Showing posts from category Eye On.
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UNFPA State of World Population 2010
›Today marks the release of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) annual State of the World Population Report. But the 2010 edition, “From Conflict and Crisis to Renewal: Generations of Change,” is unlike those that have come before. In lieu of the traditional statistic-driven report, this year’s edition has enlisted another tool to document living conditions across the world — storytelling. In addition to demographers, the UNFPA looked to journalists to fan out across the world to gather stories on the ground and paint a portrait of the challenges and opportunities facing today’s global population that goes beyond the numbers, with particular focus on gender issues and human insecurity.
For more on the UNFPA report, be sure to listen to The New Security Beat’s interview with one of its authors, Barbara Crossette, who talks about her experiences dealing with family planning around the world, as part of our ongoing Pop Audio series.
Video Credit: UNFPA. -
The “Condom King” speaks at TEDxChange on Poverty Reduction and a “9th MDG”
›“We have now found the weapon of mass protection,” said Mechai Viravaidya (a.k.a. the “Condom King”) at the recent TEDxChange event in New York. Viravaidya is the founder and chairman of the Population and Community Development Association and a former senator of Thailand. He spoke about his innovative approaches to addressing Thailand’s once high rates of poverty, child mortality, and HIV through the promotion of family planning and condom use.
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Google Data Maps Development Indicators
›If you have not had the (purely wonky) pleasure of playing with Google’s Public Data Explorer, do yourself a favor and direct your browser there now.
Born from Hans Rosling’s Gapminder, Google’s data explorer currently allows the user to choose from 24 different data sets, including information from the World Bank, U.S. Census Bureau, Eurostat, and Energy Information Agency. Users can then customize the dataset’s variables, save their work, and even embed the resulting chart, “unveiling the beauty of statistics for a fact-based world view,” as the Gapminder site puts it.
The example dataset above uses development indicators from the World Bank to show areas of the world where high fertility rate and heavy reliance on subsistence agriculture have persisted over time. It’s worth noting that many of the countries in the upper right of the graph are also where we find persistent conflict, and, if one accepts the predictions that Africa will see some of the most profound effects of climate change, they also face real risk of continuing instability as declining crop yields threaten livelihoods and population growth continues. -
Saleem Ali at TEDxUVM on Environmental Peacemaking
›“The use of the term ‘peace’ is in many circles still considered taboo, because immediately people think you are talking about something that is utopian,” said University of Vermont Professor Saleem Ali at a recent TEDx event on sustainability. “But I’m here to tell you that peace is pragmatic. Peace is possible.”
Ali points out the value of peace to every sector of society and, using an example from Ecuador and Peru, argues for the utility of the environment as a peacemaker. Other longstanding conflict areas like Cyprus, Iraq, Israel, and Korea are also ripe for environmental peacebuilding efforts, he says.
Professor Ali has written for The New Security Beat before on the strengths and weaknesses of viewing conservation and sustainability efforts through a strictly security lens. He points out that environmentalists must tread a fine line when assigning causality between the environment and conflict, but even when natural resources or climate are not central to a conflict, environmental peacebuilding can still play a role in creating shared ground (sometimes literally) between combatants.
“Treasures of the Earth,” Ali’s latest book, examines the thorny subject of how best to balance resource extraction in developing countries with long-term sustainability. Recent examples, such as Angola and Liberia’s blood diamonds, the DRC’s conflict minerals, and concerns over Afghanistan’s potential reserves have shown the difficulty in striking that balance.
“Ultimately, conflict trumps everything else” in terms of what we ought to be concerned with, Ali argues, and therefore, anyone, no matter their profession or capacity, should keep the pursuit of peace in mind – and all options on the table – when making decisions that affect others. -
Floods, Fire, Landslides, and Drought: The Guardian’s “Weather Crisis 2010”
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From the Guardian’s DataBlog comes an excellent overview of some of the extreme weather affecting the globe this summer, from the devastating floods in Pakistan which have inflicted “huge losses” to crops and exacerbated an already tenuous security situation, to the wildfires in Russia which have smothered the capital in dangerous smog and crippled domestic wheat supplies.
“Global temperatures in the first half of the year were the hottest since records began more than a century ago,” writes author and graphic artist Mark McCormick.
The orange areas of the map represent high pressure systems and the blue, low pressure systems, which as explained by Peter Stott of the Met Office, are important indicators of the rare climatic conditions that caused this summer’s abnormal conditions across Eurasia.
The flooding in Pakistan has garnered the most international attention, having now affected more people than the 2004 tsunami, 2010 Haiti earthquake, and 2005 Kashmir earthquake combined. Other highlighted areas of the map include flooding in Poland and Germany, drought in England, mudslides in Latin and South America, record-breaking drought and hunger in West Africa, and flooding and landslides in China, which recently pushed the world’s largest hydroelectric dam to its limit and have now been blamed for more than 1,000 deaths.
Although it does a good job highlighting the frequency and severity of extreme weather events this summer, it’s important to note that the map only covers events in July and August. That leaves out the “1000-year” floods in Tennessee this May as well as the heavy snowfall seen in the Northeast United States and the winter of “white death” in Mongolia earlier this year, which also severely disrupted local and national infrastructure as well as a great many people’s livelihoods.
Sources: Agence France-Presse, BBC, Guardian, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, New York Times, Telegraph, UN Dispatch.
Image Credit: “Weather Crisis 2010” by Mark McCormick, courtesy of Scribd user smfrogers and The Guardian. -
Boosting the U.S. Role in the Global Health Arena
›A new video from the Commission on Smart Global Health Policy, which was established by the Center for Strategic & International Studies, reviews the commission’s progress towards its goal of encouraging the U.S. government to embrace global health as a pillar of U.S. foreign policy.
The video reviews the recommendations from the commission’s March 2010 report, A Healthier, Safer and More Prosperous World: 1) Maintain robust U.S. support for the fight against HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis; 2) Prioritize maternal and child health, especially in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia; 3) Help other nations improve their capacity to prevent and respond to outbreaks of contagious disease; 4) Expand U.S. capacity to fund future global health initiatives by securing long-term investments for such efforts; and 5) Step up U.S. funding for multilaterals engaged in the global health field, including the World Health Organization, Global Fund, UNICEF, the World Bank, and the GAVI Alliance.
In the months ahead, commission members will be participating in public forums throughout the United States to discuss and promote the recommendations included in the report, before gathering in January to review the Obama administration’s progress on global health as the administration begins its third year. To date, the centerpiece of the administration’s health outreach efforts has been the six-year, $63 billion Global Health Initiative, designed to promote an enhanced U.S. role in addressing public health issues overseas.
The CSIS Global Health Policy Center will also be launching a year-long debate series called “Fault Lines in Global Health,” focusing on controversial topics in the global health field. The series’ kick-off event will center on U.S. AIDS funding, and is scheduled for Friday, August 6, 2010, from 9:30-11:00 a.m. -
PRB Maps the PHE World
›The Population Reference Bureau (PRB) has created an interactive Google map that highlights population, health, and environmental programs in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The Population, Health, and Environment (PHE) Map shows the locations of projects that combine improved health services, sustainable natural resource management, and ecosystem conservation.
According to PRB’s Maura Graff and Jason Bremner, “the map aims to give viewers both a sense of the scale of current PHE integration efforts, and specific information about individual organizations, projects, and their location.”
Clicking on a marker will reveal the title of a PHE program, a short description of its goals and outcomes, a link to its website, and the occasional picture of the project in action. A list on the left alphabetically catalogs all the projects based on region.
The map also provides the opportunity for those working on PHE projects in the field to find nearby projects in order to share experiences. For example, in Ethiopia, Population Media Center and DSW’s Youth to Youth could share lessons learned about disseminating information on the reduction of female genital mutilation, the importance of providing family planning services to young married couples, and the linkage between reduced family size and enhanced stewardship of social and natural resources.
Communities that understand how population, health, and environment are intertwined are more engaged and energized to make a difference. In a video interview with ECSP, Roger-Mark De Souza, director of foundation and corporate relations at the Sierra Club, explains that PHE projects are so effective because solutions to a community’s liked problems demand this logical integration. For example, while learning about the health benefits of birth spacing, father and mothers also learn how their family planning decisions can improve the economic and environmental prospects of the community.
Just like PHE projects themselves, the map is a work in progress; PRB is seeking to add PHE projects that are still active or ended after 2005. Please contact Maura Graff if you would like to add a project.
Josephine Kim is a cadet at the United States Military Academy at West Point, and an intern with the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program. -
WomanStats Maps Gender-Linked Security Issues
›The WomanStats Project has published an array of maps depicting the challenges and conditions facing women worldwide today. The maps, which serve as a visual representation of the project’s database, cover gender-linked security issues such as: son preference and sex ratio, physical security, inequity in family law, human trafficking, polygamy, maternal mortality, discrepancy in education, government participation, intermingling between the sexes in public, and required dress codes.These maps help researchers visually see correlations between two or more map themes. For example, Women’s Physical Security is moderately correlated to fertility rate, while Sex Ratio/Son Preference is not highly correlated to any other measures tested, such as women in the labor force, democracy, political rights, and economic rights. In addition to maps, the WomanStats Project’s database was used to create graphs that compare the scale values of Physical Security Clusters and Son Preference/Sex Ratio Distributions to the number of countries the scale level affected.
Some of the maps would benefit from additional functionality. For example, the “Women’s Physical Security” map broadly categorizes states based on high, medium, and low levels of security, but the legend is not linked to the definitions of these classifications. Another useful addition would be data tables that rank the countries for each theme. Such enhancements would better enable the viewer to perform empirical and spatial analysis of the status of women.
Overall, the WomanStats Project maps offer the viewer engaging visual depictions of how women’s lives vary across the world, and how countries compare to each other in terms of women’s security.
Josephine Kim is a cadet at the United States Military Academy at West Point and an intern with the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program.
Map and graph used courtesy of the WomanStats Project.
