Day: November 28, 2023

Children made up nearly half of the people driven into hunger and malnutrition by extreme weather events in countries heavily impacted by the climate crisis in 2022, according to a UK-based charity.

Citing data by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC hunger monitoring system, Britain’s Save the Children said Tuesday that children made up 27 million of the 57 million “people pushed into crisis levels of acute food insecurity or worse across 12 countries because of extreme weather events in 2022.”

“As climate-related weather events become more frequent and severe, we will see more drastic consequences on children’s lives,” said Gwen Hines, Chief Executive Officer of Save the Children UK. “In 2022, 135% more children were pushed into hunger due to extreme weather events than the year before.”

Half of the 27 million affected children came from the most affected countries of Ethiopia and Somalia.

Save the Children highlighted Somalia as particularly vulnerable to climate crises, pointing to the country’s five consecutive failed rainy seasons and the recent impact of flooding that displaced 650,000 people, about half of which are children.

Save the Children also identified Pakistan, which last year saw floods affect some 33 million people, with half being children. A year after the flood, “2 million flood-affected children are acutely malnourished, with almost 600,000 children suffering from the deadliest form of malnutrition,” the charity said.

Save the Children also called on world leaders from high income nations ahead of the COP28, the United Nations climate summit, to address the climate crisis, by “providing funding for losses and damages and climate adaptation.”

“To truly protect children now and in the future, robust support for the new Loss and Damage Fund is non-negotiable,” Hines said. “At COP28, world leaders must listen to the demands of children and invite them to be part of proposing solutions.”

Save the Children also called on action from leaders to address the “acute food and nutrition insecurity such as conflict, inequality, and a lack of resilient health, nutrition and social protection systems.”

Some information in this report came from Agence France-Presse.
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Disease could pose a bigger threat to human life than bombings in Gaza, the World Health Organization said. 

Overcrowding and a lack of access to clean drinking water or sanitation systems has led to a breeding ground for infectious disease, particularly diarrhea in children, which has reached nearly 100 times its normal level, according to the WHO.

“Eventually we will see more people dying from disease than we are even seeing from the bombardment if we are not able to put back (together) this health system,” said WHO spokesperson Margaret Harris at a U.N. briefing Tuesday in Geneva.  

The WHO says food shortages have added to the disease risk, as people are getting weak from hunger, causing them to be more prone to illness. 

People in Gaza also face difficulty in getting treatment, as there is limited medical staff and a shortage of access to medicines and vaccinations.  

Disruptions in collection of garbage from crowded shelters has furthered concern over risk of disease.

The WHO, in response to the conditions in Gaza, has called for a cease-fire, “sustained access for aid into Gaza,” “protection of civilians and health care,” and “respect for international humanitarian law,” on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter.

Israel declared war on U.S.-designated terror group Hamas after its shock October 7 attack on southern Israel that killed about 1,200 people and led to the Hamas capture of about 240 hostages. Israel’s campaign against Hamas militants has killed more than 14,000 people, according to Gaza health officials.

Some information in this report came from Reuters.
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Almost all U.S. jobs, from truck driver to childcare provider to software developer, include skills that can be done, or at least supplemented, by generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), according to a recent report.

GenAI is artificial intelligence that can generate high-quality content based on the input data used to train it.

“AI is likely to touch every part of every job to some degree,” says Cory Stahle, an economist with Indeed.com, which released the report.

The report finds that almost one in five jobs (19.7%) — like IT operations, mathematics and information design — faces the highest risk of being affected by AI because at least 80% of the job skills those positions require can be done reasonably well by GenAI.

But that doesn’t mean that those jobs will eventually be lost to robots.

“It’s important to recognize that, in general, these technologies don’t affect entire occupations. It actually is very rare that a robot will show up, sit in somebody’s seat to do everything that someone does at their job,” says Michael Chui of the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), who researches the impact of technology and innovation on business, the economy and society.

Indeed.com researchers analyzed more than 55 million job postings and found that GenAI can perform 50% to almost 80% of the skills required in 45.7% of those job listings. In 34.6% of jobs listed, GenAI can handle less than 50% of the skills.

Jobs that require manual skills or a personal touch, such as nursing and veterinary care, are the least likely to be hard hit by AI, the report says.

In the past, technological advances have mostly affected manual labor. However, GenAI is expected to have the most effect on so-called knowledge workers, generally defined as people who create knowledge or think for a living.

But, for now, AI does not appear poised to steal anyone’s job.

“There are very few jobs that AI can do completely. Even in jobs where AI can do many of the skills, there are still aspects of those jobs that AI cannot do,” Stahle says.

Rather than replace workers, researchers expect GenAI to enhance the work people already do, making them more efficient.

“This is something that, in many ways, we believe is going to unlock human potential and productivity for many workers across many different sectors of the economy,” Stahle says.

“There are a number of things that can happen,” Chui adds. “One is, we simply do more of something we were already doing, and so imagine if you’re a university professor or a teacher, and the grading can be done by machine rather than you. You can take those hours and, instead of grading, you can actually start tutoring your students, spending more time with your students, improving their performance, helping them learn.”

American workers need to begin using the new technology if they hope to remain competitive, according to Chui.

“Workers who are best able to use these technologies will be the most competitive workers in the workforce,” he says. “It was true before, but it’s more true than ever, that we’re all going to have to be lifetime learners.”

A survey developed by Chui finds that almost 80% of workers have experimented with AI tools.

“One of the great powers of these generative AI tools, so far, is they’ve been designed in such a way to make it easy for really anybody to use these types of tools,” Stahle says. “I really believe that people should be looking to embrace these tools and find ways to incorporate them into the work that they’re already interested in doing.”

Ultimately, could one of the unexpected benefits of AI be more efficient employees who work less?

“In general, Americans work a lot,” Chui says. “Maybe we don’t have to work so long. Maybe we have a four-day work week … and so you could give that time back to the worker.”
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When world leaders gather in Dubai beginning Thursday for COP28, this year’s U.N. climate summit, the heads of the world’s two largest economies will be notably absent.

U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping have no plans to attend the two-week event, which is aimed at marshaling governments around the world behind the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the 2015 Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

Both countries will send high-level representatives. Former Secretary of State John Kerry, the Biden administration’s special envoy for climate change, will attend. China’s climate envoy, Xie Zhenhua, is also expected.

Among the main issues addressed at the conference will be the structure of a “loss and damage” fund meant to compensate low-income countries that are suffering disproportionately from climate change despite having contributed little to its causes.

Another important topic of discussion will be the adoption of an agreement to phase out the use of fossil fuels, the single largest contributor to carbon emissions.

The fossil fuel discussion may be complicated by the fact that the host country, the United Arab Emirates, is one of the world’s largest producers of oil and gas.

UAE oil deals

In a development that may further snarl the talks in Dubai, the news organization Centre for Climate Reporting, in conjunction with the British Broadcasting Corp., on Monday revealed leaked documents suggesting that the COP28 organizing authority in the UAE has scheduled talks about oil and gas development projects during the conference.

The decision to allow the UAE to host the conference was already controversial, especially after Sultan Ahmed Al-Jaber, group CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Co., was named president of COP28.

The reports published Monday contained internal talking points apparently prepared for Al-Jaber ahead of meetings with representatives from various countries, including China, Colombia and Egypt. They appear to declare the UAE’s willingness to develop new fossil fuel projects.

According to the BBC, conference organizers did not deny the accusation and refused to comment further than saying that ”private meetings are private.”

Activists optimistic

While some activists remain troubled by the decision to allow the UAE to host the event, others say the revelations about the oil and gas development talks could actually boost the chances of fossil fuel phase-out language being adopted.

“We’re all very clear on where the battle lines are drawn, and with this new article that came out, we’re clear on what’s really going on behind the scenes, which we all suspected but no one would say outright,” Cherelle Blazer, director of international climate and policy at the Sierra Club, told VOA. “Given all of those factors, if there’s more clarity going into this than usual, I’m going to say there’s a good chance.”

Blazer also said she was not concerned about the absence of Biden and Xi.

“The Senate delegation is going to be there. The full U.S. negotiating team will be there. Kerry will be there. So, everyone that needs to be in place for something actionable to happen will be there,” she said.

Global Stocktake

This year’s conference will mark the completion of the most recent Global Stocktake, a two-year process that is conducted every five years to assess progress toward emissions reductions and other goals related to the effort to halt global warming.

While the final results of the process are yet to be announced, an interim report released earlier this year found that progress on various climate initiatives has been “significant yet inadequate” over recent years.

The meeting takes place at a time when the manufacture and installation of green energy development sources is on the rise globally, with costs falling rapidly for many key elements, including the photovoltaic panels used to capture solar energy.

However, experts told VOA that while some regions, like Europe, have greatly accelerated their transition to green energy in recent years, progress has been slower elsewhere. To some degree, that difference was expected, because the emission-reductions goals set following the Paris Agreement were “nationally determined” — meaning that individual countries set their own goals.

Trade complications

Michael Mehling, deputy director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told VOA that the interactions between countries further along in the transition to green energy and those in the early stages of the process are getting increasingly complicated, particularly around trade.

Mehling said the attitude of some countries that have accelerated their energy transition is, “Well, if we cannot force, say, Turkey, or we cannot force China to decarbonize through the UNFCCC-Paris Agreement, because it’s nationally driven, we can at least make sure that anything we import from them will have to live up to the same high standards.”

He said some countries find having manufacturing emissions reduction standards imposed on them by restrictive trade requirements understandably frustrating.

“Some of these countries say, ‘Well, wait. We thought we understood the Paris Agreement to say that we can decide how fast we decarbonize our manufacturing. It’s not for you to force that on us,’” he said.

The issue is further complicated by the fact that many of the countries that have been decarbonizing at a slower pace are in the Global South and contributed very little to the crisis of global warming but feel they are now being asked to forgo economic development opportunities with little compensation from wealthy countries like the U.S. and China that contributed most to climate change.
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