19-10-2020

MONDAY, OCtOBER 19, 2020
5
New global index shows
inequality across countries
Herbaria provide window into climate future.
ChRiSToPhE aSSoGBa
Dried and pressed plants are being
matched with artificial intelligence to
help researchers predict climate change
impacts. Scientists use herbaria -
collections of preserved plant specimens
- to study the phenology of plants, which
reveals the timing of seasonal events,
such as flowering, leafing and
reproduction. The manual analysis of
herbaria is a time-consuming process
that involves annotating the number of
visible reproductive structures.
But, the mass digitisation of herbaria
will boost the field of phenology, says
the international team taking a new
approach to the analysis of the world's
almost half a million identified plant
species. "With access to all known
herbaria, we could obtain data across
very large geographical and temporal
scales, which would enable us to develop
phenological models capable of
predicting plant behaviour in response
to current climate change," says Pierre
Bonnet, a botanist at France's
agricultural Research Centre for
international Development (CiRaD).
These climate models will be built by
drawing on information relating to the
number, or proportion, of reproductive
structures - particularly buds, flowers
and fruit - that can be observed on each
specimen.
Bonnet says the database of
annotations could be integrated into
predictive models. Plant phenology is a
major indicator of climate change and
its effects and is viewed by many as an
'early warning system' for future
extreme weather events or changes in
climate. aristide adomou, a lecturer
and researcher in botany at the
University of abomey-Calavi in Benin,
who is not part of the project, agrees that
digitisation will enable herbaria-based
climate projections.
katelin D. Pearson, a researcher at
California Polytechnic State University,
says that "finding more and more
applications for digitised specimens
only serves to enhance the value of
herbaria in the public sphere and, at a
very low level, for potential funders".
"The digitisation of african herbaria,
allied to continued botanical exploration
and cataloguing, would be a huge
Photo: Kerstin Riemer
Preserved plants predict future
advantage in terms of prediction
capacity," she says. Bonnet
acknowledges that images of plants
cannot capture the full picture. he says
that artificial intelligence is no substitute
for botanical and environmental
expertise, and the all-important physical
specimens.
as adomou notes, this raises the issue
of conservation - one of the major
challenges affecting herbaria in West
africa. adomou says that plant
specimens are deteriorating in most of
the region's countries, due to a lack of
appropriate conservation equipment.
he believes there is even a risk many
samples could be lost completely if
environmental degradation is not
stopped.
This is concerning as, according to
botanists, herbaria are "irreplaceable"
evidence of plants' histories. Bonnet
suggests that digitisation, coupled with
machine learning and analysis of
herbaria, will make it possible to
digitally preserve physical specimens
that are prone to degradation due to
heat, insects and physical handling.
DEvEloPMENT DESk
very low spending on public
healthcare, weak social safety nets and
poor labour rights meant the majority of
the world's countries were woefully illequipped
to deal with CoviD-19,
reveals new analysis from oxfam and
Development Finance international
(DFi).
The index ranks 158 governments on
their policies on public services, tax and
workers' rights, three areas pivotal to
reducing inequality and weathering the
CoviD-19 storm. it is being launched
ahead of the World Bank and
international Monetary Fund (iMF)
virtual annual Meetings next week.
Chema vera, oxfam international's
interim Executive Director, said:
"Governments' catastrophic failure to
tackle inequality meant the majority of
the world's countries were critically illequipped
to weather the pandemic. No
country on earth was trying hard
enough to reduce inequality and
ordinary people are bearing the brunt of
this crisis as a result. Millions of people
have been pushed into poverty and
hunger and there have been countless
unnecessary deaths."
The index highlights that no country
in the world was doing enough to tackle
inequality prior to the pandemic and
while CoviD-19 has been a wake-up
call for some, many countries are still
failing to act. This is helping to fuel the
crisis and has increased the
vulnerability of people living in poverty,
especially women.
The United States ranks last out of the
wealthy G7 countries and trails 17 lowincome
countries like Sierra leone and
liberia on labor legislation due to antiunion
policies and a very low minimum
wage. The Trump administration gave
only temporary relief to vulnerable
workers with its april stimulus package
after having permanently slashed taxes
which overwhelmingly benefitted
corporations and rich americans in
2017. The index's findings compound
oxfam's broader concerns that the
pandemic landed on a healthcare
system that excludes millions of people
living in poverty, which most affects
Black and latinx communities ?only 1
in 10 Black households has health
insurance compared with 7 in 10 white
households.
Nigeria, Bahrain and india, which is
currently experiencing the world's
fastest-growing outbreak of CoviD-19,
were among the world's worst
performing countries in tackling
inequality going into the pandemic.
india's health budget (as a percentage of
its overall budget) is the fourth lowest in
the world and only half of the
population has access to even the most
basic healthcare services. Despite an
already disastrous track record on
workers' rights, several state
governments in india have used
CoviD-19 as a pretext to increase daily
working hours from 8 to 12 hours a day
and suspend minimum pay legislation,
devastating the livelihoods of millions of
poor workers now battling hunger.
kenya, which had ranked highly (9th)
on progressive tax policies, has
responded to the crisis with tax cuts for
the wealthiest and big business and
negligible additional funding for social
protection and health measures. Nearly
two million kenyans have lost their job
and tens of thousands of people living in
Nairobi's slums and in the countryside
have received almost no help from the
government and are struggling to feed
themselves.
in Colombia, which ranks 94 out of
158 countries on labor rights, 22 million
informal workers don't have sick pay
and have been forced to work to feed
their families ?even if ill with CoviD-19.
Meanwhile, Colombian women are
bearing the brunt of the economic
slowdown, with an unemployment rate
of 26 percent compared to just 16
percent for men.
Togo and Namibia, which were
already taking strides to tackle
inequality before the pandemic, have
provided monthly cash grants to
informal workers who lost their jobs
because of lockdown measures.
Ukraine, which has one of the lowest
rates of inequality in the world despite
its relatively low GDP, has increased
frontline healthcare workers' pay by up
to 300 percent.
Since the pandemic, Bangladesh,
which ranks at just 113 on the index, has
stepped up by spending $11 million on
bonus payments for frontline
healthcare workers, most of which are
women. Both Myanmar and
Bangladesh have added more than 20
million people to their social protection
schemes.
While some countries were taking
positive steps before CoviD-19 ?South
korea boosted the minimum wage,
Botswana, Costa Rica and Thailand
increased health spending and New
Zealand launched a 'well-being' budget
to tackle issues like child poverty and
inequality, many countries had made
little progress in the fight against
inequality and some are going
backwards. Many countries near the top
of the index, such as Germany,
Denmark, Norway and the Uk, have
been back-tracking on policies that
reduce inequality like progressive
taxation for decades.
Women, who generally earn less, save
less and hold insecure jobs, have been
particularly hard hit by the lockdowns
introduced in response to the pandemic
while unpaid care work and genderbased
violence have increased
dramatically. Nearly half of the world's
countries do not have adequate
legislation on sexual assault and 10
countries, including Singapore and
Sierra leone, have no laws on equal pay
or gender discrimination.
Matthew Martin, Development
Finance international's director, said:
"Extreme inequality is not inevitable,
and you don't have to be a wealthy
country to do something about it. We
know that policies such as free public
healthcare, safety nets for people who
can't work, decent wages and a fair tax
system, have been proven to fight
inequality. Failure to implement them is
a political choice ?one that CoviD-19
has exposed with catastrophic
economic and human costs".
Carbon emissions mapped from Amazon deforestation
MEGhiE RoDRiGUES
Remote light sensing
technology has revealed that
the fragmentation of the
amazon rainforest
contributed one-third of
deforestation carbon
emissions in the region
between 2001 and 2015.
Deforestation fragments
forests, creating artificial
edges and altering forest
ecologies - known as 'edge
effects'.
"Forest edges are more
exposed to the sun, which
dries vegetation out and
raises local temperatures,"
Celso Silva Junior, lead
author of a study published
in Science advances, tells.
Fishbone-like forest cuts
create many edges,
accelerating forest
degradation. according to a
new study, this geometry
should be avoided in order to
limit 'edge effects'. This
image shows the acceleration
of deforestation around the
Fishbone-like forest cuts create many edges, accelerating
forest degradation. Photo: Lauren Dauphin
BR-163 road in Pará from
2000 to 2019.
"Forests that were used to a
and trees start to die. So,
edge effects are quite strong
in newly deforested areas,
specific climate become but they continue over time
exposed to a different one until the trees adapt to this
new environment," aragão
says.
liDaR - light Detection
and Ranging - is used to
measure distances and is
most commonly found in
satellites and aeroplanes, but
is also used for laser guidance
and self-driving cars. Silva
Junior's international team
of researchers used liDaR to
map biomass loss in new and
older forest edges, and
compared the findings with
neighbouring, undisturbed
regions to calculate carbon
losses.
liDaR is "as accurate as
measurements made by
researchers measuring trees
on the ground. The
difference is that it can cover
more area in less time," says
aragão. The technology
works like a large 3D
scanner, emitting a 'cloud' of
infrared lasers - similar to the
way radar uses radio waves
and sonar uses sound waves -
aragão explains.
NORWAY tops index, United States flails at 26, South Sudan ranks last.
Photo: Internet
PiPPa GalloP
Back in early april this year, 18
environmental organisations
working in the Western Balkans put
forward a set of recommendations on
the EU's Green agenda, covering the
five areas set out by the European
Commission.
While the devil lies in the numerous
details that are yet to be hammered
out, what sticks out overall is that the
Green agenda has plenty of good
ideas, but a conspicuous absence of
enforcement mechanisms.
anyone dealing with governments
in the Western Balkans must be
aware that they are not really
overachievers in environmental
issues. Commitments made back in
2005 under the Energy Community
Treaty to cut pollution in coal plants
remain woefully unfulfilled, two
countries still plan new coal plants,
and the whole region is suffering
from a tsunami of destructive and
unnecessary hydropower plants.
Recycling and waste prevention are at
miserable levels, while energy
wastage is rampant. Rail and other
public transport is being neglected,
while overpriced and oversized
motorways inflate the countries'
debts.
A green agenda for the Western Balkans
against this background, change
can be made, but usually only if
politicians see clear consequences of
not doing so. This has been proven
again and again by the Energy
Community Treaty. The Treaty has
been in force since 2006 and has seen
some progress with applying EU
energy and environmental legislation
in the region, but enforcement is
seriously lagging due to the lack of
penalties. a discussion is currently
ongoing about introducing monetary
penalties, which could finally speed
up implementation as long as they
are set at a dissuasive, effective and
proportionate level.
The only clear sign of extending the
countries' binding commitments is to
"facilitate their swift alignment with
the EU Climate law". This is certainly
a very welcome move, but only covers
one of the five agenda areas, and still
doesn't mention how it will be
enforced.
another issue is a lack of coherence
between the Green agenda and the
Economic and investment Plan for
the Western Balkans. it is hard to
Recently, the European commission published its economic and investment plan for the western
Balkans.
Photo: Collected
overstate how unreasonable this is in
a region which does not have a
tradition of widespread gas use. The
European Commission is knowingly
encouraging a set of not particularly
rich countries to waste their limited
resources on complex network
infrastructure that will be obsolete in
a couple of decades' time and would
call for yet another "transition".
another contradiction is on
hydropower. The Green agenda
highlights the need to diversify away
from hydropower and bioenergy,
while the investment Plan's
renewable flagship projects consist
entirely of hydropower - except for in
North Macedonia.
and while the Green agenda
mainly promotes rail and urban
transport, half the investment Plan's
transport projects are motorways.
Whether this is through existing
mechanisms like the Energy and
Transport Communities or by
changes in the Stabilisation and
association agreements with the
accession countries doesn't matter
much - the important thing is to
make it stick. This way, the Western
Balkans' environment wins but the
EU wins too, by finally convincing
people that it means business.