by David Steven | Nov 4, 2011 | Economics and development, Global Dashboard
The good news: poverty is in retreat. The bad news: hunger isn’t. That’s the headline finding for the first Millennium Development Goal , which aims to halve the proportion of people living on less than $1.25 a day and the proportion of people living in hunger between 1990 and 2015.
Great strides have been made on poverty, as I explained in a recent post, with the proportion of the poor projected to fall to 14.4% of the population of developing countries, from 41.7% in 1990. But what about hunger?
According to the UN’s 2011 assessment of the MDGs, the news is not good. In 1990, 828m people were hungry or 20% of the population of developing countries. Progress has been very slow since then:
The proportion of people in the developing world who went hungry in 2005-2007 remained stable at 16 percent [837m people], despite significant reductions in extreme poverty. Based on this trend, and in light of the economic crisis and rising food prices, it will be difficult to meet the hunger-reduction target in many regions of the developing world.
But hang on a minute. Why is the UN trotting out data for 2005-2007? That’s before the global food crisis, which hit at the same time as the financial crisis and has been just as slow to go away.
Food prices hit rock bottom in 1999, but then rose quickly with vicious increases in 2007 and 2008 (20% and 18%) and 2010 and 2011 (17% and 28%) as illustrated in the chart below. Yet we’re still relying on data from five years ago to estimate hunger.
The UN reported ‘dire’ news of a spike in its 2009 and 2010 MDG reports, with an estimate of more than 1 billion people hungry by 2009. But then it backed off in 2011, simply reporting the old data (which, oddly and without explanation, had been revised up slightly for all years, including 1990).
What gives? The problem is that our data on hunger are extremely patchy and rely on assumptions so heroic that I am left wondering if we are currently able to say anything useful about global hunger at all. (more…)
by Alex Evans | Nov 3, 2011 | Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development
Surprising news from the US via Lester Brown:
Between 2007 and 2011, carbon emissions from coal use in the United States dropped 10 percent. During the same period, emissions from oil use dropped 11 percent. In contrast, carbon emissions from natural gas use increased by 6 percent. The net effect of these trends was that U.S. carbon emissions dropped 7 percent in four years.
So what’s driving it?
The initial fall in coal and oil use was triggered by the economic downturn, but now powerful new forces are reducing the use of both. For coal, the dominant force is the Beyond Coal campaign, an impressive national effort coordinated by the Sierra Club involving hundreds of local groups that oppose coal because of its effects on human health.
The campaign started by focusing on opposing new coal power stations, which Brown says was “hugely successful”, before turning its focus to closing existing plants – and now 68 of a total of 492 are slated to close. This helps reduce oil emissions, too, given that 40% of US freigh rail diesel fuel is used to transport coal. (Brown doesn’t talk about the shale gas glut, one of the other reasons why emissions are falling – instead focusing on the high rate of growth in renewables. But let’s forgive him that.) Meanwhile, US oil emissions are falling for other reasons too, including…
…a shrinkage in the size of the national fleet, the rising fuel efficiency of new cars, and a reduction in the miles driven per vehicle.
Fleet size peaked at 250 million cars in 2008 just as the number of cars being scrapped eclipsed sales of new cars. Aside from economic conditions, car sales are down because many young people today are much less automobile-oriented than their parents. In addition, the fuel efficiency of new cars, already rising, will soon increase sharply. The most recent efficiency standards mandate that new cars sold in 2025 use only half as much fuel as those sold in 2010. Thus with each passing year, the U.S. car fleet becomes more fuel-efficient, using less gsoline.
Miles driven per car are declining because of higher gasoline prices, the continuing recession, and the shift to public transit and bicycles. Bicycles are replacing cars as cities create cycling infrastructure by building bike paths, creating dedicated bike lanes, and installing sidewalk parking racks. Many U.S. cities, including Washington, D.C., Chicago, and New York, are introducing bike-sharing programs. Furthermore, when people retire and no longer commute, miles driven drop by a third to a half. With so many baby boomers now retiring, this too will lower gasoline use.
Cheery stuff, eh? And that’s all before the spread of electric cars gets factored in to the equation – which will decarbonise things still further if emissions from power generation continue to fall.
Meanwhile, in the UK…
2001 may turn out to be the year that the UK’s consumption of ‘stuff’ – the total weight of everything we use, from food and fuel to flat-pack furniture – reached its peak and began to decline.
That’s according to Chris Goodall, a Green Party candidate and former McKinsey consultant who’s been trawling through the UK Material Flow Accounts, prepared by the Office of National Statistics. The Guardian’s Duncan Clark isn’t so sure that the 2001 peak is accurate (he thinks it might be a blip) – but he does conclude from exploring Goodall’s data that
…despite rising GDP, material consumption started falling from 2005; second, that after the recession hit, our consumption rates quickly dropped all the way down to sub-1970 levels.
Clark has a more detailed analysis piece about the data on the Guardian’s Environment Blog, which breaks the data down by sector – and shows steep declines on variables including household waste per capita (down about 15% since 2000), overall fertiliser use (nitrogen fertilisers down by a third since the early 80s, phosphate more than halved since 1970), per capita food consumption (down from almost 2,280 calories a day in the mid-90s to less than 2,070 today), and energy (total primary energy use down 10% since 2000.
Of course, there are lots of methodological issues behind these data: how much is due to the economic downturn, and how much due to genuine ‘decoupling’ of environmental impact from economic growth; how much is due to ‘exporting’ dirty industries to China and elsewhere; how much is due to one-off political factors like the ‘dash for gas’ in UK power generation in the late 1990s and so on. But still – good news is good news, and being rather a scarce commodity, you have to grab it when you see it…
by Alex Glennie | Nov 2, 2011 | Cooperation and coherence, Influence and networks
‘Euroscepticism’ is firmly back on the political agenda following last week’s battle in the House of Commons over whether to hold a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union. Labour and Lib Dem opposition to the motion ensured its defeat, but an unprecedented 81 Tory MPs defied the party whip to vote in favour, revealing sharp differences of opinion within the Conservative Party.
Where is the public in all of this? Media coverage of this issue generally gives the impression of a nation that is deeply Eurosceptic. Opinion polls indicate that much of the population regards the EU with apathy at best and antipathy at worst. A YouGov poll for Chatham House in June of this year asked respondents to rank international institutions according to how positively they viewed them (with 10 being extremely positive and 0 being extremely negative). The EU scored lowest with a mean score of 4, coming in below the oft-maligned IMF and World Bank. Recent Eurobarometer surveys have found similarly low levels of satisfaction with the EU, with just 35 per cent agreeing with the statement that EU membership has benefitted the UK, compared to 54 per cent who disagree.
However, public attitudes are more nuanced than the topline figures suggest. First, over the last decade, Europe has fallen steadily down the list of issues that voters say they are concerned about, and now sits consistently near the bottom when compared to the economy, crime, immigration and others. There have also been considerable fluctuations in the relative proportions of those who say they would vote to take Britain out of the EU if given the choice, indicated by the results of a series of Ipsos-MORI polls. In October 2011, 41 per cent said they would vote yes in a referendum on staying in, versus 49 per cent who said they would vote no and 10 per cent who were undecided. Yet in 2007, a majority of 51 per cent would have voted to stay in, against 39 per cent who would have voted to get out. It would appear that public opinion is fairly malleable then, responsive to both swings and roundabouts in the economy as well as the rhetoric of political leaders.
We held an interesting debate on these issues at IPPR earlier in the week – the first in a new series of events about the next phase of the European project following the Euro crisis – chaired by the Economist’s David Rennie and with contributions from Shadow Foreign Secretary Douglas Alexander, Conservative MP Douglas Carswell, Ben Page (Ipsos-MORI) and Olaf Cramme (Policy Network). It fairly quickly became a conversation between the two Douglases, although compared to the tone of media commentary on this issue, the discussion was refreshingly civil. (more…)
by Claire Melamed | Nov 2, 2011 | Articles and Publications, Reports
Debate has started in earnest about what should come after the Millennium Development Goals when they expire in 2015. This paper from ODI and UNDP, authored by Claire Melamed and Andy Sumner, summarises the evidence on the impact of the MDGs, looks at current trends in poverty and in global governance that will affect the shape and the scope of any future agreement on global development.
Download Report
