In The News

AL Jazeera: Puntland Teetering on the Edge of Famine

Ashley Hamer March 27, 2017
In Puntland, a semiautonomous region of Somalia, a drought has ravaged grazing land. People who raise livestock for a living must move increasingly far distances – sometimes hundreds of kilometers – to find suitable land for their animals. Yet relocation is not enough as the drought spreads through the country. Six years ago, a famine in Somalia killed 260,000 people. “Now, nearly 6.2 million...

Project Syndicate: The Geopolitics of Environmental Challenges

Giulio Boccaletti March 8, 2017
Crises with immediate impact, including economic downturns or war, distract governments from the steady and creeping dangers of climate change. “Environmental degradation and natural-resource insecurity are undermining our ability to tackle some of the biggest global issues we face,” writes Giulio Boccaletti for Project Syndicate. “Environmental insecurity is a major, though often underestimated...

World Risk Index: The Human Factor in Natural Disasters

Axel Bojanowski August 26, 2016
Natural disasters strike without warning, but government preparation and regulations on infrastructure contribute to saving lives, suggests the World Risk Index from United Nations University researchers and development organizations. Shallow earthquakes struck Haiti and New Zealand each in 2010, reports Axel Bojanowski. In Haiti, more than 100,000 lost their lives while New Zealand suffered...

NASA Accidentally Found a Way to Make Buildings Safer During Earthquakes

Margo Pierce March 3, 2016
Space flight has contributed many innovations with applications on Earth including LEDs, firefighting technologies and freeze-dried foods just to name a few. NASA has developed a stabilizing technology that prevents rockets from shaking and will also help protect buildings against high winds and earthquakes. The new stabilizer is less costly, a benefit for developing nations, and kicks into...

Taliban Calls for Aid in Areas Ravaged by Quake

Mirwais Harooni and Ashraf Hamid October 27, 2015
A 7.5 magnitude earthquake struck a remote parts of northeastern Afghanistan and Pakistan, leaving at least 300 dead with more than 4000 homes and compounds destroyed. Complicating search and rescue are aftershocks, harsh winter weather, mountainous terrain, Afghanistan’s heavy dependence on foreign aid combined with threats of attacks by extremist groups who resent Western influences. “But the...

Are Foreign NGOs Rebuilding Haiti or Cashing In?

Nathalie Baptiste August 3, 2015
Since the 2010 earthquake, billions of dollars in aid have poured into Haiti. But most of this money has gone towards salaries for expatriate NGO workers, not towards rebuilding Haiti. The trend has created a class of well-compensated expats who take jobs that might have gone to Haitians and drives up the island’s cost of living, suggests Nathalie Baptiste for Foreign Policy. Projects like...

How to Create a New Climate for Peace

Lauren Herzer July 20, 2015
The G7 commissioned an independent report to address the threats to international security from climate change including competition over resources, volatile food prices and natural disasters. Weak states and poor governance exacerbate the problems: The Ethiopian government’s policy of selling privately owned land in the face of a food shortages has left indigenous minorities without farmlands or...