risks

26 May 2017

Posted on May 26, 2017 Leave a Comment

Megan Roberts’ “The state of the world: report card on international cooperation” summarizes the main findings of the Council of Councils’ 2017 Report Card. It is depressing. The data come from asking the heads of 25 think tanks across the world to grade international cooperation efforts on global challenges. The 2016 overall grade is C minus, down from previous years in the aggregate as well as throughout specific issues from climate change to global health to global trade and conflict. The main driver behind this poor score is the global wave of nationalism coupled with the declining trust in institutions. The report card also ranks global risks and opportunities. Top 3 risks: conflict between states, transnational terrorism, and internal conflicts. Interestingly they are all security-related while the WEF Global Risks Report 2017 had three environmental risks topping its list this year. Top 3 opportunities: combating international terrorism, promoting global health, and advancing development. I cannot draw any comparison with the WEF report as it only looks at risks, contributing to the overall depressing feeling.

Andrew Mayeda’s “World Bank’s star economist is sidelined over war on words” recounts how the World Bank’s Development Economics Group staff mutinied against chief economist Romer and his rough demands to make research more straightforward. Romer requested that researchers connect their work to public debates, define clear purpose for each publication, and make emails shorter. He also had strong views on style, asking for less convoluted wording and more use of active voice while tracking frequency of “and” in reports (which he would not clear if above 2.6%). From this story it seems that requests were conveyed in a painful way. This aside, the rules seem pretty good to me. Especially as I recalled this World Bank research showing that while the Bank spent one quarter of its country service budget on reports, one third were never downloaded and only 13% were downloaded more than 250 times in their shelf-times.

A little extra this week as it is a long week-end for some of us and Bill Gates just shared his summer reading picks. I read two. Homo Deus which I recommended here as a good cerebral trip. It was no surprise to see it in the list as Gates had loved the prequel. What was surprising to me was to see Maylis de Kerangal’s The heart which is more of an emotional trip. de Kerangal is a great writer who can make a page turner out of the science of building a bridge. In The heart, which was entitled “mending the living” in French, you follow a heart being extracted from the body of a young man killed in a car accident to its transplantation in the body of a middle age woman dying of a heart malfunction. It is about grief and how every person around these two protagonists deal with it. It is powerful. I enjoyed it.

My map this week is from Fred Stolle’s “We discovered 1.8 million square miles of forest in the desert”. Stolle and colleagues counted trees on satellite images and found the equivalent of a whole Amazon worth of trees hiding in drylands and deserts. This is good news for the planet. But it also good news for the 2 billion people, most of whom very poor, who live in drylands and depend on these trees for their livelihoods.

My quote this week is from Dame Helen Mirren’s “Tulane commencement speech“: “We do need you to fix things, to make things right, to answer the big and troubling questions of this extraordinary modern world. How is it that we have figured out how to put everything from our resting pulse rate to every book or song we’d ever want to read or listen to on our iPhones – and yet for six years we haven’t found a way to stop little children in Syria from being murdered by poisonous gas?”

13 January 2017

Posted on January 13, 2017 Leave a Comment

Iris Bohnet’s What works: Gender equality by design is the book I was waiting for on the topic. Using a behavioral economics lens, Bohnet systematically compiles evidence from businesses, universities, and governments about what works and does not, and offers super practical steps to boost gender equality. The book first unpacks the unconscious biases we all suffer from. It then shows that changing mindsets is not the solution. $8 billion are spent yearly in diversity training in the US alone with no evidence of success. It also argues that going it alone is hard and risky. Bohnet’s central thesis is that de-biasing our environments by design is what yields the most impact. And she offers 36 research-grounded design suggestions to increase inclusivity in the workplace. They include: adopting a Gawande-inspired interview checklist, getting rid of self-evaluation in performance assessment, using people analytics to screen job applicants, having quota to appoint counter-typical leaders, using a point system to measure workload, using public rankings to motivate and compete on gender equality. A fundamental pre-requisite to these recommendations is the collection of staff data to understand where inequalities are and how they evolve. Despite its title, the book’s thesis and solutions apply to inequalities beyond gender. If you are committed to increasing diversity in the workplace, read this book and experiment with some proposals, or pass it on to someone in your office who is in a position to move the needle. I am doing just that.

Peter Fabricius’ “Peering into a murky crystal ball; where will Africa be in 2030?” shares the main findings of a recent Institute for Security Studies (ISS) seminar on Africa’s future. Under each of the three ISS-designed scenario (baseline, optimistic, pessimistic) Africa misses most SDGs by 2030. The main factors responsible for this outcome are poor governance and service delivery. Prospects drawn from the UK Ministry of Defense’s analysis of regional strategic trends to 2045 for Africa are more upbeat. Here extreme poverty is defeated by 2045 when Africa’s numbers catch up with the rest of the world. In this scenario, positive drivers of change are external to the region with a global economy increasingly reliant on African youth’s cheap labor. This illustrates how a foresight exercise can bring different perspectives. What matters is not to get it right but to unearth different possible futures so as to be ready no matter what.

Uber’s Movement is on my list of visual tool this week. It is new and shiny. It is launched in the midst of long-lasting (data sharing) disputes between Uber and regulators. And it could transform urban planning. But I also need to flag this graph from the WEF Global Risk Report plotting the 2017 global risk landscape because the top risks, once impact and likelihood are aggregated, are environmental. This report has been published for 12 years and this is a first.

My quote this week is from Facebook’s Fidji Simo in her “Introducing: the Facebook Journalism Project”: “We will work with third-party organizations on how to better understand and to promote news literacy both on and off our platform to help people in our community have the information they need to make decisions about which sources to trust.”

24 March 2016

Posted on March 24, 2016 Leave a Comment

“Global_Risks_and_Opportunities_Survey_Report” analyzes the results of a perception survey conducted with 460 UNICEF staff working across the globe. The highest risks children experts see in the 15 coming years are climate change and environmental degradation, rising inequalities, and political instability and conflict. The main opportunities they list are science and technology, the elimination of contemporary scourges, and the exponential power of girls. It was interesting to see that some key areas of UNICEF’s work like education and communicable diseases were not ranked high on the lists of risks and opportunities; and that, overall, respondents were very technology-optimistic. All background data including some regional perspectives, are available here.

There is a growing interest of international organizations (IOs) in foresight work. Foresight units are popping up in IO headquarters and an increasing number of field and regional offices are looking at ways to integrate foresight in their planning exercises. This is really exciting. This year, our unit is teaming up with the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) to take stock of global trends and their impacts on children, develop scenarios and hold a couple of foresight workshops with country offices. There is also a push to further integrate foresight work in UNDAF business. The rationale behind this is captured in Tully’s “Applying foresight and alternative futures to the UNDAF”. Some countries, like Montenegro, have already undertaken interesting foresight exercises, see here. There are expectations that some of the 39 countries starting to craft their UNDAF in 2016 will also do so. This is a space to watch.