Indices show that small island developing States like Jamaica are three times more susceptible than developed countries to the negative impacts of climate change.
Jamaica's economy and its social and physical infrastructure have, on numerous occasions, been impacted negatively by natural disasters, including storms of increased frequency and intensity. Furthermore, adapting to climate change and climate variability is a costly undertaking, which often goes beyond the financial capacity and resources of its government. Therefore, it is important that the various commitments from the international community become a reality.
Like many other countries in the Caribbean, Jamaica has embarked on a number of projects, with a view to building capacity to cope with the effects of climate change, though limited individual efforts can only take us so far. The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) has already pooled its efforts to establish the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre. Located in Belize, the Centre assists in "mainstreaming" climate change issues in the development planning of countries in the region. It also provides expert forecasts and analysis of the potentially hazardous impacts of climate change and promotes special programmes that create opportunities for sustainable development.
Monday, March 31, 2008
Climate Change in Southern Africa
Zimbabwe is a warmer country at the beginning of the twenty-first century than it was at the beginning of the twentieth century. The annual-mean temperature has increased by about 0.4C since 1900, and the 1990s was the warmest of the twentieth century. This warming has been greatest during the dry season. During the wet season, day-time temperatures have warmed more than evening temperatures. There has been an overall decline of nearly 5 per cent in rainfall across Zimbabwe during the century, although there have also been substantial periods - for example, the 1920s, 1950s, 1970s - that have been much wetter than average. The early 1990s witnessed probably the driest period for the century, a drought almost certainly related to the prolonged El Niño conditions that prevailed during these years in the Pacific Ocean.
Botswana is affected by the changes in global climate as evidenced by extreme temperatures, recurrent droughts, floods, severe thunderstorms and strong winds. Prolonged droughts slowed down the country's construction industry and impacted negatively on food security. As global warming pushes temperatures up and droughts become more intense, the production of maize, southern Africa's staple food, could drop by as much as 30 percent in another two decades [Stanford University].
Namibia is extremely vulnerable to climate change and faces a range of serious threats [UN Climate Change report]. The report predicts "extreme" impacts on the water sector and human development in the country. Climate change is also predicted to impact fish stocks and agriculture. Combined, these threats to food security and the economy raise the prospect of social conflict and displacement. Malaria, malnutrition, diarrhoea and acute respiratory infections are all predicted to increase in Namibia as a consequence of climate change. Namibia’s agricultural production could drop by 13 per cent because of climate change [recent study by the University of Namibia].
In Zambia, climate change is the major cause of natural disasters that has hit most parts of the country particularly in the last rainy season. Floods have left a trail of destruction that destroyed crops and infrastructure in the region.
Botswana is affected by the changes in global climate as evidenced by extreme temperatures, recurrent droughts, floods, severe thunderstorms and strong winds. Prolonged droughts slowed down the country's construction industry and impacted negatively on food security. As global warming pushes temperatures up and droughts become more intense, the production of maize, southern Africa's staple food, could drop by as much as 30 percent in another two decades [Stanford University].
Namibia is extremely vulnerable to climate change and faces a range of serious threats [UN Climate Change report]. The report predicts "extreme" impacts on the water sector and human development in the country. Climate change is also predicted to impact fish stocks and agriculture. Combined, these threats to food security and the economy raise the prospect of social conflict and displacement. Malaria, malnutrition, diarrhoea and acute respiratory infections are all predicted to increase in Namibia as a consequence of climate change. Namibia’s agricultural production could drop by 13 per cent because of climate change [recent study by the University of Namibia].
In Zambia, climate change is the major cause of natural disasters that has hit most parts of the country particularly in the last rainy season. Floods have left a trail of destruction that destroyed crops and infrastructure in the region.
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Visual Ethnography
Knowledge of photography is just as important as that of the alphabet. The illiterate of the future will be a person ignorant of the use of the camera as well as the pen.
-- Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.
Setting aside for the moment (but only for the moment) the issue about what it is that a camera records, visual ethnography suggests a whole range of methods for collecting data. In this context, the camera is analogous to a tape recorder. Film and video cameras are particularly well suited as data gathering technologies for small group interactions, ethnography, participant observation, oral history, life history, etc. The tape recorder preserves things that are not preserved in even the best researchers' field notes. Similarly, tape recordings preserve audible data not available in even the most carefully annotated transcripts: timbre, the music of a voice, inflection, intonation, grunts and groans, pace, and space convey meanings easily (mis)understood but not easily gleaned from written words alone. By opening another channel of information, visual recordings preserve still more information. The raised eyebrow, the wave of a hand, the blink of an eye might, for instance, convert the apparent meaning of words into their opposite, convey irony, sarcasm, or contradiction. So, regardless of how we analyze the data or what we do with the visual record, we can use cameras to record and preserve data.
The mainstream of the social sciences are remarkable in the way that they have privileged the written word over all else. Sociologists do little more than, in the words of Bob Dylan, "Read books, repeat quotations, draw conclusions on the wall." We take the verbal self-report as both true, and as primary source. Ethnographers pay more attention than most to verbal (as opposed to written) information. But here too the decided prejudice is in favor of self-report and words. Yet, every culture is composed of jillions of non-verbal images, a fact apparently more easily grasped anthropologists who are comfortable with studying blanket designs, pottery shapes, totems, fetishes, and graven images. (Of course Anthropology's origins as a science of "pre-literate" cultures makes problematic their theories and methods)
Here, in the early adolescence of capitalist society, we live in the most decidedly visual environment yet produced. Each one of us consumes tens of thousands, maybe millions, of images each day. Even if we don't want to see we cannot avoid it. Jean Baudrillard, the French sociologist, suggested that the image world is a "simulacrum", a media world of copies of copies of copies where there is not and has never been an original. Everything in the symbol world refers to other symbols - a world of allusion and trope, maps referring not to territories but only to other maps, news referring to other news, photographs referring to paintings and so on in an endless a game of mirrors. Visual ethnography attempts to study visual images produced as part of culture. Art, photographs, film, video, fonts, advertisements, computer icons, landscape, architecture, machines, fashion, makeup, hair style, facial expressions, tattoos, and so on are parts of the complex visual communication system produced by members of societies. Visual images are primary evidence of human productive activity, they are worked matter. Their use and understanding is governed by socially established symbolic codes. Visual images are constructed and may be deconstructed. They can be analyzed with techniques developed in diverse fields of literary criticism, art theory and criticism, semiotics, deconstructionism, or the more mundane tools of ethnography. We can count them. We can ask people about them. We can study their use and the social settings in which they are produced and consumed. So a second meaning of visual ethnography is a discipline to study the visual products of culture -- their production, consumption and meaning.
-- Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.
Setting aside for the moment (but only for the moment) the issue about what it is that a camera records, visual ethnography suggests a whole range of methods for collecting data. In this context, the camera is analogous to a tape recorder. Film and video cameras are particularly well suited as data gathering technologies for small group interactions, ethnography, participant observation, oral history, life history, etc. The tape recorder preserves things that are not preserved in even the best researchers' field notes. Similarly, tape recordings preserve audible data not available in even the most carefully annotated transcripts: timbre, the music of a voice, inflection, intonation, grunts and groans, pace, and space convey meanings easily (mis)understood but not easily gleaned from written words alone. By opening another channel of information, visual recordings preserve still more information. The raised eyebrow, the wave of a hand, the blink of an eye might, for instance, convert the apparent meaning of words into their opposite, convey irony, sarcasm, or contradiction. So, regardless of how we analyze the data or what we do with the visual record, we can use cameras to record and preserve data.
The mainstream of the social sciences are remarkable in the way that they have privileged the written word over all else. Sociologists do little more than, in the words of Bob Dylan, "Read books, repeat quotations, draw conclusions on the wall." We take the verbal self-report as both true, and as primary source. Ethnographers pay more attention than most to verbal (as opposed to written) information. But here too the decided prejudice is in favor of self-report and words. Yet, every culture is composed of jillions of non-verbal images, a fact apparently more easily grasped anthropologists who are comfortable with studying blanket designs, pottery shapes, totems, fetishes, and graven images. (Of course Anthropology's origins as a science of "pre-literate" cultures makes problematic their theories and methods)
Here, in the early adolescence of capitalist society, we live in the most decidedly visual environment yet produced. Each one of us consumes tens of thousands, maybe millions, of images each day. Even if we don't want to see we cannot avoid it. Jean Baudrillard, the French sociologist, suggested that the image world is a "simulacrum", a media world of copies of copies of copies where there is not and has never been an original. Everything in the symbol world refers to other symbols - a world of allusion and trope, maps referring not to territories but only to other maps, news referring to other news, photographs referring to paintings and so on in an endless a game of mirrors. Visual ethnography attempts to study visual images produced as part of culture. Art, photographs, film, video, fonts, advertisements, computer icons, landscape, architecture, machines, fashion, makeup, hair style, facial expressions, tattoos, and so on are parts of the complex visual communication system produced by members of societies. Visual images are primary evidence of human productive activity, they are worked matter. Their use and understanding is governed by socially established symbolic codes. Visual images are constructed and may be deconstructed. They can be analyzed with techniques developed in diverse fields of literary criticism, art theory and criticism, semiotics, deconstructionism, or the more mundane tools of ethnography. We can count them. We can ask people about them. We can study their use and the social settings in which they are produced and consumed. So a second meaning of visual ethnography is a discipline to study the visual products of culture -- their production, consumption and meaning.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Nepal's Climate Change
Farmer Barati Khadka sits in his home, eating a typical Nepalese meal of dal-bhat and rice, in his hut in the small Nepalese village of Bhawasa, about 90 miles east of Kathmandu. During the night there is light rain but its intensity increases. Within an hour, the rain becomes so heavy that Barati cannot see more than a foot in front of him, even though it is full moon. It rains like that until midday. Then the land starts moving like a cobra.
When it stopped, Mr Khadka barely recognised his village. In just a few hours the serpent had carved a 1000 foot wide path down the valley, leaving a ten foot-deep landcape of rocks, boulders, trees and rubble in its path. Hundreds of fields and terraces had been swept away. The irrigation systems built by generations of farmers had gone and houses were demolished or were now uninhabitable. Mr Khadka’s home stood isolated on a newly formed island.
Bhawasa expects a small flood every decade or so, but the two largest have taken place in the last three years. The floods are coming more severely, more frequently. The rainfall far heavier these days and coming at different times of the year.
Nepal is on the front line of climate change and variations on Bhawasa’s experience are now being recorded in communities from the Himalayas in the freezing north to the heat of the southern lowland plains.
Crop yields are down. Barati now lives with 200 other environmental change refugees in tents in a small grove of trees by a highway. The refugees are marking their observations of a changing climate. One notes that wild pigs in the forest now have their young earlier, another that certain types of rice and cucumber will no longer grow where they used to, a third says that the days are hotter and that some trees now flower twice a year.
Scientists in Nepal are recording some of the fastest long-term increases in temperatures and rainfall anywhere in the world. At least 44 of Nepal's and neighbouring Bhutan's Himalayan lakes, which collect glacier melt-water, are said by the UN to be growing so rapidly they they could burst their banks within a decade. Any climate change in Nepal is reflected throughout the region. Nearly 400 million people in northern India and Bangladesh also depend on rainfall and rivers that rise there.
Some real world conversions in US$:
$16: Solar dryer to help preserve fruit and vegetables for the winter season
$25: Local materials to insulate a home
$55: Smoke hood to protect from indoor pollution from open fires
$75: Manufacture and installation of a smoke hood
$235: Bicycle ambulance
$1560: Gravity ropeway in mountainous regions for access to markets and schools
· The average US citizen produces 126 times more carbon dioxide than someone living in Nepal
· CO2 emissions from using an electric kettle for one year in the US are equivalent to average person's total annual CO2 emissions in Nepal
When it stopped, Mr Khadka barely recognised his village. In just a few hours the serpent had carved a 1000 foot wide path down the valley, leaving a ten foot-deep landcape of rocks, boulders, trees and rubble in its path. Hundreds of fields and terraces had been swept away. The irrigation systems built by generations of farmers had gone and houses were demolished or were now uninhabitable. Mr Khadka’s home stood isolated on a newly formed island.
Bhawasa expects a small flood every decade or so, but the two largest have taken place in the last three years. The floods are coming more severely, more frequently. The rainfall far heavier these days and coming at different times of the year.
Nepal is on the front line of climate change and variations on Bhawasa’s experience are now being recorded in communities from the Himalayas in the freezing north to the heat of the southern lowland plains.
Crop yields are down. Barati now lives with 200 other environmental change refugees in tents in a small grove of trees by a highway. The refugees are marking their observations of a changing climate. One notes that wild pigs in the forest now have their young earlier, another that certain types of rice and cucumber will no longer grow where they used to, a third says that the days are hotter and that some trees now flower twice a year.
Scientists in Nepal are recording some of the fastest long-term increases in temperatures and rainfall anywhere in the world. At least 44 of Nepal's and neighbouring Bhutan's Himalayan lakes, which collect glacier melt-water, are said by the UN to be growing so rapidly they they could burst their banks within a decade. Any climate change in Nepal is reflected throughout the region. Nearly 400 million people in northern India and Bangladesh also depend on rainfall and rivers that rise there.
Some real world conversions in US$:
$16: Solar dryer to help preserve fruit and vegetables for the winter season
$25: Local materials to insulate a home
$55: Smoke hood to protect from indoor pollution from open fires
$75: Manufacture and installation of a smoke hood
$235: Bicycle ambulance
$1560: Gravity ropeway in mountainous regions for access to markets and schools
· The average US citizen produces 126 times more carbon dioxide than someone living in Nepal
· CO2 emissions from using an electric kettle for one year in the US are equivalent to average person's total annual CO2 emissions in Nepal
Monday, March 24, 2008
Autobiographical Memory
I have long been interested in understanding what we remember about our past and why we remember it. But the study autobiographical memory presents many problems. Many other kinds of memory are tested in the lab but that doesn’t work so well for autobiographical "episodic" memories, which are made over time and everywhere along the way.
The 19th century English psychologist Sir Francis Galton pioneered a simple method to study autobiographical memory, a modified version of which is still used today. He decided to go fishing for memories associated with a list of common everyday words. Four times he used the same cues to try and catch his recollections. One of Galton’s findings was that it was difficult to pinpoint when the events he remembered had occurred. Another was that his brain often produced the same associations over and over again. “This shows much less variety in the mental stock of ideas than I had expected,” he wrote, “and makes us feel that the roadways of our minds are worn into very deep ruts.”
There is no universally agreed definition of autobiographical memory, but it can be conceptualized as a mental state resulting from the interplay of a set of psychological capacities—self-reflection, self-agency, self-ownership and personal temporality—that transforma memorial representation into an autobiographical personal experience.
Theorists pursuing the ontology of self immediately find themselves immersed in a host of issues about mind and body, subject and object, object and process, free will and self-awareness. Mapping our knowledge of self is very much tied up with the “story” of how what we have experienced has made us who we are, and how who we are has led us to do what we have done.
Saturday, March 22, 2008
Augmented Memory
There are things in this life worse than dying...
But there is nothing better than living....
Autobiographical memory (AM) is the “memory for the events in one’s life”. Often it is assumed that in order to remember all those events, you just need to record everything and when you replay these recordings you will remember those events. You can compare this with a library metaphor that has been used to explain AM according to the record-keeping approach. However, after many years of AM-research it was concluded that AM is stored in a different manner, which often is initiated by memory cues.
But there is nothing better than living....
Autobiographical memory (AM) is the “memory for the events in one’s life”. Often it is assumed that in order to remember all those events, you just need to record everything and when you replay these recordings you will remember those events. You can compare this with a library metaphor that has been used to explain AM according to the record-keeping approach. However, after many years of AM-research it was concluded that AM is stored in a different manner, which often is initiated by memory cues.
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