AdvanceAid

admin January 17th, 2011

We write a lot on this blog about disasters that are perceived not to have happened because they are not covered on CNN – or in the British papers.  Amongst the pernicious effects of this ‘not on CNN’ syndrome are not just the under-resourcing of smaller (and not so small if they are in Africa) emergencies, but the over-funding of the ones that do generate all of the media coverage.

But last week Valerie (Baroness) Amos, who took over as head of OCHA in July last year did something about this by allocating around $84m, as part of the first round of allocations for 2011 from the Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF), to assist people affected by hunger, malnutrition, disease, displacement and conflict in 15 ‘neglected’ emergencies around the world.

Nearly three quarters of the $84m is going to ‘neglected’ emergencies (as defined by OCHA) in Africa.  And, to some extent, the locations of these emergencies will not surprise – Somalia receives $15m, the largest single allocation, with $11m going to Ethiopia.  Agencies working in Chad will receive $8m, while humanitarian partners in Kenya will receive $6 million to start up programmes for 2011.
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Tags: Baroness Amos, Burundi, Central African Republic, CERF, Chad, CNN, Colombia, DFID, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Iran, Kenya, Madagascar, Myanmar, North Korea, OCHA, Palestine, Somalia, Sri Lanka, UN, Zimbabwe

• East Africa , Great Lakes , Latin America , Middle East , South Asia , South East Asia , West Africa
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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

• Americas , East Africa , Great Lakes , Latin America , North Africa , South Asia , South East Asia , Southern Africa
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admin June 25th, 2010

If you keep your eyes open for these things, around the world there are regular small-scale disasters that show the impacts of global warming and climate change.  Here in the UK it can be something as simple (as apparently silly?) as drought orders being applied for in north-west England just a few months after catastrophic floods.

On a larger scale, north-eastern Brazil has been hit by torrential floods which have left more than 40,000 people without shelter following the bursting of a river dam.
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Tags: Brazil, Climate change, Drought, Floods, Global warming, Mozambique, UK

• Europe , Latin America , Southern Africa
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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

• East Africa , Latin America , Middle East , North Africa , South Asia , South East Asia , West Africa
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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

• East Africa , Great Lakes , Latin America , South Asia
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admin April 30th, 2010

The World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Cochabamba, Bolivia, which we wrote about recently closed last week by producing a 4,000 word Peoples’ Agreement.

The Agreement begins on an apocalyptic note, “Today, our Mother Earth is wounded and the future of humanity is in danger.”

The key problem that it sees that needs addressing is not just anthropogenic global warming but the economic system that has come to dominate the world: capitalism.  “The capitalist system has imposed on us a logic of competition, progress and limitless growth.  This regime of production and consumption seeks profit without limits, separating human beings from nature and imposing a logic of domination upon nature, transforming everything into commodities: water, earth, the human genome, ancestral cultures, biodiversity, justice, ethics, the rights of peoples, and life itself.
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Tags: Bolivia, Copenhagen, Kyoto Protocol, UN

• Latin America
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