climate change

13 April: Multilateralism failing us? Big techs saving us?

Posted on April 13, 2020 Leave a Comment

OECD Angel Gurria is clear: there is not enough international cooperation between governments to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic. To be sure, we did not enter the crisis on a strong multilateral footing. And according to Oxford University Ngaire Woods, nationalist responses and competition have so far prevailed. International organizations have also shown the limits of their power – largely a reflection of that given to them by their member states. Stephen Buranyi, for instance, gives a great historical account of why the WHO can’t handle the pandemic. So it was refreshing to see 200 former presidents, ministers and heads of international organizations come together to ask the G20 to step up its game. Initiated by Gordon Brown with LSE Erik Berglof holding the pen, the letter calls for heightened global cooperation in response to the twin health and economic crisis and a $8 billion package to help prevent the second wave of Covid-19. Let’s see if/how finance ministers respond this week when they regroup at the 2020 World Bank and IMF Spring Meetings.

In “How Chinese Apps handled Covid-19”, Dan Grover gives a good overview of the key role played by Chinese big techs in the crisis response. They provided information through integrated tools, helped triage patients towards fever clinics and coronavirus hospitals, scaled telemedicine services, and developed health QR Codes for reporting and tracing. His blog post was published a few days before Apple and Google announced their partnership to develop a new contact tracing platform. Does this further feed into reversing the tech backlash trend flagged two weeks ago? It’s probably wise to take the long view on this one by, for instance, watching the 3-episode PBS “Networld” of Niall Ferguson [available on youtube if you are not in the US]. Little is new in the documentary but I enjoyed thinking about the parallel between today’s digital networks and ancient analog networks used to foster revolutions, and learning about network theory.

My picture this week is from MIT Tech Review Will Heaven’s “Why the coronavirus lockdown is making the internet stronger than ever”. It shows that, with the lockdown, internet connections moved from city offices to suburban homes, ie from highly powered hubs to scattered locations with low bandwidth and outdated cables. According to Heaven this has accelerated traffic capacity upgrade, infrastructure expansion, and data plan loosening – making the internet stronger for more. This is not how I was thinking about this before reading this article. I was thinking about how the lockdown amplifies digital inequalities between urban and rural, and between rich and poor.

My quote this week is from Brookings Kemal Dervis: “A clear parallel between the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change is becoming apparent. Both feature emergence, path dependence, feedback loops, tipping points, and nonlinearity. Both call for eschewing traditional cost-benefit analysis in favor of drastic mitigation to reduce exposure. And, both highlight the need for much closer, forward-looking international cooperation to manage global threats.”

22 March 2020: Back

Posted on March 22, 2020 Leave a Comment

Two years ago, I left UNICEF and stopped What I Read. Several of you reached out recently and I realized that I missed these weekly exchanges with colleagues around the globe, most of whom I had never met in person. Glad to be back hoping you are all well!

The Guardian’s environment editor, John Vidal, reviews recent research on the connections between biodiversity and pandemics in “The tip of the iceberg: is our destruction of nature responsible for Covid-19?”. Disrupted ecosystems are a breeding ground for new viruses. Natural habitats degradation accelerates the transmission of infectious diseases from animals to humans. And today the majority of new diseases affecting humans come from animals. This shows how the health of the environment, the health of humans, and the health of the economy are interconnected. Two thoughts. One, the SDGs which capture such interlinkages remain the right compass. Two, the crisis response should be designed around these interdependences to ensure long term recovery.

Will the COVID-19 response put climate action on the back burner? Paris Accord architect Laurence Tubiana draws a parallel between the two crises: “It’s a lesson:viruses don’t respect borders, climate change doesn’t respect borders. If we do not manage the climate crisis it will be the same.” UCL Economist Mariana Mazzucato argues that “it’s a chance to do capitalism differently” and that bailouts should be structured around the green new deal strategy. Indeed, for New Yorker Bill McKibben, as large corporations are seeking governmental support, there is an opportunity to make it conditional to meeting the Paris Accord targets because “taking money from society means that you owe society something.”

My graph this week is from the 2019 Global Health Security Index, the first assessment of pandemic preparedness for 195 countries. It compiles publicly available data about countries’ levels of health security along six dimensions – prevention, detection, response, health system, norms compliance, and political system. Led by the Nuclear Threat Initiative and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security with the Economist Intelligence Unit, it was launched in 2017 shortly after health security featured prominently at Munich Security Conference and Bill Gates called for an “arsenal of new weapons—vaccines, drugs, and diagnostics – to prepare for epidemics the way the military prepares for war”. Published 6 months ago, the index showed that no country was fully prepared. It ranked US 1st, France 11th, Singapore 24th, Italy 31st, and China 51st. In view of COVID19 responses, revisions might be needed. But what worries me the most is what will happen in the 72 countries classified as least prepared.

My quote this week: “Stay home!”

4 December 2015

Posted on December 4, 2015 Leave a Comment

You can add Frances Jensen’s “The teenage brain” to your Christmas gifts list. It is a useful and accessible read for anybody working with adolescents, including at home. She digests the latest neuroscience findings on brain development to show that adolescence is a critical window of vulnerabilities and opportunities. As connectivity of the brain matures from back to front lobes through childhood, 20% remains unwired when kids enter their teens. She shows the effects of stress, substance abuse, and physical shocks on the adolescent brain development and discusses implications for education and justice systems inter alia. This is mind-blowing stuff that Jensen thinks should be made widely available to practioners, parents and adolescents themselves. So we invited her to our Conversation with Thought Leaders series, see here.

Some of you asked me what I read about ISIS. Like many of you, probably too much. But here are some of the (non-book) write-ups that helped me think and take a long view. On the origins of ISIS, I found Tim Urban’s “From Muhammad to ISIS: Iraq’s full story” clear and useful. On what ISIS is, I was interested in Graeme Wood’s “What ISIS really wants” because of the debate it triggered around the role of religion vs other pull factors attracting recruits. Lydia Wilson’s “What I discovered from interviewing imprisoned ISIS fighters”, for instance, points to “humiliated and enraged young men [seeking] a way out of their insecure and undignified lives; the promise of living in pride as Iraqi Sunni Arabs, which is not just a religious identity but cultural, tribal, and land-based, too.” For the Francophones, I would add Olivier Roy’s “Le djihadisme est une révolte générationnelle et nihiliste” because of his thought-provoking thesis, based on the study of recruits’ profiles, that we are witnessing the Islamization of (youth) radicalism rather than the radicalization of Islam [English speakers can read his Quartz interview here]. And Alain Bertho’s “Il faut être clair un monde a pris fin et il n’y aura pas de retour en arrière” which contrasts ISIS with the 1970ies political terrorism and post-communist social rebellions, and looks at the ideological vacuum they fill for destabilized young people. But I would like to hear which readings you found useful.

I found myself glued to the Bloomberg Carbon Clock, a real-time estimate of the global atmospheric CO2 level. Not very constructive. So my visual this week is from ITU’s “Measuring the information society report 2015”. The good news: 3.2 billion people are online, and 95% of the global population are covered by mobile-cellular networks. The interesting trend: Over the past year, mobile broadband subscriptions (47.2%) overtook households with internet access (46.4%). The bad news: multiple digital divides persist between and within countries; between rural and urban areas; between men and women; between rich and poor; between the more and less educated; and between social groups. The projections: by 2020 53% of people will be online globally; 45% in developing countries; but only 11% in LDCs.

My quote this week is from Nesta CEO Geoff Mulgan in “Meaningful meetings: How can meetings can be made better?”: “Some of the best meetings don’t happen.”

23 October 2015

Posted on October 23, 2015 Leave a Comment

Van der Lijn and Smit’s “Peace keepers under threat? Fatality trends in UN peace operations” deconstructs the commonly held view that the increasingly dangerous contexts peacekeepers are operating in bring growing risks to their lives. Using casualty data from 1990 to 2015 for all UN peace operations personnel (uniformed or not), they show that this assumption is not validated. While 1998-2005 witnessed an increase in fatalities, there has been no clear trend since. The nature of deaths has changed : the “number of personnel killed by malicious acts in 2013 and 2014 was at its highest level for 20 years”. Yet again, the authors show that these remain much lower than the casualties suffered by UN personnel in the 1990ies in former Yugoslavia, Cambodia and Somalia. Also to note the particular case of MINUSMA (Mali) which has sadly topped the fatality ranking over the past couple of years and is now one the deadliest in the history of the UN.

Schroeder’s blogpost “Humanitarian UAV (“drone”) experts meet at MIT” was useful to get an update on the discussions of the “Humanitarian UAV Network”, the progress on the “Humanitarian UAV Code of Conduct and Guidelines”, and general directions of practitioners in this area. The network gathers experts from the UN (e.g., HCR, WFP, OCHA, DPKO), donors (e.g., ECHO), NGOs (e.g., American Red Cross), academia and think tanks. Meeting last week, a year after their first get-together, they saw a visible increase in the number of UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) projects piloted by humanitarian actors from the IOM to map displaced populations, to Catholic Relief Services to track coastal rebuilding, to MSF and UNFPA testing UAVs for health programs. The use of UAVs in our industry has led to passionate and controversial debates which the soon finalized “Code of Conduct and Guidelines” hope to appease. The document covers data ethics, community engagement, partnerships and conflict sensitivity. The views of our innovation unit on this topic can be found here.

My graph this week is from The Financial Times & Climate KIC’s Climate Change Calculator. Ahead of the Paris climate negotiations, 146 countries have made voluntary plans to cut their greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. What will all these pledges amount to? The climate change calculator gives an indication and lets you play around with numbers to visualize their cumulative impact on global warming. If countries continue polluting as they do today, the planet will warm by 6°C by 2100 (remember the Paris agreement should keep us under a 2°C rise). With the 146 pledges made to date, the model tells us that the planet will warm by 4°C. That won’t be good enough.

My quote this week is from Bill Easterly’s “The father of millions” because, honestly, when is the last time you heard him say something positive?: “The revolution in child mortality has many impersonal causes — including the spread of lifesaving medical technologies — but also some very particular heroes, of whom perhaps the biggest is James P. Grant, the director of the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) from 1980 to his death in 1995.”