ESG and Of Interest News for the Past Year
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
NASA launches first satellite to study heat emissions at Earth's poles
July 2, 2024--The shoebox-sized CubeSats will measure the heat radiated from Earth's coldest regions.
This data will help scientists predict changes in sea, ice and weather patterns due to global warming.
For the first time, a NASA satellite has been launched with the purpose of improving the ability to predict climate change by measuring the heat that escapes from Earth's poles.
The satellite-the first of a pair- is in orbit following lift-off from Rocket Lab's Electron rocket in Māhia, New Zealand, on Saturday, NASA said.
"This new information-and we've never had it before-will improve our ability to model what's happening in the poles, what's happening in climate," said Karen St. Germain, Earth sciences research director at NASA, reported by AFP.
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Source: weforum.org
IMF Promoting Gender Equality and Tackling Demographic Challenges
June 11, 2024--Summary:
Two broad contrasting demographic trends present challenges for economies globally: countries with aging populations, often advanced economies and increasingly emerging markets, anticipate a significant shrinking of the labor force, with implications for growth, economic stability, and public finances.
Economies with rapidly growing populations, as is the case in many low-income and developing countries, will face a burgeoning young population entering the labor market in the next decades-a large potential to reap the demographic dividend if the right skills and economic and social conditions are in place.
This note highlights how gender equality, in both cases, can serve as a stabilizing factor to rebalance demographic trends. As decisions regarding fertility, human capital investment, and labor force participation are interlinked, policies should aim at relaxing households' time and resource constraints that condition these choices. This means that, in general, in advanced economies and emerging markets, policies should facilitate women's workâlife choices and boost female participation in the labor market, whereas policies in low-income and developing countries should focus on reforms that narrow gender gaps in opportunities and support human capital accumulation.
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Source: imf.org
New report states 7-9 billion tonnes of CO2 must be sustainably removed per year to hit climate targets
June 5, 2024--The 2024 State of Carbon Dioxide Removal report co-led by researchers at the University of Oxford finds that around 7-9 billion tonnes of CO2 per year will need to be removed by mid-century from the atmosphere if the world is to meet the 1.5 °C Paris Agreement target.
The authors stress that reducing emissions is the primary way to achieve net-zero, but Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) has a critical role to play.
The authors incorporated sustainability criteria including multiple Sustainable Development Goals into their analysis, and their final figure for a "Paris-consistent" range of CDR was assessed based on these.
Currently just 2 billion tons per year are being removed by CDR, mostly through conventional methods like tree planting. Novel CDR methods= like biochar, enhanced rock weathering, direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS) and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS)- contribute 1.3 million tonnes per year, less than 0.1% of the total. Methods which are effectively permanent account for only 0.6 million tonnes per year- less than 0.05% of the total. .
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Source: ox.ac.uk
Africa: Climate Change May Be Fuelling a Resurgence of Piracy Across Africa
May 24, 2024--In the churning waters off Nigeria, armed pirates in small skiffs speed towards a cargo ship. They clamber aboard, seizing control of the vessel and its valuable cargo. This isn't a scene from a swashbuckling film; it's a stark reality for seafarers in many parts of the world.
Piracy poses a threat to global shipping, trade and the safety of seafarers.
In 2020 alone, there were 135 maritime kidnappings, with the Gulf of Guinea off the west African coast accounting for over 95% of abductions. Pirates often subject hostages to violence, torture and even execution.
What's more concerning is that climate change seems to be making the problem worse. In regions like east Africa, climate change is devastating the coastal fisheries that people have depended on for generations.
Climate change is causing fish stocks to decline as some species migrate out of the reach of local fishermen.
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Source: allafrica.com
Trade data reveal changing patterns in electric vehicles market
May 14, 2024--Electric vehicles (EVs) are radically transforming the transport sector, redefining the automotive market, and reshaping global trade in transport equipment. By the end of 2023, EVs accounted for more than a third of all car imports in value terms.
Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in sales of various types of EVs- including hybrid electric vehicles (HEV), plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV) and battery electric vehicles (BEV), but they were not separately considered in the trade statistics.
As a result, in 2017 the World Customs Organization implemented an amendment to the classification system for traded goods-the Harmonized System (HS) introduced new categories to differentiate between traditional internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles and their electrified alternatives.
Prior to this, the HS classified passenger vehicles by the number of passengers they could carry and the type and size of their internal combustion engine.(1)
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Source: ECB.org
How to manage AI's energy demand-today, tomorrow and in the future
April 25, 2024--The computational power required for sustaining AI's rise is doubling roughly every 100 days.
It is imperative that we balance the progression of AI with the imperatives of sustainability.
There are steps we can take immediately -and foundations that we can lay today that will pay dividends in the future- to manage AI and the green transition.
In an era where society stands in awe of the swift progress in Artificial Intelligence (AI), the environmental footprint of these advancements often remains overlooked. The significant ecological impacts of AI demand attention and action.
For AI to fulfill its transformative potential, offering unprecedented levels of productivity and enhancing societal well-being, it must evolve sustainably.
Central to this dilemma is the AI ecosystem's heavy energy demand, encompassing everything from hardware to training protocols and operational techniques.
AI and energy demand
Remarkably, the computational power required for sustaining AI's rise is doubling roughly every 100 days. To achieve a tenfold improvement in AI model efficiency, the computational power demand could surge by up to 10,000 times. The energy required to run AI tasks is already accelerating with an annual growth rate between 26% and 36%. This means by 2028, AI could be using more power than the entire country of Iceland used in 2021.
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Source: weforum.org
New Data Show Massive, Wider-than-Expected Global Gender Gap
March 4, 2024---Women enjoy just two-thirds of the legal rights that men enjoy
The global gender gap for women in the workplace is far wider than previously thought, a groundbreaking new World Bank Group report shows. When legal differences involving violence and childcare are taken into account, women enjoy fewer than two-thirds the rights of men.
No country provides equal opportunity for women-not even the wealthiest economies.
The latest Women, Business, and the Law report offers a comprehensive picture of the obstacles that women face in entering the global workforce and contributing to greater prosperity-for themselves, their families, and their communities. It expands the scope of its analysis, adding two indicators that can be critical in opening up or restricting women's options: safety from violence and access to childcare services. When those measures are included, women on average enjoy just 64% of the legal protections that men do-far fewer than the previous estimate of 77%.
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Source: worldbank.org