R
Rida Azmi
Guest
One of the things i want to share with you today, is the power of geography to help in (perhaps) one of the biggest challenges that we’re facing in the 21st century. Moving towards a more sustainable future, sustainability is lexicon of the 21st century, it’s a concept that has been introduced and talked about for the last 20 or 30 years, and it’s really resonating in the international community which is why it’s so important that we all have a good understanding of what sustainability is, and how geographers can contribute to a more sustainable future.
Conceptualizing sustainability is the intersection of what is called the three e’s : The first E is environment, where protecting the environment, means using resources wisely and maintaining resource availability for the future generations. The second E is economics, not just eradicating poverty, but allowing people economic opportunities for fulfilling life. The third E oftentimes referred to social equity (not just social justice), but good human health and well-being, where sustainability happens is where these three e’s overlap as it is mentioned in the figure below.
The Three E’s of Sustainability: Environment, Social Equity, and Economy (Source: Wikipedia)
From the 2000s, the United Nations launched its Millennium Development Goals – MDG (https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/millennium-development-goals-(mdgs)) ; (https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/) was a set of eight goals become a challenge to achieve by 2015, and it was an idea or an agenda of eight pressing issues that the international community agreed on need to be prioritized by :
Eradicating hunger and poverty, achieving educational outcomes, promoting gender equality, reducing both child and maternal mortality, combating HIV/aids and other diseases, and working towards environmental responsibility and sustainability
In 2015, the United Nations launched a new action agenda called the « Sustainable Development Goals » – SGDs ref (https://sdgs.un.org/fr/goals) some of them are familiar from the Millennium Development Goals – MDG, some of them are much newer and expansive. It’s a really big and ambitious agenda that consists of 17 goals and within each of the goals or a series of targets that countries are challenged to meet.
The fascinating thing about these goals and why they’re so important is because it’s the global consensus on how we achieve a more sustainable future, it’s become the priority area for international investment both public and private and is one of the reasons why we have some optimism about the world because there are all these goals and 193 countries around the world have pledged to try and achieve these goals by 2030.
As a geographer, we are excited because we know that we have some unique skills and the ability to really help further to advance those sustainable development goals. We are going to present you the three interesting ways that a geographer can provide really useful information methods and analysis for helping with the SDG outcome.
Geographers will ask where are things happening a lot and because we ask where are things happening, it also leads to questions about why things are happening in one place and not other places, we’re also very adept at taking a lot of data and beginning to visualize that and beginning to understand and figure out patterns and processes and oftentimes when we take big sets of data or complex data and we visualize it one of our products is a map.
we will give a historical example in 1854 in the city of London of which it experimented a massive cholera epidemic. At the time, most experts thought that diseases were spread by the foul my asthma’s in the air. But one man John Snow (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Snow) , (not John Snow of Winterfell) that Jon Snow he thought differently, and he thought that there might be a connection between contaminated dirty water and the spread of cholera
He began to ask his patients where do they get their water, where do you live, what were doing the few days before they got sick. He took that kind of data, and overlaid it on a map of London streets, and on top of that, he put a layer that showed where the different water wells were (the drinking wells), and he began to see that pattern. Furthermore, he noticed that most of the cholera cases seemed to cluster around one single drinking well. The Broad Street pump he couldn’t convince London’s health officials to actually shut down the drinking well and he had to go out himself and break the arm of the pump off, and within a couple of days, the cholera epidemic had begun to subside.
Fig.4 : map of cholera (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chol_an.gif?uselang=fr)
This kind of spatial thinking that not only transformed our world to a new way of understanding the spread of a disease, it was also a great first example of using GIS. What does spatial thinking look like when we’re talking about sustainable development goals?
Let’s take the example of SDG number one and try to eradicate poverty. There are about 760 million people that according to the World Bank are poor, they are making less than $2 a day so we have a lot of people that we have to bring up from poverty if we’re going to achieve SDG number one.
We need to know where are those 760 lives. One way we do that is to measure poverty. (is to also look at a proxy for poverty which is looking at income) the figure below is a table that is showing you GDP per capita or generally average income and the Tewa on the left is showing you the ten richest countries in the world. Monaco with about one hundred and four-five thousand dollars per person. On the other hand, and on the right you’re looking at the ten poorest countries with Burundi making about two hundred and sixty dollars per person, that’s a big wealth gap.
Table 1 : Richest and poorest countries in the world– source Wikipedia 2019
Now, imagine if we’re going to take all 193 countries and create a big spreadsheet or a table, we would have a really hard time seeing patterns and trends things wouldn’t be in alphabetical order they wouldn’t be in geographical order. Except for, geographers can take that kind of data and they can create spatial outcomes by looking at something like this map of income
Map of income
Let’s take SDG number two, ending hunger (zero hunger) once again there’s about 800 million people almost a billion people hungry on this planet, but we can’t end hunger if we don’t know where they are
This is a global map of hunger airy countries listed in pink are countries that are pretty food secure but countries that are in red are some of the most food insecure countries on the planet. In some cases those red countries like Chad one out of every three people is hungry. Being able to map this out come to map the data that we have, helps us again to know where our intervention should take priority toggle back to the map on poverty and many of the countries that are on our poorest that come out with poorest levels of income are also some of our hungriest.
Map of hunger
Now we see a correlation between hunger and poverty and the interaction between hunger and poverty is a massive challenge to solve both SDGs means that we have to integrate our efforts in our responses.
متابعة القراءة...
Conceptualizing sustainability is the intersection of what is called the three e’s : The first E is environment, where protecting the environment, means using resources wisely and maintaining resource availability for the future generations. The second E is economics, not just eradicating poverty, but allowing people economic opportunities for fulfilling life. The third E oftentimes referred to social equity (not just social justice), but good human health and well-being, where sustainability happens is where these three e’s overlap as it is mentioned in the figure below.
The Three E’s of Sustainability: Environment, Social Equity, and Economy (Source: Wikipedia)
From the 2000s, the United Nations launched its Millennium Development Goals – MDG (https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/millennium-development-goals-(mdgs)) ; (https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/) was a set of eight goals become a challenge to achieve by 2015, and it was an idea or an agenda of eight pressing issues that the international community agreed on need to be prioritized by :
Eradicating hunger and poverty, achieving educational outcomes, promoting gender equality, reducing both child and maternal mortality, combating HIV/aids and other diseases, and working towards environmental responsibility and sustainability
In 2015, the United Nations launched a new action agenda called the « Sustainable Development Goals » – SGDs ref (https://sdgs.un.org/fr/goals) some of them are familiar from the Millennium Development Goals – MDG, some of them are much newer and expansive. It’s a really big and ambitious agenda that consists of 17 goals and within each of the goals or a series of targets that countries are challenged to meet.
The fascinating thing about these goals and why they’re so important is because it’s the global consensus on how we achieve a more sustainable future, it’s become the priority area for international investment both public and private and is one of the reasons why we have some optimism about the world because there are all these goals and 193 countries around the world have pledged to try and achieve these goals by 2030.
As a geographer, we are excited because we know that we have some unique skills and the ability to really help further to advance those sustainable development goals. We are going to present you the three interesting ways that a geographer can provide really useful information methods and analysis for helping with the SDG outcome.
- The first is we’re spatial thinkers, you’ve heard a lot about spatial thinking today, the second is that we really are one of the few disciplines that really integrates human environment interactions, and the third is the scale.
Geographers will ask where are things happening a lot and because we ask where are things happening, it also leads to questions about why things are happening in one place and not other places, we’re also very adept at taking a lot of data and beginning to visualize that and beginning to understand and figure out patterns and processes and oftentimes when we take big sets of data or complex data and we visualize it one of our products is a map.
we will give a historical example in 1854 in the city of London of which it experimented a massive cholera epidemic. At the time, most experts thought that diseases were spread by the foul my asthma’s in the air. But one man John Snow (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Snow) , (not John Snow of Winterfell) that Jon Snow he thought differently, and he thought that there might be a connection between contaminated dirty water and the spread of cholera
He began to ask his patients where do they get their water, where do you live, what were doing the few days before they got sick. He took that kind of data, and overlaid it on a map of London streets, and on top of that, he put a layer that showed where the different water wells were (the drinking wells), and he began to see that pattern. Furthermore, he noticed that most of the cholera cases seemed to cluster around one single drinking well. The Broad Street pump he couldn’t convince London’s health officials to actually shut down the drinking well and he had to go out himself and break the arm of the pump off, and within a couple of days, the cholera epidemic had begun to subside.
Fig.4 : map of cholera (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chol_an.gif?uselang=fr)
This kind of spatial thinking that not only transformed our world to a new way of understanding the spread of a disease, it was also a great first example of using GIS. What does spatial thinking look like when we’re talking about sustainable development goals?
Let’s take the example of SDG number one and try to eradicate poverty. There are about 760 million people that according to the World Bank are poor, they are making less than $2 a day so we have a lot of people that we have to bring up from poverty if we’re going to achieve SDG number one.
We need to know where are those 760 lives. One way we do that is to measure poverty. (is to also look at a proxy for poverty which is looking at income) the figure below is a table that is showing you GDP per capita or generally average income and the Tewa on the left is showing you the ten richest countries in the world. Monaco with about one hundred and four-five thousand dollars per person. On the other hand, and on the right you’re looking at the ten poorest countries with Burundi making about two hundred and sixty dollars per person, that’s a big wealth gap.
Table 1 : Richest and poorest countries in the world– source Wikipedia 2019
Now, imagine if we’re going to take all 193 countries and create a big spreadsheet or a table, we would have a really hard time seeing patterns and trends things wouldn’t be in alphabetical order they wouldn’t be in geographical order. Except for, geographers can take that kind of data and they can create spatial outcomes by looking at something like this map of income
Map of income
Let’s take SDG number two, ending hunger (zero hunger) once again there’s about 800 million people almost a billion people hungry on this planet, but we can’t end hunger if we don’t know where they are
This is a global map of hunger airy countries listed in pink are countries that are pretty food secure but countries that are in red are some of the most food insecure countries on the planet. In some cases those red countries like Chad one out of every three people is hungry. Being able to map this out come to map the data that we have, helps us again to know where our intervention should take priority toggle back to the map on poverty and many of the countries that are on our poorest that come out with poorest levels of income are also some of our hungriest.
Map of hunger
Now we see a correlation between hunger and poverty and the interaction between hunger and poverty is a massive challenge to solve both SDGs means that we have to integrate our efforts in our responses.
متابعة القراءة...