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What Could Sequestration Mean for U.S. Development and Diplomacy?
›February 28, 2013 // By Schuyler NullNewly minted Secretary of State John Kerry would probably prefer his first few months on the job to be a little quieter. But – in addition to everything else – sequestration is bearing down on Washington this week, and the U.S. government is beginning to seriously take stock of what automated cuts might mean. The Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) are not spared. Kerry sent a letter earlier this month to Senate Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) outlining the projected effects for his charges if the March 1st deadline should pass without action.
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Andrew Freedman, Climate Central
Sequestration May Degrade Weather, Climate Forecasting
›February 28, 2013 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by Andrew Freedman, appeared on Climate Central.
Across-the-board federal spending cuts that are scheduled to go into effect starting on March 1 are likely to cause further delays to weather and climate satellite programs, and may degrade the government’s ability to issue timely and accurate early warnings of extreme weather and climate events, according to federal officials and atmospheric scientists.
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Cleo Paskal and Uttam Sinha on the Geopolitical Implications of Climate Change for India and China
›India and China – “the two most important countries going forward in this century” – will both experience domestic concerns as a result of environmental change, but they are responding very differently, said Cleo Paskal, an associate fellow at Chatham House, in an interview with the Environment, Conflict, and Cooperation (ECC) Platform.
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The Other Migration Story in Mexico: Climate Change
›The conversation around immigration and Mexico has long been tied to the United States and the prevailing economic conditions in both countries. But a new report from the Royal United Services Institute argues that as temperatures rise and precipitation patterns change over the course of the next century, climate too will increasingly become a driver of both internal and international migration in Mexico. [Video Below]
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Renewable Resource Shocks and Conflict in India’s Maoist Belt
›India’s Maoist (or “Naxalite”) insurgency has resulted in more than 9,000 deaths in the last decade and famously been called the country’s “single biggest internal security challenge” by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. In, Renewable Resource Shocks and Conflict in India’s Maoist Belt, a working paper for the Center for Global Development, Devesh Kapur, Kishore Gawande, and Shanker Satyanth present their econometric analysis of the conflict and suggest that there is a link with natural resource depletion.
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Janani Vivekananda on Strengthening Resilience to Climate Variability in South Asia
›“Building resilience should help address the root causes of vulnerability, creating increased capacity to be able to adapt to a range of possible climate futures, not just cope with… specific climate impacts,” says International Alert’s Janani Vivekananda. Otherwise, if the specific impacts don’t play out, “in a fragile context that could be quite destabilizing and seen as a wasted opportunity.”
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Strengthening Responses to Climate Variability in South Asia
›Climate change and conflict can create a self-reinforcing feedback loop: Climate change exacerbates existing conflicts, while conflict makes adapting to climate change more difficult, said Janani Vivekananda of International Alert at the Wilson Center on February 7. [Video Below]
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Child Mortality in the Developing World: Hans Rosling Crosses the “River of Myths” Once More
›“The world my father told me about 50 years ago was a divided world,” says Hans Rosling, famed Swedish statistician and development expert, in a new video. Standing in the middle of one of his trademark graphs of development indicators, his body neatly splitting the data, he gestures: “In many people’s minds, the world still looks like this: developing and developed.”
“But it’s a myth,” he continues, “because the world has improved immensely in the last 50 years.”
Monthly archive for February 2013. Show all posts