Science, tech & innovation for humanitarian relief

open

Climate change

PEOPLE'S CHOICE: End of Capitalism or End of Earth

Jessi Baker (Project Provenance) delivers her talk 'Telling stories: products and their data', as part of the "Show me the future of... open data and food" research afternoon. Jessie discusses voluntary supply chain transparency, how this can affect brand and how a product is perceived by consumers. 

The open data and food research afternoon was part of the "Show me the future of" series that focuses on the potential impact of open data on different established industries. #odifutures

Consumers are demanding to know more and more about the food they eat and where it comes from. Open data is answering some of these demands by allowing people and companies to track supply chains, make better agricultural decisions and healthier food choices.

Jessi Baker - Show me the future of.... food and open data

In this podcast, Rowan Douglas of Willis Group insurers, assesses his industry’s response to extreme weather events.

http://www.scidev.net/global/climate-change/multimedia/q-a-climate-change-and-assessing-financial-risk.html

Q&A: Climate change and assessing financial risk

In this podcast, Anders Ladekarl of the Danish Red Cross says new methods are needed to explain climate change.

http://www.scidev.net/global/communication/multimedia/q-a-moving-beyond-climate-doomsday-narratives.html

Q&A: Moving beyond climate doomsday narratives

In this podcast, experts explain why higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may worsen malnutrition.

http://www.scidev.net/global/nutrition/multimedia/climate-change-may-increase-hidden-hunger.html

Climate change may increase ‘hidden hunger’

Lucia Grenna heads a World Bank unit that specialises in climate change-related communication. In 2011, she set up a communication initiative called Connect4Climate, which has grown into a major global partnership of organisations and individuals committed to climate change action. Her task, she says, is “to listen to and to engage unusual audiences” and to make people realise that the term “climate change’’ in itself does not have a message.

http://www.scidev.net/global/communication/multimedia/q-a-lucia-grenna-and-her-connect4climate-initiative.html

Q&A: Lucia Grenna and her Connect4Climate initiative

In lead to December’s 20th UN Conference of Parties on climate change, scientists and policymakers are reflecting on the future of climate science. Many are questioning whether the existing mechanisms that feed scientific evidence into international politics are working well enough.

In this interview Ilan Kelman argues that, despite its important work, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, with its consensus-based approach, is no longer suited to the new challenges posed by climate change.

http://www.scidev.net/global/climate-change/multimedia/climate-science-beyond-the-ipcc.html


What’s next for climate science beyond the IPCC?

Wednesday:  We return to our “South of the Border” feature.  Our guest is economist and journalist Mark Weisbrot we discuss the recent re election of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff.

And author and activist Naomi Klein on her new book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism VS the Climate.  

Also, voter suppression and the midterm elections, we speak to Barbara Arnwine, President & Executive Director of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. 

10-29-14 Naomi Klein on new book "This Changes Everything: Capitalism VS. the Climate"

Open Data - Jebelean Ovidiu & Nicole Roberts

CityBridge and Wheatley Education Campus in Washington D.C.

“Syrian refugees are not dying from pneumonia, they’re dying from diabetes and heart problems”, says Jon Gunnarsson of Médecins Sans Frontières. “Seventy-seven per cent of all mortality is due to non-communicable disease.”   Gunnarson, who works with refugees in Jordan, says that non-communicable diseases (NCDs) represent one of the most urgent yet underfunded health crises facing Syrian refugees displaced by the country’s civil war.

There are 600,000 Syrian refugees registered in Jordan, 84 per cent of them living outside refugee camps. Many are afflicted by NCDs such as hypertension, heart disease, asthma, smoking-related illnesses, and diabetes — indeed the Middle East and North Africa region has the highest prevalence of diabetes in the world, Gunnarsson says. These conditions are exacerbated by risk factors linked to the stress and trauma of displacement, as well as lack of access to treatment. For example, smoking and inactive lifestyles are widespread among those displaced, while high rates of depression can make treatment adherence more difficult for patients, he says.


So great is the problem, that MSF – an organisation that does not usually focus on NCDs – has been building NCD clinics and testing out new treatment programmes for refugees. Underpinning these is a ‘patient-centred model of care’, that includes health education, counselling, peer support sessions and motivational interviewing. 

In this interview, Gunnarsson, who heads up an NCD nurse team in Irbid province in northern Jordan, explains why NCD care is so effective and vital for Syrian refugees, and outlines some of the results from their work in Jordan. 

http://www.scidev.net/global/migration/multimedia/treating-diseases-killing-syrian-refugees.html


New ways to treat the diseases killing Syrian refugees

In 2002, after decades of war followed by Taliban oppression, Afghanistan’s university system was in tatters, says Osman Babury, the nation’s deputy minister of higher education, in this audio interview. Just 7,000 students were enrolled in university — and all of them male as the Taliban restricted female education. Thirteen years later, there are over 300,000 students in higher education, 50,000 of them women.

But the path to a fully functioning higher education system remains beset by challenges. Persistent conflict, political volatility and the threat of Taliban attacks — including on universities themselves — make providing higher education a struggle. 

Stress and mental health problems stemming from long-term exposure to war and oppressive regimes affect huge numbers of Afghan students. And as universities in Afghanistan and worldwide increasingly become targets for extremist attacks — the devastating Garissa attack in Kenya in April being the most recent high-profile example — giving students and staff training in how to deal with these threats becomes ever more vital, Babury says. 

In this interview, Babury discusses these and other challenges, and suggests ways to tackle them head-on.

The interview was recorded on 2 June at the British Council’s Going Global conference on international education, in London, United Kingdom.

http://www.scidev.net/global/education/multimedia/afghan-universities-violence-war-conflict.html

Building Afghan universities in the face of violence

Students in Gaza face near insurmountable barriers to university education, explains Suheil Tarazi, programme manager for the British Council in Gaza, in this audio interview. Persistent conflict, buildings destroyed by bombing, a lack of funding and equipment, a student body traumatised by years of violence and war, and the world’s lowest employment rate are just some of the devastating conditions students and teachers experience each day. 

July 8 marks a year since the beginning of the seven-week war that left nearly 2,200 people dead — over 2,100 of them Palestinians in Gaza. Like many Gazans, Tarazi says, a huge number of students and lecturers lost their homes and family members in the 2014 conflict, adding to those already traumatised and displaced.

Against this backdrop, Tarazi says scholarships to study abroad can be lifelines for students, with many going on to return home to help develop universities in Gaza. 

The interview was recorded on 2 June at the British Council’s Going Global 2015 conference on international education in London, United Kingdom.

http://www.scidev.net/global/education/multimedia/education-lifelines-palestinian-students-gaza.html

Photo credit: UN Photo/Shareef Sarhan

Education lifelines for Palestinian students in Gaza

When the NGO Field Ready first arrived at a health clinic in Haiti, they found the hospital’s maternity ward dangerously short of equipment. Nurses and doctors were using makeshift tools to clamp the umbilical cords of new-born babies. So the team began printing umbilical cord clamps using 3D printing presses, trained up the staff, and this kind of printing is still in use today, long after Field Ready left the island. Rather than buying expensive equipment, which is usually imported at great cost from China and elsewhere, healthworkers can now simply print off such kit as and when they need them. 

In this audio interview, Laura James, advisor to Field Ready, which specialises in 3D printing for humanitarian relief, explains that umbilical cord clamps are just one use for this important, rapidly evolving technology. They hope to develop the capacity to create spare car parts and the more straightforward but no less vital tool, buckets – both items that are in high demand but short supply in the global south, with countries too often reliant on expensive imports.  

In time, Field Ready hope to create a global network of 3D printing technicians and designers who, through online manuals and forums, can share designs and ideas across continents and contexts. 

http://www.scidev.net/global/innovation/multimedia/3d-printing-emergency-healthcare-haiti-maternity.html


3D printing can revolutionise emergency healthcare

Hear how a Swedish social enterprise is producing innovative housing to meet the needs of the displaced. 

Tomorrow is the anniversary of the 2003 bombing of the UN headquarters in Iraq, which killed more than 20 people, including UN envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello, and injured many more. The United Nations has designated tomorrow as World Humanitarian Day, to recognise those caught up in humanitarian catastrophes and those who work to support them. 

In this audio interview, we talk to Johan Karlsson, head of business development at Better Shelter. This Swedish social enterprise designs safe and robust shelters for refugees across the world. Karlsson says such products are an important evolution in emergency shelter, bringing dignity and safety to refugees in some of the world’s most insecure places. At the centre of the project is the idea of democratic design. Technical testing, pilot and field trials, and feedback workshops bring refugees into the design process, ensuring their practical, social and cultural concerns are heard and integrated in the shelters’ design.

The shelters are now being used in Ethiopia, Iraq and Nepal. And they can be more than homes: through use as buildings such as health clinics, women’s centres, and children’s play spaces, they can meet the many needs of those displaced from their homes. 

http://www.scidev.net/global/migration/multimedia/refugee-shelter-redesigned.html


Refugee shelter redesigned

Catching the bus in Nairobi can be a frustrating experience. For many people, it involves jumping aboard a matatu — one of the privately run, 14-seater buses that thread the streets of Kenya’s capital. But the government has little oversight of the matatus: since public transport was privatised in the 1980s, they have been poorly regulated and now vary wildly in quality. 

Now, however, a project seeks to bring order to the chaos of Nairobi’s streets. Digital Matatus, a research collaboration between the University of Nairobi, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Columbia University in the United States, uses a range of data sources to make sense of the city’s transport system. 

The team has been working with computer science students, tech companies and volunteers to map matatu routes using smartphones, mobile routing apps, satellite positioning and location- linked transport schedules. Its data-driven maps, showing Nairobi’s 130-plus matatu routes for the first time, are freely available to the public. Commuters can now navigate their city more easily and securely, and policymakers can visualise Nairobi’s transport network more clearly, thus improving urban planning.

The next step is to take the project to other places. “If we can have several other cities create data and use it to make decisions, we would be thrilled,” Sarah Williams, professor of urban studies at MIT and the project’s co-leader, explains in this audio interview. “I would love to […] start a trend where informal transit is visualised for everyone.”

http://www.scidev.net/global/transport/multimedia/project-maps-kenyan-buses-smartphones-cities.html

Project maps Kenyan buses with smartphones

Anti-Capitalism in London November 2015 Climate March

“Water is one of our most pressing global risks,” says Henk Ovink, special envoy for international water affairs for the Netherlands. When floods or tsunamis strike coastal regions, the devastation can be immense, particularly in densely built, poorly constructed neighbourhoods in cities across the global South.

But crises like flooding shouldn’t mean death, destruction and displacement. By constructing buildings and infrastructure that work with nature not against it, cities and countries will be far more resilient, Ovink says. 

Architects such as Yasmeen Lari in Pakistan, Shigeru Ban in Nepal and Alejandro Aravena in Chile have been working with local people to pioneer new ways of designing safe and disaster-resilient buildings. The idea of architects as “big heroes who will bring salvation to the world” is fast being replaced by architecture that involves and is shaped by the people who use it, Ovink says. 

This interview was recorded this week at Creation from catastrophe: How architecture rebuilds communities, an exhibition at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London, United Kingdom. 

http://www.scidev.net/global/design/multimedia/build-cities-nature-audio-ovink.html


Build cities that work with nature not against it

Jacobin editor Peter Frase examines the future beyond climate change, capitalism and other disasters, and finds tomorrow's fights for survival, prosperity and stability rooted in the same conflict - class struggle for production and power.

Peter is author of the new book "Four Futures: Life After Capitalism" part of the Jacobin series from Verso Books: https://www.versobooks.com/books/1847-four-futures

On climate change, automation, and the possibilities of life beyond capitalism.

In the seventh episode of the Climate History Podcast, Professor Dagomar Degroot (Georgetown University) interviews Professor Bathsheba Demuth (Brown University) about her experiences in a changing Arctic, and her forthcoming book on the history of communism and capitalism across the Bering Strait.

Capitalism, Communism, and Indigenous Communities in a Changing Arctic

This week's Global Research News Hour, we consider the possibility that some of the most prominent climate campaigns on the planet, including the Greta Thunberg-led Climate Strikes are in fact being co-opted by the world's most prominent financial elites, via vehicles like large environmental NGOs, to serve a pre-existing agenda having more to do with expanding capitalism than reversing or mitigating climate change. Independent investigative journalist Cory Morningstar is our guest for the hour, and she expands on the theme of her recent series of articles: "The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – for Consent."

Saving the Earth or Saving Capitalism? The Inconvenient Truth Behind Today’s Youth Climate Campaigns

When all around you seems to be going "open", what should you know and bear in mind to avoid a privacy debacle. Unless your data is solely about inanimate objects, there will be privacy considerations for your business or organisation. 

Done properly, suitable consideration may be trivial; done badly, it can be catastrophic, and hindsight is always better when the stories are about a different organisation.

With kittens and hopefully some humour, Sam Smith of Privacy International covers how your organisation can avoid a future audience laughing (uncomfortably) at the privacy choices you should have made for your users, your customers and citizens.

ODI Fridays: Business considerations for privacy and open data: how not to get caught out

SciDev.Net podcasts look at key global development issues and the ways in which science can have a positive impact on equitable and sustainable development and poverty reduction. 