Tag: inequality

  • Climate crises drove 27 million children into hunger in 2022

    Climate crises drove 27 million children into hunger in 2022

    Extreme weather events in countries vulnerable to climate change drove more than 27 million children into hunger last year, Save the Children said on Tuesday.

    The figure represented a sharp 135 percent increase over 2021, the UK-based charity said in an analysis ahead of the COP28 climate summit opening in Dubai on Thursday.

    It said children made up nearly half the 57 million people pushed into crisis levels of acute food insecurity or worse across 12 countries because of extreme weather in 2022, according to data from the IPC hunger monitoring system.

    Out of the 12, countries in the Horn of Africa were most affected, with Ethiopia and Somalia accounting for about half of the 27 million children facing hunger, Save said.

    “As climate-related weather events become more frequent and severe, we will see more drastic consequences on children’s lives,” Save’s CEO Inger Ashing said in a statement.

    The charity called on leaders meeting at COP28 in Dubai to take action on the climate crisis by recognising children as “key agents of change” but more broadly to address other causes of food insecurity such as conflict and weak health systems.

    Save highlighted the situation in Somalia, which is considered one of the most vulnerable countries to climate change, locked in a vicious cycle of drought and floods.

    It said the recent torrential rains and flooding that have engulfed many parts of the country had displaced about 650,000 people, about half of them children.

    Elsewhere, Save noted that two million children in Pakistan remained acutely malnourished after floods that swamped a third of the country last year.

    Across the planet, Save estimated that 774 million children -– or one third of the global child population — are living with the dual impacts of poverty and high climate risk.

    In a report issued last week, Save said that more than 17.6 million children will be born into hunger this year, one-fifth more than a decade ago.

  • Extreme Rainfall Increases Exponentially With Global Warming: Study

    State-of-the-art climate models drastically underestimate how much extreme rainfall increases under global warming, according to a study published Monday that signals a future of more frequent catastrophic floods unless humanity curbs greenhouse emissions.

    It comes as countries prepare to meet at the COP28 summit in Dubai beginning later this week, amid fears it could soon be impossible to limit long-term warming to the 1.5 degrees Celsius scientists say is necessary to curb the worst effects of human-caused climate change.

    Researchers from the Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research (PIK) looked at the intensity and frequency of daily precipitation extremes over land in 21 “next generation” climate models used by a UN body in its global assessments.

    They then compared the changes projected by the models with those observed historically, finding that nearly all climate models significantly underestimated the rates at which increases in precipitation extremes scaled with global temperature rise.

    “Our study confirms that the intensity and frequency of heavy rainfall extremes are increasing exponentially with every increment of global warming,” said Max Kotz, lead author of the paper published in the Journal of Climate.

    The changes track with the Clausius-Clapeyron relation in physics, which established that warmer air holds more water vapor. This finding underpinned the fact that temperature and not wind dominate the global change in extreme rainfall events, according to the authors.

    Stronger increases in rainfall intensity and frequency were found across the tropics and high-latitudes, like in Southeast Asia or Northern Canada, according to the study.

  • Pakistan’s climate problems partially due to world’s richest one per cent: Report

    Pakistan’s climate problems partially due to world’s richest one per cent: Report

    Oxfam has released a new report, “Climate Equality: A Planet for the 99%”, revealing that “The richest one per cent of the world’s population produced as much carbon pollution in 2019 as the five billion people who made up the poorest two-thirds of humanity.”

    While fighting the climate crisis is a shared challenge, not everyone is equally responsible and government policies must be tailored accordingly, Max Lawson, who co-authored the report, told AFP.

    “The richer you are, the easier it is to cut both your personal and your investment emissions,” he said. “You don’t need that third car, or that fourth holiday, or you don’t need to be invested in the cement industry.”

    Among the key findings of this study are that the richest one percent globally—77 million people—were responsible for 16 percent of global emissions related to their consumption.

    That is the same share as the bottom 66 percent of the global population by income, or 5.11 billion people.

    Pakistan

    The difference in recent floodings in Germany and Pakistan unveils how a country’s wealth can “enable or hinder its ability to respond to a climate emergency”.

    German floods affected a population of 40,000 people, resulting in damage and economic costs of 40 billion dollars. They were able to mobilise funding through federal and state government flood relief funds for reconstruction of 35 billion dollars within weeks.

    On the contrary, Pakistan floods affected a population of 33 million people, leading to damage and economic costs of 30 billion dollars. International donors pledged a funding of 8.57 billion dollars as of January 2023 for the next three years.

    While Germany could easily manage the financial and technical resources required, debt-troddened Pakistan was unable to allocate the necessary resources resulting in suffering from “the lasting impacts of the floods”.

    The report explains that this comparison between the two countries shows “a common double standard practised by many Global North countries: they rapidly find the funds needed when disasters hit within their borders, but fail to do so when they occur in the Global South”.

  • Claudia Goldin wins Nobel economics prize for work on women’s pay

    Claudia Goldin wins Nobel economics prize for work on women’s pay

    An economic historian and Harvard professor, Claudia Goldin, has been awarded with the Nobel Prize in economics for her work examining the gender pay gap.

    Goldin’s unprecedented research highlights the fact that women, despite their higher academic qualifications, are paid less than men; and that mostly this difference arises after childbirth.

    “This year’s Laureate in the Economic Sciences, Claudia Goldin, provided the first comprehensive account of women’s earnings and labour market participation through the centuries,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said on Monday.

    “Her research reveals the causes of change, as well as the main sources of the remaining gender gap.”

    After Elinor Ostrom in 2009 and Esther Duflo in 2019, Goldin is the third woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in economics — a category with the lowest number of female laureates.

    Goldin’s research examines data tracing 200 years of women’s participation in the workforce in the United States.

    As per her research, a woman’s role in the job market and her pay are, in part, decided by individual decisions, including educational choices, as well as broad social and economic changes.

    The prize committee highlights that while much of the earnings gap historically could be explained by differences in education and occupational choices, Goldin “has shown that the bulk of this earnings difference is now between men and women in the same occupation, and that it largely arises with the birth of the first child”.

  • American entrepreneur paying $4 per hour criticised for exploiting Pakistanis

    American entrepreneur paying $4 per hour criticised for exploiting Pakistanis

    A video shared on X (formerly Twitter) on Sunday is being criticised by users. The video, which features an X user named Christian, says that he remotely hires people from Pakistan to work for him.

    He has a marketing agency and he stated he pays his employees $4 an hour and “they’re extremely grateful to be working with me”.

    Christian explains that he hires a virtual assistant from Pakistan for administrative level tasks for his business like formatting spreadsheets, setting up email accounts and pays them 4 USD an hour.

    He justifies the meagre amount by expounding that an average monthly income in Pakistan is 280 USD, but as he is paying them four USD an hour, they are getting 160 USD a week or 640 USD a month, which is almost 3 times the average income, “a really great living for them”, he adds.

    “They live very very well.”

    He also added that if they perform well, the pay can be raised up to $7 an hour which is 4-6 times the average monthly income of a typical person in Pakistan.

    “They’re really grateful to be working with me because of the money they make. They have a great income, I get a great employee — it’s a win win.”

    He, however, concluded the video keeping in mind the expected criticism;

    “Before you leave a comment, yes i have US based employees. Yes, they make way more than $4 an hour. I’m just saying for this specific task, I pay a Pakistani assistant $4 an hour and they are very appreciative of it.”

    While some appreciated his work, many have criticised him for exploiting people from developing countries by paying them less than those from developed countries.