What's interesting this week...
Develop Impact - Issue 123
Happy Monday!
Hope your week’s off to a good start! Our team at Glean Asia has had a much-needed break last week, and now we are ready to get back to our projects. This week I am highlighting five articles I found interesting. I hope you find these resources interesting and helpful as well.
Have a great week ahead!
Jesse
What’s interesting…
TF ESC-B20 creates first green industrial area in Southeast Asia
The Energy, Sustainability, and Climate Business 20 Task Force (TF ESC-B20) has made significant headway in creating the First Green Industrial Area in Southeast Asia. The green industry area acts as an industrial decarbonization effort, which has become an important step not only for the cluster but also for the green industry.
“Climate Change” and Digital Technologies: redressing the balance of power
This blog post series by Tim Unwin, critiques some of the rhetoric surrounding climate change, articulates a new way of understanding the relationships between digital tech and the environment, and provides some suggestions on how to use digital tools wisely as we work toward a more sustainable future.
Throughout the article, it emphasizes the importance of understanding the interests underlying the present rhetoric and practice around the interactions between digital technology, climate change, and the environment.
AidWatch 2022 - Is the EU a payer, player… or just full of hot air?
Official Development Assistance(ODA) is a powerful tool for governments and civil society alike, enabling them to help those who are left furthest behind. However, since 2005, when CONCORD began its annual AidWatch report, the European Union has not met international ODA targets.
This year AidWatch report shows the EU spending commitment, employing ODA, its effectiveness of international partnership, providing support to least Developed Countries (LDCs) and to international partners during the COVID-19 pandemic. The report confirms that the EU clearly prioritized ‘paying over playing’ during the pandemic. Having put its own interests first, the EU added insult to injury by reporting in-excess vaccines to the OECD as ODA, thereby inflating ODA levels and significantly over-playing their generosity as donors - yet still failing to reach the 0.7 per cent of GNI target. On top of that, access by African and other partners to develop vaccines locally was actively hampered by the EU, including in the WTO.
What can the digital rights community do to support climate justice work?
Reflections from a community call by Sara Baker and Barbara Paes, focusing on two main themes: 1) environmental data & AI for climate, and 2) tech sustainability and decarbonization. While it is hard to capture how much collective energy was in the room, they share some of the main takeaways from the call below.
Prioritizing Climate Impact Data
The Centre's predictive analytics team has been using climate data to develop the trigger mechanisms that are part of an anticipatory action framework.
The most important missing data for this analysis are related to the effect of past hazards on vulnerable populations. To bring more focus and urgency to getting this data, Centre of Humdata is expanding the HDX Data Grid so that climate impact data can be included in it.
For the HDX Data Grids, climate impact data is defined as:
Tabular or vector data containing current and/or historical (previous 10 years) impacts of climate events relating to floods, droughts and storms. The data should specify the location of the event, date of the event, and contain at least one indicator of impact such as spatial extent of event, disruption to affected populations, destroyed infrastructure, and/or affected vegetation.
By the end of October, the climate impact subcategory was 28 percent complete with data available for seven out of 25 countries.