Environment & Climate Change

On Friday, October 10, Calestous Juma, professor of the practice of international development and director of the Belfer Center's Science, Technology, and Globalization Project, was awarded the coveted Lifetime Africa Achievement Prize (LAAP) during a ceremony in the Akwa Ibom State in Uyo, Nigeria.

"In 2012 alone, six African countries elected engineers for presidents; in fact, Africa currently boasts the highest number of presidents with technical backgrounds in the world. Independent African think-tanks like the African Centre for Technology Studies that Juma planted in 1988 — the first of its kind — are generating African perspectives on science, technology, and development. Although the cacophony of global debate surrounding Africa often drowns out the voices of Africans themselves, Juma knows that African leaders and youth can be immunized from outside opinions and interests if they can just be empowered to form their own. As their cheerleader, that is his goal."

As Africa's position in the world continues to grow and evolve in 2014, the Brookings Africa Growth Initiative continues its tradition of asking its experts and colleagues to identify what they consider to be the key issues for Africa in the coming year.

"Biotechnology offers Africa a wider range of economic opportunities than the Green Revolution did. It is already being used to improve food production and establish or revive cotton production. Its economic impact is therefore likely to go well beyond the farm sector to include industrial development."

"The Rio+20 process is an important reminder of the urgency to guide global production and consumption patterns with sustainability principles. Sadly, there is really no genuine global institution that is championing sustainable development. The vision that inspired Rio has been supplanted by two extreme positions. The first is a group that believes economic growth will have trickle-down benefits for the environment. The environmental camp has successfully replaced the spirit of Rio with a one-sided agenda that leaves little room for recognising the central role that human wellbeing plays in natural resource management."

"Addressing this triple challenge (more food, less hunger, less environmental degradation) will require more than just funding. For the FAO to continue to serve as the world's leading authority on food and agriculture policy, it will need to reinvent itself, becoming a thought leader in ending the hunger of ideas on how to end hunger. For example, what is the role of advance market purchasing in hunger reduction? What should be done about foreign direct investment in agriculture and large-scale land acquisitions? How should food price spikes be managed? What are the benefits and risks of emerging food and agricultural technologies? The FAO needs to be leading the debates in these and other areas."

The Spring 2011 issue of the Belfer Center newsletter features recent and upcoming activities, research, and analysis by members of the Center community on critical global issues. This issue highlights the Belfer Center’s continuing efforts to build bridges between the United States and Russia to prevent nuclear catastrophe – an effort that began in the 1950s. This issue also features three new books by Center faculty that sharpen global debate on critical issues: God’s Century, by Monica Duffy Toft, The New Harvest by Calestous Juma, and The Future of Power, by Joseph S. Nye.

This conference, co-sponsored by the Association of American Geographers and the Science, Technology, and Globalization Project, Harvard Kennedy School brought together members of public and private donor organizations with those from institutions and industry engaged in the application of geospatial science and technology to assess development needs, formulate responses to those needs, and successfully implement sustainable development programs in Africa.  Its goal was to insure that public and private sector initiatives that rely on geospatial tools, techniques, and applications achieve a high level of integration in the areas of database requirements and standards, methodologies, and strategies for sustainability.  Enhancing private sector linkages with government and nongovernmental initiatives already underway, as well as with ongoing academic and scientific research efforts, will help further capacity building and coordinate public policy applications across regions and themes.

"Costa Rica, which shares commonalities with many African nations in terms of climate and resources, has been privileged to have visionary leaders who have understood the importance of education and, since 1949, has had a free and mandatory educational system through elementary school.

In this same era, the army was abolished, arms were exchanged for books and canons for school desks and state universities offering a world-class education were established. Costa Ricans are very proud of this and stable."

"The market release of the iconic $100 laptop (XO) later this year promises to do for education what the cell phone did for telecommunications....Like the cellphone, new educational technologies such as the XO will demand greater flexibility in educational systems....Existing curricula are like landlines; fixed in place and dependent for their functioning on centralized bureaucracies."