A short post to note the latest UN refugee data (pdf), which shows a worldwide increase in 2007 of 3m – almost 10% -in the number of refugees forced from their home by conflict. It is a second successive increase after a period of decline. The UN describes the data as ‘unprecedented’, and says it [...]
The serious impact of noise on health outcomes is an emerging issue. I blogged last year about a World Health Organisation study on noise impact in Europe which suggested - among other things - that as many people died in the UK because of the effects of persistent traffic noise as in collisions. Now a [...]
The current scandals around surveillance in the UK reminds me that I meant to post about Privacy International’s most recent international league table. (Thanks to Our Kingdom for the prompt). England and Wales are in the bottom category - “endemic surveillance societies” - while Scotland, split out for the first time, is a little higher, [...]
We’ve recently finished some work for Yorkshire Futures on how Yorkshire and Humber might look in 2030. The reports - summary and full - have just been published, and there has been coverage in the Yorkshire Post. For various reasons, YF wanted a core scenario which represented “what if the prevailing trends continue to prevail [...]
A team of researchers at Oxford University has recalculated Britain’s carbon emissions since 1990 - and found that they have increased by 19%. (News report here.) The official figures - calculated according to the UN’s method - say that emissions have fallen by 15% over the period. However, the researchers, led by Dieter Helm, included [...]
Remittances from people living in rich countries to family members in poor countries now accounts for $300 billion a year, far outstripping official aid payments as the largest source of financial flows to the countries of the South. Until now it has been poorly documented, partly because it is made up of hundreds of [...]
Futurists tend to love demographic projections. They are as close as they ever get to predicting the future, because there’s simply so much population trends data out there, not to mention actuarial data, that once people have been born, the future shape of the population can be estimated pretty reliably. At least in theory. But [...]
The news that the UK Competition Competition has broadly - I’m paraprasing - found, at least provisionally, that everything is pretty much OK in the world of Britain’s supermarkets reminds me of the trouble with competition economists: they know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
If this is true, it’s alarming. The German energy consultancy Energy Watch Group [EWG] says in its latest six-monthly oil report (report and executive summary can be opened in pdf from here) that global oil production peaked in 2006 - and has since declined quite sharply.
EWG’s conclusions are based on production data rather than information [...]
It would be nice to be able to say something positive about this. But in the space of less than a week, there have been three separate reports which in their own ways have each emphasised how sharp - and how stuck - the differences are between between poor and richer in the UK.
