Responsibility to protect?
Climate: after the euphoria
Yesterday I was at a roundtable on Europe and climate change, hosted by Jim Murphy, the UK’s minister for Europe, with his French counterpart, Jean-Pierre Jouyet, as the main speaker.
France is about to take over the EU presidency and will play a critical role on the road to Copenhagen. Two questions stand out:
- Can the EU show that it is making credible moves towards its unilateral commitment to a 20% emissions cut by 2020?
- How hard will the French push the idea that laggards on climate change should be punished through the global trade regime?
The first question is the most important. In Bali, the Europeans had some success in leading the negotiations from in front. I summed up their strategy as follows in my Bali wrap up:
(i) Take a unilateral commitment first. (ii) Next bring on board others prepared to move ahead of the pack. (iii) Only then bring the US – the problem player – into the thick of the action, and do so at a time [after the presidential elections] when the country will be desperate to re-engage with the wider world; (iv) And finally, persuade developed countries to do their bit, using a blend of three arguments. First, that rich countries have committed to action first. Second, that incentives are on the table, to help the switch from dirty to clean tech. And finally that not to act is unfair on countries that are poorer and more vulnerable (expect India to hear a lot from low-lying Bangladesh, for example).
But that strategy only works if Europe’s partners believe that the EU intends to keep the commitments it has freely made. At the moment, that is far from clear. The roundtable was opened by the FT’s George Parker, who argued that the UK missed half of its own green targets, public interest in the environment was on the wane, and that the EU was failing to align its budget to its green aspirations. (more…)
The wrong approach to AIDS?
A new study published in Science claims that funds for HIV prevention (like most funds directed at Africa, cynics might argue) are being wasted. Telling people to use condoms doesn’t work, they say; asking them not to have sex is religion-inspired lunacy; testing for HIV has had little impact so far (although forthcoming research on this from UCLA is much more promising); and treating other sexually transmitted infections does not stop the most dangerous one of them all.
The study authors recommend that funds instead be diverted towards male circumcision and efforts to stop people having multiple sexual partners at the same time. Being circumcised reduces men’s risk of HIV infection by 60%. In the long term this will also benefit their female partners. Unlike condoms, you only have to get circumcised once, rather than remembering to do it every time you have sex (ouch). Unlike condoms too, circumcision doesn’t reduce pleasure (despite the religious lobby’s attempts to argue that it does – see this site which says circumcision only “slightly” reduces HIV risk!).
Persuading people to slow down their bed-hopping is also sensible, and it has worked in Uganda, Cote d’Ivoire and a few other oases. The risk of infecting someone else with HIV is greatly increased in the period immediately after infection – if you wait a while before sleeping with someone else, your viral load will have subsided sufficiently to reduce the risk sharply. This doesn’t happen enough in Africa, and combined with an absence of circumcision in the hardest hit regions it has been a major driver of the epidemic’s spread. Will anyone listen? They have a fairly strong lobby to contend with if they do, but at least those who fight against condoms should be pleased. Here’s hoping they don’t all jump on the anti-circumcision bandwagon instead.
Is Lebanon going to war over a network?
It may be too soon to determine what has trigged the current violence in Beirut. Some analysts have suggested Hezbollah took advantage of a labour strike on Wednesday by using it as a political opportunity and the strike quickly escalated into a flashpoint over Lebanon’s 17-month-old political crisis.
What is more clear is that the Lebanese Government is determined to end Hezbollah’s communications network. This has been interpreted by Hassan Nasrallah as “a declaration of open war.” The government believes Hezbollah is using the equipment to keep tabs on the movement of its opponents in the government.
But Nasrallah has defended Hezbollah’s use of the monitoring equipment, saying it is ‘the right of any militia during war’ and furthermore that ‘a wired network is the most important weapon in the battle’.
More to come.
Cyclone Nargis – Burma
Before After
(The red square denotes the capital – Rangoon]