How the world’s poorer countries breathe worse air, in charts and maps, By Max Bearak, October 3, 2016, Washington Post: “On Sunday, India ratified its accession to the Paris climate accords on the 147th anniversary of the birth of Mahatma Gandhi. President Obama congratulated India in a tweet, saying that ‘Gandhiji believed in a world worthy of our children. In joining the Paris Agreement, @narendramodi & the Indian people carry on that legacy,’ using a Hindi honorific for the man who championed Indian self-rule and stewardship of its land. The Paris agreement is the international community’s biggest push yet to limit carbon emissions and other forms of pollution. Unfortunately, if worthiness is measured by being able to live in a world where the air one breathes does not spread disease and blacken one’s lungs, then we are far from it…”
Tag: Developing nations
Millennium Development Goals
Poorest countries hit hardest as world lags behind on global education goals, By Kate Hodal and Josh Holder, September 5, 2016, The Guardian: “The international community has not only failed to meet the education targets set out in the millennium development goals, it is also highly unlikely to meet the 2030 deadline for education laid out in the sustainable development agenda, with the poorest countries the hardest hit, according to the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation. Unesco’s global education monitoring report 2016 shows that just 64 countries of the 157 tracked by the report met MDG 2, which called for every child in the world to receive a full course of primary school education by 2015…”
Identifying Poverty Areas using Satellite Imagery
Scientists use machine learning to fight global poverty from space, By Lonnie Shekhtman, August 18, 2016, Christian Science Monitor: “Satellites are best known for helping smartphones map driving routes or televisions deliver programs. But now, data from some of the thousands of satellites orbiting Earth are helping track things like crop conditions on rural farms, illegal deforestation, and increasingly, poverty in the hard-to-reach places around the globe…”