Writing on the Wall

The IPCC has come out with some fairly mixed messages about food security. The headline finding is that up to 3 degrees of warming, global food production will increase. Policy makers have so much else to worry about even as we approach 1.5 or 2 degrees, meaning that food security slips down the agenda.

But as I read the fourth assessment several things made me stop and think. For instance, the IPPC admits that its predictions do not take into account extreme weather events. This is very worrying: ask any farmer and they will tell you that it is not the 364 days of normal weather that scares them, but the one day of flash flooding.

Take the 2003 summer heat-wave in Europe, it reduced agricultural yields in affected countries by between 10 to 40% of the harvests for that year. This is exactly the kind of thing which is set to become much more frequent.
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The leaders of big oil companies should get behind the scheme of contraction and convergence, as it might be their only chance of avoiding nationalisation.
It should have been a wake up cry for big oil when UN secretary general Ban Ki Moon announced (1) that the tragedy of Darfur was caused by global warming. You would think that the horror of a country collapsing into civil war under environmental pressures would be enough. But I suspect that the really frightening thing for oil bosses is the techtonic shift in opinion that means a Secretary General will say this despite American disapproval. The world is changing,and so are the political dynamics that go with it. Indeed, on closer examination, the situation in Darfur reveals how profound these changes are.
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New Statesman - A new idea: find out what works

Yes the AID industry has had big problems with evaluating effectiveness, and has been agonising about this more than almost any other sector since around the mid 1980s. The main reason for this was that up till then AID was treated as a means to buy off rich world guilt, rather than to really improve conditions for the poor. Oh, and it was also a way of forcing countries into disadvantageous trade contracts, so called “tied AID.”

Now as a sharp critic, I have to admit things have got a bit better in the AID industry. So much energy was spent on project management and evaluation frameworks, by people like USAID (not my favourite organisation, but credit where its due) that some other small organisations have taken these methods on board, er like the HM treasury for instance.

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