This may be a little morbid, but I was looking again at the Billion Dollar Gram, one of the smartest things I’ve seen all year.
Together with the constant bomb paranoia in Islamabad, I was inspired to try making a visual comparison of some of the risks and probabilities in my life. Suggestions for improvement are welcome!
Click on the picture for the full size file
Someone somewhere is surely doing a study on who is less popular, pirates or bankers. But to confuse things, seems the pirates have actually been learning from the bankers – let’s hope they don’t start securitising those RPGs or we’ll all be in trouble. (h/t Texas in Africa)
Ahmed Rashid provides the best analysis I’ve seen of why Obama’s Afghanistan troop surge is a nothing more than a political ass-covering exercise, with very little chance of success. After holding out for nearly a year, I’m beginning to join the Obama-doubters. (h/t Teddy)
Wronging Rights highlights some outrageous badvocacy
“King Leopold’s Ghost” author Adam Hochschild visits Bunia to see what ex-child soldiers think of the Thomas Lubanga trial at the ICC, and comes back with a surprisingly good summary of the issues. (also thanks to Texas in Africa)
The sighs around the humanitarian community in Pakistan this week have been almost audible. What it boils down to is:
We’re trying to deal with a humanitarian emergency in Pakistan. It’s an emergency created by a US-encouraged Pakistani military campaign against the Taliban and driving millions of people from their homes. The Taliban themselves are largely the mutant offspring of the anti-Soviet Mujahedeen originally aided by the US, and the religious extremist militant groups encouraged by Pakistan themselves to fight against India in Kashmir.
We are trying to deliver assistance to displaced people in placeswhere the army doesn’t want us to go and get in the way (no link, because no one wants to talk about it), and in a post-Afghanistan, post-Daniel-Pearl world where the main strategy of militants is blowing up innocent people, and one where they increasingly see aid workers as legitimate targets (here, here and here).
Yet, this week has seen certain journalists trying their best to make life even harder.
This totally baseless campaign (here and here) clearly targeting foreign journalists (incredibly enough from a newspaper that calls itself the “most credible” in Pakistan) is either publicity-seeking or has a political agenda behind it, and no one I’ve spoken to seems sure which. You might just think it’s irresponsible, but coming after the Matthew Rosenberg affair it seems certain that it’s more than that. Pretty bizarre to see journalists basically working against freedom of the press, but there you have it.
This, on the other hand, is sheer irresponsible stupidity. It’s journalism so irresponsible that is even manages to surprise the jaded, cynical aid workers. OK, the guy’s obsessed with Blackwater, and yes the story is interesting, although using only anonymous sources who contradict each other makes it questionable. But in this context, the throwaway line about Blackwater operatives posing as aid workers adds nothing to the story and is quite likely to lead to more humanitarian workers being killed. And this will reduce still further the space that humanitarians have to get assistance to people who need it.
Idiot.
NB – The title of this post comes from some more irresponsible journalism, a populist an anti-paedophile campaign a few years back in the UK that got taken to some ludicrous extremes. It would of course be wrong to make Jeremy Scahill fear for his life for no good reason, but that’s exactly what his irresponsible journalism has done for thousands of other innocent people.
Here’s an old post on Butembo I never finished back in DRC…something for my friends and colleagues currently spending much more time there than they want to, after unrest in Lubero forced NGOs to temporarily leave the area. ================================================
One morning back in DRC, I found myself trying to get passport photos taken of some of our team. It was part of the very lengthy process of opening our very own bank account. Those with DRC experience could imagine what opening a bank account with the International Bank of Congo might involve, but I’ll save that story for a very rainy day. Instead I focus on one small part of the story which captures in microcosm the more general problems of getting things done in a state such as DRC. This is the story of the Butembo passport photo experience.
Now Butembo is one of the larger, and certainly one of the richest towns in DRC. So when our team had to get passport photos taken to open our bank account, I had assumed that it might not be completely out of the question. Luckily I had some passport photos with me but some of our team didn’t, so they went off to find a photo studio while I went to do some shopping.
Our new bank manager had been very helpful in pointing them in the right direction, and a short walk down the road was indeed the one photo studio in town:
Yes the arrow on the sign may have been pointing into the street, rather than at the studio, but the fact that they had added “NB – quick & good” at the bottom of their sign suggested an establishment of rare quality.
As it turned out, the first problem was to deal with the surprisingly large crowd at the desk of the photo shop. All of the people there seemed to be customers, and they all had cameras which they were waving around vigorously, but apart from that no one seemed to be doing anything. Eventually someone in the team managed to find one person who admitted to working in the shop and duly asked for some passport photos. They had then left the shop to discuss this complicated transaction, and I found them on the street outside the shop a half hour later, when I came back from shopping.
The problem seemed to be that the shop had a new camera, didn’t know how to use it, and the instruction manual they had was helpfully written only in Chinese. So about 10 people were clustered around the camera, all trying to press the various buttons on the camera at the same time. I took a look at the chaos, and decided I was better off leaving them to sort it out, and use my time in town where there was a good mobile phone network reception to make a few work phonecalls.
15 minutes more button pressing and I saw the crowd dispersed dejectedly, the Chinese camera declared the undisputed winner for successfully having resisted all efforts to make it function. But one of our team had a great idea – she had her camera with her, so why don’t they use that. This turned out to be an arrangement that pleased everyone.
We followed the man from the shop to where the photos would be taken, which turned out to be down the street, round the corner, and through some kind of carpark. Here indeed there was a photo studio, and I watched from an amused distance as the photographer energetically tried to persuade our team members to have their bank account passport photos taken with a backdrop of Copacabana Beach, or the Eiffel Tower. I half expected them to pull out the background of a smiling Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden waving some guns around, which since they are still the most popular calendar boys of Africa (rivalled only these days by Obama) I’m sure they have stored away somewhere.
Finally the photos were done, and we all trooped back through the carpark, round the corner and down the street to the shop. At this point the photographer clearly felt we were invested enough into the process that he could inform us that, actually, they had a little problem with their printer and currently it wasn’t working. Which meant that he had spent the last 2 hours or so using our camera to take photos of us, all the while knowing that he had no means of printing them out at the end of it.
At this point, looking around me I saw that there were many other shops around us advertising passport photo services. “Let’s just give up and go to another shop” I suggested. But some more Butembo-experienced of our team quickly disabused me of this notion. These shops don’t have the capacity to take or print photos, they just lead the hapless customer back to the one “real” photo studio, the one we were currently enjoying the services of, and charge a commission for the trouble. It seemed it was game over for our bank account application for that day.
We may have wasted the whole afternoon, I thought, but at least we haven’t paid them anything, a small consolation. But of course, we were to be denied even that. “Let’s just go” I said. “But we paid in advance for 6 sets of photos”. Of course we did. And we didn’t really have any other option anyway, if we wanted a bank account opened.
To cut the final chapter of the saga short, it involved me cajoling and entreating at length the people in the photo studio to see if there wasn’t any way that the non-functioning photo printer could be encouraged to function, at least for long enough to print out our photos. This may seem unlikely, but most vehicles, buildings and machinery of varying complexity in DRC are held together by little more than hope, elastic bands and maybe a few pieces of cloth. I really have seen 20 tonne trucks in DRC with broken suspension repaired by pieces of pagne cloth, and with that level of improvisation surely fixing a photo printer is possible. And so it proved. An hour or so later, once the photo shop owner was sufficiently convinced that we weren’t leaving without either money or photos, we finally got our reward. And it was even in time to give to the bank before they closed.
One step done. Only another five hundred or so similar steps between the idea of delivering humanitarian assistance in the DRC and the end products in the hands of the people who need it.
The Pakistani media and the Government are paranoid about external intervention in their country. India, Afghanistan, America, or whatever is the enemy du jour has agents everywhere. But no one seems to have considered the possibility that John Cleese has become a cunning sleeper agent for the British Government in Pakistan. Consider the evidence…
Slogans at a recent anti-Taliban protest in Pakistan (the last 2 paragraphs).
and some of Cleese’s earlier work:
Spooky coincidence or something more? You decide.
NB – to avoid any possibility of confusion of this sort, I should point out that John Cleese obviously isn’t a British agent in Pakistan.
The MONUC is the UN peacekeeping mission in DRC, currently the largest and most expensive in the world, with a budget equivalent to that of the whole Congolese state, about $1.4bn annually, the last time I looked.
To put it another way, they have apparently the 2nd largest fleet of aircraft in Africa, with more aircraft than all but the very biggest commercial operators in Africa.
As such, they have the capacity to employ their own dedicated press corps and hold their own press conferences.
Given the distance of most of their target audiences from the reality of the situation in East DRC, these have metamorphosed into such masterpieces of obfuscation and spin that Campbell and Rove must be revolving in their political graves. And while the Orwell’s MiniTrue was one of the pinnacles of modernism, I feel that MONUC’s wonderful press conferences are best seen as a postmodern reaction to a very postmodern war.
Here is the most recent example, from yesterday.
And here is your cut-out-and-keep handy translation guide to the what’s going on in the MONUC press department backroom when putting these things together:
Translation guide to the MONUC press conference of 29th July
“In Ituri district, the DRC Armed Forces (FARDC), with the support of MONUC forces have been taking part in operation "Pierre d’Acier" since 22 July 2009.”
Translation: “Sh*t, we’ve run out of hard things to name our super-hard super-scary military operations after because we’ve had so many of them. I know, let’s call it “Stone of Steel” – doesn’t mean anything, but wasn’t it a Van Damme film a few years back? Can’t get harder than that!”
“The joint operation enters its third phase, with the aim of neutralizing residual elements of militiamen of the Patriotic Resistance Front in Ituri (FRPI) and those of the Popular Front for Justice in Congo (FPJC) that continued to destabilize localities in Irumu territory.”
Translation: “OK we know this is the 17th ‘phase’ of the never-ending operations against these d&mn militia in Ituri, but that really doesn’t sound good – let’s call it the 3rd phase of this particular operation. And seriously, we’re still fighting the FRPI since 2005? That’s just going to sound like we have no idea what we’re doing. Well we’ll just have to call them ‘residual elements’, at least then it sounds like we’re making some progress. And noone’s going to want to know that we’re using helicopter gunships against women and children armed with spears, but if we call it ‘neutralizing’ then that sounds a hell of a lot better.”
“At the end of last week, the FARDC took the control of Janda, Pkoma, Matalatala and Fitchama, villages situated within a 10-40 kilometre radius of Aveba.”
Translation: “Didn’t we take this same area a few months back? And actually several times in the last few years but then lose it again because the army doesn’t have the capacity to hold them and the underlying problems aren’t addressed? Hmm, at least find some villages noone has heard of, that way it’s less obvious and hey, ‘taking’ all this territory has to be good!”
“MONUC forces prepared the heavy weapons and fight helicopters to assist in the operation.”
Translation: “What? Protection of civilians is the main part of our mandate? FRPI is partly made up of whole villages, with women and children on the front lines, who don’t much like the army but are mostly civilian when they aren’t being attacked? We’re planning to use artillery and helicopter gunships on them? Again? Well if we slip it in here now in the press conference, at least noone can say we didn’t tell them.”
“In North Kivu province, confrontations in the past week between FARDC and the FDLR rebels (FDLR) as well as the APCLS and PARECO rebels, caused several civilian victims. According to reports, at least 24 people were killed during the FDLR attack of 20 July 2009 in the border area between North and South Kivu in Mandje village…Of the 24 fatalities, sixteen were civilians, five were FDLR rebels and three were FARDC soldiers. The exact number of victims is difficult to establish at the moment, and some sources have indicated that this number could be higher.”
Translation: “This one was an FDLR attack, not an FARDC attack so remember to put in the number of civilian casualties that the FARDC told us there were. And of course since the FARDC figures are clearly not reliable, we can always say that the number of victims could be higher, sounds better that way. Funny how there’s always many more civilian casualties than military in all these ‘confrontations’ between these armed groups, isn’t it? Almost like they aren’t actually fighting each other at all but just using the excuse to target the local population. We’d better slip some more good military language in the next few paragraphs to remind people that this is a real war and MONUC is protecting civilians as best it can by supporting the FARDC against the terrorists in best military fashion.”
“The commander of the military operation Kimia II confirmed the attack, and added that nine FDLR troops had been neutralised. The governmental troops also freed 14 civilian hostages and a boy of four years.”
Translation: “Hey, let’s use the word neutralised again, otherwise it’s beginning to sound a bit messy. Oh and here’s another good opportunity to call anyone we find in territory out of government control who hasn’t been shot by one group or another a ‘hostage’. That way you can imagine the heroic soldiers abseiling down the walls and swinging in through the windows, shooting the nasty bearded terrorists, and rescuing the blindfolded and terrified little children in the corner. Somehow calling them ‘people still living in the village who somehow had missed out on being rounded up and held hostage by the government soldiers’ just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
“A MONUC military patrol rushed to Hombo where they noted that the security situation was extremely volatile".
Translation: “Someone who talks in a language we understand, like English and er, English, told us something might be happening somewhere. We found out about it before it actually happened! Admittedly there wasn’t actually anything going on when we got there, but come on, you can’t blame us for highlighting something like this. You know it’s not every day, or every month actually, that we arrive for once before the fighting’s all over and everyone’s packed up and gone home. And hey, we can call it volatile because, well, where is there in East DRC that couldn’t be called ‘volatile’”
And… a nice clean military picture to round things off with:
I’ve just looked at the Ituri and North Kivu parts because they are the bits I know, but I’m sure South Kivu is no better. Sorry that today’s post is a bit negative but sometimes it’s hard to see the bright side in DRC.
I haven’t been blogging since I’ve been back in the Democratic Republic of Congo, partly because I’m just too busy, and partly because there’s not a whole lot of cheerful things that I can write about.
But I’ve just come back from a week of holiday in Uganda, just across the border but a completely different culture. I feel about as relaxed as a very sleepy hippo:
But relaxation didn’t come straight away. After spending about 2 of the last 3 years in various parts of East DRC, I’m very much adapted to surviving and dealing with the kind of problems that come up around here, and it always takes time to return to normal social functioning whenever I leave.
So here’s my my aide memoire for myself and others who may find themselves in this unusual situation of being somewhere outside the Bermuda Triangle-esque East DRC. The top 10 things you need to remember when leaving DRC:
The Keynesian demand-side policies currently being practised and preached by the US and UK governments were once memorably summed by JMK as:
“The government should pay people to dig holes in the ground and then fill them up."
Keynes was trying to make the point that in what we nowadays euphemistically call a ‘downuturn’, in his view the most important thing is to get money circulating again, and how that money gets into people’s hands is much less important. He probably never expected that his words would be put into practice literally, as there are generally other activities that can be carried out that people can be paid for which are slightly more useful than digging holes in the ground and filling them in again.
But in a strange parallel between the global economic crisis and the difficulties in drought management in the Somali Region of Ethiopia, I found myself doing exactly what Keynes suggested in some villages on the Somaliland/Ethiopia border.
In the project I’ve been working on recently, we have actually paid about 1,000 people in about a dozen animal herding communities either to dig holes, to fill them in, or sometimes both, as part of a response to drought. Now this may seem like a strange use of emergency aid money, and it’s the first time I’ve seen this as a drought response technique, but so-called “cash-for-work” (which is the way most of us live, surely?) has become an increasingly common tool in the humanitarian emergencies. It’s adaptable and flexible to most situations: the adjustable spanner, or the Swiss army knife of the humanitarian intervention toolbox, perhaps?
The basic idea is: in situations where people temporarily do not have the money to pay for the most basic necessities, instead of just giving them what you think they need, or just giving them money, you pay people to do some type of public community work. This potentially has the dual benefits of the achievement of some kind of public works (preferably something that will reduce the community’s vulnerability to the type of problem they are currently having), and the injection of cash into the community. It also has the advantage of encouraging local markets rather than bypassing them by giving out stuff.
It’s called cash-for-work because a previous, and still widely used, method of doing the same thing is ‘food-for-work’. As it sounds, it is the somewhat less dignified approach of paying people in food for the work that they do. It’s more appropriate when food is not available in the local market and food is the main thing that people need, but this is rarely the case. Sometimes also it’s an option when it’s too dangerous to give out cash, or there is reason to believe that the cash will be diverted to things other than people’s immediate needs, though it’s difficult to think of a plausible scenario for this latter. As with much food aid, food-for-work is used more because a lot of the resources given to the World Food Programme are largely in-kind, i.e. food surpluses, mostly resulting from the enormous subsidies paid to farmers in the US and the EU, being legally dumped on poor people, pushing down local food prices and reducing incentives towards self-sufficiency and investment in agriculture. My NGO thankfully doesn’t do very much food-for-work.
In this case, the rains had either failed or been significantly less than normal in the Somali Region of Ethiopia for the last 3 rainy seasons, meaning that it was getting towards 2 years since the last decent rains, meaning rain catchments which provide most of the water were virtually exhausted, and the pasture land for animals was almost completely depleted. Communities were getting by on remittances from relatives in towns and overseas, and through reducing their consumption. Normally they sell animals when they need money, but one of the covariancy problems of a drought cycle like this is that in the bad times everyone’s animals are weak from lack of pasture and water and everyone wants to sell them at the same time, but there’s little demand for weak animals that no one can either use for meat, or maintain in the drought environment. Which leads to sights like this:
Cash-for-work in this circumstance was one approach we used to try to tide people over until the rains came and the pasture land recovered. Also if they can do this through works which build their resilience to future droughts, all the better.
The projects chosen by the community were to increase the size and clean out the silt that builds up in their rain-catchment ponds (i.e. digging holes), and to control erosion gullies through filling them with rocks, preventing them from cutting off access to valuable pasture land and even access to the villages themselves (filling in holes).
Here is a pond that has been dug (and then filled with rain to be used for water for animals):
…and here are some holes that have been filled in with rocks:
There are also problems with cash-for-work, aside from the danger of driving large quantities of cash to places that are generally slightly off the law-enforcement radar. Problems include:
In this particular case, when I arrived in Somali Region, most of these issues seemed to be addressed: we had consulted communities about what they thought could usefully be done in their area, this was the dry season where anyone who could take their animals out of the area to get pasture had already left. Those who were left were not doing a lot, mostly just waiting for rain.
Actually the immediate challenge was trying to get the cash quickly enough to the people who were out digging in the sun every day. The practical details of this were not too thoroughly thought through, and when I arrived the work had already started but no payment method had been devised. It was clear that this could cause us major problems in the villages! Since we are working with animal herders in low-density, remote areas, people move around with their animals and even where there are more permanent villages, they don’t really have anything except maybe a kiosk shop or two, a restaurant, maybe in the larger ones a school or a pharmacy. Certainly nothing like a bank or even a micro-finance NGO through which we could transfer money. So we would have to transport the cash ourselves, first getting it wired from Addis, then putting it in cars to the project areas.
Unfortunately in Ethiopia my organisation has a limit of 75,000 Ethiopian Birr (about $7,000) that could be transported at any one time. This was manageable for normal operations, but the cash-for-work was quickly building up debts of over 150,000birr (about $14,000, or as I like to call it, about a fifteenth of a Frank Lampard) each week that we didn’t pay. Also the slightly nervous country office in Addis Ababa wanted the lists of people to be paid and the exact amounts, before transferring any money, then for us to send documents proving all the payments back to them before they would transfer any more. But just visiting the 12 villages where the cash for work was going on took days, always with the risk that sometimes after a day of driving you would arrive to find the person you needed to see was not there. Going round them collecting lists of who worked which days before sending all the documents to Addis, waiting for approval and the Ethiopian bank transfer (which is not the quickest), then organising vehicles and finding all the people to pay them their money in all the different villages, all put together meant that people could expect to be paid maybe a month after they’d started the cash-for-work, a supposedly emergency cash injection activity! We also didn’t have the people to do the payment, and the prospect of recruiting new people and sending them off with a rental car and money equivalent to several years’ worth of wages didn’t seem like the wisest idea.
The final complicating factor was that by the time the cash-for-work got started, there was only about 3-4 weeks left before the potential start of the rainy season. Once the rains came, people wouldn’t have to pay for water from trucks coming from the few boreholes, they wouldn’t have to buy imported fodder for their animals, and animal prices would return to normal levels. So the key thing was to get the money to the people before this, during the time when they really needed it. To cut a long story about procedures short, we cut a few of the more unnecessary corners and patched together a system to get people paid the following week. And happily this time the rains arrived pretty much on schedule. Although this led to a few logistical problems in delivering the remaining cash:
Given the very limited resources and time at our disposal over these few weeks, one thing I was disappointed that we didn’t manage to address was the issue of families with no member able to take part in the cash-for-work. I talked to people in a few of the villages and it seemed like in each there was maybe a few families like this, although the powerful clan system in the area means that they were generally helped out by the rest of their clan, so this was not as much of a problem as it is in some places.
Still, as part of the post-distribution monitoring, we’ll be looking at what people spent the money on as well as whether the most vulnerable people in the communities were assisted to cope, as well as learning some lessons for if we need to do this again.
So Dr Keynes, what do you think of seeing your ideal in action?
“In the long run, we’re all dead.”
And on that note, I think it’s time to leave. I’m interested to see the results of our monitoring of what people used the cash for, mostly because I find it really amazing that they do manage to survive in that environment through a drought, or even under normal circumstances, and this might help us to understand their coping mechanisms a bit better. So when I get the monitoring results, I’ll share them.
I was recently struck by a strange comparison. After extensive sampling, the eating opportunities of the capital of the Somali Region of Ethiopia, a place over twice the size of England, seem to vary between spaghetti:
and shiru with injera:
meaning one thing in each of the two restaurants in town. Admittedly I haven’t tried the camel meat restaurant yet, I’m saving that delicacy for a very special occasion.
Things have improved somewhat since orthodox Easter Sunday, as the christian restaurant now serves fried (and raw) meat as well as shiru. The downside being that the other restaurant has closed for some badly needed renovation, so the net effect is that I continue to subsist largely on Snickers bars in various stages of heat decompositon:
(this one is not my photo, in fact this Snickers looks positively sprightly!)
What brought this forcibly home to me was the booking of my flight back home on Emirates. Enchanted by the ability to actually reserve seats and print off tickets on the internet, I was playing around with the settings and ended up at the meal options for the flight. This is what I was confronted with:
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“Low purine meal?” I have not the slightest idea what that is. And really, if you’re a Jain, should you be flying? Think of all those poor insects that get sucked into the jet turbines…
Nice touch that they cater specifically for the British tourist with the “bland meal”, though even with these options the ultra-discerning British traveller can be pretty hard to please.
Anyway, rest assured that I will be registering my displeasure with Emirates that disgracefully they do not provide for my incredibly mainstream requirements, and will of course be bringing my own distilled, remineralized water and will have no choice but to make a stand for my religious freedom if the security guards try to take it off me. I hear Dubai is nice at this time of year…
“By 2015, on average over 375 million people per year are likely to be affected by climate-related disasters. This is over 50% more than have been affected in an average year during the last decade.”
Oxfam International have decided to use this figure prominently in the first paragraph of their latest paper on “The Right to Survive: The humanitarian challenge for the twenty-first century”, a 148 page document aimed at justifying a “step-change in the quantity of resources devoted to saving lives in emergencies and in the quality and nature of humanitarian response”. The same statistic appears also as their ‘killer fact’ on the last page of the same document, and it’s already been picked up by the wires and quoted all over the place, including in the New Statesman, the Guardian, even the News of the World (an English tabloid newspaper better known for celebrity sex-scandals and the like).
The suggested increase in disaster-affected people of 50% in the next few years struck me as an enormous change in a very short period of time. I know we’re getting worried about global warming, but is it really likely to have that much effect so quickly?
While in general I think the world could and should devote significantly more resources to humanitarian intervention, there are plenty of convincing arguments for this based on the way the world is now, without having to make predictions about how it’s all about to get much worse. I decided to have a closer look at how this alarming figure was generated, as if this demand for more resources relies so heavily on a projection like this, the researchers had better be pretty sure that their calculations are sound and defensible.
Turns out this figure comes from a short paper written by Shamanthy Ganeshan, & Wayne Diamond for Oxfam, called “Forecasting the numbers of people affected annually by natural disasters up to 2015”. Ganeshan and Diamond use figures from the EM-DAT database compiled by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED). They use the 1980-2007 quarterly figures of people “affected” by natural disasters starting in that quarter. “Affected”, in CRED terms, means those “who suffered physical injuries or illness, as well as those made homeless or who otherwise required immediate assistance during a period of emergency.”
Ganeshan and Diamond separate out ‘climate-related’ disasters because “predicted changes in the global climate could be expected to increase the frequency and severity of these natural hazards”, they take the number of affected people each quarter between 1980 and 2007, smooth the data using a method called “double exponential smoothing” and then do a linear regression, i.e. a best-fit straight line, which they then project on to 2015 to get the headline 375 million figure, and a “95% confidence interval” of 338m – 413m.
Luckily for all of us, there are several reasons why this estimate isn’t to be taken at face value and we don’t need to break out the dinghy and the tins of Spam just yet.
Firstly, there are questions over the statistical methods used. According to the authors, double exponential smoothing is supposed to be “used when there is reason to believe there is an underlying trend in the time series”. This, however, is generally reflected using a method called simple exponential smoothing. Double exponential smoothing is used when we think that this trend might be changing, i.e. following the authors argument in this case it would be not just that disasters are increasing, but that this increase is actually accelerating. But the authors do not try to justify this choice. The authors then fit a linear regression to their smoothed figures. The logic behind this is unclear – if there is a mechanism such as climate change that is increasing the number of disaster-affected people over time, there is no need to smooth the data first if you are then going to fit a linear regression to it, this simply reduces the accuracy of the regression (and also makes their confidence interval calculation meaningless). I recalculated using their dataset and the most simple method – a best fit line (linear regression), and came up with a projected figure of 306 million in 2015, a 28% increase. Still a sizeable figure, admittedly, but disturbingly different to their 375 million, 50% increase. What this means is that a highly questionable choice of statistical method is responsible for a sizeable chunk of their ‘killer fact’.
Secondly there are actually reasons to doubt the implicit model of an accelerating increasing trend in people being affected by disasters. Although they do not try to show how this hypothesis fits the data, the mechanism Ganeshan and Diamond seem to be using is that there is an underlying climate change trend that is increasing the severity and frequency of climate hazards (an increase that may be linear or exponential, it is unclear), and that there are potentially other factors that could exacerbate this (they mention “population growth, including in vulnerable areas, and the range of factors that can make people more vulnerable to the disasters that occur”). This concept of an accelerating climate change has begun to appear more frequently in the literature, and there is growing research into potential positive feedback mechanisms, but this is far from established science, and I haven’t seen anyone suggesting that an accelerating climate change has already been happening over the last 30 years. The authors do not present a model or evidence to justify this choice. And while Ganeshan and Diamond make mention of some possible other mechanisms to increase the figure – population growth, growth of people living in areas such as urban slums particularly vulnerable to extreme climate events, they do not consider the possibility of factors acting in the opposite direction. Such factors could be technological improvements (allowing better communications to at-risk populations, better climate modelling and weather predictions); decreasing numbers of poor people and increased government capacity in the countries providing the bulk of the figures (unsurprisingly China and India provide 77% of the affected populations in the chosen time period, and the number of people living below the poverty line in these two countries has nearly halved from 1.2 billion to 663 million according to World Bank 1981 & 2005 figures), and all of the work done by organisations like Oxfam in improving resilience in at-risk populations . As Oxfam actually says in its “Right to Survive” paper:
“While Cyclone Sidr killed around 3,000 people in Bangladesh in 2007, this was a tiny fraction of the numbers killed by Cyclone Bhola in 1972 or even by Cyclone Gorky in 1991, despite the fact that these storms were similar in strength or weaker…because governments have taken action to prepare for disasters and reduce risks”.”
One simple approach to address this lack of clarity as to in which direction the number of affected people is actually heading in is to see which type of line best fits the data we have. I used annual rather than quarterly data for 1980-2007 (CRED records quarterly data in the quarter in which the disaster starts, but most of these go on for more than one quarter, so annual data may actually be more accurate as well as being less ‘noisy’ so providing easier comparison of different trends, and found that a logarithmic (i.e. an increase that flattens off to level) fit the data better than a straight line increase (R squared value of 0.1619 for logarithmic, R squared 0.1434 for the straight line, both pretty bad fits but it is data with very high variance), and that a quadratic curve (a decreasing trend) fits even better, with an R squared of 0.1844. The implication of that best fit curve? Average affected people peaked at around 225 million around the year 2000 and by 2015 would be around 148 million, a sizeable decrease. I’m not saying this is correct, and Ganeshan and Diamond do admit that “different forecasting models could lead to different results”, I am just saying there are reasons to doubt the model that the authors’ have chosen, since there is no explicit logic to the model and it is not the model which best fits the data they have chosen to use, and therefore to doubt their claims that theirs “is a reasonable forecast” especially when they undermine this reasonableness by drawing incorrect conclusions such as:
“we can be 95% confident that the number of people affected by climate-related natural disaster in 2015 will be between 336 million and 413 million in an average year”
This can only possibly be true if their model is correct, and there is a far higher than 5% chance that it is not.
Thirdly and finally there is the choice of datasets. The authors do not say why they have chosen to use 1980-2007. Looking at the data, it is clear that we do not have accurate figures before the 60s, and between the 1960 and 1970 disasters seem to become more completely recorded. Underrecording in earlier data therefore could well be an error which could explain some or all of the observed increasing trend. Although it may seem reasonable to assume that from 1980 onwards there would not have been too much change in accuracy of disaster victim recording, there are also plausible arguments that for example during the Cold War, disaster victims might have been underreported for political reasons by both sides. So I looked at how dependent the results were on the years chosen.
I would like to compare the impact of changing datasets using the same methods as the authors, but they have not given enough information to replicate their smoothing, which requires two constants, not just the one that they provide. So I have recalculated using a simple linear regression, which can be compared to the 306 million projection for 2015 above, and the average of the last 10 years that the authors base their comparison on, which is 238 million.
Ganeshan and Diamond seem to have excluded the latest 2008 data, which are available with CRED. Including these immediately reduces the projection for 2015 to 288 million. Let’s take the Cold War hypothesis, and use the dataset from 1989-2008, less data but maybe more reliable – this gives us 244 million (a very small increasing trend, scarcely higher than the 238 million average).
As an aside, you may wonder if the increases in the numbers of affected people is significant, ie. if we can actually statistically say that there is an increasing trend. The answer as far as I can see is clearly no, at least not most of the ways you cut the data. But this in itself is not a disqualification of the premise of the paper, since we have a pretty well scientifically established mechanism (i.e. climate change) by which these numbers probably will increase, so it’s a reasonable working hypothesis that there is an increase, rather than assuming the null hypothesis (having to prove that there is a statistically significant increase before we can do any further projections – we just don’t have the data for this).
Going back to the datasets, the shorter time we look back, the smaller the increasing trend, and from 1993 onwards the best fit straight line actually shows a decreasing trend, i.e. we would project a decreasing number of people being affected in the future. We might say that 15 years of data is not enough to get over the natural fluctuations in disasters, but it is not immediately obvious then that 27 years used by the authors is enough to be reliable.
My general conclusion would be that you have to take all these figures with more than a pinch of salt. From looking at the available data in detail, I would conclude that it is just as easy to make the case that the number of people being affected by climate hazards is decreasing over time as that it is increasing, and that the data is far too incomplete and of questionable accuracy to accept the authors’ claim that their “headline figure” is “reasonable”. It is an interesting way to look at the data, and this type of evidence-based approach is often lacking from NGOs’ advocacy positions, but it needs to be done very carefully and very thoroughly if it is going to have the desired impact.
I think Oxfam would be better off relying on the observables and generally accepted facts than to risk a backlash and the loss of credibility through use of questionable statistical methods. Few Oxfam supporters would question that global warming is happening and likely to have a big impact on poor people, nor that we should devote more resources to humanitarian issues, but relying on alarmist statistics like this in the end will only serve to weaken the underlying message.
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