Weekending Sunday, 17 February 2008

LA NINA GATHERS STRENGTH, CAUSING CONCERN IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

11 February 2008 [MEDIAGLOBAL]: The climate phenomenon known as La Niña is gathering strength and affecting global weather patterns, according to a report released this week by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the UN’s authoritative voice on weather, climate and water. “Globally La Niña, in very general terms, will mean that those parts of the world that normally experience dry weather will be drier and those with wet weather will be wetter,” Dr. Rupa Kumar Kolli, Chief of the WMO’s World Climate and Services Division and the WMO’s La Niña expert, told MediaGlobal. “The Atlantic and Pacific hurricane activity will increase with La Niña and the effects of severe droughts are likely in those already dry parts of the world,” he said. La Niña events are characterized by the cyclical cooling of water in the central and Equatorial Pacific. According to the WMO, the current La Niña began in the third quarter of 2007, and has grown stronger in the last three months, with surface water temperatures now 1.5 to two degrees Celsius colder than average. Already the effects are evident, Kolli said. “We have already seen some of these impacts in the third quarter of 2007, in terms of devastating floods in South Asia and Africa.” La Niña events typically last for nine to 12 months. The current event is predicted to last well into the second quarter of 2008. So for developing nations, Kolli warned, flood and drought risk remains “definitely a cause for concern.”

SMALL ISLAND STATES PROPOSE NEW IDEAS TO FIGHT CLIMATE CHANGE

12 February 2008 [MEDIAGLOBAL]: The Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) is lobbying to raise finances and international awareness of the impact of climate change on small island developing states (SIDS). SIDS are defined as “small island and low lying coastal countries that share similar sustainable development challenges, including small population, lack of resources, remoteness, susceptibility to natural disasters, excessive dependence on international trade and vulnerability to global developments.” Small island states suffer disproportionately from the negative effects of climate change when compared to other developing nations, yet produce less than one percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. AOSIS emphasizes the need for partnerships with the United Nations, financial institutions, and NGOs to encourage action. “We’ve been raising the alarm bells for 20 years now, because we’re the ones who are feeling the impacts first,” said Dr. Angus Friday, the Chair of AOSIS and Permanent Representative of Grenada, in an interview with MediaGlobal. “Having been exposed to the impacts of climate change for 20 years, it has given us enough time to think about the solutions, and not just think about it but to start doing things about it.”

ISLANDS COULD BE ‘LIVING LABORATORIES’ FOR CLIMATE CHANGE TECHNOLOGY

12 February 2008 [MEDIAGLOBAL]: Companies developing green technologies to combat climate change should make use of small island states as “living laboratories” to test the efficacy of their products in the field, says The Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS). With climate change now seemingly inevitable, many companies in developed nations are coming up with technologies, such as alternative power sources, that will help humans lessen the effects of shifting weather patterns and rising temperatures. But while climate change feels like a distant prospect to the developed world, many small island states are already living their worst climate change nightmares. Because they are low-lying, and have limited landmass, small island states are feeling many of the effects of climate change larger countries won’t feel for years. Thus, Dr. Angus Friday, Permanent Representative of Grenada and Chair of AOSIS told MediaGlobal, small island states can provide an excellent testing ground for these technologies. Such a situation has the potential to benefit all parties, Friday said, as companies have an opportunity to trouble-shoot their technologies more cost-effectively than they could in the developed world, and the people of the small island nations benefit from technology they might not otherwise have access to. “[The technologies] would have been tested in principle in a laboratory somewhere, and then it’s a case of rolling it out to demonstrate its applicability in a real society” Friday told MediaGlobal. “That’s where we come in.”

KENYAN OFFICIAL CALLS FOR END OF ‘WINNER TAKE ALL’ POLITICS

12 February 2008 [MEDIAGLOBAL]: A new constitution could be a first step toward solving the deeper problems that have plunged Kenya into a month and a half of unprecedented bloodshed, said Maina Kiai, Chairman of the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights and Advocate of the High Court of Kenya, speaking at Columbia University on Tuesday. While political chaos and ethnic violence have called Kenya’s very existence into question, “the crisis also presents us with a unique opportunity which we need to grab,” Kiai said. “This is a time to reconstitute the state.” Kenya’s rival political leaders have pledged to rewrite the constitution within a year, potentially to allow power to be shared more equally among parties. Kenya’s government must move away from the “winner take all” mentality, Kiai told MediaGlobal. He called for “Proportional representation within parliament, government, that says ‘we recognize that the minority vote, in its minority, is a significant vote.’” While political parties tend to be drawn along tribal lines, Kiai warned against building issues of ethnicity into a new constitution. “We can’t pretend it doesn’t exist. [Ethnicity] is a big issue for us and the country,” he said, adding that Tanzania has worked to bring its many ethnic groups together by encouraging the use of a common language, Kiswahili. “We have many ideas,” he said.

INNOVATIVE MOBILE PHONE HIV/AIDS EDUCATION PROGRAM LAUNCHED IN UGANDA

14 February 2008 [MEDIAGLOBAL]: A pilot project using cell phone-based texting quizzes to educate users about HIV/AIDS is being launched this week in Uganda. Text to Change (TTC), a Netherlands-based NGO, developed the quizzes, which focus on general knowledge about HIV/AIDS. TTC estimates that less than 50 percent of young people in sub-Saharan Africa have comprehensive knowledge of HIV. The aim, Bas Hoefman, founder of the Text To Change Foundation told MediaGlobal, is to create “a significant increase in HIV/AIDS knowledge levels and an increase in uptake of VCT [voluntary counseling and testing] in Uganda.” With the number of mobile phone users in Africa at 4 million and increasing steadily, a phone-based program has the potential to reach many people, even across wide geographic areas. The pilot project, implemented in partnership with Celtel-Uganda and the AIDS Information Center (AIC) in Kampala, will start among 15,000 mobile phone subscribers in the Mbarara district of Uganda over the next 6 to 8 weeks. Hoefman, however, hopes that the program will soon reach significantly further. “Our ultimate goal is to expand the program first in Uganda, then to more African countries and eventually worldwide in order to become a worldwide platform of mobile phone based health services,” he said.

ETHNIC VIOLENCE IN KENYA NOT GENOCIDE, YET

14 February 2008 [MEDIAGLOBAL]: The violence that exploded following Kenya’s December elections has torn the country apart. At least a thousand people have lost their lives, and as many as 600,000 more have been displaced. But the ethnic violence has not reached the proportions of genocide yet, Ahunna Eziakonwa, head of the Africa (II) section of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), said in an interview with MediaGlobal. While Jendayi Frazer, the chief U.S. envoy to Africa called the recent rash of tribe-based killings “ethnic cleansing,” and Alpha Oumar Konare, the commission chairman of the African Union (AU) called on African leaders to intervene to stop impending genocide, Eziakonwa was hesitant to use either term. “What we’re seeing is [that] all the preventative action needs to be taken now so that we don’t get to that point. But we’re not at that point,” she said. She underscored the importance of ongoing peace talks led by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. “While the problems are not ones that can be solved overnight, we are hoping that at least the first steps in the right direction in terms of political outcome will help to stop the violence,” she said. A political solution is urgently needed before the underlying causes of the conflict can be addressed. Most important, she said, is that “the killing stops and the displacement stops and the destruction of livelihoods [stops]. And these talks could contribute immensely to that, cooling the tempers, and then people can begin to deal with the real issues which will then take, what, a year—two years? Who knows how long.”

COMMUNICATIONS TRAINING WILL IMPROVE HUMANITARIAN COORDINATION EFFORTS

15 February 2008 [MEDIAGLOBAL]: The Vodafone Group Foundation has joined with the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) and the United Nations Foundation to establish an information and communications technology (ICT) training program. The partnership will focus on harmonizing telecommunications during disasters. Over a period of three years, the partnership intends to produce faster and more efficient responses to crises and expand the number of trained ICT staff by 500 “responders.” The program will include the deployment of rapid response ICT teams, who will often be called upon to re-establish the communication infrastructure that is essential to disaster relief. “This partnership supports the smart, effective use of telecommunications technology to enable the WFP to quickly deploy into the most difficult and dangerous situations to set up the communications networks necessary for relief workers to coordinate logistics and deliver supplies,” Katherine Miller of the United Nations Foundation told MediaGlobal. “This is not about technology for technology’s sake – it’s about harnessing the power of telecommunications technologies to better enable the WFP and other humanitarian groups to get the job done.” The training program will be open to the global community of humanitarian relief organizations and is funded by US$4.3 million from the Vodafone Group Foundation and US$1.8 million from WFP.