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NTS Bulletin January 2010 (Issue 1)
Issues:
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Disclaimer: All links and news reports are correct at the time of publication.
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MAIN HIGHLIGHT
COP15 at Copenhagen, 7-18 December 2009
Briefing the press at the end of the two-week conference, Yvo de Boer, Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC said an accord has been reached that has significant elements, but that is not legally binding. He described the accord as ‘politically important’, demonstrating a willingness to move forward. It brings together a diversity of countries that have put in place a letter of intent with the ingredients of an architecture for a response to climate change.
The key points of the accord include the objective to keep the maximum temperature rise to below 2 degrees Celsius; the commitment to list developed country emission reduction targets and mitigation action by developing countries for 2020; USD 30 billion short-term funding for immediate action till 2012 and USD 100 billion annually by 2020 in long-term financing, as well as mechanisms to support technology transfer and forestry. The challenge now is to turn what is agreed into something that is legally binding in Mexico one year from now.
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HEALTH SECURITY
News & Commentaries
- ‘Afghanistan: Fighting H1N1 with one lab and no vaccine’, IRIN, 24 November 2009.
- ‘First swine flu cases confirmed in Gaza’, IRIN, 7 December 2009.
- Catharine Paddock, ‘H1N1 swine flu deaths reveal new pattern of the disease, Brazilian study’, Medical News Today, 23 December 2009.
- ‘CDC: H1N1 activity continues to decline’, Infectious Disease News, 23 December 2009.
- ‘A/H1N1 pandemic death toll rises to 11,516, says WHO’, China View, 24 December 2009.
- ‘Pakistan: Nine swine flu deaths prompt fear’, IRIN, 24 December 2009.
- Alicia Chang, ‘Study: Swine flu poses a threat to new moms’, Associated Press, 24 December 2009.
Papers & Reports
- Pratik Mukherjee, Poh Lian Lim, Angela Chow, Timothy Barkham, Eillyne Seow, Mar Kyaw Win, Arlene Chua, Yee Sin Leo & Mark I-Cheng Chen, ‘Epidemiology of Travel-Associated Pandemic (H1N1) 2009 Infection in 116 patients, Singapore’, Emerging Infectious Diseases, vol. 16, 1 November 2009 - January 2010.
This article aims to understand how travel patterns affected the initial influenza A (H1N1) pandemic outbreak in Singapore. The authors examined epidemiologic and travel data for the first 116 case-patients admitted to Tan Tock Seng Hospital. They arrived mostly from North America, followed by Australasia and Southeast Asia. Individuals on longer flights were more likely to become ill before arrival while those on shorter flights tended to become ill after arrival. Thermal scanners detected fevers in 12 per cent of the arriving case-patients, resulting in a shorter time to isolation for those individuals. An increased understanding of how travel-associated infections propagated the first wave of this pandemic can yield rich insights into how health authorities might respond to future outbreaks of emerging respiratory infections.
Pneumonia kills 1.8 million children under five years of age every year, more than any other illness, in every region of the world. In spite of its huge toll, relatively few global resources are dedicated to tackling this child killer. In response to this situation, WHO and UNICEF developed the Global Action Plan for the prevention and control of Pneumonia (GAPP). The aim of the GAPP is to increase awareness of pneumonia as a major cause of child death and spur action to deal more effectively with the problem.
The specter of the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic, which killed an estimated 40-100 million people worldwide, hangs over analyses and responses to the current pandemic of swine-origin novel influenza A (H1N1). There are four major differences between today and 1918. We have advance warning of the threat of a highly lethal influenza pandemic, a global human health surveillance and response system, new medical countermeasures, and there is no global conflict like World War I to act as an incubator and vector for a highly lethal influenza virus and an impediment to medical and public health responses to the pandemic.
The Foundation has issued its latest survey on the US role in global health, which probes American public opinion about efforts by the US to improve the health of people in developing nations. According to poll findings, most Americans support current US spending to improve health conditions in poorer nations despite the economic recession and more of them prefer an emphasis on health infrastructure rather than fighting specific diseases.
Events and Announcements
- Mekong Basin Disease Surveillance meeting in Beijing, China, February 2010.
- Conference on Global Health Security, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia, 1-2 February 2010.
- Dateline 2010: Global Health Goals and Metrics, Washington, D.C., USA, 14-18 June 2010.
Latest Publication
By Howard Lempel, Ross A. Hammond & Joshua M. Epstein.
School closure is an important component of US pandemic flu mitigation strategy. The benefit is a reduction in epidemic severity through reduction in school-age contacts. However, school closure involves two types of cost. First is the direct economic impact of worker absenteeism generated by school closures. Second, many of the relevant absentees will be health care workers themselves, which will adversely affect the delivery of vaccine and other emergency services. Neither of these costs has been estimated in detail for the US. The authors offer detailed estimates, and improve on the methodologies thus far employed in the non-US literature. They give estimates of both the direct economic and health care impacts for school closure durations of two, four, eight, and 12 weeks under a range of assumptions. They find that closing all schools in the US for four weeks could cost between $10 and $47 billion dollars (0.1-0.3 per cent of GDP) and lead to a reduction of 6 to 19 per cent in key health care personnel. These should be considered conservative (i.e., low) economic estimates in that earnings rather than total compensation are used to calculate costs. The authors also provide per student costs, so regionally heterogeneous policies can be evaluated. These estimates permit the epidemiological benefits of school closure to be compared to the costs at multiple scales and over many durations.
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CLIMATE CHANGE, ENVIRONMENTAL SECURITY AND NATURAL DISASTERS
News and Commentaries
- Robert Stavins, ‘What hath Copenhagen wrought? A preliminary assessment of the Copenhagen Accord’, Harvard Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, 20 December 2009.
- Jacob Werksman, ‘“Taking note” of the Copenhagen Accord: What it means’, World Resources Institute, 20 December 2009.
- David Doniger, ‘The Copenhagen Accord: The big step forward’, Natural Resources Defense Council, 21 December 2009.
- Lenore Taylor, ‘China's climate stonewall’, The Australian, 21 December 2009.
- Arvind Panagariya, ‘The Copenhagen Accord and India’, The Brookings Institution, 22 December 2009.
- Mark Lynas, ‘How do I know China wrecked the Copenhagen deal? I was in the room’, The Guardian, 22 December 2009.
- Kenneth G. Lieberthal, ‘Climate change and China's global responsibilities’, The Brookings Institution, 23 December 2009.
- Martin Khor, ‘Blame Denmark, not China, for Copenhagen failure’, The Guardian, 28 December 2009.
Papers and Reports
A Copenhagen agreement on climate change will likely take a legally binding form, but one that provides for a range of commitments by countries. This Working Paper clarifies a complex set of issues around the legal character of commitments and weighs the potential risks and benefits to countries of expressing their ‘nationally appropriate mitigation actions’ in a legally binding form.
The World Bank has recently completed a Country Environmental Analysis to review the key challenges and opportunities for Indonesia's environment and management of its natural resources, set in the context of sustainable economic development. The report highlights the economic costs of environmental degradation, and identifies key recommendations to address priority issues of environmental governance and climate change. This analysis intends to guide the World Bank's support to Indonesian institutions for more sustainable development. However, the report can also be used by Indonesian stakeholders to trigger more intense dialogue and prompt decision-making in relation to Indonesia's development path.
It seems obvious that the more people there are on the planet, the more the pressure on planetary resources and the larger the emissions of greenhouse gases. So it also seems obvious that population growth must be a major driver of global warming. But it is just as obvious that very poor households contribute very little to greenhouse gas emissions. So if most of the world’s population growth is among very poor households, population growth is not the culprit. The greatest human driver of global warming is the number of consumers on the planet and their consumption level. Individuals and households contribute to global warming by consuming goods and services that cause greenhouse gas emissions – for instance, by owning a refrigerator or a car. Through this they are responsible for all the fossil fuels that go into making, distributing, advertising, selling, using and disposing of it.
Latest Publication
By Alex Evans & David Stevens.
Looking at the weak result of the Copenhagen meeting, this paper offers 12 recommendations for deal-makers to steer into the skid by building on unprecedented engagement by heads of state; ratcheting up pressure for US legislation; revitalising strategy among those pushing for a deal; and fundamentally altering the politics of developing country engagement on climate.
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FOOD SECURITY
News & Commentaries
- ‘Food stamps: The economics of eating well’, The New York Times, 7 December 2009.
- ‘A better future for coastal fishers in South and Southeast Asia’, FAO Media Centre, 9 December 2009.
- Alexander Dziadosz, ‘UNDP calls on wealthy Arab states to help neighbors’, Reuters, 20 December 2009.
- Paul Voosen, ‘Quiet biotech revolution transforming crops’, The New York Times, 21 December 2009.
- Elton Robinson, ‘World rice crop falls, prices up’, Farm Press, 24 December 2009.
- Vivek Kaul, ‘Melting of Himalayan glaciers the biggest threat to food security’, DNA, 29 December 2009.
Papers & Reports
Globally, 1.7 billion farmers are highly vulnerable to climate change impacts. The many who are already hungry are particularly vulnerable. Yet scaling up localised ‘resilience’ successes offers hope for these farmers, while helping to address the climate problem. New thinking to recognize vulnerable farmers as critical partners in delivering solutions is needed to increase their resilience and to enable them to help combat climate change. Bold new public investment to the supporting institutions will be needed.
An overview of the current scientific knowledge available on climate change implications for fisheries and aquaculture is provided through three technical papers that were presented and discussed during the Expert Workshop on Climate Change Implications for Fisheries and Aquaculture (Rome, 7–9 April 2008). The first paper reviews the physical and ecological impacts of climate change relevant to marine and inland capture fisheries and aquaculture. The second paper tackles the consequences of climate change impacts on fisheries and their dependent communities. The third paper addresses the impacts of climate change on aquaculture.
From 2006 to mid-2008 the international prices of agricultural commodities increased considerably, by a factor larger than two. This upward trend in agricultural prices captured the world’s attention as a new food crisis was emerging. Several explanations for these movements in prices, ranging from demand-driven forces to supply shocks, have been provided by analysts, researchers, and development institutions. This paper is an attempt to empirically validate these explanations using time series econometrics and data at monthly frequency.
Latest Publications
This book is written jointly by the World Bank Group and the World Food Programme, building on the comparative advantage of both organisations. The overall objective is to provide guidance on how to develop and implement effective school feeding programs, in the context of both a productive safety net as part of the response to the social shocks of the current global crises, and a fiscally sustainable investment in human capital as part of long-term global efforts to achieve Education for All and provide social protection for the poor.
Edited by David C. Dawe, Piedad F. Moya & Cheryll B. Casiwan.
The Philippines is currently the largest importer of rice in the world, importing around 1.8 million tons of rice in 2008. According to this book, three main factors explain why the Philippines imports rice:
Land area: The Philippines is about 300,000 square kilometres in size, of which around 43,000 square kilometres of harvested area are used for rice production. As most of the country is very mountainous and consists of many small islands, suitable land is limited to expand rice production without affecting wetlands, forests, or areas producing other crops. Urban areas also continue to expand rapidly.
Population growth: The population of the Philippines is estimated at 97 million. Its annual growth rate of around 2 per cent – among the world’s highest – means that just to keep pace with growing demand the country would have to increase rice production and yield at rates rarely seen in history.
Infrastructure: Irrigation infrastructure is not used and maintained as efficiently as it could be, thus reducing productivity potential. Transport infrastructure, particularly good-quality roads, is lacking in the Philippines, which affects the transport of rice and hinders the rice trade.
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ENERGY SECURITY
News & Commentaries
- ‘ADB to Invest in Greater Mekong Subregion, clean energy fund’, Asian Development Bank Media Center, 17 December 2009.
- ‘China tightens energy hold in Central Asia’, The Economic Times, 17 December 2009.
- ‘NE Asian Energy Dialogue Channel Needed’, KBS World News, 20 December 2009.
- ‘S. Korea poised to compete in “nuclear renaissance”: NEA official’, OANA/Yonhap, 22 December 2009.
- ‘Taiwan unveils Asia’s biggest solar plant: Govt’, AFP, 23 December 2009.
- ‘Tokyo electric’s quake-hit nuclear plant suffers another setback’, Nikkei.com, 24 December 2009.
- M. Zafar Haider Jappa, ‘Energy sharing in the South Asian context’, Business Recorder, 27 December 2009.
- Anna Smolchenko, ‘Putin launches new Russia oil route to energy-hungry Asia’, AFP, 28 December 2009.
Papers & Reports
This report is a culmination of a conference jointly conducted by the National Bureau of Asian Research, the Global Energy and Environment Initiative at the School of Advanced International Studies of the John Hopkins University in May 2009 in Washington D.C., USA. Entitled ‘The New Energy Silk Road: The Growing Asia-Middle East Energy Nexus’, this conference aimed to explore the rapid, historic shift in new capital flows, energy partnerships and strategic relationships from one between the Middle East and the developed world toward one which comes to be increasingly dominated by a developing Asia, which has been witnessing growing demand for energy since the mid-1990s. In this conference, four main players – China, India, Saudi Arabia and Iran – constituted the key focal points of discussion; not to forget the increasingly prominent roles of emerging external players as well, in particular Japan, Korea and Russia. In view of the long-standing American power and influence in the Middle East, the report also delves into a discussion on the long-term implications for American strategic and energy interests in the Middle East as a result of increasing energy and geopolitical ties between the region and Asia, especially emerging great powers such as China and India.
This paper first discusses the connection between nuclear power, nuclear proliferation and terrorism risks in order to illuminate the importance of future nuclear power development to global security. Next, the intertwining relationship among nuclear power expansion, the future of nuclear disarmament and international nuclear regimes is highlighted. Finally, the authors conclude with some observations about current global nuclear challenges, arguing that the global nuclear future remains fraught with uncertainty. They point out that decisions made in the coming years regarding nuclear arms control and disarmament, the spread of nuclear power technologies and the reform of international nuclear regimes will strongly determine the future of world nuclear safety and security.
Events & Announcements
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