UN
lborkowski | November 11, 2016Months after a severe earthquake devastated Haiti in 2010, UN peacekeeping troops exacerbated Haitians’ suffering by introducing cholera to the country, via waste that leaked from a UN housing base into the Artibonite river. The disease sickened 800,000 people and killed more than 9,000 – although a study at four sites in northern Haiti found the actual death toll could be substantially higher than the official count. In August 2016, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon acknowledged the UN’s role in Haiti’s cholera epidemic, accepting moral but not legal responsibility.
The UN was working to…
sastyk | April 22, 2013From the Japan Times:
Former Irish President Mary Robinson’s foundation for climate justice is hosting a major conference in Dublin this week. Research presented there said that rising incomes and growth in the global population, expected to create 2 billion more mouths to feed by 2050, will drive food prices higher by 40 to 50 percent.
“We must prepare today for higher temperatures in all sectors,” said Gerald Nelson, a senior economist with the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).
All of the studies suggest the worst impacts will be felt by the poorest…
illconsidered | July 20, 2012This is not my opinion! But forget about damning with faint praise, given the source this is damning with high praise.
Obama’s negotiator, Todd Stern, will be here today. They have kept the exact same principles and negotiating stance as President George Bush did for eight years. Obama has carried on Bush’s legacy. So, as skeptics, we tip our hat to President Obama in helping crush and continue to defeat the United Nations process. Obama has been a great friend of global warming skeptics at these conferences. Obama has problems, you know, for us, because he’s going through the EPA regulatory…
sastyk | June 22, 2012So everyone raise your hand if you are shocked, shocked and appalled, that the sum up for the Earth Summit Rio+20 conference was, as the UK's Deputy Prime Minister put it "Insipid."
The meeting, marking 20 years since the iconic Earth Summit in the same city and 40 since the very first global environment gathering in Stockholm, was aimed at stimulating moves towards the "green economy".
But the declaration that was concluded by government negotiators on Tuesday and that ministers have not sought to re-open, puts the green economy as just one possible pathway to sustainable development.
Mary…
lborkowski | March 22, 2012Today is World Water Day, and this year's theme is "Water and Food Security." UN Water explains why we should care:
Each of us needs to drink 2 to 4 litres of water every day. But it takes 2 000 to 5 000 litres of water to produce one person's daily food.
Today, there are over 7 billion people to feed on the planet and this number is expected to reach 9 billion by 2050.
To be able to feed everybody, we first need to secure water, in sufficient quantity and adequate quality.
We will also need to produce more food using less water, reduce food wastage and losses, and move towards more…
sastyk | October 16, 2011From Yale Environment 360, more questions about future UN population projections:
For now, we can indeed be highly confident that world population will top 7 billion by the end of this year. We're close to that number already and currently adding about 216,000 people per day. But the United Nations "medium variant" population projection, the gold standard for expert expectation of the demographic future, takes a long leap of faith: It assumes no demographic influence from the coming environmental changes that could leave us living on what NASA climatologist James Hansen has dubbed "a…
sastyk | June 10, 2011In thousands of ways, UN policy helps shape how we respond to emerging crises, from basic poverty to world political events, from food to climate change and population. What is emerging, however, is that UN analyses are increasingly diverging from reality - as they attempt to describe our future, they have failed to adequately (or at all) take into account that most basic of all considerations, material limits on energy resources.
The UN is one of the most powerful organizations in the world influencing international policy - the IPCC, the Populaton Council, the FAO - their work informs how…
sastyk | June 6, 2011Hi Folks - Back from the wedding and shivaree, and catching up...slowly. Tired and have much farm stuff to catch up on as well, so bear with me one more day.
In the meantime, Fred Pearce has a great essay in Nature on what's wrong with the UN population revisions that anticipate 10+billion by the end of the century. As you'll remember, I'm pretty dubious about the underlying assumptions of the model as well - it doesn't have anything to do with the real constraints we're facing. The Pearce article is well worth a read, even though I don't agree with all of his assumptions about the…
sastyk | May 6, 2011The fact that the mid-range projections for world population rose by nearly a billion people this week should have garnered a lot more attention than it did. The UN offers biennial updates of its world population estimates, and for the last few years, the mid-range (ie, the most likely scenario) has suggested that the world will peak around 9.2 billion people near the middle of this century, and then slowly begin to decline. The 2010 estimate, however, found that the decline is no longer considered likely, and that by 2100, the world may have as many as 10.1 billion people.
This raises a…
sastyk | January 12, 2011
The Food Crisis, of course. In fact it really never left - since 2007 we've had more hungry people on the planet than ever before in human history, and while we've seen brief declines in the numbers of the hungry worldwide, those declines were of such short duration that they were essentially meaningless - earlier this year when the UN trumpeted that the number of the hungry had dropped back below 1 billion, it admitted that this excluded Pakistani flood victims, the impacts of the crisis in the Russian wheat crop and a host of other late-year issues.
On the lists of guests no one ever…
sastyk | September 21, 2010_The Pump Handle_ often addresses the same issues that I do, from a public health perspective and is one of my favorite reads. As the UN Convenes to evaluate progress on the Millenium Development Goals - designed to reduce poverty worldwide, Liz Borkowski has done an admirable job of describing exactly what these are and how they work.
At the same time, however, I think both Borkowski and most evaluators don't explore the ways that the Millenium Development Goals simply begin from assumptions that don't allow them to succeed. That's why many of them are simply failing. The most basic one…
lborkowski | September 20, 2010If you're working on a major global problem like poverty, it's important to have goals to work towards. Back in 2000, world leaders came together and adopted the United Nations Millennium Declaration, which commits to reducing extreme poverty and sets out a series of goals to be reached by 2015. Each of the eight Millennium Development Goals, as they've come to be known, has between one and five specific targets, many of which involve reducing the proportion (by half, two-thirds, etc.) of people who suffer from a particular condition or lack access to an essential resource like clean drinking…
sastyk | September 15, 2010Ok, that's not quite the headline at the New York Times, but close enough. Yes, the latest Oxfam figures that came out today say that we're back under 1 billion starving people. But yes, those figures were compiled before the Pakistani Floods, and before the 5% rise in food prices driven by the Russian wheat crisis.
The number of hungry people fell to 925 million from its all-time high of 1.02 billion in 2009, with much of the improvement tied to income growth in the Asia-Pacific region as well as a 40 percent decline in food prices from their 2008 peak.
The hunger number remains "…
sastyk | June 10, 2010A newly produced UN Report rightly points out, among other things, that the western model of meat and dairy production simply won't work on a planet of 9 billion people. The report, which quantifies the basic unsustainability of affluent societies and the challenges facing us in satisfying needs we've spent a century creating and can't possibly actually fulfill, is generally a good one. But I do want to take issue with the underlying assumptions in the report, including the ones that lead the UN to the most controversial and media-attention gathering claim - that we need to move towards a…
illconsidered | December 17, 2008How's this for jaw dropping, mind-boggling, unintentional irony?
Question to the Bush administration at this year's UN climate change talks:
If you look back over the course of the last few years, is there anything you would have done differently or is there anything you wished had happened but didn't happen?
Answer:
I wish first that Russia had made its mind up sooner as to whether it was going to join Kyoto or not.
Read the particulars here. (No it won't make anymore sense)