Category Archives: Resource Based Economy

Novateks Yamal LNG facility in Sabetta, northern Russia. Photo: Novatek

Chinas Arctic engagement has increased considerably during the past decade, which has not only offered plentiful economic opportunities but also created new risks and concerns among the eight Arctic states, non-state actors, and peoples. To increase understanding of dimensions of Beijings Arctic activities, The Arctic Institutes new China series probes into Chinas evolving Arctic interests, policies, and strategies, and analyses their ramifications for the region (and beyond).

During the last twenty years of increased activity in the Arctic, China has become one of Russias most successful Asian partners. The scale of the Yamal LNG and Arctic LNG 2 projects stimulates discussion on further strengthening of bilateral cooperation. At the same time, during the analysis of this new area of relations, it is important to take into account several factors.

For both Russia and China, Arctic activities are associated with the development of territories, which has long remained a challenge. This factor, in spite of its high importance, is not discussed with the same thoroughness as the demand for having sources of energy supply and new routes.

However, the Russian Arctic today is inextricably linked with the development of the Russian Far East. The Northern Sea Route along the circumpolar coast of the Arctic country attracts the transit of cargo by sea and Siberian rivers, and helps to increase the connectivity of previously inaccessible and sparsely populated territories. The Ministry for the Development of the Russian Far East and the Arctic oversees infrastructure development projects aiming to unite the land.

For China, emergent Arctic logistics also promise to give new impetus to the economically lagging northeastern Heilongjiang and Jilin provinces. Both provinces actively cooperate with Russias northern and Far Eastern administrations and strive to formalize their role within the northern branch of the Silk Road.

These domestic motivations add value to national politics in raising the GDP and seeking new routes for strategic maneuvering. This factor emphasizes the natural difference between the national interests of the two states.

Sino-Russian collaboration in the Arctic remains a part of the general outline of bilateral relations. Today, the comprehensive partnership and strategic cooperation of the two states, thanks to a series of joint statements, have included the Arctic as an important sphere of partnership. In the same context, the discussed docking of the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) with its polar branch also shapes a new framework for the implementation of Arctic projects. Besides, for the reasons described above, Arctic cooperation is associated with border relations between the two countries. In this regard, for example, such projects as Primorye-1 and Primorye-2 turn out to be embedded in logistics focused on deliveries of cargo via the Northern Sea Route.

All the above brings new political leverage for promoting Arctic cooperation. At the same time, it allows involving a larger bunch of international and bilateral mechanisms from the already established, to the potentially effective for the reasons of security and regional cooperation.

The legacy of bilateral affairs affects the relations between Russia and China in the Arctic. It would seem, quite rightly, that for Russia and China, cooperation in the Arctic has no historical precedents. With the exception of some exotic examples, such as activities of the Russian-American Company, which at one time included the delivery of Chinese goods to Alaska, the countries do not have enough experience of interacting in the region. Nevertheless, as part of bilateral relations, they are developing the hard-won principles of cooperation, which above all include the desire to be equal partners and remain independent from each other. Chinas pragmatic approach to the Arctic, even more, encourages Russia to adhere to these rules and develop interaction with other Asian partners. Therefore, the bilateral cooperation in the region inevitably remains a balance between the largest Arctic state with a developing resource-based economy and the Arctic newcomer riding the wave of the economic boom.

The strategic shifts in the Arctic affect Sino-Russian relations in the region. The climatic drive for circumpolar development opened up a new geopolitical environment. The increase in shipping access to Asia through the Bering Strait involves the states of the North Pacific with strategic interaction. Thus, the determination of Russia and China intersects with the interests of Japan, North and South Korea, and the United States, bringing to life a new balance of power.

Another aspect related to the development of the circumpolar north is the emerging of a new international route from Europe to Asia. Both states are hoping to use this opportunity in their national interests: Russia strives to turn the Northern Sea Route into an international transport corridor, and China aspires to develop the initiative of the Polar Silk Road.

For these reasons, differences in approaches, the legal interpretation, discrepancies and the issues of the strategic balance invariably appear in documents and stay in the framework of bilateral cooperation in the Arctic.

Sino-Russian relations in the Arctic are of a complicated nature and are tightly bound to a whole scope of diversified factors from the domestic motives of the territorial development to the historical background and strategic interests. In this regard, the nuanced approach to the analysis may provide a more precise and unbiased assessment of Sino-Russian relations in the Arctic.

Dr. Mariia Kobzeva is a Postdoctoral Fellow at UiT-The Arctic University of Norway, Troms.

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A Framework for Sino-Russian Relations in the Arctic - The Arctic Institute

The coronavirus pandemic continues to spread across the Ohio Valley Region. But stay at home orders and social distancing restrictions reduced the number of cases modelers projected without them.

Now there is pressure to ease the restrictions and open states economies back up as the businesses that were closed struggle to find relief and record numbers of people apply for unemployment.

Here is a brief rundown of how West Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky plan to reopen businesses.

West Virginia Governor Jim Justice announced on April 27 that the state would begin reopening businesses before the federal government and outside organizations recommended.

The voluntary openings in the West Virginia Strong The Comeback plan are scheduled to take place in waves over three to six weeks, depending on outbreaks and hospitalizations spikes as social distancing restrictions relax.

Week 1 (April 30)

-Hospitals across the state were able to resume elective medical procedures, provided that they have a plan in place to safely phase-in procedures based on clinical judgement while following all CDC guidelines. They must also have enough personal protective equipment and a plan to respond if there is a surge of COVID-19 patients in the future. The West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources Office of Health Facility Licensure & Certification was tasked with approving each application.

-Outpatient health care operations could resume if their boards or associations approved.

-Testing of daycare staff began across the state.

Week 2 (May 4)

-The states Stay at Home was replaced with a Safer at Home order on May 4.

-Any small business with fewer than 10 employees was able to resume operations.

-All businesses providing professional services, such as hair salons, nail salons, barbershops and pet grooming were permitted to reopen. But customers are required to make appointments for these businesses and must wait in their vehicles until their appointment.

-Outdoor dining at restaurants is permitted under strict physical distancing restrictions.

-Churches and funeral homes that chose to stop in-person services that wish to resume are encouraged to take extra precautions such as limiting seating to every other pew, maintaining physical distancing and wearing face covering restrictions.

All businesses included in the Week 2 phase of reopenings are required to operate with physical distancing measures in effect. Businesses are also required to implement efforts to increase sanitation and the use of face coverings.

Weeks 3-6 (May 11)

-Wellness centers operated by or with West Virginia Licensed Health Care providers, dental offices (as approved by the West Virginia Board of Dentistry) and drive-in theaters will open up May 11.

-Remaining business including office and government buildings, specialty retail stores, parks and facilities at parks, gyms, fitness centers, recreation centers, dine-in restaurants, hotels, casinos, spas and massage parlors and other businesses will be notified one week before they are allowed to reopen.

-There is no timetable for the reopening of nursing home visitation, entertainment venues and gatherings of more than 25 people.

Ohio Governor Mike DeWine also announced his Responsible Restart Ohio plan to reopen businesses in the state on April 27.

He said the plan was a balancing act between restarting the economy and keeping people safe, outlining measures to increase testing and contact tracing.

DeWine organized the plan by when certain sectors would reopen. Some business owners continue to wait on the governors word.

May 1

-The states Stay at Home order was replaced with a Stay Safe Ohio order scheduled to run through May 29. The order relaxed some restrictions, but still included social distancing and sanitation practices at businesses and banning social gatherings of 10 or more people.

-DeWine signed an order allowing hospital procedures to resume as long they dont require an overnight stay in the hospital. There are exceptions, such as cases involving cancer or extreme pain.The order also applied to dentistry and veterinary offices.

May 2

-Retailers could open offering curbside pickup only.

May 4

-All construction, manufacturing and distribution companies could reopen.

-General office environments could reopen.

May 12

-Retailers can open in-store operations.

All companies that reopen were told they have to follow five rules:

-Wear face masks (for most employees, not customers)

-Assess employee health daily health, such as by checking temperatures

-Maintain good hygiene

-Clean and sanitize surfaces frequently

-Limit capacity to 50 percent of fire code requirement to maintain social distancing

On May 7, DeWine announced another round of openings.

May 15

-Barbershops, salons, day spas and similar personal services can reopen under new guidelines. These include waiting for appointments outside, only allowing the person holding the appointment inside (with some exceptions for children) and mask wearing for workers

-Outdoor dining and restaurant and bars can resume. Restaurants and bars must operate under guidelines developed by working groups established by DeWine. These include barriers between seating areas, no open congregate areas, employees required to wear masks (with exceptions for cooks and certain other employees).

May 21

Indoor dining at restaurants and bars can resume under new guidelines

DeWines working groups will establish timelines for remaining businesses, including entertainment venues, to reopen.

Kentucky is taking a slower approach to reopening that Ohio and West Virginia.

Gov. Andy Beshear announced his Healthy at Work plan would include different phases for the health care industry and non-health care industries.

April 27

-Non-emergent/non-urgent outpatient healthcare services were permitted to resume. This includes physical therapy, chiropractic services, dentistry, oral surgery and anesthesia. Non-emergent/non-urgent surgical and invasive procedures were not included in this phase.

May 6

Outpatient/ambulatory surgery and invasive procedures can resume. But all patients must have COVID-19 pre-procedure testing and each facility must maintain a 14-day supply of all necessary PPE. Acute care hospitals must maintain at least 30 percent bed capacity, per facility surge plan, in both ICU and total beds for COVID-19 patients.

May 11

-Manufacturing and construction businesses may reopen.

-Vehicle or vessel dealerships can reopen

-Half of office-based businesses may reopen.

-Horse racing, with no fans, may resume.

-Dog grooming and board can continue.

May 13

Non-emergent/non-urgent inpatient surgery and procedures may resume at 50% of pre-COVID-19 shutdown volume. The same guidelines with outpatient/ambulatory surgery and invasive procedures will apply.

May 20

Retail businesses can resume in-store shopping.

-Houses of Worship can hold in-person services with social distancing guidelines.

May 22

-Restaurants will be able to open at one-third capacity with some social distancing requirements.

May 25

-Kentuckians will be allowed to gather in groups of 10 or fewer.

-Barbers, salons, cosmetology businesses and similar services may resume.

May 27

Non-emergent/non-urgent inpatient surgery and procedures may resume at volume determined by each facility.

June 1

-Movie theaters and gyms will be able to open.

June 11

-Campgrounds will be allowed to open.

June 15

-Childcare facilities and youth sports can begin operation.

July 1

-Bars will be allowed to open and groups of 50 can meet.

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How Ohio Valley States Are Reopening Their Economies - Ohio Valley ReSource

The following is a contributed article by Todd Snitchler, President and CEO, Electric Power Supply Association.

As policymakers in states including New Jersey, Maryland, and Illinois consider exitingPJM Interconnection's capacity market to pursue clean energy goals, they should look to Virginia as a cautionary tale. Alternatives such as the Fixed Resource Requirement (FRR) come with stark consequences for power customers and questionable environmental gains.

Power prices in PJM were the lowest on record in 2019 and emissions have decreased by 34%since 2005 without mandates or requirements to produce clean energy. Why the rush to abandon a successful system for an option that PJM's Independent Market Monitor estimates would raise costs in Marylandand Illinoisto the tune of $200-400 million?

The latest energy news from Virginia provides an additional data point showing the potential costs of the FRR path.

Last Friday, Dominion Energy, which holds a monopoly over power generation and distribution in Virginia, offered state regulators a clean energy proposal with a stunning price tag: nearly $50 per month added to each customer's power bill. Yet the utility's plan only halves current carbon emissions by 2035 with proposals including the addition of 5 GW of offshore wind and 2 GW of battery storage.

While more cost-effective and efficient options to fight climate change likely exist after all, onshore wind and solar are increasingly the least expensive energy technologies the state has nowhere else to turn for power generation solutions.

Dominion's 2020 Integrated Resource Plan(IRP) is the first filed under Virginia's Clean Economy Act, which goes into effect on July 1, 2020, and requires 100% clean energy by 2050. The upshot is far from surprising: An aggressive, single-state clean energy goal paired with a powerful utility spells trouble for Virginia families and businesses already struggling financially due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dominion touted its planto "quadruple" renewable energy and energy storage, and many have praised the company's aggressive renewable additions. Improving our environment is a worthy goal, and one EPSA's members support, but the headlines miss some key details.

Because natural gas is still the cleanest, least cost option needed to support intermittent resources, the IRP proposes to build 970 MW of new natural gas-fired generation to back up a renewable-heavy grid in all four scenarios. And even the most aggressive options proposed only halve current Commonwealth emissions by 2035.

But what is most problematic about Dominion's IRP is the most instructive for other states. It's also the least surprising for those of us who know what happens when generators exert market power.

Dominion estimates that under its second least aggressive option, "Alternative B," consumer bills will increase by $45.92 a monthby 2035. That's a nearly 40% increase.

Such a hit would raise eyebrows in normal times, but when families and business are struggling to recover from the devastating economic impacts of COVID-19, a massive increase to their power bills is the last thing they need.

How can responsible leaders justify burdening their constituents with this expense when there is a more sustainable, cost-effective path to reduce emissions? Moreover, the financial strain could undermine political appetite for clean energy efforts across the board, putting environmental progress at the whim of the next election and plummeting state revenues.

Dominion has a history of pursuing questionable, over-priced projects. Just last year, the Virginia State Corporation Commission (SCC) was forced to approve a Dominion plan to build a new offshore wind facility despite finding that it would not be "prudent under any common interpretation of the term"and was the highest cost option proposed.

PJM is the regional power grid serving 65 million customers in 13 states and the District of Columbia, including Virginia. Unlike Virginia, many of the states in PJM require power generators to compete against other companies to build new plants resulting in a stronger grid and cleaner generation.

While FRR is not an explicit return to the monopoly model that exists in Virginia, it is functionally similar.

Under an FRR, the states oversee resource adequacy decisions and consumers are deprived of the benefits of regional competition and power pooling. Economics 101 tells us that monopolies are bad for consumers and Dominion's latest IRP proves it especially when determinations of "just and reasonable" are dictated by statute and not based on the evidence evaluated through a regulatory proceeding.

Competitive power suppliers in PJM and across the nation are retiring unnecessary, costly, and often higher-emitting plants while building more efficient cutting-edge solutions, including renewable resources and battery storage without asking ratepayers to foot the construction bill. Nearly 31,000 MWof coal generation capacity has been deactivated in the PJM footprint since 2002, resulting in substantial emissions reductions and cost savings.

Meanwhile, back in Virginia, Dominion is proposing a plan that will increase power bills by nearly $50 a month at a time when consumers should be benefiting from the lowest prices on record.

The lesson is clear for Maryland, New Jersey and Illinois leaders. Customers deserve better. Rather than trying to go it alone, PJM states should work together to find regional cost-effective solutions to address and reduce carbon emissions on a wide scale not highly fragmented approaches that rely on politically powerful monopolies.

At EPSA, we're working with a broad coalitionincluding renewable developers and economic experts to find market solutions that will achieve sustainable climate progress at a cost Americans can afford. States abandoned the monopoly model for a reason. Let's not go back now.

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Dominion's nearly $50 monthly power bill hike in Virginia is a warning for other states - Utility Dive

REUTERS/Brendan Mcdermid

Besides helping societies remain connected over the Internet, these technologies are also enabling public health officials to track potentially infected individuals, enforce quarantine measures, create community-wide awareness about the virus, and plan coordinated responses to deal with resource shortages. So how exactly is this being done?

Countries like Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, and Israel are using data from citizens mobile phones to perform contact tracing a method that uses trajectory and geo-location data from mobile phones to detect and isolate individuals who were in close proximity to someone who has been tested positive for COVID-19. It is based on the same technology and analytics that digital marketers often use to identify and target potential customers with advertisements through their smartphone apps, such as in geo-targeting and geo-fencing.

Soumya Sen

Quarantine enforcement

In China, the country where COVID-19 cases were first reported, Baidu the Chinese equivalent of Google has developed an infrared sensor for no-contact screening that uses AI to automatically identify individuals with fever, even when they are in a crowd. The government has created a health code app that give users a color-coded designation based on their health status and travel history, which can be checked by the authorities before permitting entry into crowded locations, for example, train stations. A green code allows a user to travel, a yellow code indicates that the user should be in self-isolation, and a red code indicates the user has tested positive for the virus and requires quarantine. The Chinese government views this health code app as an essential tool to ensure that its healthy citizens can get back to work while others observe the quarantine measures fully. The intent is to prevent a second wave of infections that could harm its economy even further. Similarly, Taiwan rolled out a mobile phone-based electronic fence that monitors the phone signals of quarantined individuals and alerts the police if they leave their home.

In the U.S., tech giant Google has announced that it will use anonymous and aggregated user data from mobile phones to help government agencies understand if social distancing rules are being observed in public places in different counties. Many federal and state government agencies are also working with telecom operators and mobile advertisers to measure the success of their lockdown directives.

Mobile apps are also playing a vital role in creating awareness in the community about the virus. For example, the government of India has launched a chatbot feature on WhatsApp, called MyGov Corona Helpdesk. Its citizens can send text messages to this chatbot to receive authoritative answers about coronavirus symptoms and treatment. An active community of software developers in India is also developing innovative mobile applications ranging from those that help patients locate nearest hospitals with available beds to those that facilitate grocery delivery for senior citizens.

Faced with the problem of long wait times for callers inquiring about COVID-19 information, several health care centers in the U.S. are deploying AI-based software to replace staffed hotlines with online screening and triage tools. The goal is to identify those callers who do need additional medical care (e.g., high-risk patients who need to be directed to testing sites, clinics, or emergency departments) while reassuring others who only need some information and self-monitoring.

Another area in which information technology is playing a vital role is in hospital resource planning. In this era of big data, various organizations have been collecting data from multiple sources about this pandemic and developing analytics-powered dashboards to present real-time information to the public. For example, several websites are reporting data about the number of COVID cases, hospitalizations, and death counts in different countries. Many state governments in the U.S. have also launched their own dashboards to provide timely information to the public. These public data repositories will allow researchers and policymakers quantify the real-time impact on hospital systems and forecast future utilization levels of hospital resources.

These are just some of the ways in which data, analytics, and technology are helping us to respond to this global pandemic. With no cure or vaccine available in the immediate future, we will need to increasingly rely on data, analytics, and technology to turn the tide against the spread of the virus. There will be many more examples of human ingenuity that will emerge from this crisis, and hopefully these innovations will also help propel our society forward in the post-COVID world.

Soumya Sen, Ph.D.,is a McKnight Presidential Fellow and an associate professor of Information & Decision Sciences at theCarlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. His expertise is in internet technologies, data communications, electronic commerce, cloud technology, network security and broadband data pricing.

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How data, analytics, and technology are helping us fight COVID-19 - MinnPost

The Finance Ministry has begun writing to several other ministries to put new projects on hold as it prepares to introduce the budget for the next fiscal year amid a slowing economy due to the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The government has frozen new hires and there won't be an increase in the salaries of civil servants this year even as tax rates go up, according to Finance Ministry sources.

The impact of the lockdown on businesses and a drastic reduction in remittance, all caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, will be reflected in the reduced size of the annual budget and its spending allocation.

Ever since the government instituted a nationwide lockdown to prevent the spread of Covid-19, Nepal has been in the midst of financial stress. The lockdown, which has been in place for over a month, has reduced consumer spending and impacted domestic worker wages and money remitted by migrant workers, according to economists.

"This, in turn, has caused sales and income tax revenues, the major source of capital in the annual budget, to plummet, said economist Bishwamber Pyakurel. "Given the deficit in financial resources, the government should dramatically reduce the size of the budget, with allocation only for development projects that are in the final phase of completion.

According to government officials, the upcoming budget will focus on improving health infrastructure as the pandemic has brought to light its poor state, which has increased Nepals vulnerability to the coronavirus. The budget will also focus on employment generation, as tens of thousands of Nepali migrant workers are expected to return home after losing their jobs in foreign countries due to the global economic crisis caused by the pandemic.

The Ministry of Labour and Employment has projected that around 400,000 Nepalis are expected to return home. This number will supplement the thousands of domestic workers who will also lose jobs at home.

According to finance experts, a reduction in the size of the budget could benefit the country, as every year, a large budget is introduced and the government fails to spend it.

This government appears to believe that a bigger budget brings about development and prosperity faster, Ram Sharan Mahat, a former finance minister, told the Post. But the success of the budget depends on its implementation."

According to Mahat, who is also the coordinator of the special budget committee formed by the opposition Nepali Congress, the size of the budget should not be bigger than Rs 1.2 trillion.

In February, the government had whittled down the budget for this fiscal year by 10 percent after realising that it wouldn't be able to spend the amounts allocated. In the mid-term budget review, Finance Minister Yubaraj Khatiwada had trimmed the budget down to Rs 1.38 trillion from Rs 1.53 trillion.

Pushpa Raj Kandel, vice-chairman of the National Planning Commission, told the Post early this week that the resource committee he heads will likely make a downward revision in the budget ceiling by 5-10 percent.

Various ministries and government agencies prepare a list of projects and programmes based on the ceiling set by the resource committee and the Finance Ministry, taking the planned projects into account, prepares the budget.

The Department of Roads expects its budget allocation to be reduced by 20-25 percent, said Shivahari Sapkota, the department spokesperson.

Besides a reduction in the budget ceiling, we have been advised not to incorporate any new projects, he said.

In the current fiscal year, the Road Department received a budget allocation of Rs124 billion. But in line with Mahats assessment, Sapkota admitted that only 32 percent of that budget had been spent so far, as most projects have stalled due to the ongoing lockdown. The lockdown, however, was only imposed on March 24, just around two months before the end of the fiscal year in mid-May.

The Ministry of Urban Development had a ceiling of Rs29 billion for the next fiscal year.

We had prepared our programmes based on the ceiling given to us, but we have been told that the revised ceiling could go down by 15 percent, said Madhusudan Adhikari, a secretary at the ministry.

According to Adhikari, his ministry will continue to implement the plan of creating urban centres along the mid-hill highways and constructing major infrastructure, including the new parliament building on the premises of Singha Durbar.

The government has been forced to lower the budget ceiling as it has been collecting far less revenue than in the previous years due to the lockdown. Customs offices are major sources of revenue for the treasury but ever since the closure of the international border, only medical goods and essential food items have come in, and these goods are either at zero or very low tariffs.

The domestic economy too has come to a standstill, affecting internal revenue collection. Income tax and value added tax have not been collected as the government decided on April 30 to allow businesses to postpone payments in light of the impact of Covid-19.

Given the shortfall in revenue collection, the government has been seeking more funds from donors, but donor economies too are predicted to contract in the aftermath of the pandemic, likely affecting the amounts they provide.

But the government is also under pressure to provide relief to the unemployed and stimulus packages to businesses.

"The government will need to roll out a raft of fiscal and monetary measures to provide credit and tax relief to companies, especially small businesses that have been hit hard by the outbreak, said economist Pyakural.

The Central Bureau of Statistics last week projected the countrys economy to grow at a meagre 2.27 percent in the current fiscal year, the lowest since the 2015-16 fiscal year when the country witnessed a growth of just 0.2 percent after experiencing devastating earthquakes in 2015 followed by an Indian trade blockade.

With economic activities battered by the ongoing lockdown and uncertainty over the end to the pandemic, the government is facing the prospect of low revenue collection in the upcoming fiscal too, prompting it to review the budget ceiling.

As of mid-April, the federal governments revenue collection had been short of its target by Rs200 billion, according to the Finance Ministry.

According to economist Pyakurel, the upcoming budget should be drafted with a clear roadmap for the next two years. A poor response to the pandemic and a failure to revive the economy could be disastrous, he said.

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Upcoming budget to put new projects on hold as the economy braces for a hit - The Kathmandu Post

ByHub staff report

With the urgent need to limit the spread of COVID-19, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, with Bloomberg Philanthropies, today launched a free online course to help train a new cadre of contact tracers to reach and assist people exposed to the virus. Taking and passing this course will be a requirement for thousands of contact tracers being hired by the state of New York to fight the pandemic.

The new course, "COVID-19 Contact Tracing," is available for registration on the Coursera platform beginning today. The course highlights how contact tracing is a key component of a public health strategy to slow the spread of COVID-19 without large-scale shutdowns and stay-at-home orders.

Through presentations by expert faculty and role plays, the course teaches the basics of interviewing people diagnosed with COVID-19, finding their close contacts who might have been exposed, and providing them advice and support for self-quarantine. Contact tracing is a public health practice that has been successful in breaking the chain of transmission of other infectious diseases, including measles and tuberculosis.

New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Michael R. Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg Philanthropies and former three-term mayor of New York City, recently announced an initiative to develop a large-scale contact tracing program in New York state. The program will include a baseline of 30 contact tracers for every 100,000 residents in the state and will utilize additional tracers based on the projected number of cases in each region. The program is expected to have 6,400 to 17,000 tracers statewide depending on the projected number of cases.

"Contact tracing allows us to communicate with people infected with COVID-19, identify those who may have been exposed, and provide all of them with guidance to limit the spread of the disease," Bloomberg said. "This new training course, which we're making available online for free, will teach contact tracers how to do this work effectivelyand help cities and states across the nation undertake these critical efforts."

The new course is open to anyone in the world, whether they are interested in becoming a contact tracer or just want to understand the process. Applicants in New York state will be invited to take the course after their application is reviewed and they pass an initial interview. The interview, followed by taking the course and passing the final assessment within 72 hours, will be required to be hired into the New York state program.

Michael R. Bloomberg

Founder, Bloomberg Philanthropies

Bloomberg Philanthropies is supporting the state Department of Health with recruiting and interviewing applicants, and the Bloomberg School has developed this online curriculum to train candidates. Vital Strategies' initiative Resolve to Save Lives will provide technical and operational advising to New York state health department staff. The program will serve as an important resource to gather best practices and as a model that can be replicated across the nation.

"Testing and tracing are critical to our reopening plan, and New York is leading the nation on both fronts. We're testing more than any other state and now we're working with Bloomberg Philanthropies and Johns Hopkins to quickly build an army of tracers for our contact tracing program that can serve as a model for the rest of the nation," Cuomo said. "This innovative online training course is a key component of our program that will provide tracers with the tools to effectively trace COVID-19 cases at the scale we need to fight this pandemic."

A recent report from the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security at the Bloomberg School estimated that the current situation in the United States requires a new workforce of at least 100,000 contact tracers to limit the spread of COVID-19 and begin to reopen the economy.

"Controlling the spread of COVID-19 will require the hiring and training of a public health workforce in record time," said Joshua M. Sharfstein, vice dean for Public Health and Community Engagement at the Bloomberg School. "This introductory course provides a strong foundation in the core concepts of contact tracing, from how to talk to people about COVID-19 to key ethical principles."

The lead instructor of the course is Emily Gurley, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the Bloomberg School. Among other contributors to the class is Bloomberg School senior research associate Tolbert Nyenswah, who was the incident commander for the response to the Ebola outbreak in Liberia.

The contact tracing course, which takes six hours to complete, is divided into five sections or "modules." The course covers:

"We hope the excellent content and easy accessibility of this virtual training program can contribute to achieving the speed and scale required to get the New York State program up and running," said Kelly Henning, who leads the Bloomberg Philanthropies Public Health program. "We believe it also can be useful for health departments around the country and around the world eager to aggressively expand contact tracing."

Added Bloomberg School Dean Ellen J. MacKenzie: "The Bloomberg School of Public Health has been at the forefront of the fight against COVID-19 since the beginning, helping leaders and the public understand and respond to this pandemic with the best available science and evidence. Massive contact tracing is a critical component of our recovery. We are thrilled to bring our deep expertise on this important public health practice, as well as our experience in industry-leading online teaching, to the training and curriculum for this groundbreaking effort."

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Johns Hopkins launches online course to train army of contact tracers to slow spread of COVID-19 - The Hub at Johns Hopkins

By Anthonie Cilliers

Over the last 140 years, burning coal for electricity generation has provided the backbone of economic development, supporting industrialisation and becoming the backbone of an exponential improvement in the quality of life.

Just more than a 100 years ago, the discovery of oil in the Middle East has resulted in similar advances in the quality of life as well as accumulation of wealth, and supports now the world economy to such an extent that seems virtually impossible to break our dependence on it.

Read more about:Energy accessEconomic transformation

Of course, this fossil-fuel-based economic growth was made possible by the 2 to 3.5-fold increase in energy density compared to burning wood for our energy needs. Subsequent economic development has enabled people in developed countries to afford to be more environmentally conscious and that is a good thing.

However, large parts of the world have been left out of this massive development: wealth gaps have grown to such an extent that countries in Africa and many in Asia will remain dependent on support from developed countries. In fact, energy poverty is the largest limiting factor to economic growth facing the developing world today.

If that was the only challenge facing the developing world today, it would have been relatively simple to overcome. But with all the advances that came from the use of fossil fuels came hefty impacts on the environment, including ocean acidification and changes in climate that have resulted in more arid regions, especially in Africa.

The world needs to break its reliance on fossil fuels at the expense of the developing world no doubt a tough pill to swallow.

Luckily, several solutions to these problems have been developed over the last few decades. Renewable energy, spearheaded by wind and solar, have shown some promise.

A drawback is that these represent a major step back in energy density, and even if harvesting the energy from wind and solar has developed into an exact science, they remain the most resource-intensive sources of energy per unit.

Add to this the issue of intermittency, and were left with a climate conundrum the availability of clean dispatchable energy sources to support intermittent energy sources are limited to only two: large-scale hydro, and nuclear power, neither without its own challenges.

While the use of hydropower is limited geographically to countries with large river systems that flow year-round, nuclear power is the only all-round viable low carbon dispatchable energy solution but its struggling to get real momentum behind it in the drive to carbon neutrality.

One of the main reasons for this is economic, given that conventional nuclear power plants (NPPs) are large in size and therefore require lots of capital to plan and construct. The significant price tag is often limiting the appetite of private capital to invest in these plants. NPP also take long to build, costing money and accumulating interest during construction.

These factors are undeniable, but a singular focus on them distorts how these costs level out in the long-run, which make nuclear in fact a viable option. For example, pressurised water reactors are big, but also produce output between 1,000MW to 1,650MW electrical, per reactor.

Important to note here is that they can sustain this output for decades, as reactor design life is typically 60 years, with an option to extend to 80 years.

As a result, the levelised cost of electricity (LCOE) over the NPPs life is in actuality quite low and very competitive. For this reason, nuclear power has been more successful within long term government programmes to support economic growth.

The long plant life also means that once a large build programme, such as what happened in the US and France, is complete, new installations become few and far between.

Because of the large capital investment, and the low variable cost of operations, nuclear plants are most cost-effective when they can run all the time to provide a return on the investment. Hence, plant operators now consistently achieve 92% capacity factor (average power produced of maximum capacity). The higher the capacity factor, the lower the cost per unit of electricity.

Unfortunately, with electricity grids utilising more intermittent solar and wind, maintaining a high capacity factor becomes a challenge. Intermittent sources displace power produced by other sources when they come online, forcing NPPs to ramp down. The cost of that unserved energy often makes nuclear power artificially uneconomical on high penetration intermittent grids.

Considering the generally positive long-term cost calculation, a number of countries in the Middle East, North Africa region (MENA), including the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Turkey and Jordan, have expressed strong interest in nuclear power.

These countries have been willing to (partially) support the large capital outlay required for NPPS, and either already possesses or have the ability to set up the grid infrastructure to support them.

That leaves the planning for a cost-effective realisation of the technology. Here, the correct and accurate cost assumptions are key: consistent operation at around 92% needs to be ensured, that is, their capacity should not be changed by adding intermittent power to the grid. Only then can long-term reliable electricity that reduces in cost over time in nominal terms be realised.

Finally, the cost of capital needs to be reflective of the real world. A good discount rate to assume for funding nuclear power plants is around 3%.

This rate rewards longer plant lives and does not penalise longer construction delays. If the overnight cost of $6,000/kW can be secured, over 60 years at a discount rate of 3%, no low carbon dispatchable energy source will match the cost-effectiveness of nuclear power.

Considering the massive challenges ahead of us, nuclear power deserves a seat at the clean energy table. Now that the UAE, Egypt, Turkey, Bangladesh, China and India are in the process of building and commissioning new NPPs, we can expect to see massive drops in CO2-emissions for each unit coming online not to mention the benefits of the socio-economic injection coming from embarking on these mega-projects. It is now time to up the game if we hope to reduce global reliance on fossil fuels.

Article originally published on http://www.sustainability-times.com and republished with minor edits under Creative Commons license.

Continued here:

Op-Ed: Energy poverty is the largest limiting factor to economic growth - ESI Africa

In February 2020, the Tungsten Explorer drilling ship launched operations to explore potential gas and oil deposits in part of the Lebanese seabed. In theory, during the first year of production, these hydrocarbons could generate US$8 billion some 7.25 billion according to a study by Lebanese bank Credit Libanais. Lebanon, caught in the throes of a banking, monetary and financial crisis, is looking for a ray of light at the bottom of the sea.

The Lebanese president, Michel Aoun, referred to the launch of the drilling operations conducted by a consortium of energy giants comprising Total (French), ENI (Italian) and Novatek (Russian) as an opportunity to rise from the abyss. But not everyone shares his optimism.

Its irresponsible to make people believe that this sector will save the country. No reliable forecast can be made until an actual discovery is made, explains Sibylle Rizk, board member of the NGO Lebanese Oil and Gas Initiative (LOGI) and representative of the Kulluna Irada NGO, which focuses on political reform. The likelihood of finding a marketable deposit is 25 per cent and it is estimated that the resources would take seven years to be accessible.

Exploration, particularly offshore exploration, is a long process, with lots of challenges and uncertainties. So, expectations should be kept in check, says Mona Sukkarieh, risk analyst and co-founder of the Middle East Strategic Perspectives think tank.

In March 2020, the Lebanese government declared itself in suspension of payments, strangled by a public debt equal to 170 per cent of its GDP, according to official figures. The economic crisis stemming from COVID-19 was the last straw in a country with forty per cent of the population living under the poverty line. The scale of the damage is now such that no deposit, other than one of the size they have in Saudi Arabia or Qatar, will be enough to cover our losses, says Rizk, adding that she does not agree with allocating resources belonging to this and future generations to cover losses caused by three decades of bad governance.

The high levels of corruption in the country also create misgivings about the future distribution of the resources. Lebanon is totally bankrupt, and not just the state but the entire economy. Lebanons system of governance is totally bankrupt and, so, entrusting a potentially wealthy sector to such a governance system is very dangerous, warns Rizk, who also, as a representative of the LOGI, advocates for good governance to ensure that the resources be used in the public interest rather that to serve private interests.

The Italo-Franco-Russian consortium is expected to start operations in another part of Lebanons maritime space this year, but the jurisdiction of a strip of this area is disputed by Israel. Lebanon is a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), but Israel is not, so the guidelines for demarcating their maritime boundaries are not the same. And because the economic interest is not clear, no one is willing to budge, says Rizk. The negotiations between Israel and Lebanon are blocked.

Lebanon is a decade behind in the race to exploit offshore oil and gas resources. In 2009, when it was discovered that the eastern Mediterranean basin may, according to estimates of the US Geological Survey, house a mean of 1.7 billion barrels of recoverable oil and a mean of 122 trillion cubic feet of recoverable gas, expectations were raised that the countries of the east Mediterranean basin would leave behind their dependence on foreign energy and become exporters to the European market. But the complex web of geopolitical interests has dampened the initial optimism.

Egypt and Israel are the only gas exporters in the Mediterranean for now; Cyprus, Turkey and Lebanon have launched exploration; Greece plans to start drilling this year, and the Israeli blockade on the Gaza Strip has prevented Palestinians from accessing the deposit discovered in their waters in 1999.

For many years Ive been hearing how the discovery of gas in the East Med was going to bring everybody wealth and peace, because they would have too much to lose. But it hasnt worked out that way, says Steven Cook, a senior analyst for the Council on Foreign Relations, a US think tank.

Territorial disputes such as those between Cyprus and Turkey or Lebanon and Israel, coupled with the deterioration of Ankaras relations with its neighbours, have increased regional tensions. I dont really see how they are going to avoid the resource curse, says Cook.

Given the exploitation and transportation costs, regional coordination is essential to making hydrocarbon extraction viable. In 2019, Egypt, Cyprus, Greece, Israel, Italy, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority founded the Eastern Mediterranean Gas Forum (EMGF). Turkey was excluded. Sukkarieh points out that although the EMGF is a platform to facilitate discussions among the regional players, the poor relationship between these countries and Turkey is also probably a factor that has encouraged the rapprochement among the members of the forum. Turkey, meanwhile, is feeling suspicious, says Cook. It feels that it has been cast out of its own neighbourhood, which is why the Turks have concluded their provocative agreement with the Libyans.

Last November, the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoan, and Libyas Government of National Accord redrew their exclusive economic zones (under international law, this zone extends from the baseline to a maximum distance of 200 nautical miles 370.4 km or 230.2 miles), overlapping with Greek, Egyptian and Cypriot waters. After months of escalating tension, in February 2020, the Council of the EU took restrictive measures in response to Turkeys illegal drilling activities in Cyprus exclusive economic zone.

The historical conflict between Turkey and Cyprus is at the root of these territorial disputes: Ankara does not recognise the exclusive sovereignty of the Republic of Cyprus over the island, and, in addition, is not a signatory to the UNCLOS Convention on the Law of the Sea, and therefore considers that it has maritime jurisdiction over waters laid claim to by the Republic of Cyprus.

If Turkey were to be left out of the distribution of resources in the eastern Mediterranean, it would lose its strategic position as a transit country for Russian gas to Europe. But Erdogans aggressive tactics, such as sending a warship in 2018 to prevent an Italian ship from drilling off the coast of Cyprus, do not seem to be helping ease its regional isolation. In the meantime, Egypt, Israel, Cyprus and Greece are weaving new networks. I dont think the Israelis, Egyptians or the Greeks are willing to pay the price for their relationship with Turkey, given how provocative its moves have been, says Cook.

The distance between Ankara and Brussels increased after the recent opening of Turkish borders to allow refugees into the European Union. I dont see any major global power coming in and playing a kind of referee between all these groups, says Cook, who does not rule out the accidental outbreak of a conflict in the Mediterranean.

Meanwhile, Greece, Israel and Cyprus agreed, in January 2020, to build the EastMed pipeline: 1,900 km of underwater pipes connecting Israeli deposits with southern Europe, at an estimated cost of 6 billion (about US$6.6 billion).

Sukkarieh has her doubts about the competitiveness of the proposed pipeline, for two reasons: Russian gas is cheaper and Egypt already has LNG terminals in place to liquefy and export gas. Added to that, Turkey is laying claim to an area that the pipeline would pass through.

For Cook, the insistence on pushing ahead with the pipeline project, regardless of the serious commercial and geopolitical challenges, is down to geostrategic interests. From an Israeli perspective, the influence gained by being a supplier of gas to Europe may help to blunt European public criticism and policies towards Israel over issues like the Palestinians, the analyst explains.

The European Union, for its part, wants to reduce its dependence on Russian gas, which accounts for 40 per cent of its supplies. Russia, as a major gas supplier, is obviously going to lose out if the East Med pipeline comes to fruition, explains Cook. But Moscow has already positioned itself by obtaining the exploitation concession on the Syrian coast and taking part in the exploration of Lebanese waters.

Seismic airguns are used in the perforation of the seafloor, which can produce lethal acoustic injury to whales, dolphins, turtles and sharks, according to Ziad Samaha and Maria del Mar Otero, marine experts from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). They caution that many of the species that make up the seafloor ecosystem would be affected by the sediments and debris generated by the drilling. Drilling uses certain oil-based fluids and produces muds that can introduce heavy metals and other toxic materials into the marine ecosystem, warn Samaha and Otero.

The risk of accidental oil spills would also put birds and marine mammals at risk. And the backdrop to this is the European Green Deal adopted by the European Commission, which calls for a move away from fossil fuels, such as oil, to achieve a net-zero emissions economy by 2050.

Gas is often presented as a clean fossil fuel because it emits up to 50 per cent less CO2 when combusted than coal or oil. The IUCN, however, warns that drilling and extraction of natural gas from wells and its transportation through pipelines can also result in the leakage of methane. Methane gas is responsible for 25 per cent of global warming, according to the Global Energy Monitor.

Gas is not a bridge fuel or transitional fuel from dirty energy to a cleaner one, if we really want to reach a sustainable liveable future we have to decrease our dependency on any kind of fossil fuels, insists Efe Baysal, an environmental rights activist from the 350.org platform.

According to the World Wildlife Fund, the expansion of the gas industry is incompatible with the goal set by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of limiting global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

In the Lebanese context, however, gas could, in fact, be considered a comparatively cleaner energy. The countrys power plants are unable to produce electricity 24 hours a day, so the Lebanese use highly-polluting electricity generators during the daily power cuts. Rizk explains that, given the situation in Lebanon, securing 30 to 40 per cent renewable energy within a few years would already constitute a success. As for the remaining 60 per cent, if rather than importing it we can benefit from our own resources, it would make sense for us to use them, she argues.

All will depend on what the Tungsten Explorer finds at the bottom of the sea.

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Lebanon enters the eastern Mediterranean's oil and gas fray - Equal Times

The ways in which the media has covered the plastics debate have sometimes clouded consumer perceptions, to put it mildly. Victoria Hattersley spoke to Libby Peake, head of resource policy at the independent Green Alliance think tank, about its study on the grocery sectors response to the packaging waste problem, published earlier this year, and the response it has generated.

As part of its work for the Circular Economy Task Force, in early January this year the Green Alliance published a report, Plastic promises: what the grocery sector is really doing about packaging, which suggested that we are seeing a disjointed and potentially counterproductive approach to solving plastic pollution, with brand owners on the verge of swapping to other materials that may have even more serious environmental consequences such as higher carbon emissions.

This is no surprise to us any regular readers of Packaging Europe will be aware that we have long argued the need for nuance in the plastics debate. That our approach to sustainability should encompass wider issues of climate change, and that tackling plastic waste means viewing the material as a valuable commodity that should be re-used and recycled accordingly, rather than demonizing it. And while shows like Blue Planet II have been fantastic for drawing our attention to the huge global climate challenges we face, they have also unwittingly contributed to the narrative that plastics are the cause of our environmental ills.

On this subject, the reaction to the Green Alliance report edges a wider issue into the frame: the role the media has to play in covering such stories and the partial responsibility it should take when consumers reach inaccurate conclusions. Headlines such as Break the plastic habit!, while no doubt eye-grabbing, are too simplistic. Unfortunately, its usually the case that simple narratives have more impact, and its almost impossible to convey such a complex issue in a few words.

We cant just replace plastics

One of the central quotes from the report was this: We are aware that [by switching from plastic to other materials] we may, in some cases, be increasing our carbon footprint.

But some of the press coverage [to the report] was not accurate and some headlines while not being wrong werent what we would have chosen and might have led a reader to assume we were saying we should keep using plastic exactly as we had been that it was an either / or which doesnt come close to conveying the nuance of our argument, says Libby Peake.

According to Libby, one of the biggest frustrations is the assumption, since the emergence of the plastics backlash, that its better to replace plastics with alternative materials. One of the most important points we included in the report is that almost everyone now thinks its equally important to tackle climate change and plastics. People hadnt necessarily connected the two before and were looking to separate one from the other. Were trying to promote that you need to address both in conjunction.

[Following the plastics backlash] there has been an automatic assumption that plastic should be replaced with other items. But bear in mind that for every tonne of aluminium that is on the market, 12 tonnes of waste is produced and that includes toxic waste. Glass has a really high carbon impact, especially single-use, and if youre shipping it from far away there are higher carbon emissions. If youre looking at cartons, theyre often multilayer which makes them difficult to recycle and its not a closed loop system. Our report is trying to show not that we should continue using plastics as we have been, but that we cant just replace plastics in this inefficient recycling system we have. After all, if its an inefficient system for plastics it will be inefficient for other materials, too.

It doesnt help, of course, that there is an inevitable pushback from those who advocate for these alternative materials. For example, in response to the Green Alliance report, Jenni Richards, federation manager of British Glass, was reported as saying: While we cant disagree that glass is heavier [during transportation], the bigger picture is that glass has the perfect qualities for a truly circular economy and our industry is taking great steps to achieve NetZero carbon emissions.

And yes, glass has its place too, as does aluminium and cartonboard. No one material should be scapegoated if we are to find an approach to packaging that works across the board and develop more efficient recycling infrastructure.

A lot more emphasis on reduction

There is no one-size-fits-all solution to the problem of packaging waste (and that goes for alternative materials as much as for plastics), but one thing Libby Peake is clear about is that there needs to be more of a focus on reduce as opposed to replace. Again, were all familiar with the Reduce, Reuse, Recycle mantra but its gaining ever more traction.

Take some of the examples weve been seeing recently of big brands responding to the plastics outcry by substituting single-use plastic items with other materials which can use up more resources to produce, dont work as efficiently and are not getting to the root of the problem in any case (the McDonalds paper straw, to give a particularly well-known instance).

If you think about it, most adults dont need to use straws at all, she says. We should be encouraging a system where there is a lot more emphasis on cutting out unnecessary items. Then you get similar situations where single-use plastic bags for bakery items are being replaced by single-use paper where there could instead be reusable items or no bags whatsoever.

And hand-in-hand with reduction, she says, should come a greater simplification of the entire plastics production infrastructure granted, this will take some time, but the benefits when it comes to recycling and the supply of high-quality recyclate would be considerable. Theres a tension with plastics in particular; an awareness that we need to rationalize polymers so that we are only using, say, HDPE, PP or PET while phasing out the more niche materials like PVC or polystyrene.

Other countries throughout Europe might also follow the model of places like Norway, which has a notably high quality of recycled plastics because items are collected completely separately so there is less contamination of the supply chain.

Re-use: Great potential

One positive development, as far as Libby Peake is concerned, is the steady rise of re-use and refill packaging models. There is certainly an increased interest on the part of the industry and consumers, but in order for this to really take off she feels there needs to be more of a focus on incentivization.

In the UK, for example, the single-use carrier bag charge is meant to reduce littering which it has done but we have found that people are still using multi-use carrier bags as single-use. We definitely need more of a cultural shift so we get people using these systems in the right places. Some of the obvious places to start introducing such models include carrier bags, home delivery refill models, the Terracycle Loop model operating on the milkman model, and so on. These offer great potential and wed like to see them introduced in a systemic way thats not increasing overall environmental impact and material use.

What does she have in mind when she talks about incentivization? Lets take bags for life: they currently cost 10 pence in the UK, but if you made them much more expensive, they would be more inclined to embed the right behaviours. Or if you make it harder to do single-use for example charging for plastic coffee cups that are single-use then its more incentivizing for consumers to switch to multi-use. Academic research says people would be more inclined to use reusable coffee cups if there is a charge attached to them. (In case youre interested, a report released last year by Zero Waste Scotland is a case in point.) The key here is to factor environmental cost into the value of a package not just the money it takes to produce.

Unhelpful and misleading claims

One part of the equation we have not discussed so far is compostable and biodegradable packaging. This is a perfect example of how press reports and also the industry itself can further muddy the waters of consumer understanding. According to the Green Alliance report, Consumers are hugely confused about what bio-based, compostable and biodegradable mean.

Why is this such a problem? Theres too much greenwashing across the board and very little to stop companies making unhelpful and misleading claims to consumers, says Libby Peake. Compostable or biodegradable plastics are a particular concern, though, because they are viewed very favourably by the public, but theres little understanding about what the terms mean, nowhere near enough control over material standards and a lack of the right infrastructure to deal with them in many instances. The UN has suggested that using the term biodegradable could actually encourage people to litter. So, we should stop using that term, and make sure that compostables clearly look different from conventional plastic, to make it as simple as possible for people to know what to do with material.

Thats not to say we should be avoiding compostables altogether they have great potential its just that they need to be used in the right context.

Novel materials like compostable plastics have the potential to improve environmental performance in some instances, but only if theyre used in the correct situations and dont wind up in the wrong place, so its important to factor in systems thinking from the start. We think compostable plastic liners for food collection are an obvious place to start.

There are a couple of major hurdles that need to be addressed for them to succeed generally, though. The first relates to standards and infrastructure. At the moment, material is allowed on the market that isnt certified compostable, which shouldnt be allowed. Weve also heard from several industrial composters that even certified compostable material particularly rigid plastics dont degrade in the UKs current industrial composting infrastructure, so those existing standards should be adjusted to reflect real life conditions.

Joined-up action

Of course, the average consumer cannot be expected to be an expert in the labyrinthine ramifications of every packaging material. (Even as someone who writes for the packaging industry I cant hope to be an inviolable authority on all the myriad technical issues, nuances, debates and counter-debates that encompass the vast packaging industry and all the other industries that feed into it.) But while companies must clearly play their part by remaining transparent about the challenges they face and the environmental costs of the materials they use, it cannot be solely down to the industry to educate them. What is sorely needed, says Libby Peake, is more top-down leadership. (Another quote from the report is worth throwing in here: If I could have a magic wand, Id like to see more joined up, top-down government intervention We would like to see government be braver.)

While the Green Alliance is a UK-based organization and any recommendations it gives as a result of its report are for this market, the conclusions it draws could apply to any countrys recycling system. Businesses are all competing and developing strategies that go in different directions; at some point there needs to be a homogenous approach. There has been some leadership in the grocery sector with the big players autonomously mandating what should be used, but the body that has the most potential to influence the supply chain is of course the government. We need to level the playing field.

Cautious optimism

All well and good. But at the risk of labouring a gloomy point, the UK is not nor perhaps will be for the foreseeable in a position to give lessons to the rest of Europe on how such things should be done. At a time when what we need is a recognition of our shared responsibilities, the UK is wilfully pulling in the opposite direction. But enough of that subject (for now). Time will tell, they say only time isnt necessarily a commodity any of us has in abundance.

So finally, to bring us back to my original question whats in a headline? Quite a lot, in fact. At Packaging Europe, as with all other members of the press and all sectors of the packaging value chain, we are not without responsibility to ensure that we discuss environmental issues in as accurate and transparent a way as possible. And no doubt we have fallen short here in the past just like everyone else. We can always strive to do better.

But youre a writer, you say (well I claim to be), so of course you think language is important. But in such contexts, its important for everyone. After all, were not talking about the pros and cons of a new kitchen gadget; its far more important than that. And were firmly in an age of clickbait headlines (like the one for this article, some might of course suggest) and where anybody can post whatever they like online and others can take it as gospel. Where there is no requirement to back up what you say on a social media site with fact.

But Libby Peake does voice a note of cautious optimism for the future. There are more instances now of people thinking about the long-term consequences of knee-jerk reactions to plastic waste, and that you cant just shift the environmental burden. Its been a bit of a journey but I believe were getting there and I hope things are slowly being pushed in the right direction.

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Whats in a headline? The challenge of reporting on packaging waste - Packaging Europe

The coronavirus pandemic has triggered a massive reverse migration from the destination to source in large parts of the country. We witness hundreds of thousands of labourers marching back to their villages in order to find some warmth and empathy more than anything else, as the rest is going to be too hard to come by. This article is about that migration.

The available data indicates a widely differing reality about migrants in India. While, as per Census 2011, the total number of internal migrants would be 450 millionmore than 30% higher than 2001the actual numbers perhaps are higher than what is captured by the census. Field realities do indicate that Uttar Pradesh (uP) and Bihar are the biggest source states of migrants, followed closely by Madhya Pradesh (MP), Punjab, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, Jammu and Kashmir and West Bengal; the major destination states are Delhi, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala. Another marked change in the migration pattern in the last decade has been the interstate movement to new growth centres, especially in small and medium sized towns and million plus cities. However, the defining feature of who is a migrant is rather flexible, even in official records. Usually the migrants do get defined on the basis of place of birth or last place of residence and a deviation from it. Hence, such a characterisation puts severe constraint to understand the issue of migrants in this form of definitional context.

Compounding the issue is another limitation in the analysis as the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) as well as the census fail to capture the short-term seasonal movements, which form a large component of the migration process. Apart from the above, there are other issues too that relate to the problems of data. These are the inadequacies in capturing the extent of tabulating the migration of children of a particular age group as well as women who would accompany the household heads to the destination points. The data is also inadequate in terms of understanding the very large-scale migrations that occur from tribal areas and of tribal and Scheduled Caste people. We, however, do know that in the last two and a half decades, India has urbanised at a rapid rate, and this urbanisation is built on the labour of the migrant population as well as the services to a rapidly urbanising India. Hence, a very rough estimate would put Indias migrant labour, which would include daily wage labour, local migrants, seasonal migrants and long-distance migrants, at a fairly large numbers than what is computed.

Source and Destination Points

So what are the major streams as well as the sources and destination points of this vast mass of migrant population? First, the major area of work they are engaged in would be agriculture labour, brick kilns, construction sites, services (maids to watchmen to drivers) industrial non-skilled workers, small and tiny road side businesses (tea shops, dhabas, small eateries, hotels, restaurants, etc).1 This entire workforce falls under the informal sector, which, of course, constitutes 93% of Indias total workforce. The total Indian informal sector workforce is calculated at around upward of 450 million as per varying estimates.

Where were the migrant labour deployed in the peri urban and urban locales of the economy? Certain studies on this issue do come up with some major areas. It does appear that the major concentration of the migrant labour in the urban economy was on the construction sites, and brick kilns located at the edge of the peri-urban areas followed by the concentration of unskilled ones who are on daily wages (employed from the daily wage labour markets or the naka, which is ubiquitous these days in all our cities). The other major area of migrant labour employment is, of course, the green revolution states of Punjab, etc, and related areas as well as the sugar cane growing areas and the three-crop areas. These were seasonal migrants. Apart from these, there were of course the other service sector areas that accounted for migrant labour employment.

There have been issues raised in terms of whether this kind of migration is due to distress or is opportunity-oriented. Given the nature as well as the shared experiences, the so-called source regions are inscribed by low social and economic developmental indices. Large-scale migration induced by greater and greener pastures of economic growth is largely a myth, as most of the migration is for subsistence and survival and falls under the citatory of distress migration.

Given the diverse realities of expanding of urban settlements in which lives of migrants are embedded, it is important to note that the coping strategy of the migrants constantly vacillates between the inhuman work conditions of urban and peri-urban India on the one hand and the impoverished and destitute landscape of the rural on the other. The significance of the source village in the coping strategy of the migrants differs with the varying stages of the work cycle of migrants. Invariably, the outer limits of these individual or group adaptive strategies are determined by the work opportunities and survival conditions at source and destination. It is here that region specificity and the possibilities of different contexts assume significance. Such contexts create a characteristic heterogeneity that is fully understood in terms of a sliding scale, a continuum on which only the extremes on both sides are in sharp contrast to each other (Breman 2013a: 8081).

Failed Development

The so-called source regions that see a large influx of migrants to the destination regions are Bihar, Odisha, Rajasthan, MP, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, largely eastern Up, parts of Maharashtra and Gujarat (especially the tribal areas). Invariably, these regions internally also experience chronic drought, have deforested landscapes and devastated agro-ecologies that bear the imprints of tardy implementation of welfare schemes as well as schemes in the arena of agriculture services of soil and water conservation. This failed development contributes to the continuation of poor resource bases and assets of marginal and small farmers, which is accentuated by the persistence of a context of subjugation that perpetuates severe economic deprivation and thrives on entrenched social discriminationthe exploitation of the poor, the landless, and the castes at the bottom of the social hierarchy.

Due to the young male population out-migrating, the source econiches are also getting increasingly characterised by the feminisation of agriculture that has meant the largely distress-induced participation of women. Thus, migration is not a reflection of failed agricultural policy alone. It can be viewed as a risk diversification strategy, and the remittances do contribute a share in household incomes. The issue, however, is the low threshold of such incomes that perpetually keeps families at subsistence levels. Thus, the world of migrants is shaping urban transformations as a captive construction force where each seasonal brick kiln worker, semi-permanent to permanent casual construction worker, loader, carter and carrier, and domestic worker occupies a different niche and provides cheap and often unaccounted human labour that shapes our peri-urban and urban landscape. The Table (p 29) below presents a representative example of movements between source and destination regions in some selected parts of India.

Seasonal migration is circulatory in character, and even for semi-permanent and permanent migrants, source continues to be the only social reality they could draw upon. In the narratives of most of the migrants, source is equally important as destination. In fact, the cash remittances from seasonal migration often complement the meagre agricultural produce from which food security of the household is somehow met. As so many of the migrants testify, cash earned from the destination helps them negotiate the rural economy that is increasingly monetised.

Old and New Forms of Subjugation

Thus, in the overall context of the ongoing urbanisation and rural industrialisation, what needs to be understood is the manner in which the subordination, exploitation and control of labour takes new forms that are a combination and an ingenuous adaptation of the older forms of control and bondage contextualised to new conditions of capitalism. It is necessary to comprehend the reproduction of vestiges of older forms to better understand processes internal to the new conditions of capitalism. The core of labour servitude draws upon older forms of subjugation, thus offsetting the belief propagated by capitalism that it is based on free labour. Instead, it would be worthwhile to develop a perspective that offers useful insights into the realities of the institutionalisation of labour vulnerabilities through an adaptive system of labour exploitation. In proposing the term industrial serfs, there is an effort to delineate the contours of the age old contrast between freedom and servitude, to see what it received from the past, as if passing it through a prism, and transmitted it to succeeding ages (Bloch 1962: 279). Mapping the world of the unorganised poor in India clearly shows that capitalism is not dissolving this matrix of social institutions but reconfiguring them slowly, unevenly and in a great diversity of ways (White and Gooptu 2001: 89119, 90).

It is in this context that the term neo-bondage suggested by Jan Breman is more appropriate as it captures the experience and fate of footloose labour tied to a cycle of production that is seasonal and operates in different ways like a combination of advanced payments and postponed payments (Breman 2013b: 34345) Arguing that labour bondage is not likely to disappear when economic growth is sustained at its current rate of increase, Breman locates the continuation of this practice in the on-going restructuring of capital and suggests that

the emergence of neo-bondage is strongly connected to the reinforcement of the casualisation , informalisation of employment and reflects the increased monetisation of commodity exchanges and of social relationships. (Breman 2008: 8390, 86)

In labour studies, the aim is to understand and envisage a crude and primitive world with its moments of tragedy (Bloch 1962: 264). Being tied to the land and master is the defining attribute of classical (mostly pre-industrial) versions of serfdom. The associated attribute that, by default, grips the serf is the lack of any new opportunities to learn new skills. In modern times, especially after liberalisation, there is a transition to a bondage that is more rooted in the immobility of the structures of capital.

It is in this context that we need to understand the world of farmers, the agriculture labourers and the nomads who, today, inscribe the world of the migrants. The pauperisation of the habitats of that world has led to the creation of conditions in which labour is being harnessed in a most iniquitous manner by the emerging capitalist system today. The nature of such a process should then, inevitably, lead to a major political and societal crisis, where the edifice of urbanisation, driven by an economy riding on debt, may totter. Perhaps, this is why we see a reverse migration today as the destination is soulless and devoid of any other meaning other than deriving profits and cheap labour. However, what is the situation in the destination?

Effects of the Lockdown

The imposition of the lockdown as a measure to contain the exponential progression of the COVID-19 pandemic has hit the unskilled and semi-skilled migrant labourers the most. In the last few weeks, we have all been witness to harrowing, nerve-wrenching and bone-chilling images of the exodus of these marginal and invisible drivers of the informal economy of urban India. Indian highways emptied of most vehicles were lined with bedraggled, poor pedestrians, many carrying all their worldly belongings in bundles on top of their heads walking to their home villages, hundreds or thousands of miles away across states. Add to that equally desperate attempts by small distance migrants to somehow reach their destination from medium-sized towns and cities and we have a scenario of crowding back villages that constitute the famished and dried up source. Even as this is being written, there are field reports emerging about scarcity of food and water compounding the dried source. The issue of crop harvest for rabi and the sowing of kharif will create some relief in the short run but the source regions cannot be relied upon to take the additional load of the returning sons and daughters of the region. Rough estimates indicate that roughly more than 120 to 140 million are, at the moment, either walking back or are stranded in various camps. This number does not take into account the vast majority of slums that characterise our cities and house the migrants. The actual numbers wanting to return home would be fairly large. The post-coronavirus recovery of the shattered world of migrants would witness diverse and multiple realities. International Labour Organization estimates are that around about 400 million workers in the informal economy are at the risk of falling deeper into poverty during the crisis. What is the nature of this dried up source? What awaits the returning people at the source?

Agrarian Crisis and Migration

The so-called source over the last two and a half decades and more has witnessed an unprecedented crisis in the arena of agriculture. The source villages where these migrants have managed to return somehow are passing through an agrarian crisis that gets firmly inscribed in these diverse ecoscapes of India with each passing agricultural season. The majority of them are smallholder subsistence economies reeling under the crisis of falling productivity, water scarcity, crisis of other livelihood options, and competing claims by private capital on natural resource endowments. The lands are now fragmented to such an extent that the bottom 50% are cultivating 0.4% of the total cultivable lands. This is, of course, compounded by low investments in agriculture, negligible capital formation, debt-ridden farming and improper price mechanisms that farmers have to deal with. A combination of these elements over the last two and a half decades has resulted in lakhs of farmers committing suicides and turning the agrarian rural landscape into a barren one. Moreover, the average holdings have drastically reduced to almost 1.13 hectare, and it was this agrarian crisis which, in the first place, induced the migration from the agrarian areas to the rapidly urbanising areas. We must also take into account the fact that Indian agriculture for the last two decades and more is in a terminal crisis, and it cannot hope to sustain this pressure on land and resources in an instant manner. For Indian agriculture to sustain, the new post-coronavirus rural would be the last straw.

Hence, the process of recovery is going to be long-drawn-out and painful for those who would opt for meager options available at source and equally for those who would be looking for opportunities in urban spaces. Due to the diffused nature of Indias urbanisation and the phased-out partial manner in which the lockdown is going to be lifted, the contractor-driven labour supply chains are going to take time to get regrouped. Some sectors, especially construction that accounts for a large proportion out of the streams of migrant workers, are not going to recover soon. There is going to be an increased pressure on interstate migration to nearby towns and cities that may not be able to offer much. Overcrowding and cheap supply of labour would have disastrous consequences for collective bargaining, security and entitlements of the labouring classes.

Need for a Charter of Rights

In such a context where the capability of the source is already severely compromised, social kinship ties with their embedded hierarchies are going to compound the crisis of human survival in these regions as they would be stretched out to their fullest limits. The pressure of this reverse migration is going to be felt in the fields of agriculture and allied activity and will put immense pressure on a system that is already broken. We need a complete transformation of economic and administrative processes, practices and policies to enable the rural to face up to the issues that the coronavirus-induced reverse migration has thrown up. We need a charter of the rights of the working population across the board that ensures the right to livelihood, food, security and above all dignity of labour. Such a charter should become the guiding principle in the post-coronavirus phase of Indias polity and economy. A failure to consider the above will result in a calamity.

Note

1 This observation is based on fieldwork on the issues of migrant workers in five states: Odisha, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra. This fieldwork was funded by Sir Dorabji Tata and Allied Trusts.

References

Bloch, Marc (1962): Feudal Society, Volume I, The Growth of Ties of Dependence, UK: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Breman, Jan (2008): On Labour Bondage, Old and New, The Indian Journal of Labour Economics, Vol 51, No 1.

(2013a): Circulation and Immobilisation of Labour at Work in the Informal Economy of India: A Perspective from Bottom Up, Delhi: Oxford University Press.

(2013b): Neo-bondage: A Field Work Based Account, At Work in the Informal Economy of India: A Perspective from Bottom Up, Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Denis, E and K Marius-Gnanou (2011): Toward a Better Appraisal of Urbanisation in India, Cybergeo: European Journal of Geography 569.

White, Barbara Harris S and Nandini Gooptu (2001): Mapping Indias World of Unorganised Labour, Socialist Register, Vol 37.

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Migration and Reverse Migration in the Age of COVID-19 - Economic and Political Weekly