What’s the point of running a blog if you can’t indulge in a little nepotism? Last year, I went with my son Finlay (18) to visit Bangladesh and look at the impact of climate change: rising sea levels are leading to ever-greater damage from the region’s cyclones, as we saw in the community of Koyra a few months after the

Anna Marriott is Health Policy Advisor for the Development Finance and Public Services Team at Oxfam. The international health community had been long-awaiting last week’s launch in Berlin of the 2010 World Health Report. Its theme was how to finance health care to achieve universal coverage. Oxfam and others began with a stunt in front of the Brandenburg Gate, highlighting the

Sarah Best is a policy adviser on low carbon development One of the positive twists from climate change is that it has brought attention to a long-neglected issue: poor people’s access to energy. The scary realisation that we need gargantuan amounts of investment to meet rising energy demand and keep emissions levels safe, has alerted policy wonks and leaders to

Robert Bailey is the Head of Economic Justice Policy at Oxfam. With the Cancun climate negotiations kicking off this week, and anticipating a flood of articles questioning the process, I was going to write a post in defence of the UNFCCC. However, it looks like lots of other people had the same idea. So I’ll probably hang on to mine

Kirsty Hughes is the Head of  Oxfam’s Advocacy and Policy Team. Two years ago, as Lehman’s collapsed, the world economy fell into recession and the G20 surfaced as a prime ministerial-level outfit to stem the chaos, it looked as if one positive outcome, at least for the optimist, would be the end of the “Washington consensus” and the start of

A random round-up of climate change links to coincide with this week’s UN gabfest in Cancún An excellent overview on climate change adaptation from The Economist. Favourite quote? ‘The best starting point for adaptation is to be rich’. “The environmental issue in India has been seen to be largely an upper-middle class elitist issue. I believe that a larger number

Jasmine Burnley is Global Economic Crisis Adviser for Oxfam and has taken up the baton for this post in Duncan’s absence… Six short months ago, pundits didn’t hold out significant hope that the G20 would seriously tackle development. But the Korean government – hosts of the G20’s most recent bash in Seoul earlier this month – worked hard to push

A few weeks ago, Dani Rodrik pointed out that while East Asia has topped the charts in recent decades on growth and poverty reduction, many of the best performing countries on human development are majority moslem, scattered across the Middle East and North Africa. I’ve just been reading IFPRI’s Global Hunger Index 2010, and the same pattern emerges. Here’s the

Rob Bailey is a senior Oxfam policy adviser on food issues. Last week on his blog, Dani Rodrik took issue with Oxfam and the World Bank for not being balanced in communications about food prices. When they’re low, we complain. When they’re high (like they were in 2008, and may soon be again we complain. On the face of it,

Max Lawson, Senior Policy Adviser at Oxfam, looks forward to an important year for taxing the financial sector. With the French now in charge of the G20, all eyes are on President Sarkozy to see whether he will press for a Robin Hood Tax on the financial sector to fund development and tackling climate change. Meanwhile a series new of

The idea of stopping blogging fills me with a disturbing mix of reluctance, relief and alarm at the impending withdrawal symptoms, but I have no choice. It’s getting on for two and a half years since I started this blog, and I’m taking a break, probably til the end of the year. The reason, as always, is workload – I’m writing

Alex Evans is on a bit of a roll at the moment, with an excellent new paper on ‘Globalization and Scarcity: Multilateralism for a World with Limits’. It’s a great summary of the problems created by the threat of scarcity of food, land, water, energy, and ‘airspace’ (for greenhouse gas emissions). He confines his solutions to the implications for the