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Aviation flying high on alternative sources of power - 360 Mirjam Wiedemann Published on December 20, 2023 Transport is one of the world’s biggest polluters, but on the path to net zero, aviation is reinventing itself, potentially building a new kind of jet age. November 28, 2023, was a landmark day for the international airline industry. It marked the first time a jet airliner powered by 100 percent sustainable aviation fuel flew from London to New York. The Virgin Atlantic flight, which carried no paying passengers but did have an airline executive, a politician and Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson onboard, flew using a fuel made up mostly of waste fats and plant sugars. Sustainable aviation fuel is one of the many alternative fuels and propulsion technologies being developed as the aviation industry moves toward net zero emissions by 2050. After electricity and heat, transport is the sector with the highest carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Aviation counts for 2 percent of Co2 emissions globally. Aviation is crucial not only for global passenger movement but also global supply chains. While civil aviation nearly disappeared during the COVID-19 pandemic, cargo flights distributed much-needed disease controlling equipment and vaccines. The impact of fewer passenger flights was felt across supply chains as a lot of regular cargo is transported as belly capacity in passenger flights. Aviation bodies such as the International Air Transport Association and International Civil Aviation Organization have committed to decarbonising the industry by 2050. There are many ways to tackle aviation emissions. New aircraft designs to reduce noise and pollution have been developed for decades. In recent years, however, new technologies for decarbonising aircraft have been emerging and accelerating. Sustainable aviation fuels to electric and hydrogen flight, as well as hybrids, are all being researched, designed, tested and commercialised. Airlines prefer sustainable fuel currently as it can be used in existing aircraft without alterations. But it is not the only long term solution as questions linger over emissions during its production, challenging supply chains, competition for sustainable produced feedstock and worries about deforestation for cultivating feedstock for sustainable fuels. Sustainable fuels alone will not decarbonise aviation. Other solutions for a more sustainable way of flying are aircraft powered by electricity and hydrogen. Electric flying has made significant progress with, for example, Pipistrel certifying the first fully electric aircraft, the Velis Electro in 2020. Drones for cargo, and in the future passenger transport, have been betting on electric propulsion as well. Volocopter, a fully electric powered drone for passenger transport, received approval for a production line in 2023.The main challenge for electric aircraft is range due to the limited capacity of batteries. Electric aircraft can be a solution for short-haul but will not decarbonise medium to long-haul flights. Other important factors to consider with electric aircraft are the production of renewable energies at scale and upgrades of the distribution grid especially in regional and remote areas. Lifecycle analyses are also needed to consider emissions for the whole life of an electric aircraft, which includes battery production and battery life to determine how much emissions can be reduced in comparison to traditional flight. Acknowledging the challenges around the short range of electric flight, numerous start-ups are moving to a hybrid model using hydrogen and electricity. Examples include Dovetail Electric Aviation supported by regional airline Rex, and ZeroAvia supported by big names such as Airbus. Others are looking at an all-hydrogen solution such as Stralis by retrofitting existing aircraft but also designing a new aircraft that would cater for the medium-haul sector with an estimated entry into service in 2030 with a range of 3,000km. In the passenger drone sector, companies such as AMSL Aero are also moving to a hybrid solution with ranges of up to 1,000km. An all-hydrogen solution is promising as a long-term long-haul solution for civil aviation but has its own challenges. One is the increase of the size of fuel tanks due to hydrogen’s properties. This not only changes the aircraft designs but also comes with challenges at airports with limited space. Questions about supply chains and possible negative climate effects of contrails are other obstacles. It is not only the start-ups that are active in sustainable aviation. Manufacturers such as Airbus and Rolls Royce are also working towards more sustainable solutions. Airbus plans to have the first commercial hydrogen-powered aircraft ready by 2035 and Rolls Royce is actively working with partners such as budget carrier easyJet on hydrogen and hybrid propulsion. Commercial airlines such as easyJet, Air New Zealand and Rex have all made some headway into the market. Rex is an investor in Dovetail Electric Aviation, easyJet is working with Rolls Royce, and Air New Zealand recently bought its first all-electric aircraft. Meanwhile, Emirates and Qantas have established climate funds. Some of the main challenges with net zero aviation are the sustainable production of the fuel, understanding the lifecycle of emissions, understanding the effect on the climate of other emissions than Co2 and contrails, the limited ranges of electric powered flights, longer aircraft design due to large size hydrogen fuel tanks, infrastructure and sustainable supply chains of electricity and hydrogen especially to more regional and remote areas, high costs of new technology, and skilling up the workforce to work in these emerging fields. However, with aviation bodies, manufacturers, airlines and entrepreneurs working together on keeping the world moving, one may hope that flying on significantly reduced emissions will be a reality sooner than later. Dr. Mirjam Wiedemann is a lecturer and researcher at the School of Aviation at UNSW Sydney and managing director of WiedemannConsultants GmbH. Her work focuses on the Aerotropolis model, sustainable aviation and drones for regional economic development.

news-360info

2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on December 20, 2023

Bad buildings and heat pandemic a lethal combination - 360 Peter Graham, Peter Bragge, Kate McFarlane Published on March 17, 2023 Properly designed and built homes deliver so many ‘win-wins’ that could end our ‘heat pandemic’ it’s a mystery there’s not more of them. It is a typical summer’s afternoon in Gujarat, India. Women and children are listless as they swelter in the 34 degree heat. It’s even hotter outside. Families that have moved into affordable housing units built in the last few years are finding their comfort and health have not been sufficiently considered in the design and construction of the new dwellings. There are similar issues in Indonesia — where one study showed most household energy use was dedicated to trying unsuccessfully to stay cool — and Australia, where tenants in rental properties were regularly experiencing indoor temperatures above 30 degrees in summer. We are experiencing a heat pandemic. And it’s caused by lousy buildings. Homes could be refuges from the impacts of climate change, rather than silent contributors to the climate emergency. But for that to happen requires changing the way we build so homes are suited for future climates. Heatwaves are the leading cause of climate related deaths in Europe and the United States, and building design is a major contributing factor. A recent report by the European commission calls for a sustainable cooling strategy that also takes into account the need for equitable access to thermally comfortable buildings. Increasing average and extreme temperatures, urbanisation, accelerating cooling energy demand, and an ageing population are increasing the vulnerability of millions to heat-related health risks globally. For most people in Gujarat supplementing the poor thermal performance of their homes with air-conditioning is unaffordable. Cooling is a top priority when finances allow. But this demand for cooling is accelerating growth in demand for electricity, which is still predominantly generated with fossil fuels, thus increasing greenhouse gas emissions, and global warming. India has approved the construction of 8 million new affordable housing units over the next two years. If these buildings are not designed to enable people to stay cool and healthy without air-conditioning, then millions of people will become more vulnerable to the health and social impacts of climate change. Simple low-cost design changes can make a big difference. For example, using more insulating wall materials, ensuring windows have appropriate shading, providing ventilation louvers above doors and insect screens so windows can be opened without letting mosquitos in, can reduce annual cooling loads by around 25 percent compared to standard practice, research by ABLA Architects, Monash University Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture and Global Buildings Performance Network to be published soon shows. A research collaboration between Monash and the Global Buildings Performance Network of energy use in Indian and Indonesian homes is showing that this is not unique to India. As global warming progresses, people in already warm climates around the world are becoming increasingly vulnerable to overheating in their homes. A study in the Indonesian city of Samarinda showed that most household energy use was dedicated to trying to stay cool. Yet, the poor design of houses led to average indoor temperature and humidity being about the same as outdoor conditions — above 27C and 70 percent humidity – even when air conditioner thermostats were set to 20C. Lack of shading and natural ventilation coupled with poorly insulated and constructed walls and roofs means buildings heat up quickly and let cooled air leak out. Despite some Australian state governments and municipalities declaring a ‘climate emergency’ and producing action plans to achieve net-zero emissions by 2030, these have had a limited impact on the climatic adequacy of new housing and renovations. Planning controls applicable to new townhouses for example, are not able to be modified to ensure buildings provide thermal comfort and zero-net emissions without state government approval. Councils also seldom have influence over the performance of single dwelling proposals or renovations beyond enforcing the National Construction Code. If climate change benefits don’t convince governments and industry, the health and economic benefits might. Yet this is not a narrative currently framing the debate about policy reforms in the buildings sector. Monash University and the Global Buildings Performance Network released a global evidence review during COP26 showing the benefits of implementing policy for zero-emissions buildings go beyond keeping global warming well below 2 degrees. A key finding was that sustainable building practices — those that reduce carbon emissions across all phases of the building cycle from design and material choice to supply chains and waste management — deliver substantial physical and mental health benefits. There is also evidence that up to one fifth of the value of energy savings from well designed and implemented energy efficiency building retrofitting and renovation policies relate to direct health benefits such as lower rates of respiratory illness and heart disease In the European Union for example, direct health benefits of energy efficiency building renovation was estimated at EU2.86 billion by 2020. Indirect benefits include better physical and mental health. Improving and safeguarding thermal comfort in homes is therefore a priority. There were also significant job creation and economic benefits. Each USD$1 million invested in Energy Efficient Buildings creates about 14 job-years of net employment with as much as 16 million jobs per annum possible in the green building market globally. It also drives improvement in productivity of the construction value chain. Policies such as mandating net-zero energy performance in building codes leads to a positive return on investment to public finances over time. For example, direct and co-benefits of energy efficiency measures have the potential to add 1 percent growth in GDP in Germany. Higher energy efficiency performance also leads to lower home operating costs. Energy efficiency measures to eliminate fuel poverty in 2.5 million homes in the UK provided a net economic benefit of GBP1.2 billion in 2008. Other non-health benefits reported included cost savings to households, educational benefits of enhanced lighting and increased energy security. As part of the review, the research team conducted interviews with policy influencers in Indonesia and India, and shot video of people at home to determine whether the lived experience of people living in more sustainable housing matched the evidence base. Householders talked about cost savings and the health benefits from moving into affordable sustainable housing in Jakarta Indonesia. Which begs the question: if sustainable building delivers so many ‘win-wins’ and could end our ‘heat pandemic’ why aren’t all new buildings sustainable? It turns out the health and other benefits of sustainable building which have been reported in research are either not well known in practice, or not often used to promote sustainable building. Because sustainable building has been viewed primarily through the lens of climate change, other sectors that could benefit such as health, transport, energy and real estate have not been effectively brought into the conversation. Doing so could help convince more people that sustainable building is the ultimate ‘win-win’. Peter Graham is an Associate Professor in Architecture at Monash University, Australia and the Executive Director of the Global Buildings Performance Network, an international network of experts dedicated to achieving the mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions from the buildings sector. Professor Peter Bragge specialises in evidence reviews to support better decision making for policy and practice. He is Director of Monash Sustainable Development Institute’s Evidence Review Service (ERS), which delivers research and practice reviews to a diverse range of government and industry organisations. Kate McFarlane is a Research Manager in Architecture at Monash University, Australia and the Head of Networks and Engagement at the Global Buildings Performance Network. This article has been updated and republished to reflect the record heatwave affecting most of the northern hemisphere. It was originally published on March 13, 2023. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™. Editors Note: In the story “Hot house” sent at: 13/03/2023 12:26. This is a corrected repeat.

news-360info

2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on March 17, 2023

Bait to plate: making fishing supply chains more transparent - 360 John Virdin Published on June 8, 2022 Lessons from the ethical clothing movement, forest stewardship and other transparency initiatives could help end illegal fishing. Just under a decade ago the garment industry faced a reckoning: in April 2013 Bangladesh’s Rana Plaza building collapsed, killing more than 1100 people and injuring thousands of others. It had housed five garment factories. The disaster spotlit the unethical and inhumane conditions women and children endure in the fast-fashion supply chain and led to international pressure for improvements. Illegal fishing is increasingly under similar pressure. It too is responsible for human rights abuses as well as environmental harms. A recent study looked at supply-chain transparency initiatives in three industries to see how lessons learned might help stop the trade in illegal catch. Recent estimates suggest 7.7 to 14 million tonnes – or up to US$17.2 billion – of unreported catches are traded illicitly each year. Illegal fishing puts additional pressure on small-scale fishers who rely on the resources to live. Illegal fishers break rules designed to sustainably manage fish stocks – for example, by catching non-targeted species such as sharks and dolphins and using destructive gear like driftnets where prohibited, damaging reefs and the natural environment. Illegal fishers may also avoid licence fees and underreport their catch. The last 10 to 15 years have seen a stronger push to trace catches ‘from bait to plate’ by requiring each company in the supply chain to disclose where their fish comes from and ensure it is caught legally. In 2020 Japan passed a law requiring all catch and transfers of seafood to be submitted to the government for a certificate of legal catch. The law was similar to regulations introduced by the European Union and the United States. Australia, Chile, Ecuador, Indonesia, Mexico, Morocco, Peru, the Philippines and Taiwan have also signalled their interest in expanding transparency in internationally wild-caught seafood. These efforts are crucial, but their ability to change real-life practices is still to be measured – and changing what fishers do is the only way to stop the problem at its core. The fisheries industry is not the first to face global sustainability pressures, yet it is often analysed separately from land-based sectors – a lost opportunity to learn from industries with similar features. The global supply chains of the fashion and textile industry include large corporations whose operations can have significant environmental impacts – just as illegal fishing does. Voluntary transparency initiatives have been widely encouraged from the 1990s and early 2000s throughout the fashion industry, in extractive industries such as oil and gas, and in logging. Global brand Nike was among the first to increase transparency in the apparel industry. In the 1990s it began disclosing information such as the names and labour practices of its suppliers. Over time, companies such as Levi-Strauss and Nudie Jeans moved towards fuller traceability of fibres from production to supply. Multiple voluntary labelling initiatives such as Fairtrade began to disclose supply-chain information, including supplier names and labour practices where they had sourced their cotton. Cotton makes up nearly half of all fibres used in the apparel industry. Tracking organic cotton is a complex challenge given the variety of fibres involved in production. Many companies have since also adopted the Better Cotton initiative, which supports cotton producers to meet sustainability standards across environmental, social and management criteria rather than focusing on enforcement. But there are no accredited third parties to independently verify compliance, so the system is not fully traceable. To combat illegal logging consumers have pushed companies to purchase timber certified by the Forest Stewardship Council as sustainably managed. The EU introduced a timber regulation in 2010 putting the onus on importers to ensure timber entering the market is traceable. Similarly, to combat corruption in oil and gas concessions, more than 50 governments have signed up to the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative requiring them to disclose the terms of sales. Each voluntary initiative was led by civil society organisations, with varying sustainability standards and compliance. As companies expand internationally, the risk of being caught out by consumers, along with pressure from civil society groups, is one of the main drivers of supply-chain transparency. Governments and markets from wealthier economies have largely been the ones to support these initiatives, often targeting resources and producers from lower-income economies. In the case of the fishing industry, initiatives to increase transparency will need to address the power imbalance between larger companies and small-scale producers and processors. Each industry is unique, with important differences that determine how effective transparency initiatives will be in enhancing sustainability. But some common features suggest lessons for policymakers tackling illegal fishing: These examples show there has been clear demand for more transparency in the supply chains of international industries. To be effective, similar initiatives in the fishing sector will depend on continued pressure from governments, international organisations and consumers. John Virdin is an adjunct Assistant Professor and Director of the Coastal and Ocean Policy Program at the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions. His areas of expertise include assisting developing-economy governments to reform and strengthen their institutions responsible for ocean fisheries, thereby reducing poverty and enhancing sustainability. Funding for this work was provided by The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, USA (Grant #: 2020–70120). The author has declared no conflict of interest in relation to this article. This article has been republished for World Fisheries Day. It was first published on June 7, 2022. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™. Editors Note: In the story “Empty oceans” sent at: 07/06/2022 10:29. This is a corrected repeat.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on June 8, 2022

Ban drug ads to promote health - 360 Joel Lexchin Published on December 15, 2021 Advertising promoting new drugs is effective but often leads to inappropriate prescribing. To protect the health of their citizens, countries should ban it. By Joel Lexchin, York University Many drugs, but certainly not all, are extremely useful in controlling symptoms and preventing or curing illness. The companies that produce them are generally expected to make profits, growing revenues with higher prices or bigger sales volumes. But nearly all wealthy developed countries impose restrictions on the price of drugs so that option is not always available. And so companies spend massive amounts on promotion to grow sales. In the US alone, US$20 billion was spent in 2016 to convince doctors to prescribe brand name drugs. The promotion is not only directed at doctors. The US and New Zealand both allow direct-to-consumer advertising, mentioning the name of a drug along with the problem it’s meant to treat in a single advertisement. Companies spend nearly US$10 billion a year on advertising drugs to consumers in the US. Evidence shows advertising influences patients. Three quarters of the respondents in one American survey said they were likely to ask a health care provider about advertised drugs and 26 percent said they had already done so. Almost a quarter would look for a different doctor if their doctor refused to prescribe a requested brand name drug. This influence continues despite accumulated evidence strongly suggesting the information patients receive through advertising does not result in better prescribing – there are more negative than positive consequences from such advertising. One randomized controlled trial, the strongest form of evidence, looked at the influence of patient requests for the antidepressant paroxetine using actors pretending to have a standard set of symptoms. These pseudo-patients described either symptoms of depression or of a less severe temporary condition, ‘adjustment disorder’ that is due to life problems and does not require antidepressant treatment. If patients requested an advertised brand-name drug, they were equally likely to receive an antidepressant prescription whether they had symptoms of depression or adjustment disorder. A systematic review of 20 studies looking at consumer advertising and the use of testosterone replacement concluded advertising was associated with prescribing testosterone replacement therapy without adequate testing. Direct-to-consumer advertising may also promote over-diagnosis of high cholesterol and over-treatment for populations where risks of statin use may outweigh potential benefits. Canada has general and medical cultural similarities to the US, but does not allow direct-to-consumer advertising, making it a useful comparator. However, some US media reaches Canadian audiences with prescription drug advertising that is illegal under Canadian law. Barbara Mintzes and her colleagues surveyed patients and doctors in Vancouver (Canada) and Sacramento (USA) to compare prescription decisions. In Sacramento, patients were much more likely to ask for a drug because of advertising. However, physicians in both countries were just as likely to fulfil requests when patients asked for a prescription by name, even when the doctors were ambivalent about the requested drug’s suitability. Another set of researchers looked at three drugs being promoted on US media and compared prescribing rates in English-speaking Canada versus Quebec, which is mainly francophone, and less affected by US media. They found increased prescribing rates for one product, tegaserod, a drug approved for use in irritable bowel syndrome, that was later withdrawn from the market for safety reasons. The solution to such advertising and its effect on prescribing is simple in most areas of the world. If it isn’t allowed, don’t let it start. In countries where disease awareness ads are already present, governments should move to ban them. Addressing promotion to doctors is not as easy. A little more than a decade ago, researchers (including me) analysed 58 studies, and looked at three dimensions of prescribing – how often did doctors prescribe, how expensive was the prescription and was the correct drug chosen. The conclusion: “with rare exceptions, studies of exposure to information provided directly by pharmaceutical companies have found associations with higher prescribing frequency, higher costs, or lower prescribing quality or have not found significant associations. We did not find evidence of net improvements in prescribing.” The problem needs tackling at two ends: better regulation of promotion and making doctors less susceptible to it. Turning over regulation to the drug companies, as is done in Australia, or to independent bodies dominated by groups that benefit from promotion, as is done in Canada is not the answer. At least when it comes to ads in medical journals, direct government regulation is far better. But the zeal with which government agencies approach regulation can be subject to the ideology of the party in power. Moreover, government agencies are often under-resourced. As of 2016, the US Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Prescription Drug Promotion with a staff of just over 70 people received nearly 100,000 promotional material submissions related to prescription medications annually. Only a non-governmental body backed by legislation and with a stable source of income can do a proper job of proactively monitoring promotion. We should not be fooled into thinking that imposing fines on drug companies is going to stop their practices. In December 2005, Eli Lilly pleaded guilty in court to misbranding Evista, a drug used for osteoporosis, and paid a US$36 million fine. Just over three years later, the same company pleaded guilty to misbranding its antipsychotic Zyprexa and paid a fine of US$1.415 billion. Lilly made US$36 billion in revenue from selling Zyprexa. Much as some people would like to see pharmaceutical company executives jailed for the way their companies promote, that also may not work. In the early 1980s, Australian criminologist John Braithwaite found at least two companies were paying people to take the position he called “vice-president responsible for going to jail”. What would really hurt a drug company and make it think twice about the way  it promotes is a loss of patent rights — generic companies could produce and sell the drug at lower prices and capture the market. Even a $20 meal can affect the way that doctors prescribe. But doctors generally believe they are individually invulnerable to the blandishments of drug companies. What does work is keeping medical students and drug company representatives apart, and training for medical students and registrars on conflict of interest. Once these student doctors who are trained to spot drug company inducements are out in independent practice, they are less likely to prescribe heavily promoted drugs, less likely to prescribe newer, but no more effective drugs and less likely to trust what drug company salespeople have to say. Direct-to-consumer advertising and other forms of promotion have a corrosive effect on prescribing. It is up to governments and the medical profession to correct this problem. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™. Joel Lexchin received his MD from the University of Toronto in 1977. He is a  Professor Emeritus in the School of Health Policy and Management at York University in Toronto, Canada where he taught health policy until  2016. In addition, he has worked in the emergency department at the University Health Network also in Toronto for more than 33 years. Disclosure statement In 2018-2021, Joel Lexchin received payments for writing a brief in an action for side effects of a drug for Michael F. Smith, Lawyer and a second brief on the role of promotion in generating prescriptions for Goodmans LLP. He is a member of the Foundation Board of Health Action International and the Board of Canadian Doctors for Medicare. He receives royalties from University of Toronto Press and James Lorimer & Co. Ltd. for books he has written.

news-360info

2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on December 15, 2021

Ban won't stop transnational surrogacy - 360 Jutharat Attawet Published on July 19, 2023 The nature of transnational surrogacy, where an intended parent seeks a woman to carry their baby internationally, allows people to circumvent national laws. Anong*, from Thailand’s northern Petchaboon province, was 25 when she decided to be a surrogate mother for the first time. “I was a surrogate in 2013 and 2018 … [I] was hired by a couple from a foreign country,” she said, adding she needed to pay off her debt and looked online for a surrogacy agency that would help her. Thailand was once an international hub for surrogate mothers, before the practice was banned in 2015. But instead of putting a halt to surrogacy, Thailand’s ban resulted in surrogacy practices moving across borders to avoid breaching regulations. “My second time [being a] surrogate, once again, I was hired by foreigners,” Anong told researchers. “This time I went to Laos for the embryo transfer and came back to carry my pregnancy in Thailand. “Around 38 gestational weeks, I flew to China … the intended parents’ country, to give birth.” Women in low-to-medium-income countries are often targeted by intended parents from high-income countries for a range of reasons, including the ability to circumvent national laws and financial motivations. Research found restrictions, prolonged processes and a lack of resources to access domestic surrogacy treatments are the main motivators for intended parents. Large lump sum payments, particularly after considering exchange rates, are one of the motivating factors for surrogate mothers. The 2015 baby Gammy scandal — where a Thai surrogate claimed the intended Australian parents abandoned one half of their twins because he had Down’s syndrome — became an international scandal and resulted in a ban on commercial surrogacy across the country. The closure of Thai fertility clinics moved commercial surrogacy to Cambodia before it became criminalised under human trafficking laws, carrying a 20-year sentence. China and India soon followed, moving demands of surrogate mothers to Laos and Myanmar, where they remain unregulated, putting the health of hundreds of women and their babies at risk of lifelong health impacts and human rights violations, such as trafficking. Yet the practice still persists, despite border closures during the pandemic which left numerous newborn babies of commercial gestational surrogates stranded. “[There] was not much opportunity to be a surrogate during the pandemic,” Hathai* told researchers. “Since the border opened, I was contacted by a Chinese clinic to be a surrogate.” The nature of transnational surrogacy, where an intended parent seeks a person to carry their baby internationally, allows people to circumvent national laws and places women and children at risk due to a lack of national regulations and protection. Restructuring domestic or national surrogacy laws could help to protect the influx of intended parents seeking commercial surrogacy overseas. While altruistic surrogacy is ideal, it may not be realistic for many — it’s a big ask for a woman to carry a baby she will have to eventually give up. Increased regulations and support, instead of outright banning commercial surrogacy locally, could prevent the trickle effect, or people from seeking surrogate mothers in low-to-middle-income countries. Health literacy and legal support, both from the government and not-for-profit sector, can also better support surrogates who are often exploited due to the promise of money without understanding the depth of the consequences. Taxing intended parents for the return of a child by an international surrogate can also encourage intended parents to think twice before proceeding with the transnational commercial surrogacy arrangement due to the extra costs. Better support for intended parents who seek a domestic surrogacy arrangement could help prevent people seeking overseas surrogates and stop the chain of commercial surrogacy. The power imbalance between transnational surrogacy agreements is significant — women in these arrangements are often at an extreme financial, social and legal disadvantage. Punishing those who are already in vulnerable positions will not make the situation better and neither will banning surrogacy outright. *The experiences of women mentioned in this article are real, but their names have been changed to protect their identities. Dr Jutharat Attawet is a lecturer in the Faculty of Health at Charles Darwin University. Her research focuses on surrogacy, diversity inclusion and equity, public health, health promotion and health/social policy. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on July 19, 2023

Bangladeshi tech law would gag journalists, embed authoritarianism - 360 Abdul Aziz Published on May 3, 2022 Already under fire from the Digital Security Act, Bangladeshi journalists face even worse censorship if a new piece of legislation gets up. “I was picked up, held, interrogated and eventually deported by intelligence services because of my reporting”,  Susannah Savage, a freelance journalist working for the Economist in Bangladesh, recently tweeted after she was interrogated and forced to leave the country by  Bangladeshi intelligence forces. Human rights activists have been railing against the Bangladeshi government’s use of the controversial ‘Digital Security Act’ to gag media and free speech for a long time, to no avail. Bangladesh continues to fall down the rankings in the World Press Freedom Index:  hundreds of people, including journalists, university teachers, cartoonists and photographers, have been arrested and jailed on charges of “spreading disinformation against the government and state” on social media platforms. Significantly, while journalists make up a disproportionately large group among the total number of arrestees, around 80 percent of accusers are politically affiliated with the Bangladesh Awami League, the ruling centre-left political party. Newly drafted legislation could go beyond the draconian Digital Security Act, effectively turning Bangladesh into a surveillance state. Under the guise of regulating the tech companies, the law would enforce traceability and interception of end-to-end encrypted services offered by social media and messaging platforms. All digital platforms, including social media and over-the-top (OTT; direct via the internet) media services, are set to come under strict government monitoring. The very last space for dissent, free speech and independent journalism will be taken away. The regulations are dense and complicated, and come as the Awami League–led government continues to amass power through regulating freedom of expression and social media. While there has been significant growth in the media industry in Bangladesh in recent years, most media outlets are backed by the current regime, reflecting a corrupt nexus between political power and media ownership. The boundaries of press freedom and digital spaces are set by the regimes, with multiple tactics including partisan licensing, revenue control and even repressive control. The government also creates ‘invisible fear’ by using state apparatus. In addition to the oppressive regulatory framework, the rapid growth of political ownership of the media industry mutually shapes media policy that restricts the free flow of information and press freedom in Bangladesh. Both television channels and newspapers are forced to constantly negotiate and compromise their journalism. They survive through self-censorship, silencing voices and views critical of the government. At the same time, misinformation and hate speech on Facebook have fuelled violence and communal attacks. The public understands the need to regulate the digital space to combat hate and misinformation as well as hold monopolistic tech giants such as Facebook and Google to account. But instead of regulating the tech giants directly, the government has focused on regulation that creates a culture of fear, intimidation and digital authoritarianism. It would do better to promote digital critical thinking skills and media literacy among Bangladeshis to ensure a better informed and inclusive society free from digital hate and misinformation. State-led digital infrastructure investment and the politics of digitalisation in Bangladesh under the agenda of ‘Digital Bangladesh’ has stifled the free press and freedom of expression for many years. As media scholar James Carey once argued, “when democracy falters, journalism falters, and when journalism goes awry, democracy goes awry”. Abdul Aziz is a PhD candidate at the School of Communication and affiliated with the Digital Media Research Centre at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia. His research focuses on digital inclusion and participation, particularly with regard to social justice, digital resistance and identity negotiation online. Mr Aziz declared no conflict of interest in relation to this article. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on May 3, 2022

Bangladesh's crumbling democracy no roadblock for superpowers - 360 Mubashar Hasan Published on January 4, 2024 As Bangladesh votes, the world’s major powers are seeking to exert control over what happens next, with Sheikh Hasina set to win another disputed term. When Bangladesh goes to the polls on January 7, the great performance of democracy will take centre stage. Voting booths will be set up, voters will cast votes, and they will be counted. However, despite the show, there is no surprise twist lurking for election watchers, because the result is already known. Sheikh Hasina will be re-elected for a fifth time, and her party, the Bangladesh Awami League (AL), will form government once again. Bangladesh’s longest-serving female Prime Minister will extend her reign because her main opposition Bangladeshi Nationalist Party (BNP) has boycotted the election. In explaining the reason behind the boycott, BNP’s acting chairman Tarique Rahman told Diplomat Magazine that “as long as Hasina retains power, every election in Bangladesh will involve extensive irregularities, making the much-anticipated level-playing field a distant dream”. Since late October 2023, more than 20,000 opposition activists have been imprisoned.  Five of these activists died in prison. Human Rights Watch termed the government’s response to the opposition as an “autocratic crackdown” ahead of the election. Bangladesh’s Agriculture Minister Mohammad Abdur Razzaque told media that the government has offered freedom to the imprisoned BNP leaders in exchange for participating in the election, hinting that this crackdown was merely a bargaining chip to legitimise the election. Reports of BNP grassroots activists spending time away from their families and homes to avoid arrests have surfaced. A New York Times report has claimed that about one million of BNP activists are facing court cases. The number of cases filed against each opposition activist varies from dozens up to 400. The government justifies the crackdown by claiming that opposition activists are being violent. They are setting fire to public transport and hurling crude bombs at police and officials. The BNP accuses the government of sabotaging the opposition movement with government agents and AL party members posing as opposition to commit violent acts. In the absence of an independent law enforcement and judiciary, it is difficult for external observers to get to the bottom of these claims and counter claims. Against this backdrop, the rhetoric of regional and global superpowers like India, China, Russia and the US about what the opposition described as Bangladesh’s “farcical” election reveals the intriguing dynamics of the swirling geopolitics which Bangladesh is being dragged into. India and China are supporting the Bangladeshi government in its tilt toward another term. The two regional powers who oppose each other across Asia make strange bedfellows in the Hasina camp. Sheikh Hasina met with Xi Jinping in August, with Xi claiming China is ready to “strengthen coordination and cooperation with Bangladesh in multilateral affairs and safeguard international fairness and justice”. China has invested heavily in Bangladesh through its Belt and Road initivative, while billions in construction contracts have been opened up for Chinese firms going the other way. India, meanwhile, shares over 4,000km of its land border with Bangladesh and uses Bangladeshi ports as transit to connect its north eastern frontier to other parts of the country. This was only made possible because of the Hasina government’s friendly gesture to India. The US says it wants a free and fair election in Bangladesh and has imposed visa restrictions on what it claims are “Bangladeshi individuals responsible for, or complicit in, undermining the democratic election process.” In an attempt to spread the blame, the statement claimed, “these individuals include members of law enforcement, the ruling party, and the political opposition.” Russia has publicly accused the US of interfering in Bangladesh’s internal matters and claimed Washington is plotting an Arab-Spring-like post election protests in Bangladesh to overthrow Hasina’s government. Despite Moscow’s rancour, the US remains one of Bangladesh’s most significant trading partners. The US is a  major destination for Bangladesh’s billion-dollar textile exports. In addition, because of the US’s liberal visa regime, many Bangladeshi businessmen, politicians, military elites and bureaucrats are able to make new homes in the US. US calls for a fair election come against the backdrop of two lopsided votes  in 2014 and 2018. Joe Biden’s administration levied human rights sanctions against Bangladesh’s elite paramilitary force Rapid Action Battalion and several of its former officials following accusations of severe human rights violations, including hundreds of enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings. However, these relationships do not exist in a zero-sum vacuum, where every nation is looking to exert their own individual will on Bangladesh. India and the US are perceived to be allies in the region. The hard work done on growing the relationship from Delhi to Washington has seen a closer diplomatic relationship culminate in the Quad, along with Australia and Japan, aimed almost entirely at deterring China in the region. However, the US sits apart from the Modi government, which argues it is in its national interest that Hasina’s government continues. India’s reasoning however could be perceived as somewhat thin under analysis. In a recent keynote speech in Dhaka, India’s former foreign minister, M.J Akbar claimed that superpowers want puppets who can serve their interest because Bangladesh is important geopolitically. Akbar termed Sheikh Hasina as the “liberator of democracy from dictatorship”. In reality, all the globally accepted indicators for freedom and democracy contradict Akbar’s claim. The statement shows the general sentiment of the Indian establishment towards Bangladesh: that Hasina’s rule satisfies Indian aims regardless of the trouble for the people of Bangladesh. Who wins and who loses may be obvious to the pundits in Dhaka, but the weight that it will put on the US and India relationship will continue long after the vote, with an “agree to disagree mentality”  likely to test the burgeoning friendship. Dr Mubashar Hasan is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo, Norway. His research was funded by the Norwegian Research Council. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on January 4, 2024

Bangladesh's prospects for democracy and development fade - 360 A S M Mostafizur Rahman, Rahul Mukherji Published on January 4, 2024 Bangladesh is slipping towards elections that may not be free and fair and will undermine its democratic future. Free and fair elections were singularly responsible for the birth of Bangladesh. The nation’s founding father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, did not want secession from West Pakistan — at that time Pakistan spanned West and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), with India in between. However, he was also not willing to take home anything short of an endorsement of his legitimate electoral victory in the general election of 1970 which had given his Awami League (AL) party a clear majority. The Pakistani military and political establishment refused to honour the clear majority he had won. Instead of being appointed the prime minister of Pakistan, Sheikh Mujibur was imprisoned, precipitating an armed insurrection for independence from Pakistan. Bangladesh’s history, however, seems to have come full circle. The national parliamentary election slated for January 7 risks being neither free nor fair. The main Opposition, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), is boycotting the election. It has no faith in the incumbent government providing a level playing field in the elections. The central demand of the BNP is that the incumbent Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina, resign,  paving the way for a neutral caretaker government to oversee the elections. Caretaker governments in Bangladesh have played a crucial role in democratic consolidation in the past by ensuring free and fair elections. However, the Awami League government changed the Constitution in 2011, doing away with the provision. Now the Awami League is opposed to the caretaker government system, claiming there is no provision for it, citing the very Constitution it had changed. Bangladesh today seems to have taken an authoritarian turn. It has slipped from 136th position to 147th in V-Dem’s liberal democracy index between 2015 and 2022, falling below even Turkey (141). The consequences of democratic decline may be severe. Justifying democratic backslide citing rapid economic growth may become increasingly more difficult as it may not be easy for Bangladesh to sustain rapid economic growth. Developed nations may also be unwilling to support Bangladesh’s low-income country status, which has up to now given it a considerable trade advantage. They may not look kindly on human rights violations, adversely impacting Bangladesh’s exports. Already, foreign direct investment in Bangladesh has fallen from USD$2.8 billion in 2015 to USD$1.5 billion in 2022. The democratic downslide, however, did not occur overnight. The original idea of Bangladesh was of a secular and democratic nation. It reflected the Sufi-Lalon philosophy, imbued with secularism and deeply embedded in the tolerant and liberal Bangladeshi worldview. The newly found nation categorically rejected the notions of caste and religious discrimination in public life. The post-1975 transition, caused by a military coup, however, has eroded the secular nature of the state. It gave rise to Islamic political mobilisation. Constitutional restrictions on religion-based political parties were revoked, leading to the emergence of Islamic parties, even those that opposed the independence movement. By 1988, Islam was declared the state religion, resulting in Islamist parties gaining prominence, with the largest one forming a ruling coalition with a mainstream party in 2001. The country’s turbulent political history, characterised by military coups, political assassinations and decades of military-backed rule  eventually culminated in a democratic uprising and the establishment of a civilian government in 1991. This period witnessed festive and participatory elections, fostering a vibrant parliamentary culture in the 1990s. Despite a return to the parliamentary system, the concentration of power in the hands of respective prime ministers, facilitated not only by their personal charisma but also by constitutional provisions, led to the erosion of democratic institutions. Personal acrimony between the two main leaders, Begum Khaleda Zia of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and Sheikh Hasina of the Awami League, further contributed to a toxic political culture. In 2006, amid the BNP’s attempt to leverage the caretaker government system to its advantage, the AL refused to participate in the 2007 general election. A ‘soft coup’ by the military ensued and the country was ruled under the guise of a civilian caretaker government until the end of 2008. Both Hasina and Zia faced corruption charges, making them ineligible for public office. In the face of an economic crisis and political pressure, the military organised an election in which the Awami League secured a two-thirds majority, which proceeded to swiftly abolish the caretaker system. Although Sheikh Hasina and her party worked to restore secularism subsequently, her electoral coalition with hard-line Islamic parties like Hefazat-e-Islam and the support for the Quami madrasas have allowed the resurgence of majoritarian religious sentiments. As a result, there is a sense of fear and insecurity among minorities. Increasing attacks on them have deepened it further. The BNP boycotted the 2013 general election, demanding that a caretaker government conduct the elections. However, it participated in the 2018 election, which was not considered free and fair by large sections of the international community. Prior to that election, the AL government intensified persecution of political opponents, imposed media restrictions and disqualified many Opposition candidates. Now, the BNP has once again fallen back on the election boycott strategy to ensure a level playing field. However, the party is currently fragmented and faces a leadership vacuum. The potential for strong political mobilisation is hindered by Khaleda Zia’s inability to actively participate in politics due to her imprisonment and health issues. Her son, Tarique Rahman, vice-chairman of the BNP, is in self-exile in London after being convicted in several corruption cases. Furthermore, the BNP’s strong ally, Jamaat-e-Islami, is banned from contesting elections and most of its top leadership has been executed for war crimes. Jamaat had opposed the independence of Bangladesh 50 years ago and collaborated with the Pakistani armed forces, committing mass killings of Bangladeshi nationalists and pro-Independence intellectuals. It is against this background that impending elections should be judged. The AL has to decide whether or not it will respect the process of free and fair elections that led to the creation of the Bangladeshi nation. The party, however, does not seem to have learned any lessons from the nation’s nascent history. How the democratic future of Bangladesh unfolds will depend on the choices that Sheikh Hasina’s ruling AL party makes. Under her leadership, the country may be undermining its very foundational values by slipping towards national elections that are not free and fair. A S M Mostafizur Rahman is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science, South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University, Germany. Professor Rahul Mukherji is Chair, Modern Politics of South Asia, South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University, Germany. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on January 4, 2024

Banks need to speak the same digital language - 360 Tom Butler, Daniel Gozman Published on July 3, 2023 Complex, opaque and often outdated systems in large international banks can threaten the stability of the global banking system. With UBS finalising its acquisition of Credit Suisse earlier this month, the multinational investment bank now oversees a reported USD$5 trillion in assets across the globe. It may be richer but may also now be riskier. Large mega-banks are more prone to operational risks from the increased complexity of their business processes and products and the diversity of their information systems. The basic problem is that large banks have too many standalone systems supporting complex front-, middle-, and back-office processes delivering sophisticated products. They and the data they produce are not well-managed and are vulnerable to a range of threats, from fraud and money laundering through to cyberthreats. The much larger UBS may now be more exposed to multiple individual systems that were not designed for intercommunication, meaning their data cannot be easily accessed and integrated. Large banks also rely on outdated legacy systems dating from the 1970s, with high risks of failure. Systemically important financial institutions, like UBS, whose failures might trigger a financial crisis, can threaten the stability of the global banking system. Much of the data in these large multinational banks aren’t easily available, making it difficult to identify existing or emerging risks. These risks lower banks’ market values, causing a threat to the stability of the financial system. Based on a study by US researchers, the total direct annual losses to operational risks for the global banking sector is estimated as US$190 billion globally, with indirect losses projected to be much higher. As banks are interconnected, devastating knock-on effects can happen — evident in the 2023 banking crisis when three small-to-medium-sized US banks went insolvent within five days, triggering a sharp decline in global bank stock prices. These problems are made much worse by the banking industry not having a common language to communicate financial information about products, processes, accounts and various forms of financial and operational risks. Andrew Haldane, former Chief Economist at the Bank of England, refers to this as the ‘Tower of Babel‘ problem — an analogy based on the Bible story from the Book of Genesis about why the world has different languages. “Most financial firms have competing in-house languages, with information systems siloed,” he said in a 2012 speech. “Across firms, it is even less likely that information systems have a common mother tongue … today, the number of global financial languages very likely exceeds the number of global spoken languages.” Because of the absence of a common language, global banks are littered with significant data governance problems, with related difficulties in data access and processing. These issues make effective management impossible and many banks are unable or unwilling to disclose the full extent of financial or operational risksThis, in turn,hampers regulators’ ability to assess systemic risks facing the banking system as a whole. The UK’s Prudential Regulatory Authority, the country’s financial services regulatory body, found deficiencies in banks’ risk management are “symptoms of a broader root cause … where lessons from the global financial crisis had not been sufficiently learnt” due to a “historic lack of [prioritisation]“. One reason for this may be that risk committees at many banks “have neither the clout nor the expertise to push back against corporate leadership” and are content with the status quo of increasing the bottom line. Historically, board members of financial institutions also lack adequate digital competencies which impact their decisions on ways to best use information technologies, leading to unnecessary risks, according to the European Commission’s Regulatory Obstacles to Financial Innovation Expert Group. To assess risks, banks have mostly relied on periodic, historical and subjective or biased self-assessments from managers. This has led to systematic under-reporting across the industry and a systematic failure to account for losses. Artificial intelligence may provide a solution. Using AI’s semantic and graph technologies, banks can integrate and virtualise data from multiple information systems and make it accessible for strategic risk-based decisions. At least one globally significant bank in the UK is in the process of creating an integrated virtual platform based on Graph AI which stores different types of data with different types of relationships. To fully leverage the power of graph database technology, AI semantic technologies based on ontologies are required. An ontology is simply a metadata model with added semantics and rules. It can be used to reason, make inferences and create new knowledge. Ontologies provide a common language for the different languages used across information systems, so they can be communicated as one — they provide the semantics (meaning) and rules (grammar). The graph databases provide the technical means to integrate, link and store related data from different information systems on one system. Together they provide the means to make the data from multiple visible and available as if they were on one single system. AI technologies such as inference engines, reasoners, machine learning and natural language processing provide powerful capabilities to query and process the data to provide answers to complex questions — think ChatGPT. But building an ontology can be time-consuming and managers of large banks think only in the short term. However, the Enterprise Data Management Council and the Object Management Group’s Financial Domain Task Force developed the Financial Industry Business Ontology as a common language for the industry. It is the only standard human and machine-readable common language for banking. The group is a standards body for the software industry, while the council was formed to help banks address their data management and governance problems. The language was developed incrementally by subject matter experts from large banks across the financial industry under the sponsorship of the council. It is perhaps ironic that Credit Suisse was active in developing the language to address data integration and solve the issues in the banking system’s Tower of Babel. It’s now hoped that UBS retains and builds on these competencies to tackle operational risk and compliance reporting issues that bedevil large global banks. Tom Butler is professor of Information Systems and Regulatory Technologies at University College Cork. He works closely with UK and EU banking regulators, global banks, law firms, and the big four professional services firms on risk and compliance as a part of his research. Daniel Gozman is the director of Engaged Research and an associate professor at the University of Sydney Business School. Currently, his work focuses on the intersection between policy, emergent technology and innovation. Prior to academia, he worked for Accenture and Deloitte. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on July 3, 2023

Banning TikTok will take away once-silenced voices - 360 Tom Divon Published on June 28, 2023 TikTok has given young Palestinian activists and others a loud visibility. Taking it away would marginalise a generation. The internet has become the virtual haven for billions of young people across the globe, offering them a unique platform to express themselves. In regions where democracy faces challenges, this digital realm has empowered them to craft their online personas and courageously share their thoughts, experiences and creativity with a vibrant community of like-minded individuals. Such an example is TikTok, emerging as a powerful political space where young users constantly challenge the status quo of their realities. Users now have at their disposal a novel set of tools to fearlessly envision new possibilities and redefine their reality from their own living rooms, with the ability to forge new pathways to rectify injustices, crises and social decline. Over the past few years, it’s become evident how the video-sharing platform has given the chance for geographically dispersed groups, such as Palestinians, to capture the attention of a vast and diverse audience. The app has served as an unbreakable realm of activism where Palestinian and pro-Palestinian users can navigate the complexities of everyday conflict with Israel and convey their messages through the platform in ways many can empathise, understand and live through their screens themselves. These users have skillfully highlighted the rich legacy of Palestinian culture, transcending geographical boundaries and shedding light on both global and local issues such as living conditions, human rights violations, unlawful arrests, and various instances of perceived injustice. They accomplish this by leveraging the platform’s powerful dissemination systems of hashtags, challenges, comments, trending sounds, and features (like ‘duet’ and ‘stitch’) to connect with Palestinians from around the world, fostering a dialogue that creates a community of support and affinity. One of the pivotal moments for Palestinian users on TikTok occurred in 2021 during the eruption of the war between Gaza and Israel when the #FreePalestine movement migrated from platforms like Instagram and YouTube to TikTok. This movement had already established a legacy on other social media platforms, but the unique meme-based qualities of TikTok provided an immersive and contagious experience of activism, elevating its impact to new heights of virality. Users deployed playful templates for content creation (#challenges), where their everyday adversity took on a (self-)performative form, superseding the crude, real-life images with metaphorical representations of what the Israeli oppression “does” to their bodies. On TikTok, they don’t show victims for exhibitionist purposes like on Instagram; rather, they perform victimisation, disclosing their faces and bodies as sufferers of conflict. Instead of depicting the conventional imagery of injured or dead bodies of Palestinians, many users opted for artistic renditions, symbolising the inflicted violence upon them. For Palestinians, any ban on TikTok would deprive them of daily and accessible visibility to a nation yearning for recognition, in a territory where their existence is constantly contested. Don’t anticipate Palestinian users easily migrating to a different platform, as the notion of home for them is in a perpetual state of flux, with many already grappling to find a stable sense of belonging in the real world. However, this does not apply solely to Palestinian users. The language of activism on TikTok extends beyond Palestinians with countless users striving to bring their struggles into the public eye, to educate others and aspire for justice. TikTok has been instrumental in mobilising passionate advocates who use their skills on the platform to fight for social issues like race, gender, class, elections and climate change. If TikTok was taken away, it could disrupt the work of those advocates and potentially lead to a sense of disenfranchisement, hindering users’ ability to actively engage in political discussions and current affairs. A ban would sever an essential connection point between the online and offline worlds for an entire generation of users. Within TikTok’s vibrant network of “universes,” it serves as a platform for the amplification of marginalised voices and underrepresented communities, including regions that often go unnoticed in the West, such as the #AfricanNative movement, allowing them to take centre stage on the devices of millions around the world. Although this exposure comes at a price and often invites hateful speech, many take that risk, for a chance to tell their own story which has historically been suppressed or overlooked. To uncritically align with moral panic demanding a TikTok ban is to disregard the broader context. TikTok is merely a symptom of the larger issue including data harvesting and user privacy across platforms, as well as the influence of American legislation. Enforcing a ban would inevitably cause casualties, with the democratic principles of freedom of expression being among the first, dragging down the users along with them. is a PhD student at the Department of Journalism and Communication at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel. His research focuses on digital culture, platform affordances, and user-generated content. Specifically, he explores TikTok’s socio-political subcultures and their potential for education in three areas: (1) TikTok users’ engagement with history education, (2) TikTok users’ performative combat against antisemitism and hate speech and (3) TikTok users’ memetic participation in nationalism-driven conflicts, with a focus on Palestinian resistance. Twitter: @TomDivon Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on June 28, 2023

Bat scan could insure against future pandemics - 360 Pablo Penaloza-MacMaster, Sara Phillips Published on October 31, 2022 Even mismatched vaccines could confer some immunity against related coronaviruses. To prepare for the next pandemic, the world could build a vaccine library. In a cave in the Chinese province of Yunnan, creamy dollops of limestone are suspended from the ceiling. It’s warm, humid and stinky. Nestled between the rock formations are thousands of horseshoe bats, squabbling and jostling for roosts. It was a cave like this that possibly was the source of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that devastated the world in 2020. While the vaccine response to SARS-CoV-2 was developed in record-breaking time, there is very little to suggest that we would be able to move so quickly against a new virus. And a new virus is just a matter of time. It was bats in a cave in China that harboured SARS-CoV-1 before it jumped to humans in 2002, killing 800 people. Lyssa virus, Hendra virus, Marburg, Nipah and Ebola are all viruses that jumped from bats to humans. It is not entirely clear why bats have been associated with such spillovers. One possibility is that destruction of their habitats by deforestation or global warming have caused bats to migrate to human-dense areas, resulting in spillovers. Bats are also among the most populous mammals in the world, and despite their bad reputation, they play an important role in the ecosystem. Bats are highly communal creatures, their massive roosts providing opportunities for viruses to spread and mutate. There’s also evidence that bats have a robust first-line immune response, releasing proteins called interferons that interfere (hence the name) with viruses’ ability to replicate. Such a challenging environment for a virus may force mutation, increasing the risk it could evolve to be more virulent and able to bypass the body’s first line of defense, which is very similar among mammals. When SARS-CoV-2 emerged in late 2019, the world had already done the groundwork for developing a vaccine. Scientists already knew the most vulnerable part of coronaviruses (the spike protein), based on prior studies with related coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-1 and MERS. In addition, many of the vaccine platforms used in the battle against SARS-CoV-2, such as the mRNA or adenovirus, had already been tested for other diseases. It was therefore relatively easy to apply the knowledge to the new, similar SARS virus. Another reason why the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine was developed so fast is because there was a large financial investment and high number of infections to test several candidate vaccines. It is easier to test a vaccine when there are millions of cases worldwide, allowing rigorous statistical comparison of efficacy between the vaccine and placebo. There was no shortage of volunteers willing to trial the new vaccine. New viruses have emerged multiple times in history. About a century ago the Spanish flu pandemic killed millions of people, and various forms of flu continue killing people every year. HIV was first documented in central Africa in the 1950s, and perhaps made the leap as a result of humans encroaching on ape habitat. Some scientists also speculate that some of the viruses that cause the common cold were previous coronavirus pandemics that became endemic in the human population. New viruses can be generated by mutation or recombination of existing viral components. New viral epidemics could arise from the animal world, as well as from humans. Every time a virus enters a new host and replicates, it incorporates errors or mutations, and over time, these changes can significantly alter the biology of a virus. There are more than 20 known families of viruses. Only a fraction of these cause disease in humans. Highly effective vaccines exist against smallpox virus, polio virus, yellow fever virus, measles/mumps/rubella, hepatitis B virus, papillomavirus, rotavirus, rabies virus; and some partially effective vaccines, including those against influenza. While the world developed the SARS-CoV-2 virus successfully we may not be as prepared for the next virus. In the case of HIV, we still do not have an effective vaccine after almost 40 years. Other viruses, such as influenza, have high rates of mutation, substantially more than that of coronaviruses, creating an obstacle for developing a vaccine. But the world can learn from the lessons of COVID. Data shows that even a vaccine that is designed for a viral relative could confer partial protection against disease. Mice vaccinated with an old SARS-CoV-1 vaccine from 2003, were somewhat protected against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. This means that the vaccine does not have to be 100 percent matched. By knowing the viral sequences that are circulating in bats and other animal hosts, we may be better prepared for a future pandemic, because it would be possible to pre-emptively understand the biology of the virus and develop vaccines. The world could potentially make a stockpile of vaccines based on the known bat coronavirus sequences, and during a future pandemic test the vaccine that is most genetically similar in a small number of people, as a quick stopgap until more ideal vaccines are developed. Such work would require a substantial investment in basic science: sampling bats, sequencing and categorising their viruses, building a library of vaccines based on these known viruses. This effort would need to be continuous, as viruses continue to evolve. The technology exists. The only question is whether the world is prepared to invest more in a basic science insurance policy for a future pandemic. , is an assistant professor at Northwestern University, USA. He declares no conflict of interest. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on October 31, 2022

Battle for ideas will shape new global order - 360 Stephen Nagy Published on May 24, 2022 In a world increasingly dominated by the ‘mini-lateral’, competition in standard setting and technology is where the real power struggle lies. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi was on the front foot ahead of this week’s Quad summit, reportedly warning host Japan to “not pull others’ chestnuts out of the fire”. It’s a comment symbolic of a China threatened by the growing number of hybrid alliances and security partnerships popping up between states it seeks to influence. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has strengthened the unity of not only US-EU security co-operation but enlarged co-operation to include Japan, South Korea and Australia. This new coalition of states sees co-operation that is a hybrid of formal alliances such as NATO, the Japan-US alliance and US security partnerships and extends to three levels of security co-operation for Ukraine: 1) financial and economic sanctions; 2) the provision of military aid including equipment, training, intelligence, helmets and vests; and 3) diplomatic co-operation. The implication of these hybridised coalitions of alliances and security partnerships in Ukraine has consequences for the Indo-Pacific region. ‘Mini-laterals’ have become the preferred configuration for pragmatic and expedited co-operation on security, economic, technological, development and connectivity issues. That states so far from the battlefield of Ukraine are engaging at this level reflects the Indo-Pacific not just being a zone of hard security competition but one characterised by extreme competition in standard-setting and technology. Areas such as AI, quantum computing, cybersecurity and cyberspace, hypersonic missiles and the relationship between the state and citizens. AUKUS, a trilateral security pact between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States is a vanguard mini-lateral in this regard. Its commitment to investing in AI, quantum computing, cybersecurity and hypersonic missiles is an expression of what these three states understand as the key technologies shaping the Indo-Pacific region (and the world). The winner of the standards competition between China and the US and its partners will define the rules of the digital economy,and the role of government in economies and our lives. In 2017 and 2016 respectively, China adopted new national intelligence and cybersecurity laws. The laws imply that “citizens have a duty to co-operate with state intelligence and security agencies”. Seen alongside the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) dictates that the internet, media and business must serve the interests of the CCP, there are  real consequences for Indo-Pacific stakeholders if China wins the competition for standards. AUKUS contributes to ensuring China does not become the standard-setter regionally and globally. The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) further buttresses AUKUS with its technology working groups, commitment to rules-based trade, support for supply chains and infrastructure and connectivity. Trade agreements such as the Comprehensive and Progressive Transpacific Partnership (CPTPP), the 2019 mini-trade deal between the US and Japan, the renegotiated NAFTA agreement  and the forthcoming Indo-Pacific Economic Framework add an additional layer of commitment to standard setting in the region by focusing on the digital economy, intellectual rights protection, limiting the role of state-owned enterprises, and the adoption of strict labour and environmental laws. Each is meant to ensure it is the market, not the state and its resources, that is the final arbiter of competition. In contrast to the war in Ukraine and the new forms of alliance co-operation we have seen, multifarious mini-lateral co-operation in the Indo-Pacific region remains focused on  competition for who will set the standards for the region and its forms of governance. War remains a distinct possibility in the region. Key areas of concern include a forced reunification of Taiwan by China or a unilateral declaration of independence by Taipei. Accidental conflict in the South China Sea and the use of grey zone operations and lawfare in both the East and South China Sea also pose a significant risk for the region. To manage this risk Japan, Australia, South Korea, Taiwan and Southeast Asian states continue to invest in embedding themselves in multilayered and multinational partnerships with and without the US. These partnerships are not just wedded to security but include trade, technology, infrastructure and connectivity and public good provision.  Their objective is to build a transparent, rules-based region that reflects free and open societies understanding the appropriate role of the state in governance, technology and society. Any successful US led Indo-Pacific Economic Framework will need to be based on this understanding. Stephen Nagy is a senior associate professor at the International Christian University in Tokyo, a fellow at the Canadian Global Affairs Institute (CGAI); a senior fellow at the MacDonald Laurier Institute (MLI); a senior fellow at the East Asia Security Centre (EASC); and a visiting fellow with the Japan Institute for International Affairs (JIIA). The author declares no conflicts of interest in relation to this article. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on May 24, 2022

Battling menstrual taboos in a pandemic - 360 Heli Askola and Megan Adams Published on November 29, 2021 By Heli Askola and Megan Adams, Monash University. Pandemic-related disruptions across Asia-Pacific had devastating consequences for people who menstruate. School closures made it harder to access vital information, and those who had the necessary information found it harder to find period products due to supply chain issues. Where products were in stock, they were often more expensive – a meaningful problem for those who faced deeper economic hardship during the pandemic. Lockdowns forced many households to send only one person out for essential items, in many parts of the world this was left to men. Women and girls, already dealing with less privacy in their homes, were left with fewer facilities for washing and cleaning, and more stigma around periods in general. Period poverty, the inability to access necessary sanitary products such as pads and tampons, has been a long-standing issue for the entire Asia-Pacific region. In wake of the pandemic, and policy responses to it, period stigma and poverty has worsened. The economic impact of lockdowns, border closures and disrupted supply chains all limited women’s and girls’ access to period products, according to Plan International Australia, a charity focused on girls’ equality. More than half (51 percent) of the Australian girls and young non-binary people Plan surveyed said products had been harder to find and purchase, while a fifth (20 percent) reported the cost of period products had risen since the pandemic started. Around one in three girls and women surveyed in the Pacific said period products had become harder to find during the pandemic. Necessary facilities for washing and cleaning, and critical information about menstruation, became less accessible. Stigmatisation became more profound. More than a quarter (26 percent) of Australian young people said COVID-19 had made it hard to find facilities to change and privately dispose of period products safely and hygienically – in the Pacific, this figure rose to 40 percent. For many adolescent girls, the disruptions to schooling brought about by the pandemic, severed the immediate connections they had with their teachers, schools, friends, health workers and family networks. For girls in lockdown, this generally led to less access to important information about first periods and menstrual hygiene management — particularly in areas where young people have limited to no access to online resources. More than half (54 percent) of global  water, sanitation and hygiene professionals Plan surveyed said COVID-19 led to  disruptions of information and education about menstrual hygiene management. In the Pacific, around one in five girls and women surveyed said they felt more embarrassed about their periods during the pandemic. Some of the Australian survey participants also said the pandemic had led to them delaying or avoiding seeing a General Practitioner, due to fear of either contracting coronavirus or taking up resources for those who had contracted the virus. For many women and girls, these challenges became even more difficult in 2021 as the pandemic continued, even intensifying in some nations. In a severely impacted country like  Indonesia, school closures left girls with no options for home-based learning isolated. This worsened period stigma, shame and privacy concerns during menstruation in big households. These problems are worse in remote communities. The fight to access information on periods became even harder for girls in Indonesia in 2021. This was the biggest challenge of the pandemic’s second wave: 64 percent of experts surveyed said girls had less access to accurate and comprehensive menstrual hygiene information. Access to products was also an issue — Indonesia particularly felt the global supply chain issues caused by the pandemic. These problems were exacerbated by an ongoing lack of privacy for those managing their periods. Almost half (45 percent) of girls and gender diverse people who menstruate were facing decreased privacy when managing their periods: struggling to change menstrual products, clean themselves hygienically and dispose of menstrual products after use. In some countries, this lack of privacy has also led to period stigma and myths being amplified, with many girls and gender diverse people who menstruate feeling they had to hide signs of menstruation from family. Being unable to access sanitary products has negatively affected girls’ health, lives and their education. A lack of access to period products is compounded by menstrual stigma, shame and secrecy which makes it hard to speak of menstrual management and hygiene. Governments are slowly starting to recognise the importance of period poverty and menstrual stigma. A pilot project in Indonesia provided 1,000 pairs of reusable underwear to Indonesian girls (approximately three pairs each), alongside menstrual health education. After the three-month pilot, almost all of the participants (99 percent) said they would continue to use the product. In Australia, state governments have commenced the rollout of free sanitary products in schools. Such initiatives could make a real difference to period poverty What is still often absent from policymaking is the perspective of girls and people who menstruate. Menstrual taboos are persistent, calling for ongoing education and investment in government health responses. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™. Dr Heli Askola is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law at Monash University and an associate of the Castan Centre for Human Rights Law. Dr Megan Adams is a Senior Lecturer and Graduate Research Lead in the Faculty of Education at Monash University. Special advice from Claire Knox, and the policy and WASH teams from Plan International Australia, the charity for girls’ equality. The authors declared no conflict of interest in relation to this article.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on November 29, 2021

Behind Gaza's casualty counts: the enduring injuries of war - 360 Craig Jones Published on November 13, 2023 As debate rages over civilian deaths, new physical and psychological wounds add to the burden on Gaza’s broken healthcare system. On 25 October, more than two weeks after the deadly Hamas raid on Israel, US President Joe Biden was asked about the Palestinian death count from Israeli bombardments launched on Gaza in retaliation. “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed. I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s the price of waging a war,” Biden said. The Ministry of Health in Gaza responded by publishing the names of those killed, along with the sex, age and identity card number of each of the victims. Seldom has the issue of civilian casualties been so politicised. In Gaza in recent weeks, it has taken centre stage in debates about Israel’s military operations in the besieged territory controlled by Hamas. And hidden behind those numbers is the reality that for many survivors, life will never go back to ‘normal’ – the injuries of war endure. The grim list of the dead and injured grows each day. Although difficult to verify with absolute accuracy, thousands of Palestinians have been killed, a fact the Biden administration has not disputed. The numbers of casualties are being reported by the World Health Organization, which publishes regular emergency situation reports. And in any accounting of civilian casualties in this conflict, two points are critical. First, in previous escalations of violence in Gaza, the major parties have broadly agreed on the final toll. In the 2014 Gaza war, for example, which lasted approximately seven weeks, the Gaza Ministry of Health put the death toll at 2,310, while Israel put it at 2,125. For comparison, the United Nations noted the toll at 2,251. So, there may yet be a broad agreement in the fullness of time. Second, it is the injured who tend to be forgotten. Although sometimes casualty counts distinguish between the injured and dead, there is often an assumption that, merely because they survived, the injured are going to be okay. But research shows this is not the case. Before this war started, Gaza already had a great number of injured. Successive waves of military violence, including major escalations in 2008-9, 2012, 2014, 2018-19, and 2021 have created an enormous burden of injury. Research at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City found that Israeli military operations in Gaza from 8 July to 26 August 2014 injured more than 11,000, including at least 3,436 children. The UN recorded more than 36,100 injured, including nearly 8,800 children, in the Great March of Return, a mass protest calling for the Palestinian right of return that lasted from March 2018 to the end of 2019. Each war in Gaza has brought its own patterns of injury – gunshot wounds, crush injuries, explosive blast injuries – which require complex and often highly-specialised medical intervention. But with little opportunity or resources to absorb the mass of casualties from one conflict, another round of violence soon brings a new cohort of patients whose medical needs are more urgent. Inevitably, the logic of triage under siege dictates that the needs of those injured months or years ago are left at least partially unmet. Amid the latest bombardment of Gaza, the aid organisation Médecins Sans Frontières said, “There are constant flows of patients and seriously injured people, with complex trauma wounds, burns, fractures and crushed limbs.” The current conflict only adds to the burden – not only on the injured, but also on a healthcare system that has been chronically ‘de-developed’ and is now near collapse. Thousands of war-injured patients struggled to navigate everyday life long before 7 October. Those with disabilities are especially vulnerable, and evidence suggests evacuation orders are often impossible to comply with for those in wheelchairs and with other mobility restrictions. The wounded often require long-term and complex care, and there are many complications associated with injury, including multi-drug resistant infection, amputation, prosthetics, and other medical issues. All of these have an impact on the mental and physical health of not only the injured but also their families and the wider social fabric. And even after the military bombardments end, war and weapons continue to injure through toxic effects and exposure to carcinogenic and other harmful substances. Physical injuries tend to be more visible, but the psychological distress of living under siege and through war should not be underestimated. There is an epidemic of serious mental health issues in Gaza, and findings by Save the Children suggest that four out of five children report living with depression, grief and fear. Gaza has been under international blockade, enforced by Israel and Egypt and supported by much of the international community, since 2005, when Israel withdrew settlers and its army in what it called its ‘disengagement plan’. While Israel maintains that from then on the Gaza Strip was no longer occupied, the UN, international human rights organisations and many legal scholars regard the Gaza Strip as still under military occupation. The blockade has shaped daily life, with everything from the economy to reconstruction efforts to health affected by extensive limitations placed on the movement of goods and people in and out of the territory. According to the UN, 95 percent of people lack access to clean water and more than 80 percent live in poverty. When blockade and war combine, it’s not only the injured who are at risk. Gaza is home to 350,000 people suffering from cancer, diabetes, heart, and kidney diseases. The total blockade announced by Israel on October 9 has placed the territory’s entire healthcare system under insurmountable pressure, and patients are dying due to a lack of resources and services. Casualty counts are not just an important metric for understanding the scale of war and conflict. They also serve as an important political and ethical reminder of the human costs of war. In recent years, many militaries have become increasingly accountable for the civilian casualties and collateral damage they cause. This is in part the result of internal pressures and the realisation that causing civilian casualties makes achieving military objectives more difficult as it creates resentment and opposition from affected populations. But it is also the result of external organisations like the US-based Center for Civilians in Conflict, Israel-based BTselem, or UK-based Airwars pushing for greater transparency and awareness. Today both the US and Israel have extensive civilian casualty mitigation procedures, even if they are imperfect and allow for sometimes large amounts of civilian casualties. The degree of restraint in Israel’s current military operations is difficult to gauge. Early in the campaign, military spokesperson R Adm Daniel Hagari suggested that “the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy” – a declaration of intentional disregard for civilian lives. The Geneva Conventions do not outlaw civilian death and injury, but they make clear that any damage must be proportionate to the military advantage gained. The surest and perhaps only way to prevent further civilian suffering in Gaza would be an immediate ceasefire. Dr Craig Jones is Senior Lecturer in the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology at Newcastle University in England. He is author of The War Lawyers: US, Israel, and Juridical Warfare (OUP, 2020) and is currently researching war-related injury among civilian populations in Gaza and Iraq. Twitter/X: @thewarspace This research was funded by the Independent Social Research Foundation Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on November 13, 2023

Behind the Beijing Winter Olympics - 360 Ken Nosaka, Courtney C. Walton, of Melbourne; By Hans Westerbeek, Marc Zupan Published on February 17, 2022 As the best winter athletes compete for gold in Beijing, we look at the stories that go beyond the sports. The world’s best are in Beijing for the 2022 Winter Olympic Games. In a Games like no other, athletes are traversing difficult COVID-19 regulations while launching their bids to take home Olympic gold. The feats that winter athletes pull off seem to defy all logic and belief — watching slopestyle snowboarders spin from dizzying heights, seeing speed skaters zoom across the ice or the thundering run of a bobsled. But behind the athletic champions competing at the Winter Olympics is a reserve of science, training and data that has helped them reach the pinnacle of their chosen sport. The science and statistics behind the stars of the Winter Olympics may not make it onto the podium, but is a crucial aspect of all contemporary sporting success stories. It all plays a role: from training regimes to help competitors maximise results whilst minimising injury, to their equipment choices, to the structures in place around athletes to help their headspace. Beijing is hosting the 24th Winter Olympic Games. It is the first city to host both the Winter and Summer Olympics, having held the latter in 2008. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) estimates there are approximately 2,900 athletes in Beijing competing in the Winter Olympics. There will be 109 events contested during the competition — seven of which are new (monobob, mixed team ski jumping, Freeski Big Air, mixed team snowboard cross, short track team relay and mixed team freestyle skiing aerials). Norway has won the most medals in Winter Olympic history, bringing in a total of 368. The United States is a distant second at 305 medals, followed by Germany with 359. Athlete well-being in the spotlight at Olympics Courtney C. Walton, University of Melbourne The 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics could be uniquely difficult athletes’ mental health unprecedented challenges — but there are tools to help. Cross-country skiing not quite the marathonKen Nosaka, Edith Cowan University Cross-country skiing is one of the most captivating endurance events at the Olympics — so how do the athletes get back on the snow so quickly after a race? Material difference in ski technologyBy Marc Zupan, UMBC-University of Maryland, Baltimore County High-tech materials have moved beyond the preserve of elite ski athletes. These days, skiers across all level  exploit ground-breaking materials technology. Smarter than your average OlympianBy Hans Westerbeek, Victoria University They may not be prominent on the slopes, but intelligent machines are busy at the Beijing Winter Olympics. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™. Editors Note: Framing article

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on February 17, 2022

Behind the scenes assembling an IPCC report during COVID - 360 Kathryn Bowen Published on February 28, 2022 In a period troubled by COVID, the already difficult task of assembling a mammoth climate change report was made much harder. The most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released later today, is the product of more than four years’ work from hundreds of scientists and bureaucrats. Assembling a report like this is ordinarily no small undertaking, but during COVID lockdowns, it’s a labour borne of late-night Zoom calls and painstaking revision. The latest report pulls together more than 34,000 recent scientific studies on climate change, reviews them, assesses their scientific merit, and draws conclusions about where we are, and where we are heading as climate change continues. It’s the sixth assessment report and this particular release is from Working Group II. The collection of 270 scientists and government delegations from around the world has provided their analysis of the “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability” to climate change. Initially, the government delegations nominate which topics they would like to see covered in the report and a skeleton outline of the report is assembled by consensus. From there, authors are recruited to the task. In assembling the authorship group, the IPCC considers representation of men, women, geographical spread, and expertise. A country that is a party to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is permitted to provide experts to contribute to a given chapter. Scientists self-nominate or are selected because of their experience. It is a prestigious role, and one with great responsibility. But one with huge demands. Two co-chairs then take the lead in co-ordinating meetings and for check-ins for the report. The current report was chaired by Hans-Otto Pörtner from Germany and Debra Roberts from South Africa. The “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability” report consists of 18 chapters. The specialist authors assigned to a chapter coordinate their smaller group to assess the science and produce the text. Within each chapter group, a few people are assigned to check in with other chapter groups to make sure their section does not overlap, and complements the other chapters. There are usually two ‘coordinating lead authors’ who take a leadership role in the process, while ‘lead authors’ do the bulk of the writing. ‘Contributing authors’ are called upon as necessary. They’re people with specific technical expertise who write a section on their area. Contributing authors don’t see the entire chapter, they just provide their input as requested. The authors are heavily engaged on the project for the full four-plus years it takes to produce the report. COVID-19 has provided some extra challenges in the preparation of this report. Ordinarily, the authors meet in person several times to work on the report and overcome any sticking points. Working Group II did meet in Durban, South Africa, Faro, Portugal and Kathmandu, Nepal, but in the final two years of the assessment cycle, international travel has not been possible for many countries. Instead, the group, like so many other industries, has had to learn to work remotely. The final step in the assembly of the report is the hardest. The thousands of pages of the report are condensed into a summary for policymakers (SPM). The summary is created with the expectation that policymakers might not have a chance to read the full report, so it needs to be an accurate reflection of the underlying report. It also needs a clear connection — ‘line of sight’ —  to the full report, so that policymakers can delve deeper into a topic if they need to. Around 50 scientists from the initial group are co-opted to the summary group. Then, in an online meeting of authors and government delegations lasting two weeks, each sentence of the Summary for Policymakers is read out and agreed to by consensus. When consensus is reached, the chair bangs a gavel and the sentence is turned green to signify its acceptance. Recreating the process of a live plenary over Zoom has significant challenges. There might be a split second between someone raising their hand for an objection and the gavel coming down. The split second might be a result of computer lag and so an IPCC legal officer needs to adjudicate on whether to hear the objection. COVID has also made production of the report more difficult in the same way that COVID has challenged everyone. People becoming unwell, juggling caring responsibilities, or even professionals being pulled into COVID response teams has pulled focus from production of the report. Even through the ravages of COVID, climate change remains a growing problem, and the report team remained committed to the task. The process is a co-production between a large group of government and scientific experts. Through many rounds of iterations, the report has been questioned, commented on, reviewed and refined. More than 62,000 review comments were received, with a single chapter receiving as many as 8,000 comments in a review round, each of which must be addressed. Working Group I released its contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report on 9 August 2021. It assessed the scientific evidence for whether climate change is caused by humans (it is). Working Group III, looking at ways to prevent climate change from becoming worse, will release its report at the beginning of April. The reports build upon previous versions. Over time, the message remains the same, but with increased certainty and urgency: climate change is an immediate threat to our planet, and our health. Preventing climate change from reaching 1.5°C is our best chance of staying safe. But with climate change already well advanced, learning to adapt to a climate changed world is becoming increasingly important. Kathryn Bowen is Professor – Climate, Environment and Global Health, and deputy director, Melbourne Climate Futures at University of Melbourne. She is a lead author on chapter seven of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (Human health, wellbeing, and the changing structure of communities) and a lead author on the Summary for Policymakers. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on February 28, 2022

Being housed is not the same as having a home - 360 David Jenkins, Kimberley Brownlee Published on May 30, 2022 ‘Home’ is not only a place to sleep. Well-being comes from the social aspects of home just as much as from four walls and a roof. At the end of The Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy clicks her ruby slippers together and says: “There’s no place like home,” she is not wishing herself back to a lonely bedsit in the city. Nor is she imagining a Citizen Kane-style Xanadu with vaulted arches, high walls and bountiful gardens. Luxury does not feature in her ideal. Indeed, in contrast to the vivid technicolour of Oz, her Kansas home is a dreary, monochrome vision of desolate plains pocked with scrub. For Dorothy, though, her home is irreplaceable because of what greets her on her return from Oz: a small group of people who together create a place of safety, warmth and happiness – a place where she belongs. A home, then, is much more than four walls and a roof under which a person can meet basic human needs like sleeping, bathing and eating. When we think of homelessness we tend to think of rough sleepers. Rough sleeping is the most visible and extreme manifestation of homelessness – or, more specifically, houselessness. But those who sleep rough are actually in the minority of cases of recorded homelessness. People who live in temporary accommodation, squat illegally, sleep in shelters or face extreme threats from outside or from within their four walls are classified in most jurisdictions as legally homeless even though they have a roof over their heads. So too are people who must ‘couch-surf’ under other people’s roofs. For a person to be housed, he or she must have, at a minimum, legally guaranteed access to a minimally adequate dwelling for a minimally sufficient length of time. Of course, terms like ‘minimally adequate’ and ‘minimally sufficient’ give policymakers significant interpretative leeway. To be adequate, must a dwelling have at least as many rooms as occupants? Must it be tolerable not just for ordinary living but for 24-hour occupancy during a lockdown? Must it be affordable without holding down three jobs? Must it be securely available indefinitely or is ‘to the end of the month’ sufficient? Even in the best case, however, a gap remains between the ideal of home invoked by Dorothy and the living conditions secured by a legal focus on housing. Home is, as poet Robert Frost put it, “The place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in”. Home honours the reality that a person is a deeply social creature who depends on other people to meet her basic social needs. Home is always peopled by those who have to relate to her in certain ways, with generosity, warmth and (implicitly) forgiveness. When being ‘not homeless’ specifies only a minimally secure legal relationship between a person and a private space where she can sleep, bathe and eat, the social dimensions of that place are obscured. More specifically, the rights that a person may have to those social dimensions of ‘home’ go missing. The documentary Dreams of a Life (2011) tells the tragic story of 38-year-old Joyce Vincent, who died alone in her London bedsit in 2003 and was not discovered until 2006. Her story underscores the potentially lethal seriousness of this gap between legal relations and the expansive, social notion of a home. Joyce had a flat that was adequate, with space for her possessions, a secure, lifetime tenancy, privacy, heating, a bed, washing facilities, food cupboards, a fridge and cooking equipment. She also received rent assistance from the state, a benefit she continued to receive after her death because her death went unnoticed. At the time of her death, Joyce had drifted away from the people she had once known, to such an extent that they had no idea she had died until they learned of it through an advertisement filmmaker Carol Morley placed in the local paper in an effort to find people who may have known Joyce. (In a sad touch, recounted in Dreams of a Life, Joyce’s badly decomposed body was surrounded by Christmas presents that she had wrapped but never delivered. Joyce did have family, but they were not in touch with one another, and they apparently did not know where she lived. The presents may have been intended for herself or possibly she bought them with the thought of reconnecting with her family.) The gap between housing and a home is not entirely lost in some formal understandings of homelessness. The Australian Bureau of Statistics’ definition of homelessness – which includes the typical references to dwellings and tenure – also describes homelessness as a lack of “control of, and access to, space for social relations”. But even when the law formally recognises the importance of “control” and “access” over private social space, social relations can still fail to get going. Joyce had control of and access to a space for social relations, but she still fell through the cracks. Her house was never a space within which social relations figured. Similarly, parents who spend few waking moments with their children because, to pay the rent or mortgage, they must work long hours, work two or three jobs, commute great distances, or work night shifts, are unable to use their residence to engage in social relations. They have access and control but precious little freedom to use their space for social relations. When the material realities of people’s lives undermine their ability to sustain their social relations, they may well be homeless, even as they are housed. This distressing reality – that people can be housed yet homeless – is appreciated implicitly by Sharon Thompson, a Birmingham, UK, City Council Cabinet Member for Homes and Neighbourhoods, who was herself on the streets as a 16 year old. She said: “Homelessness is more than just about a house. It is about a whole life and creating a home. It is more than simply giving (people) a key to a door”. Legislating within this gap between ‘housing’ and ‘homing’ has complex implications for housing policy and law. Overall though, appreciation of the gap suggests that housing policy – or indeed ‘homing’ policy – must go beyond legal guarantees of minimally secure tenure over an adequate dwelling. ‘Being homed’ need not mean that a person must cohabit with others, but refers instead to a condition of belonging. Even seemingly unrelated legislation can undermine people’s ability to start, develop and sustain the social relations that constitute their sense of being homed. For example, workplace legislation allowing long hours can interfere with people’s ability to generate and sustain social relations with others, and neglect these richer, more complex, but no less important, aspects of what it means to be home. Housing policies that do not take into account the ways that various kinds of legislation can impact home life are taking too shallow a view of what a home does for people. It is for social reasons that there is no place like home. David Jenkins is a lecturer in the politics department at the University of Otago. His current work focuses on housing and urban politics. He is author (with Kim) of What a home does (Law and Philosophy) and co-editor (with Kim and Adam Neal) of Being Social: The Philosophy of Social Human Rights (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). Kimberley Brownlee holds the Canada Research Chair in Ethics and Political & Social Philosophy at the University of British Columbia. She is the author (with David) of What a home does (Law and Philosophy) Being Sure of Each Other (Oxford University Press, 2020) and Conscience and Conviction: The Case for Civil Disobedience (Oxford University Press, 2012). She is the co-editor (with David and Adam Neal) of Being Social: The Philosophy of Social Human Rights (Oxford University Press, forthcoming), The Blackwell Companion to Applied Philosophy (Wiley, 2016) and Disability and Disadvantage (Oxford University Press, 2009). Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on May 30, 2022

Belarus stands alone as Europe’s last defender of the death penalty - 360 Natalia Antolak-Saper Published on September 5, 2022 Belarus is an outlier, as the last European state to maintain the death penalty. And, with a recent amendment, they’re doubling down. In 1997, the last person to be sentenced to death and executed in Europe met their end in Ukraine. For Belarus, keen to join the Council of Europe for alliance-building and legitimacy in the region, its retention of the death penalty remains the biggest obstacle to being fully embraced by its neighbours. Now, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko’s May 2022 intervention to amend the country’s Criminal Code and expand the application of the death penalty to include those found guilty of “attempting an act of terrorism” has alarmed human rights organisations. In itself, it was a legal overreach, but Amnesty International also fears the amendment’s design and timing could allow the law to become a mallet to bludgeon political dissent — particularly the activism against Belarus’ involvement in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Although Belarus is not an official party to the conflict, it has provided Russia with access to its borders, hospitals and logistics networks. Activist groups in Belarus such as BYPOL, who allegedly attempted to disrupt transportation of Russian weaponry and military personnel to Ukraine in the so-called ‘railway war’, have drawn the government’s ire. Belarus remains the only state in Europe and Central Asia that still uses the death penalty. The death penalty has been a part of the Belarusian criminal justice system since the country gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, but was limited to “especially grave crimes” such as genocide, terrorism, crimes against humanity, and murder committed in aggravating circumstances. Determining how many offenders are sentenced to death and subsequently executed in Belarus is difficult to assess. Between 1994 and 2014, 245 people were officially sentenced to death. Human rights NGOs International Federation for Human Rights and Viasna believe the true number of executions is “largely under-reported and unknown,” owing to Belarus’ “regular execution of people on the basis of unfair trials and in an atmosphere of total secrecy”. But invoking the death penalty is more than a theoretical or remote possibility. The International Federation for Human Rights and Viasna estimate that, since 1991, “over 300 people have been sentenced to death and about 400 have been executed”. This odd discrepancy could be explained by the fact that upon gaining independence, Belarus executed offenders who had been sentenced to death by the Soviet Union before 1991. Domestically, Belarus maintains a strong commitment to retaining the death penalty. But in its dialogue with international organisations and foreign states, Belarus has at times adopted a different tack — showing some openness to law reform in pursuit of improved international standing. Belarus has sought to be a full member of the Council of Europe since first applying in 1993. The Council of Europe is an international organisation concerned with upholding “human rights, democracy and the rule of law” in the region and boasts 46 member states. For Belarus, joining the Council of Europe would be another step towards legitimacy. But the Council’s commitment to abolishing the death penalty in the region is a longstanding priority area: it introduced “the first legally-binding instrument abolishing the death penalty in peacetime” in 1982, which was ratified by all current member states. Seven years later, the Council made the abolition of the death penalty a condition of accession for all new member states. Finally, in 2002, the Council of Europe introduced Protocol No 13, requiring all members to maintain complete abolition of capital punishment, including in times of war. Following Belarus’ unsuccessful application to the Council of Europe in 1993, it was provided ‘special guest status’ to the Parliamentary Assembly. This was subsequently suspended in 1996 after a Belarusian referendum saw the death penalty upheld and other democratic freedoms limited. In 2009, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe suggested Belarus could regain its special guest status if the government would impose a moratorium on the death penalty. In 2010, a Belarusian parliamentary working group was formed to investigate problems associated with the death penalty. At the time, then-Chairman of the Commission on Foreign Affairs Mikalai Samaseika put forward a pathway to restore the special guest status of Belarus to the Parliamentary Assembly. It was said this pathway to restoration could facilitate “a more effective parliamentary diplomacy in promoting national interests and developing bilateral contacts”. However, the working group failed to file a report into its findings by the end of the government’s term. To date, Belarus remains outside the Council of Europe and is the last European state not only using the death penalty, but with these recent amendments, expanding its application. The hardening of capital punishment means Belarus now appears further from abolishing the death penalty than it ever has been, but with a renewed geopolitical focus on alliance-building, opportunities to influence remain. If Belarus is to join its European neighbours in outlawing the death penalty, it may be through deft negotiation and enticement from the countries and institutions that have shunned it to date. Natalia Antolak-Saper is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Law, Monash University. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on September 5, 2022

Beleaguered parties and strategic voters - 360 Shandana Khan Mohmand Published on February 7, 2024 While more and more of the country’s voters now live in urban areas, the bulk is still in the countryside. Does this effect voting behaviour? All the talk as Pakistan heads to the polls on February 8 is about the two main political parties, their beleaguered leaders and the military’s role in choosing who will govern the country. What’s not talked about so much is how Pakistan’s 128 million voters participate in elections. PTI leader Imran Khan, deposed as prime minister in 2022 and hit with two jail sentences last week, cannot run as a candidate. Nawaz Sharif, leader of the PML-N, is favourite to become the new PM. Ironically, in 2018 when Imran’s PTI won government, it was Sharif who was in exile. Pakistan has lurched from one crisis to another: devastating floods, an intense economic crisis, near bankruptcy, a cost of living crisis, and an impossible debt crisis marked by rounds of negotiations with, and bailouts by, the IMF. The past 20 months have also seen Pakistan’s army become more visible in politics. Even those who insisted it did not play a role in the 2018 election which delivered Imran to power now argue it will determine the results in coming days. But if an election is heavily manipulated, what does it mean for the voting behaviour of the millions that will line up at voting booths on election day? Pakistan’s electoral turnout is not high, but a range of between 44-54 percent over the last three elections means that we can expect over 60 million people to turn out on February 8. The general story on voting behaviour in Pakistan is that it is determined by relations of patronage and clientelism; by ethnic and kinship politics; or by dependence on powerful landlords. While this is not untrue, it is marked by so much variation across location, class, and gender that this characterisation is essentially unhelpful in understanding the country’s voting behaviour. A majority of Pakistan’s voters are rural. This is the group that is usually characterised as dependent on the economic and social power of landlords. These landlords use their power and their ready vote bank to become dynastic politicians in Pakistan’s political parties. Parties thus function as networks of such ‘electable’ politicians that can carry their vote base from party to party, leading to a phenomenon of frequent party switches. Yet, if we dig deep, as this book Crafty Oligarchs, Savvy Voters did, we find that this defines a very small minority of voters. A reduction in land sizes and other economic and social changes over the decades means that this is now a dated story. What we find instead is a fair amount of agency that rural voters exercise, but given the weakness of Pakistan’s political parties, this agency is exercised through collectives organised around kinship, or biraderis. Again, while some voters are drawn into these groups on the basis of social linkages, for many voters these groups represent a space in which to increase their numbers to better negotiate with landlords and politicians for scarce services and other benefits. In many cases these are relationships of pure clientelism – my vote in return for street paving or teacher attendance at the village school – but for a large majority, these represent more strategic forms of organising politically in the most readily available spaces. Why these are the only spaces available has to do with the weakening of student, labour, and trade unions and political parties in the military-dominated politics of Pakistan. The main source of variation in rural politics comes from economic and social equality – more unequal villages and members of lower biraderi groups (which function much like castes) have more dependent and clientelistic politics, while those of higher castes and in more equal villages can use their vote for more strategic bargaining at election time. A very rapid pace of urbanisation means that more and more of Pakistan’s voters now live in urban areas where the logic of politics is not based on landlord power or the ability to strategise within biraderis. A study in Lahore, Pakistan’s second-largest city with a population of over 11 million, shows that voting behaviour here revolves instead around partisan preferences or support for political parties and their leaders. Voters in cities are driven by the ideological, populist, or charisma-led appeal of political parties, rather than by personalistic promises or co-ethnicity. This is not different from how politics functions in many cities around the world, including those in more developed countries. The variation here comes from the usual differences of class, age, and gender. This brings us to a particularly important group of voters – women. Pakistan has one of the largest gender gaps in voting in the world – about 11 million fewer women than men voted in the last election. Part of this is explained by difficulties in registering women as voters, but the gap above represents those who are already registered, and this gap is larger in urban than in rural areas. There is one major reason for the gender gap – the fact that women remain invisible to political parties and policy processes in Pakistan. Even though women hold 20 percent of seats in the national parliament, parties do not see women as a distinct political constituency with needs, preferences, and demands that are different from those expressed by men. Why then do women in rural areas vote more than in urban areas? A simple explanation is the collective form of voting discussed above, which works to draw out all members of a kinship group to help inflate numbers and signal strength to patrons and politicians. Where voters are individualised, such as in cities, women disappear off the political agenda. Most of the analysis above hinges on the weakness of political parties. These must be strengthened to allow other forms of mobilisation and organisation for rural voters; to respond to party programmes for urban supporters; and to recognise and mobilise women as a distinct and valuable constituency. Research has shown that attempts to mobilise both women and men in urban households can close the gender gap very quickly. The strengthening of political party organisation is difficult in contexts where non-political forces are involved in electoral politics. But the good news is that the increasingly strategic voting behaviour of most rural and urban voters makes it harder to manoeuvre elections, at least on election day. Shandana Khan Mohmand is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex, UK, and the lead of its Governance Research cluster and Pakistan Hub. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on February 7, 2024

Best plans hit a snag on the way to saving Australia’s biggest river - 360 Quentin Grafton Published on March 25, 2024 Australia attempted a national management plan for its long-suffering Murray-Darling River. Over a decade later, what are the lessons for others? For more than a decade, the Australian government poured billions into the country’s biggest river system, trying to protect it from irreversible damage. But instead of saving the river, the Murray-Darling Basin Plan serves as a cautionary tale for other regions. The Murray-Darling Basin, a river system spanning over a million square kilometres, stretches over four states and one territory on Australia’s eastern side. It is often referred to as “Australia’s food bowl” and the farming centre of the country. In 2007, amid widespread and devastating decade-long drought, the Australian Government set aside AUD$10 billion in funding and enacted the Water Act, a policy to protect the basin. The Water Act gave rise to the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, a 2012 strategy that — among other things — was supposed to ensure sustainable water use from the basin and to “protect, restore and provide for” its natural environment. The plan has not met its potential. It has been described as “destroying rural communities” by lobbyists and “failing to deliver for the environment” by researchers and some communities. Former prime minister John Howard, initiator of the Water Act, said in 2021 that the basin has suffered from “very, very bad administration over the years by governments of both persuasions.” On paper, it doesn’t make sense: Australia is a stable democracy with a robust public service. It could be a model case study of sustainable river management. Instead, it has been derailed by political dispute and cross-border in-fighting. A set of reforms brought in at the end of 2023 offers a chance to improve the basin’s fortunes, but it has to undo a saga that has stretched over a decade. The Basin Plan was an agreement between two levels of government – Australia’s federal government, and individual state and territory governments. The federal government had, earlier, created a statutory body, called the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, to implement the agreed upon plan. From the outset, there was controversy. The Authority’s 2012 Basin Plan featured a notable departure from the 2010 “guide to the proposed Basin Plan”, a document from the same body which provided much of the modelling and science for the final product. In 2010, the guide estimated that 3,856 billion litres per year needed to remain flowing in the river system to meet the Water Act’s environmental goals. Even then, the plan noted, it was highly uncertain whether this cut to water extractions would deliver healthy rivers. When the Basin Plan arrived two years later, it told a different story: it said river water extractions should only be reduced by 2,750 billion litres per year — 40 percent less than the minimum suggested in 2010. There were more points of difference. The 2012 Basin Plan almost doubled allowable bore-water extractions without properly considering effects it may have on water quality and surface water.   The plan also failed to account for climate change and increasing droughts when considering the sustainable diversion limits for water extractions. In a 2018 Royal Commission, a former official at the Murray-Darling Basin Authority shed light on the difference between the 2010 and 2012 documents. Speaking under oath, water planner David Bell said there was “a very clear understanding” from the Authority’s board, conveyed by senior management, “that the sustainable diversion limit of it had to be beginning with a number two.” The Royal Commission determined the changed figures from 2010 to 2012 may have been “unlawful”, a potential violation of the Water Act which demands “environmental considerations to be paramount” (the Authority contests this finding). Instead, the Authority came to a compromise between the best available science and needs of irrigators. The dispute that followed showed two issues with the Water Act: its lack of clarity around the triple bottom line and its inflexibility. The shifting goalposts between the basin guide and plan is a case of regulatory capture, where government decisions are shaped by outsiders to benefit their interests over the public. In the Murray-Darling Basin, irrigators — who use about 80 percent of the extracted water — were the big winners of the changes made between 2010 and 2012. This has been a pattern in the basin. According to two independent researchers, “irrigators came out of each subsequent stage of the [water] reform process better placed than the environment.” When change came in 2018, on advice from the Authority, it opted not to reduce the amount of river water available for irrigators. Instead, legislators dictated that 600 billion litres were to be available for water extractions and water for the environment would be found by other means. Within months of the 2018 adjustment, two separate evaluations showed that river health had not stopped declining and the amount of water flowing in the rivers was equal or less than what it was before the Basin Plan. Then, in the summer of 2018-19, tens of thousands of fish began to die. An investigation into the phenomena acknowledged the “severe (but not unprecedented) drought”, but lay blame at the feet of the “excess upstream diversion of water for irrigation”. In 2023, the amount of dead fish was in the millions. In a report to state parliament, New South Wales’ Chief Scientist and Engineer Hugh Durrant-Whyte observed that “mass fish deaths are symptomatic of degradation of the broader river ecosystem over many years”. Effective planning involves understanding how the world is, and how to respond to the world that might be, so as to achieve well-defined goals. While planning is necessary, it alone is not sufficient. The contested numbers, for instance, were always undermined by contested information about what was really happening in the rivers. Independent water audits would have settled the debate sooner and helped to expose the facts. So would have much better-quality analyses and reports to decision-makers that were commissioned by the Authority, among others. This has been especially problematic for economics studies with many consultant reports overestimating the costs of water recovery for the environment and underestimating the benefits. Initially, few compliance actions were taken in the first years of the Basin Plan, despite well-documented ongoing problems such as water theft. Rules can be set up to govern the multi-billion-dollar water market, but they are toothless if not properly enforced. But following an ABC report in 2017, monitoring and enforcement has been ramped up. A separate New South Wales regulatory agency has been formed. Water market reforms are planned in 2024 to limit possible market manipulation. The 2019 Royal Commission on the Basin delivered 44 recommendations in 2019 aimed at improving the Basin Plan and helping satisfy the Water Act, but many have not yet been implemented. The Plan has scope for regular reviews. To date, it has not sufficiently adapted to changed circumstances and new risks, such as climate change, floodplain harvesting, and reductions in stream flows from increases in irrigation efficiency. Without appropriate checks and balances, administrative agencies can  fail to deliver. The Royal Commission described decision-making by the Authority as “incomprehensible” and “indefensible”. The Basin Plan’s deficiencies have compromised its ability to ensure healthy rivers in Australia’s most important river basin. Nevertheless, the Basin Plan has made some progress towards achieving the aims of the Water Act, but it’s far from satisfactory. A December 2023 amendment, passed by the federal Labor government with help from independents, will make a positive difference. The 2023 water reform will allow governments until December 2027 to recover more water for the environment and to allocate more funds to deliver another 450 gigalitres  that was committed to in 2012 but never delivered. It also repeals a statutory cap on Commonwealth water purchases for the environment set by the previous government in 2014, while adding an independent review of existing Basin Plan infrastructure projects and more funding for Aboriginal Water Entitlement Holdings. The 2023 reforms are a solid step forward in water reform but much more is required to secure the future of the Murray-Darling Basin, including a new plan that fully considers climate change in its setting of sustainable diversion limits. Australia’s 2012 Murray-Darling Basin Plan is a cautionary tale of what and who can get in the way of good practice and how reform can, sometimes, go backwards, as well as forwards. Professor Quentin Grafton is an Australian Laureate Fellow and Chairholder of the UNESCO Chair in Water Economics and Transboundary Water Governance at the Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™. Editors Note: In the story “Water conflict” sent at: 21/03/2024 07:04. This is a corrected repeat.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on March 25, 2024

Better understanding makes better home care for cancer patients - 360 Christantie Effendy Published on February 5, 2024 Indonesia’s strong family ties mean many cancer patients are cared for at home. Understanding palliative care can help elevate a patient’s quality of life. Cancer is the third leading cause of death in Indonesia, after heart disease and stroke. In 2018, the prevalence of cancer in Indonesia was 1.78 per 1,000 people. In 2020, breast cancer had the highest number of new cases, with 68,858 out of 396,914 cases, or 16.6 percent. When cancer patients no longer respond to treatment, they need palliative care. Palliative care can be part of the treatment for various conditions, such as chronic kidney disease, cardiovascular disease, dementia, HIV/AIDS and other non-communicable diseases. In Indonesia, palliative care is mostly used in cancer treatment. Patients with cancer have various problems and needs in which palliative care has an important role in addressing. In Indonesia, where family ties are strong, families must take part in caring for their family members when they are sick, whether in hospital or being cared for at home. Family caregivers often spend 24 hours a day caring for and helping patients. Palliative care is an integrated approach that aims to improve the quality of life of patients and families in dealing with problems related to life-threatening conditions, through preventing and overcoming suffering with early identification and assessment, treating pain and other physical problems, and psychological, social and spiritual problems. It is more effective if implemented early in the diagnosis of the disease. Early palliative care not only improves patients’ quality of life but also reduces hospitalisations and unnecessary use of health services. Every individual who needs it has a right to palliative care, regardless of age, religion, ethnicity, race, type of disease or economic status. This means the right to obtain information when needed about what palliative care means. This has been established clearly in both the third goal of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and in the World Health Organization’s palliative care guidance. In Indonesia, the law concerning health in 2023 states that palliative care can be carried out both in hospitals and in community health centres. Good collaboration among various professionals is critical to implementing effective palliative care. Family is also part of the team. Family support is extremely important for cancer patients, especially in helping to overcome various symptoms and in efforts to improve quality of life. Each cancer patient may have different needs – physical, psycho-social, spiritual and financial – even if they have the same medical diagnosis as others. Nurses and other health workers often pay more attention to physical problems, and are not always trained to identify and deal with psycho-social and spiritual problems. Identifying non-physical problems is a particular challenge for health workers in implementing palliative care in Indonesia. More than 54 percent of patients with advanced cancer in Indonesia stated that they still needed attention from health workers when they were treated in hospital regarding fulfilling daily needs related to pain and other physical problems, as well as psychological, social and spiritual problems. In determining patient treatment, family decisions often override the patient’s decisions. Often the patient’s preferences conflict with the family’s preferences, and the family makes decisions based on the family’s perspective and interests. The family belief in striving to the end often prevents patients from determining their own destiny and autonomy and can deny patients the ability to die with dignity. At the same time, the responsibility to care for sick family members often allows patients to receive care at home with full supportfrom family members. In cases where the patient’s condition worsens and requires palliative care, the family often prefers to care for the patient at home rather than having the patient treated in hospice care. Problems that occur among family caregivers are usually related to their readiness to care for patients, which can be an obstacle in implementing palliative care for patients at home. Various causes of family unpreparedness include inexperience in caring for the seriously ill, lack of knowledge and sources of information, lack of emotional support, and an unsuitable home environment and facilities. Family caregivers who are less prepared might feel anxious about the caregiving process, feel burdened and stressed, and can experience mood swings. In addition, their own health is at higher risk than that of caregivers who are better prepared. On the other hand, family caregivers who are well prepared have skills and knowledge that suit their needs, make them feel more confident in providing care and accompanying patients, and have better hope and well-being both physically and emotionally. Nurses can increase family readiness in caring for patients at home by providing education and training about the goals and benefits of home-based palliative care for patients, especially in managing the signs and symptoms experienced by patients as an effort to improve the patient’s quality of life. Better understanding among families providing palliative care can help reduce anxiety, improve coping, reduce decision-making conflicts, increase patient autonomy and improve skills in dealing with patient health problems and quality of care. Christantie Effendy is a professor in Medical Surgical Nursing at School of Nursing, Universitas Gadjah Mada Yogyakarta, Indonesia. She has been interested in palliative care, cancer care, colostomy care and wound care. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on February 5, 2024

Better workers don't need more hours, they need decent sleep - 360 Srinivasan Ramachandran Published on February 12, 2024 Boosting sleep health may create a more efficient workforce than working longer hours. There is an ongoing debate in India about the merits, or otherwise, of a 70-hour working week. It was sparked by tech billionaire Narayana Murthy, who made a comment on a podcast that young Indians needed to work those hours to benefit the nation’s economy. Research suggests, however, that the opposite would be the reality. A 70-hour week would translate to five 14-hour days for workers. The effect on sleep habits and, consequently, people’s health would be profound. Sleep is essential for survival, an evolutionarily ancient behavioural state exhibited by mammals, birds and reptiles. Even amphibians, fish and invertebrates go into states of reduced activity resembling rest if not sleep with its characteristic electroencephalographic sleep patterns. Experiments with rats demonstrate that sleep deprivation has dire consequences on physiological well-being. Sleep deprivation can increase the risk of several chronic diseases such as type 2 diabetes and obesity by causing changes to nervous system activity, affecting the hormones underlying appetite regulation and increasing cortisol levels. Obesity is a risk factor for diabetes, heart disease and many other ailments. Anxiety and depression are also reportedly associated strongly with reduced sleep. There is no question that sleep impacts quality of life. Yet sleep appears antithetical to other important functions of life such as nurturing children, skill development of the young and more recently, school and college education and technology-associated productivity. In a 24-hour cycle, eight hours of sleep is generally allocated in the night followed by the eight-hours-for-work principle based on the hard-won eight-hour workday. If this routine is maintained, eight hours remains for all other activities. The five-day work week pattern means an input of 40 hours per week devoted to work where attention is restricted to a few domains of activity. Literature and cinema is replete with examples of ways of extending or compressing the time allocated in each of these three arms. This famous scene from Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times is a case in point. The 70-hour work week comment has reignited a discussion on economic productivity but little has been said about its costs. This essentially means 14 hours devoted to work per day based on the five workdays per week pattern. If sleep is to be allocated eight hours then only two hours remain for all other activities including bathing, exercise, cleaning, cooking, eating, commuting to work, and socialising, which are among the most essentials of life functions. Clearly, the 70-hours work per week imposition would also affect sleep duration. The loss of work performance due to insomnia has been estimated to be in the range of USD$2,280-3,274 at the individual level. Extending the five-day work week to six or even seven would attract huge costs of impairing health and family care. Yet, industrialists appear to think that increasing work hours is the key to higher productivity. The evidence points to the contrary. It suggests optimal work hours as safe towards health, notably heart functioning. The average number of hours worked per person in a year varies between countries, ranging from about 1319.131 in Germany to 2405.385 in Colombia for a five-year period between 2018 and 2022. The GDP per hour worked — a measure of productivity — ranges from 87.80427 in South Africa to 139.63803 in Ireland in the same period. The GDP per hour worked in Germany in this period ranges from 103.3757 to 106.4607. Comparatively in Colombia, the range was 104.5059 to 114.8887. Even though the average number of hours worked per person in a year in Colombia shoots up to 1.8 times that of Germany, the maximum productivity for that period is 1.08 times that of Germany — nearly the same. Raising the number of hours worked does not necessarily translate to a good quantum increase in productivity. Germany is trying a four-day work week for six months with as many as 45 companies participating in this pilot study. The goal of this trial is increasing efficiency to boost the economy through enhanced well-being and motivation. Long work hours are significantly detrimental to health, as reported in several studies in different countries with varying geographies and population characteristics. In India, the average annual hours worked by persons engaged has been more than 2000 in the last decade. The latest GDP per capita for India is USD$2410.90. While evident that the GDP per capita is among the low category of countries, the momentum to boost productivity would perhaps need a different strategy than simply increasing work hours. A recent survey shows that interest in sleep improvement and awareness of sleep benefits was generally low among diverse women and a discrepancy was noted between the need and interest in sleep duration. Neither did adolescents realize sleep hygiene as important over other factors. Several approaches to a good night’s sleep have been suggested. Many over-the-counter and prescription medications are also available, although not without side effects. Non-pharmacological approaches are also reported, such as foot reflexology and warm foot baths, limited tea drinking , mindfulness meditation and yogic sleep. Advancements in sleep research continue innovatively including music therapy, behavioural sleep medicine for obstructive sleep apnea, continuous care intervention for type2 diabetes and prediabetes individuals and several other methods for hospitalized patients. Individual variations need consideration for meeting the factors of sleep hygiene, including sleep regularity, regular exercise, alcohol consumption, caffeine intake, napping, relaxation, food intake and light exposure. Light exposure is also linked to circadian rhythms, the biological clock we are born with. To maintain sleep hygiene, daily activities need to be carefully planned. On the other hand, employer sponsored efforts towards better health and well being of employees including good quality sleep could enable productivity, perhaps a take-home lesson for employers and industrialists. Dr. S. Ramachandran is an Emeritus Professor at Manav Rachna International Institute of Research and Studies, Faridabad, Haryana. His interests include Data analytics, software development, computer text mining, machine learning, experimental molecular biology. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™. Editors Note: In the story “Rethinking sleep” sent at: 08/02/2024 06:00. This is a corrected repeat.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on February 12, 2024

Betting on China's Belt and Road - 360 Reece Hooker Published on July 10, 2023 China’s Belt and Road Initiative has transformed the face of Asia, but what might its legacy be? China’s trillion dollar infrastructure plan has fuelled its rise to a global superpower, bringing Beijing into closer quarters with nearly every corner of the world. The Belt and Road Initiative has dominated China’s economic and diplomatic relationships since its launch in 2013. Among the projects produced are a transborder railway connecting Laos and China, a national power grid in Timor Leste and an international airport in Cambodia. Indonesia, which has collaborated with China on a mass transit and railway, is benefitting from Chinese investment. One of Indonesia’s three largest foreign investors, China’s money is helping Indonesia re-develop its mass transit network. But critics of China’s Belt and Road projects see it as something sinister masquerading as a helping hand — a play to acquire political influence and a way to trap developing economies in debt. Some experts have linked Sri Lanka’s economic hardship to China’s involvement in infrastructure projects, while the Belt and Road “jewel”, the USD$60 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, has been beset by financial and security challenges. A reckoning on the Belt and Road Initiative is coming. Costs are blowing out, pandemic-related disruptions are still being felt and China’s domestic economy is fast becoming more uncertain. If the financial issues facing Chinese property kingpin the Evergrande Group aren’t resolved, infrastructural projects at home and abroad could be massively affected. In this special report, experts examine the legacy of China’s Belt and Road Initiative and look ahead to what its future holds. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on July 10, 2023

Bhutan banned smoking and it didn’t go so well - 360 Michael Givel Published on May 31, 2022 The world watched as Bhutan enforced a blanket ban on tobacco: could the solution be as effective as it was simple? In 2021 the World Health Organization (WHO) described tobacco use as “one of the biggest public health threats the world has ever faced”. Prohibition of tobacco seems like a clear solution, then: ban tobacco, problem solved. But the experience of the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan shows a ban is more complicated than it might seem and provides fodder for the long-term debate over whether incremental regulatory and tax policies, or prohibition and abolition, will stop tobacco use. Bhutan enacted a national ban on the domestic sale, promotion, cultivation and distribution of tobacco products in 2004, and created a 100 percent tax on small amounts of tobacco products legally imported into Bhutan for personal consumption. Those who used tobacco illegally were fined. Two reasons were given for this 2004 neo-prohibitionist law: protecting public health, and recognising that tobacco consumption is contrary to Buddhist Dharma (law). By 2006, surveys showed Bhutanese had continued to smoke, purchasing black-market tobacco products. The WHO’s Global Youth Tobacco Survey of people aged 13 to 15 showed 23.7 percent of young Bhutanese had used tobacco in the last 30 days. In 2010, as illegal smuggling of tobacco products into Bhutan remained robust, the government beefed up the 2004 prohibition. The 2010 amendment continued to ban the sale, cultivation, promotion and distribution of tobacco – but now this was a fourth-degree felony. Someone found cultivating, supplying, harvesting or distributing tobacco faced mandatory imprisonment of three to five years. It also became a fourth-degree felony to have more than a “permissible amount”, as determined by the Bhutan Tobacco Control Board, or to show tobacco use in domestic videos, movies or other cultural presentations, except for the purpose of countering tobacco use. But the tougher stance did not last long. In 2011 Bhutanese Prime Minister Jigme Thinley declared that due to “the pain and the suffering” the 2010 law had caused – including 59 felony arrests – the Bhutanese government would amend it in the next legislative session. A 2012 amendment changed possession of less than three times the defined tobacco limit to a petty misdemeanor, and possession of three to four times the defined limit to a misdemeanor. Possession of four times the limit remained a fourth-degree felony. In 2013 the WHO again surveyed Bhutanese youth and found that smokeless tobacco use had increased from 9.4 percent in 2009 to 21.6 percent. Any type of tobacco use had increased from 18.8 percent in 2009 to 30.3 percent – the highest in the region as well as globally. In 2014 the most recent national survey for adult tobacco use found about 25 percent of adults used tobacco, mostly smokeless tobacco. In 2019 tobacco use remained high, with 22.2 percent of 13- to 15-year-olds using tobacco products. Following the outbreak of COVID-19, smugglers bringing in tobacco were found to be driving up case numbers. Responding to this different public health emergency, the government repealed the ban on the sale, distribution and importation of tobacco for commercial purposes. Meanwhile, the ban on domestic tobacco cultivation, production and manufacture remains. The Bhutan government also pledged to begin vigorous public health education campaigns on the dangers of tobacco use as well as tobacco-cessation programs such as nicotine-replacement approaches. Bhutan’s experience shows solving and reversing tobacco use is more complicated than simply prohibiting or abolishing tobacco. Tobacco use did not decline under the ban but instead remained robust for both youths and adults over a long period. Smuggling remained vigorous as demand for tobacco products continued to be strong. Bhutan provides an important lesson for other nations considering tobacco bans. Curtailing demand for tobacco products through tobacco regulation, taxes and stop-smoking programmes remains an important approach to counter tobacco use. Recognising this, the Bhutanese government has pledged to engage in effective anti-smoking and public-health media campaigns and medical tobacco-cessation efforts. The lesson from Bhutan appears to be that the simplest method is not necessarily the most effective. Michael Givel is full professor of political science at the University of Oklahoma, USA. In 2009, Professor Givel was the first American Fulbright to serve in Bhutan. He declares no competing interests. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on May 31, 2022

Biden's democracy fix starts at home - 360 Simon Jackman Published on December 6, 2021 Joe Biden’s pledged to “reinvigorate American democracy” starts with bridging the gap between America’s perception of itself and its reality. By Simon Jackman, University of Sydney A key campaign promise of US President Joe Biden in 2020 was to “reinvigorate American democracy” and “repair the damage wrought by President Trump”. His proposals were ambitious, addressing voters’ rights, criminal justice reform, access to education, gender equality, immigration, and restoring “a commitment to science and truth in government”, particularly with respect to climate change. His ‘Summit for Democracy’, announced in the first days of his presidency and that commenced this week, plays to that narrative, with goals to “set forth an affirmative agenda for democratic renewal and to tackle the greatest threats faced by democracies today through collective action”. In truth, the summit is Biden’s opportunity to establish strategic global positioning for his young presidency, and the US as a whole. Biden’s emphasis on democratic renewal is explicitly a rejection of Trump’s foreign policy foundation of “America First”. But Biden and his lieutenants have repeatedly stressed that the task to reassert America’s leadership “begins at home”. Biden’s democracy agenda inside the US gains legitimacy when couched in terms of promoting the country’s national interests on the world stage. As Biden repeatedly said during his campaign, the US must lead not just with the example of power, “but the power of our example”. EMBED START Image {id: "editor_2"} EMBED END Image {id: "editor_2"} The summit is an important piece of statecraft in itself, a vivid demonstration of the global leadership Biden aspires to. It is commonplace to observe that the dominant feature of the international system is great power rivalry, principally between the United States (and its allies), and China and Russia. Many in the US strategic affairs community, and elsewhere, go further, seeing an epoch-defining contest between systems and philosophies of governance – between liberal democracy and various species of authoritarianism. This view is broadly shared across party lines in the US — one of the few points of consensus in Washington. The rise of China challenges the US unlike any other great power rivalry since the demise of European empires. Cold War analogies are unhelpful; China in the 2020s is altogether different to the USSR circa 1950-1990. China’s combination of national wealth, integration in the global economy, its technological capabilities and ambition — under increasingly assertive, authoritarian one-party rule — poses a profound and multi-faceted challenge to the US-anchored liberal international order. As Biden said in his 2021 State of the Union address, Chinese President Xi Jingping is “deadly earnest about [China] becoming the most significant, consequential nation in the world”. “He and others — autocrats — think that democracy can’t compete in the 21st century with autocracies because it takes too long to get consensus.” Biden concluded by asserting that the “central challenge of the age” is “proving democracy is durable and strong”. The summit will be a platform for Biden and other democratic leaders to reinforce this view, building the solidarity to persuade countries in geo-strategic orbit of China and Russia that engagement with the US — and the liberal, international order it helped build after World War Two — is a robust and viable path to prosperity and security. Strategic aspirations and rationales aside, Biden must confront inconvenient truths about the state of democracy in the US. Any failure by the Biden administration at the summit will play into the hands of the summit’s critics, China and Russia chief among them. A US with ailing democratic institutions and unable to extend constitutionally guaranteed rights to all its citizens lacks legitimacy on the world stage, undermining its leadership aspirations. The American political system contains numerous anti-majoritarian bottlenecks and veto points for minorities, by design. The Electoral College used to elect presidents gives disproportionate voting power to citizens in less populous states. The 30 smallest states have a greater share of the Electoral College than their share of the national population. Republican candidates have won the presidency twice in the last 20 years despite not winning the most votes nationally (George W. Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016). Meanwhile the US Senate is elected via a constitutionally-mandated system of malapportionment, guaranteeing all states two senators irrespective of population. Short of amending the US constitution, little can be done about these anti-majoritarian facets of American politics. But this is hardly the extent of the ways that the promise of democracy fails to be realised in America. EMBED START Image {id: "editor_4"} EMBED END Image {id: "editor_4"} Legislation in the US Senate is often blocked by the filibuster — a rule that has allowed 41 of the country’s conservative Senators to stymie many pieces of legislation, including laws to guarantee voting rights. This bloc of senators currently represents just 38.5% of the adult population of the fifty states. Partisan gerrymandering — drawing maps of legislative districts with the goal of ‘packing’ or ‘cracking’ clusters of party supporters to gain an advantage at election time — also runs rampant. Historically, both parties are guilty of partisan gerrymandering. But Republicans are currently enacting some of the most durable and extreme partisan gerrymanders of the modern era, entrenching their control of state legislatures and using those legislative majorities to enact partisan gerrymanders for Congressional elections. In North Carolina, under a map enacted by Republicans, Democrats won 50.5 percent of the 2018 vote for Congress but just three out of 13 districts. In 2019, the US Supreme Court held that partisan gerrymandering is not within the purview of the federal court system, allowing the practice to reach new extremes in the lead-up to midterm elections in November 2022. Reforming these issues has been made even more difficult by restrictions placed on access to voting. Voter suppression continues to affect US elections in many ways: voter rolls are periodically purged, accessing a polling booth is hard for many, and convicted criminals mostly have their voting rights removed. The first piece of legislation the Democrats introduced to the current US Congress targeted voter reform. Designated HR-1, the “For The People” Act proposes same-day voter registration, expanding access to early voting and postal voting, automatic voter registration, and making Election Day a national holiday. HR-1 also proposes an end to partisan gerrymandering, requiring states to use independent commissions for redistricting, along with campaign finance reform. Despite passing the House of Representatives in March 2021 (with no Republicans in favour), HR-1 has languished in the Senate, where it would need 60 votes to pass — meaning it is doomed, given resistance by the Republicans. These shortcomings of American democracy are not just pain points for Democrats in US domestic politics. They are seized on by adversaries of the US — and of democracy — as examples of the emptiness of American claims to democracy’s primacy in the international order. For millions of Americans, national pride is expressly tied to viewing their country as the ‘leader of the free world’. The political force of this ideal should not be underestimated. If the US wishes to retain its identity as global leader, both sides of domestic politics need to come together to ensure the democracy of which they are so proud is strengthened into the 21st century. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™. Simon Jackman is a Professor of Political Science and Chief Executive Officer of the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. Simon Jackman served as an expert witness for plaintiffs in litigation challenging partisan gerrymandering in Wisconsin and North Carolina, 2016-2017. He declared no conflicts of interest in relation to this article.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on December 6, 2021

Biden’s democracy summit risks being a talking shop - 360 Robert Thomson Published on December 6, 2021 The ‘Summit for Democracy’ is heralded by organisers as the start of democratic renewal. But without a clear agenda, it risks being a forum for grandstanding. By Robert Thomson, Monash University US President Joe Biden’s online ‘Summit for Democracy’ is being heralded by its organisers as the start of democratic renewal. Leaders from governments, civil society and business will discuss what can be done to strengthen democracy. The White House argues such action is urgently needed, as democracies around the world are under threat both at home and from meddlesome non-democracies. Democratic renewal is an attractive idea, but it is also broad and undefined. Without a clearer definition, the summit will be a talking shop: a forum for grandstanding and lofty words without impact. The White House has offered three themes to focus the discussions: defending against authoritarianism, addressing and fighting corruption, and advancing respect for human rights. There is also a process for turning words into actions: leaders will be encouraged to make commitments on what they will do to strengthen democracy in their countries. These commitments will be reviewed at a second summit in a year’s time, which it is hoped will be held in person. While this is a welcome initiative, the summit has three main features that are very likely to limit its impact. First, there is a general scepticism about the real motivations behind the summit. Second, the proposed process lacks any teeth. And, third, the agenda is vague. Of the three problem ingredients, the third one is something the organisers can change. The general scepticism about the real motivation for holding the summit matters: if participants suspect the summit’s organisers have ulterior motives, they are unlikely to engage wholeheartedly. Genuine engagement is needed if leaders are going to sign up to any new initiatives. Without it, they are likely to commit to doing what they would have done anyway. Scepticism about the summit is understandable. The United States’ perception of itself as a shining beacon of democracy is not shared by all. At home, the US suffers from chronic problems in its democratic institutions — to name a few: an anachronistic Electoral College, flawed campaign finance laws, endemic gerrymandering, and lax media regulation that has blurred the line between news and partisan propaganda. Biden has shown no plans to deal with such problems. This leads many to ask whether the US should sort out its own democratic house before lecturing the rest of the world. EMBED START Image {id: "editor_2"} EMBED END Image {id: "editor_2"} The history of American interventions overseas also suggests that “promoting democracy” is not their only motivation for holding the summit — or that this is desirable. Some US interventions have overthrown democratically-elected governments that were deemed a threat to their interests: Chile and Argentina in the 1970s are cases in point. Other US-led interventions have attempted to impose democratic elections from above when conditions on the ground were unfavourable, which has often ended in disaster. There is a more simple explanation of why the summit is being held: political strategy. What politicians do can often be explained by what they think will strengthen their political support. One of Biden’s priorities is to distinguish himself from former president, and likely future presidential candidate, Donald Trump. Holding a ‘Summit for Democracy’ provides a platform from which to oppose Republican-led initiatives to make voting more cumbersome. Democrats fear that limiting access to the ballot will tilt future elections in favour of Republican candidates. The second main feature that means the summit is likely to be a talking shop is its proposed process. There are few limits to what summit participants can commit to, and no consequences for failing to fulfil these commitments — write down whatever commitment, and then review it together next year. In some ways, this is similar to the process to reduce carbon emissions in the Paris climate agreement. As continuing increases in carbon emissions indicate, this is an ineffective process. This system will likely be even less effective here — commitments to strengthen democratic institutions are harder to quantify and test than emission reductions. The final feature of a talking shop is a vague agenda. A far more concrete agenda is needed. Otherwise, participants will push their own pet projects and talk past each other. The summit’s themes, which are supposed to provide more focus, are also open to interpretation. Authoritarianism, corruption and human rights are all important but they are so general that they open up the discussion to a disconnected general chatter, lofty words, but few of any substance. Setting the agenda means deciding what others talk about and is one of the main parts of political power. The agenda should steer the discussions toward clear and actionable priorities. A clearer agenda would also heed one of the main findings from systematic comparative research on the causes of democratisation: education. Over the past decades, educational opportunities have expanded to include larger parts of the population. This has brought fundamental changes in what people expect of their own lives and of their governments. Educated citizens are generally more demanding and critical of their governments. Such citizens are more difficult for governments to satisfy, but they are what democracy needs in order to thrive. Educated and critical citizens are better able to hold governments to account. They are also better able to recognise the misinformation that plagues today’s politics. This is true of developing economies, where universal access to primary and secondary education is the priority. But it is also true in developed economies, where better education at all levels including post-secondary needs further expansion. The current agenda of the summit does not mention education explicitly, but it could easily be accommodated under the theme of human rights. A major advantage of prioritising education is that there are also practical economic reasons for governments to invest more in expanding educational opportunities. This approach also avoids the mistake of attempting to impose democratic rules where the necessary underlying conditions are not present. Instead, expanding education helps to build the fundamental conditions needed to strengthen democracy in the long term. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™. Robert Thomson is a Professor of Political Science at Monash University. His research examines the practice of democratic representation in different countries around the world. Professor Thomson declared no conflicts of interest in relation to this article.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on December 6, 2021

Biden’s moment to decide on nukes is coming - 360 Daniel Steedman Published on March 21, 2022 US foreign policy will change in wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Whether Biden departs from his predecessors on nuclear weapons policy remains to be seen. The nuclear threats that came with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have presented US President Joe Biden his biggest foreign policy test since entering office. With the administration soon to release its Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), an important policy signpost, Biden has the opportunity to outline his position on nuclear weapons. But in the years since the end of the Cold War, many nuclear disarmament treaties have lapsed or collapsed, leaving few mechanisms for global strategic arms control remaining. With Russia belligerent and the EU nervous about being drawn into a war, Biden has a challenging task before him. Previous NPRs focused on improving US nuclear weapons capabilities and strategy. They also rejected a no-first-use policy, meaning the US reserves the right to use nuclear weapons first in a conflict. It is unlikely Biden will seriously depart from this concept. US foreign policy underwent a profound shift under President Ronald Reagan in the mid-1980s. After decades of Cold War tension, the nuclear arms race between the US and the Soviets ended with the watershed Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in 1987. The agreement, which eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons with operational ranges from 500 to 5500kms, was a sign of the growing trust between Reagan and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. Up to this point in the Cold War, there had been only suspicion and animosity between leaders in Washington and Moscow, which fed into formulation of foreign policy. Gorbachev continued disarmament talks with Reagan’s successor, President George H.W. Bush. Together they negotiated the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START). However, Bush and Gorbachev did not address the stockpile of their tactical nuclear arsenals with START. These weapons remain outside the scope of any nuclear arms control agreement. The momentum towards nuclear disarmament continued with President Bill Clinton who, upon taking office in 1993, pressed for a global moratorium on nuclear testing. The resulting 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) has been ratified by 170 countries, but the US is not one of them. Although Clinton championed the treaty, it was not ratified by the Senate. The Obama and Trump administrations expressed interest in ratifying the CTBT, but failed to seriously pursue the matter. It leaves the US outside the bounds of the treaty, retaining the right to resume testing nuclear weapons, if deemed in the interests of national security. Under Obama, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was agreed to in 2016. The deal provided a means of verifying Iranian nuclear activities, ensuring Iran did not develop a nuclear bomb. Until Obama’s involvement, no US president had directly negotiated with Iran since 1979. But the arrival of Trump the following year saw an erratic period of foreign policy, during which his administration engaged in a game of nuclear brinkmanship with North Korea and made several moves that had adverse repercussions for nuclear arms control. Trump walked away from the JCPOA, then withdrew from Reagan’s INF Treaty after the agreement was violated by Russia. What could be seen as a setback for arms control was taken as an opportunity for Trump: his administration claimed that any viable strategic arms control negotiations in future had to also include China. Biden has since reversed Trump’s action and moved to re-engage the US with the JCPOA. But developing US foreign policy involving nuclear arms control is more challenging in today’s climate. The number of nuclear weapons states has grown to nine since the Cold War ended; technology has advanced and diversified; and the calculus of developing nuclear arms control regimes is more complicated. The only remaining nuclear arms control agreement in place between the US and Russia is the New Strategic Arms Reductions Treaty (New START), a legacy of foreign policy under Reagan. However, even the future of New START is looking tenuous as with Russia’s war against Ukraine. Increasingly, the atrophy of nuclear arms control regimes is coming to resemble some of the darker days of the Cold War. Biden has restored the transatlantic relationship, a bedrock of US foreign and nuclear policy since 1945 that Trump had upset. However, given Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Putin’s aggressive rhetoric against the US and the West, Biden faces a far more daunting task if he wishes to restart arms control negotiations with Putin. None of these developments bode well for the future of strategic arms control. Daniel Steedman is undertaking a PhD in international relations at Monash University. His research interests are US foreign policy, EU foreign policy, nuclear weapons and great power rivalries. He’s twice served on the board of the Australian Institute of International Affairs (Victoria). Mr Steedman declared no conflicts of interest in relation to this package. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on March 21, 2022

Big data and big dollars are changing cricket - 360 Rushikesh Gawade Published on February 2, 2023 Technology and the enhanced scope for money have reshaped cricket and the way people interact with it. But will the game’s essence be lost in the process? Cricket is famously revered in India. Sometimes referred to as a ‘religion’ because of its huge popularity, for many years when the national team played, people in villages across the country would crowd around televisions to watch. If a TV was not available, people would carry transistor radios to listen to the commentary. During test matches, the performance of certain players would dominate conversation in the streets. Cricket brought people together. In the past few years however, the way people interact with cricket has changed. Fans tend to own smartphones which allows them to watch cricket matches anywhere. It is less of a communal activity now. It is only during world cups or for India versus Pakistan matches that people tend to come together to watch cricket. And nowadays there is so much cricket. Tests, one-dayers, T20 … the calendar is full of games. English player Ben Stokes blamed his early retirement from one-day matches in July 2022 on there being too much cricket. Former West Indies fast bowler-turned-commentator Michael Holding stepped away from the game after more than 50 years and said he would not miss it. “This game is not the game that I started playing and the game that I knew. It’s different,” he said. The large scale communication that has come with new technologies has opened up more possibilities for commercialising the interaction between cricket and spectators. With the number of people engaging with the game reaching new heights, cricket matches have become an important advertising avenue. Until 1992, India’s public broadcaster Doordarshan charged the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) a sizeable amount of money to broadcast matches happening on Indian soil. Thirty years later, Disney Star paid US$3 billion to the International Cricket Council (ICC) for the rights to broadcast matches in India from 2024-2027. The broadcast rights to Indian Premier League (IPL) for the period between 2023 and 2027 were sold for over US$6 billion. The IPL has paved the way for a new style of cricket, where money is the driving force, replacing traditional regional or national loyalties. Players from around the world are auctioned to the highest bidder to form teams. Loyalty lasts as long as the contract stipulates. Each season the process is repeated. The IPL has become so successful since its launch in 2008 it spawned three copycat leagues in 2023 alone in the UAE, the USA and South Africa. The rapid spread of online fantasy sport platforms around cricket has also opened up new possibilities for monetising the interaction between the game and its spectators. Online fantasy sports have flourished due to the rapid proliferation of smartphones, realtime global communication and easy access to digital banking. The industry is worth billions of dollars. While not the same as online betting, which is illegal in India, these platforms give fans a direct monetary stake in the sport they are following. What happens on the field can affect a person’s wallet. “Team hai to maza hai” (You will enjoy the game only if you have made your team on the fantasy platform) is the slogan of one of the key online fantasy platforms in India.Fantasy platforms claim they enhance the level of fan engagement with sports. But researchers also argue fantasy platforms can distract spectators from fully embracing aspects of the game that make sport important for people, such as the joy of cheering on a team working together, rather than dissecting the quality of individual players. If you were to gauge the success of cricket by the number of people getting involved or by the amount of money being exchanged, the game appears to be reaching new heights of success day by day. But something of the game’s very essence seems to be losing out in the process. Michael Holding, in the same interview where he lamented the game being different also said: “What [the ICC] are trying to do is manage the money that the game can bring in, not the game, and that is very disappointing.” Technology has brought big changes to the sport but with it challenges: an overcrowded schedule, rule changes to make the game ‘more attractive’, players’ mental health and risk of burnout. To avoid these issues getting out of hand, cricket’s guardians could explore views that do not gauge the success of the game only in terms of its reach or the amount of money it can generate. is a PhD research scholar in sociology at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in Mumbai. He has been following the game of cricket since his childhood. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™. Editors Note: In the story “Game changer: sport tech” sent at: 30/01/2023 09:27. This is a corrected repeat.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on February 2, 2023

Big promises but corruption flourishes in Punjab - 360 Amit Kumar Published on December 1, 2022 The Aam Aadmi Party promised a corruption-free Punjab but it has not been able to deliver on its campaign promise. Winning government on the back of an anti-corruption platform has proved to be a double-edged sword for the Aam Aadmi Party in India’s Punjab state. The Aam Aadmi Party, literally “Common Man’s Party”, emerged from an anti-corruption mass movement which itself  was a reaction to a string of corruption scandals that plagued Indian politics in the early 2000s. The party made its political debut in 2013 when it formed a 49-day alliance government in Delhi. It then swept the Delhi elections in 2015 and 2020. But its biggest and most surprising gain came in 2022 when it swept the legislative election in Punjab. It lured voters with promises that were impossible (eliminating corruption from government in the first 20 days) and uneconomical (freebies and social security payments despite Punjab’s perilous finances). But not having any historical baggage in the state, it enjoyed a distinct advantage over traditional political parties like Congress, the Shiromani Akali Dal and the Bharatiya Janata party. It’s no surprise the Aam Aadmi Party would have popular appeal. Voters were jaded by numerous scams and corruption cases, especially under the United Progressive Alliance government led by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. A mass movement led by some NGOs under the umbrella of India Against Corruption quickly grew calling for improved legislation, such as an Ombudsman, at both federal and state levels. Civil servant-turned-activist Arvind Kejriwal then formed a political party to provide alternative politics based on corruption-free governance. That is how the Aam Aadmi Party came into being. The question now is whether the party has lived up to people’s expectations on the issue of curbing corruption in Punjab. A report by Transparency International India for 2019 revealed corruption was widespread in Punjab. It has been in the top ten states for  corruption cases since 2019 and in 2021 it was placed eighth. Property registration and land issues contributed the most to corruption of government officials in Punjab in 2019.  Police corruption took the top slot in 2018. The Transparency International study rejected the role of changes to work practices and technology in reducing corruption. It also showed that despite the withdrawal of 500 rupee and 1000 rupee notes (to curb hoarding of black money) announced by the central government in 2016, cash bribes continued to be preferred by corrupt officials. A National Crime Records Bureau report shows reported corruption cases in Punjab grew in 2021 by 13.2 percent after negative growth of 15.3 percent two years earlier. This coincided with a  low conviction rate and a high proportion of pending anti-corruption cases in the courts. The pre-election claims and post-election performance of the new administration in eradicating corruption have to be seen in this context. In March 2022, an anti-corruption helpline was launched. The government has claimed more than 4000 complaints have been received so far, and over 200 arrests made. The administration also launched an investigation into the policies, projects and public schemes implemented by previous governments, apparently to unearth the corruption of its predecessors. But only a few months into government, the Aam Aadmi administration has been accused of malpractice and incompetence. Several of its policies appear to be repackaging and rebranding of the old. One example is the conversion of sewa kendras (service centres) into mohalla clinics (neighbourhood clinics). Sewa kendras were constructed in 2016 at the cost of 2 million rupees each during the Shiromani Akali Dal-Bharatiya Janata Party government’s tenure. They were closed in 2018 by the Congress government which succeeded itNow the Aam Aadmi administration has converted 117 defunct sewa kendras into mohalla clinics by renovating them at the cost of 1.9 rupees  million per building – virtually the original cost of construction. The party’s advertising spending has also come under scrutiny. According to documents procured through the Right to Information Act, within the first two months of forming government, the Aam Aadmi Party  spent 373.6 million rupees on advertisements tom-tomming its achievements. The government has also allegedly allowed the use of Punjab State funds for contesting elections in other states. In the run-up to the Punjab election, it was accused of selling assembly poll tickets to political aspirants. After taking charge, the party was attacked  for its apparently selective approach in weeding out corrupt party officials. Opposition leader Pratap Singh Bajwa questioned the Aam Aadmi Party’s attitude to legislator Fauja Singh Sarari’s involvement in corruption and extortion cases. Shiromani Akali Dal president Sukhbir Singh Badal also demanded an inquiry into the party’s involvement in a 5000 million rupees excise-tax scam. A similar concern is shared by the social activists that the current government, like its predecessor, is holding back information on pending corruption cases against its party and government officials. It would seem the Aam Aadmi Party’s focus has been largely on sting operations to uncover corruption in projects associated with previous state governments. These operations are then trumpeted on social media platforms and through full-page newspaper advertisements. Meanwhile, corruption seems to have taken different forms. Political parties are being accused of selling poll tickets, thus corrupting the electoral process. Elections are being fought by offering freebies and making uneconomical promises, the extravagant use of public funds, delaying the prosecution of the corrupt and a selective approach to punishing and weeding out corrupt government functionaries. This not only affects voting behaviour but the financial system and the legal system as well.  What the Aam Aadmi Party’s penchant for dramatics has done is to reveal a selective enforcement of its anti-corruption agenda at the cost of ignoring the preventive approach. A preventive approach would require behavioural changes at the grass-roots level, transforming public institutions to make them transparent and accountable, changing the nature of people’s interaction with government agencies by automating the process and empowering citizens through various legislations such as the RTI Act and Public Services Guarantee Act. There are signs the prevailing culture of corruption has neither disappeared nor abated. The enforcement strategies to curb corruption seem designed more to make an impact in the media while there has not been a visible reduction in the avenues of corruption. Amit Kumar works as a Research Officer at Institute for Development and Communication, Chandigarh, India. His areas of specialisation include Gender and Masculinities studies, Social and Political Geography. The author declared no conflicts of interest in relation to this article. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™. Editors Note: In the story “Combatting corruption in democracies” sent at: 01/12/2022 09:34. This is a corrected repeat.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on December 1, 2022

Big Tobacco’s toxic waste dodge - 360 Stella Bialous Published on May 31, 2022 The waste tobacco products create is an increasingly recognised environmental hazard. Environmental laws might be used to tackle it. Cigarette butts are one of the most littered items in the world. The filters they contain were a marketing strategy by tobacco companies in the 1950s to address health concerns. They offer no protection to smokers, but release 300,000 tonnes of microplastics each year. A recent Californian bill aimed to ban single-use filters and single-use vaping products. But it was watered down, lawmakers backtracking on banning the single-use cigarette filter. In mid-May the bill’s author ordered the proposal to “inactive”, perhaps to try again in a more politically amenable climate. Extended producer responsibility’ – allocating responsibility for environmental harm to the tobacco industry – may be the way forward. It would see policymakers impose a fee to address the costs of waste linked to cigarettes. Tobacco companies might then modify their product to minimise negative impact. Policies to reduce microplastic waste are another option. Tobacco companies are aware of the environmental impact of filters, but they have not developed biodegradable replacements. They also want to prevent any sort of ‘litter tax’, as part of their overall efforts to oppose taxation. In 2009, the city of San Francisco imposed a tobacco-product litter levy. But then the tobacco industry supported state law requiring a two-thirds majority for new levies, and other localities in California were pre-emptively prevented from following San Francisco’s example. To deflect criticism, tobacco companies deployed a public relations and marketing campaign focused on “clean-up” efforts in high-visibility areas such as beaches. These widespread campaigns do not address the environmental problems related to toxic tobacco-product waste – or the source of the pollution. And the butts collected, just a fraction of the total, are still toxic waste. Lawmakers globally are moving to ban smoking in beaches and parks, but the tobacco companies will likely seek to derail these bids to denormalise tobacco use. Following a playbook of ineffectual activities that hamper policy implementation, the companies will continue to establish ‘partnerships’ with local authorities while doing all they can to prevent real change. The rise of e-cigarettes makes tobacco-product waste even more complicated. Where cigarettes contain plastics, e-cigarettes are plastic, metal and electronic components, including batteries. The proper disposal of millions of devices, including single-use devices, is yet to be widely measured or addressed. Tobacco pollution remains a burden mostly borne by thousands of individuals, localities, schools and communities. If the public had better awareness of the environmental harms of cigarette filters there might be more political pressure to act. Meanwhile, the cost of clean-up is mostly unknown. One estimate placed the cost for 30 large US cities at US$264.5 million a year. Estimates for Australia are A$73 million a year. And these costs fail to take into account the costs and environmental harm associated with cigarette-related wildfires. Stella Aguinaga Bialous is a Professor at the School of Nursing, University of California San Francisco. She has over 30 years of experience in tobacco control. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on May 31, 2022

Black days ahead if coal city does not change - 360 Shatabdi Das Published on January 12, 2023 The coalfields around Asansol, 210km northwest of Kolkata in West Bengal have provided a way of life for workers since colonial times. But for the thousands drawn to the area for job opportunities, those same mines also carry the risk of death. Along with the prosperity coal has brought for mining companies comes pollution, shaft collapses and displacement. These problems have continued since the 19th century when indiscriminate extraction and unscientific methods of mining led to land-subsidence, mine fires, air, water and land pollution, displacement and mining related health issues. Yet the promise of employment, housing, water, transport, healthcare centres and schools acted as a magnet and these towns continued to draw people to the coalfields and subsequent mines digging for other mineral reserves such as iron ore, manganese and bauxite. Asansol owes its development to the growth of coal mines, but its sustainability as an extractive town now faces ecological limits while other mining towns in the area face a long battle ahead to become environmentally liveable and sustainable. Coal mining represented the new modern economy of Bengal under which the region flourished during colonial times. The region, in the Raniganj Coalfield of West Bengal, at the fringe of the Chota Nagpur Plateau in Eastern India, has been a hub of commercial coal production since 1840. Asansol, then a railway hub,  became the focus for the growth in the coal producing region and supported Kolkata as a secondary enclave and home to migrant workers. Mining practices have been haphazard, unplanned and unscientific. As a result, the urban centres in the coal region are threatened by unstable ground and land subsidence. Safety concerns for collieries, towns and surrounding areas only surfaced since the nationalisation of coal mines in India in the 1970s. Environmental measures and subsidence control schemes were outlined in a 2009 Master Plan. Land use development now falls under the remit of the  Asansol Durgapur Development Authority which works closely with Eastern Coalfields Limited and the Central Mine Planning and Design Institute Limited Regional Institute in Asansol. Though the government, mining company and development authority sometimes address the issues of subsidence and mine fires, it is difficult to implement checks and controls at every mine site. The hunger for coal means once-productive farmland is swallowed up by mines. Open-cast mines operate near residential areas on the city boundary. Despite the risks, displaced people still encroach into the peripheral areas of mines to scavenge coal. As mining companies buy up more land, there is less for farming. Other areas near mines become unproductive. Land acquisition contracts do not always proceed as planned, triggering loss of livelihood, worse employment conditions and reduced incomes. Development projects such as the construction of dams, industrial townships, expansion of coal mines and growth of infrastructure and transport projects have displaced more than 100,000 people since the 1950s. Land loss and the failure to adapt to alternative livelihoods at times cause distress migration. The Sonepur-Bazari open-cast mine area has been a prominent zone of displacement. Travelling this urban industrial corridor, you see people on bicycles with overflowing bags of coal collected from the fringes pits. With farming jobs disappearing, picking at the seams of abandoned mines becomes the only way to eke out a living. Urban sprawl to the edge of mines leads to safety concerns. However, as mining is the impetus for economic growth, towns around the coalfield continue to grow, causing a subsequent demand for more land. And migrant workers continue to come despite poorer contractual arrangements and fewer social protections due to outsourcing. Allied industries such as iron pigment and ingot manufacturing plants, refractories and brick kilns also provide possibilities of employment. As Asansol confronts the pressures of urban sprawl toward open pit pines, safety issues and pollution — among the worst in India — land development needs to be more attuned to the hazards. Reforestation, stricter control of mine operations, greater safety efforts, accessibility to water and transport services all need a greater focus to reduce regional imbalances. Shatabdi Das is a researcher with the Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group,  Kolkata. This article is part of a Special Report on ‘Cities after colonialism’, produced in collaboration with the Calcutta Research Group. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on January 12, 2023

Blamed, defamed, deported: media attacks on migrants in Malaysia - 360 Kwan Yee Kow Published on May 3, 2022 Migrant workers keep the Malaysian economy humming during peak times. But when times got tough, they were scapegoated. As COVID-19 swept through Malaysia, xenophobic comments in the mainstream press defended and amplified harsh government treatment of undocumented workers. Migrant workers face health, social and economic challenges, even at the best of times. During the pandemic, the plight of undocumented workers in Malaysia grew desperate as they struggled with job loss and inadequate access to healthcare. Hate speech on social media intended to humiliate and blame the community became more prevalent, and these xenophobic messages were repeated in the mainstream media. In July 2020 Al Jazeera aired a documentary called Locked Up in Malaysia’s Lockdown, which focused on the hardships endured by migrant workers during the first MCO implementation. The documentary highlighted that many migrant workers were left stranded in their dilapidated and poorly maintained hostels, relying entirely on their limited savings and hiding from immigration raids. Al Jazeera criticised the Malaysian government’s perceived lack of empathy for the plight of migrant workers. In response, the authorities defended the immigration raids and investigated Al Jazeera’s journalists. A Bangladeshi national interviewed and featured in the documentary was deported. Between July and September 2020, numerous articles were published highlighting the alleged threat posed by undocumented migrant workers, in a clear attempt to justify the government’s aggressive actions towards them. The Star – the highest-circulating English-language local newspaper – published 29 articles or reports covering migrant workers in Malaysia, at least 13 of which predominantly included negative reactions from various government officials to Al Jazeera’s documentary. The ‘migrant workers are a threat’ narrative was used in almost all of the reports, which emphasised quotes from government officials, police officers, academics and local citizens living in areas with a high number of migrant workers. The Star even published articles that cited professors, columnists and economic experts who claimed foreign workers were responsible for “spreading the virus” and the “increasing hiring cost that worsens the country’s economy”. Berita Harian – one of the highest-circulating Malay-language newspapers in Malaysia – published numerous articles and reports directly and indirectly condemning the Al Jazeera documentary. Words such as fitnah (slander), tidak beretika (unethical) and tidak tepat (inaccurate) were repeatedly used to describe the report and the journalist who produced it. A few of the articles in Berita Harian went even further, questioning the legal status of Al Jazeera as a media agency operating in Malaysia and insinuating that there was a foreign imperialistic agenda against the country. Migrant workers were repeatedly described using words such as bahaya (dangerous), ancaman (threat), jenayah (crime), seludup (smuggling) and sindiket (crime syndicate). The Bangladeshi national who featured in Al Jazeera’s report was described as someone who had purposely made a series of false accusations against the Malaysian authorities and who must immediately be deported. Both The Star and Berita Harian are part of private media corporations associated with component parties of the ruling government. This social phenomenon is not unique to Malaysia. In the United States and United Kingdom, the influence of right-wing ideologies and politics has been growing through effective digital media strategies. It is important to note that the xenophobic narrative in the media has been contested by some Malaysian journalists and social activists, who are advocating for a more objective and constructive analysis. National news agency Bernama and online media outfit Malaysiakini published articles citing individual foreign workers as their main source of information. This has given the marginalised workers a platform to share their experiences. Pseudonym were used to protect the workers’ identities. Similarly, human rights activists who are speaking out on behalf of migrant workers have been cited more often by online media such as Malaysiakini and The Malaysian Insight. These media organisations referred to migrant workers using terms such as “undocumented foreign workers” instead of calling them “illegal”. However, in general, individual migrant workers are only quoted, most of the time under pseudonyms, when they are the subject of a report. They are rarely given a chance to contribute directly to policy decisions on issues such as the high number of undocumented workers, human trafficking and forced labour in Malaysia. Newsrooms have great power to affect how the public learns about migrant groups and forms political judgements. Ethical journalism is essential to disseminate inclusive narratives about migrant workers and at the same time guarantee freedom of expression for all. It is also crucial that editors and journalists are aware that there is a series of key international texts condemning discrimination, racism and hate speech. In 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations established that every individual was entitled to inalienable rights and freedoms. Similarly, the UNESCO Mass Media Declaration (1978) invited the media to “contribute to promoting human rights, in particular by giving expression to oppressed peoples who struggle against … all forms of racial discrimination and oppression and who are unable to make their voices heard within their territories”. Journalists need to be aware that, when they interview migrant workers, it is their responsibility to ensure the interviewees’ safety. The fate of the Bangladeshi national featured in the Al Jazeera documentary shows that it is risky to reveal migrant workers’ identities in news stories. Therefore, journalists need to ethically grant anonymity to those who are most vulnerable. Media organisations could more often discuss potential ways to counter xenophobia against migrants, assess existing media practices to raise awareness about multiculturalism and xenophobia, and develop partnerships to design new training activities. Ethics and professionalism need to be emphasised as the most effective solutions. Some international groups have been calling for media regulation to counter xenophobia exacerbated by news outlets, but the restrictive media environment in Malaysia means this kind of regulation is unlikely. Therefore, it is essential to create a functional community involving journalist unions, media activists, non-governmental organisations and universities to support and conduct activities, workshops and training that promote ethical coverage and representation of migrant workers. Kow Kwan Yee is a lecturer at the School of Communication & Creative Arts, UOW Malaysia KDU University College. She has worked as a journalist covering a range of topics, including crime, the courts and politics, for several media organisations. Her research interests include press freedom, media reform, journalism regulation, communication policies and practices. This article was supported in part by an internal grant from the University of Wollongong Malaysia (UOWM) KDU University College (UOWMKDURG/2020/1/001) to the author. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™. Editors Note: Kow Kwan Yee

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on May 3, 2022

Bland warehouses hide the heart of a city - 360 Published on January 12, 2023 When you travel on the outskirts of many cities, a sea of featureless warehouses can stretch to the horizon. Behind those bland walls beats the heart of the logistical city. From Kolkata to Singapore, Hong Kong to Melbourne, the business of the modern world depends on these structures which house data centres, freight forwarders and other supply chain businesses. How this complex system works and how it is changing the face of many post-colonial cities is a special area of interest for Professor Brett Neilson from Western Sydney University. Neilson’s research and writing aim to provide alternative ways of conceiving globalisation, with particular emphasis upon its social and cultural dimensions. He sat down with 360info for a discussion about logistical cities. 360info: Can you explain what a logistical city is? The logistical city is that part of the urban environment which is given to creating connections both in terms of transport and communication to other parts of the world. So it can be understood as a series of infrastructures that implant themselves in urban environments in order to facilitate different kinds of flows and connections, usually with other cities, but also with rural environments. What would be examples in Asia? The first example that comes to mind is the new town of Calcutta, Rajarhat, where I was involved in conducting a large project with the Calcutta Research Group. This is an area that has been developed over the last 10-15 years and there are a number of IT companies that operate as well as other kinds of urban development, particularly housing and consumer infrastructure such as malls. However, one of the first things that was done by the development company was to lay down fibre optic cable all through the area. More generally, I think we can say that the logistical city is often located on the urban fringes. It’s not the city centre. It’s not given to spectacular architectural or monumental kinds of structures. Its form is quite mundane and often anonymous. The kind of bland warehouse structure created in the 20th century is the sort of ubiquitous kind of theme of the logistical city. Some of the infrastructures it houses are critical to modern life. But because they are critical, they are also made obscure. You can walk past them without even noticing them, or even thinking about what might be going on inside. So it’s a city that lives in front of you, but is unseen. As a researcher interested in the logistical city you have to learn to see it. I know Melbourne a little bit. I know if I hop off the plane at Tullamarine and take the bus into the centre of Melbourne that I’m passing through spaces like this. But without those spaces the centre is not going to function. The shelves won’t be full. The digital messages won’t be bouncing around and so forth. So these aspects are crucial to the life of any city? They are critical. A good way to understand how is to see what happens when they stop working. This was certainly something that was experienced during the pandemic, so logistics and supply chain disruptions became front of mind during that period. That’s when that criticality becomes really obvious and visible to people. Clearly these infrastructures are critical for trade, critical for economic life in a way different to say the financial world, which is also a critical part of the global economy, but tends to occupy an urban centre in places like Hong Kong and Singapore. Certainly finance has its logistical aspects. Particularly because it’s such a global and digitalised process these days. So even the financial world has its shadow in the logistical city in the form of infrastructures such as data centres. In Hong Kong and Singapore these are really important aspects of the logistical city. They are not downtown. In Singapore lots of them are pushed out to the west of the city, in the Jurong district. In Hong Kong, many of them are pushed up into the New Territories, 90 minutes from the financial centre on Hong Kong Island. These kinds of facilities, which are basically hangars full of computer servers, are critical to the way those cities position themselves in the global economy. These cities have also instituted programmes and incentives to deliberately attract this kind of logistical business and infrastructure. Things like tax breaks, available water and electricity, and training people who are able to operate these kinds of structures have been key to their positioning. Interestingly, Singapore has recently introduced a moratorium on new data centre construction for environmental reasons. These facilities chew up vast amounts of energy, which is another factor at stake in the logistical city. A lot of the IT business in Kolkata is beta testing of products that have been developed in Bangalore and Hyderabad, which have a stronger IT industry, and Kolkata sort of hangs off them. Kolkata is interesting because it’s an inevitable choke point in the flows between India and the countries to its  east — southeast Asia, and of course, China. Kolkata is mapped on most representations of China’s Belt and Road Project, even though it’s kind of tucked right up in the corner of the Bay of Bengal. For both land and maritime flows, it is a city that has to be dealt with, but negotiating logistics in Kolkata can be very tricky. If you go to the ports near the city centre you can see big semi-trailers squeezing through very small lanes to try and load or unload containers. In some ways it’s a choke point, and that is its interest given that its logistical connections become challenging. Often they’re the most interesting to observe and study. What’s the future of the logistical city? When you want to smooth out flows and ease connections, standards are really important. If you think about standards in any aspect of economic life, if you think about something like the thickness of a credit card which has to pass through ATM machines and so forth … we take it for granted but there is work, and all sorts of agreements between different kinds of organisations to establish such a standard. This is particularly so in the digital world where we face the so-called decoupling of the US and Chinese economies. Not that that’s an inevitable process — maybe it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy in some respects — but it is pronounced in the digital economy. So one thing we may see in the future is the evolution of different standards associated with different hemispheric economic powers. And a competition to see who can set the global standards in a more multi-polar world. In the worst case scenario that may lead to some incompatibilities. Look at Australia. In the 19th century we had different rail gauges in Australia and we still have different rail gauges. These things can be negotiated. They become kind of choke points, if you like. They become points where human labour becomes much more visible in a world that’s becoming more automated. One thing to watch out for in the logistical city is the way in which geopolitics and the standard-making associated with it will impact upon its processes and infrastructures and in turn, what eventualities from those processes will have for the populations on the ground, particularly the working populations. We can’t know the exact effects of future developments on workers, but past experience gives us some clues. New standards of efficiency usually come with new modes of surveillance. Workers are liable to be subject to real time controls that close the gap between the act of labor and the measure of its productivity. This applies to mental as well as manual work, as the example of workplace surveillance software shows. But with new efficiencies, new chokepoints tend to emerge. In these situations, workers will have options. They can use supply chains snarls as opportunities to organise, to hold employers to ransom. Or they can find workarounds, such as the mouse jigglers used to evade monitoring software. Workers can also ply through chokepoints, putting in extra time and effort that isn’t always recognised. The point is that these decisions are almost always in the hands of workers. Management is left to follow. is professor and deputy director at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University.  His research on logistics has been funded by the Australian Research Council. Project details are available at the following websites: Transit Labour, Logistical Worlds and Data Farms. The research was undertaken with financial assistance from the Australian Research Council, DP200101409. This article is part of a Special Report on ‘Cities after colonialism’, produced in collaboration with the Calcutta Research Group. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on January 12, 2023

Blockchain’s potential extends to poverty busting - 360 Andrei Kwok Published on October 18, 2022 The technology can help circumvent traditional barriers to women’s empowerment. When women and girls in Afghanistan were barred from attending schools, many resorted to online courses to continue their education. Blockchain, with its public accessibility and pseudonymity, could help them obtain globally recognised tamper-proof and portable credentials. It has the potential to transform education by resolving infrastructural and institutional-related costs typically faced by less developed and geographically remote communities. But blockchain’s ability to empower women striving to escape poverty goes beyond education. It can improve social inclusion by granting equal opportunities to every individual regardless of background and status. Blockchain technology provides women with financial inclusion and entrepreneurial opportunities to gain independence and self-sufficiency. It offers small business owners affordable and efficient cross-border payments, and can help women gain access to previously unavailable finance. In countries that still prohibit women from having property rights, women can turn to blockchain or cryptocurrencies to circumvent restrictive cultural norms and gain financial access outside of the traditional banking system. Female micro-entrepreneurs without assets for collateral can turn to crypto-funding to finance their business. For example, the Grameen Foundation offered blockchain-enabled micro-financing to support women entrepreneurs in the Philippines during COVID-19. Blockchain technology has also been used to aid women refugees in humanitarian crises. Immigration systems can provide unidentifiable and displaced people with verifiable personal identification on a blockchain-based database. Financial assistance can be deposited in the form of digital currency or cryptocurrency at minimal transaction cost into their accounts to enable them access to basic amenities. Since the emergence of Bitcoin in 2009, blockchain technology and distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) have been widely adopted in various sectors. A recent report by accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers revealed that blockchain technology has the potential to increase global GDP by US$1.76 trillion in the next ten years. As a revolutionary technology, blockchain has significant potential for empowering women in vulnerable and marginalised communities. It can improve their livelihood which then reduces household, community and national poverty. The two most critical aspects that can help women gain equality are better access to education and income-generating opportunities. Blockchain technology can be the tipping point for social inclusion and poverty alleviation. Andrei Kwok is Senior Lecturer, Department of Management, School of Business, Monash University Malaysia. He declares no conflict of interest. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on October 18, 2022

Borderless haze threatens Southeast Asia - 360 Helena Varkkey Published on August 15, 2022 Governments, civil society and the international community need to work fast to combat the threat of smoke haze in Southeast Asia. Fire haze returned to southeast Asia in 2023 after several years of respite due to COVID-19 slowdowns. But as an El Nino settles in, the clock is ticking as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) works to develop a new action plan after an independent review found that the vision of the original roadmap, of a “Haze-Free ASEAN by 2020”, has not been fully achieved. Haze severely disrupts regional economies by reducing productivity and tourism while increasing emergency medical spending. The 2015 haze was estimated to have cost USD$16 billion in Indonesia alone, while a less severe episode in 2019 cost an estimated USD$5 billion. The biomass particles making up the haze are extremely dangerous to human health. As small as 2.5 microns, the particles can easily enter the lungs and bloodstream. This can cause short- and long-term respiratory, dermatological and ophthalmological problems, especially in young children and adults. The 2015 haze episode caused 40,000 to 100,000 additional deaths in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, according to studies. And recent research suggests people regularly exposed to significant levels of air pollution can be more susceptible to diseases such as COVID-19. With Southeast Asians having already spent decades intermittently breathing in smoke haze, the return of this form of air pollution is of great concern. Most haze-producing fires occur in disturbed peat swamps in Kalimantan (the Indonesian part of Borneo), on the Indonesian island of Sumatra and to a lesser extent in Malaysia. Peat swamps are naturally waterlogged, but when they are drained for agriculture the carbon-rich soil dries out quickly and becomes extremely fire-prone. Fires occur intentionally (to prepare the land for planting) and accidentally (from lightning or cigarette butts). Peat fires can burn for long periods underground, and they release especially potent smoke that can travel across vast distances and national boundaries. They are also close to impossible to suppress without heavy rainfall. In especially bad episodes, haze can reach almost all Southeast Asian nations. The haze is transboundary not only in its effects but also in its causes. Alongside local commercial palm-oil and pulpwood plantations operating on peat, foreign plantations have been linked to fires. Malaysian interests own 18 percent to 30 percent of Indonesian palm-oil plantations, and Singaporean firms also feature prominently. Even though large-scale intentional burning to clear land has decreased over the years thanks to increased scrutiny, commercial drainage and water-management operations often disrupt peat hydrology in and around plantations. This can increase the risk of large-scale fires in surrounding communities. Laws and regulations prohibit large-scale plantations in sensitive, fire-prone peatlands, but they are rarely enforced. Patron–client networks are commonplace in the business culture of Indonesia and other Southeast Asian nations. In these symbiotic relationships the person with the higher socioeconomic position (patron) exercises their influence and resources to provide for the person of lower status (client) in exchange for support, assistance and services. In the case of plantations, government ‘patrons’ often shield their business ‘clients’ from scrutiny and punishment. This results in a culture of impunity: only a handful of companies have been prosecuted for causing fires. National pride comes into play too, and patronage can function even across borders: the home governments of foreign plantations have defended their companies against accusations of causing haze. Complaints and requests from affected countries to Indonesia to control its fires often dissolve into finger-pointing as each country blames the other’s plantations for causing the fires. Haze has also sparked diplomatic rows. Indonesia has infamously labelled complaining neighbours as being ungrateful for the fresh air that Indonesia provides them outside the haze season, and Indonesia has openly chided Singapore for putting into place an extraterritorial law that would hold liable any entity that causes haze in Singapore. The complex transboundary nature of the problem means haze cannot be addressed by any individual country. Even the solutions offered by ASEAN have been underwhelming. It is notable that one of the only legally binding agreements under ASEAN is the 2002 Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution, but its operationalisation has been hampered by delayed ratification by Indonesia, lack of clarity over the functions of the ASEAN Specialised Meteorological Centre and uncoordinated assistance efforts. Still, hope for clean air in Southeast Asia remains. The Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil, the world’s most recognisable multi-stakeholder certification scheme for palm-oil production, includes principles and criteria related to peatlands and fires. And work continues on the new Haze-Free Roadmap. Civil-society movements such as the Clean Air Network in Thailand, PM Haze in Singapore and CERAH in Malaysia have worked to keep haze on the public (and, therefore, government) agenda even outside the haze season. As El Nino continues to bring drier weather to the region into the next year, action at local, national and international levels could stop the progress of recent years from going up in smoke. Dr Helena Varkkey is an Associate Professor of Environmental Politics in the Department of International and Strategic Studies at Universiti Malaya in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Her monograph The Haze Problem in Southeast Asia: Palm Oil and Patronage was published by Routledge in 2016. Her research interests are transboundary haze cooperation, global palm oil politics, and climate governance. Dr. Varkkey declares no conflict of interest and does not receive special funds in any form. This article has been updated and republished as part of a special report on Asia’s dirty air problem on January 8, 2024. It was first published on August 8, 2022. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™. Editors Note: In the story “Asia’s dirty air” sent at: 10/01/2024 08:44. This is a corrected repeat.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on August 15, 2022

Breaking the billion-dollar addiction to consultants in government - 360 Denis Saint-Martin, Chris Hurl Published on August 14, 2023 Private consultancy companies have governments addicted to their services and the bill continues to balloon year on year as the ties that bind get tighter. The revelation that the Canadian government spent CA$15 billion (USD$11.2 billion) on consultant contracts in the 2021-2022 fiscal year has dogged Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s administration all through 2023. It cast new light on the 2019 appointment of former McKinsey & Company Global Managing Director Dominic Barton as Canada’s Ambassador to China (McKinsey received around CA$100 million (USD$74.9 million) worth of contracts in the 2021-2022 fiscal year). The appointment, queried at the time, was scrutinised in a 2023 investigation into the large sums flowing from government coffers into private consultancy firms. During Barton’s tenure at the helm of McKinsey, the company pitched a pharmaceutical company on aggressively marketing Oxycontin and other highly addictive opioids to Canadians. In a leaked memo published in The Globe and Mail, McKinsey told Purdue Pharma it could help determine whether there were opportunities to “better target and reach high-potential prescribers” and help motivate the company’s sales representatives to “better align the sales force goals to company objectives.” The following year, Barton was a pro-bono economic adviser to the newly-elected Trudeau. Under Trudeau, costs for consultancy services have “ballooned“, with some estimates reporting a USD$5.25 billion increase in spending between 2015 and 2022. In June 2023, a government review of federal contracts with McKinsey found “no evidence of political interference”, but acknowledged that there were “always opportunities to further improve and strengthen” the government’s contract procurement process. Companies like McKinsey are for the most part privately owned by the partners who run them. They are accountable only to themselves. The products they sell are theories, concepts and methods. The services they provide are intangible, whose effects are unknown and difficult to measure. This makes it difficult for governments and large corporations to assess whether they are getting their money’s worth when using consultants. Governments calling on consultants for advice on strategy and organisation is not a new phenomenon in Canada. As far back as 1918, the Unionist coalition in power in Ottawa was criticised for its use of “pseudo experts” from the Chicago firm Arthur Young (which later became Ernst & Young) in its reform of the public service. Today, consultancy firms have become the keeper of secrets for the world’s biggest companies and most powerful governments. As advisors and confidants, firms have become the private repositories of top decision-making knowledge across a wide range of areas and organisations in business, society and the public sector. It has served them well. Sources vary, as firms are not required to report on their revenues, but the global management consulting market in 2022 was estimated at nearly USD$700 billion. Pre-COVID, the policy influence of firms like McKinsey, KPMG, Deloitte and Accenture tended to be exercised behind closed doors, and only when the issues were seen as technical concerns (i.e. not politically salient). The pandemic changed everything. “Privatised policy-making” suddenly became more visible to the public. In many countries, the high costs of using consultants became politically noisy with governments and consulting firms feeling the backlash. McKinsey was not only subject to an enquiry in Canada, but was embroiled in a 2022 investigation in France into suspected tax fraud. Ernst & Young received a two-year ban on some audits in Germany in April 2023 over a scandal involving insolvent payment processor Wirecard. Scandals have also followed Deloitte in South Africa (shortly following Bain & Company) and PricewaterhouseCooper in Australia. In the UK, a top minister argued Whitehall had been “infantilised” by consultants. In 2021, a plan to limit the government’s reliance on external consultants through an in-house “Crown Consultancy” was announced, then dropped in 2023 before it ever materialised. In 2022, the UK government reportedly awarded £2.6 billion (USD$3.3 billion) worth of consulting contracts (a 75 percent increase since 2019). French president Emmanuel Macron’s government was found by a Senate committee investigation to have signed contracts worth at least USD$2.4 billion with consultancies since 2018. It also found many examples of “revolving doors” between McKinsey consultants and the president’s inner circle. There remains debate over exactly how much influence consultants hold over governments, and it varies from country-to-country, but consultants are involved in all stages of policy-making. Some believe consultants are brought in to provide specialist technical skills or to rubber stamp decisions already made by political elites. Others argue that consultants have effectively colonised the public sector, raising concerns about policy-making at large being privatised — potentially, granting private interests more dominion over government than the public. But there’s little credible evidence to suggest consultants have become shadow governments, pulling the strings. Instead, attention has shifted to the “ties that bind” consultancy firms to governments and companies. Consultancy services are in a state of change. The management consulting industry is expected to bring in USD$860.3 billion in revenue in 2023. Most consulting revenue comes from manufacturing and consumer products, financial services, and media, tech and telecommunications, but a growing share is also coming from government (10.5 percent in 2022) and government-adjacent services, such as energy and utilities (10 percent in 2022) and health services (10 percent in 2022). The market for consultants runs wide: from huge transnational professional service firms (Deloitte, KPMG, PwC, Ernst & Young), and strategy consultancies (McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, Bain) to small niche enterprises run by sole operators. The remarkable growth of management consultancy in the public sector has generated extensive debate in academia about why demand has increased. Ask a different discipline and you’ll hear a different theory. Functionalist and economic theories may say policy-makers often use management consultants because of their efficiency in addressing the complex tasks and technological problems faced by modern governments. Consultants provide a wide variety of highly specialised technical skills that would be more expensive to produce inside the civil service. Sociologists may view consultants not as efficiency experts, but knowledge brokers between business and government. They are agents of legitimation who help transfer practices and principles into organisations that make them seem more rational and efficient. Consultants define the norms and disseminate models of appropriate action in the management of large organisations. In these explanations, growing demand for their services in government comes from pressures to make public organisations more business-like. Or, as political theorists may say, it’s about power relations. In one version of political theory, public sector demand for consultants grew sharply with the election of neoliberal leaders who sought to bypass the blockages and inertia of public administration and break the monopoly of the civil service over policy. In another, it started with the expanding consulting profession and industry and its ability to shape clients’ demand for its services. In this perspective, consultants are the sources of “demand inflation”. They themselves influence the decision to hire outside experts by creating uncertainty while also offering a readily available solution. They make clients addicted to, or over-reliant on, their expertise. This, in part, speaks to the changing source of power of these firms. Beyond relying on consultants themselves, consulting firms are also increasingly providing the platforms that governments rely on in order to operate, giving them infrastructural power. As the COVID-19 pandemic revealed, governments all over the world depend on the global database and analytics provided by the world’s biggest firms to coordinate their responses to crises. The growing infrastructural power of these firms is reflected historically in their shifting organisational form. British public services expert Antonio E. Weiss has observed at least five different ‘waves’ of consulting. The first began in the late 19th century with the ascendancy of cost accountants and efficiency engineers, such as F.W. Taylor, who set out to rationalise the labour process under the guise of scientific management. It was followed in the 1950s and 1960s by the rise of accounting firms, promising organisational restructuring for large companies, and strategy firms, who offered to show the public and private sectors how they measured up to one another. By the 1970s, these services had been eclipsed with the rise of IT consultants, who set out to computerise administrative services. Finally, from the 1990s onwards, outsourcing firms entered the fray, promising to go beyond consulting on infrastructural IT rollouts and actively participate in the day-to-day administration of public services, blurring the line between advising on public services and directly delivering them. As management experts Matthias Kipping and Ian Kirkpatrick noted in 2013, these different kinds of consultancies did not replace one another — they’ve been integrated into overlapping forms of service delivery, with many firms offering a multitude of services. While the field is quite diverse, there are indications that the industry has become increasingly concentrated over the past four decades. From the 1980s onwards, “Transnational Professional Service Firms” have grown their market share, often cross-subsidising consulting services and gaining entry through other services, such as accounting. Firms have been able to heavily invest in new technologies, taking advantage of their scale and scope in order to generate network effects. The industry is expected to continue consolidating, “leading to the creation of larger, globally linked companies” as well as complex partnerships bringing multiple consultancies together under single contracts. Consultants can be convenient lightening rods and scapegoats. But the more governments delegate to consultants, the more consultants acquire intimate knowledge of a government’s internal operations. This insider knowledge is an asset for private consulting firms, and can result in information advantages, causing various dependencies and rent-seeking behaviour by consultants. It makes the optics of, for instance, Trudeau’s appointment of Barton as the Canadian Ambassador to China seem problematic, even though no wrongdoing has come to light. Critics of this new normal use the term “consultocracy” to describe the “increased power of consultants over politics, public governance, and public sector practices”. Their work suggests that short-term, outsourced expert knowledge production is increasingly replacing the long-term work of civil servants and diminishing public agencies’ policy capacity. The time has come to better regulate the “consultocracy”, exercising better control over the revolving doors between government and consultancy firms. Consulting firms should be subject to stricter disclosure requirements and codes of conduct. And, while the firms are reined in, the analytical and research capacities of the civil service should be boosted — it serves the public interest to have a civil service that can attract the best talent and compete with the big consulting firms. Denis Saint-Martin is Full Professor in the Department of Political Science at Université de Montréal. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on August 14, 2023

Breaking the cycle after another climate fund setback - 360 Isabella Massa, Samory Toure Published on November 8, 2023 The PIF Leaders’ Meeting is an important chance to jolt the world into action on a climate Loss and Damage Fund after decades of fighting for justice. For decades, small island developing states have struggled to achieve some form of global climate justice. Of the USD$100 billion in climate finance pledged to developing economies in 2019, small island developing states had access to only USD$1.5 billion. The Loss and Damage Fund established at COP27 is an important step in the right direction. But a few weeks ago, at the fourth meeting of the Transitional Committee, countries failed to reach an agreement on key details of the fund — the hosting, the scale and sources of financing and the resource allocation. The upcoming Pacific Islands Forum Leaders’ Meeting and COP28 offer the opportunity to raise more awareness about the environmental challenges facing small island developing states. It gives them a chance to find common ground with other countries and to finally establish a Loss and Damage Fund that helps restore climate justice. Small island developing states have spent 18 times more in debt repayments than they received in climate finance. Notwithstanding their high degree of environmental vulnerability, they receive seven times less climate finance than the least developed economies, 11 times less than lower-middle-income countries and five times less than upper-middle-income countries. Small island developing states are particularly at risk of climate change and extreme weather events. According to a report developed by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), small island developing states are the most environmentally vulnerable countries in the world. Small island developing states located in the Pacific are the most vulnerable to environmental shocks, including sea level rise, droughts, biodiversity loss and displacement of people living along the coasts. These environmental shocks cause significant damage to sectors critical to their economies, such as tourism, fisheries and agriculture. As a result, small islands face greater gaps to SDG achievement than the rest of the world, according to the SDSN report. Pacific small island developing states are the farthest behind and have the greatest number of targets (44 percent) moving in the wrong direction. Although small island developing states have been able to cope with environmental threats over centuries, the challenges brought by continuous changes in the climate system are unprecedented. There is an undeniable rise in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events and slow-onset processes, like sea level rise, ocean acidification and salinisation, land degradation, desertification or glacial retreat. These disproportionately hurt the most vulnerable economies. In the last two decades, the frequency of disasters experienced by small island developing states has doubled. Scientists and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change agree that a large share of climate changes is directly due to human activities and, in particular, to human-made increasing greenhouse gas emissions and changes in land use. Yet small island developing states have contributed the least to human-induced climate change. Data shows that, over the period 1850-2019, small island developing states were responsible for just 0.02 percent of all carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels. The US alone accounted for more than 34 percent of total emissions, the European Union for almost 24 percent and China for nearly 19 percent. However, because of climate-related disasters for which other nations are responsible, small islands are facing disproportionate losses and damages at the economic (loss of infrastructure, destruction of human activities and services) and non-economic (loss of people, ecosystems, biodiversity and cultural heritage) levels, which add to adaptation and mitigation costs. The loss and damage costs for small island developing states are massive and cannot be covered by their often limited domestic resources. A recent study estimates that, in small island developing states over the period 1970-2018, natural disasters caused on average an annual damage of 2.1 percent of GDP. There is still no consensus on who should host the Loss and Damage Fund. While developed economies push for having the World Bank as a host institution, developing economies ask for the creation of a new independent entity, as they believe the World Bank could tip the balance of power towards richer nations. There is also still no clear framework for defining the scale and sources of financing of the Loss and Damage Fund, including who will contribute and how much and the eligibility criteria. The burden of financing for human-induced climate costs should be shared fairly and globally among responsible countries. This is the only way to align with the principle of Common but Differentiated Responsibilities and Respective Capabilities on which all countries agreed back in 1992. A forthcoming paper by the SDSN argues that each country should be responsible for funding its own mitigation measures. But, the paper argues, the costs of adaptation and loss and damage to disasters caused by human activity should be shared among polluting countries only, according to their historical and current responsibility in greenhouse gas emissions. On the other hand, the share of adaptation and loss and damage costs which is caused by natural variability should be shared among all countries, including those not responsible for but affected by climate change. This could provide the right incentive to affected countries to continue investing in their efforts to adapt to climate change. Policymakers would benefit from a widely accepted framework to help quantify costs for adaptation and loss and damage (including non-economic costs). This could be done through a cost indicator framework which fairly splits the burden of the share of these costs caused by human-caused climate change among responsible countries. The final objective should be to create a special fund with the payments realised by countries in proportion to their share of current and historical greenhouse gas emissions, relative to their population size. This fund could act as global insurance, paying affected countries equal to their adaptation and loss and damage costs resulting from global human-induced climate change. The right functioning of this dedicated fund can prevent countries from contracting new loans to finance climate-related costs, increasing their burden of debt and jeopardising their capacity to recover and build resilience to climate change. Isabella Massa is Senior Economist at the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), where she leads the work on SDG financing and vulnerability. Previously, she worked at the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) and as an independent consultant for several international organisations. Samory Toure is a Program Associate at the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN). As a junior economist, he has previous professional experience at the UN ESCAP and the OECD Development Centre. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on November 8, 2023

Breaking up the Big Four is the only solution - 360 Allan Fels, James Guthrie Published on August 11, 2023 The Big Four’s behaviour is a global issue of concern. They cannot be relied upon to regulate themselves, so the only way to solve it is to break them apart. The Australian government has so far failed to deliver on legislation that would bring the most significant breakthrough to date into forcing stronger tax and transparency regulations on multinational corporations. Reports suggest that these global giants, along with their professional enablers lobbied against the proposed new laws. This is at a time when the Pricewaterhouse Coopers Australia scandal has dominated headlines and repeated criticism of partnerships by the government and various senate inquiries. The head of big four consulting firm Ernst & Young has criticised rival PwC over the firm’s tax leaks scandal, saying the alarming and disappointing conduct has rightly triggered intense scrutiny of the whole sector. The PwC scandal, along with multiple international inquiries, reveals that the only solution to resolve conflicts of interest between auditors, accountants and consultants is to break up the Big Four and other businesses performing audits. The role of other major non-audit-based consultants, such as McKinsey, the Boston Consulting Group, Bain and Accenture, also requires a total overhaul of how they work for and with the government is needed. The major global audit market has essentially halved since the mid-1980s, when there were eight large international audit firms, through consolidation. In the wake of the Enron scandal, its auditor, the firm Arthur Andersen, was charged with shredding documents relevant to the investigations into the energy company. The revelation decimated the company’s books and it was wound up in 2002. Since then the market has reduced to four global majors. Deloitte, PwC, Ernst & Young (EY) and KPMG. Between them, these firms have almost complete ownership of the market for audits of major companies worldwide. They audit companies that account for about 95 per cent of the Australian share market, 97 per cent of the London market’s FTSE index, and over 99 per cent of the companies in the US market’s S&P 500 share index. In the recent Senate inquiry, Allan provided evidence that audit plays a critical role in the economy and should not be unnecessarily compromised. The fact that the Big Four provide consultancy, advisory and other services threaten to compromise the performance of audits] and it should be prohibited by legislation. Other ways of dealing with the conflict appear not to work. The PWC scandal demonstrates that the Big Four cannot be relied upon to regulate themselves. Nor can legislation. It has loopholes and is challenging to apply and enforce even when regulators try (which does not seem to happen now). There is an actual and perceived conflict of interest when a firm conducting audits also seeks to do consulting work, whether for it or others. In the previous inquiry into the audit firms in 2019, James stated that conflicts of interest seem to be inherent in providing independent auditing services and being paid for these services year in and year out by the firm being audited. It is best not to overlay these conflicts with another set of potential conflicts, which heighten the possibilities that auditors will not provide timely independent audits. His submission indicated significant complications, pitfalls, costs and inconveniences in all compromise measures that are sometimes proposed as an alternative, such as internal separation of the functions within one firm. The conflicts can never be entirely resolved and where they go closer to being eliminated (or looking as if they are nearly eliminated), the rules and arrangements are costly to operate, with considerable external oversight required to ensure compliance. A clean, clear, sensible solution is preferable. The early July spinoff of PwC’s government services to private equity buyers for $1 leaves doubts about the effectiveness of the consultancy’s purge and how the industry could be reshaped. During the 2023 Finance and Public Administration References Committee inquiry into the management and assurance of integrity by consulting services, James highlighted  that the work of consulting organisations was often rife with conflicts of interest. Examples include advising leading fossil fuel polluters as the government mandated to reduce national emissions, auditing a sizeable prime contractor while bidding for similar contracts and writing federal tax legislation while advising clients how to minimise tax obligations. Senators Deborah O’Neill and David Pocock have been the critical inquisitors during the Senate investigations of PwC, which resulted in a report late last month titled “PwC: A calculated breach of trust”. The introduction of the report claims that ” the scale of significance and substantial public interest in the matter of PricewaterhouseCoopers’ (PwC) conduct about Australia’s anti-avoidance tax laws, dating back to 2013. Subsequent reports will deal with the broader range of matters arising from the inquiry’s activities which extend to the more significant consulting industry”. The dominant role in accounting and auditing practices of transnational corporations played by the Big Four is a global issue of concern, not just a national problem. Currently, the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Corporations and Financial Services is inquiring into ASIC’s capacity and capability to respond to reports of alleged misconduct. A growing body of international research has documented how transnationals and their legal and accounting advisors engineer the law and regulatory structures to their advantage. Elected officials routinely support legislation that advantages the interests of business and industry over that of the public. Business and industrial elites gain and maintain their influence over political and bureaucratic elites through lobbying, political donations and revolving door appointments between government and industry. As a matter of priority, the various parliamentary enquires now underway should investigate conflicts of interest and dubious ethical practices by the Big Four and those legal firms that provide aggressive taxation advice. These entities enable companies to refashion themselves as transnational and avoid paying taxes on revenue earned in national jurisdictions. Such enquiries should review the social licence and the social contract of the individuals and entities that provide such aggressive taxation advice. It would then act to withdraw such licences and contracts from those individuals and entities engaged in unethical and tax avoidance practices. On 22 June 2023, the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Corporations and Financial Services resolved to commence an inquiry into recent allegations of and responses to misconduct in the Australian operations of the significant accounting, audit, and consultancy firms (including but not exclusive to the ‘Big Four’), Ethics and Professional Accountability: Structural Challenges in the Audit, Assurance and Consultancy Industry. Our principal recommendation is that the Big Four accounting partnerships in Australia use a structural split in the audit and consulting parts of the firm. Instead of an operational split, a “structural split” is needed. Under this, audit firms would do audit only, and neither the firms nor their associates would be permitted to sell any consultancy to audit clients. If the Australian Parliament legislates for a structural split of the Big Four it would go some way to solve the problems handing the ability to rebuild its institutions back to the Australian public sector. Allan Herbert Miller Fels AO is an Australian economist, lawyer and public servant. He was most widely known in his role as chairman of the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) from its inception in 1995 until 30 June 2003. Upon his retirement from the ACCC, he became the foundation dean of the Australia and New Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG) until January 2013. He was made an Officer of the Order of Australia in June 2001. Fels was awarded a Doctor of Laws (honoris causa) by the University of Melbourne in February 2022 and a Doctor of Laws (honoris causa) by Monash University in December 2021. James Guthrie AM is an Emeritus Professor in the Accounting and Corporate Governance Department at Macquarie University. He has held positions at various Australian and Italian universities in a career in accounting education that spans more than 40 years. He is the joint editor of the highly regarded interdisciplinary accounting journal, Accounting, Auditing and Accountability. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on August 11, 2023

Breakthroughs and burdens in a century of diabetes treatment - 360 Namson Lau Published on January 17, 2024 Since the discovery of insulin, diabetes treatment has made huge advances, but the condition has grown into a global killer. Leonard Thompson was 14 when he made history. The Canadian teenager was on his deathbed, drifting in and out of a coma in a Toronto hospital in 1922, when he became the first person to receive an insulin injection to treat diabetes. It worked. Leonard lived for another 13 years. Insulin became the mass-produced, go-to treatment for millions suffering a disease that had been identified by the ancient Greeks but until then had no effective treatment. A group of researchers at the University of Toronto — Frederick Banting, Charles Best, James Collip and JJR Macleod — perfected the novel technique that extracted and then purified animal-sourced insulin, the pancreatic hormone that they proved regulated blood glucose levels. Banting and Macleod won the Nobel Prize for their discovery. While the centenary celebrations of insulin’s discovery were muted by the COVID-19 pandemic, the moment allows for reflection on the current state of diabetes. The term ‘diabetes’ was first used around 250BC and applied to a constellation of symptoms, including sweet urine and unexplained weight loss, that caused lethargy, coma and death. The core pathophysiology of diabetes mellitus is elevated blood glucose levels, typically due to either absolute insulin deficiency (seen as type 1 diabetes mellitus) or overweight and obesity causing resistance to the actions of the body’s intrinsic insulin (seen as type 2 diabetes mellitus). At the time of insulin’s discovery, diabetes mellitus was mostly seen in the industrialised North. Cases were predominantly type 1 diabetes, which meant it was amenable to treatment by insulin therapy. Over the past century, however, with the rising global obesity epidemic, the burden of diabetes has come to be dominated by type 2, and a truly international problem. In the past two decades, it has become one the world’s leading causes of morbidity and early mortality. Since insulin’s discovery, greater understanding about diabetes’ pathophysiology has helped diabetes therapies move on from only insulin to oral agents that stimulate insulin release or reduced insulin resistance, so that diabetic comas, even if not fully preventable, have become survivable. But as the incidence of type 2 diabetes skyrocketed, brought on by a global epidemic of overweight and obesity, it became increasingly evident that these therapies focusing on reduced blood glucose levels did not directly reduce cardiac and renal complications linked to diabetes. As a result, they had a blunted impact. Since the 2000s, the number and mechanisms of diabetes therapeutics has evolved from just targeting blood glucose levels to more novel agents, such as those that look at diabetes’ sine qua non of sweet urine, or gut-focused agents that target appetite and satiety. For the former, the renally acting glucose-sodium transport agents, clinicians were for the first time presented with convincing evidence of a diabetes-related therapy that actually reduced cardiac and renal hospitalisations and deaths. The the latter gut-focused incretin agents, working on neuroendocrine hormones found in the gut and brain, have proved so powerful in their impact on weight loss that for the first time there are medications that can potentially reverse type 2 diabetes. However, these newer agents are costly and difficult to manufacture and distribute, which affects their availability and accessibility, especially for lower-income people and countries. On top of that, wealthy countries now hoard incretin agents for predominantly aesthetic or cosmetic reasons, rather than their capability as powerful treatments for diabetes. More positively, potentially effective and low-cost public health strategies – mandated food labelling; promotion of healthy diet, activities and lifestyle; and childhood and early education obesity prevention strategies – have become more widely adopted. In urban environments, prioritising public transport, pedestrians and cyclists over private vehicles and implementing public taxation policies for energy-dense beverages and foods have all had success in various jurisdictions in moderating the rise of overweight and obesity and type 2 diabetes, including in Mexico, South Africa, the US and the UK. Indeed what is striking is the relative success of the Global South in implementing many of these interventions, compared with Australia, which only launched its national comprehensive strategy in 2022. Since Leonard Thompson and the team of Toronto researchers made history in 1922, the burden of diabetes mellitus has increased markedly and spread to where it is among the leading global health concerns. Yet alongside this challenge has been a growing public awareness of the drivers of this increased prevalence, the development of medical therapies that for the first time reduce the mortality of diabetes’ associated complications and can potentially put type 2 diabetes into remission, and an increasingly sophisticated public health response that looks at a multi-sector and multi-system approach to reduce the underlying cause of type 2 diabetes. Still, significant obstacles remain in the cost and accessibility of the most advanced therapies and in the willingness of governments to implement an effective public health response. Dr Namson Lau is a Conjoint Senior Lecturer with UNSW Sydney, Senior Fellow with the Liverpool Diabetes Collaboration, Ingham Institute of Applied Medical Research and senior clinician affiliated with Liverpool and Royal Prince Alfred Hospitals, New South Wales, Australia. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™. Editors Note: In the story “Living with diabetes” sent at: 15/01/2024 06:00. This is a corrected repeat.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on January 17, 2024

Breast cancer can bring financial ruin in India - 360 Sanjay Mohanty, Tabassum Wadasadawala, Suraj Maiti, Soumendu Sen Published on February 5, 2024 Lowering the screening age, increasing health awareness and improving access to screening services can improve breast cancer outcomes for poor women. Meenati* presented at the clinic with a painful lump in her left breast, which she had first noticed three months before. The 32-year-old West Bengal resident had never undergone breast cancer screening in her life. A local physician advised her to have a mammogram — a special X-ray of the breast and fundamental breast-imaging tool. The report that came back said the lump was suspicious for malignancy. Meenati was advised to consult an oncologist at a cancer treatment centre in Kolkata. She travelled with her husband for four hours to reach the state capital for evaluation and confirmation of diagnosis. A series of tests confirmed she had advanced stage (Stage IV) breast cancer, which had already spread to other organs. Doctors referred her to a tertiary cancer centre at Mumbai, which serves financially disadvantaged patients through public and philanthropic funding. Breast cancer is the most common form of cancer in Indian women. It largely affects women of reproductive age. The median age of diagnosis in India is 47, meaning that half the women diagnosed with breast cancer are under 47 years old. The mortality rate associated with breast cancer is high in India compared with any developed country, primarily due to lack of routine screening programs and health awareness. Social stigma associated with cancer diagnosis further leads to diagnosis in the advanced stage, which has lower cure rates. A nationwide survey found that breast cancer screening among women aged 30-49 years in India is abysmally low, especially among the poor, less educated and rural population. Diagnosis at an advanced stage often leads to protracted treatment that can result in therapy-related side-effects, high out-of-pocket payment and lower chance of survival. Prevention and effective treatment of breast cancer requires early diagnosis, which will only be feasible by lowering the breast cancer screening age, increasing health awareness and improving access to screening services, especially in remote areas, leading to reduction of breast cancer-related mortality. Breast cancer screening is grossly neglected at household, state and national level. At the household level, lack of awareness, stigma and economic constraints prevent many women from accessing breast cancer screening. Health is a state subject, but cancer screening has not been prioritised yet. The lack of availability of cancer screening in public health facilities and long distances to city centres prevent many women from accessing cancer screening and diagnosis. The National Programme for Prevention and Control of Cancer, Diabetes, Cardiovascular Diseases and Stroke recommended breast cancer screening for women aged 30 years and above in the country, along with screening for other common cancers. Opportunistic screening programmes and occasionally organising health camps for mass screenings at different levels of health facilities have not been enough to make a difference. Meenati’s household economic condition is very poor, and as a housewife, she had to take care of her two children and in-laws, managing all the household chores by herself. Her husband works as an agricultural labourer and had no source of stable income. They had one acre of land and no other wealth. They were covered under a state government-sponsored health insurance scheme. They used their little savings to get a diagnosis in Kolkata and were referred to one of the largest and oldest tertiary cancer care centres in the country for treatment. Meenati and her husband borrowed INR200,000 (USD$2,736) at a high rate of interest by mortgaging their land. He accompanied her for treatment in Mumbai. They travelled by train and stayed in a dharamshala, a rest house for pilgrims, close to the hospital. After they registered for treatment, she was enrolled as a general patient at the cancer care centre and received treatment at a subsidised rate. In the cohort of 500 breast cancer patients registered at this centre and studied by the authors, over 55 percent of the patients had travelled from other states in India. On average, patients travelled more than 1,076 kilometres to seek treatment. They faced additional hardship during the COVID-19 lockdown, which increased the cost of travel, accommodation and food consumption. The economic burden on households treating breast cancer is enormous. The average cost of breast cancer treatment at the centre was INR258,095 (USD$3,531); half was for non-medical costs such as accommodation, food and travel. The out-of-pocket payment was INR178,076 (USD$2,436) (62 percent of her treatment expenditure at the cancer care centre). For private patients, the average cost of treatment was almost double that for subsidised patients (INR552,368, or USD$7,556). Three out of four cancer patients had some form of reimbursement, but one-fourth had none. The reimbursement for cancer treatment accounted for only 27.8 percent of the total cost. Both public and private insurance solely cover hospital expenses, neglecting daycare treatment costs, which forms a significant component of cancer care. Non-medical expenses, which account for almost half the total treatment cost, remain excluded from insurance coverage. The financial catastrophe of breast cancer treatment is high. More than 85 percent of cancer patients have faced financial catastrophe in treating the disease, and 55 percent households were impoverished following treatment. People resort to multiple sources of financing to be able to pay for treatment. During Meenati’s entire treatment period, her husband did not work, and her children were left with their grandparents, leading to loss of education and income. Meenati’s high out-of-pocket payment was primarily due to lower reimbursement and distance to place of treatment. She got help from charitable trusts and other financial sources, but not enough to protect her from the financial toxicity of breast cancer treatment. Just like her, many households have to sell their assets and deplete savings, which leads to financial distress and high levels of loans and debt to cover treatment costs. The problems do not end here. After the long treatment and increased cost due to her advanced stage of breast cancer, Meenati’s challenges continued during the follow-up phase. She did not come for needed follow-up treatment in Mumbai, owing to distance and financial constraints. The family had exhausted all its savings for affording systemic therapy and getting to Mumbai posed an additional burden. Many patients discontinue treatment during the active phase of treatment due to distance, monetary problems and lack of medical insurance or reimbursement. Some of the registered patients died during the treatment period. Despite the challenges of breast cancer treatment, Meenati found solace in the improved quality of life she experienced. Her life choices improved, but she continues to bear a financial burden. Numerous others like Meenati are unable to afford treatment in the nation’s most expensive cities, where cancer centres are generally located. Could all of this have been prevented? If Meenati had received health education and screening services in her village, she would probably have sought medical help without delay to diagnose cancer at an early stage. This highlights the importance of health awareness and access to proper screening facilities for non-communicable diseases, including common cancers. Given the persistent lack of awareness, there is a need to increase public education about breast cancer screening through mass media. The financial burden Meenati faced could have been mitigated if the social health insurance net had been wider, providing higher levels of reimbursement, including for daycare treatment cost. Nothing of the sort happened for Meenati and her family, who are still living in financial distress, coping with the catastrophic burden of healthcare expenses. *Name changed for privacy reasons. This research was funded by the Women’s Cancer Initiative, the Nag Foundation, the International Institute for Population Sciences, and the Tata Memorial Centre. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript. Professor Sanjay K. Mohanty is Head, Department of Population and Development, International Institute for Population Sciences, Mumbai, India. Tabassum Wadasadawala is Professor, Department of Radiation Oncology, Advanced Centre for Treatment, Research and Education in Cancer (ACTREC), Tata Memorial Centre, Homi Bhabha National Institute, Kharghar, Navi Mumbai, India. Suraj Maiti is Independent Consultant at International Institute for Population Sciences, Mumbai, India. Soumendu Sen is Senior Research Fellow at International Institute for Population Sciences, Mumbai, India. Disclosure Statement: This research was funded by the Women’s Cancer Initiative, the Nag Foundation, the International Institute for Population Sciences, and the Tata Memorial Centre . The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on February 5, 2024

Brexit fractured the UK’s democracy and cynicism now reigns - 360 Gerry Stoker Published on December 6, 2021 In the shadow of Brexit, this ideal seems far from reality in the UK, many Britons have come to view politics through an antagonistic lens. By Gerry Stoker, Viktor Orri Valgarðsson and Will Jennings, University of Southampton US President Joe Biden is billing his  ‘Summit for Democracy’ as an opportunity “to prove democracy still works and can improve people’s lives in tangible ways”. In the shadow of Brexit, this ideal seems far from reality in the UK. Many Britons have come to view politics through an antagonistic lens. They’ve lost trust in politics and the quality of political leadership, perceive an increase in the level of corruption and a failure to address severe economic inequalities. And this highly negative view is affecting how they engage with democracy. Just 28 percent of those surveyed in a May 2020 TrustGov UK poll expressed confidence in the government and politicians looking after their interests, or the public interest. In contrast, mistrust (a sceptical attitude towards government and politics) and distrust (an assessment that government and politicians do not have your interests at heart) are dominant in UK politics. In the same survey, nearly two-thirds of citizens displayed mistrust and nearly half expressed distrust in their responses to statements about politics and government. EMBED START Image {id: "editor_2"} EMBED END Image {id: "editor_2"} The question in citizens’ minds has become less ‘what is democracy doing for me?’ and more ‘how is politics doing me down now?’ It turns out this cynicism was a key factor in the divided Brexit vote — in particular, how citizens reasoned their way to a choice over whether to vote Remain or Leave. Generally, in high political trust contexts there is a positive relationship between the endorsements of political elites and voting patterns of citizens. Take the 1975 Referendum that led to the UK joining the Common Market, the forerunner to the EU. Voters ‘followed the leader’ and backed ‘Yes’ because that was largely what the two main Conservative and Labour parties – and especially the party leaders – recommended. By contrast, in the current low political trust context,  ‘negative elite cues’ were important in driving votes for both Leave and Remain camps. Voters used politicians as proxies not for positions they wished to support, but for positions they wished to vote against. The result of the 2016 Brexit vote in turn appears to have had a real impact on British citizens’ satisfaction with the way democracy works in the UK.  That shows through in public opinion surveys, including the British Election Study (BES) internet panel study. In 2014, two years before the referendum, Remain supporters were modestly more satisfied with the workings of democracy than Leave supporters, but within both groups about half said they were ‘very’ or ‘fairly’ satisfied with democracy. After the 2016 referendum, the satisfaction of Remainers in democracy slumped and remained low and even declined further in the coming years, with only about a third of this group presently expressing satisfaction with UK democracy. Leavers, in contrast, became much more satisfied soon after the referendum, but this boost faded as the protracted negotiations over the Brexit deal were seen as a betrayal by the political establishment in the referendum’s outcome. However, the level of satisfaction of Leavers with UK democracy reached new heights after the election of the Conservative government led by Boris Johnson in December 2019 which pledged to ‘get Brexit done’ – and delivered on that promise in January 2020. Before the referendum, citizens with different levels of education expressed roughly similar levels of satisfaction, but since the referendum, citizens with lower levels of educational attainment have been more satisfied with UK democracy and those with university education have been least satisfied. EMBED START Image {id: "editor_4"} EMBED END Image {id: "editor_4"} EMBED START Image {id: "editor_5"} EMBED END Image {id: "editor_5"} One interpretation of these trends is to view it as an example of the democratic process at work. Leave voters finally got something they wanted from the political system and responded with greater satisfaction. Remain voters found themselves on the losing side of a decision for once and their satisfaction slumped. But this interpretation, framing the Brexit vote as a sort of bloody nose for political elites and their supporters, underplays the undercurrent of the low trust environment. For Remain voters it is difficult to see what could help recover their sense of satisfaction with UK democracy, given how many of them, especially those of younger generations, tend to see the Brexit campaign and the manoeuvres of its leaders (including the current Prime Minister of the UK, Boris Johnson) as a betrayal. Meanwhile, Leave voters’ sense of imminent treachery is never far from the surface; especially if the claimed benefits of Brexit – whether cultural or economic – are not delivered. Brexit’s legacy sees renewed calls for another vote on Scottish independence and a  destabilising impact on the Northern Ireland peace process. In the context of recent revelations of low-level corruption in the allocation of contracts during the COVID-19 crisis and concerns about the lobbying practices and second jobs taken by MPs, polling suggests that see the moral standing of MPs among the British public is at an all-time low compared to the 1980s and 1990s. The UK, like most countries, is in a complex struggle to recover in the context of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the challenges involved in moving to a low carbon economy. Withdrawal from the EU has added to the sense that the UK is struggling to find its way. The “sunlit uplands” and levelling-up of regions and economic fortunes promised by Prime Minister Johnson may yet appear, but until they do, a grinding sense of scepticism stretching to cynicism about politics and UK democracy will dominate. That cycle needs to be broken if the future of democracy is going to be secured. Gerry Stoker is Chair of Governance, University of Southampton and co-investigator on the TrustGov project. Viktor Orri Valgarðsson is a research fellow at the University of Southampton and part of the TrustGov team. Will Jennings is Professor of Political Science at the University of Southampton and is the principal investigator of TrustGov. Will Jennings, Gerry Stoker and Viktor Orri Valgarðsson’s TrustGov research project is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council’s research award ES/S009809/1.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on December 6, 2021

Bridging the fertility care gap in India - 360 Shraboni Patra Published on November 6, 2023 To make infertility care widely accessible, services for basic infertility investigations can be integrated into existing reproductive health facilities. There is an idea in developing nations that infertility doesn’t need to be the focus of family planning programmes because of “overpopulation”. In India, the world’s most populous nation, this idea has taken hold, meaning childless couples — especially in rural areas or from less privileged backgrounds — find it difficult to seek treatment. The irony is, Assisted Reproductive Techniques (ARTs) are increasingly available to foreigners or those with the money to afford them. Contrary to the population policies of developing countries, which focus primarily on reducing total fertility rates, research says infertile couples must have access to ARTs despite the state’s fears that contributing to demographic growth in this manner would result in further overpopulation. Denying infertility treatment is an ill-considered population control policy. Unlike in developed countries, where couples increasingly opt to not have children, in India involuntary childlessness could be treated as an important reproductive health and rights issue. In India, a few districts are underperforming in terms of fertility treatment received by women. There have also been increasing cases of male infertility in the post-COVID era and reduced fertility rates in south Indian states like Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Telangana. The management of infertility requires prioritising certain public health concerns in India. The advancement in treatments such as in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) has improved assisted births, opening the doors not only to many Indian couples who have been struggling with infertility for years but to many couples from other countries. Medical tourism is booming due to the cheap ART and IVF facilities offered to international patients in India as compared to the US, UK and Singapore. India offers a significantly lower price range of USD$1200 to USD$2500 per IVF cycle. Experienced medical personnel, pre- and post-procedure provisions and reduced language barriers have made India a favourable destination for medical tourism in IVF. The country currently sees up to 250,000 IVF cycles per year. The future looks promising as the Indian fertility industry has grown 20 percent in the last five years and is expected to grow at the same pace in the next five years. Still, infertility treatments are very costly and sometimes lead to out-of-pocket expenses or catastrophic health expenditure for those who need it, as they spend a greater proportion of their income on fertility care compared to people in wealthier societies. ARTs are mostly inaccessible for most couples in developing countries like India. Families from low- and medium-income groups still can’t afford IVF. The costs incurred by couples from rural areas are relatively higher than those from urban areas, regardless of the type and phase of treatment consulted. Rural couples are forced to visit urban fertility clinics for treatment and to bear the travel expenses for food, transport, accommodation and other expenses. A 2022 study in rural West Bengal explored that a considerable proportion of couples could not opt for advanced allopathic fertility treatment due to its high cost. Couples stop their treatment for many reasons although cost and inaccessibility are the most common. Inaccessibility due to lack of transport, lack of knowledge about available treatment options and lack of diagnostic facilities at the primary health centres in rural areas are the other factors that make fertility treatment inaccessible to poor people. As a result, despite their inclination towards modern treatment, some couples seek varied low-cost traditional methods and religious practices in rural areas. The demand for infertility medical services and ARTs varies, driven mostly by the couple’s socio-economic background. Disparities in access to treatment may lead to additional disparities in health and quality of life. The West Bengal study shows that about 54 percent of women diagnosed with infertility in rural areas took a long time to realise the necessity of fertility treatment and spent a long time seeking this treatment due to lack of information, counseling and proper knowledge of reproductive health problems such as pelvic inflammatory disease, endometriosis or polycystic ovary syndrome. If the causes of infertility problems are diagnosed early, treatment becomes easier. It is necessary to make ARTs accessible and affordable to less privileged groups. To make infertility care widely accessible, services for basic infertility investigations to determine the cause of infertility and simple forms of infertility treatment such as ovulation induction and artificial insemination could be integrated into existing reproductive health programmes. Sallam’s model of fertility assistance may be effective in a rural context, consisting of a basic infertility clinic offering diagnostic tests and simple forms of infertility treatment; an advanced clinic where IVF, the simplest procedure and more advanced diagnostic procedures are available in addition; and a tertiary-level infertility clinic offering specialized assisted reproduction and surgical procedures. In rural India, women with higher levels of reproductive health knowledge, which correlates with their level of education, are more likely to receive allopathic treatment for infertility whereas those with low reproductive health knowledge tend to opt for traditional, superstitious or religious treatments. The role of low-cost treatment alternatives like ayurveda, yoga and naturopathy, unani, siddha and homoeopathy or Ayush needs to be assessed thoroughly. India’s commitment to comprehensive reproductive health service delivery can emphasise the awareness of fertility and the factors affecting it. In addition to public services, the private sector and the traditional healer are both important alternative sources of first help in rural areas. The involvement of healthcare staff from both the formal and informal sectors when investing in the education of infertile couples and the community is important. One of the targets of the United Nation Sustainable Development Goal 3 is to ensure universal access to sexual and reproductive healthcare services by 2030. Maternal health starts with quality reproductive health care that includes pre‐conception fertility care. In India, no medical insurance covers the medical expenditure on infertility treatment. Arguments for mandatory insurance coverage may let the government enact regulations that require varying forms of insurance coverage for infertility treatment. Dr. Shraboni Patra is a Women and Child Health Researcher at Centre for Technology Alternatives for Rural Areas (CTARA), IIT Bombay, Mumbai. She also works with the Public Health Department, Maharashtra, and was earlier at International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS), Mumbai, India. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on November 6, 2023

Bringing the skills of a diplomat to global health challenges - 360 Erica Di Ruggiero, Garry Aslanyan, Ophelia Michaelides Published on November 14, 2022 COVID-19 highlighted the importance of strong global networks to address big issues. What’s needed are the people to drive them. More than ever, global health needs skilled diplomats. The COVID-19 pandemic revealed the fragility of our social, economic and health systems. It also elevated the place of health in foreign policy. And with the G20 summit beginning in mid-November, accelerated and coherent ideas that navigate the intricacies of domestic and foreign policy are needed. As countries start to rebuild and improve resilience in the face of uncertainty, global health diplomacy — the politics of intertwining domestic and foreign policy with global health — is now a key feature of foreign policy negotiations. Effective global health diplomacy needs a diverse number of public, private and not-for-profit organisations and a recognition that sectors unrelated to health — including trade, environment and labour — have a direct impact on population health and equity. These bodies compete for attention and resources — seeking to influence policy and develop solutions. Trade diplomats at the World Trade Organization negotiated concerns from health advocates around the intellectual property rights on COVID-19 products and technologies covered by the international TRIPS agreement. But stalled negotiations meant the COVID-19 vaccine distribution to low- and middle-income countries was delayed. While it was eventually approved, it highlighted the importance of diplomacy skills in health — significant decisions made on an international stage can have direct ramifications on livelihoods back home. In Canada, for example, foreign policy has not kept pace with the complexity of global health problems. A proper review of Canada’s foreign policy has not been conducted since 2001 and an increasingly complex global situation means there is a need for renewal. In a globalised world, a nation’s foreign policies need to better align with domestic policy agendas. COVID-19 and other infectious diseases showed human health and global environmental change are linked. Many of the root causes of climate change, such as rapid urbanisation and the degradation of ecosystems, have also put the health of human populations at greater risk of pandemics. The problem for some countries is that national commitments — for example, to reduce carbon emissions in line with the Paris Agreement and COP26 — can face domestic resistance. “We are still nowhere near the scale and pace of emission reductions required,” said Simon Stiell, executive secretary of UN Climate Change, in October. Global health diplomacy requires its own particular skill set. The increasingly global nature of health problems requires a cadre of skilled professionals who can better navigate geopolitical spaces within and across nations to centre the role of health in the cross-sector of foreign policy while balancing domestic interests. These include working in complex environments across varying sectors, diplomatic, communication and negotiation skills, as well the ability to analyse global health and foreign affairs. The Dalla Lana School of Public Health’s Centre for Global Health at the University of Toronto is trying to meet this challenge as the only Canadian school offering a course in global health diplomacy. Other courses are offered by institutions  in countries including the USA, the UK and Switzerland. As countries continue to navigate complex global challenges, the world needs strong global institutions working with governments that can work across nations’ interests and negotiate effective global and equitable solutions. This must be reinforced through the kind of relationship building and negotiating processes that global health diplomacy brings to the table. Erica Di Ruggiero is an associate professor of global health and director at the Centre for Global Health, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto. She is a global health policy researcher and mentor, and co-directs DLSPH’s executive course on global health diplomacy. Garry Aslanyan is an adjunct professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto and manager of partnerships and governance, at Special Programme TDR at the World Health Organization. He co-directs DLSPH’s executive course on global health diplomacy. Ophelia Michaelides is the manager for the Centre for Global Health at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto. She is an undergraduate and graduate mentor and a co-host on podcast focused on healthy cities in the SDG era. The authors declare no conflict of interest. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on November 14, 2022

Bringing up baby - now with robots - 360 Eduardo Benitez Sandoval Published on April 24, 2024 More and more children are growing up with robots at home, but their impact on early learning and development is still largely unknown and unregulated. Technology has a profound impact on children. From the humble pencil to the touch-screen tablet, the information that infants absorb from these tools shapes their behaviour and development. As young humans take in the world around them and learn by observing, interacting and imitating, their survival lies in the hands of carers and companions. For the generation of kids born today, a companion might be at home that none of their parents grew up with: robots. This emerging reality, in which infants and children routinely interact with all manner of robotic devices, presents complex challenges for which few people seem prepared. It is a new frontier – socially, legally and ethically. Domestic robots are becoming increasingly common, performing tasks such as cleaning, cooking, entertaining, even gardening. Robotic pets can mimic the behaviour of real furry friends, without the same need for care and feeding. The integration of AI actually makes them trainable. Likewise, service robots are appearing in public spaces such as restaurants, shops and airports, deployed as servers, cleaners, guides or baristas. In public and in private, humans are active and unpredictable participants in human-robot interaction, and there are no established standards for this novel technology. Human-robot interaction is still a field of exploratory research, and robot manufacturers are still looking for strategies to guide effective human-robot interaction in broad and complex scenarios. Within this largely uncharted realm, ‘robot natives’ occupy a special place. In just the last decades, more and more kids have routinely grown up exposed to digital devices – smart phones, tablets and the like. The assumption is that these so-called digital natives develop a sense of how things work in the digital realm, and quickly master them in a way their parents never could. Robot natives are different. Children exposed to robots from their earliest days will develop a natural interaction closer to how humans relate to each other in everyday life – with verbal interaction, non-verbal communication, sharing of physical space and many other social activities. These interactions can offer a rich complexity, with unexpected consequences –something far beyond the essentially one-way relationship between a child and a digital device. But research into very young children’s interaction with robots is challenging. Early exploration into the topic and anecdotal evidence point to an urgent need to understand the impact of robots on infants and their development of social, cognitive and physical skills. A range of research can be found on the topic of child-robot interaction: robots used to boost new ideas and stimulate children’s creativity, social robots assessing children’s emotional states (by analysing psycho-physiological signals), tracking children’s perceptions of robots, the use of humanoid robots and storytelling as a therapeutic tool for children with autism, the design of huggable robots for pediatric care, and the use of the Ultimatum Game to analyse child-robot interaction. For baby-robot interaction, there are only a few studies out there, including using robots to encourage infant leg-motion training via reward learning and imitation, and the use of thermal infrared imaging to assess autonomic response in babies during interaction with a robot and an avatar. And there are efforts to design and test a telepresence robot for interacting with babies and toddlers, for use by other members of the family, such as grandparents. However, moving from this exploratory research to producing a commercial robot requires a multidisciplinary approach to design, and regulations to minimise the potential adverse impact of robot technologies on children and infants. Proper guidelines are urgent, as technical, educational and social issues should be addressed before these service and social robots become widespread, standard technology. One easy fix, for example, is the noise level of robots around babies at home, which manufacturers can do relatively quickly. However, more complex scenarios, such as how robots verbally and physically interact with babies and toddlers, raise questions about how such interactions might affect children cognitively and socially. Research pointing to the negative impact of screen time on children’s language development, for example, shows the unexpected potential for harm in new technologies. Privacy is another major consideration. Cameras and sensors are essential elements in robots navigating human environments, and they enable the collection of detailed information about their surroundings. This raises questions about how to manage the privacy of young children interacting with them and how to establish clear ethical and legal boundaries. In March 2024, the European Union endorsed the AI Act, which addresses unacceptable uses of AI, such as behavioural manipulation. While the legislation is directed at the use of AI, much of it could apply to robots, which are essentially computers capable of interacting with the real world. Voice-activated toys encouraging dangerous behaviour in children is one scenario the Act explicitly cites as an unacceptable risk. Verbal interaction with robots should be treated in the same way, so that families and kids are kept safe around robots capable of social interaction. Biometric identification and facial recognition are also features that can generate data for social scoring and other kinds of classification of humans based on behaviour, socioeconomic status or personal characteristics (ethnicity, nationality, disability, etc.) when robots navigate continuously around children and adults. Timely legislation and interaction design guidelines will go a long way to avoiding a dystopian future for robotic natives. A handbook on human-robot interaction to be published in June 2024 lays out some essential considerations for the design of safe, transparent, traceable, non-discriminatory robots for infants and children: Compared to building regular service robots for more mundane tasks, responsibly designing robots for infants and children will take much greater investments of time and money. However, the impacts of previous interactive technologies on young humans have provided important lessons about unintended consequences. A new reality is coming, and robot natives deserve a future with well-designed and safe robots. Dr Eduardo Benítez Sandoval is a Scientia Lecturer in the Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture at UNSW Sydney, associated with the Creative Robotics Lab. His work spans various aspects of social robotics, such as reciprocity in human-robot interaction, robots and education, robots and healthcare, and addiction to robots, among other topics. He is the co-author of ‘Robot natives: future design and regulations for baby robot interaction’, to be published in June 2024 in The Cambridge Handbook of the Law, Policy, and Regulation for Human–Robot Interaction. The research was undertaken with financial assistance from the UNSW Scientia Development Package. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on April 24, 2024

Britain's tea shortage scare a sign of trouble brewing - 360 Sarah Schiffling, Nikolaos Valantasis Kanellos Published on March 13, 2024 The Red Sea supply chain crisis has exposed glaring weaknesses in global transport that pose big questions about how our economy will work moving forward. A tea shortage in Britain is surely a sign that the apocalypse, or a near-national crisis at least, are nigh. In February, supermarket chain Sainsbury’s warned of exactly that. In some of its stores signs announced “supply issues affecting the nationwide supply of black tea”. The presumed culprit: attacks on shipping in the Red Sea. Linking the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea provides southern access to the Suez Canal, one of the most important trade lanes in the world. A colossal amount of freight usually goes via this route. Around 90 percent of globally traded goods are carried by sea and, of that, 12 percent of trade goes through the Suez Canal. The Suez transports over USD$1 trillion worth of goods every year. Since Houthi forces from Yemen hijacked a commercial vessel on November 19, 2023, attacks have been ongoing. The Houthis claim they target ships with links to Israel, the US and the UK in a show of support for Palestinians, but the targeted ships’ links to Israel have not always been clear. What has been clear of the repeated attacks is the impact on global trade. The initial multinational security initiative, which started December 18, 2023, was aptly called Operation Prosperity Guardian. Subsequently, US and UK forces, supported by other countries, have conducted air strikes to disrupt the Houthis’ ability to continue their attacks. Military intervention in the region hasn’t helped make shipping secure in the region. Two recent attacks show that the risk for ships and crews is real. First, the sinking of the Rubymar, a Belize-registered bulk carrier carrying fertilisers, which will cause an environmental catastrophe, and more recently the first fatal attack on the M/V True Confidence, a Liberian-owned bulk carrier. More than 80 percent fewer containers than normally expected are currently transiting the Red Sea. For much of 2023, daily Suez Canal transits were above the previous year’s figures, but now they are sitting at around half the number of ships. In February 2024, nearly 300 fewer ships per week traversed the Suez Canal in either direction. In the same period, re-routing via the Cape of Good Hope had almost doubled.  A detour of 2000 nautical miles might seem extreme, but there are few alternatives. Going around Africa adds one-to-two weeks’ shipping time and around USD$1 million to a journey between Asia and Europe. Greenhouse gas emissions can rise by 70 percent on a Singapore to Northern Europe round trip. That is because vessels travel faster to cover longer distances, eroding the environmental gains from slow steaming. But many shipping lines prefer this over the dangerous waters off the coast of Yemen. As a result, the number of incoming ships in European ports like Hamburg, Germany, has decreased by 25 percent, with the Mediterranean Sea becoming a cul-de-sac. Container rates, especially between Asia and Europe, rose sharply (although never to the levels experienced by the COVID-19 induced supply chain crisis). Container rates have recently fallen slightly, the first sign the global transport system is adjusting to the new norm where costs are higher and ships are tied up for longer on some of the main trade routes. There is no other way than to adapt. Looking at the main Asia to Europe routes, the only other options for sea transport are to go east through the Panama Canal, which is a considerably longer distance and adds travel time, or north through niche routes in the Arctic. Both routes are plagued by severe challenges. The Panama Canal has been hit by extreme drought, which severely limits the number of ships able to pass through it. Indeed, ships between Asia and the US East Coast had been rerouted through the Suez Canal before the start of the Houthi attacks. With that option now no longer feasible, companies have shifted cargo to the railway line running in parallel to the Panama Canal. The extreme drought has brought to the forefront discussions about the defunct Nicaragua canal or the construction of a 130km Maglev technology tunnel in northern Colombia. With both great canals experiencing disruptions at the same time, all global trade flows are feeling some effects of the problems. At first glance, going north seems appealing. The northern sea route is 40 percent shorter than the Suez Canal route. But it can only be used for around five months of the year because sea ice makes it impassable and running ships year-round could drastically hurt the environment. At the moment, transiting these waters off the coast of Russia is affected by sanctions due to the Ukraine war. The same is true for the rail connection between China and Europe. The remaining option is air freight. Shipping goods by air is much faster. Greenhouse gas emissions are about 47 times higher but, given the disruption on the seas, some shippers might be tempted to send their goods by plane instead. For many of the goods that usually transit the Red Sea, flying is not an option. Transporting oil by air would be too dangerous. For bulky but relatively low-value goods like grains, the 12-16 times cost increase is not economically viable. But for tea — a lightweight, thoroughly non-dangerous and vital part of the British lifestyle — a flight from Sri Lanka or India over all the sea transport troubles might be considered the smartest move. However, air freight is having its own issues, particularly on the routes between Asia and Europe and North America. For once, it’s not because of geopolitical complications. Instead, it’s the enormous success of online retailers Shein and Temu. Between them, around 9,000 tonnes of goods are shipped per day — that’s enough to fill 73 Boeing 747 jumbo jet freighters. Companies wanting to switch from sea to air freight find that all the capacity is being snatched up by the enormous demand for fast fashion. The Red Sea crisis is not solely to blame for a potential tea shortage. It sits amid a wide array of transport disruptions around the world. More broadly, the transport system struggles to keep pace with the consumerism and overconsumption that drive global supply chains. Disruptions at choke points like the Suez Canal are particularly likely to result in ripple effects. The fears of a UK tea shortage turned out to be largely unfounded. Industry representatives agreed that there were some ongoing issues with shipments, but that stock levels were good and any impact on consumers should be minimal. However, this storm in a teacup shows just how vulnerable countries are to the geopolitical weaponisation of supply chains which is increasingly becoming a part of economic statecraft. Dr Sarah Schiffling is an Assistant Professor in Supply Chain Management & Social Responsibility and the Deputy Director of the HUMLOG Institute at the Hanken School of Economics, Finland. Dr Nikolaos Valantasis Kanellos is a Lecturer in Logistics and Programme Coordinator of the MSc Logistics and Supply Chain Management course in the School of Business Technology, Retail, and Supply Chain at TU Dublin. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on March 13, 2024

Broken China-US relations put the world's health at risk - 360 Deborah Seligsohn Published on November 14, 2022 China and the US cooperated for many years on health issues and it’s in the world’s best interests they continue. The breakdown in relations between the US and China is putting the entire world at risk when the next pandemic strikes. For 40 years, the two superpowers co-operated on health and bioscience, benefitting the global community, before the relationship began to falter not long before COVID-19 swept through the world. Poor relations could impede planning for the next pandemic. The world has a lot to lose if scientific collaboration splits into camps. It isn’t only Chinese scientific progress that will slow down. Western scientists will lose some of their best collaborators and access to important data sources, especially as China is one of many sources of new viruses. Despite the deterioration in relations, doctors and scientists shared a great deal of information from the onset of COVID-19. All of the major breakthroughs in fighting the disease involved cross-border co-operation, including years of work between scientists in the US, Australia, the UK, China and other countries to understand coronaviruses. The US and Germany co-operated on the Pfizer vaccine and there was international collaboration on most of the other vaccine development and testing. The speed with which the world was able to respond to the pandemic was in part a product of robust global scientific collaboration over previous decades. China’s rapid integration into the cutting edge of global scientific discourse — as described in David Quammen’s book on the virus and the scientists who worked to contain or defeat it, Breathless — made this process more effective. That process began in the 1970s when the US and China began working together, even before diplomatic relations were normalised in 1979. In those early years, there were groundbreaking discoveries, such as the importance of folic acid supplementation to prevent neural tube defects, preventing millions of birth defects. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention worked most closely with China’s own CDC on many projects, including establishing one of the world’s largest influenza surveillance networks It also assisted the Chinese CDC’s transformation from a research institute into an action-oriented public health agency. This work was deepened in the wake of the 2003 SARS outbreak and the 2004-2005 H5N1 avian influenza outbreaks. While these were contained, they increased concern about the likelihood of a global pandemic. The US CDC expanded into more countries as part of its Global Disease Protection Program. But China remained a major focus; critical to monitoring for novel infections and for its scientific innovation. There was further cooperation in the early 2000s when US institutions collaborated with the Chinese government in preventing and treating HIV/AIDS. China’s efforts were extraordinarily effective, with the number of people living with HIV/AIDS kept to a fraction of what the UN had predicted. Beyond tracking diseases, Chinese bioscience developed with two institutes in China joining the human genome project. The Beijing Genomics Institute became a world leader in sequencing. When COVID came along, multiple Chinese groups sequenced the SARS-CoV-2 virus much more rapidly than anyone had been capable of doing back in 2003 with SARS-CoV-1. Things began to unravel in the later part of the Obama administration, and mistrust grew between the powers during the Trump years — worsening as COVID-19’s origins became mired in conspiracy theories. This sparked a response, with China spreading rumours the virus actually originated in the US. But there is hope. Scientists are still communicating with each other. Even at the height of the COVID pandemic doctors on the ground were actively consulting with their colleagues in Wuhan on treatment. The National Institutes of Public Health holds regular webinars with scientists and doctors from around the world. The most recent, in September 2022, just to give an example, hosted speakers from China, Germany and Rwanda. There is still some cooperation at some levels of government, and the US continues to have a Health Attache and a large Food and Drug Administration office in Beijing. The positive relationships built over years of collaboration are still a basis for resuming closer cooperation. But it will require some patience and diplomacy on both sides. The costs of not trying would be to split the global scientific establishment, especially if the kinds of controls that have just been put on scientists working with computer chips were to be put on those in the biomedical sciences. The result would be poor communication and even less warning and preparedness for the next pandemic. Deborah Seligsohn is an assistant professor of political science at Villanova University and a non-resident senior associate of the Trustee Chair in Business and Economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. She declares no conflict of interest. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on November 14, 2022

Build better homes; survive worsening fires - 360 Fernando Branco, Mário Rui Arruda Published on December 11, 2023 Houses should be able to withstand wildfires thus allowing firefighters to spend their time fighting the blaze rather than evacuating residents. It’s remarkable that in the 21st century, while medicine, electronics, and rocket science have evolved to outstanding levels, people continue to die in their houses because of forest fires. We have structural codes for all kinds of events, such as earthquakes, explosions, vehicle impacts, and indoor fires, but for forest fires — aka bushfires or wildfires — these are non-existent. With climate change exacerbating the wildfire threat, one of the main problems is not the increase of fires, but the increase of  “great forest fires” that, in a single event, may consume more fuel and lives than in an average year, depending on the region. The elephant in the room is clear: this threat is increasing and our houses are not more resilient against forest fires. In 2017, two of the largest forest fires ever recorded in Europe (‘Pedrógão Grande’ and ‘October 15’) burned a combined 286,000 hectares and left 114 dead. However, analysis of expert opinions and inquiries clearly showed the dwellings that burned lacked any  “passive fire” protection. The disregard for this aspect led to burned houses being rebuilt in the same way as the originals, which means that they are likely to burn again in the next forest fire. Although fire in structures has been studied since the end of the 19th century, the foundations of fire design in structural engineering laid at the beginning of the 1980s were only for indoor fires. Several fire codes were assembled but until 2016 all disregarded any fire design for the exterior of houses against forest fires. Only after 2016, two of the most important standards were published in the US and Australia, providing testing and design possibilities. The main problem is that these were very heterogeneous and were not directly connected with previous structural codes, being used mainly as a reference for construction guidelines. For the fireproof design of houses against forest fires, it is better to use performance-based design and classical safety standards used in structural codes. This is fundamental to providing a safe, economical, and optimised design using the classical tools already known to structural engineers. If the exterior façade of a house is designed for a nominal indoor fire of 120 minutes, it will clearly endure a forest fire since the maximum temperature of this is around 900 degrees Celsius with a peak duration of 2 to 5 minutes. However, this is neither economical nor optimised. Some researchers have investigated the action of wildfire in construction materials, but they were mainly observational studies without any direct application to country fire codes or structural engineering. Existing fire codes are based on the required fire resistance exposure time needed to evacuate a certain building and don’t always guarantee the safety of the residents. Therefore, an evacuation is always enforced by firefighters. For a house to be resistant to a forest fire, it must be a shelter capable of enduring the full duration of the fire to protect its residents. This is needed for less than 30 minutes once the forest fire hits the house. For these reasons, new safety philosophies are now being proposed, in which the houses need to be an “anti-fire” refuge or bunker in which the dwellers can shelter and be safe. This would help firefighters engage and suppress the forest fire directly and quickly without worrying that a populated area needs to be evacuated because the houses may burn. With these new fireproof house design concepts, a forest fire can be seen in the future as the equivalent of a strong storm, in which people can shelter comfortably and be safe without the aid of any firefighter. Contrary to popular belief, 70 percent of houses actually burn not due to being in contact with flames, but due to firebrand accumulation in specific spots that may trigger a secondary ignition. Firebrands are airborne burning particles which travel through winds. It is then important to separate the direct thermal action of a forest fire (flames) from the indirect action of a forest fire (firebrands) during the design process. Firebrands can travel more than 500m and ignite another structure, sometimes up to 2km. This is important to note because some houses are only in contact with the indirect action of forest fires due to being more than 50m from dense vegetation, meaning a less robust and less expensive solution is needed. Therefore, studying the temperature curves (charts) of forest fires separately due to the action of the flames and the firebrand transportation and accumulation becomes a more important area to research. Even though research advances are being made, problems remain. The first is that governments are not susceptible to changing firefighting tactics, including evacuating people from their houses to save lives and prevent a catastrophe. For example, in Australia, until 2009, people were not compelled to leave their houses and instead followed the tactic of ‘stay and defend’, which was not efficient since most deaths were among people inside the fire shelter or who went outside after its failure. This led to a change of policy to ‘leave earlier’, which is at the moment the most accepted tactic during forest fires. It is vital to note neither the houses nor shelters were actually fireproof. The second is economic. Some proposed fireproof construction guidelines may increase the final value of the house, which may be unpopular, especially in rural areas with low incomes. For a new house, these new fireproof requirements are below 5 percent of the total cost, but for an old house that may need retrofitting the cost may increase from 5 percent to 15 percent. After the Maui wildfires in Hawaii this year, some conspiracy theories circulating on the internet claimed the houses of the rich there didn’t burn as much compared to those of low-income people. However, the owner of one house whose dwelling didn’t burn down while others next to it were razed said that replacing her asphalt roofing with a metal one is what probably saved her home. The main reason expensive houses don’t burn down is because they are designed with new and more costly materials and are up to code in terms of fire reaction needs for the external facade. This is clearly not enough, but it helped, and by increasing the cost by less than five percent to fireproof a house facade, USD$6 billion in damage and more than 1,000 lives would have been spared in Maui rather than with the classical tactic of ‘leave earlier’. Is it possible to save lives by designing fireproof houses for forest fires, using the latest state-of-the-art in fire engineering? Yes. Is there political and external pressure to promote these fireproof construction guidelines? Depends on the country. Put the global answer at ‘no’. Fernando Branco is Distinguished Professor at the Higher Technical Institute, School of Engineering and Technology, University of Lisbon, Portugal Mário Rui Arruda is Research Associate with the Civil Engineering Research and Innovation for Sustainability Unit, University of Lisbon. The authors’ research was sponsored by the Foundation for Science and Technology, Portugal Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on December 11, 2023

Building a disaster-ready culture in Indonesia - 360 Wahyu Wilopo Published on October 10, 2022 Indonesia had almost 10,000 floods last decade, and flood incidents keep rising. To turn the tide, new cultural and infrastructural solutions may be needed. Around 100 million people live in flood-prone areas of Indonesia, totalling almost one-third of the national population. Relocating these people from disaster-prone areas to safe locations is a challenging proposition, but one of increasing importance. Over the decade from 2010 to 2021, Indonesia experienced 9,894 floods, which killed 2,394 people, and prompted an average economic loss of 22.8 trillion Rupiah (US$1.5 billion) – and the incidence of floods is increasing year-on-year. Floods are one of Indonesia’s most frequent disasters, disrupting economic activities, logistics flows, transportation, agricultural production, and other sectors, as well as causing tragic casualties. Indonesia’s vulnerability to flood stems partly from its complex geological makeup, arising from its position at the confluence of three of the world’s major tectonic plates: Eurasia, India-Australia, and the Pacific. This led to the formation of a series of volcanoes from the west to east of Indonesia, making the country vulnerable to volcanic eruptions, as well as earthquakes, tsunamis, liquefaction, landslides, floods, and extreme weather. Data from Indonesia’s national Disaster Risk Index shows that in 2021, 324 districts and cities were classified as high flood risk, 69 were medium-risk and just three were low-risk. The increasing incidence of floods in Indonesia has been exacerbated by a combination of factors. Primarily they are the result of climate change, which causes coastal flooding through rising sea levels and high tides and also triggers alterations to rainfall patterns which have led to long periods of high intensity rainfall. The runoff from this rainfall greatly exceeds the volume estimates that were originally used to design stormwater systems. Indonesia’s waterways are already under pressure from rapid urban expansion which has paved over the permeable surfaces that previously absorbed high-intensity rainfall. This is complicated by inundation in areas where land subsidence has occurred following massive groundwater extraction. Human activities also exacerbate the effect of floods through land-use changes upstream, river sedimentation and deforestation, and insufficient or poorly functioning drainage channels in big cities, particularly Jakarta. The risks of flood disasters are heightened by growing numbers of people needing somewhere to live and moving into floodplain areas. Managing and mitigating floods cannot be based on administrative boundaries, but must be coordinated within one river basin area, including upstream and downstream factors. Flood disaster mitigation can be carried out via two approaches: structural and non-structural. Structural solutions look at the physical factors which can minimise the impact of flooding, such as increasing the water channel’s capacity, and reducing the speed of the water flow. Waterway capacity can be improved by widening the cross-section of the channel or river, deepening the riverbed and/or elevating the embankment, or developing a canal to break up the flow of the river. Meanwhile, reducing the speed of water flow can be achieved by constructing reservoirs. Another structural solution to reduce flooding is building infiltration wells around new buildings to reduce surface runoff and increase groundwater recharge – this would require legislative changes to building permits. Regional spatial planning is the first stage in disaster mitigation efforts. However, the response by different regional areas in Indonesia to include disaster information in preparing spatial plans has been patchy, with economic pressures among the reasons given for not following the plans. Improving community preparedness in flood-prone areas can be conducted through education, socialisation, training, developing flood standard-operating-procedures, developing maps of evacuation routes and safe points, and flood early warnings. Flood early warning systems have been built in several areas in Indonesia, but not all of them function optimally, for several reasons, including: a low understanding of flood risk in the community; flood early warning and waterways monitoring systems that are not yet integrated; dissemination of flood information early warnings that have not been effective and efficient; lack of community capacity in responding to information and flood early warnings; lack of coordination between institutions and local governments in the delivery of flood early warnings to the public; and the use of technology is not yet optimal. Disaster education is crucial to achieving community resilience in facing disasters, and should be introduced from an early age both in the family and school environment in order to turn knowledge into culture – a process that requires a long time and continuous effort. However, until now, Indonesia has had limited curriculum to require or guide disaster education in schools, both in class and in extracurriculars.  It sporadically implemented in local level. Disaster education which provides knowledge about disasters and which implements anticipating and responding to disaster events into daily life, will in time lead to preparedness becoming the culture of the community, improving national resilience and mitigation in the face of increasing flood risks. Wahyu Wilopo is a Lecturer in the Department of Geological Engineering Universitas Gadjah Mada, Indonesia. He is a member of Global Alliance of Disaster Research Institutes (GADRI), International Consortium of Landslides (ICL), Indonesia’s Geologist Association (IAGI), Indonesia Disaster Expert Association (IABI), etc. His research interests include hydrogeology, landslide, and disaster mitigation. Dr Wilopo declares no conflict of interest and is not receiving specific funding in any forms. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™. Editors Note: In the story “Flood ready” sent at: 03/10/2022 12:22. This is a corrected repeat.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on October 10, 2022

Building resilience in Indonesia’s drought-ridden island of Java - 360 Annisa Mu'awanah Sukmawati, Puji Utomo Published on June 22, 2022 Community engagement can ease the pressures of urban drought, but government interventions are the key to sustained change. Indonesia holds 6 percent of the world’s water potential – fresh water that can be used directly for daily human needs. Despite this, 85 percent of the country is in drought, according to government officials. Java, its most populous island, has reached a ‘crisis’ point, and water deficits are expected until at least 2070. Water quality across the vast island is also expected to significantly decline, as resources are not well managed. Increased public awareness and community engagement can begin to ease these pressures, but government interventions are the key to sustained change. Last year the local government of Bantul regency, in the region of Yogyakarta, Java, alerted its residents to the high possibility of widespread drought. The regency grew rapidly in recent times: urbanisation increased because of new infrastructure connecting villages to urban areas. A total of 99.4 percent of the island’s area is threatened by drought, according to 2013–17 data (the latest available) from national disaster body BNPB, and more than 13 percent of the population does not have access to clean water. The situation has been made worse by climate change, which increases overall temperatures and alters the duration and distribution of rain. Drought often refers to a natural phenomenon of reduced water availability. But urban drought is also heavily influenced by human activity. Population growth increases the need for and use of water, creating an imbalance in water supply and demand. Continued growth triggers water scarcity in the long run. In a study, researchers collected 2008–18 data from 12 weather stations across the Bantul regency and found the eastern, southern and western areas were particularly hard hit by drought. They also found below-average rainfall and recurring days without rain between May and August. Residents of Bantul rely on wells as their main water source – 73 percent of water for daily needs comes from these, despite local reports of many slowly drying up. Other main water sources are pipes (providing 14.5 percent of publicly available water), which mainly bring water from the Progo and Oyo rivers, managed by government-owned Perumdam Tirta Projotamansari. Less than 1 percent of publicly available water comes from freshwater springs, and rainwater reservoirs account for less than 0.04 percent. Building resilience to urban drought requires a collaborative approach from governments, academia, the private sector, community groups and the media. The government plays an important role in providing reliable infrastructures to meet water needs in the Bantul regency, starting with storage, distribution, and equitable access for users. More of the budget will need to be allocated to ensuring a supply of clean water, and legal policies related to water resources management are needed – such as regulations on water use, damage control, conservation and quality standards. These changes will ensure a reliable, safe and accessible water supply for everyone in the community. Local media also play a vital role in sharing effective water management practices that can be replicated at home. Universities and the private sector can contribute by sharing innovative studies, technology and mentoring. Community participation and public awareness of water saving can play a major role in anticipating and managing urban drought. Household rainwater harvesting can boost low government reservoirs, and the community can collect, store and distribute rainwater to meet their local needs. Urban communities can use rainwater collection ponds, infiltration wells in yards, or biopore holes that ​​can reduce runoff, fertilise soils and prevent flooding. Rainwater harvesting has huge potential: the rainfall rate in Bantul regency is relatively high during the wet season at more than 1,500 millimetres per year. Areas such as Sedayu, Piyungan and Pandak have begun using these methods, and widespread adoption would begin to make sustainable changes across the region. Annisa Mu’awanah Sukmawati is a lecturer in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning, University of Technology Yogyakarta. She is interested in urban and regional issues especially those related to settlements, disasters, and communities. Puji Utomo works as a lecturer in the Civil Department, University of Technology Yogyakarta. He is focused on water resource engineering. The authors previously received funding from the Ministry of Research, Technology and Higher Education, Indonesia. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on June 22, 2022

Building the future with robotics - 360 Dagmar Reinhardt Published on November 7, 2022 Amid a search for greener, cheaper construction, innovations in robotics are being keenly watched. The construction industry – a major contributor to greenhouse emissions – urgently needs to rebuild itself into a smarter, greener and more efficient industry without breaking the bank. The solution might lie in the declining automotive industry. Six-axis robots, often used in the manufacture of cars, are being introduced to the world of architecture, fabrication and construction, with promising results. Robots can be used at all stages of manufacturing and fabrication processes. On construction sites, robots are used for automated tasks, such as bricklaying, 3D printer, and timber module fabrication. There’s still work to be done before robots become a common sight on building sites – their unpredictable nature (uneven surfaces and the constant movement of people, machines and materials) places more challenges on the deployment of a robot. And there are some issues with safety, costs and skill applications which have held back its wider implementation. There is still a mismatch between the technology available and the knowledge of how to harness it. And, given the power and danger involved with such machinery, there’s trepidation to embrace the technology until the gap closes. Still, robotic integration is a question of when, not if. Robots already have a role in the next iteration in digitising architectural practice. Advanced manufacturing software and tools — computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) — are part of the digitalisation of architectural practice. Digital tools are natural extensions from designing in 3D modelling and scripting environments to fabrication, and now to industrial arm robots that are reliable and flexible. With manufacturing and construction tools adopted for robot motion, standard construction materials and processes (such as for timber, brick, or concrete) are reconsidered, and robots can effortlessly execute a wide variety of non-repetitive tasks. Pioneering work has been delivered here by robotic labs as part of academic institutions along with private robot developers.  Recent investigations into construction standards and methods with industrial robotic arms have resulted in novel methods for bricklaying, fluid deposition, timber sheet cutting and assembly, bespoke welding of steel elements, or tile cutting. As the technology evolves, these robots are becoming increasingly affordable, accessible and usable. Two factors are likely to fuel the increased integration of robotic systems in the building sector. Architecture, engineering and construction are all facing a crisis of money and skilled labour, and the onset of climate change. Implementing robotics in building helps bring the sector along with Industrie 4.0 — a Fourth Industrial Revolution — that centres on conducting commerce with a reduction in resources, emissions, and waste. Next to advanced technologies such as the Internet of Things, cloud computing, 3D printing, augmented reality and virtual reality, many of these technologies link in the fabrication and production processes by connecting digital to physical data. This enables design-to-make production processes to be tightly linked in with digital technologies, empowering construction to modernise and advance. The implementation of automation and robotics goes beyond the machines on the floor. Given the diversity of the teams involved in commercial building (architects, engineers, consultants, and on-site/off-site contractors), there is value in technologies that allow a greater quality of construction information to be spread with speed. Some kind of automated system that can give data-based feedback on material cost, labour and production protocols, or offer guidance on dynamic issues across a construction site, is a technology that would greatly benefit infrastructure projects when or if the right group gets it off the ground. Part of this next-generation technology is the use of virtual environments, digital replications of buildings or designs that grant its creators more power in test, building and editing. Increasingly, buildings will have a digital twin: a virtual model designed to accurately reflect a physical object. Building file to factory capabilities within architecture will help manufacturers to engage in design-led production. Intellectual Property and training for AI-driven manufacturing based on a digital twin is likely to be an important part of the architectural industry.  In that scenario, digital twins could not only pass data back to manufacturing, but robot fabrication could segue into robotic maintenance. If successful, our notions of human-robot collaboration would deepen — embedding in buildings technology such as industrial arms, drones, robot swarms, and augmented support through interactive and haptic interfaces. The digital twin system will, in the next decade, refer not only to buildings, but to city structures, their infrastructel systems and data networks. Data on building performance under changing environmental conditions will enable a deeper understanding for individual buildings. It also will enable a better overview of complex data for building collectives and urban scapes that can respond to extreme changes, such as extreme heat, floods and bushfires. Robot systems will be used for continued data feedback, calculation and simulation, analysis and evaluation that will help humans assess building stock, construction site and worker capacity, resource management, passport of building materials for circular performance, and as a direct pathway for decreasing the construction industry’s carbon footprint. Dagmar Reinhardt is a roboticist, architect, and associate professor at ADP, The University of Sydney. Reinhardt develops robotic manufacturing for acoustic, structural or constructive criteria; and human robot collaboration systems for user-focused workspaces and environments. Orcid [0000-0003-0477-492X] Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on November 7, 2022

Bus lanes are efficient and bike lanes are fair – transport messages that work - 360 Varsolo Sunio, Robert Cortes Published on July 28, 2022 Building acceptance for sustainable initiatives can be as simple as finding the right way to frame the problem. In 2022 we reached Earth Overshoot Day a little over halfway through the year. Overshoot Day marks the point where we have used up a year’s worth of the planet’s resources and are starting to live on borrowed time. To dial down our resource use, humanity as a whole is being urged to behave more sustainably – and here sustainable transport is key. Sustainable-transport messages from governments and environmental groups need careful framing to cut through. In Manila, such framing built acceptance for new sustainable policies. Often sustainable messages try to align with the values, goals, personality, motivation or beliefs of the target audience. Such an approach is supposed to heighten the messages’ persuasive power. But this assumes people will willingly transition to sustainability with no hesitation or resistance. In reality, even the most well-meaning eco-warrior will struggle to make a smooth transition. Typically, any change involves a back and forth between competing logics. The argument for private vehicles (e.g. they are warm and dry) is pitched against the arguments for public and active transport (e.g. they are healthy and low emissions). Recent research explored a different approach to persuasion by considering ‘rhetorical orientation’. This is the content or information that the speaker stresses and pays attention to. More than 100 articles from online newspapers about transport in the Philippines were analysed to extract 2,500 text segments and determine the arguments of each segment. The researchers identified 11 arguments, or rhetorical orientations, for promoting (or impeding) sustainable travel: convenience, status, health, privacy, safety-security, economic, environmental, impact, justice-equity, geographical and problem-solution. The arguments were organised according to whether they were pro- or anti-sustainability. In general, arguments of convenience, status, health, privacy and safety-security were more anti-sustainability. Economic, environmental, impact, justice-equity and geographical arguments generally pushed towards pro-sustainability. This shows that when it comes to mobility, there are many different ways to look at the situation, and that they may be in conflict with each other. How to make pro-environmental messages more persuasive is a major concern for many individuals, organisations and policymakers. Government organisations advocating for sustainability typically face resistance from existing systems and must fight to have their messaging taken seriously. Paying attention to rhetorical orientations could be a way to build legitimacy. Because the arguments around convenience, status, health, privacy and safety-security tend not to promote sustainability, the results suggest that policy-makers must improve these aspects for active or public transport. It shows where the biggest concerns are for the travelling public and directs priorities for improvements. If issues associated with convenience, status, health, privacy and safety-security are addressed it can make pro-sustainability messages legitimate and more persuasive. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Philippines’ Department of Transportation decided to dedicate lanes on the city’s main thoroughfare, ESDA, for the exclusive use of buses and bicycles to isolate them from mixed traffic. There was resistance: EDSA is notorious for gridlock, and assigning bus- and bicycle-only lanes meant taking lanes away from private vehicles. But eventually, stories emerged on social media that tipped public opinion in favour of accepting the dedicated lanes. In the case of the bus lane, the discussion was the ‘impact’ rhetorical orientation: buses move more people and so they should be given priority in road space. For bicycles, the absence of protected bike lanes was framed as ‘social injustice’, so putting in protected lanes was considered an issue of equity. Adopting an appropriate rhetorical orientation may help policies become more legitimate in the eyes of the public, rendering them more acceptable and credible, and promoting sustainable options. Varsolo Sunio is an S&T Fellow affiliated with the Philippine Department of Science and Technology (Government) and the Chief Research Fellow of the Science Engineering and Management Research Institute of the University of Asia and the Pacific (Academe). He finished his PhD in Urban Management (Transportation) at Kyoto University in 2018 and worked in the Philippine Department of Transportation as a data scientist. Robert Cortes is an assistant professor in the School of Communication of the University of Asia and the Pacific. He finished his MA in Education Leadership at Columbia University (USA) and his PhD in Social Communication at the Pontifical University of Santa Croce (Italy) in 2019. He obtained a postgraduate degree in ancient philology from Polis – The Jerusalem Institute of Languages and the Humanities (Israel) in 2021. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on July 28, 2022

Bushfires have changed the way we holiday - 360 Linden Ashcroft Published on December 11, 2023 Summer holidays in Australia are not what they used to be due to climate change and the increasing threat of bushfires. This time four years ago, before the heartbreak of lockdowns and forced separations, my husband and I were preparing to go on holiday. Maybe you were too. We were heading to our favourite coastal destination in eastern Australia, our final break before becoming parents. We’d packed board games and bathers and books, and were looking forward to relaxing and forgetting the worries of the world. Maybe you were too. We were in for a rude shock. We would instead welcome 2020 by fleeing the place we love, as it was engulfed by smoke and flames. Maybe you did too. The fires, smoke haze and trauma from 2019-2020 Black Summer affected 80 percent of the Australian population. The inferno that brought in the new decade caused unimaginable damage to property and ecosystems, not to mention the human lives lost and forever changed. So as we head into another potentially dry summer, you might be asking the same question as us — are we ready to do it again? After the catastrophe of Black Summer, the world was not only plunged into COVID but into a rare triple-dip La Niña. The warm ocean temperatures in the western Pacific Ocean during 2020–2022 primed Australia’s atmosphere for increased rainfall, and floods became our main concern rather than fires. But this year, things have turned dry once more. August to October 2023 was Australia’s driest three-month period at any time of year since at least 1900. Although three years of good rain means plenty of moisture in the soil, it also means a lot of plant growth, so lots of fuel to burn. Fires have already destroyed more than 60 homes in Queensland, Tasmania, and Western Australia in recent weeks. The major drivers behind this return to dry are La Niña’s brother, El Niño, and relatively cooler than normal ocean temperatures off the coast of Indonesia, also referred to as a positive Indian Ocean Dipole. Both ocean patterns have their greatest impact on Australia’s rainfall during spring, but are generally associated with more severe bushfire seasons and drier summers for much of the country. Late November rain across the country have eased the risk a little, but drought continues in much of eastern New South Wales and into southern Queensland. If you overlay a map of the current drought-affected areas with a map of regions burnt during Black Summer, there are some depressing similarities. AFAC, the national council for fire and emergency services, says in its summer outlook that  there is still an increased fire risk for large areas of Queensland, NSW and the NT, as well as popular holiday locations in Tasmania, Victoria, SA and WA. The Bureau of Meteorology is also forecasting a drier than average summer for much of Western Australia and Queensland. The recent rains won’t undo the record-breaking dry conditions of early spring, and high summer temperatures could quickly crispen the abundant plant growth of the past three years, increasing fuel loads. While the outlooks aren’t as dire as 2019–20, this summer has the greatest bushfire risk since that terrifying start to the year. As AFAC boss Rob Webb said, “We really must treat summer with respect”. Although a relationship between a warmer world and more fire seems obvious, it is tricky to untangle the precise influence of human-induced climate change on bushfires, because there are so many ingredients required. Climate change is certainly making things hotter, which means more evaporation and drier fuel, hotter and more frequent heatwaves, and more volatile bushfire weather. Studies looking at the past 40 years already show a clear increase in metrics used to quantify bushfire risk, such as the length of the season, and the Forest Fire Danger Index, which combines details about how dry the landscape is and the weather conditions likely to produce a blaze. Explorations of future climate using computer simulations also point to an increase in fire weather as things continue to get hotter and drier. But how a hotter planet affects swings between wet and dry — the biggest deciding factor in Australia’s year-to-year bushfire risk — is still unclear. A recent study of past climate using tree rings, coral skeletons and ice cores suggest the set-up which led to Black Summer has been more common in recent decades compared to the past 400 years. However, more work is needed to understand why this might be, and what the future may hold. The impact of climate change on the crucial weather systems is also a big area of research: how does a hotter planet influence the storms that light the fires with dry lightning and the fronts that fan the flames once they are lit? These wicked research problems are scientifically fascinating, but don’t really calm us as we move into a warmer world. Four years on, our holiday packing list looks pretty different. Bluey now instead of board games, floaties to accompany bathers, but still, plenty of books. Among the pile of children’s books is a new release about all the things that make an Australian Christmas. One page features a car driving along the highway, green trees in the foreground but smoke billowing at the back. “Check on bushfires we can’t see on the local ABC”, the rhyme advises, “so we know we’ll get there safely”. Seeing our harrowing 2019 experience in a kids’ book hits home like no scientific article can. Summer in Australia doesn’t mean what it used to. The summers our children are having aren’t the same as the ones we had. There’s still family and friends, fun and love. But there is also an increased need to plan, and prepare, for more extreme summers. To holiday differently, as our precious places are no longer places where we can afford to forget about the worries of the world. The worries are coming to us. So, we’re also packing our updated bushfire plan this summer. And preparing to have some uncomfortable conversations with family members about why action on climate change is so, so important. Maybe you are too. Dr Linden Ashcroft is a Lecturer in Climate Science and Science Communication at The University of Melbourne. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on December 11, 2023

Business stares down big challenges in 2022 - 360 Christo Karuna and Michael Mintrom Published on December 15, 2021 After two years of pandemic-related disruption, businesses will need to address ongoing challenges to operations and culture. By Christo Karuna and Michael Mintrom, Monash University For decades, experts have claimed that business leaders must navigate a world of increasing volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity if their enterprises are to survive. They termed this the V.U.C.A. world. The pandemic brought everyone into the V.U.C.A. world, disrupting global supply chains and presenting new challenges to businesses. Supply chains were already vulnerable, but the pandemic provoked a crisis expected to continue well into 2022, leaving many in-demand goods more scarce and more expensive. Businesses are starting to reconsider their use of lean systems and just-in-time inventory management. To meet customer demand, businesses are having to create robust supply mechanisms to find ways to reduce bottlenecks in industries such as car-making, pharmaceuticals, and semiconductors. This can be expensive, but is increasingly necessary. Businesses now see the importance of safeguarding their supply chains. The current crisis will change the operating context for businesses for years to come, and effective use by businesses of data analytics will be even more critical for competitive advantage. Being forced online has left customers impatient with slower, face-to-face services of the past, changing expectations everywhere, from restaurants to car dealerships to universities. Our phones have gradually become the new High Street, a trend which accelerated in the past two years. Hybrid working is here to stay for millions of workers. Large employers like Salesforce in San Francisco have allowed their staff flexibility in working from wherever they like, despite investing in office space and design. Shared workspaces have become an important by-product of disrupted work arrangements. Businesses have realised downsizing their office space and reducing days in office for their workforce creates a more sustainable, cost-friendly work environment. A typical employer can save more than US$11,000 a year for every half-time telecommuter, the result of a combination of greater productivity and reduced real estate, turnover and absenteeism. The ‘great resignation’ of 2021 has shown employee wellbeing is an important component of establishing a post-pandemic work environment. Seeing the need to create positive workplace cultures, businesses are fostering environments for employees to thrive. Businesses understand the merit in building employee resilience in the face of adversity. To thrive in a post-pandemic V.U.C.A. world organisations will need to be more agile. A recent MIT Sloan study showed company employees spoke more negatively about their company’s lack of agility during the first six months of the pandemic than in the preceding year. Delivering agility will require a shift from hierarchical and rigid organisations to flatter and more responsive ones, where communication happens often, facilitated effectively and quickly with advances in technology. Freelance and remote workers, already used to working this way, have shown they can be delegated the authority to make quick decisions. An employee who can work flexibly in this environment becomes even more valuable to an employer, helping maintain key organisational relationships. Organisational agility goes a long way towards building resilient business systems to deal quickly with disruptions caused by unforeseen events such as COVID-19, and enables organisations to sustain a competitive advantage. Businesses have embraced ‘purpose and meaning’ as guiding operational principles. When ingrained into the mindset of an employee, these principles drive a high-quality workplace culture that maximises value while minimising costs. Purpose drives meaning in the workplace which in turn increases employee engagement, according a 2016 PricewaterhouseCoopers study. The same report found 79 percent of 502 US business leaders surveyed believed that purpose was key to business success and to an organisation’s existence. From the 1,510 employees surveyed, 83 percent valued meaning in their day-to-day work. Purpose and meaning are even more important in the post-COVID-19 environment. Millennial and Gen Z employees — adults under 38 — are increasingly conscious of choosing to work for organisations that they believe care about societal welfare. Managing risk in a V.U.C.A. world requires strong mechanisms for accountability and governance. Sustaining high levels of success over many years is rare for businesses. The past two years have brought greater volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity for businesses everywhere. Many business leaders might wish for a return to how things once were, but profound changes of the pandemic have revealed the need for new ways of doing business. Successful leaders in 2022 and beyond will build workplace relationships that promote a sense of belonging, even as they are supported by increasingly flexible contracts. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™. Dr Christo Karuna is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Accounting at Monash University. He is founding coordinator of the International Consortium for Values-based Governance (ICVG) based at Monash University. Professor Michael Mintrom is the inaugural Director of Better Governance and Policy at Monash University. His books include Public Policy: Investing for a Better World (Oxford University Press). The authors declared no conflict of interest in relation to this article.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on December 15, 2021

Can forensic psychology help improve policing practices? - 360 Magdalene Ng, Kai Li Chung Published on June 14, 2023 Forensic psychology – the practice of psychology in the justice system – offers a way to address Malaysia’s issues with police violence. Police in many parts of the world resort to force – sometimes excessively and unlawfully. While infrequent, Malaysia has experienced cases where detainees have died in custody. Human rights group Suara Rakyat Malaysia, aka SUARAM, has raised concerns about the alleged excessive use of force by the Royal Malaysia Police and ill-treatment of detainees, as well as the lack of accountability and transparency. The group released a Human Rights Report which revealed that 21 deaths in police custody were recorded by the Criminal Investigation Unit on Deaths in Custody in 2022. This unit was founded in 2022 to investigate deaths in police custody under the Royal Malaysia Police Department of Integrity and Standards Compliance. It is managed by 13 police and one public official to investigate any elements of crime or negligence regarding every death in police custody. According to SUARAM, of the 19 cases investigated by the unit, only one led to the prosecution of two police officers and two detainees for voluntarily causing hurt. Malaysia will implement the Independent Police Complaints and Misconduct Commission in July 2023, which is intended to investigate and address allegations of police misconduct and promote accountability, while ensuring adherence to human rights. The introduction of the bill has sparked significant conversations as it is said to lack the authority to uphold police accountability, defeating its purpose. Forensic psychology  – the practice of psychology in the justice system – offers a way to address Malaysia’s issues with police violence. Forensic psychology has been providing expertise on enhancing police practices. Researchers and practitioners have come to understand that reactive policing strategies of the past were not effective in crime prevention, and even led to miscarriages of justice, eroding community trust in policing. There is now a drive for law enforcement agencies to become more proactive and data-driven, which has led to the emergence of an evidence-informed model of policing. Psychologists help law enforcement agencies collect and understand data on their officers’ behaviour – data that can encourage policy change to tackle police use of excessive force and unconscious bias. In the US, there is evidence to suggest African American men are 2.5 times more likely than white men to be killed by police. This disparity is largely due to implicit biases. As a result, implicit bias training programmes were introduced to help officers better manage their biases, change their behaviour, and track their progress. Although the integration of psychology in policing is not a novel concept (for instance in countries such as the UK and the Netherlands), its implementation in Malaysia is new. Despite the prevailing sense that the Malaysian police force is not open to change, the force is receptive to the integration of psychology in policing, as seen by its efforts to engage with non-governmental organisations and academic institutions in recent years. Technology used in crime fighting can also be used to promote police transparency and improve objectivity. With an allocation of MYR 30 million (USD$ 6.5 million), Malaysia is looking to equip its police officers with body cameras. However, camera angles can alter our perception of a filmed police encounter; psychology research has shown that video footage that focuses on the citizen can lead to the citizen being seen more negatively than if the footage showed just the officer or both parties. With the implementation of police body cameras, the use of video evidence will increase in court cases, more research is therefore needed to identify potential biases of video viewers. While this marks a positive beginning, forensic psychology in Malaysia still has a considerable journey ahead. One reason is that forensic psychology has yet to permeate the psychology and law curricula. Research in forensic psychology primarily draws on samples from Western contexts, thus posing theoretical challenges when applying these findings in Malaysia. Most police work is concerned with human behaviour; and given that context and culture shape human cognition and behaviour, it is essential to generate more context-specific publications to justify psychology-informed policies in policing. It is also important to consider Malaysia’s multicultural aspects and idiosyncrasies, as well as deep-seated beliefs. For example, in a country like Malaysia where the “spare the rod and spoil the child” mentality is deeply embedded, the use of physical force or violence is normalised through its routine and trivial use. Despite efforts by the United Nations to prevent corporal punishment, it is still widely accepted in Malaysia, legally and culturally. When a female government minister advised husbands to physically discipline their wives, it highlighted the urgency of promoting progressive attitudes that violence should not be tolerated. Malaysia remains a state member that has not acceded to the United Nations Convention Against Torture, signifying its unreadiness to commit to becoming a torture-free nation. The psychological literature teaches us that social motivations are essential for achieving cooperation within an organisation or community. Following principles of fairness and transparency, giving officers a voice and treating them with respect within their department when handling complaints and disciplinary proceedings would also help reduce police isolation, which in turn leads to increased officer well-being. The more officers feel they are treated fairly within their organisation, the more likely they will enact these principles in their interactions with the public, resulting in improved community relations. Recognising stress in police officers is crucial, especially when PTSD symptoms have been shown to be linked to abusive policing. Knowing the signs of mental distress and having support will assist police do better. More partnerships between mental health organisations and law enforcement agencies are urgently needed in Malaysia. Promoting greater diversity can also help address existing inequalities and enhance effectiveness. Recent efforts to recruit ethnic minorities into the police can help lead to a more diverse, inclusive, and equitable environment that promotes tolerance and respect, a key to preventing violence in a multiracial country like Malaysia. Integrating forensic psychology within Malaysia’s policing framework has immense potential to strengthen the institution which needs to regain public trust. Ultimately the aim should be the cultivation of both the police’s and the community’s understanding that forceful methods do not necessarily result in less crime. Police practices that respect basic rights would lead to greater trust by the community and cooperation between the two. Magdalene Ng is a psychology lecturer at the University of Westminster, UK. Ng is currently researching the role of technology in investigative interviewing and digital forensics in investigations. In her spare time, she plays keys and synths in the London band, Heavy Wild. She tweets at @Magdalene__Ng Kai Li Chung is an associate professor and the Head of Psychology at the University of Reading Malaysia. Her research interests include the psychology of investigative interviewing and dark personality traits. She tweets at @kailichung. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on June 14, 2023

Can Indonesia’s love law ensure domestic harmony? - 360 Susilowati Suparto Published on April 10, 2024 There are risks with making cohabitation illegal, so striking a balance is essential. When Indonesia announced a new law that meant unmarried couples who choose to live together could face jail time, it sparked a media frenzy around the world. The UN called the law a threat to human rights. There were concerns foreign tourists could be arrested and imprisoned — newspapers in Australia shouted about a “Bali bonk ban” — though officials were quick to allay those fears. Under the revised code, which legislators said would uphold Indonesian values, police could only act if family members or spouses made a complaint about a couple. For one political candidate in South Sumatra, however, it was complaints from neighbours that landed him and his partner in trouble. Instead of contacting police, residents took the law into their own hands. The man claimed he already performed “siri” (unregistered Islamic marriage) but this was deemed invalid because he did not use a legal marriage guardian. While the case was settled amicably, it highlighted one of the problems surrounding cohabitation in Indonesia. From local culture and values, cohabitation is also known as kumpul kebo (originally Dutch “koempoel gebouw” or together under the same roof). Indonesia’s Civil Code does not specifically regulate the prohibition of cohabitation. But it is considered a crime under the Criminal Code. The challenge for Indonesia is striking a balance between “Indonesian values” and the rights of private citizens. After the initial reaction to the new code, Indonesia’s Minister of Law and Human Rights responded that police could only act if there was a complaint from parents or a spouse. So, for foreigners, as long as there is no complaint, the authorities cannot act. The danger, of course, is  an increase in unjustified police and vigilante raids targeting family members based solely on suspicion. It may also embolden abusive family members to falsely accuse domestic violence survivors of crimes. Criminalising the act of  living together also violates people’s privacy, which is protected by international human rights law such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which Indonesia is obligated to uphold. There are opinions that issues of decency should not be regulated by the state. Many assert that the state has entered the realm of private life. The “interest” of cohabitation intervention by the Indonesian state in this case is based on the first principle of “God Almighty” in its state’s ideology (Pancasila) as a sign that Indonesians hold religious principles. Many religions do not allow adultery for married or unmarried couples. The separation of private life is a challenge for countries that recognise the principle of divinity such as Indonesia. Indeed, there are many challenges in implementing this cohabitation rule in Indonesia. As a country that holds the principle of religious diversity, cohabitation does need to be regulated specifically. In designing a law or formulating a rule of law, it must lead to the formation of rules that can accommodate the needs of the times. But it must also fulfil a sense of justice for the community in the long term by looking at the cultural and philosophical aspects of the nation. Susilowati Suparto is a lecturer in the Civil Law Department at the Padjadjaran University’s Faculty of Law. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on April 10, 2024

Can lab-grown meat satisfy India's growing food needs? - 360 Pawan K. Dhar Published on August 4, 2023 Lab-grown meat isn’t only being produced in the US. The fledgling industry in India faces both unique opportunities and challenges. The US Department of Agriculture’s recent decision to approve the sale and distribution of cultured meat, produced by Good Meat and Upside Foods, has led to renewed global interest in the food technology. This makes the US the second country in the world, behind Singapore, to have the products available for sale. But cultured meat is not only being produced in California. There is also a fledgling industry in India. The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India is currently reviewing the cultured food sector and may consider granting the regulatory approval for such products to be sold in India. Cultured meat, also known as lab-grown meat and by various other names, represents a groundbreaking development in the food industry. It involves cultivating animal cells in controlled environments while eliminating the need for traditional livestock farming and slaughter. Stem cells derived from animal sources are artificially kept alive in bioreactors, grown to a certain abundance, and then harvested and customised for human consumption. With more than eight billion people living on the planet, a number expected to increase to nine billion people by 2040, demand for meat and other sources of protein will continue to increase. Ensuring sufficient food supply will remain a challenge. These pressures are likely to be particularly acute in South Asia and Southeast Asia where countries are facing massive population pressures distributed over a smaller land mass than equivalent population increases in Global North countries. In 2022 a report from India indicated that among a population of 1.4 billion, only 16.6 percent of men and 29.4 percent of women between the ages 15 and 49 exclusively followed a vegetarian diet. Solutions will have to be found in the next few years as currently available food resources are diminishing fast. To meet the surging demand, cultured meat is expected to offer a viable solution that is economical, slaughter-free, environmentally sustainable and safe, although the technology has yet to be applied and proven at scale. Traditional livestock farming, a booming sector in India, poses environmental challenges like deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions and high water consumption. Cultured meat offers the potential to bolster food security by providing a consistent and dependable nutrition source independent of weather conditions or land availability. India’s cultured meat industry, however, faces some unique challenges in getting off the ground. The production of cultured meat requires advanced technological infrastructure. Developing the proof-of-the-concept at the lab level is one thing but sustaining a large scale production, treatment and distribution of cultured meat remains a critical challenge. Cultured meat production is significantly more expensive than conventional methods of meat production due to the costs of the growth medium, scaffolding material and technological support. It also necessitates strict safety and nutritional assessments and fair market practices, including clear labeling and traceability of cell sources. Fetal bovine serum, a costly ingredient in the culture medium, is one of the main contributors to higher expenses. Finding alternatives to fetal bovine serum could significantly bring the cost of cultured meat down, and this technology is already being developed in India. The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India is currently evaluating pathways towards the development of a regulatory framework for cultured meat production and distribution. Such a regulatory framework, combined with government incentives to lower the carbon footprint of cultured meat and subsidise the cost of its production, could really turbocharge the growth of the industry in India. It’s important to note that the cultured meat industry will not result in unemployment in the conventional meat industry. The cultured meat sector is expected to mainly produce products in the boneless (minced) category. The lab-grown meat and farm-grown meat industries will eventually coexist, as replicating the entire architecture of meat in the lab is still a long shot. While India has a long history of meat consumption, currently consumer awareness of cultured meat is low and it is not yet approved for sale. Convincing consumers to embrace new and unfamiliar food products is always challenging and to reach mass acceptance cultivated meat will need to deliver the taste, texture and nutritional profile of conventional meat. But once regulatory approvals are in place, the costs are brought down and big players come into the industry, cultured meat has the potential to be a major disruptor in the Indian market. In future, one would expect to see established regulatory guidelines on the production and distribution of cultured meat, in particular, prescriptions around how it could be imported to or exported from India; a policy on ‘exotic’ cultured meats like wooly mammoth meatballs, for example; and discussions on the sustainability of the sector. Only time will tell if reaching the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 2 of Zero Hunger will be partly achieved by food scientists in eradicating hunger and malnutrition through making cultured meat mainstream. heads the Synthetic Biology group in the School of Biotechnology at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He is the co-founder of ClearMeat, India’s first lab-based meat company, and is also a member of the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India’s working group on cultured meat. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on August 4, 2023

Can Malaysia's public universities move away from racial quotas? - 360 Rozilini Mary Fernandez-Chung Published on May 8, 2024 While boosting Bumiputera enrolment, Malaysia’s racial quotas in universities face criticism for hindering meritocracy and causing brain drain. In 2023, a video of a Malaysian graduate giving a powerful speech at his convocation ceremony went viral and touched the hearts of many Malaysians. He spoke out against the discriminatory racial quotas at Malaysian public universities, recounting a story about how his deceased friend failed to secure a spot in matriculation despite good academic results. The graduate stressed how the government and public universities should practise meritocracy over divisive quotas. It is believed the narrative surrounding Malaysia’s racial quotas in education, introduced as part of the broader New Economic Policy (NEP) in the early 1970s, was aimed at promoting economic equality among races. Yet, preferential practices of selecting Malays for elite administrative roles date back to the colonial period. These practices were formally recognised in the 1948 Federation of Malaya Agreement and enshrined in Article 153 of the Malaysian Constitution. The shift in 1971 was significant, marking the creation and systematic implementation of a wide-ranging ethnic preferential policy. This policy was manifested in higher education through quota systems for public university admissions to ensure substantial representation of Bumiputera (ethnic Malays and other indigenous ethnic groups in Peninsular and East Malaysia) and the establishment of higher education institutions primarily serving Bumiputera students. In 1971, Malay enrolment in tertiary education stood at 54.1 percent, which increased to 72.8 percent by 1980. After more than four decades, the implementation of these preferential admissions practices for Bumiputera students has resulted in a significant percentage of enrolment (81.9 percent) in public sector institutions, highlighting the policy’s lasting impact and scale in shaping educational opportunities and demographic representation within Malaysia’s higher education landscape. While these measures have had successes, they also face criticism for perpetuating racial divisions and overlooking meritocracy. Critics argue that such policies have contributed to a ‘brain drain,’ with talented non-Bumiputera students and graduates seeking education and employment opportunities abroad. This outflow of talent significantly challenges Malaysia’s economic and technological advancement aspirations. Attempts to implement merit-based admission have not seen much success as the pathways into public higher education are either through nationally standardised or institutional-based assessments. The racial quotas, part of the broader NEP, aimed at economic parity now translate into a segmented higher education system. This has been successful in increasing Bumiputera representation in higher education but criticised for fostering racial divisions and overlooking meritocracy and eroding the quality of public-funded higher education in Malaysia. The effects of this policy extend beyond the confines of university campuses. Non-Bumiputera students, compelled to enrol in the private and more expensive higher education sector, find themselves saddled with a substantially heavier and longer student loan repayment. This financial strain persists deep into their careers and family lives, impacting their economic well-being, and resulting in further brain drain. Proponents of the quota system emphasise its role in ensuring educational opportunities for Bumiputera communities, who have historically been economically and educationally marginalised. They argue that these policies are essential for maintaining social harmony and national cohesion by levelling the playing field. Conversely, opponents of racial quotas call for a more merit-based system, arguing that talent and hard work should be the primary criteria for educational advancement and promotion. They highlight the importance of creating a competitive yet fair environment that rewards excellence, irrespective of racial background, to drive the country forward. For a constructive discussion on racial quotas, acknowledging the shared objectives of educational equity and national unity is crucial. The dialogue should evolve from a zero-sum perspective to one embracing the diverse needs and potentials of all Malaysians. Given Malaysia’s unique topography, history, and trajectory, policy reforms for an inclusive future are necessary. These include embracing meritocracy with sensitivity, offering targeted scholarships and support programmes, and promoting a multicultural educational ethos to combat brain drain. Implementing a merit-based admissions system that also considers socioeconomic status could ensure that disadvantaged students from all ethnic backgrounds have access to higher education opportunities. This approach can help balance the need for competitiveness and quality with the imperative of inclusivity and diversity. Expanding scholarship programmes and support services for underprivileged students, irrespective of their racial background, could mitigate the need for racial quotas. Such initiatives could focus on rural and economically disadvantaged urban areas, providing a ladder for talented individuals to climb. Developing a curriculum that mirrors Malaysia’s multicultural fabric will foster mutual respect and a unified national identity. Addressing the brain drain requires creating a conducive environment for career growth and innovation, ensuring equitable employment opportunities, and cultivating a meritocracy culture in both public and private sectors. The debate over racial quotas in Malaysian education reflects deeper issues related to national identity, equity, and the vision for Malaysia’s future. By engaging in a constructive dialogue that seeks to understand and address the concerns of all stakeholders, Malaysia can chart a path towards an educational system that truly reflects the richness of its diversity. The goal should be to create policies that address historical injustices and adapt to the evolving needs of a dynamic and diverse society. In doing so, Malaysia can harness the full potential of its people, ensuring that the nation thrives as a beacon of unity and progress while simultaneously achieving the economic progress it desires. Dr Rozilini Mary Fernandez-Chung PFHEA, is an Associate Professor at the University of Nottingham Malaysia. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on May 8, 2024

Can space stay peaceful during tension on Earth? - 360 Qisong He Published on April 12, 2022 If spacefaring nations can set aside geopolitics, the hope and cooperation that characterised the dawn of the space age will come to the fore once again. With the launch of Sputnik in 1957 and Yuri Gagarin’s space flight in 1961, Russia’s spacefaring marked the dawn of a new age. The era saw treaties that expressed aspirations for international cooperation and the betterment of humankind. In recent decades, though, space technology has often been treated by nations as a tool for gaining national power and status. Parties to the 1967 UN Outer Space Treaty recognised “the common interest of all mankind in the progress of the exploration and use of outer space for peaceful purposes” and declared their belief that “the exploration and use of outer space should be carried on for the benefit of all peoples irrespective of the degree of their economic or scientific development”. Space technology, including manned technology, has the potential to greatly enhance the development of science and technology in general. In turn, this advancement would not only create wealth and jobs but also contribute to the development of intelligent technology, significantly enhancing human society and our well-being. In 2011 the UN General Assembly declared that it was “deeply convinced of the common interest of mankind in promoting and expanding the exploration and use of outer space, as the province of all mankind, for peaceful purposes and in continuing efforts to extend to all States the benefits derived therefrom”. In 2015 the UN General Assembly adopted the “2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” (UN 2030 Agenda), which put forward 17 Sustainable Development Goals. These address the three dimensions of society, economy and environment, so the world can move along a sustainable development path. Based on the contribution of space science and technology to human development, manned space-flight technology can make a great contribution to the UN 2030 Agenda. At the first UN Conference on the Exploration and Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (UNISPACE+50), held in Vienna in June 2018 the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (UNCOPUOS) presented the Space 2030 Agenda. It articulated a comprehensive, inclusive and strategically oriented vision for strengthening international cooperation in space exploration. In the Space 2030 Agenda space is seen as a major driver of, and contributor to, the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. According to realist theory, a nation’s power and status include technology and military power. Space technology is a dual-use technology and a symbol of a country’s overall technological and military power. Great powers invest in the space sector in order to gain power and status. Manned flight was the result of the United States–Soviet Union space race during the Cold War. The US and the Soviet Union competed fiercely to land a crewed vessel on the Moon, and ultimately the US won the race. After the 2010s, the space powers began a new race to the Moon. They sought lunar sovereignty under the pretext of mining the Moon for minerals (or at least jurisdiction over the mining areas). Although manned lunar landings and exploitation of lunar resources are beneficial to human society, participating countries (especially the US) were really aiming to increase their own power and status. In line with the above, some countries use space technology as an arm of diplomacy and as a tool to advance national interests – for example, by offering or denying space technology to other countries. During the Cold War era, the US provided space technology to its allies, friends and partners to enhance and consolidate US leadership in the West; conversely, the Soviet Union denied space technology to its partners to keep them under its control. As a result, the US and the West won the Cold War–era space competition. In the post–Cold War era, the US continues to cooperate with its allies and partners in space, hoping to establish a unified front in the development of new space rules and thereby establish a space order and space landscape in its favour. Russia and China, in the meantime, have intensified their cooperation. The two countries coordinate closely and jointly propose initiatives such as the Prevention of the Placement of Weapons in Outer Space Treaty and the No First Placement of Weapons in Outer Space, which aim to prevent the weaponisation and battlefielding of space. In space technology, the two countries work closely together to form a relatively stable space triangle consisting of China, Russia and the US. China and Russia have cooperated in human space flight and a joint exploration of Mars and the Moon. They are also working together to develop navigation satellites, jointly constructing international lunar research stations and exchanging rocket-engine technologies. There is also a strong relationship in the field of space military technology. Russia provides China with early-warning technology, and the two countries conduct computer-simulated anti-missile drills together. Importantly, China and Russia supply public goods for space, aimed at preventing the emergence of a space ‘Kindleberger trap’ – an undesirable situation in which rising powers fail to provide the international public goods that declining established powers are supposed to provide during a period of transitioning power. The term is named after US policy architect Charles Kindleberger, who saw this set of circumstances as the catalyst for much of the global instability of the 1930s. At present, cross-border cooperation in space technology is terminated or cancelled during times of crisis or conflict. At the beginning of the Russia–Ukraine conflict, the West and Russia mutually cancelled their space cooperation. The only redeeming factor is that the West and Russia continue to cooperate on the International Space Station. Space technology now carries too great a geopolitical load, depriving it of its supposed mission of promoting international peace and the common welfare of humanity. For the sake of the continuation of human civilization and its advancement to a more distant planet, it is time to return space to peaceful use. The words of the Outer Space Treaty must be on everyone’s mind. Perhaps the first and last American astronauts to land on the Moon said it best. Neil Armstrong declared that landing on the Moon was “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”. Gene Cernan, the last astronaut to walk on the Moon, got back into the lunar module and promised: “We shall return in peace and hope for all mankind”. Manned space technology can make a tangible contribution to the achievement of the UN 2030 Agenda and can deliver on COPUOS’ commitment to the Space 2030 Agenda. In future manned space flights, all spacefaring powers could benefit from abandoning geopolitical thinking and working together to use space technology to combat the risks and threats humanity faces. Qisong He is a professor at the East China University of Political Science and Law, Shanghai, China. Prof. He declared no conflicts of interest in relation to this article. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on April 12, 2022

Can sports innovate without losing the romance? - 360 Sebastian Uhrich, Kim Uhlendorf Published on February 2, 2023 In-stadium augmented reality can change the way fans watch sport — but is that what they want? Professional sports are fighting harder than ever for the attention of the next generation. With TikTok, streaming services and interactive experiences like video games taking up more time of young people, some sporting bodies are looking to technology to enhance the fan experience. A key technology that might help connect traditional sports to young people is augmented reality. Allowing spectators in stadiums the chance to have real-time overlays to offer a lot of intuitively appealing benefits: live statistics supplementing the on-field action,  animated players and mascots, real-time 3D effects (such as team line-ups) embedded, face filters, or even virtual directions around the stadium facilities. Leagues and teams are trying. National Football League teams such as the Carolina Panthers and Baltimore Ravens have introduced “mixed-reality” mascots, large virtual depictions of their namesake animals that made for spectacular viral footage. At the 2022 FIFA World Cup, fans in Qatar could download a FIFA+ app that could project an augmented reality overlay of team and player data, such as heatmaps, line-ups and statistics. Sporting administrators are keen to wed augmented reality with the fan experience, but the enthusiasm hasn’t been fully reciprocated. Market research indicates that spectators are inclined to try out new technology offered in stadiums, but there’s also a lot of pushback. The power of rebellious fans has been historically potent. American broadcaster Fox invested over US$2 million in the early 1990s to develop ‘FoxTrax’, an augmented reality-based technology to help ice hockey fans follow the puck during televised National Hockey Games. Despite the substantial innovation, the gimmick lasted two years, sunk by fan backlash. In March 2022, the National Basketball Association and ESPN collaborated to make a 3D highlight reel of a real-life contest between the Dallas Mavericks and Brooklyn Nets. The pixelated blurry footage resembled a dated video game, and the “NBA CourtView” product hasn’t been seen since. Resistance is multi-dimensional. Some are shy adopters, holding out until they see others doing it. Some will reject innovations no matter how promising the technology looks. The most disruptive will rebel against new technology in stadiums, discouraging others from taking it up and calling for a boycott to force their way back. Anti-innovation sentiments among sports fans have their own unique drivers. On the surface, backlash against video assistant refereeing technology might seem puzzling — one would assume sports fans would welcome an innovation that reduces the prospect of an umpiring error that could influence the outcome of the game. But research has shown some fans disapprove of the technology, for it robs them of spirited, emotionally-driven debates over refereeing decisions with other fans in lieu of a robust, more objectively correct verdict. A 2022 study of over 1,000 sports fans in Germany and the UK unearthed other concerns they had about the integration of in-stadium augmented reality technology. Some feared that integrating apps with the in-stadium experience could hurt the in-stadium atmosphere, distract fans from the live action on and off the pitch, and that using augmented reality is at odds with the identity of a ‘good’ or ‘sincere’ sports fan. Worries that the experience of live sport is predicated on holistic fan buy-in echoes across other research on sports fans and use of technology: singing, clapping, cheering, supporting one’s team and engaging with nearby barrackers to create a community oriented around live action. Part of fans’ trepidation to embrace a data-rich world of augmented reality is the risk of sterilising a pastime that is driven by emotion, for instance heated discussions among spectators might be cooled by the glut of statistics available in real-time. Surveyed fans tended to enjoy having emotionally charged conversations with friends and some expressed concern that the character of discussions would shift away from enjoyably speculative to objective and data-based with increased augmented reality integration. There were other pragmatic concerns uncovered by research — some fear that using augmented reality technology in stadiums might be disruptive or prompt criticism from nearby spectators, while others worry about surrendering data and the security implications of using such apps. Such trepidation does not necessarily mean sporting administrators are misguided for pushing ahead with augmented reality. The opportunities are vast and there have been widely lauded integrations, especially on television broadcasts. ESPN’s pioneering virtual first down marker for NFL broadcasts have become ubiquitous in all coverage of the sport, while the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers have launched an augmented reality-based ‘ClipperVision’ broadcast of their games that utilises technology to show live diagrams, shooting percentages and player details. But research suggests adopters of augmented reality might need to carefully consider how it’s rolled out. Limitations could be placed on the initial rollout of augmented reality — for instance, statistics might only be available during breaks to avoid dampening live atmosphere during match play. Sports capture a special alchemy for many supporters, blending analytic brilliance with athletic prowess with deep emotional connections. Finding a way to innovate without casting aside those romantic bonds is a challenge all forward-thinking administrators are staring down. Sebastian Uhrich is Professor of Sport Business Administration at the German Sport University Cologne in Germany. His research focuses on understanding the psychology and behaviour of consumers, particularly in sports contexts. Ms Uhlendorf’s research was supported by the Internal Research Funds of the German Sport University Cologne under Grant L-11-10011-235-061000. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on February 2, 2023

Can Sri Lanka turn around its corrupted democracy? - 360 Neil DeVotta Published on December 6, 2021 The Rajapaksa family have drastically weakened democracy in Sri Lanka, but face a stirring civilian resistance that is picking up momentum. By Neil DeVotta, Wake Forest University Once feared by the country’s most powerful, the Rajapaksa family that rule Sri Lanka now see their effigies hit and burned in the street, by many who once voted for them. Although their ethnonationalist government sits securely in power, there is mounting resistance to a regime that has driven Sri Lanka into economic crisis amid continuous corruption. And they will not be aided by the United States — who did not extend Sri Lanka an invitation to its upcoming online ‘Summit for Democracy’. The summit aims to challenge authoritarianism, address corruption and advance human rights — all difficult goals for Sri Lanka, since the majoritarian politics that led to civil war and grotesque human rights violations still lives on. The war ended in 2009, but corruption and authoritarianism have reached new heights under the rule of former president Mahinda Rajapaksa from 2005 to 2015, and his brother — President Gotabaya Rajapaksa — elected in 2019. Yet while Sri Lanka’s backsliding democracy stands out, so too does the resilience of its civilians. Most Sri Lankans may reject pluralism and justify the prevailing majoritarian milieu, but they make abundantly clear they value the right to protest and vote. If the former contributes to democratic backsliding, the latter at least allows for electoral democracy. EMBED START Image {id: "editor_0"} EMBED END Image {id: "editor_0"} The ethnocentric policies that rule Sri Lanka efficiently took hold within a decade after independence— Sinhalese Buddhists rose to completely dominate state-associated institutions. This has benefitted so many powerful sectors — government servants, security, Buddhist clergy, and corrupt entrepreneurs — that completely reversing course is an almost impossible challenge. To grow and keep power, nationalists need enemies, real or manufactured. In the civil war, the terrorist tactics of separatist Tamil rebels energised Buddhist nationalists. Post-war, these forces have targeted Muslims. Extremist group Bodu Bala Sena (Buddhist Power Force, or ‘BBS’) most forcefully spread anti-Muslim sentiment — abetted by Mahinda Rajapksa’s Government. While Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s election as president in 2019 prompted fears that anti-Muslim rioting would ramp up, the health and economic crises created by COVID-19 seemd to stimie the anti-Muslim forces. The pandemic, however, did not completely prevent the government from tormenting the Muslim community. Congested Muslim areas in Colombo were among the first to register cases of COVID-19, and some claimed Muslims were spreading the virus. The government’s requirement that all who died from COVID-19 be cremated was especially traumatic for Muslims, whose religion mandates burial. The government persisted with a blanket cremation policy, despite the World Health Organization’s declaration that burying coronavirus victims was safe. The government only reversed course in February 2021, when it required predominantly Muslim states in the United Nations Human Rights Commission to vote against a resolution brought against it. Rampant corruption is another major factor undermining the rule of law in Sri Lanka. Family, friends and allies of the Rajapaksas have profited from lofty, well-paying state-funded positions that require little work. Today Gotabaya, Mahinda, two other brothers, and Mahinda’s son oversee departments and agencies that collectively control nearly 70 percent of the island’s budget. This takes place while the Presidential Commission of Inquiry on Political Victimization, created by Rajapaksa’s Government, absolves the family and their allies of criminal charges. Officials from the previous government’s Attorney General’s Office and Criminal Investigation Department who filed the charges are now being prosecuted for allegedly fabricating evidence. Chinese-funded projects have played a large role in promoting Rajapaksa, just as Chinese state support for the family has aided their authoritarianism. The no-revenue generating, non-concessionary, non-transparent, and unsolicited “blingfrastructure” projects have lined Rajapaksa pockets, but also have saddled Sri Lanka with massive unpayable debts and led to a dire economic climate. Sri Lankans have revolted against resultant scarcities, showing the island’s resilience as a democracy. Sri Lanka was pushed into debt by civil war, but war-related corruption has seen the debt increase. Repaying China for exorbitant infrastructural projects, debts owed to non-Chinese entities, and corruption that persisted through the pandemic have all contributed to a severe balance of payments crisis. Government coffers contain only around US$1.5 billion in reserves as of November 2021, while debt payments for 2022 amount to around US$4.3 billion.  The foreign currency shortage has prevented banks from providing importers lines of credit, which has caused long queues for essential items like petrol and milk powder. The government banned chemical fertilisers, saving around US$400 million and appealing to nationalist sentiment by claiming locally-produced organic fertiliser was better. But the decision led to widespread protests from farmers. Teachers also went on strike, citing rampaging inflation, made worse by the government recklessly printing money. Protests have been led by grassroots civil society groups. Previously, village-level groups may have avoided challenging Rajapaksa governments given their mutual commitment to Sinhalese Buddhist supremacy. Their now-vociferous demands show the strength of civil society, and resilience of democracy in Sri Lanka. It seems illiberal democracy stands to dominate the world in the years ahead, and this will certainly be the case in Sri Lanka, where majoritarianism is here to stay. But an illiberal democracy can be improved faster than a mature autocracy. The trick is to craft an ethnoreligious compact where majoritarianism coexists in a peaceful and diverse setting. While Sri Lanka’s leaders should be pushed to reconcile with minorities, reject ethno-religious violence, and promote a more pluralist setting, one must be realistic about what to expect. Pro-democracy advocates should continue to engage with the government while advocating for democratic reforms. Less engagement will push the country’s leaders to further lean on autocratic states and exacerbate democratic backsliding. There’s also an opportunity to  leverage the island’s dependence on western export markets to push for pro-democracy policies. The Elections Commission and anti-corruption bodies remain important for promoting transparency, and sanctions remain a live option to stimie individuals and their families who violate human rights and thrive on corruption. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™. Neil DeVotta is Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Wake Forest University. Professor De Votta declared no conflicts of interest in relation to this article.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on December 6, 2021

Can tech really help tackle domestic violence? - 360 Abbas Kouzani Published on November 29, 2023 Tech has a role in helping protect women from abusive men, but it’s not a cure-all. The murder of Lilie James in the toilet block of a Sydney school by her former boyfriend in October shocked Australia. Her death came amid a spike in alleged domestic violence killings — six women died in the space of 10 days. The deaths again thrust the issue of domestic violence into the spotlight. They also thrust technology’s potential to help prevent domestic violence into the public eye. Since Ms James’s murder, some experts have called for GPS tracking and monitoring on men flagged as potential killers — suggesting that an online monitoring program developed in the UK, and currently being trialled there for potential domestic violence perpetrators — be introduced in Australia. GPS tracking is just one example of how technology could help tackle domestic violence. This is a field that is rapidly advancing and shows great potential, although most tech solutions require more work before they’re ready for use in the real world. Perpetrators are increasingly using technology — smartphones and social media —to stalk, harass, threaten and abuse their victims. Among their arsenal are location tracking-using GPS apps and spyware to monitor a victim’s communications. But the same tech can be used to tackle domestic violence, helping to identify, reduce, and prevent violence; hold perpetrators to account; train support personnel; and provide resources and therapy to victims. A few of these tech approaches are already widely established: ankle monitors to track perpetrators is a decades-old example. Websites and smartphone apps to help and inform victim-survivors are becoming widespread, as are online support hotlines, digital support groups, and evidence repositories used by support providers. Advances in cybersecurity (such as encryption, one-time passwords and virtual private networks) are increasingly helping protect survivors from monitoring and cyberstalking. So, too, are spy-detection tools and “bug detectors” used to find tracking devices. But other tech approaches that are largely still in the research phase show great potential to help combat domestic violence, as this recent review of the literature found. Many of these approaches aim to harness the endless possibilities of AI. AI can analyse data from social media, emails and web content, as well as sensor devices — including smartwatches, surveillance cameras and motion sensors — to detect patterns that indicate abuse. By picking up on indicators such as heart rate and skin temperature, or even by identifying violent sounds, sensations such as beating or pushing, these technologies could identify domestic violence incidents before or as they occur. They could even automatically alert authorities. EMBED START Image {id: "editor_4"} EMBED END Image {id: "editor_4"} Location tracking devices are also becoming more sophisticated. The humble ankle bracelet has historically used GPS technology; this was later enhanced with additional methods (such as tracking using WiFi and mobile signals) to also function effectively in indoor environments including large buildings. Other anti-stalking and anti-monitoring approaches being developed use AI methods to identify stalkerware and keyloggers, or to recognise physical stalking in camera feeds. Tech innovations could also help prevent image-based abuse, which is on the rise. Sensitive contents can be labelled with ‘digital fingerprints’ to prevent dissemination without a user’s consent. Content monitoring can be used to prevent uploading of videos and images tagged as non-consensual. AI algorithms can analyse videos and images and identify explicit contents. Virtual reality (VR) is also being explored for first responder training, and for perpetrator rehabilitation. VR simulators can create a sense of being present in a domestic violence environment — acting as an “empathy machine” that puts perpetrators in a victim-survivor’s shoes. One such machine is being trialled in France in an attempt to stop perpetrators from reoffending. AI-enabled conversational chatbots are being trialled to anonymously offer support and advice to victim-survivors. “Sophia,” the first chatbot for survivors of domestic violence, has been developed by a team at Swiss human rights organisation Spring ACT. The developers claim the multi-lingual chatbot can help victims “gather evidence, assess their rights, learn their options 24/7 without trace”. For victim-survivors who are isolated or afraid of speaking out about their abuse due to stigma, such conversational AI tools could be a game-changer. While these advances are significant, most are not yet developed enough to fully address the challenges of identifying, intervening, and preventing domestic violence. As some researchers have put it, these technologies are “necessary without being sufficient.” Human resources to support victims of domestic violence are still crucial. Tech innovations face other roadblocks. Many carry privacy concerns: Smartphones and apps may be used to track victims’ location via hidden spyware, while digital platforms carry a risk of hacking and “data sniffing”. Some researchers have expressed concern over the ubiquity of smart home devices– ultimately suggesting these devices may be more likely to be “co-opted by men to control and abuse women” than to be helpful in detecting and reporting such abuse. Ambient and wearable sensors face tampering risks, as well as data quality degradation due to environmental factors (such as low lighting for surveillance cameras). Wearable sensors may cause discomfort, need regular charging, and get interrupted by drained batteries. And some tech innovations, such as virtual reality platforms and wearable sensors, can be expensive. The effectiveness of AI algorithms is also limited by the lack of large datasets of images, audio or text. These algorithms often also require extensive computational resources to deliver real-time responses. Over time, while tech won’t stamp out domestic violence on its own, it can play an important part in predicting, preventing and responding to what is a pressing issue. Dr Abbas Kouzani is a Professor of Engineering with Deakin University. He leads the Smart Technologies Research Theme, and has undertaken research projects for over 40 industry partners. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™. Editors Note: In the story “Gender violence” sent at: 27/11/2023 08:52. This is a corrected repeat.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on November 29, 2023

Can the ATT take any lessons from the new EU dual-use Regulation? - 360 Published on August 23, 2022 This week, the Eighth Conference of States Party to the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) will take place in Geneva. The annual conference comes just a few months after important changes in strategic trade control in Europe and the ATT negotiations could look to those changes for inspiration. In September 2021 the European Union “recast” the regulation on the trade in dual-use items (2021/821). ‘Dual-use items’ are those with both civilian and military applications, for example GPS software or high-powered lasers. The update came after almost ten years of discussions and negotiations. In the Recast, the EU has faced up to new technological, economic and political challenges. In particular, to emerging dual-use technologies, as well as to the intangible transfer of technology, for example, uploading sensitive information to the cloud. The Recast also mentioned and emphasised for the very first time the role of academic and research institutions that face special challenges in export control of technology. The ATT has so far overlooked technology transfer, but it is a crucial element in developing and trading weapons and their components. Specific technology is often needed to enable or enhance military items, including weapons of mass destruction. Accordingly, the international treaty could consider widening its scope to include controls on military-related technology. The Recast also seems to bridge some gaps that remained in the previous regulation by clarifying some definitions, for example, the definitions of export and exporter, and by introducing new ones, such as the definition (and the control) of technical assistance. The ATT provides no definitions of the activities covered. This is understandable since it was negotiated at a global level, and not at a regional one as is the case for the EU, leading to more compromise on wording and control. But if no definitions are in the ATT, there is no reason it couldn’t include control of technical assistance and technology. The ATT could also address internal compliance programs and due diligence, that is, the policies and procedures that an organisation or company use to comply with the export regulations, for example, risk-assessments. Encouraging nations to establish their own measures in this regard could be crucial to strengthening the international coverage of conventional weapons trade. The Recast also endeavours to increase harmonisation and transparency by encouraging states to implement paperless e-licensing systems. The ATT could also emphasise this, paving the way for a future system of sharing and pooling information. The Recast has called for nations to pursue enhanced co-operation between national authorities such as customs, but also with supranational authorities (for example, the EU Commission). This enhanced co-operation requires sharing information more regularly and with greater detail, and a shared reporting and database could aid in this regard. The Recast has also called for an enforcement coordination mechanism; a platform to exchange best practices of national enforcement authorities. While the EU is a unique supranational organisation, other economic and regional unions (for example ASEAN) could decide to enhance co-operation on trade controls and enforcement. For this reason, it is important that ATT stresses regional co-operation. Furthermore, setting up technical expert groups, an existing EU practice formalised in the Recast, is something the ATT can learn from. The Treaty could establish new working groups to address specific issues, for example, working groups dedicated to clarification of some aspects of the Treaty. Finally, following the Recast, the Treaty could work towards being more precise and comprehensive. The Treaty has an opportunity to address the transfer of weapons for non-commercial reasons (for example diplomatic reasons). And it could better define what is meant by “parts and components” and include reference to dual-use items. Improved definitions of parts and components could encourage nations not to overlook an important aspect of the assembly of weapons and supply chain. While dual-use items are not included in the Treaty, the logic underpinning the Treaty should apply both to purely military parts as well as dual-use items — if a nation can easily buy a helicopter meant for peaceful uses and then acquire a weapons system from another source, it can assemble the two parts to finally obtain a fully functional military item. It’s why the Recast, to fulfill its objective, endeavours to cover all items with civil and military purposes, peaceful and non-peaceful application, and include those with the potential to violate human rights, for example cyber-surveillance items and emerging technologies. If the ATT were to stress the importance of dual-use items it would go further towards controlling all arms transfers. The new elements of the Recast are an important step forward for arms control. The ATT could take inspiration and work towards a more efficient implementation of the control of conventional weapons. is a researcher, assistant and PhD candidate at the University of Liège. Her main area of research and expertise concerns strategic trade controls (systems, regimes and national implementation). She declares no conflict of interest. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on August 23, 2022

Can the ICC prosecute Putin, the head of a non-member state? - 360 Monique Cormier Published on May 23, 2022 The International Criminal Court moved fast on allegations of war crimes perpetrated in Ukraine, but those looking for swift justice may be disappointed. If the wheels of justice turn slowly, the international community’s efforts to prosecute Russian President Vladimir Putin for war crimes are likely to move at an even slower pace. Mere days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor Karim Khan announced his office would be investigating allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity. This week he dispatched a team of 42 investigators, the largest ever delegation, in search of evidence. The stakes are high, but there are nuances to the ICC’s role and what the court can and can’t do in this situation. Tempering expectations of what the ICC can achieve for Ukraine is important. The investigation and evidence-gathering could take years, only a small number of arrest warrants are likely ever to be issued, and it may be that some suspects are able to avoid arrest. Anyone who does end up in a Hague courtroom will face lengthy trial proceedings. Neither Ukraine nor Russia are state parties to the Rome Statute that gives the ICC its power, but in 2014 Ukraine made a limited declaration to accept the ICC’s jurisdiction over crimes committed on its territory from that time onwards. So even though Russia has not agreed to the ICC’s jurisdiction, the court   has the authority to prosecute Russians suspected of committing war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide on Ukrainian territory. The ICC will not, however, have jurisdiction over the crime of aggression in this situation. This is unfortunate, as the Russian invasion was a clear act of aggression under international law. But when the crime of aggression was being discussed for inclusion in the Rome Statute, most state parties didn’t want the ICC to have jurisdiction unless both the aggressor and victim states agreed to it. In this instance, the aggressor state – Russia – has not agreed to any aspect of the ICC’s jurisdiction, so prosecuting the crime of aggression in the ICC is off the table. So how will the investigation proceed, and who might face trial? The ICC has an independent prosecutor, whose team is responsible for undertaking investigations and deciding which individuals to charge with one or more crimes. Like prosecutors in national legal systems, the ICC Prosecutor is responsible for presenting evidence against the accused at a trial and convincing the judges of the accused’s guilt. There is no jury at the ICC; instead, there is a panel of international judges. The investigation will likely take a long time and it will almost certainly be years before any suspects face court in the Hague – if any ever do. The ICC does not have its own police force and relies on states to arrest suspects and transfer them to the court. Any Russians wanted by the ICC could theoretically evade arrest by avoiding travel outside Russia. In choosing which individuals to charge with crimes, the Prosecutor will consider the evidence against them and the role they allegedly played in committing the offences. International crimes are usually committed on a large scale, with many victims and many perpetrators. But the ICC was established as a ‘court of last resort’, meaning it will typically only prosecute a small number of people – those considered most responsible for the worst crimes. The ICC simply doesn’t have the resources to pursue everyone who has committed a crime, and it is expected that ‘low-level’ offenders should be prosecuted in local criminal courts, as is the case with Vadim Shishimarin, a 21-year-old Russian soldier currently on trial in Ukraine for war crimes. Many countries now have their own laws relating to international crimes and are encouraged to prosecute persons accused of war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity, even if they were committed elsewhere in the world (this is known as universal jurisdiction). The ICC can, and does, prosecute senior military and civilian leaders, even if they have never physically committed a crime or even set foot in a conflict zone. Through a concept called ‘command responsibility’, senior leaders may be held criminally responsible for the actions of their subordinates if they knew or should have known that crimes were being committed. There has been some discussion of the possibility that Russian President Vladimir Putin could himself be prosecuted by the ICC using command responsibility. The catch here is that, as a sitting president, Putin is immune under international law from criminal prosecution in foreign jurisdictions. The ICC itself normally does not recognise such immunity, but Putin’s status as an incumbent president of a state that is not party to the ICC might still shield him from the court’s jurisdiction. The ICC has in the past exercised jurisdiction over sitting heads of state, but it has only done so where the president is from a state party, or where the UN Security Council has been involved in referring the situation to the ICC. Given that Russia is a permanent member of the UN Security Council, the council has been largely sidelined during the current conflict. The bottom line is that it is unclear, legally speaking, whether the ICC would be able to exercise its jurisdiction over Putin while he remains in office. If the Prosecutor decides to pursue a case against him, there will almost certainly be litigation over whether the court has the authority to do. But the ICC is just one part of the broader international justice project. By conducting a thorough and timely investigation, there will be a detailed record of atrocities committed in Ukraine. By pursuing even a small number of high-level individuals for large-scale crimes, the ICC is taking an early lead that it is hoped states will follow to ensure such crimes do not go unpunished. Dr Monique Cormier is a Senior Lecturer at Monash University’s Faculty of Law in Australia. Her area of expertise is international criminal jurisdiction and she is the author of The Jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court over Nationals of Non-States Parties (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Dr Cormier disclosed no conflicts of interests in relation to this article. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™. Editors Note: In the story “Putin and the ICC” sent at: 20/05/2022 12:47. This is a corrected repeat.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on May 23, 2022

Can the Indo-Pacific eliminate cervical cancer? - 360 Marion Saville Published on February 5, 2024 Australia is close to eliminating cervical cancer. Could other countries in the Indo-Pacific soon follow suit? Australia is on track to be the first country in the world to eliminate cervical cancer as a public health concern. The latest figures show 6.5 per 100,000 women are diagnosed with cervical cancer in Australia each year, with an estimated 942 new cases of the disease and 222 deaths from it in 2022. In 2020, the World Health Organization announced a global strategy to accelerate elimination of cervical cancer as a public health problem. The agreed elimination target from that strategy is that fewer than four per 100,000 women are diagnosed with cervical cancer each year. Modelling by the Daffodil Centre predicts that Australia could reach that target by 2035. However, in the broader Indo-Pacific region outside Australia and New Zealand, rates of cervical cancer are generally substantially higher. In Timor-Leste, for example, there were 25.6 cases of cervical cancer diagnosed in every 100,000 people in 2020. There are many factors contributing to higher cervical cancer rates in the broader Indo-Pacific, but addressing the main underlying cause of the disease is essential for reducing these numbers. Almost all cervical cancer cases are caused by the human papillomavirus, or HPV, a common virus transmitted through sexual contact. Coordinated screening programmes and vaccination against HPV have proved highly effective in bringing down the rate of cervical cancer. Much of Australia’s success in reducing the incidence of cervical cancer lies in its already strong organised HPV vaccination and cervical screening programmes. This was further bolstered in November 2023 by the release of the National Strategy for the Elimination of Cervical Cancer, setting ambitious targets in the areas of HPV vaccination, cervical screening and cervical cancer treatment, and outlining the steps required to achieve these. Australia’s national HPV vaccination programme is playing a key role in the elimination journey, with around 80 percent of girls and 77 percent of boys turning 15 in 2020 fully vaccinated against HPV. Vaccinating both boys and girls against HPV means that, over time, there will be wider protection against cervical cancer in communities. Vaccination remains the best intervention for those under 25, but for people over 25, screening is the most effective measure to prevent the development of cervical cancer. Even for those 25 and older who have received the HPV vaccine, screening remains important. Although the vaccine they would have received protects against HPV types that cause 72 percent of cervical cancers, there are several other types of HPV not covered by that vaccine. This means that, while less likely, they still have the potential to develop cervical cancer, so regular screening is still needed to detect HPV and pre-cancerous abnormalities. Australia’s National Cervical Screening Program recommends that women and other people with a cervix, aged between 25 to 74 years are screened every five years. Despite significant progress, cervical cancer remains firmly a disease of inequity. Inequities exist both within Australia and globally, with low- and middle-income countries facing the highest burden of the disease. In Australia, your chance of developing cervical cancer depends on who you are, where you live and what resources you are able to access. In particular, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are more than twice as likely to develop cervical cancer, and almost four times more likely to die from it than non-Indigenous Australians. To address these inequities, an update to Australia’s screening policy now allows all screen-eligible people to choose between having a sample taken by a healthcare provider, or taking their own sample from the vagina, using a soft swab, like those used for COVID-19 testing. Both methods use high precision polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing to detect the presence of HPV. They are equally as accurate for the detection of HPV and subsequently, for the detection of the pre-cancerous abnormalities that the screening programme aims to detect and treat, thereby preventing the development of cancer. Higher rates of cervical cancer in the broader Indo-Pacific region are closely related to countries’ level on the Human Development Index and their appetite to prioritise the expenditure of precious health dollars on preventative health measures, which directly affects people’s access to HPV vaccination and cervical screening. However, there are promising signs that countries in the Indo-Pacific will be able to replicate Australia’s success. While the lack of systematic screening and vaccination programmes is a challenge in some countries, there are several partnerships to support the equitable elimination of cervical cancer across the Indo-Pacific. One of these is Program ROSE, which has screened over 25,000 women in Malaysia, with delivery of people’s results to their smartphones directly via a digital health platform called canSCREEN, and linkage to follow-up care for treatment, if required. A recently announced initiative between the Australian government and partnering organisations called the Elimination Partnership in the Indo-Pacific for Cervical Cancer, or EPICC, will enable even more partnerships with countries in the Indo-Pacific region. These will support the components of an effective elimination strategy, including the implementation of HPV vaccination programs, screening programs and increased access to treatment. This programme will build on the success of the Eliminating Cervical Cancer in the Western Pacific project, which has led to sustainable cervical cancer interventions in Vanuatu and the Western Highlands province of Papua New Guinea. Self-collection — for which there is strong evidence of accuracy and acceptability — underpins this critical agenda to address inequity of access to acceptable screening in Australia and around the region in each of these projects. When supported with linkage to follow-up care, it can be the key to saving the lives of many women and people with a cervix who would otherwise not participate in screening. Cervical cancer is almost entirely preventable. Modelling predicts that by achieving the targets set out in the WHO’s global strategy in low- and lower-middle-income countries, over 14 million cervical cancer deaths would be averted by 2070, and over 62 million by 2120. Professor Marion Saville AM is the Executive Director of The Australian Centre for the Prevention of Cervical Cancer, a visiting professor in the Department of Obstetrics & Gynaecology at the University of Malaya and an honorary clinical associate professor in the Department of Obstetrics & Gynaecology at The University of Melbourne. The work referred to in this article has been funded by the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) and by the Minderoo Foundation. The Australian Centre for the Prevention of Cervical Cancer (ACPCC) is funded by the Australian and Victorian governments for domestic activities related to cervical cancer control, and has received funding from the Minderoo Foundation for work in Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has announced funding for the Elimination Partnership in the Indo-Pacific for Cervical Cancer (EPICC). ACPCC is an EPICC consortium organisation and anticipates receiving a part of the announced funding. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on February 5, 2024

Can the US convince India to help it contain China? - 360 Zeno Leoni Published on May 19, 2023 The US views the Quad as an alliance that can contain Chinese expansionism in the Indo-Pacific, but India may not feel the same way. The planned Quad Leaders’ Summit in Sydney on 24 May has been derailed by the US debt ceiling crisis. It’s a regrettable cancellation as the meeting was due to take place at a crucial time (although the leaders have arranged to catch up on the sidelines of the G7 meeting this weekend). More than a year after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it was to be the first, top-level opportunity to take stock of how cohesive the Quad is — a framework that is still evolving — as the previous leaders’ summit only happened some three months after the start of the war. The war has been a dramatic event which has compelled many countries to pick a side. In this way, it has been helpful to get a sense of the geopolitical worldview and priorities of each country. While the Quad was born as a non-traditional security minilateral framework — a more informal initiative than its multilateral counterpart — the rise of China has transformed the group into an alliance that can contain Chinese expansionism in the Indo-Pacific, at least from the point of view of the US. Australia, the US and Japan have stood in strategic lockstep over Russia, condemning Russian President Vladimir Putin and slapping heavy trade sanctions on his country. However India has remained a wildcard, and its ambiguous messaging could present the US with its biggest challenge when it comes to the grouping. In this regard, India is a weak link in the Quad, and its participation in the group was recently described by many observers as precarious. During the last year, India has stood out for its strategic autonomy regarding relations with Russia, especially about issues like gas imports from Moscow. Although India worries about friction with China along a contested border, and an ever more powerful Chinese navy, New Delhi sees Beijing as a partner from an emerging economy viewpoint — as could be seen at COP26 — while it does not desire to escalate tensions with a stronger military and economic power. As an India-based pundit recently noted: “It is relatively easy to establish coalitions to work on non-traditional security issues but nurturing a group to focus on security issues as the core is not easy, especially for countries like India.” Yet, they also argued,  at the recent ministerial-level meeting of the Quad India’s stance appeared more critical of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Political cohesion is fundamental to the Quad — especially about China — because this has an impact on the underlying rationale of this framework. The Quad is one of several US-led minilateral and multilateral initiatives — others include Build Back Better World, AUKUS, Indo-Pacific Economic Framework and the enlargement of NATO towards Asia — that the Biden administration has pursued with the aim of “updating” alliances in an evolving environment. Biden’s national security strategy and approach to the Indo-Pacific contrast with previous administrations in explicitly acknowledging that successful competition with China “cannot be accomplished alone” and “require[s] unprecedented cooperation with those who share in this vision”. All this is part of a US effort at creating a liberal international order (LIO) 2.0. That is a “more exclusive club than the LIO” with a “stricter layer of rules” to prevent China from eroding US power and influence. This is why ensuring a commitment from all members of the alliance on traditional security issues — such as defence — as opposed to only non-traditional security issues — for example, supply chains and climate change — is critical. In the late 2000s, the Quad had a setback because of Australia’s strong economic relationship with China. But commercial tensions in recent years between Canberra and Beijing have pushed the former closer to Washington. Similarly, the war in Ukraine has increased Japan’s already existing concerns about China’s assertiveness in East Asia. Towards the end of the last decade India’s stance about US-China competition was more ambiguous, but since the conflict with China in 2020 New Delhi has taken steps to consolidate its partnership with the US. However there’s also been the recent revival of BRICS — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — and proposals for expanding it, As well as the emergence, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, of middle powers that position themselves in a sort of non-aligned camp. Both these developments will offer India more options if it wants to maintain its strategic autonomy. Dr Zeno Leoni is a lecturer in ‘Challenges to the International Order’ at the Defence Studies Department of King’s College London, based within the Joint Services and Staff College of the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom. He is also an affiliate of the Lau China Institute of King’s College London. Dr Leoni is the author of the book Grand Strategy and the Rise of China: Made in America, published in April 2023. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™. Editors Note: In the story “Quad Summit” sent at: 19/05/2023 08:54. This is a corrected repeat.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on May 19, 2023

Can we afford to lose any more languages? - 360 Ria Ernunsari Published on August 16, 2023 The very regions richest in languages are the ones most at risk of climate-induced language loss. Languages speak to our identities, our histories, our traditional knowledge and our world views. In some cases, they may be the only tangible thing linking us to our ancestors. Yet under a changing climate, they are also more at risk than ever. Half of the languages that we speak today will disappear or become seriously endangered by the end of this century, according to the United Nations. There are many factors that influence this, but more recently climate change is emerging as a significant cause. Communities forced to migrate due to environmental disasters often end up not passing their language on to future generations, if another language in their new home is more dominant. Some of the most linguistically-diverse countries in the world are in the Indo-Pacific and cruelly, this region is also known for being particularly prone to environmental disasters. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on August 16, 2023

Can we improve on a once-in-a-century TB vaccine? - 360 Visai Muruganandah, Andreas Kupz Published on April 22, 2022 It has been over 100 years since the last licensed tuberculosis vaccine. The clock is ticking to find a new one. Tuberculosis (TB) remains one of the deadliest infectious diseases known to humankind. The existing TB vaccine is highly protective, but it has some limitations. A new model will allow scientists to compare vaccines in development so they can be ranked. As the model is refined, the hope is that it will deliver an improved vaccine for TB – and other illnesses – much faster. Caused by the bacteria Mycobacterium tuberculosis, TB has coevolved with humans over centuries. It still claims the lives of around 1.5 million people annually. A quarter of the world’s population is latently infected. Treatment of the disease requires months of intensive therapy with high-quality antibiotics. Those with active TB may cough up blood or experience fever, chills and weight loss, among other symptoms. In many parts of the world, access to life-saving medications can be limited, and the stigma attached to the disease often complicates treatment. The only licenced TB vaccine, Bacille Calmetter-Guérin (BCG), was first administered in July 1921. BCG has saved millions of lives, protecting infants and children against various forms of the disease. However, the vaccine’s protective capabilities diminish over time, becoming ineffective as recipients reach adulthood. BCG also fails to protect against pulmonary TB, a form of the disease that allows transmission from an actively infected person to an uninfected person. Strains of TB that are multidrug resistant (hard to treat) and extensively drug resistant (even harder to treat) have spread across the globe, and TB remains a global health priority in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Developing new vaccine candidates continues to be of paramount importance. One strategy has been to genetically modify BCG to incorporate genes that code for some of Mycobacterium tuberculosis’ disease-causing proteins. This could prompt the body’s immune system to recognise and destroy TB upon entry into the lungs. However, the resulting BCG strain must not become virulent enough to cause the actual disease. A 2020 study to advance this approach, undertaken by the Australian Institute of Tropical Health & Medicine, suggests that carefully designed strains of genetically modified BCG could retain the safety profile of standard BCG while generating a more comprehensive immune response in the recipient. One challenge in such a large-scale undertaking is interpreting the results: when new vaccines are being developed by different research groups around the world, it is difficult to feasibly make direct comparisons between every potential TB vaccine. The ‘Vaccine Empirical Integrated Model’ (VEIM) has been developed in a bid to overcome this obstacle. The model aims to integrate multiple measurements of vaccine safety, whether it triggers the immune system, and protection, producing a ranking system to help guide scientists in how vaccines compare head-to-head. This model is still in its infancy, but the hope is that scientists with different areas of expertise will refine the model and produce a ‘gold standard’ that streamlines the vaccine development and testing process. This in turn would speed up the development of new vaccines. The way TB vaccines are administered has also been rethought. Traditionally, vaccines are injected into muscle or skin tissue, inoculating the recipient with the necessary material to develop a specific yet systemic immune response. However, a strong body of evidence demonstrates the benefit of matching the route of vaccine delivery to the route the disease enters the body. In the case of TB (a respiratory-spread disease), this could mean administering the vaccine directly into the respiratory system. Nasal spray vaccines such as ‘FluMist’ have already been approved for use and serve as a possible avenue for a respiratory-delivered TB vaccine. Booster-dosing has also garnered attention. The emergence of new infectious diseases with pandemic potential, such as SARS, MERS and COVID-19, highlights the importance of rapid vaccine development. Currently, 21 new TB vaccine candidates have entered clinical trials, and several others are in their preclinical phases. While some of these candidates have demonstrated a reasonable degree of efficacy in human studies, BCG remains the gold standard. With an exponentially increasing population, mass land clearing and climate change contributing to a drastic transformation of our natural environment, the risk of frequent pandemics is rising. By developing a universal method to compare new vaccine candidates, scientists will be able to advance their long-standing battle with TB and be more equipped to respond to the next pandemic. Dr Visai Muruganandah is a resident medical officer researcher at the Australian Institute of Tropical Health & Medicine at James Cook University. Dr Andreas Kupz is a senior research fellow at the Australian Institute of Tropical Health & Medicine at James Cook University. The laboratory of Dr Kupz is supported by the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) through an Investigator Grant (APP2008715) and an Ideas Grant (APP2001262). Dr Muruganandah and Dr Kupz disclosed no conflicts of interest in relation to this article. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on April 22, 2022

Can we trust machines doing the news? - 360 Chiara Longoni Published on March 30, 2023 AI is becoming more prevalent in everyday situations but there is still distrust. The challenge is overcoming that barrier. When you scan the headlines on your favourite news app each morning, do you ever stop to think who — or what — wrote the story? The assumption is there are human beings doing the work. But it’s also possible an algorithm wrote it. Artificial Intelligence is capable of producing text, images and audio with little to no human intervention. For instance, the neural network called Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) is capable of producing text — a fictional story, a poem or even a programming code — virtually indistinguishable from text written by a person. Major media outlets such as The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Forbes have automated news production with the aid of generative AI – AI algorithms that autonomously produce textual content. With great advances in machine learning and natural language processing, the difference between content written by a human and content produced by advanced neural networks such as GPT-3 can be indiscernible even in domains quintessentially humanistic like poetry. As we come to rely more on AI-generated information in everyday settings, the question of trust becomes more important. Recent studies have examined whether people believe AI-generated news stories or trust AI-generated medical diagnoses. They found that people are mostly sceptical of AI. A machine can write an accurate story full of facts, but readers will still second-guess its veracity. And while a program can give a more accurate medical analysis than a human, patients are still more likely to go with their (human) doctor’s advice. The conclusion is people are more likely to distrust AI if it makes a mistake than an individual human. When a reporter makes an error, a reader isn’t likely to think all reporters are unreliable. After all, everyone makes mistakes.  But when AI makes a mistake, we are more likely to mistrust the entire concept. Humans can be fallible and forgiven for being so. Not so machines. AI content is not generally marked as such. It’s rare for a news organisation to flag in the byline that the text was produced by an algorithm. But AI-generated content may lead to bias or misuse, and ethicists and policymakers have advocated for organisations to transparently disclose its use. If disclosure requirements are enforced, future headlines might include a byline that tags AI as the reporter. Research examined how disclosing use of AI in news generation affected news accuracy perceptions. The results strongly corroborated the AI aversion account: disclosing the use of AI led people to believe news items substantially less, a negative effect explained by lower trust toward AI reporters. Media outlets are faced not only with the challenges of grabbing the attention of readers in a highly competitive digital marketplace, but also of earning their trust. This is true of any organisation that uses digital technologies to inform their customers, whether that be a regulator, business or academic institution. In fact, the robustness of the negative effect of AI in research suggests that AI aversion applies to other domains where AI generated text is used. AI is a tool. There certainly needs to be oversight and regulation, but it also has the potential to do a lot of good. AI could democratise healthcare, for instance by producing an app for a skin cancer risk assessment. People unable to afford a dermatologist, or who simply don’t have access to that type of care, could be alerted to that primary red flag — go check this mole. AI has the potential to make prescriptively good outcomes available to people who otherwise would not have access to them. And so the question is, if AI has the potential to be used for such positive ends, how can we understand how people view it and how can we foster uptake? If forced to disclose AI-generated content, what can an organisation do to retain trust in the information that it communicates? The answer is not yet clear, but the hope is current findings will raise awareness of the influence of disclosure of AI-generated content on perceived accuracy and trust and encourage greater research on this topic. When AI serves in an assistant role to a person who retains the veto or remains the ultimate decision-maker, it’s more likely people would be fine with AI doing some things as long as the final call is made by a human being. Chiara Longoni is a behavioural scientist and Assistant Professor of Marketing at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. She conducts interdisciplinary research on psychological responses to artificial intelligence across healthcare, recommendation systems, automated content generation, and government services. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on March 30, 2023

Canada: Universities need to enrich the world, not just the few - 360 Murali Chandrashekaran Published on April 11, 2022 Universities that benefit from taking the best and brightest from developing economies could help re-balance global inequality. Many universities in developed economies seek greater and more equitable collaboration with their counterparts in the developing world. In doing so they hope to build a more just, sustainable, resilient and thriving world. That would be inspiring if it came to pass. But such high-minded ideals ignore the fact that universities and developed economies have been complicit in what is referred to as “immigration colonisation”, namely how the reputable universities from the richer countries recruit students from around the world, especially from low and middle-income countries. The benefits to countries in the developed economies are significant. In many countries, international students are allowed to work while they study; post-graduation work permits give students work experience; and paves the way to permanent residency. According to the Canadian Bureau for International Education, 60 percent of international students will seek permanent residency in Canada after their studies. For many academic institutions, recruiting large numbers of international students is a vital source of revenue. With stagnating domestic student enrolments, universities and colleges have been left with practically no choice but to recruit more students from overseas in order to financially sustain themselves. International students pay significantly higher tuition fees than domestic students. More international students also means that the university scores higher on criteria that contribute to global university ranking. Students go to richer countries for a variety of reasons, including world-class education opportunities, a welcoming environment, and quality of life.Viewed from the perspective of international students, migration is an individual choice related to where they study, live and seek prosperity. Viewed from the perspective of source countries, however, and through the lens of sustainability and resilience, universities are complicit in immigration colonisation. Universities in developed economies are not directly colonising other countries, of course. But they are helping their own country meet its future needs by directly compromising the ability of source countries to meet their needs. This reduces long-term resilience by removing vital capacity that is needed to drive prosperity. However, the effects of immigration colonisation can be offset by those universities promoting equity with international students and their host countries as opposed to focusing their equity and diversity work solely on their campuses. Such a commitment could facilitate capacity development, defined by the United Nations Development Programme as when “individuals, organisations and societies obtain, strengthen and maintain the capabilities to set and achieve their own development objectives over time.” This is not about universities in the West embracing a ‘saviour’ role. Rather, efforts at collaborative capacity development need to be responsive to the 2005 Paris Declaration and the 2008 Accra Agenda on the effective use of aid, and at the invitation of communities in developing economies. These efforts need to be locally-led while being globally-served, as opposed to the other way around. An offset could help to reduce resilience inequality by providing greater access to education. The value of technology in reaching students has been demonstrated since the start of the pandemic. We may be arriving at a point where a technology-paved path allows greater access to education for all. Leveraging technology constructively in partnership with technology providers opens up avenues for universities to develop better access to education for more isolated populations. An offset needs to engage with diverse populations. Impact at scale requires leveraging everyone, not just faculty and students. Consider if universities used the offset to build a ‘resilience corps’ – a group of difference-makers that will have lasting impact through hands-on and grassroots-led actions. The offset needs to be fair. One way to approach the investment is for universities to align with the UN agreement by countries to commit 0.7 percent of annual gross national income towards international assistance work. If a university has revenue of US$2 billion, this translates to an annual investment of US$14 million in 2021-2022. Extrapolated to all North American universities, it could represent investment in low-to-middle income nations in the order of US$4.7 billion. Dr Murali Chandrashekaran is Vice Provost International at University of British Columbia, Fred H. Siller Professor at UBC’s Sauder School of Business. He also serves as the Director of the Collaborative for Urban Resilience & Effectiveness (CURE), conceptualised as a global collaborative to mobilise talent, knowledge and experience across disciplines, colleges/universities, community organisations, cities and corporates to drive inclusive urban prosperity, innovation and development. Dr Chandrashekaran declared no conflicts of interest in relation to this article. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on April 11, 2022

Canberra leaps into AI without a working safety net - 360 Jayson Lamchek Published on December 13, 2023 A partnership with Microsoft will trial the use of AI within the Australian Public Service, even while safety policies are still being developed. The Australian Public Service will become one of the first in the world to use AI when it trials Microsoft’s 365 Copilot software next year. When Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced the six-month trial in November, he said the move would “enhance” the work of its public servants without compromising on safety. With the public service about to get retooled with advanced AI, assuring Australians that the “enhancement” is worthwhile will require identifying and managing the safety risks. Australia might claim to be at the forefront of integrating AI tools in the public sector, but it has no binding legal or policy framework around their use. Other governments do, which could help Australian policymakers navigate this new territory. The launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT just over a year ago – the first such tool released for free to the public – caused alarm in many circles. ChatGPT uses a type of machine learning known as a large language model (LLM). Large language models are ‘trained’ with massive data inputs, including books, articles and websites, to respond to natural language queries. What goes in to train the machine determines what will come out in response to those queries. One reason for the alarm over ChatGPT is that user prompts are also used to further train the large language model. This information lives in OpenAI’s servers, where others – including malicious actors – could potentially retrieve the data. This design problem has made businesses worry that employees might unintentionally leak sensitive company data or confidential information by interacting with ChatGPT. Such a leak has already happened at Samsung. The 365 Copilot software is based on machine-learning architecture similar to ChatGPT. Although Microsoft promises the software “is not trained on your organizational data” – meaning it won’t eat up and spit out users’ search queries – other AI safety concerns remain. Perhaps most importantly, AI based on large language models has a ‘hallucination problem’ – the ability to present fictional statements confidently as fact. It means the AI tool might inject inaccuracies or misinformation when used for research. Some AI scientists say this is not a bug, but the central feature of this type of AI. Observers have also argued that widespread reliance on generative AI including large language models might lead to further erosion of public trust in official or scientific information. There is also concern over the potential loss of critical thinking, where flawed information is accepted as ‘‘good enough’’, or gospel. Concerns about the implications on academic integrity have already led most Australian public schools to ban ChatGPT in schools. Teachers worry that students might be relying on AI to complete take-home exams despite the ban – but it’s too hard to tell the difference. Addressing these issues at a policy level – enforcing responsible AI – partly depends on having adequate and effective rules governing relevant actors like corporations. In Australia, this means that AI ethics and – increasingly – soft and hard law are seen as necessary to address the risks AI could pose. Many organisations have devised AI ethics principles to guide engineers and scientists developing AI tools and systems, as well as the companies and organisations deploying them. Before the arrival of ChatGTP, the Australian government established a set of voluntary AI ethics principles aiming to ensure AI is safe, secure and reliable. It is not known how widely these principles have been applied or how effective they have been. Only New South Wales has a government review committee, established under its AI assurance framework, with the power to require compliance by companies selling AI products to government or contractors using AI applications. But beyond the ethics principles, Australia has no AI-specific law similar to the EU’s AI Act or China’s detailed regulation. Instead, regulatory authorities draw on laws applicable to all existing technologies, such as the Privacy Act 1988, to govern AI, applying them on a case-by-case basis. The appearance of highly capable and multi-purpose generative AI prompted a government review earlier this year to determine if existing measures, largely based on self-regulation by AI developers and deployers, needed to be beefed up. In June 2023, the Albanese government said it was considering a ban on “high-risk” AI and automated decision-making in its AI governance toolkit. Europe’s AI Act, for example, provides for prohibition in the case of certain “unacceptable” uses of AI. As the Microsoft 365 Copilot roll-out confirmed, there is no ban in Australia on the use of AI to support government functions. Instead, through its interim guidelines, the federal government has encouraged government employees to exercise caution using generative AI. These guidelines are not mandatory and only supplementary to any guidance developed by agencies, which are still free to adopt their own. They are being reviewed by a task force assigned to develop a whole-of-government approach to AI by March 2024. Recent international developments might help guide Australia’s approach to AI integration. Among these are the US President’s Executive Order on AI and the AI Safety Summit held in November in the UK, which the US, the EU, China and Australia all attended. While President Joe Biden’s executive order is mainly addressed to US government agencies, it effectively creates new reporting duties for companies developing advanced AI systems. That should include large language models and generative AIs that exceed the capabilities of GPT-4, the model powering Bing. It also creates those extra reporting duties for companies or individuals that acquire computing power beyond a certain threshold. Such a policy is an example of a government using its market power as buyer and user of AI products, as well as its administrative power as regulator of infrastructure to set out rules and requirements for companies. The recognition of a variety of risks – including risks whose trajectories are unknown, such as the displacement of workers, and risks that are potentially catastrophic – is a notable aspect of international policy developments around AI. The approach towards the deployment of AI systems has, by necessity, become more cautious. Biden’s executive order acknowledges the known risk of discrimination in automated decision-making caused by embedded bias in historical data used for training AI models. Corrective measures to promote fairness in AI models have been devised. It also acknowledges the risks of fraud, disinformation and displacement of workers. And perhaps most critically, it recognises potential threats to national security – such as the chance that advanced AI systems could help produce or access biological or chemical weapons. Like Biden’s executive order, the AI Safety Summit recognised the risk of catastrophic harm from advanced AI and stressed the need for the government to develop capacity for safety testing for these risks. Dr. Jayson Lamchek is a Research Fellow at Deakin University Law School and the Cyber Security Cooperative Research Centre. He researches human rights, Artificial Intelligence and cybersecurity. The work has been supported by the Cyber Security Research Centre Limited, whose activities are partially funded by the Australian Government’s Cooperative Research Centres Programme. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on December 13, 2023

Cancer care is more than survival - 360 Piya Srinivasan Published on February 5, 2024 Britain’s King Charles has been diagnosed with cancer.  As we mark World Cancer Day, we look at how cancer affects people across the Indo-Pacific, how survivors are being helped and the new research into possible cures. Cancer is a many-headed hydra, with only slow-burning torches in sight. It is the second leading cause of death globally, and its damage cuts across medical, financial and emotional lines, affecting families, healthcare systems and economies. Asia records 58.3 percent of all global cancer deaths. Early onset cancer is on the rise. Tobacco use, poor diets, longevity, lack of physical activity, and exposure to carcinogens – artificial sweetener aspartame and air pollution join the growing list – have contributed to the increase in cancer globally. Advancements in treatment can lead to improved survival rates for many types of cancer, even as overall incidence has risen. The successful development of mRNA Covid-19 vaccines holds promise for the development of cancer vaccines, currently under clinical trials. Personalised cancer medicines specific to an individual’s tumour type promise to reduce side effects and control the re-emergence of tumours. But it will be a while before such forms of targeted care become the norm. For now, the average cost of a year’s treatment exceeds USD$100,000 per year, putting a huge economic burden on families and resulting in catastrophic out-of-pocket expenditure at the household level. Apart from the medical burden of cancer, growing research attests to the economic and emotional toll cancer takes on those affected and their families. Cancer treatment can be accompanied by job loss, reduced productivity, discrimination and stigma, often resulting in loss of household income. Bring in economic, social and gender inequality, and the story becomes worse. There is no insurance coverage for follow-up treatment or non-medical expenses, such as travel to treatment centres, which bears heavily on lower-income groups. There is also no guarantee that the cancer will not return. Even after successful treatment, preventing the return of sleeping cancer cells – a process known as senescence – requires more research. Toxic after-effects of cancer treatment also remain a concern for survivors, even as non-toxic treatments such as plant-based therapies are emerging as complementary to conventional cancer therapies. Australia is on track to become the first country to eliminate cervical cancer, thanks in large part to a national HPV vaccination programme that began in 2007. The lessons from there could translate across the Indo-Pacific region. However, a revolution in cancer care remains elusive. Inequities in healthcare systems in low- and middle-income countries are one reason for this. First Nations women in Australia have almost twice the likelihood of cervical cancer diagnosis as non‑Indigenous women, and they face greater barriers to accessing cervical screening. For women in India, breast and cervical cancer are the most common – and highly preventable – cancers, drawing attention to gender-based barriers to health-seeking behaviour. Early detection and treatment can substantially improve life expectancy. Timely diagnosis of breast cancer, a critical factor for higher survival rates, is significantly more likely in high Human Development Index countries. Many Asian societies deal with disease as a family affair, with family members closely involved in healthcare decision-making and support. Cancer becomes more than a physical sickness – it is a fight for quality of life, for whole families as much as patients themselves. Addressing not just the medical aspects but also the financial, psychological and cultural aspects of cancer could have benefits extending beyond patients and families and into whole communities and even economies. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on February 5, 2024

Candidates sing the same old anti-corruption song - 360 Elisabeth Kramer Published on February 14, 2024 The presidential contenders are playing up their commitment to fighting an old problem — but with few new details. As Indonesians prepare to go to the polls on February 14 to elect a new president, along with legislative representatives across national, provincial and local government, the sight of candidates distributing goods like rice, cooking oil and other household items to voters is not out of the ordinary. Some incumbents might even use their government position to attach themselves to public programs they have nothing to do with – handing out government-procured goods as ‘gifts’, when actually the goods are part of official social assistance programs (bantuan social, or ‘bansos’). Money politics and vote buying have been normalised in Indonesia over the years, and every election brings with it concerns about corruption. As a result, corruption and how to eradicate it has become a staple topic when voting time rolls around. ‘Anti-corruptionism’ — the rhetorical use of corruption issues to present oneself as the ‘cleanest’ candidate with the strongest commitment to fighting corruption — has traditionally been seen as a compelling campaign tactic, appealing to voters on a popular issue, and this year is no different. The misuse of state-sponsored assistance is one of several campaign tactics that have raised concerns this election cycle. A national election oversight NGO, Rumah Pemilu, has urged citizens not to be swayed by politicians hijacking bansos for their own campaign purposes and directing social assistance to potential supporters rather than to citizens in need. Even if candidates claim that the social assistance they distribute is merely a no-strings-attached gift, it’s still illegal. Law No.7/2017 states that candidates are prohibited from offering goods or money to voters in order to influence their decision. Besides the distribution of goods to attract votes, there is concern about potential ‘dawn attacks’ (serangan fajar), a common tactic in which candidates distribute envelopes of cash to voters the evening before election day. The Electoral Commission (Badan Pengawas Pemilihan Umum, ‘Bawaslu’) and the Corruption Eradication Commission (Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi, KPK) have both identified this issue as a concern in the 2024 election. Corruption has never really been out of sight in Indonesian politics, but the past few years have seen some unfortunate developments. Legislation governing the KPK, once an independent agency with extensive investigative powers, was changed in 2019 to make it an executive agency subject to more oversight and restrictions. As a result, Indonesian Corruption Watch (ICW), a well-respected NGO, referred to 2019 as the country’s “toughest year for the fight against corruption”. During this past political term, 38 ministers and heads of state agencies have been charged with corruption. Of course, an accusation is not necessarily a reflection of guilt, and there have been suggestions that some allegations are politically motivated. However, the fact that so many officials have been accused of corruption reflects ongoing challenges in deterring corrupt behaviour. In 2023, corruption cases embroiled the Minister for Agriculture, Syahrul Yasin Limpo, and the Minister for Communications and Information, Johnny G. Plate. A further issue is that there is no restriction against former corruption offenders competing in the elections. ICW reported that at least 56 candidates running in the 2024 elections had previously been convicted of corruption. Another organisation, Perludem, has suggested that candidates with a criminal record should have a mark on the ballot papers so voters are aware of their background. The poor state of Indonesia’s anti-corruption efforts was also highlighted in the 2022 Corruption Perceptions Index, released by Transparency International. Indonesia’s score fell from 38 to 34 (out of 100), representing a drop from 96 to 110 in the world, with its lowest score since 2014. News of the decline was met with commentary that President Jokowi had not fulfilled his promises to strengthen the KPK. Voters continue to identify corruption eradication as a core political issue, though perhaps not as fervently as in the past. A Center for Strategic and International Studies study of key issues among young voters ranked fighting corruption as the third most important issue, after social welfare and employment opportunities. Another survey released in December 2023 by Indikator found that only 28.7 percent of respondents felt that current anti-corruption efforts were enough. President Joko Widodo, known as Jokowi, cannot contest the election, having reached his two-term limit. With no incumbent in the running, the playing field is wide open for presidential hopefuls to campaign hard on issues they believe matter to the public. Three presidential pairings — the presidential and vice-presidential candidates campaign as a package deal, like in the US — are competing in this election: Anies Baswedan and Muhaimin Iskandar, Prabowo Subianto and Gibran Rakabumin Raka, and Ganjar Pranowo and Mahfud MD. Each has their own political history, and the dynamics of each pairing and the political parties they represent have led to extensive academic commentary on the weakening of democracy, the merging of party interests and a lack of institutional accountability. Prabowo has contested (and lost) every presidential election since 2014, while his running mate, Gibran, is Jokowi’s son. Anies and Ganjar have been Governor of Jakarta and Central Java, respectively, and both tenures have encountered public controversies. All the candidates have identified corruption as a key policy issue in their ‘vision and mission’ documents, which are submitted to the Electoral Commission several months before election day and include a list of priorities and election promises. Their platform documents are vague, though they have had the opportunity to expand on their ideas in media interviews and in the first presidential debate. All agree that anti-corruption efforts need to be drastically improved, but there are some fundamental differences among them. Anies and Muhaimin offer a range of anti-corruption aspirations. This includes improving Indonesia’s Corruption Perceptions Index score from 34 in 2022 to 49 by 2029. Indonesia achieved its highest score of 40 in 2019, so this is an ambitious goal. The platform includes strengthening the asset recovery laws to ensure officials found guilty of corruption are “made poor”. Also notable is a stated commitment to restoring the independence of the KPK, a veiled critique of what transpired in 2019. The anti-corruption platform shared by Prabowo and Gibran makes specific mention of the high level of corruption that existed before Jokowi became president, and a pledge to prevent Indonesia from returning there. Through this framing, Jokowi’s government is positioned as an improvement on previous governments, something to be respected. They make no mention of restoring the independence of the KPK. In contrast, they propose an additional regulatory body that would monitor the activities of the KPK, the courts, the police and the attorney-general. Of the three presidential pairings, Ganjar and Mahfud have the most visible references to corruption in their platform document. Corruption eradication would be a “foundation” of their leadership, they assert, alongside improving the national budget and digitalising the bureaucracy. They will fight corruption through the use of technology and “strengthen” the KPK, the police and the attorney-general’s office. A televised debate on December 13 last year brought some added clarity from Ganjar, who made further promises to promote harsher punishments for those convicted of corruption, including sending them to the infamous Nusa Kembangan prison off Java. In general, however, the debate did not offer any further clarity on the concrete policy actions any candidate would take to combat corruption. The corruption discussion ended with a three-way agreement that their policies were all heading in the same direction. Instead of any of the candidates leveraging the issue to gain the upper hand over rivals and present a coherent plan of action, the overarching appeal to voters by all presidential candidates seems to be: “Just trust us, and we’ll give you the details after we win.” Dr Elisabeth Kramer is a Scientia Senior Lecturer and 2023 ARC DECRA fellow at UNSW Sydney. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™. Editors Note: In the story “Indonesia votes” sent at: 12/02/2024 07:57. This is a corrected repeat.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on February 14, 2024

Car or robot? Unlocking the future of autonomous vehicles - 360 Martin Tomitsch, Marius Hoggenmueller Published on November 7, 2022 Communicating what autonomous vehicles ‘see’ can improve pedestrians’ trust and public acceptance. Can it also lead to widespread adoption of robots in cities? Autonomous vehicle technology will change how people live and move around in cities. As a mode of transport, the benefits of autonomous vehicles include independence, comfort and safety for riders. Applied to services like parcel delivery and waste collection, autonomous technology also promises to address worker shortages and reduce congestion. Technological progress and regulatory approval are key enablers of autonomous vehicles and their mass adoption. But there is one factor that will make or break their success: public acceptance, which represents a significant hurdle. The issue of public acceptance not only relates to whether people feel comfortable riding inside a driverless car, it also extends to how other road users interact with the vehicle. Early trials of driverless cars have been met with public backlash, including attacks on vehicles and threats against operators. Even behaviour that is not intended to cause physical damage but born out of curiosity, such as stepping in front of a driverless car to see its reaction, significantly affects their operational efficiency. A recent study further found that trust remains a concern expressed among all respondents. Researchers have linked these behavioural patterns and lack of trust to the absence of non-verbal communication cues between vehicles and other road users. For manually driven vehicles, these non-verbal cues, such as eye contact and gestures, are essential to ensuring safety, understanding and trust. This is particularly pertinent in unstructured traffic and in situations involving vulnerable road users, such as a pedestrian crossing the road in front of a vehicle or in areas where pedestrians and vehicles share the same space. To overcome the lack of non-verbal cues, studies have investigated ways to communicate the intention of autonomous vehicles, their awareness – what they ‘see’ – and even their ‘emotions’. For example, a vehicle could express its frustration when being challenged by a pedestrian deliberately stepping into its path. This vehicle-to-pedestrian communication is achieved through designing so-called external human-machine interfaces that may take the form of simple text or visual displays attached to the front of the vehicle, projections onto the road and auditory alerts. In a more distant future, this information could be communicated through augmented reality, as suggested by a study proposing to overlay autonomous vehicles with relevant visual cues. External human-machine interfaces are a necessary evolution of the traditional blinker, which became widely adopted by car manufacturers in the late 1940s. At their core, fully autonomous vehicles are robots, requiring more advanced communication channels than simple light signals. But unlike the depiction of Johnny Cab’s driverless taxi in the movie Total Recall, they don’t come with a humanoid robot driver. Instead, they are part of an automated infrastructure, where the city itself becomes a distributed robot. This kind of conceptual shift opens up new perspectives on how road users will interact with autonomous vehicles in future cities, which are expected to come in different shapes and sizes beyond just driverless cars. Pedestrians may be able to assist delivery robots that get stuck in the snow or lost in the woods. Starship Technologies, the company behind the iconic white delivery robot, even encourages passersby to give their robots a helping hand when they get stuck. But this relies on bidirectional communication and the ability of the robot to understand human input, which was clearly not the case for a rogue robot driving right into a crime scene. It is a long road towards robots roaming the city and getting the human-machine interaction right for public acceptance is challenging. This is not only because of the costs of fully functional autonomous vehicles but also the risks associated with real-world studies. To overcome this risk, many researchers have turned to studying digital replicas or 360-degree recordings of real-world situations in a virtual reality environment. Results from these studies are promising, suggesting that external human-machine interfaces can improve the trust of road users in autonomous vehicles. In a study of crossing scenarios, 81 percent of participants reported they felt safer if an external display communicated the vehicle’s intention. In more complex scenarios, such as those  in unregulated mixed-traffic environments, the combination of several factors was found to contribute to study participants expressing trust in the vehicle. These factors include observing the vehicle’s interactions with other pedestrians, implicit cues, such as the vehicle  slowing down and explicit cues, such as external light signals showing intent and awareness. Historically, car manufacturers have primarily focused on the safety of their passengers. It’s a business strategy as manufacturers can use safety as a selling point. Mercedes-Benz’s manager of driver assistance systems even publicly stated that the company would prioritise the safety of passengers over pedestrians in their autonomous vehicle technology. As we are moving closer to a future in which the city and its infrastructure become automated, this approach requires rethinking. This is key to encouraging active transport and transitioning towards greener and healthier urban living, reflected also in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 11. Manufacturers of autonomous vehicles have a unique opportunity to be a leader in this emerging and rapidly growing market by complementing their focus on technology with a strong understanding of the social and human challenges. The successful adoption of autonomous vehicles in and by cities also requires innovative policies. Regulatory bodies need to emphasise how these vehicles interact with pedestrians and other vulnerable road users not only algorithmically but also through vehicle-to-pedestrian communication channels. Instead of regulating how cars adopt automation, what might policies look like if we think about cars more as robots that operate in close proximity to people? Dr Martin Tomitsch is a Professor of Interaction Design and Director of Innovation at the University of Sydney where he leads the Urban Interfaces group and teaches interface design, creative thinking and innovation. Dr Marius Hoggenmueller is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Sydney’s Design Lab, focusing on design-led approaches for prototyping emerging interfaces such as urban robots. They declare no conflict of interest. The research on which this article is based was funded in part by the Australian Research Council. The authors would like to acknowledge the contributions of their colleagues to some of the research cited in the article, Dr Luke Hespanhol, Dr Callum Parker, Tram Thi Minh Tran, Yiyuan Wang and Dr Stewart Worrall. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on November 7, 2022

Caring for a cancer condition that often goes unseen - 360 Vanessa Vaughan Published on February 5, 2024 Cancer cachexia affects 50 to 80 percent of people with cancer, but you may never have heard of it. “Wasting away”, “looking starved” or feeling a loss of self are just some of the ways people describe themselves or their loved ones living with cancer cachexia. Cancer cachexia is a pervasive but often overlooked condition that affects 50 to 80 percent of people with cancer. Despite its prevalence, the condition often goes unrecognised, leaving patients and even healthcare providers grappling with its elusive nature. Often confused or conflated with the side effects of treatments such as chemotherapy, cachexia is usually associated with unintentional weight loss, loss of muscle strength and fatigue. Reduced appetite, changes to taste and nausea are also common symptoms. But awareness of the condition is increasing, alongside understanding of how it might best be managed. Unlike starvation, where feeding more calories leads to weight regain, cancer cachexia is a complex web of factors — including inflammation, changes in the way the body produces or maintains energy, and the body’s response to the presence of cancer cells — all of which contribute to muscle breakdown. This complexity has made finding treatments difficult, with no ‘silver bullet’ in the form of a single medication. The silent progression of cachexia can be particularly insidious, reducing the effectiveness of anti-cancer treatment and the overall wellbeing and quality of life of people with cancer. Recognising cachexia as a separate condition allows healthcare professionals to tailor interventions that aim not just to treat the cancer but also to mitigate the debilitating effects of cachexia on a person’s overall health. While a definitive cure remains elusive, effective management strategies can significantly reduce its impact and improve patient wellbeing. A multidisciplinary approach is proving to be a crucial component in addressing this multifaceted condition. It involves healthcare professionals such as palliative care specialists, oncologists, nurses, dietitians, physiotherapists and mental health specialists, as well as patients themselves. The approach usually includes four main elements: Ensuring adequate nutritional intake is a cornerstone of managing cancer cachexia. Dietitians may work closely with patients to tailor nutrition plans that not only meet their caloric needs but also address the specific nutritional challenges posed by cancer and its treatments. Often this includes high-protein and high-calorie food. Nutritional supplements may be recommended to bridge nutritional gaps and support overall wellbeing. Physical activity has shown promise in countering muscle wasting and improving overall strength and functionality, and providing a sense of regaining control. Tailored exercise programs developed with a physiotherapist or exercise physiologist can be adapted to a patient’s capabilities and can contribute significantly to the management of cancer cachexia. Several drugs are being investigated for their potential in mitigating cancer cachexia, though their wide use has not yet been approved in any country except Japan. These include appetite stimulants, anti-inflammatory agents and drugs targeting specific pathways involved in muscle wasting. Rather than curing cachexia, the focus of these drugs is more often on controlling symptoms such as nausea, lack of appetite and pain. While no single medication has emerged as a definitive solution, ongoing research holds promise for future breakthroughs. Mental health and wellbeing play a vital role in managing cancer cachexia, both for patients and those who care for them. Doctors, nurses and mental health professionals assist patients in coping with the emotional toll of their condition, addressing anxiety, depression and the psychological impact of significant weight loss. They may also help families and loved ones with the stress and conflict that may come up during this time. This holistic approach recognises that managing cachexia extends beyond the physical realm, encompassing mental and emotional wellbeing. Research has underscored the benefits of adopting a multidisciplinary and shared decision-making approach in tackling cancer cachexia. A collaborative effort ensures that healthcare professionals pool their expertise to tailor interventions to each patient’s unique needs. Shared decision-making involves patients actively participating in their care, providing them with a sense of agency and encouraging them to take control of their treatment plans. The benefits of taking a multidisciplinary and shared decision-making approach extend beyond mere symptom management. Studies have indicated that such collaborative efforts result in improved treatment tolerance, reduced hospitalisation rates and an overall enhancement in the patient’s ability to withstand the challenges of cancer therapies. Studies show that patients engaged in shared decision-making processes are more likely to stick with nutritional and exercise recommendations, leading to improved outcomes. Moreover, a collaborative approach enables early identification of cachexia, allowing for timely intervention and a more effective management strategy. Future research endeavours must focus not only on unravelling the intricate mechanisms underlying cachexia development, such as identifying biomarkers and therapeutic targets, but also on ways to make supportive cancer care accessible for people with cancer. Clinical trials exploring novel interventions, such as pharmacological agents and targeted therapies, are vital for expanding the toolbox for cachexia management. Large-scale community-based studies can provide valuable insights into the prevalence and risk factors associated with cachexia, guiding the development of preventive strategies. The future of cachexia research hinges on collaborative efforts between clinicians, researchers, patients and the broader community. Increasing awareness, fostering a commitment to continued research and advocating for shared decision-making will contribute to more effective interventions. By empowering patients to actively participate in their care, the gap between scientific knowledge and the human experience can be bridged, ultimately improving the lives of those affected by cancer and cachexia. Dr Vanessa Vaughan is Sub-Dean for Global Medicine at the University of Western Australia. Their research focuses on the way people interact with and experience health services, particularly improving outcomes for people with cancer cachexia by applying evidence-based interventions in person-centred care. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on February 5, 2024

Cashing in on women's health - 360 Grace Jennings-Edquist Published on May 10, 2024 Women’s health has been sidelined for centuries. But now that women are finally being heard, some unscrupulous companies are cashing in on the movement. After centuries of being sidelined by medical science, women’s health may finally be starting to get the attention it deserves. The mass media has begun to cover the gender pain gap, an expert panel is investigating medical misogyny in Australia, and scientists in many countries are now required to include women in their research studies. Unfortunately, some unscrupulous companies are cashing in on the women’s health advocacy movement. Recently published research led by University of Sydney’s Dr Tessa Copp has found that a number of corporations are “co-opting feminist messages” to promote useless health treatments and tests. The researchers found that, although increased awareness of women’s health issues is important to overcome gender inequalities in healthcare, “promoting healthcare interventions that are not supported by evidence, or while concealing or downplaying evidence, increases the risk of harm to women through inappropriate medicalisation, overdiagnosis, and overtreatment.” In some cases, the problem is not with the products, tests or treatments themselves but with the way they’re being inappropriately marketed to healthy women who won’t benefit from them. For example, egg-freezing is being marketedby some fertility services via paid social media influencers. One fertility provider has defended its advertising on the grounds that the ads are aimed at “empowering” and informing women. But experts say the messaging may give the impression that egg-freezing is a “silver bullet”  for anyone wanting to delay their childbearing years, when in fact it’s expensive, invasive and far from failsafe. Diabetes drug Semaglutide (Ozempic) is also being promoted by celebrity influencers and websites as an “empowering” weight loss aid. While Australia’s drug regulator has warned influencers against publicly promoting the drug for this off-label use, the practice remains rife in the United States, Malaysia and elsewhere. The problem is this: By framing Ozempic as a “miracle” drug for losing weight, this marketing creates unrealistic expectations among their followers regarding the medication’s safety and efficacy. The popularising of this medication for its weight loss benefits can be also seen as a blow to the feminist body positivity movement – all while presenting Ozempic as an empowering means to “take control of your body”. And with the drug selling for more than AUD$150 per month with a private prescription, the medicine’s off-label use is a money-maker for pharmaceutical giants. Menstrual products and milk formula for breastfeeding mothers are also sometimes subject to misleading, supposedly feminist-branded advertising (known as “femvertising”). Some companies are also (arguably) over-selling treatments for menopause: As a major 2023 study found, there are strong financial  incentives to “catastrophise” menopause in order to drive them women purchase treatments for it. Finally, women are disproportionately impacted by chronic pain – and a recent ABC Four Corners special shone a spotlight on costly and invasive treatments offered by the pain management industry. These include spinal fusions and spinal cord stimulators, which can fail and cause complications. As Mary O’Keeffe, from University College Dublin, writes, women with chronic pain are not always made aware – as they should be – that in many cases, the most appropriate treatment may be lower-cost, less invasive, evidence-based treatments such as Cognitive Functional Therapy. As public discussion about women’s health and pain wears on, this special report examines what can be done to rein in the unscrupulous actors in this space – while acknowledging that women’s health awareness and advocacy is a pressing issue in need of real solutions.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on May 10, 2024

Caste census: game changer or false hope? - 360 Ajay Gudavarthy Published on November 27, 2023 The opposition wants to bring back caste as a check on the BJP’s reach, but the strategy may not live up to expectations. The results of the five state elections underway in India will be known on 3 December, and the next general election is just around the corner, in April 2024. In most cases, state election results have no visible impact on general elections. However, this time around they are being watched closely. The big question is whether the demand for an all-India caste census will make a palpable difference to the fortunes of the opposition. India’s ten-year census normally does not capture caste affiliations and sub-categories within castes. But the opposition Congress party has campaigned on the promise of a caste census in the election-going states of Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, and after 2024, an all-India national caste census. The ruling Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) may not actually oppose the caste census, as subdividing castes has helped it gain electoral support among the Other Backward Classes (OBCs), a general category of socially and educationally disadvantaged castes. It remains to be seen if Congress, which is leading the demand for a caste census, can also make inroads into the OBC votes. Certain sub-castes might shift to Congress, but it’s unclear if that will alter the results in its favour in 2024. The caste census nonetheless signifies an important departure in the way Congress has moved from secularism as its central plank to social justice around caste for the first time. It hopes to bring back caste as an effective check on the growing footprint of the BJP. However, it seems that the caste census is being front-loaded with political expectations that may not be realised. The state of Bihar has already carried out the caste census and found that OBCs constitute 63 percent of the population, not 50 percent. It has revealed extreme poverty among Dalits and the Extremely Backward Castes. This has laid a pitch for increasing OBC reservations and breaching the 50 percent rule put by the Supreme Court. In Indira Sawhney and Others vs Union of India case the Supreme Court implemented 27 percent reservations, or quotas, for the OBCs, provided it does not cross the cap of 50 percent. This may be repeated at the national level with an all-India caste census. Earlier, a caste census was carried out for the Scheduled Castes (also referred to as Dalits, or the downtrodden) and Scheduled Tribes – officially designated groups as the most disadvantaged socio-economic groups in the Indian Constitution and therefore worthy of ‘positive discrimination’ (better known in India as reservations), which allots a specific number of seats in government educational institutions and in jobs. However, the same privilege is sought to be extended to OBCs. A caste census will not only give a clear picture of the population percentage of each caste group, but will also provide identifiable social and economic indicators for each caste group, such as education level, employment and income, among others. It will also provide a breakdown of each sub-caste within the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and OBCs. In the context of the rise of nationalist politics around religious identity, this information could be a game changer for the non-BJP parties in bringing the political focus back onto caste. The conventional understanding has long been that because Hindus are ‘internally’ divided along caste lines, India could never become a confessional majority, in which political power is distributed proportionally across the country’s main religions. Political scientists Sussane Rudolph and Llyod Rudolph argued in the 1990s that India was essentially a centrist polity. The centrist character of Indian democracy emerged from the relative insignificance of class politics, the federal character of the Indian Union of states, the first-past-the-post electoral system, and the large presence of small farmers, which they referred to as “bullock capitalists” who owned 5-15 acres of land and belonged to what are today known as OBCs (earlier referred to by political scientists as the intermediary and backward castes). These factors, they claimed, kept the Indian polity from moving far to the left or the right. The 1990s was a watershed decade in Indian politics with the implementation of the Mandal Commission report (the Socially and Educationally Backward Classes Commission set up in 1979), which resulted in 27 percent reservations for the OBCs in central government jobs and educational institutions. Political scientist Rajni Kothari referred to the implementation of reservations for the backward classes as a ‘secular upsurge’. This was at a time when the BJP was trying to ‘Hinduise’ India through its agitation for building a Ram Temple at the site of a destroyed controversial mosque, the Babri Masjid. In a sense, there is a return today to the political debates of the 1990s. Some allege that carrying out an all-India caste census will help the polity return to a secular agenda of expansion of political representation based on population and targeted welfare policies based on social and economic indicators, and thereby arrest the surge of cultural majoritarian politics. The assumption is that this will alter the results of the general elections in 2024 in favour of the opposition parties. However, the outcomes are likely to be more complicated than a simple ‘caste versus religion’ narrative. The BJP`s strategies have changed dramatically since the 1990s, when it was known as a Brahmin-Bania party. Today, it has a wide appeal among all the castes. Data collected by the Centre for Studies in Developing Societies in 2019 showed that 33 percent of Dalits and 42 percent of OBCs voted for the BJP. The primary reason for this rightward shift is the expansion of political representation in the BJP to non-dominant Scheduled Caste and OBC groups. It is possible that the caste census will lead to more intra-subaltern conflicts between dominant and non-dominant castes within the OBCs. It is unclear, however, whether this will necessarily benefit only the opposition parties. It is also argued that a caste census will lead to more targeted welfare policies. However, none of the political parties that support the caste census have announced any concrete welfare measures that go beyond transactional welfarism. The caste census is also intended to halt the surge in cultural/religious majoritarianism. By this argument, a growing caste discourse will arrest Hindu majoritarianism because each sub-caste will have specific interests which undercut a common Hindu identity. Further, the caste census will advance a discourse of entitlement based on share in the population and social and economic indicators. This, it is assumed, will lead to caste assertion, rather than a monolithic Hindu religious identity. However, it is important to recognise that in the last few decades the relation between caste and religion has changed. They are no longer mutually exclusive. One can be a Dalit or an OBC for the purposes of claiming representation, and a Hindu to claim political recognition. Each of these identities serves a different purpose. The outcome, therefore, will depend on how the tensions between these identity claims play out. Ajay Gudavarthy is a political theorist, analyst and columnist. He is associate professor in political science at Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on November 27, 2023

Challenges ahead for Indonesia’s interfaith couples - 360 Hartini Published on April 10, 2024 An Indonesian Supreme Court decision has made it harder for interfaith couples to have their marriages recognised. Gaba and Rya, an interfaith couple from the Catholic and Protestant denominations of Christianity, were overjoyed after their marriage application was approved by the North Jakarta District Court to be recorded and registered at the Population and Civil Registration Agency. They had reason to be worried. In Indonesia, interfaith marriages are not considered legal under the law but their registration at the Civil Registration Office can be done with court approval. There were 1,425 interfaith couples registered between 2005 and 2022. Indonesia is characterised by pluralism in terms of ethnicity, culture, race, law and religion. With six officially recognised religions in Indonesia, it is not uncommon for people from different religions to be in a romantic relationship leading to marriage. The issue of interfaith marriage in Indonesia has been controversial  since the enactment of a 1974 law concerning marriage, referred to as the Indonesian Marriage Law. This is because the validity of marriage in Indonesia is determined by religion or belief. Having faith is a conditio sine qua non — an indispensable condition — for couples bound in matrimony. Since the enactment of the Population Administration Law in 2006 – known as the Population Administration Law – couples of different religions can apply to the district court to obtain permission to register their marriage at the Population and Civil Registry Office. Under Article 35 of the Population Administration Law, “Marriage registration also applies to marriages determined by the court”. Here, “marriage determined by the court” is a marriage between people of different religions. So far, two misunderstandings have occurred in the community regarding the stipulation of the district court for couples of different religions. Firstly, there is an assumption that the parties apply to the district court for the registration of their marriage and secondly, the idea that the district court legalises marriages of different religions. Marriage registration in Indonesia is not under the authority of the District Court but under the Office of Religious Affairs (for Muslim couples) and the Population and Civil Registry Office (for those married under laws other than Islamic law). The District Court does not have absolute authority to legalise interfaith marriages because the validity of a marriage is determined by the religion of each party. The District Court can merely stipulate that an interfaith marriage has taken place, not legalise it. Regardless, a regulation that allows interfaith couples to apply for permission to register interfaith marriages at the Population and Civil Registration Office is welcomed by interfaith couples. Such a route is considered the most effective, affordable, and progressive as it permits them to continue practising their own religion without changing to their partner’s religion. In 2023, the Supreme Court issued Circular Letter (SEMA) No. 2 of 2023, prohibiting judges from granting applications for registration of marriages between people of different religions and beliefs. The SEMA serves as internal guidance for administering justice and is classified as a policy regulation. It directs judges under the Supreme Court’s authority in implementing administrative tasks, distinct from legislation but mandated for supervision and guidance. To provide uniformity in adjudicating applications for registration of marriages between people of different religions and beliefs, the SEMA states that when deciding cases of marriage applications of interfaith couples, judges must be guided by the following provisions: 1. A valid marriage is a marriage conducted according to the laws of each religion and belief 2. The court does not grant the application for registration of marriage between people of different religions and beliefs. The issuance of this SEMA was met with mixed responses from the public. Those in its favour argue that court decisions allowing interfaith marriages degrade marriage law, even though in their legal considerations, they often use the 2006 Population Administration Law as a basis. The SEMA stipulates that judges should prioritise the formal principles of marriage law rather than population administration law when examining cases of interfaith marriage. Those who oppose the SEMA argue that it hampers the development of the judicial system in guaranteeing the rights of citizens from various backgrounds and contradicts the principle of judicial independence, namely that judges in deciding cases must be free from influence or interference from other parties. Judicial practices that have so far granted marriage registration applications such as the Surakarta District Court, Yogyakarta District Court, South Jakarta District Court, Surabaya District Court are considered progressive in their efforts to guarantee the rights of citizens. Whilst a SEMA is not considered binding legislation (unlike a Supreme Court Regulation or PERMA), a SEMA  can influence judges in deciding cases. Psychologically and culturally, judges in lower courts follow the direction of higher judges, especially in the Supreme Court. SEMA No. 2 of 2023 actually hinders progress in guaranteeing the rights of interfaith couples to marry. After the issuance of the SEMA on 17 July 2023, there was only one case involving determination of an interfaith marriage that was decided by the North Jakarta District Court. This most likely happened mainly because the judge was not yet aware of these rules as the case was submitted to the North Jakarta District Court on 14 July 2023 and the case was decided on 8 August 2023. Today there are limited channels for interfaith couples to marry. They can marry abroad, or submit to one of the partners’ religious rituals. After marriage they are free to return to their original religion. Submission to the rituals of the partner’s religion is practised by most interfaith marriage couples even when they apply for the establishment of an interfaith marriage. The Population and Civil Registry Office will allow the registration of their marriage without having to apply to the district court for permission. Indonesia’s legal landscape regarding interfaith marriages remains complex and evolving. While the SEMA has stirred debate regarding judicial independence and citizens’ rights, it also underscores the need for continued dialogue and progress in addressing the diverse needs of interfaith couples. Hartini is an associate professor at the Faculty of Law in Gadjah Mada University, Indonesia. Her research interests are Law and Legal Studies/Litigation, Adjudication and Dispute Resolution, Family Law Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on April 10, 2024

Change driver behaviour to beat Jakarta’s traffic jams - 360 Alvinsyah Alvinsyah Published on February 16, 2023 The relaxation of COVID policies adds momentum to tightening Jakarta’s traffic policy. Parking management might help if the public plays along. Jakarta’s insufferable congestion problems are legendary. The city is ranked 10th worst in the world by the traffic Index and drivers lost an average of 123 hours a year to sitting in jams, according to Tomtom. Clearly, the situation must change. Building more roads and highways is unsustainable. Applying a properly thought-out Travel/Transport Demand Management (TDM) could be the way out. There are many ways to implement a Travel Demand Management strategy, including  parking management, progressive vehicle taxes and other tax incentives, tighter regulations on vehicle ownership, transportation cost compensation, changing work hours, reducing the number of working days, teleworking, implementing restricted traffic corridors and restricted areas, ridesharing (carpool/vanpool), priority and promotion for public transport, better transport integration and applying mass transit-oriented development. Travel Demand Management is relatively cheap, has a direct effect on patterns of people’s activities and limits people’s mobility. The essence of this approach is managing the trip makers (i.e., people) themselves. Therefore, solving the transportation dilemma requires more than just providing infrastructure, because the transportation issue is a political not technical issue, which means the solution lies in changing behaviours, not necessarily infrastructure and technology. One strategy which has been floated since the easing of COVID restrictions has been electronic road pricing or ERP that was planned in 2012 but not implemented due to strong opposition and legal dispute. Efforts to implement a Travel Demand Management policy began in 1992 when Jakarta hosted the Non-Aligned Movement Summit. The city government adopted  high occupancy vehicle corridors. In 2016, came the odd-even plate policy. The City of Jakarta already has a plan and has implemented several strategies, which have been piecemeal and unco-ordinated due to separate legal framework for several sectors. The revised Jakarta 2030 detailed land-use plan (unpublished but seen by the author) covers the concept of limiting parking spaces, designation of high parking fee areas, and applying incentives and disincentives for urban area development. In the revised Jakarta 2030 Spatial Plan (unpublished but seen by the author), the vision of Jakarta development has been set to manage urban growth. For transport,  the focus is on increasing urban mobility and area access. The highest priority has been to focus on pedestrian and non-motorised transport; private cars are a low priority. The challenge now is to synchronise all these plans related to Travel Demand Management  from different sectors and merge them into one integrated package policy. Parking management policies, such as limiting parking space and making parking expensive have been in place for decades. While benefits include increased revenues, reducing traffic problems, optimising the use of space and reducing congestion, the reality is the city government has treated it only as a source of revenue and traffic management. Parking pricing is considered to be the second-best alternative to road pricing. Since road pricing has hit numerous road blocks mainly due to opposition, parking pricing is an alternative solution. It’s easier to implement because people are more familiar with and accustomed to paying for parking. For congestion policy to succeed there needs to be compliance to institutional, legal and public transport systems along with monetary incentives and coordination between sectors and institutions. The key to the success of urban transportation policies depends heavily on the leadership and “action-will” (not just political will) from the government at city and national level. And Jakartans could help by using public transport and fewer private cars. Alvinsyah is a lecturer in the Faculty of Engineering, Department of Civil Engineering at University of Indonesia (UI) Depok. His research interests are in Urban Transport Planning & Policy, Transport Modelling, and Public Transport Planning & Operation. He declared that he has no conflict of interest and is not receiving specific funding. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on February 16, 2023

Changing climate an existential threat to sports - 360 Reece Hooker Published on January 22, 2024 It is becoming harder to play and attend sports without climate-related disruptions. With emissions trending upwards, our sporting future is up for grabs. A changing climate means a shift in the way sports are played, watched and organised. Every grade of competition is feeling the climate crisis, from participants in social sports sweltering in the Australian summer to the postponement of a high-stakes playoffs game in the United States’ NFL due to an inhospitable cold front. While governments are tasked with saving the world from a climate emergency, the sports sector is reckoning with how to safeguard the future of athletics and recreation. It requires innovation and investment: Australia is set for its first indoor snow resort in western Sydney and the last men’s FIFA World Cup saw huge expenditure on climate-proofing stadiums to withstand the scorching Qatari heat. Everyone will have to adapt. Top-flight competitions like Formula 1 are trying to go green but some experts say it’s not happening fast enough. Spectators and consumers may have to seek out more sustainability gear, but the burden also falls on manufacturers to produce ecologically friendly products at an appropriate price point. 360info turns to the experts to explore the effects that climate change is having on sports and what needs to be done to avert disruptive irreversible changes.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on January 22, 2024

Changing the climate of festivals starts small - 360 Michelle Duffy, Judith Mair Published on March 19, 2024 While Australia’s festival scene awaits federal support, there are some in-house changes to improve its relationship with the environment. Australia’s festival season is in full swing and it’s already brought a raft of highlights – King Stingray staking their claim as Australia’s next great rock band, Fred again fever running rampant with Gen Z and the announcement that Kylie Minogue will grace the stage in Byron Bay at Splendour in the Grass. But a shadow hangs over all the positivity and power chords, as the live music scene reckons with another existential crisis just years after the pandemic rocked it to its core. A combination of the cost-of-living crisis, a post-pandemic surge in operational expenses and the intensifying climate crisis has Australia’s festival scene under siege with a murky future. There is a lot riding on the sector overcoming these challenges. Festivals are tourism drivers, especially in regional areas, and benefit community wellbeing. They are a vibrant part of Australian culture and are beneficial for the wellbeing of attendees. Yet these benefits are at risk as the climate crisis deepens. March 2024 has reminded us of the worst of it: Victoria’s Pitch festival cancelling midway through due to an extreme fire risk, and after a 23–year-old man died from a suspected drug overdose. But even when the consequences aren’t deadly, the shifting climate threatens the ability to consistently run festivals at any point on the Australian calendar. Increased temperatures, drought, flood, extreme heat, bushfires and changes in biodiversity, water availability and pests and weeds have jeopardised the feasibility of festivals which used to run with little environmental resistance. While there are many factors behind the cancellation of music festivals, a big fear is that extreme heat will cause serious health issues. But this is not the only concern. Regional festivals are often staged to build communities and economies. But this means attendees are often placed in fire-prone areas at the height of fire season. As was the case with attendees at Pitch, which faced backlash for pushing ahead given the dangerous weather conditions over that weekend. There is no legislation or regulations to drive climate action at festivals. There is little financial assistance and few incentives for festival organisers to think strategically about climate change. Failure to plan and adapt for climate change could be the death knell for Australia’s festival scene, which is already struggling amid the cancellation of regional touring staple Groovin’ the Moo and a “perfect storm” of rising costs and changing consumer behaviour. What results is a complex two-way relationship between festival events and climate change. On the one hand, festivals themselves are significant emitters of greenhouse gas, particularly through their transport and energy use. But festivals also offer an opportunity to showcase best practice in combating climate change, serving as platforms to educate, inform and influence behaviour among attendees. The most important things for organisers to think about are reducing the negative impacts and boosting the positives for the local community and for the environment. Many festivals have been trailblazers in this — the Woodford Folk Festival in Queensland has engaged in environmental initiatives such as tree planting, land and wildlife management, recycling, alternative energy sources and actively encouraging patrons to use public transport. Woodford also goes beyond to educate attendees about environmental issues and uses its influence to advocate local and state governments on green causes. In South Australia, the Adelaide Festival has been certified as Australia’s first carbon neutral arts festival. It encourages attendees to use social media as a vehicle to share messaging around being environmentally friendly. Festivals also provide us with opportunities to express and share our ideas about our communities and places, which in turn can help bring about social change. Such was the goal of the Clunes Booktown Festival in regional Victoria, initiated as a response to the community’s population decline, a longstanding drought, weakened local agriculture, high unemployment, an ageing population and a resultant struggling local economy. If there’s one thing we’ve learned from COVID-19 and the recent periods of bushfire, heatwave and flooding disasters, it’s that the arts sector is vital in caring for individuals and communities dealing with challenging circumstances. Participation and enjoyment at music festivals help individuals and communities regulate negative emotions and find new and creative ways to reconnect and create feelings of belonging. A festival can contribute to changing people’s capacities to act, and this is where its significance in generating sustainable and resilient communities lies. As the effects of climate change continue to bite, the capacity for recovery, resilience and transformation offered by public events like music festivals will be more important than ever. Michelle Duffy is Associate Professor in the School of Environmental and Life Sciences at the University of Newcastle. Judith Mair is Associate Professor at the UQ Business School, University of Queensland. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on March 19, 2024

Charity groups tackle food waste in Indonesia - 360 Vrameswari Omega Wati, Elisabeth A.S. Dewi, Yulia Indrawati Sari Published on June 15, 2022 Millions of tonnes of food are wasted in Indonesia every year. Social movements are filling a policy void and hungry stomachs. Every Indonesian throws away an average of 2.1 million rupiah (US$145) worth of food each year. While that might not sound like much, when it is multiplied by 273 million people, the total is astronomical: close to 330 trillion rupiah ($US22.8 billion). Food waste is the largest category of waste in Indonesia. Despite this, it remains a little-known issue, leaving charity groups to find a solution. Food waste is a ‘wicked’ problem: it is unstructured, cross-cutting and relentless. Its exact causes and impacts are hard to identify, numerous groups are involved from farm to fork, and commitment from individuals, businesses and agencies is needed to solve it. The economic loss from food waste costs Indonesia as much as 551 trillion rupiah (US$38 billion) per year, according to the Indonesian government’s National Development Planning Agency. Food that is never eaten wastes the resources used to grow it, harvest it and bring it to market. In landfill, food waste decomposes into methane gas, which contributes to climate change. It is also a more immediate danger: 12 years ago an explosion of methane gas from decomposing food waste caused a landslide at the Leuwi Gajah landfill, killing 143 people. Plastic waste has a much higher profile. But changes in food packaging have added to the complexity of waste management. The shift from traditional to modern, non-biodegradable food packaging was made to meet consumer needs on a large scale and make packaged food more durable. But it happened without adequate waste-management infrastructure. Several attempts to campaign for programs to reuse, reduce, recycle and also sort organic from non-organic waste have not resolved waste-management problems. The National Development Planning Agency has acknowledged the issue of food waste and loss and has introduced a framework to address it, integrated into its Low Carbon Development policy as a priority programme for 2020–24. But with government intervention not yet visible, social initiatives such as food banks, food sharing and utilising technology applications have sprung up to fill the gap. Their big, shared goals are to rescue and redistribute decent food, avoid sending leftovers to landfill and feed the many people in Indonesia who are undernourished. Garda Pangan is a pioneer in food management. As in many places, it is customary in Indonesia to serve a lot of food at weddings, which results in a lot of waste. Garda Pangan collects the surplus for distribution to people in need or processes it into compost or animal food. It also runs a gleaning programme in the agricultural sector, collecting crop residues that are still edible. Another example is Surplus Indonesia, which has developed an app to connect the general public with partner shops or restaurants that have surplus or unsold food. FoodCycle distributes surplus food from restaurants, weddings and vendors of fast-moving consumer goods to people in need. It also reprocesses leftover food into new food products. Lack of widespread information about these social movements and low awareness in the general public regarding food waste remain as challenges, but these social initiatives have fostered solidarity among those in the know as they strive to unravel the wicked problem. The vision of achieving a zero-waste lifestyle while helping to eradicate hunger may one day be achievable. Vrameswari Omega Wati, Elisabeth A.S. Dewi and Yulia Indrawati Sari are lecturers in the International Relations department of Parahyangan Catholic University. The IN2FOOD project as part of Capacity Building for Higher Education-Erasmus Plus from the European Union is supporting the university in food waste research. The authors have declared no conflict of interest in relation to this article. This article has been republished for the International Day of Awareness on Food Loss and Waste Reduction. It was first published on June 13, 2022. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on June 15, 2022

Chart: Assisted reproductive technology cycles in ANZ. - 360 Dean Marchiori Published on March 15, 2024 In 2021, more than 20,000 babies were born following over 100,000 initiated Assisted Reproductive Technology cycles in Australia and New Zealand.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on March 15, 2024

Chart: Mismanaged plastic waste - 360 Published on October 31, 2022 Hospitals, masks and test kits all produce plastic waste. Only a small part of it is recycled. Plastic has saved lives in the pandemic — but it’s piling up, choking our rivers and oceans. With the widespread introduction of disposable masks and test kits, the COVID-19 pandemic has reminded us that healthcare uses plastic too. But most of it is used away from the eyes of the public, in hospitals. As this chart shows, researchers are racing to estimate just how much of the pandemic’s plastic waste is being recycled. EMBED START Image {id: "editor_1"} EMBED END Image {id: "editor_1"} Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on October 31, 2022

Chart: The speed of tourism recovery - 360 Published on September 7, 2022 Most of the world’s top cities have at least partially recovered their tourist traffic following the pandemic. But not all have recovered at the same pace. EMBED END Image {id: "editor_0"} Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™. Editors Note: In the story “Tourism economies” sent at: 31/08/2022 11:24. This is a corrected repeat.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on September 7, 2022

Chatbot revolution risks becoming a race of the reckless - 360 Toby Walsh Published on March 30, 2023 Tech titans are rushing to stake their claim in the lucrative AI chatbot market, but they’re trading off all-important transparency in the process. AI Chatbots are like buses: you’ll wait half an hour in the rain with none in sight, then three come along all at once. In March 2023,  OpenAI released its newest chatbot, GPT-4. It’s a name that sounds more like a rally car than an AI assistant but it heralds a new era in computing. Google responded with Bard, its more grandly named search chatbot. Chinese search giant Baidu launched its cheeky-sounding Ernie Bot. Salesforce demoed its more serious sounding Einstein GPT chatbot. And Snapchat, not to be outdone, announced its My AI chatbot. It’s now fashionable for every tech platform and enterprise software company to have an AI chatbot providing an intelligent interface to their software. It may soon look and sound like the Hollywood movie Her. We will interact with our smart devices through AI chatbots. We will talk to them. They’ll understand complex and high-level commands. They will remember the context of our conversation. And they’ll intelligently do what we instruct them to do. We’re still working out what these chatbots can do. Some of it is magical. Writing a complaint letter to the council for an undeserved parking ticket. Or composing a poem for your colleague’s 25th work anniversary. But some of it is more troublesome. Chatbots like ChatGPT or GPT-4 will, for example, make stuff up, confidently telling you truths, untruths and everything in-between. The technical term for this, according to experts, is “hallucination”. The goal isn’t to eliminate hallucination. How else will a chatbot write that poem if it can’t hallucinate? The aim is  to prevent the chatbot from hallucinating things that are untrue, especially when they are offensive, illegal or dangerous. Eventually the problem of chatbots hallucinating untruths is likely to be addressed, along with other issues such as biases, a lack of references and concerns around copyright when using others’ intellectual property for training the chatbots. Disturbingly, however, tech companies are throwing caution to the wind by rushing to put these AI tools in the hands of the public with limited safeguards or oversight. For the last few years, tech companies have developed ethical frameworks for the responsible deployment of AI, hired teams of scientists to oversee the application of these frameworks, and pushed back against calls to regulate their activities. But commercial pressure appears to be changing all that. At the same time as Microsoft announced it was including ChatGPT into all of its software tools, it let go of one of its AI and Ethics teams. Transparency is a core principle at the heart of Microsoft’s responsible AI principles, yet Microsoft has been secretly using GPT-4 within the new Bing search for the last few months. Google, which had previously not released its chatbot LaMDA to the public due to concerns about possible inaccuracies, appears to have been goaded into action by Microsoft’s announcement that Bing search would use ChatGPT. Google’s Bard chatbot is the result of adding LaMDA to its popular search tool. Deciding to build the Bard chatbot proved an expensive decision for Google: a simple mistake in the Bard’s first demo wiped USD$100 billion off the share price of Google’s parent company, Alphabet. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, put out a technical report explaining GPT-4. OpenAI’s core mission is the responsible development of artificial general intelligence — AI that is as smart or smarter than a human. But the OpenAI technical report was more white paper than technical report, having no technical details about GPT-4 or its training data. OpenAI was unashamed in its secrecy, blaming the commercial landscape first and safety second. AI researchers cannot understand the risks and capabilities of GPT-4 if they don’t know what data it is trained on. The only open part of OpenAI now is the name. There is a fast-opening chasm between what technology companies are disclosing and what their products can do that can only be closed by government action. If these organisations are going to be less transparent and act more recklessly, then it falls upon the government to act. Expect regulation. We can look to other industry areas for how that regulation might look. In high-risk areas like aviation or pharmacology, there are government bodies with significant powers to oversee new technologies. We can also look to Europe, whose forthcoming AI Act has a significant risk based focus. Whatever shape this regulation takes, it is needed if we are to secure the benefits of AI while avoiding the risks. Toby Walsh is Chief Scientist of UNSW.AI, UNSW’s new AI Institute. He is a Fellow of the Australia Academy of Science. His most recent book is “Machines Behaving Badly: the morality of AI”. Prof Walsh is supported by the ARC by means of an ARC Laureate Fellowship exploring “trustworthy AI”. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on March 30, 2023

Cheap Russian oil fuels India’s response to Ukraine war - 360 Biswajit Dhar Published on June 21, 2023 The West expected India to turn its back on Russia, but a look at the numbers shows that expectation never seemed realistic or likely. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has revived Cold War sentiments and triggered a major realignment of the global economy, with India at the centre of it all. In the first days of the conflict, the United States-led Western alliance imposed a slew of sanctions on Russia, including a ban on key Russian banks from the world’s dominant financial messaging system, SWIFT. The ban prevented these banks, representing over 80 percent of total Russian banking sector assets, from conducting transactions quickly and efficiently. The sanctions dealt a body blow to Russia’s ability to trade with partners, including India, one of Russia’s closest allies going back to the Cold War era. Prior to its invasion of Ukraine, Russia was a relatively small trader with India, not figuring among India’s top 20 partners. In the 2021-22 financial year (1 April to 31 March), trade between India and Russia accounted for a meagre 1.3 percent (USD$13 billion) of India’s total trade. Where their relationship has been close has been in the supply of armaments, which has spanned decades. Since 2000, India has been the largest importer of Russian armaments, which was valued at USD$39.5 billion, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Russia’s supply of armaments to India is critical for a country in one of the most militarised and politically volatile regions of the world. In comparison, India’s imports from the US were almost USD$5 billion. Since the outbreak of conflict in Ukraine, the West had expected India — its strongest ally in South Asia — to support efforts to economically isolate Russia, an expectation that never seemed realistic given the strategic support that India was receiving from the Russians. Immediately after the Russia-Ukraine conflict began, the India-Russia entente went several notches higher as commercial relations between the two countries expanded significantly. In the 2022-23 financial year, India’s imports of crude oil from Russia increased nearly 13-fold, from less than USD$2.5 billion in 2021-22 to over USD$31 billion in 2022-23. Russia became India’s second largest source of crude oil imports with a share of 19.1 percent. Imports of other major commodities of India’s interest, namely fertilisers and coal, also increased four-fold and three-fold, respectively. Consequently, Russia emerged as India’s fourth largest import source in 2022-23 with imports totalling USD$46.2 billion, 6.2 percent of overall imports. The new financial year dawned with even better news for Moscow. In April 2023, Russia was India’s largest source of crude oil imports with a share of almost 33 percent and was the second largest import source overall with a 10 percent share. Russia’s share in India’s imports catapulted from 2.1 percent (in March 2022) to double digits. India’s oil imports from Russia clearly provided a win-win situation for both countries. Reeling under sanctions, Russia — the third largest producer of crude oil — lost a large share of its export market, especially in Europe, which accounted for nearly a half of its exports at the beginning of 2022. This was when India stepped up its imports of crude oil from Russia, taking advantage of the hefty discount on offer. In the 2022-23 financial year, India imported Russia’s Ural oil at an average discount of nearly 9 percent a barrel, compared to the price offered by its second largest source, Iraq. This discount had increased to 14 percent in April 2023, fuelling a surge in India’s imports crude oil imports from Russia. The discounted oil imports could not have come at a better time for India as it helped the government address its own macroeconomic problems, arising primarily from surging prices of petroleum products. Cheap imports of crude oil from Russia was a windfall for India’s export business as well. Exports of petroleum products, the largest component of India’s export basket, increased by almost USD$30 billion (by 44 percent) during the financial year 2022-23, contributing significantly to the record levels of exports of USD$451 billion during the year. With this context, the most important development was the steep increase in India’s exports of petroleum products to the Netherlands by almost 2.5 times. Thirteen percent of India’s exports of petroleum products landed in the Netherlands’ Port of Rotterdam during 2022-23, which had increased to over 15 percent in April 2023. Rotterdam, the most convenient location for supply and transit of crude oil in Europe, was fed by imports from India, helping EU members to partially obviate the supply shortages arising from the sanctions imposed on Russia. The Western alliance’s economic sanctions aimed at isolating Russia has undoubtedly put India in a difficult position. Delhi has had to weigh its geopolitical economic interests as a close ally of the US in the Indo-Pacific region with its continued dependence on cheap Russian oil, coal, and fertilisers and armaments for meeting its domestic economic and strategic compulsions. Given these choices, it is hardly surprising that India has opted for the latter. Professor Biswajit Dhar is Distinguished Professor at Council for Social Development, New Delhi, and former Professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University. This article has been republished as part of a Special Report into the second anniversary of the Ukraine war. It originally appeared on June 19, 2023. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on June 21, 2023

Cheaper gene screening makes for DNA data dilemma - 360 Sara Phillips Published on February 28, 2023 Cheaper DNA sequencing promises a world of health benefits. But to realise these, careful and sensitive storage of DNA data is vital. Seventy years ago this week, scientists Francis Crick and James Watson burst into a pub in Cambridge, UK, announcing to friends and colleagues they had “discovered the secret of life”. They formally published their discovery, the shape of the DNA molecule and the way it codes information, just a few months later. The study of DNA has continued in giant strides since that day. Just last week, the life of a UK toddler, Teddi Shaw, was saved using understanding and manipulation of her genetic code. The ability to read the DNA code, known as sequencing, has become cheaper and more widely available, leading to challenging questions for scientists and ethicists. On the one hand, cheaper sequencing will allow newborns to be screened for genetic conditions, such as MLD, the one that would have killed Teddi. MLD is considered a rare disease, affecting perhaps one in 160,000 children. But as Gareth Baynam, from the Rare Care Centre at Perth Children’s Hospital, Australia, says rare diseases are anything but. “With around 7,000 different rare diseases, they are collectively very common, affecting more people than have diabetes,” he says. “The significant decrease in the cost of DNA screening and profiling … has the potential to revolutionise the way we diagnose and treat rare and undiagnosed genetic conditions and diseases.” Danya Vears from the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute and University of Melbourne says: “Incorporating genomic sequencing into newborn screening would mean more babies who are going to develop severe conditions could be detected earlier, leading to earlier interventions and healthier babies.” But she adds a note of caution. “Storing and re-analysing genomic newborn screening data …also poses ethical issues and questions.” Such questions include discrimination. Jackie Leach Scully from UNSW Sydney says that an abnormality on a genetic test may too easily be understood as something that must be selected against. “Differences in bodies and behaviour, no matter how minor, may be automatically assumed to be unwanted,” she warns. According to Yann Joly, research director of the Centre of Genomics and Policy at McGill University, Canada, genetic discrimination has occurred in the past and must be guarded against. “In the late 1970s mandatory genetic screening programmes for sickle cell disease (a group of inherited blood disorders) in the US adversely impacted members of the Black population who were not able to gain employment or medical insurance following a positive test result.” He says an international Genetic Discrimination Observatory was established in 2018 to identify and prevent genetic discrimination worldwide. Careful protection of genetic data is key to preventing such discrimination, says Lucky Runtuwene, from the National Institue of Infectious Diseases, Japan. “The handling of genome sequences, especially the whole genome, must be regulated as strictly as other sensitive information.” And ironically, it is the handling of this sensitive information that will most propel, or hold back further understanding of our DNA. “The fragmented and bloated state of an individual’s health information in the US stands in stark contrast to its ability to create technical and life-saving advances,” says Beth Tarini a pediatrician at the Children’s National Hospital, USA. The USA’s failure to have centralised health records, “hinders the ability to realise much of the value of the genomic technology that the nation has created”. Without good health records, the link between DNA data and health conditions cannot be made. Researchers agree that whether in newborn screening, understanding of rare diseases, detective work on infectious diseases or understanding what makes humans tick, cheaper DNA sequencing will only be of benefit to humanity. But if public confidence in this life-saving technology is to be maintained, DNA data privacy is key. Editors Note: In the story “Gene screen” sent at: 27/02/2023 14:24. This is a corrected repeat.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on February 28, 2023

Child marriage is no escape from poverty - 360 Ria Ernunsari Published on April 6, 2023 Child marriage has been going on for generations but is harmful. One of the main drivers is to escape poverty but that rarely is the case for victims. Marrying before the age of 18 is a violation of human rights. Even though there are laws in place to prevent it, this damaging practice continues in many countries. Child marriage has the potential to cause immense long-term suffering. Young brides have a lower chance of continuing their education and are at a higher risk of domestic violence. Teenage girls are also at a greater risk of death due to complications during pregnancy and childbirth than women in their 20s. Their offspring are more likely to be stillborn or die during the first month of life. UNICEF said “over the next decade, up to 110 million more girls will be at risk of becoming child brides as a result of the pandemic.” The problem persists due to cultural and social norms, poverty, lack of education, and gender inequality. In some societies, child marriage is seen as a way to secure a girl’s future and protect her from poverty or sexual promiscuity. In other cases, it may be viewed as a way to preserve traditions or customs. These cultural and social habits can be very difficult to change, as they are deeply ingrained in the community. Poverty is also a major contributing factor, as families may see child marriage as a way to alleviate financial burdens or gain economic benefits, such as dowries or financial support from the groom’s family. The pandemic worsened child marriage globally by many factors. The pandemic caused a significant economic downturn, leading to increased poverty and unemployment, making it difficult for families to meet their basic needs. Families saw marrying off their daughters as a way to alleviate financial burdens because of significant economic downturn. Because of the economic impact, many parents could no longer afford to support their daughters’ education. Marrying them off helps alleviate their financial burden. The death of a parent because of COVID can also increase the likelihood that a female orphan will be married off, since family members may find it hard to support her. Religious leaders can use their moral authority to promote change in their communities. They can advocate to prevent early marriage and promote alternative rites of passage that celebrate girls’ coming of age without requiring marriage. Together with community leaders, they can help to identify and intervene in cases of child marriage and advocate for the provision of services and support to prevent it.Parents and other adult relatives can take the lead to give young girls more options in their life so marriage is not always the solution to the adults’ problem. Marrying off girls young costs trillions of dollars, according to the World Bank. Addressing child marriage requires several approaches. Those underlying factors and works can change social norms and attitudes towards girls and women. Providing girls with access to education, healthcare and economic opportunities along with strengthening child protection systems and enforcing laws that prohibit child marriage are essential. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™. Editors Note: In the story “Child marriage” sent at: 03/04/2023 11:59. This is a corrected repeat.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on April 6, 2023

China and India's intense contest for influence - 360 Jabin T. Jacob Published on March 18, 2024 India has kept a close watch on China’s activities and responded strongly where its security was directly affected. Under a new defence cooperation agreement with the Maldives, China is set to offer free military assistance to the island nation. Coming soon after the presidential order to remove Indian naval personnel from the Maldives and after a so-called Chinese research vessel visited Malé, the agreement is no doubt a provocation to India. Whatever the domestic political considerations of the Maldives for these developments, they are in keeping with China’s increased security focus in the region. They are also a signal to India — this time in the Indian Ocean and away from their  disputed boundary in the Himalayas — that China will keep up military pressure on India’s frontiers and areas of influence. Since Beijing views India as part of the US-led West for all practical purposes, it becomes imperative for it to counter New Delhi’s regional and global influence as part of its competition with the US. In the Indian Ocean, in particular India’s immediate South Asian neighbourhood, China has at different times supported anti-India political leaders such as the Rajapaksas in Sri Lanka and Abdulla Yameen and Mohammed Muizzu in the Maldives. However, over time Beijing’s diplomacy has also become sophisticated enough to reach out to the more moderate or India-leaning leaderships in South Asia. In  Bangladesh, both India and China back the Awami League government in power, ignoring Western criticism of Dhaka’s democratic backsliding and questionable electoral processes. After the COVID-19 pandemic, the Sino-Indian strategic competition in the Indian Ocean region has entered a new phase. China has scaled up its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to launch the Global Development, Security and Civilization Initiatives. However, given the economic crisis it is in and the pressure from the West on a range of issues – from its mercantilist policies to support for Russia in the Ukraine conflict – there are probably increasing constraints on Chinese diplomacy. This further encourages the ideological turn in its domestic politics allowing the ruling Communist Party of China to portray the world in Manichean terms of an “us versus them” conflict between China and a Western-led global order. It also suggests in turn that China’s hard security interests are likely to be promoted more forcefully than earlier. India, by contrast, has always had a limited geopolitical canvas. Despite its talk of being a “leading power”, it has first and foremost wanted to ensure pre-eminence in its own neighbourhood. New Delhi has also learned from its past mistakes and has been much more balanced in its outreach to neighbourhood political elites as well as more patient in handling potential crises. For instance, it did not refuse the newly-elected Maldivian President Mohammed Muizzu’s demand for withdrawal of Indian naval personnel operating search and rescue platforms in the islands. However, it did insist on replacing them with other civilian personnel. In the last three decades, Asia has seen the greatest arms race in history – much of it driven by China or reasons related to China. India has also reacted and responded to Chinese pressure by promoting its own security involvement in the Indian Ocean region. It is, for example, building up and upgrading infrastructure for improving sea and air connectivity in Mauritius – a new airstrip and jetty on the Agalega islands supported by India was inaugurated by the prime ministers of the two countries in late February. India also has assisted in multiple development projects alongside those in the security realm. In the Maldives, India has continued to engage with the Muizzu government for capacity-building and other cooperation while also increasing its development aid. In Mauritius, several community development projects have been inaugurated in addition to the airstrip. It is also widely acknowledged that India’s security presence protects Mauritius’ economic and other security interests, helping patrol the millions of square kilometres of the country’s Exclusive Economic Zone and countering piracy, terrorism, narcotics and human trafficking, as well as illegal and unregulated fishing. China is, in fact, a major contributor to illegal and unregulated fishing in the Indian Ocean. Arguing that India is merely responding to China’s Belt and Road Initiative with its development projects is to misread India’s approach. Indian foreign policy in its neighbourhood has always been to support its neighbours in their development objectives. This is a recognition of the fact that the consequences of the lack of development and economic or political instability in the neighbourhood inevitably spills over into India which it is then forced to address. Take the example of Sri Lanka’s latest economic crisis. Indian assistance of over USD$4 billion was not only swiftly delivered but was more than the International Monetary Fund’s bailout aid of around USD$3 billion. New Delhi was also willing to go along with a multilateral debt restructuring programme for Sri Lanka while China, which had previously ignored Colombo’s requests for debt restructuring only “tentatively agreed” with great difficulty, given its preference for a bilateral arrangement. At the same time, India has been closely watching Chinese actions and unsurprisingly has responded strongly in cases where its security was directly affected. In January, India intercepted an illegal Chinese shipment of dual-use military technology to Pakistan. Earlier, it pressured Sri Lanka to deny permission for a Chinese research vessel to berth at Colombo port while increasing the visits of its own naval ships to the island nation. It also objected to a Chinese renewable energy project in northern Sri Lanka and offered several power projects of its own in the region instead. China responded to the cancellation of the Sri Lankan project by offering a similar one to the Maldives – showcasing its nimbleness and ability to adapt. China clearly will keep pushing the envelope in the Indian Ocean. However, India has increasingly demonstrated both the will and the resources to push back. Jabin T Jacob is Associate Professor, Department of International Relations and Governance Studies, Shiv Nadar University and Adjunct Research Fellow, National Maritime Foundation, India. X: @jabinjacobt. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on March 18, 2024

China and Taiwan: a comparison - 360 Reece Hooker Published on April 27, 2023 Taiwan’s soft power allows it to maintain international influence even as its size, market value and military power is dwarfed by China. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on April 27, 2023

China changes tack on water politics - 360 Fengshi Wu Published on March 25, 2024 Long a source of tension with its neighbours, China’s transboundary rivers are opening opportunities for regional cooperation. Sixteen major rivers originate in China that supply fresh water to nearly 3 billion people in 14 Asian countries – more than a third of the world’s population. As ‘Asia’s water tower’, China has often been depicted as the upstream bully when it comes to water politics – taking what it needs for itself with little consideration for its downstream neighbours. But with the growing connection between sustainable development and regional stability, China has an opportunity to use transboundary water management as a springboard for regional peace and cooperation. Its success will depend not just on navigating diplomacy with many neighbouring states, but also on the unpredictable course of the US-China rivalry, as China looks to lead the world in renewable energy production. Clean energy industries are re-adjusting their global strategies to be more in sync with international political alliances. And global mineral markets and supply chains have shifted, with China recently limiting exports of strategic rare earth minerals. At the same time, transboundary water management and hydropower development are becoming integrated into security, political and economic negotiations among riparian states – part of an emerging “security-sustainability nexus”. For China, this scenario presents challenges to its aspirations to create and oversee platforms for regional cooperation. Neighbouring states are under immense pressure to bring economic growth to large populations — and to do so with clean energy. Hydropower — harnessing the immense potential of these rivers — could be their ticket. Since the 2016 implementation of the UNFCCC Paris Agreement, many countries in the region are facing increased pressure to phase out fossil fuels and invest in hydropower development. Various domestic clean energy demands and complicated geopolitical positions, diplomatic histories and political cultures mean that China might make a better partner for some than for others. Since landmark protests in Thailand 2004 against a proposed dam project in southwestern China, environmental activists and campaigners from four lower Mekong countries — Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam — have often rallied together to halt the construction of hydropower plants and dams on the upper stream Mekong (Lancang jiang in Chinese) inside China. The protests also marked the beginning of Chinese environmental NGOs joining transnational coalitions against the construction of large dams in China. But in recent years, due to domestic energy demands, lower Mekong region states have collaborated with China in developing hydropower projects on the river. Some of the authoritarian states in the region, despite being highly sensitive to public protests, have allowed environmentalists and non-governmental organisations to protest against dams invested in by Chinese capital and built in neighbouring countries. The Xayaburi dam in Laos and Sanakham dam project in Thailand are cases in point. The situation is even more intense between China and India. Diplomatic skirmishes related to transboundary water resource management have sometimes been referred to by observers as “water wars”. Since the establishment of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, India has frequently accused China of interfering in India-Pakistan water disputes. A decade ago, research pointed out that China’s water diplomacy had remained underdeveloped or ineffective due to institutional constraints at both domestic and international levels. At home, transboundary river basins, lakes, and other water resources are viewed by the Chinese state as having different economic functions such as agricultural irrigation, hydroelectric generation, fishery and shipping. As a result, they are managed on a piecemeal basis by various state agencies. The field of transnational water management, much like other non-traditional security policy areas such as refugee and irregular migration, lacks a designated regulatory agency or unified legal-political framework.  Disputes and collaborations are handled individually, depending on the specific geopolitical factors, without any cross-referencing. In other words, what works for the Lancang-Mekong region may not be applicable to China and Kazakhstan’s collaboration on the Ili River. At the international level, China’s involvement in multilateral water and environmental cooperation remained extremely limited until the 2000s. China was never a member of the Mekong Committee, which ran from 1957 to 1995, and only became a ‘Dialogue Partner’ of its successor,  the Mekong River Commission, in 1996. The five lower Mekong countries invited India and formed the Mekong-Gonga Cooperation in 2000. As a result, there was a diplomatic lapse in China’s governance of transnational waters. Fast forward to 2024, and this lapse has been significantly improved. The constraints in China’s transboundary water and environmental resource management have been largely alleviated. Although there is still no single designated state agency to coordinate China’s water diplomacy across regions, the Foreign Ministry and international-facing agencies are much more present, compared to a decade ago. In the case of the Mekong, China finally created its own platform for international cooperation — the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation — in 2017, highlighting its upstream geopolitical standing, rather than shying away from it. This is the second year into the second  Five-Year Plan of Action on Lancang-Mekong Cooperation (2023-2027). Cooperation in transboundary water conservation and management is included on a long list of comprehensive actions planned, including high-level political-security dialogue, trade and finance, disaster prevention, transnational crime, reduction of poverty and economic development, energy and more. In the case of the Ili, Irtysh and other rivers that connect to Central Asia waterways, China has negotiated broadly with relevant parties, including Russia. Utilising a few key multilateral spaces, either initiated by China (Shanghai Cooperation Organization) or friendly to China (Eurasia Economic Union), China has tagged water and hydropower projects along with other types of development cooperation in the region, such as farming and rural development, transportation and infrastructure building and smart grid and energy system. And since the launch of the Belt and Road Initiative in 2013, transboundary water and environmental resource management related to Southeast Asia, Central Asia and parts of South Asia has been quickly streamlined, repackaged and integrated into multifaceted, large-scale projects of development, clean energy and capacity building. For example, China has been training professionals in water conservation and hydropower in many ASEAN countries directly or not linked to the Mekong river basin. Compared with traditional intergovernmental cooperation and negotiations, these may be more incremental initiatives, but they are aimed at building new foundations and consensus for long-term cooperation. Fengshi Wu is Associate Professor in Political Science and International Relations at the School of Social Sciences, UNSW Sydney. She is a world leading scholar in environmental politics, state-society relations and global governance with empirical focus on China and Asia. This article was updated on 22 March 2024 to correct the spelling of Lancang. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™. Editors Note: In the story “Water conflict” sent at: 22/03/2024 09:34. This is a corrected repeat.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on March 25, 2024

China collaborating in space - 360 Yang Yang Published on April 12, 2022 China has launched the first stages of its space station. International projects selected to come aboard may be ready to fly from late 2022. In 1961 Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin orbited Earth and began the era of manned space flight. Manned space activities have since diverged into two tracks: space exploration, such as the Apollo program; and scientific research in space, such as Mir and the International Space Station (ISS). Both tracks are deeply rooted in the principle of international cooperation, bringing together the world’s brightest and the best science and technology. China was not involved in those early space missions. But in recent years its space science, space technology and space utilisation have rapidly developed. China is now in the process of building its own space station. The assembly of the main body of the China Space Station (CSS) will be completed later in 2022, making the CSS fully operational. Research on the CSS is planned in four areas: space life science and human research; microgravity physical science; astronomy and earth science; and new space technology demonstration. These categories cover dozens of research disciplines. More than 1000 experiments are now jostling for an opportunity to board the CSS. To support this research, the modules of the CSS house 22 experiment racks. Each experiment rack is a highly integrated laboratory and can accommodate research in one or several disciplines. Instruments such as a high-energy radiation detection device will be mounted on the outside of the modules, and the China Space Station Telescope (CSST) will fly at the same orbit as the main body of the CSS. Most of this equipment can be updated or even replaced, providing more possibilities for future scientific research and international cooperation. Even before the construction of the CSS, international cooperation was advancing. Cooperative activities have been carried out with organisations including the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), and space agencies from Europe, Russia, Germany, Italy, France and others. Hundreds of experts from different countries have engaged in the scientific and space-utilisation mission of the CSS. As far back as 2014 the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) and the European Space Agency (ESA) noted that Chinese and European scientific communities have common research interests: their respective science and utilisation mission plans have overlapping concepts. The CMSA and the ESA have previously jointly selected 10 cooperative scientific projects involving 158 teams from 23 countries, and covering the topics of space biology, fluid dynamics and materials science. These 10 projects have been supported by flight opportunities from the ESA since 2018, such as parabolic aeroplane flight, sounding rockets and the Columbus module of the ISS. With the launch of the CSS, China will continue to support these cooperative projects. The CSS extended its invitation to cooperate to all UN member states. In June 2019 in Vienna, the CMSA and UNOOSA jointly announced that nine projects proposed by 17 countries had been selected from 42 proposals, through multiple rounds of joint selection, and would fly onboard the CSS. The projects will contribute to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. More than that, they will share the excitement and opportunity that access to space provides. This is particularly significant for countries whose space technology is relatively underdeveloped. Simonetta Di Pippo, director of UNOOSA, said at the announcement: “[This] is a pioneering approach to capacity building in space”. Scientific payload for some of the selected teams is now being manufactured, and some projects may be ready to fly by the end of 2022. This partnership has aroused widespread interest, with more and more members of the space science and utilisation community enquiring when the next call for proposals will be. Preparation for this is already under way. The CSS will provide opportunities for scientists worldwide and be an active contributor to the development of space science research and international cooperation. It’s not just a piece of equipment: the CSS can build a bridge to the world of space science and space utilisation, allowing humanity to fly higher and further. Yang Yang is director of international cooperation at the Chinese Academy of Science Technology and Engineering Center for Space Utilization in Beijing. He has no conflicts to declare. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on April 12, 2022

China is still Australia's trade frenemy - 360 James Laurenceson Published on May 24, 2022 Despite rising geopolitical tensions the evidence of a correlation between political talk and economic connections between trading nations is often overdone. For politicians seeking soundbites it’s easy to espouse a global narrative that sees liberal democracies valuing “freedom” pitted against countries where “autocracy and authoritarianism” dominate. In the wake of Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine, this narrative was given a shot in the arm, bolstered by the cohesion, speed and scale of economic punishment unleashed on Russia by the West, along with some partners in Asia, including Japan and Taiwan. A less prosecuted but equally simplistic portrait being painted is that current geopolitical division will realign trade and investment patterns because, in the words of former Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, “global economics is downstream from global politics”. For Morrison, Beijing being unwilling to condemn Moscow’s recent actions, continuing to buy Russian wheat, and earlier decisions including refusing to abide by a 2016 tribunal judgement on its activities in the South China Sea, firmly qualified it for inclusion in an “arc of autocracy”. When asked about the potential for economic sanctions on China as well as Russia, Morrison, rather than emphasise a lack of evidence for Beijing providing Moscow with military support, or offering it assistance in evading Western sanctions, instead responded, “We will move in lockstep with our partners and allies on these issues”. Yet the reality is that unless Beijing flagrantly crosses these thresholds, or launches its own military offensive on Taiwan, any economic decoupling from China will be limited, even with greater geopolitical distance from the West. This is mostly because while Western leaders are frequently happy to ramp up ‘tough on China’ rhetoric for domestic political purposes, they are reluctant to take policy steps that would retard economic engagement with China. This would harm their own country’s self-interest. Meanwhile, for most countries outside the West, the binary of democracies versus autocracies simply does not ring true. Nor are they inclined to participate in economic sanctions, even in face of developments as egregious as Russia’s latest moves. And with a primary focus on development, their interest in disconnecting from the growth engine of China’s economy is close to zero. It is one thing to cut economic ties with Russia, which accounts for 3 percent of global GDP, and is the world’s . It is another thing entirely to contemplate doing so with China, which has a global economic weight of 19 percent, and ranks as the world’s . As a result, even in Western capitals, the default has been to talk loudly about market diversification and the benefits of forging closer ties with “trusted partners”, while only fiddling around the edges in terms of policies that would put greater economic distance between themselves and China. In March, for example, while Morrison warned that an Australian business should not “put all of its eggs in one basket”, in the following breath he acknowledged that, “ongoing engagement between private industry and business with markets like China is very important and I would continue to encourage that”. Even diversification, a far cry from decoupling, is not easily achieved given patterns of international trade and investment are driven by economic fundamentals like purchasing power and production complementarities, not bureaucratic manoeuvres like striking free trade agreements with geopolitical friends. Australian businesses with exposure to China are cognisant that their operations can fall victim to geopolitical fallout. Yet for those at the coalface of this economic engagement, geopolitical fallout is only one risk they must manage. Oftentimes it is far from the most significant and/or can be readily mitigated. The residual level of risk still then needs to be compared with the opportunities on offer in China versus elsewhere. Premium Australian wine-maker, Treasury Wine Estates (TWE), provides a useful case study. After Beijing placed prohibitive tariffs on Australian wine in late 2020, TWE was able to maintain deep connections to the lucrative Chinese market by sourcing more of its offerings from California and boosting its investments in vineyards in China’s Ningxia region. The result is that at an aggregate level at least, the correlation between economic connections and shifts in geopolitical tensions tends to be weak. In 2016, Australia’s goods trade with China totalled US$106 billion, accounting for 28 percent of total Australian trade. Despite the subsequent geopolitical falling out between Canberra and Beijing, this increased to US$183 billion and 31 percent in 2021. Or consider Taiwan. In 2016, goods trade with the mainland in 2016 was US$118 billion, or 23 percent of the total. Despite being threatened with invasion by Beijing, by 2021 these figures stood at US$209 billion and 25 percent. Even the case of the US, despite China being its arch geopolitical rival, and both sides throwing much sand in the wheels in the form of tariffs and other restrictions, trade still rose from US$597 billion in 2016 to US$693 billion in 2021. Peer-reviewed research by Australian National University scholars Vishesh Agarwal and Jane Golley reveals that shocks in political relations between the ‘Quad’ countries (US, Japan, India and Australia) and China have had no consistent and statistically significant impact on overall trade values. Of course, the relationship can be tighter at a firm or industry level. It is on this level that headlines tend to concentrate, leading to skewed perceptions of just how extensive the link is. And if China crossed either of the thresholds mentioned earlier, then even at an aggregate level the association between geopolitical tension and trade is likely to strengthen. Or if the Chinese economy lost its dynamism, this would also cause businesses overseas to shift their attention elsewhere. But in the absence of such scenarios, the gap between the reality and the narrative of tightening geopolitical alignment in the West leading to greater economic distance from China, will be vast. Professor James Laurenceson is Director of the Australia-China Relations Institute at the University of Technology Sydney. His academic research has been published in leading scholarly journals including China Economic Review and China Economic Journal. Professor Laurenceson also provides regular commentary on contemporary developments in China’s economy and the Australia-China economic and broader relationship. The author declared no conflicts of interest in relation to this article. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on May 24, 2022

China: Preserving the local as universities become international - 360 Shibao Guo Published on April 11, 2022 China’s universities have embraced a global perspective, but students say their own language, culture and history have been disregarded in the turn to the West. In universities throughout China international conferences are often conducted in English, even when most attendees are from China. This is just one of the many issues with higher education that Chinese students reported in a new study. Many top Chinese universities have tried to become more international, recruiting professors from overseas, setting up study-abroad programs, adopting original English textbooks and using English as the language of instruction in courses. Since China’s economic reform and opening up in 1978, the internationalisation of Chinese higher education has accelerated. The assumption is these practices will enhance the institutions’ reputations as world-class international universities. The Chinese students who participated in the study are not against internationalisation, but they raise questions about its execution, suggesting that what is practised is more aptly termed ‘Westernisation’. They took issue with the narrow perception of internationalised higher education: students were learning in and from a limited number of developed Western economies, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada. The participating students were critical that Western sources of scholarship and knowledge were promoted as superior, whereas Chinese heritage and knowledge were seen as devalued. From the students’ perspective, English has become a gatekeeper for internationalisation. As part of the informal curriculum, the English-language international conferences were seen as evidence of the narrow view of what it means to be international. In the formal curriculum where ‘English as a medium of instruction’ (EMI) courses are taught as part of degree programs, students reported considerable difficulties in using English to understand the content due to their low proficiency with the language. As one of the selection criteria for studying abroad, students needed high scores in International English Language Testing System or Test of English as a Foreign Language exams, which are international standardised measures of English language proficiency. These cost them time, effort and money. Students were concerned that not all students have access to internationalisation. Only the economic and academic elite are likely to be selected for study-abroad programs. Rural students, without the financial resources and cultural capital of their more well-off peers, perceive studying overseas as impossible. Where the narrow interpretation of ‘internationalisation’ of education speaks to the content and form of students’ experiences, concerns about inequality indicate the ways internationalisation is viewed in contemporary Chinese society. Students’ lived experiences highlight tensions between internationalisation and localisation. Their accounts question the Eurocentric tendencies and the underlying colonial assumptions that influence the current ideological basis of internationalisation policies and practices. In light of Chinese students’ perspectives and experiences, there is a need to de-Westernise the ideological underpinnings of higher education. As part of the de-Westernisation process, it is time for a rigorous examination of how Eurocentric assumptions embedded within internationalisation increases, rather than decreases, inequality in China. Shibao Guo is a professor in the Werklund School of Education at the University of Calgary and a former president of the Comparative and International Education Society of Canada (CIESC). He can be reached at [email protected]. Prof Guo declared no conflicts of interest in relation to this article. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™. Editors Note: In the story “Education brain drain” sent at: 11/04/2022 08:45. This is a corrected repeat.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on April 11, 2022

China’s Big Pharma bet could change the IP game - 360 Seamus Grimes Published on July 20, 2022 China’s muscling into the pharmaceutical industry, helping Big Pharma bite back against generics. But its global ambitions might turn the industry upside down. Like any good relationship, the burgeoning love affair between China and the relatively small number of global companies known as ‘Big Pharma’ offers promise for both parties. For Big Pharma, there’s the chance to cut costs and expand into a wealthy, populous market. And for China, the influx of investment is an important stepping stone to fulfilling its long-held desires to create a robust domestic pharmaceutical industry. The pharmaceutical value chain is composed of a number of key activities: drug discovery and development to identify promising pharmacological candidates, clinical trials to ensure the safety and effectiveness of these drugs in humans, and mass production of approved drugs. To date, much of this activity has been controlled by Big Pharma, but the business model that has driven their success has entered a period of considerable uncertainty. Among the reasons for the upheaval in the drug industry and life-sciences sector are declining profits and rising costs, declining research and development (R&D) productivity, and an anaemic drug pipeline. Big Pharma’s profits have fallen partly because of increased competition from generic drug companies exploiting the ‘patent cliff’ of former blockbuster drugs. Unlike Big Pharma, which invests heavily in R&D to develop new drugs, generic companies can capture market share by manufacturing existing drugs at lower cost after patents have expired. Many generic drug manufacturers are located in developing economies. Sales of generic drugs have outpaced those of the pharmaceutical industry in recent years. Some pharmaceutical companies, such as Novartis and Sanofi-Aventis, have responded by building or purchasing generic operations. More generally, Big Pharma is looking to emerging regions such as China for market expansion and to reconfigure the drug-development model by outsourcing clinical trials and some aspects of R&D. Although emerging regions, including China and India, have already experienced significant investment by Big Pharma, particularly in relation to outsourcing, the long-term success of these regions needs to be evaluated in the context of significant challenges. Some wonder whether the increasingly global spread of R&D is heralding a paradigm shift in the way companies organise their activities, but there are particular reasons the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries are moving their R&D to India and China. Pharmaceutical development cycles last 10 years or more, from the identification of a potential new drug through preclinical testing, mainly on animals, to later clinical trials with humans. In the case of both China and India, foreign multinational companies must establish a local trial-management capability as a condition for market entry. Because of lower costs and significant potential for market growth, both India and China have emerged as important offshoring centres for preclinical R&D, large clinical trials and contract manufacturing. The increasingly modular nature of R&D activity makes it possible to segment it into particular slices, which helps to avoid significant intellectual-property loss in locations such as China. As well as being cheaper, China has an abundant supply of science and technology graduates. But because it is still in the early stages of developing its pharmaceutical/biomedical ecosystem, there is a scarcity of leadership and management skills in these areas. The determination of China’s policymakers to attract pharmaceutical investment, particularly in clinical research outsourcing, is reflected in the significant level of state investment in both science parks and soft skills. With its huge population of potential participants in clinical trials, China presents opportunities to Big Pharma for lowering the cost of an essential aspect of drug development, but gaining access to its rapidly expanding market may present particular challenges to foreign companies. While there is an obvious complementarity between Big Pharma’s desire to improve R&D productivity and increase its market share and China’s many attractions, it should be noted that China’s primary objective is to develop its own pharmaceutical and biotechnology capacity. To date, China’s approach to inward investment has been to provide market access in exchange for technology transfer. But while multinational companies in China realise they must share some technology with Chinese partners, they also seek to ensure as much as possible that their intellectual property does not benefit potential competitors. Some suggest that China’s recent push for ‘indigenous innovation’ could negatively affect its innovative capacity if it were to focus too much on domestic applications. Reflecting this domestic orientation, China’s share for biotechnology patents has remained at the same level as its overall US Patent and Trademark Office share: one percent. So, while Indian and Chinese firms increasingly occupy higher-value segments of the pharmaceutical value chain, few of these firms engage in the discovery and development of new-concept drugs because of the high costs involved and their high failure rates. Most companies instead are engaged in producing low-cost generics or copycat versions of existing drugs, for which there is a significant market in both countries. China is making rapid progress in gaining access to resources that can support innovation through scientific collaborations and through facilitating clinical trials, but it also needs to invest in basic science and ensure that innovation is not constrained by a bureaucracy that limits autonomy. Professor Brian Salter of King’s College London suggests China can exploit its advantages, including the availability of research materials such as oocytes (immature eggs formed during the female reproductive cycle) and a large pool of human subjects for clinical trials, in exchange for access to basic science and to venture capital. China faces the major challenge of acquiring ownership of intellectual property through a judicious use of national and international patenting systems. The growth of China’s middle class together with China’s significant investment in healthcare and its stated plans to provide greater access to healthcare for its huge population presents considerable growth opportunities for the global pharmaceutical industry at a time of falling revenues and very modest growth rates outside emerging economies. China also presents opportunities for big pharma to reduce its R&D costs and perhaps to reconfigure its low-productivity R&D model. But China’s pharmaceutical and biotech ecosystems are still in the early stages of development and lack an abundance of senior management and scientific expertise with the necessary experience to create an innovative R&D environment for drug development. At this stage the main opportunities China has to offer the global pharmaceutical value chain is in outsourcing clinical trials and producing active pharmaceutical ingredients. China’s current early stage in the development of its life-sciences sector creates a dependency on foreign investors, but the country has a very clearly stated medium-term goal of becoming a significant force in the global pharmaceutical/biotechnology industries. While some commentators are positive about China’s capacity to play a significant role in the future development of the global value chain, others suggest it will be quite a few years before innovative drug development becomes a reality in China. Seamus Grimes is an Emeritus Professor at the National University of Ireland, Galway. His research in recent years, which has been published in a wide range of international journals, has focused on foreign technology companies in China and the role of China in technology global value chains. His latest book, China and Global Value Chains, was published in 2019. Prof Grimes declared no conflicts of interest in relation to this article. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on July 20, 2022

China's influence weighs heavily on Solomon Islands election - 360 Priestley Habru Published on April 17, 2024 Chinese cash is reaping political rewards ahead of the Solomon Islands election as the West fails to walk the talk in its Pacific step-up. China has made it clear who it wants to win Solomon Islands’ upcoming election, and there is little surprise it is the pro-Beijing candidate Manasseh Sogavare. The increase in Chinese investment in Solomon Islands is the political ticket Sogavare and his coalition members need to win back power after the April 17 poll. His Democratic Coalition Government for Advancement (DCGA) was instrumental in the Solomons’ diplomatic switch from recognising Taiwan to recognising Beijing in 2019. This decision changed everything for Solomon Islands. Sogavare maintains the upper hand going into the election as his coalition was instrumental in facilitating Chinese investments in the country, tapping into Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative to finance infrastructure developments. The People’s Republic of China and the many Chinese companies operating in the Solomon Islands want to see Sogavare back at the helm. This is evident from the Chinese Embassy’s support of the incumbent government in facilitating and coordinating many activities leading up to the April 17 elections. Posts on the Chinese Embassy in Solomon Islands Facebook page demonstrate this active engagement, with Chinese dignitaries pressing the flesh across the country. This month, a new relationship was struck between the Solomon Islands’ most populated island Malaita Province and Jiangsu Province of China. Chinese English-language newspaper The Global Times has since reported on the delivery of “essential items like water tanks, solar lamps, and fishing nets to Malaita’s governor (sic), Martin Fini.” Meanwhile, in North Guadalcanal, the Sogavare government is heralding the delivery of the first of 140 telecommunication towers, which was funded with resources obtained from Exim Bank with the assistance of China. Other activities include a construction update visit of the China-Aid National Referral Hospital Comprehension Medical Center Project by the caretaker Minister of Health, Dr Culwick Togamana, and the announcement of a Chinese Government Scholarship Programme. This new and shining infrastructure points to the fruitful relationship between the Sogavare government and China. The announcement in March 2024 of the feasibility study of the China-aid Auki Road project in Malaita Province, the country’s most populous island, is another step in advancing Chinese investment in the country. In 2019, Malaita Province Premier Daniel Suidani opposed the diplomatic switch from Taiwan to China. In February 2023, he was ousted following a second vote of no-confidence and was disqualified as provincial member for Ward 5 of West Baegu and Fataleka for refusing to recognise the national government’s One China Policy. This investment allows Chinese investors to enter the mining and forestry sectors. However, it must be noted that Chinese investments had already been operating in Solomon Islands over a decade before the 2019 diplomatic switch. For example, the China Harbor Engineering Company (CHEC) first entered Solomon Islands in 2015 to build two bridges outside of Honiara funded by the Asia Development Bank (ADB). The increase in Chinese investment in the country also paved the way for the security agreement between Solomon Islands and China in early 2022. The riots of November 2021 which targeted Chinese shops in Honiara triggered the security agreement which facilitated the establishment of a China Police Liaison Team under a cooperative relation between the Solomon Islands Royal Police Force and Ministry of Public Security in China. It was part of the China-Solomons policing cooperation according to then China ambassador to Solomon Islands Li Ming. The Chinese Liaison Team was deployed to the Solomon Islands to train local police on public order management. This deployment also included the donation of water cannon vehicles, motorcycles, protective equipment as well as food items as Christmas presents to the families of local police officers in Honiara at the end of 2022. Sogavare had claimed the November 2021 riots indicated that “security could not be adequately provided through RSIPF and existing security arrangements, despite years of capacity building and other assistance provided under the Australian-funded Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands”. Protecting Chinese investments in Solomon Islands was demonstrated in a “community engagement” by senior Chinese Liaison police officers visiting the Win Win Mining Investment Limited outside Honiara in October 2022. The visit followed the arrest of Win Win Managing Director Dan Shi, a Chinese national, who allegedly threatened local landowners with a replica gun. The matter was settled out of court , and Shi currently serves as one of the directors and shareholders of the mining company. He is also an executive member of the Solomon Islands Chinese Business Council (SCBC), established in 2021 for Chinese entrepreneurs who are influential in the local business sector and politics. Win Win Mining Investment Limited, whose majority of shareholders are Chinese nationals, was in 2019 caught by Solomon Islands Customs trying to smuggle 1.7kg of pure gold out of the country by one of its mining officers. Then Minister of Finance and Treasury Harry Kuma told Parliament the attempted gold smuggling and tax evasion by Win Win Mining Investment Limited in 2019 had been settled administratively. The China relationship has always been at the forefront of political debates  within and outside of Solomon Islands. Australia can do so much to change the attitudes and behaviour of ordinary Solomon Islanders. People turning up during the launching of political parties’ campaigns might just be present for the goodies. Only a handful understand the political party manifestos, while the majority only thinks of short-term goals of what to feed their families, in an environment that has become dependent on free handouts. There is a need for increased investment in education, infrastructure development for market access, and trade. Australia must also step up in its public diplomacy becoming visible in its aid and assistance to Solomon Islands. Australia must not be reactive to Chinese engagements just reflecting the larger geostrategic competition concerns but develop a more public diplomatic approach to soft power through the three important governance institutions, namely the church, state, and traditional customs of each diverse island province. Furthermore, Solomon Islands should not be seen together in the wider Pacific stereotyping as “small, weak and fragile” as they are not passive in their responses to them. Australia can engage with them collaboratively and listen to what they think should be done to improve their lives in the current political climate so often shaped by the interest of outside players. Priestley Habru is a PhD Candidate at The University of Adelaide researching Public Diplomacy and its implications in the Pacific. Habru has worked as a journalist in Solomon Islands for over 15 years. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on April 17, 2024

China’s older people risk curtailing the prosperity they created - 360 Xiujian Peng Published on November 21, 2022 China’s economic and family planning policies of the 1970s ushered in a ‘golden age’ of growth. But as China ages, keeping it golden will be a challenge. China’s stunning economic growth over the past 30 years has been fuelled by the sweat of a generation of workers at the peak of their powers. As a result, China’s economy is on-track to overtake the United States’ by 2030. With an average growth rate of more than 9 percent between 1980 and 2010, China became the world’s second-largest economy in 2010. But now a demographic reversal unlike anything since the great famine in 1959-61 casts doubt on this prosperity. A rapidly ageing population and declining fertility are set to plant a bomb under the economic boom. Since the 1950s, China’s mortality rate has declined steadily from 23 in 1000 in 1950 to 6.2 in 1000 in 2001. And while its birth rate initially surged, from the early 1970s, the birth rate declined dramatically in response to various factors, particularly the famous one-child policy. EMBED START Video {id: "editor_3"} The result was a population that featured a high share of working-age people and low numbers of the young and old. In 1976, 100 working-age people supported 77 dependents (4 old and 73 young people). By 1990, 100 workers only needed to support 49 (5 old and 44 young). This dramatic demographic transition coincided with economic reform and opening up to the world, creating a ‘golden age’ of sustained and rapid economic growth. Millions of agricultural workers moved to non-agricultural sectors and from rural to urban areas, providing a vast supply of labour which helped China to become the ‘world’s factory’. This delivered a ‘demographic dividend’ which was responsible for around 15 percent of China’s impressive economic growth from 1982 to 2000. But it cannot last. Although the rapid change brought China prosperity, it also brings a potentially bigger cost: China’s population ageing will accelerate and become much faster than both developed countries and many of Beijing’s competitors in Asia. Based on the United Nations’ 2022 population prospects, it will take China less than 18 years for the proportion of its elderly (aged 65 and over) to double to 20 per cent. It took Sweden more than 70 years, Germany 56 and Japan 21. EMBED START Video {id: "editor_6"} EMBED END Video {id: "editor_6"} China’s declining fertility rate is also a concern. Despite the government loosening controls over family planning, fertility plummeted from 2018 reaching a historical low of 1.15 children per woman in 2021. High housing prices, expensive education and women’s job insecurity after giving birth are all factors in the falling fertility rate. Demographers believe fertility will decline further in 2022 because of COVID-19 and the government’s strict COVID zero policy. By 2100, UN estimates show 100 working-age Chinese will have to support as many as 103 dependents (83 elderly and 20 young people). Some scholars in China are gloomier. The Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences (SASS) believes China’s fertility is likely to follow that of Singapore and South Korea, further declining to 1.1. If so, in 2100, 100 working Chinese will have to support 134 people (120 elderly plus 14 young). !function(){“use strict”;window.addEventListener(“message”,(function(e){if(void 0!==e.data[“datawrapper-height”]){var t=document.querySelectorAll(“iframe”);for(var a in e.data[“datawrapper-height”])for(var r=0;r<t.length;r++){if(t[r].contentWindow===e.source)t[r].style.height=e.data[“datawrapper-height”][a]+”px”}}}))}(); China’s population was expected to peak in 2021. This rapid ageing is likely to mean lower economic growth unless productivity increases fast.  Higher labour costs, driven by the lack of available workers, are likely to push low-margin, labour intensive manufacturing out of China to countries such as Vietnam, Bangladesh and India where workers are more available. China will need to direct more of its resources towards health, medical and aged-care services to meet the demands of an increasingly elderly population. Declining workforce numbers will accelerate the movement of people to economically developed areas — cities — accentuating the imbalance in economic growth that currently exists in China. To maximise the demographic gift and minimise the burden, China can encourage fertility, increase the retirement age, invest in human capital and continue technological innovation. EMBED START Video {id: "editor_11"} EMBED END Video {id: "editor_11"} Investing in human capital to improve the quality of workers and enhancing innovation will be crucial. China is already on this track. According to Bloomberg, it will produce more than 10 million college graduates this year, nearly double the number of a decade ago. And “The share of 25 to 60-year-olds with a high-school education has risen to 37 percent and is on track to reach at least 50 percent by the end of this decade — moving closer to levels seen in countries like Portugal — if Beijing can continue to boost education spending”. Despite falling numbers, a high-quality workforce, equipped with high technology, and supported by good economic policy can boost China’s productivity and alleviate the negative effects of population ageing. Xiujian Peng is a senior research fellow at the Centre of Policy Studies (CoPS), Victoria University, Australia. Her main area of expertise centres on the development of economic models and their application to China, with particular emphasis on demography, labour markets, energy, and economic growth. She declares no conflict of interest Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on November 21, 2022

China's social credit system is a fragmented experiment - 360 Fan Liang Published on November 29, 2021 By Fan Liang, Duke Kunshan University China’s Social Credit System (SCS) has attracted much international attention from critics, academics and the general public — often described as a dystopian “big brother” tool for political control. But most of the discussion has distorted or misunderstood the operation and purpose of the system. There’s been much international focus on the national SCS but far less on the implementation of it in municipal governments. The national system is still in the development stage, delivery day unknown. It mostly focuses on financial functions. In contrast, local implementations are already a tool for social control — a new way of nudging people towards desired behaviours by encouraging “good citizens”, while regulating “deviant citizens” through social management. While the SCS is considered a central policy that must be adopted by local authorities, its implementation is inconsistent. Instead, rollouts are considered competitive national experiments, where one successful framework might ‘win’ and be expanded to other cities. The result is individual systems in 41 different cities all at varying stages of implementation, and a further 38 cities in pilot mode. Another156 cities have announced plans to build their own version of the SCS. Built into these systems is each city’s vision for what it means to be a “good citizen”, meaning behaviour that may impact someone’s score in the major seaport city of Weihai, which employs 2,800 items to calculate social credit, could be completely ignored in the southern coastal city of Nanyang or the city of Yulin, both with less than 30 indicators. The variation in systems also impacts the points available for specific types of positive behaviour in different cities. For example, people in Weihai can receive 150 points for the same type of behaviour that would only attract 60 in the city of Nanyang. These points are used to further categorise citizens into different credit ratings, with some cities employing alphabetical measurements running from AAA to D, whereas others adopt naming conventions that range from Excellent to Poor and Risky citizens. The differences are not restricted to the metrics used to judge citizens, with the points available varying widely depending on where people live. For example, credit scores allocated in the city of Suzhou, west of Shanghai, and the city of Yiwu in Eastern China range from 0 to 200. Meanwhile, credit scores in the significantly larger western city of Quzhou stretch from 0 to 1,000. The highest maximum point given per person is 9,130 in the eastern coastal city of Rongcheng, and the lowest is 42, in Taicang city located south of the Yangtze River. Localised systems are a tool for restricting inadequate behaviours and improving social management. They’re based on metrics that measure people’s social morality, financial credit, legal enforcement and government compliance. Local governments use them to foster “good citizens” by encouraging positive actions such as being involved in charity, volunteer activities or acts of heroism such as helping others or donating blood. “Good citizens” can receive rewards and benefits, like discounts for parking, public transportation and deposit waivers in libraries. On the other hand, citizens can lose points or be deemed a “deviant” if they have commercial defaults like being in arrears on their bills, or if they break the law. These trust-breaking behaviors are mainly related to law enforcement and law-abiding actions, such as traffic violations and administrative penalties. The sanctions can range from paying higher interest rates, being banned from travelling or going to private school, which ultimately aims to enforce law-abiding behaviours. Cities also have more categories for point deduction rather than point accumulation. The SCS is China’s attempt to address economic, social and moral challenges by leveraging data and digital technology, according to official national and municipal SCS policy documents. It does not involve advanced technology like artificial intelligence but uses a scoring mechanism based on existing government data to calculate and compare people in real time, the data constantly updated. These local systems relied exclusively on pre-existing administrative databases and were built from existing data and technologies. They collect two types of data: biographical, such as name, gender, education, used to identify individuals. And behavioural data, which are measurements of people’s actions and behaviours. These data are from official records already collected by governments and state-owned enterprises such as the National Development and Reform Commission, Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and the Ministry of Agriculture and National Health. Behavioural data, in particular, are mostly gathered from local courts, justice and law enforcement bureaus. It’s too early to tell whether the SCS is effective. While people tend to change their behaviour if they are conscious that they are being evaluated, it does not mean it can transform people to have internally altruistic good intentions. The use of credit rankings can also be overly-simplistic or discriminatory. This raises the question about the intrinsic quality of citizens who are demotivated by regulations and incentives.The system cannot guarantee increased sincerity and morality, but instead allows the state to intervene in the lives of its citizens. The Chinese government’s access to large databases has provided them with the vast information needed to quantify dimensions of people’s lives into a common metric. Doing so puts people into measurable, comparable and governable units by blurring the qualifications between their social and economic life. The SCS aims to normalise the process in which state actors are able to be data processors, but the use of social quantification in modern governing isn’t new. Government and public sectors have used numbers and statistics to count people to have a better understanding of their society since the early nineteenth century. Consumer credit rating systems were adopted in the United States towards the latter end of the century. And many welfare states in Europe and elsewhere use census and public statistics still today. In the private sector, corporations like financial credit reporting firms have developed programs to measure whether people would default on their debts since the 1960s. China’s experiment in connecting the data dots could pave the way for an entirely new ratings system. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™. Fan Liang is an Assistant Professor of Media in the Division of Social Sciences at Duke Kunshan University. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and his research explores how new communication technologies construct social and political changes, and how powers shape and regulate the design and operation of such technologies. Fan Liang declated no conflicts of interest in realtion to this article.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on November 29, 2021

China’s vaccine vision turns crisis to opportunity - 360 Anna Kobierecka Published on November 14, 2022 The COVID-19 outbreak could have decimated China’s reputation. Here’s why it didn’t. The pandemic threatened to take a sledgehammer to China’s international ascent, but some deft diplomacy turned a threat into an opportunity for Beijing to emerge stronger and more influential. For decades, the nation has been on a charm offensive — pouring in development aid and trying to win friends around the world. Since the Cold War, China has funded sports infrastructure in Africa, sent doctors and teachers abroad and provided preferential loans to developing economies. Beijing has formalised its foreign aid strategies in several official documents, as recently as 2021. A country’s public diplomacy aims to reach foreign populations and shape their attitudes towards their nation, generating support for their politics — the same can be said for Beijing and the Chinese Communist Party. Considered the origin country of COVID-19, China faced a lot of global media criticism for its alleged role in igniting the pandemic — with some media outlets and public figures initially dubbing COVID-19 a “Wuhan virus”. In this terrain, China had to conduct its diplomatic relations with great care and turn negatives into positives. China’s foreign policy manoeuvring came with a sense of urgency during the pandemic. Pandemic-era foreign aid revealed several core goals: providing conditions and space for international co-operation, presenting China as a successful, responsible and dedicated nation (especially in assisting developing economies) and providing — mostly economic — mutual benefits. Official statements from China’s Ministry for Foreign Affairs parrot similar language, tying vaccine diplomacy with foreign aid. In such statements, China is showcased as an advocate of international co-operation and solidarity, a responsible international actor and provider to the developing world. Giving away vaccines is a gambit that brought the soft power benefits of being positioned as a responsible actor, whatever the financial opportunity cost. China’s pandemic-related foreign policy began with sending protective medical equipment. There is evidence that Chinese assistance was twofold. In the beginning it was sent to countries that had earlier offered China help during the outbreak of COVID-19 — there was a narrative provided by the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs expressing gratitude to those countries by returning the favour. Beijing was also offering help to those who asked for it with the condition of not recognising Taiwan as a sovereign entity. This ‘mask diplomacy’ morphed into ‘vaccine diplomacy’ later in the pandemic as China developed its own brand of vaccines. While using health as a tool to strengthen national interests within foreign countries has been accelerated during the pandemic, it’s not new. Vaccine diplomacy can be traced as far back as 1798 when the first smallpox vaccination was discovered. But it has since gained momentum to become a persuasive strategy during the COVID-19 pandemic. Beijing’s vaccine exportation was less about altruism than it was about power — not only were many COVID-19 jabs sold, but those donated were to strategic nations, building a narrative that positioned China in a good light. China’s jabs have mostly targeted Asia-Pacific countries, followed by African and Latin American nations. The geographical distribution suggests which regions are perceived as strategically important to Beijing, with the possibility of strengthening their influence. Whichever country is providing COVID-19 vaccines, be it China, Japan or somewhere else, benefits often extend beyond the goodwill of the donor. The obvious outcome is that the donor is helping global health and health security, which benefits all. But there’s also a positive effect on how the nation is perceived. Such as how strong they are viewed, their ability to set agendas, the power to influence mainstream discussions and their national image. The pandemic provided favourable conditions for vaccines to be used in this way. European states and the United States were accused of buying much bigger amounts of vaccines than needed, which left developing economies with a shortage of doses. China had an opening to swoop in and fill the vacuum, providing its vaccines and assistance to countries such as Indonesia and Sri Lanka. China was already the leading manufacturer of COVID-19 vaccines at the start of 2021. By the start of March that year, they had produced almost 170 million doses. But their vaccine diplomacy started early — as far back as July 2020, with the first agreements signed with selected partner countries, many of whom were lower-to-middle-income states. In December 2020, Egypt was one of the first countries to receive Chinese vaccines produced by the state-owned pharmaceutical company Sinopharm. By October 2022, China had sold 1.84 billion doses and donated 325 million to its international partners, according to the newest available data provided by Bridge, a consulting company. By influencing countries, China used the pandemic to fortify itself ahead of the next confrontation with the West with both foreign aid and ‘vaccine diplomacy’, generating favourable conditions for winning friends. Anna Kobierecka is an assistant professor at the Faculty of International and Political Studies, University of Lodz. Her main research field is focused on public diplomacy and nation branding. The author discloses no conflict of interest. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on November 14, 2022

Chinese techno-nationalism more than mere propaganda - 360 Jun Zhang Published on May 16, 2022 After decades of lagging behind, China’s technological innovation competes on the world stage. It has helped define what Chinese nationalism looks like today. For many educated professionals in urban China, the government’s plan to make China a world leader in scientific research and technological innovation is not mere government propaganda. China’s political leaders and social elites have long argued that stale scientific and technological development was a key reason why the country lagged behind the West, since suffering defeat in the first Opium War in the mid-19th century. Techno-scientific development became tethered to national security and economic growth, especially to reduce dependence on imports, pursue exports and capitalise on increasingly global value chains  and shift China beyond its status as ‘the world’s factory’. Granted, the Chinese people have been repeatedly exposed to this narrative through decades of formal education and official media, but there is more to it. This narrative provides the language for them to think about and make sense of the economic and technological practices in their daily lives. Nationalism is an emotional connection some citizens feel to their countries. For many educated professionals in China, their expression has taken a distinctly techno-nationalist sentiment. From engineers and technicians to lawyers and accountants, educated professionals have been working with and for — directly or indirectly — small workshops and big assembly-line factories that have provided the momentum for the country’s rapid economic growth since the late 1970s. In their eyes, China’s being the ‘world’s factory’ is not merely an expression used by the media, but describes their everyday encounters. Lu is a lawyer based in Foshan in the Pearl River Delta area, one of the industrial hubs in China. Over his two decades of practice, Lu has routinely dealt with small business owners who make clothes, shoes, toys, electric appliances, and other daily consumer items. However, as Lu understood it, those businesses involved “very little or no technology” (meiyou jishu hanliang) and had nowhere to upgrade to. Shao, an engineer, has similar observations. Shao has worked for a European company that has supplied machinery to factories in the same region for over a decade. Shao dealt with factories that used and produced more technologically sophisticated items such as solar batteries and computer chips. Nonetheless, to him, many of the Chinese factories were “there to provide mere assembly service”. The key technologies were “in foreign hands”. Lu and Shao are by no means unique in their understanding of technology and the economy. Many professionals understand that profit extraction largely comes from the control of technologies and related intellectual property rights, and a biggest share of the profits flow out of the country because many Chinese businesses have no ownership of key technologies. When the economy slowed down, many of them had first-hand experience: they saw factories fold when foreign investment withdrew and labour costs in the region rose. Many professionals come to the conclusion that what China earns is “xuehan qian” — literally, money from blood and sweat. The success of small businesses and assembly-line factories (and, by extension, China’s economy) lay in cheap labour, thanks to the large number of workers from rural areas. China’s achievement in development is  “sweatshirt modernity”, a low-end form of modernity. Professionals’ contribution to it, important as it may be, is largely overshadowed by the cheap labour that has attracted capital investment in the first place. Opportunities and income from the process of developing such “sweatshop modernity” has undoubtedly enabled Lu, Shao and other professionals to enjoy upward social mobility that many of their peers aspire to. Thanks to the vibrant economy made possible by the labour-intensive businesses and factories, the middle class has experienced a sea of change in their material lives. In the 1980s and 1990s, when Western societies had been enjoying the convenience brought by technological advancement such as computers and mobile phones, many urban Chinese families still did not have landline phones. Now, two decades into the new millennium, many middle-class families are using the same technologies as their counterparts in the West — handling work and life on the smartphone through services provided by Chinese platforms. This makes the Chinese middle class feel that their lives are finally synchronised with those of their peers in the developed world after decades of lagging. It connects middle-class citizens with the country through the lens of technological development. This sentiment is as much about pride as it is about anxiety. The rise of nationalism among many urban professionals when Chinese tech company Huawei was faced with various charges abroad is not merely a result of the government’s mobilisation of its propaganda machine. It is also a techno-nationalist sentiment born of a heartfelt need to move on and beyond. Jun Zhang (ORCID 0000-0002-4196-8101) is a sociocultural anthropologist and the author of Driving toward Modernity: Cars and the Lives of the Middle Class in Contemporary China (Cornell University Press, 2019). Her research interests lie at the intersections between material culture, social changes, and urban studies. Fieldwork mentioned in this article was supported by grants from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (project no. 17636016 and 17612719). Dr Zhang declared no conflicts of interest in relation to this article. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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2024-05-27T18:22:32.821463

Published on May 16, 2022