admin July 31st, 2010
In Thursday’s post we reported that floods were affecting Pakistan – possibly brought on by the La Niña effect. Today the BBC is reporting that one million people in Pakistan are affected by these floods, and that the city of Peshawar, with three million inhabitants, is cut off.
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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.
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.
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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admin May 26th, 2010
That is the rallying cry sounded by Muhammad Yunus, founder of Grameen Bank, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize 2006 and creator of microfinance, speaking at the London School of Economics (LSE) last night.
Yunus’s new (well, relatively new) idea is that social businesses, run for selfless reasons on a non-profit basis, have massive potential to solve the problems that we see in the world. “We don’t have to wait for governments or NGOs to solve the problems that we see around us, we can do this ourselves via social businesses,” says Yunus. “We all have the capacity to change the world”.
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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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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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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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