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global inequality
Global Inequality Robbing Millions of Children of 'What It Is to be a Child'
'Before they draw their first breath, the life chances of poor and excluded children are often being shaped by inequities,' says UNICEF
Jun 28, 2016
Global inequality--"a vicious cycle of disadvantage"--threatens the lives and futures of tens of millions of children around the world, according to a new report from UNICEF.
The annual State of the World's Children report, released Tuesday, warns that unless serious steps are taken to narrow the gap between the rich and poor, 69 million children under five will die from mostly preventable causes, 167 million children will live in poverty, and 750 million women will have been married as children by 2030.
"Taken together, these deprivations effectively cut childhood short, robbing millions of children of the very things that define what it is to be a child: play, laughter, growth and learning."
--UNICEF
"As we look around the world today, we're confronted with an uncomfortable but undeniable truth: Millions of children's lives are blighted for no other reason than the country, the community, the gender, or the circumstances into which they are born," UNICEF executive director Anthony Lake writes in his introduction to the report (pdf).
"Before they draw their first breath," he continues, "the life chances of poor and excluded children are often being shaped by inequities. Disadvantage and discrimination against their communities and families will help determine whether they live or die, whether they have a chance to learn and later earn a decent living. Conflicts, crises and climate-related disasters deepen their deprivation and diminish their potential."
Nowhere is the situation "grimmer" than in sub-Saharan Africa, the report finds, where at least 247 million children--or 2 in 3--live in multidimensional poverty. By 2030, fully 9 out of 10 children in this region will be living in extreme poverty.
As UNICEF notes, poverty is about more than money, "[f]or children and adolescents. They experience it in the form of deprivations that affect multiple aspects of their lives--including their chances of attending school, being well nourished, and having access to health care, safe drinking water, and sanitation.
"Taken together," the report reads, "these deprivations effectively cut childhood short, robbing millions of children of the very things that define what it is to be a child: play, laughter, growth, and learning."
Coming less than a year after world governments signed onto 17 Sustainable Development Goals that aim to " leave no one behind," the findings are "another example of where the gap between the rhetoric of leaving no one behind, and the reality of what donors and governments do is very, very stark," lead report author Kevin Watkins told the Guardian.
"The truth is that governments have signed up to these commitments on leaving no one behind with absolutely no intention, for the most part, of doing anything that will promote the interests of those left behind," he said. "The challenge really is how do we use this new framing, the 'no one left behind' language...to galvanize the movement that can push governments to deliver."
Among UNICEF's recommendations to tackle the crisis are increased investment in vaccines, insecticide-treated mosquito nets, and nutritional supplements for the most excluded children and communities; cash transfers that enable children to stay in school longer; and "an integrated approach to development and humanitarian action" that recognizes the overlapping nature of global crises.
As Lake says in his introduction: "Inequity is not inevitable. Inequality is a choice. Promoting equity--a fair chance for every child, for all children--is also a choice. A choice we can make and must make."
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Robin Hood in Reverse: Climate Change Takes from Poor, Gives to Rich
A new study finds that climate change is triggering a massive reallocation of resources to the world's wealthiest countries
Feb 24, 2016
A warming climate is exacerbating global inequality by pushing critical natural resources, such as fish stocks, away from impoverished equatorial regions and making them more exploitable by the wealthy, according to a study released on Wednesday.
While the gap between the rich and poor in the U.S. and worldwide has expanded at a mind-boggling pace in recent decades, the new study, designed by scientists at Princeton, Rutgers, Yale, and Arizona State, shows that the frightening speed with which the globe is warming will only compound the economic trend.
The study looked specifically at fish to better understand the phenomenon.
"We tend to think of climate change as just a problem of physics and biology," Malin Pinsky, professor of ecology and evolution at Rutgers, explained to Rutgers Today. "But people react to climate change as well, and at the moment, we don't understand the impacts of human behavior on natural resources affected by climate change."
To examine those impacts, Pinsky told the newspaper that "[w]hat we find is that natural resources like fish are being pushed around by climate change and that changes who gets access to them."
The study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, looked at what the authors call "inclusive wealth," or the "sum of a community's capital assets."
Rutgers Today reports that the researchers examined natural resources such as fish and forests, a community's infrastructure—buildings, roads, factories—and its population's education level and health.
The newspaper wrote:
Pinsky reports that the stronger and more conservation-oriented a community's natural resource management, the higher the value it places on its natural resources, whether those resources are increasing or diminishing. If wealthier communities and countries are more likely to have strong resource management, these wealthy groups are more likely to benefit, thus exacerbating inequality.
The study used data collected by Pinsky in his studies of fish migration and applied a mathematical formula created by Yale University economist Eli Fenichel to illustrate the connection between the migration of natural resources and the migration of wealth. The scientists created two fictitious fishery-dependent communities, Northport and Southport, and used Fenichel's formula to examine future interactions between them and their fish stocks.
The findings also echo the changes and depletion reported by commercial and Indigenous fisheries worldwide.
The researchers observed that "a changing climate can reallocate natural capital, change the value of all forms of capital, and lead to mass redistribution of wealth."
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Robin Hood in Reverse: How Hotter Planet Takes from Poor, Gives to Rich
Global warming 'is essentially a massive transfer of value from the hot parts of the world to the cooler parts of the world,' says UC Berkeley researcher
Oct 22, 2015
Ever-increasing temperatures and unmitigated climate change will worsen global inequality and widen the north-south gap between rich and poor countries, according to a groundbreaking new study published in Nature this week.
Published by researchers from Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley, the findings use a novel metric to show that "climate change will reshape the global economy, causing a small number of cold countries to perform better and many temperate and hot countries to perform worse."
In a fact sheet (pdf), the authors state: "On net, we project that the global economy will do much worse because of climate change, with global average incomes 23% lower in 2100 with climate change relative to without it. In addition, because some of the cooler richer countries are expected to benefit from warming and poorer tropical countries are hurt, global inequality is projected to get much worse due to climate change."
The findings are especially troubling given the latest figures from the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which on Wednesday confirmed that 2015 is on track to be the hottest year in modern human history.
The Nature study posits that global economic growth will drop sharply after temperatures pass a critical threshold of 55 degrees Fahrenheit (13 degrees Celsius). As average annual temperatures in individual countries tick past that mark, wealthy nations will start to see a decline in economic output, a Stanford press release explains, while poorer ones, mostly in the tropics, will suffer even steeper losses because they are already past the threshold.
"This is like taking from the poor and giving to the rich."
--Solomon Hsiang, UC Berkeley
"What climate change is doing is devaluing all the real estate south of the United States and making the whole planet less productive," study co-author Solomon Hsiang, an economist and public policy professor at UC Berkeley, told the Associated Press. "Climate change is a massive transfer of value from the hot parts of the world to the cooler parts of the world."
"This is like taking from the poor and giving to the rich," Hsiang added.
Moreover, wealth doesn't necessarily insulate rich countries from the devastation of global warming. As Stanford's statement points out, a common assumption among researchers is that wealth and technology protect rich countries from the economic impacts of climate change because they use these resources to adapt to higher temperatures.
"Under this hypothesis, the impacts of future warming should lessen over time as more countries become richer," said study co-author Mitchell Burke, professor of Earth system science at Stanford's School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences. "But we find limited evidence that this is the case."
Burke and his fellow researchers say their findings should inform upcoming UN-brokered climate talks in Paris. They caution against relying on adaptation as a solution or strategy to deal with the climate catastrophe, noting that "our results suggest that over the last 50 years, we have not adapted much to the current climate that we are in, so we are not optimistic about the next 50 years."
Instead, the team says mitigation and how to pay for it should be at the forefront of discussions in Paris.
"Our research is important for COP21 because it suggests that these economic damages could be much larger than current estimates indicate," Burke said. "What that means for policy is that we should be willing to spend much more on mitigation than we would otherwise. The benefits of action on mitigation are much greater than we thought because the costs of inaction are much greater than we thought."
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