel looking at ‘Moving from disaster relief to long-term development’. With him on the panel are: Beatriz Casals, Founder and President, Casals & Associates, Inc; Hansjoerg Strohmeyer, Chief of Policy and Development Branch, United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA); Erin Mote, Director of Resource Development, CHF International; Joseph Fernandez, Founder & Executive Director, Trade Without Borders; and Abhas K. Jha, Regional Coordinator, The World Bank.
Continue Reading »