I would like give a plug about Compassion International. Karen and I sponsor our children through this organization. Not only do they help us connect to children who need financial assistance, they promise to make sure that most of our money get to the needs of the children rather than paying for administrative overhead cost. They also help us with the communication with our sponsored children through letters. Since our children do not speak or write English, Compassion workers help with the two-way translation. In addition to financial support, they hook up our children with a local church, providing them with a supportive community where they learn about the love of God. It’s a wonderful program. If you would like to support a needy child, please consider Compassion International.
Archive for September, 2009
Compassion International
September 29th, 2009A Dialogue on ICTs, Human Development, Growth, and Poverty Reduction
September 29th, 2009In September 2003, IDRC organized A Dialogue on ICTs and Poverty: The Harvard Forum. The current paper has been drafted as background for a second Harvard Forum – A Dialogue on ICTs, Human Development, Growth and Poverty Reduction, September 2009. Six years later, much has changed. Trends highlighted at the Harvard Forum and elsewhere have progressed and many have accelerated. ICT regulation and policies have improved in many countries, often in response to good research and advocacy. There has been explosive growth in mobile phone access and use in all regions, with both private and non-profit operations servicing the ‘bottom of the pyramid’ (BoP) with very low-margin, high-volume business models.
In both poor and wealthy countries and populations, mobile phone use has enabled and facilitated the expansion of markets, social business and public services. An entire range of economic services, enabled by mobile phones, has emerged – banking and financial transactions, marketing and distribution, employment services, personal services, and public services. [1] Beyond economic impacts, improvements are being made in other freedoms or dimensions of well-being: personal security, political participation and accountability, peace, dignity and opportunity.
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via Publius Project.
Fighting pollution on the Pearl River
September 29th, 2009The following article from Chinadialogue highlights the environmental governance structure’s limitation to environmental protection. And it uses Pan-Pearl River Delta cooperation project to illustrate these points. The suggestions are valid, but it still does not resolve the conflict between the central government’s agenda to prioritize economic development over environmental protection.
However in 2004, a group of 11 provinces and administrative regions along the Pearl River Basin, in southern China, joined together in a unique, bottom-up initiative. Members of the Pan-Pearl River Delta (PPRD) declared their willingness to cooperate in water pollution abatement and sustainable development. This suggested a new path for environmental resource management in China. But five years on, did this approach really represent a new horizon for managing transboundary rivers in China? Or did institutional issues still constrain the project?
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Existing economic interdependencies between the provinces and their platform of cooperation – the PPRD economic development agreement – have allowed the promotion of cooperation in environmental protection in the region. But why has this cooperation not yielded active joint action to fight water pollution? I suggest that the main reasons for this limited cooperation are: the dependence of the EPBs on funding from local governments; the unwillingness of local governments of poorer upstream provinces to invest in joint efforts to reduce pollution; the inability of Guangdong province to oblige upstream provinces to act, because of the hierarchical rank structure of the respective governments; the unwillingness of Guangdong, though a rich province, to bear the burden of the costs of regional cooperation; and the efforts of Guangdong, as well as other provinces, to shift the responsibility for funding on to the central government.
Thus, the existing governance structure in China limits even this bottom-up initiative for environmental cooperation. It is also unlikely that this structure will be significantly reformed in the near future, since the central government continues to focus on strengthening its central power. However, under the existing structure there are some steps which could be taken to promote environmental cooperation and improve sustainable management of environmental resources in China.
First, environmental protection efforts should be included in the evaluation of local government officials, to enhance their incentives to invest in environmental protection programmes. Second, the independence of the MEP and EPBs should be strengthened through direct funding of their operations, in order to help them act independently of local governments and enhance their enforcement of regulations on environmental protection across China. Finally, the central government could improve the incentives of provinces and localities to participate in cooperative mechanisms, such as the PPRD. The central government could provide support both in clear administrative recognition of such mechanisms – and in financial assistance when it is needed.
via Fighting pollution on the Pearl River | Reut Barak – China Dialogue.
The New Sputnik
September 28th, 2009Thomas Friedman observes that the Red China will become Green China, outplaying US in 21st Century green tech.
Most people would assume that 20 years from now when historians look back at 2008-09, they will conclude that the most important thing to happen in this period was the Great Recession. I’d hold off on that. If we can continue stumbling out of this economic crisis, I believe future historians may well conclude that the most important thing to happen in the last 18 months was that Red China decided to become Green China.
Stimulus Is Greenest in South Korea and China
September 24th, 2009South Korea and China lead the world’s 20 largest economies in the percentage of economic stimulus money they invest in environmental projects, the United Nations Environment Program reported Thursday.
Other members of the Group of 20 trail well behind in their percentages of such investment from stimulus money, the U.N. agency found.
via Stimulus Is Greenest in South Korea and China – NYTimes.com.
China Emerges as the Yin and the Yang of the Global Warming Problem
September 22nd, 2009An article from NY Times regarding the struggle China is facing.
One question is “What will China do?” said Jake Schmidt, international climate policy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council. And, just as importantly, he added, it’s “Will Congress accept it?”
The world may get an answer to the first question tomorrow, when Chinese President Hu Jintao speaks to the U.N. General Assembly. He is expected to announce a major climate change plan, which some experts say could include a new five-year commitment to reducing the greenhouse gas content of China’s economy, and may indicate when China plans to peak its emissions before lowering them.
via China Emerges as the Yin and the Yang of the Global Warming Problem – NYTimes.com.
Consumers Trust Recommendations From Friends Online, Opinions From Strangers
September 22nd, 2009Consumer survey…
According to the latest Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey of over 25,000 Internet consumers from 50 countries, recommendations from personal acquaintances or opinions posted by consumers online are the most trusted forms of advertising worldwide. 90% of consumers surveyed said that they trust recommendations from people they know, while 70% trusted consumer opinions posted online.
Mobile app sees science go global
September 18th, 2009I am currently working on the OakMapper project that aims to enable citizen science using the web and mobile phone, which has a very similar approach as EpiCollect. OakMapper Mobile is built for iPhone and is now in AppStore. Check it out. I hope to try out EpiCollect with a Android phone one of these days.
A mobile phone application will help professional and “citizen” scientists collect and analyse data from “in the field”, anywhere in the world.
The EpiCollect software collates data from certain mobiles – on topics such as disease spread or the occurrence of rare species – in a web-based database.
The data is statistically analysed and plotted on maps that are instantly available to those same phones.
The approach is outlined in the open-access journal PLoS ONE.
The software has been developed for so-called smartphones that run Google’s Android open-source operating system.
via BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Mobile app sees science go global.
Green Intelligence: Toward True Ecological Transparency
September 16th, 2009Wal-Mart’s Sustainability Index and GoodGuide are two interesting systems to study.
Two months ago, Wal-Mart made an announcement that could set off an ecological earthquake: The giant retailer disclosed it was cooperating with an academic consortium to develop a sustainability index for rating its hundreds of thousands of products.
Just weeks after Wal-Mart’s announcement, the Harvard Business Review featured a cover story proclaiming that sustainability has become the key to successful corporate strategy. The article, co-authored by the University of Michigan-based strategy maven C.K. Prahalad, proclaimed that the next business model must be green and touted ecological innovation as the coming driver of economic growth.
Wal-Mart has handed the environmental movement a new tool for ameliorating the human footprint: using an emerging generation of information systems to create market pressures to upgrade the ecological performance of commerce and industry. This strategy entails making life-cycle-assessment data for products transparent — that is, labeling them with a sound, independent rating so shoppers can easily take the ecological impacts into account as they decide what to buy.
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A prototype for just such a sustainability index is already in operation: GoodGuide.com, launched earlier this year, aggregates more than 200 databases — from the global warming evaluations of companies compiled by ClimateCounts, to government listings of toxic chemicals — into a single rating on a 10-point scale.
The advantage of an all-in-one rating is this: say you’re buying a wood product that has won Forest Stewardship Council approval — but you also want to know how it rates on chemicals of concern, how workers are treated, and its carbon footprint. GoodGuide, developed by a team led by industrial ecologist Dara O’Rourke of the University of California at Berkeley, tells you all that, and much more — either in a single summative score (on a 1 to 10 scale), or broken down into sub-ratings in environmental, health, and social categories — and, if you’re determined to dig down to details, with transparency about how the ratings were arrived at. So far GoodGuide rates 70,000 or so individual products, with more in the pipeline
via Green Intelligence: Toward True Ecological Transparency by Daniel Goleman: Yale Environment 360.
China begins raising Three Gorges reservoir level to 175m
September 16th, 2009The water is rising…
An operation to raise the level of water in the Three Gorges’ reservoir to 175 meters began early Tuesday.
The level increased to 146.3 meters at 11 a.m. Tuesday from the 145.87-meter mark when the operation began, said Yuan Jie, chief of the control center of the China Three Gorges Project Corporation.
via China begins raising Three Gorges reservoir level to 175m — china.org.cn.
