The United Nations today appealed to donors to make up an enormous shortfall in emergency funding for relief work in Haiti, where hundreds of thousands of people are still suffering from the devastation caused by four hurricanes over the past month.
Only 2 per cent of the $108 million flash appeal has so far been donated, nine days after it was launched, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported.
OCHA stressed that the situation remains very serious in the impoverished Caribbean country, where over 320 people were killed by the storms and flooding, and 160,000 others are still living in the open, exposed to disease and malnutrition.
Some $54 million are needed for emergency food aid. The UN World Food Programme (WFP) has already helped feed some 298,000 people since the start of the crisis.
OCHA is also concerned over access to those who have not yet received aid, including people in the Artibonne and Nippes regions, where continued rains might complicate relief efforts.
This article discusses a project by the Center for Hazards Assessment, Response and Technology (CHART) at the University of New Orleans.Three years after Hurricane Katrina, houses are still going up across the metropolitan area. And "up" doesn't mean new: It means, well, up.
The sight of homes being raised 3 or 4 or even 10 or 12 feet above ground has become common. But what will this do to the local architectural landscape? What is the impact on neighborhoods? Individual blocks? And how high is too high?
Early on, Laska says, the group realized that elevation conversation can be complex. The earliest house-raisings post-Katrina often looked like structures on steroids. Laska refers to them as "flood rage houses" -- residences hoisted by people who said, succinctly, "Never again."
In fact, many homeowners lifted their foundations to the level of their Katrina watermarks. Which is actually not such a bad idea, Laska said.
"That kind of reaction is based on actual flood experience. It's a good barometer of what the highest potential flood level might be."
More recent elevations, however, tend to be less severe. "The elevated house has grown on us, and people are doing a better job at it, " Laska said.
It appears that individuals' psychological response to risks has followed patterns discussed previously in academic literature on risk and mitigation. Individuals appear to assign higher probabilities to these risks immediately after the event, thus overcompensating. These people may have raised their homes more because of this experience. As the event becomes more distant in individuals memories, they do not overcompensate as much. This poses the question, will we continue to see less and less mitigating behavior as Katrina becomes a more distant memory?
Here is a link to an interactive map of New Orleans.
A new study has been published in Science concerning dead zones. From the New York Times:
A study to be published Friday in the journal Science says the number of these marine “dead zones” around the world has doubled about every 10 years since the 1960s. About 400 coastal areas now have periodically or perpetually oxygen-starved bottom waters, many of them growing in size and intensity. Combined, the zones are larger than Oregon.What are dead zones?
The most widespread, chronic environmental problem in the coastal ocean is caused by an excess of chemical nutrients. Over the past century, a wide range of human activities—the intensification of agriculture, waste disposal, coastal development, and fossil fuel use—has substantially increased the discharge of nitrogen, phosphorus, and other nutrients into the environment. These nutrients are moved around by streams, rivers, groundwater, sewage outfalls, and the atmosphere and eventually end up in the ocean.How do dead zones impact marine life? From the NY Times:
Once they reach the ocean, nutrients stimulate the growth of tiny marine plants called phytoplankton or algae. When the concentration of nutrients is too high, this growth becomes excessive, leading to a condition called eutrophication.
What are some strategies to address dead zones?“The overwhelming response of the organisms in our coastal areas is to migrate or to die,” Dr. Diaz said. “To adapt to low oxygen water, it has to be a part of your evolutionary history. It’s not something you can develop in a 40- or 50-year time period.”
Many dead zones are cyclical, recurring each year in the summer months. But over time, they can permanently kill off entire species within the zone. They have also prevented the rebounding of species that are under protection after overfishing, like the Baltic Sea’s cod.
Low oxygen levels also kill off annelid worms and other sources of food for fish and crustaceans.
Robert W. Howarth, a professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell, said methods to reduce nitrogen-rich runoff existed, including the planting of winter rye or winter wheat rather than leaving fields fallow after fall harvest. Such planting would cause much fertilizer to be absorbed by the winter crops rather than being leached into waterways by spring rains.From Oceanus
There are some novel ideas as well. A project is currently underway at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to examine the feasibility of using shellfish aquaculture to reduce nutrients in the coastal ocean. The experimental shore-based aquaculture system at the National Center for Mariculture in Eilat, Israel, uses shellfish to absorb excess nutrients excreted by fish. Researchers at WHOI are trying to determine whether the same idea is feasible in the ocean. As the shellfish produced by such an enterprise have economic value, this is an example of a win-win situation.
For some species, like shrimp, croaker, and bluefish, the average price per pound in 2007 was lower than the price paid more than a decade earlier.
In 2007, shrimp averaged $1.88 per pound, compared to $2.61 in 1994.
Fishermen were paid $0.30 for bluefish in 2007, less than the $0.36 paid in 1995.
Croakers earned fishermen $0.37 per pound in 2007, but brought in $0.51 in 1990.
A direct correlation between growth of the global seafood market and downward spiraling prices for some, if not all, types of wild-caught seafood produced in NC is hard to deny.Unfortunately, as we see in many situations, opening up trade has led to winners and losers. This article does not directly mention the winners, the consumers of seafood. The consumers now have access to a less expensive product. Elsewhere in the global market, someone has a competitive advantage for many of these products.
The evidence that globalization has hurt NC fishermen is perhaps most compelling in the case of shrimp, one of the most important commercial fisheries in the state.
