October 2009

In July, biodiversity specialist and blogger Tony Whitten wrote a post about not abandoning old-fashioned conservation techniques as an important method of taking positive action on climate change. One of the important old-school mitigation methods, he wrote, lies in protecting the world’s forests through reforestation and avoiding further deforestation.

Accordingly, a big part of the ongoing climate change discussion includes reducing emissions through deforestation and degradation (known as REDD). And the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization now offers a tool to help monitor forests in developing countries. Using satellite imagery and other data, the Global Forest Resources Assessment Portal displays the information on an interactive map.

Click to view large.

A colleague over at the PSD blog first pointed out yesterday a brand new data visualization tool recently rolled out by the World Bank. The Data Visualizer displays the 2009 World Development Indicators – including 49 indicators for 209 countries from 1960-2007 – in an attractive, easy-to-understand and highly customizable way. The data contains social, economic, financial and environmental indicators and can be filtered in a number of different ways, including by region and country.

Someone familiar with Gapminder.org, which I wrote about last spring, will quickly notice that this new tool from the World Bank is quite similar to the Gapminder World animated graphing tool. As I mentioned in that post, I think one of the most interesting aspects of this type of data visualization is being able to literally hit Play and witness how the data indicators have changed over time right in front of your eyes.

There were perhaps too many children to a class, but these were clearly participatory.

It’s usually pretty hard for a World Bank sector director to make a spontaneous site visit.  But this one was fortuitous.  The informal school visit was hastily arranged when I realized my vacation tour would run through remote townships where World Bank projects have been supporting government in improving education through the Basic Education in Western Areas Project (BEWAP)…townships that had not, to my knowledge, been visited by previous missions.  I wasn’t sure exactly when I would arrive at each town on this trip so the visits could not be pre-arranged in advance.  Luckily, the whole province is almost totally ‘wired,’ so, the day before, I was able to call our Beijing office, which made arrangements for the Ministry of Education to contact the headmaster of the Tagong Township School with no difficulty.  In fact, the quality of the telecom coverage was better than that in many parts of Washington DC – like my office where my cell phone often doesn’t work unless the weather is clear and I press my face up against the window. 
 

Editor's note: This post is part of Blog Action Day on climate change. For more information, visit blogactionday.org.

Apologies for having been out of touch since Carbon Expo. I needed a break, and summer in Croatia proved one can have a life beyond international development and carbon finance. Climate change, however, very much stayed on my mind with reports of wildfires in the United States and Greece. Clearly, one cannot escape all-encompassing global change, in particular when negotiations have now started in earnest on a post-2012 treaty to reduce carbon emissions and provide financing for developing countries.

Some still think that climate change is just a buzz topic and will quietly disappear from global attention. Let me assure you that many people in East Asian and Pacific countries would disagree. They are hit by natural disasters, which in recent years not only steadily increased in frequency, but also in intensity.