ESG and Of Interest News for the Past Year
World Trade Report 2024 highlights trade's role in supporting inclusiveness
September 9, 2024--The 2024 edition of the WTO’s World Trade Report presents strong evidence that trade has played a crucial role in narrowing the income gap between economies since the WTO was established 30 years ago. The flagship publication also analyses trends in the distribution of the gains of trade among people within economies, and emphasizes the need for a comprehensive strategy that integrates open trade with supportive domestic policies.
"Perhaps the biggest takeaway from the report is its reaffirmation of trade's transformative role in reducing poverty and creating shared prosperity- contrary to the currently fashionable notion that trade, and institutions like the WTO, have not been good for poverty or for poor countries, and are creating a more unequal world," WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala says in her foreword to the report.
"But the second biggest takeaway is that there is much more we can do to make trade and the WTO work better for economies and people left behind during the past 30 years of globalization," DG Okonjo-Iweala says.
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Source: World Trade Organization (WTO)
State of the Climate in Africa 2023
September 3, 2024--Africa bears an exceptionally heavy burden from climate change and disproportionately high costs for essential climate adaptation. On average, African countries are losing 2-5% of GDP and many are diverting up to 9% of their budgets responding to climate extremes.
In sub-Saharan Africa, the cost of adaptation is estimated to range from US$ 30-50 billion annually over the next decade, or 2-3% of the region's Gross Domestic Product.
By 2030, it is estimated that up to 118 million extremely poor people (living on less than US$ 1.90 per day) will be exposed to drought, floods and extreme heat in Africa, if adequate response measures are not put in place. This will place additional burdens on poverty alleviation efforts and significantly hamper growth.
The report focussed on climate change indicators and impacts in 2023-globally the hottest year on record.
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Source: World Meteorological Organization
US unveils new tools to withstand encryption-breaking quantum. Here's what experts are saying
August 27, 2024--Quantum computing brings significant opportunity -and cybersecurity risks.
New encryption algorithms have been designed to endure cyberattacks from quantum computers.
Industry experts told the World Economic Forum that the algorithms mark a "pivotal milestone" and are an "essential stepping stone."
Earlier this month, a government lab in the United States released three highly anticipated encryption algorithms that were built to withstand cyberattacks from quantum computers.
The encryption standards, two of which were developed by IBM, can be used to "secure a wide range of electronic information, from confidential email messages to e-commerce transactions that propel the modern economy," the US Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) said in a statement.
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Source: weforum.org
Africa: Gender Equality Has Everything to Do With Climate Change
August 16, 2024--When a climatic disaster strikes, women have nowhere to go. They sit out dangerous climatic events, hoping that it is only a passing cloud. How is it, asks senior IPS correspondent Joyce Chimbi, that the road to COP29 is not littered with meaningful and powerful gender and climate blueprints from countries that are already making headway?
After years of reporting on the frontlines of climate change, I have witnessed the devastating impact extreme weather events have on women and girls. In Kenya's pastoralist communities in far-flung areas of Northern Kenya, West Pokot, Samburu and Narok counties, droughts mean a resurgence in harmful cultural practices such as outlawed female genital mutilation (FGM), beading and child marriages.
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Source: allafrica.com
Researchers Have Ranked AI Models Based on Risk-and Found a Wild Range
August 15, 2024--Studies suggest that regulations could be tightened to head off AI misbehavior.
Bo Li, an associate professor at the University of Chicago who specializes in stress testing and provoking AI models to uncover misbehavior, has become a go-to source for some consulting firms.
These consultancies are often now less concerned with how smart AI models are than with how problematic-legally, ethically, and in terms of regulatory compliance-they can be.
Li and colleagues from several other universities, as well as Virtue AI, cofounded by Li, and Lapis Labs, recently developed a taxonomy of AI risks along with a benchmark that reveals how rule-breaking different large language models are. "We need some principles for AI safety, in terms of regulatory compliance and ordinary usage," Li tells WIRED.
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Source: wired.com
Hunger numbers stubbornly high for three consecutive years as global crises deepen: UN report
July 24, 2024-FAO-IFAD-UNICEF-WFP-WHO Joint Release
Around 733 million people faced hunger in 2023, equivalent to one in eleven people globally and one in five in Africa, according to the latest State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) report published today by five United Nations specialized agencies.
The annual report, launched this year in the context of the G20 Global Alliance against Hunger and Poverty Task Force Ministerial Meeting in Brazil, warns that the world is falling significantly short of achieving Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2, Zero Hunger, by 2030.
The report shows that the world has been set back 15 years, with levels of undernourishment comparable to those in 2008-2009.
Despite some progress in specific areas such as stunting and exclusive breastfeeding, an alarming number of people continue to face food insecurity and malnutrition as global hunger levels have plateaued for three consecutive years, with between 713 and 757 million people undernourished in 2023-approximately 152 million more than in 2019 when considering the mid-range (733 million).
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Source: ifad.org
African insights 2024-Democracy at risk-The People’s Perspective
July 17, 2024--Africa's democratic project faces challenging times. Since 2020, soldiers have pushed out elected governments in six countries. Three presidents have defied constitutional limits to claim third terms in office. Other leaders use subtler means to erode democracy, weakening checks on their authority and harassing the political opposition.
Non-compliance by member states frustrates the African Union's progress in enforcing democratic norms.
Until the late 1990s, not much was known about the values, preferences, or insights of Africans. The idea of polling African citizens seemed impossible, even laughable, to some observers. Experts, media pundits, and politicians purported to know what the people thought. Conventional wisdom held that Africans typically focused on economic and social development and did not care much about democracy or human rights.
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Source: allafrica.com
In a nod to resiliency, FEMA will take climate change into account when rebuilding
July 11, 2024--When the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) spends millions of dollars to help rebuild schools and hospitals after a hurricane, it tries to make the community more resilient than it was before the storm. If the agency pays to rebuild a school or a town hall, for example, it might elevate the building above the floodplain, lowering the odds that it will get submerged again.
That sounds simple enough, but the policy hinges on a deceptively simple question: How do you define "floodplain"? FEMA and the rest of the federal government long defined it as an area that has a 1 percent chance of flooding in any given year. That so-called 100-year floodplain standard, though more or less arbitrary, has been followed for decades-even though thousands of buildings outside the floodplain go underwater every year.
Now FEMA is expanding its definition of the floodplain, following an executive order from President Joe Biden that forced government agencies to tighten rules about how they respond to the increasing risk of floods.
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Source: thebulletin.org
The oceans are heating so fast, some scientists call for a new "Category 6" hurricane classification
July 11, 2024--Hurricane Beryl, which slammed into Texas on Monday after wreaking havoc in the Caribbean, was supercharged by "absolutely crazy" ocean temperatures that are likely to fuel further violent storms in the coming months, scientists have warned.
Beryl left more than 2 million people without power after making landfall near Houston as a Category 1 storm, after having rampaged through the Caribbean as a category 5 hurricane, with wind speeds reaching 165 miles per hour (265km/h), killing 11 people.
There has never been a category 5 Atlantic hurricane this early in the year before, with most major storms forming closer to September. Beryl, however, rapidly accelerated from a minor storm to a Category 4 event in just two days.
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Source: thebulletin.org
Power-hungry AI is driving a surge in tech giant carbon emissions. Nobody knows what to do about it
July 8, 2024--Since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, the world has seen an incredible surge in investment, development and use of artificial intelligence (AI) applications. According to one estimate, the amount of computational power used for AI is doubling roughly every 100 days.
The social and economic impacts of this boom have provoked reactions around the world. European regulators recently pushed Meta to pause plans to train AI models on users' Facebook and Instagram data. The Bank of International Settlements, which coordinates the world's central banks, has warned AI adoption may change the way inflation works.
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Source: theconversation.com