By Mario Osava 10 March 2015 SÃO PAULO (IPS) – Six million people in Brazil’s biggest city, São Paulo, may at some point find themselves without water. The February rains did not ward off the risk and could even aggravate it by postponing rationing measures which hydrologists have been demanding for the last six months. […]
By Brandon Miller, Madison Park, and Laura Smith-Spark13 March 2015 (CNN) – Tropical Cyclone Pam, one of the strongest storms seen in the South Pacific in years, has made a direct hit on the capital of Vanuatu, Port Vila. Satellite imagery shows the eye of the massive Category 5 storm making landfall on a small […]
By Marussia Whately and Rebeca Lerer11 February 2015 São Paulo (The Guardian) – It should be the rainy season. Instead São Paulo state is experiencing a third consecutive year with soaring temperatures and rainfall patterns well below historic records. The main water reservoirs are operating at their lowest capacity. The Cantareira reservoir system, which serves […]
By Ian Sample2 March 2015 (The Guardian) – The prolonged and devastating drought that sparked the mass migration of rural workers into Syrian cities before the 2011 uprising was probably made worse by greenhouse gas emissions, US scientists say. The study is one of the first to implicate global warming from human activities as one […]
By Gillian B. White6 February 2015 (The Atlantic) – Conversations about affordable housing are often dominated by questions of how to get lower-income residents in expensive cities—like New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco (and their surrounding areas)—into safe, affordable places to live. That makes sense: Often urban hubs are a good bet for jobs […]
By Jessica Lukjanow 9 February 2015 (VICE News) – Up to 200 indigenous communities in Australia could lose access to power and water because the government says it can no longer afford to deliver the basic services. The remote communities are mainly located across the northern tip of Australia and the Kimberley in the country’s […]
(UNDP) – Material living standards can be better monitored, particularly during economic downturns, through measures of household income and consumption rather than GDP (see figure). For example, while GDP fell sharply (by 5.7 percent) in the euro area in 2008 and 2009, household disposable income stayed at precrisis levels. This can be attributed at least […]
By DIONNE SEARCEY and ROBERT GEBELOFF25 January 2015 (The New York Times) – The middle class that President Obama identified in his State of the Union speech last week as the foundation of the American economy has been shrinking for almost half a century. In the late 1960s, more than half of the households in […]
By Lyndsey Layton16 January 2015 (Washington Post) – For the first time in at least 50 years, a majority of U.S. public school students come from low-income families, according to a new analysis of 2013 federal data, a statistic that has profound implications for the nation. The Southern Education Foundation reports that 51 percent of […]
9 December 2014 (OECD) – The gap between rich and poor is at its highest level in most OECD countries in 30 years. Today, the richest 10% of the population in the OECD area earn 9.5 times more than the poorest 10%. By contrast, in the 1980s the ratio stood at 7:1. The average incomes […]
