Desastres ligados ao clima geraram mais de US$ 3,64 trilhões em perdas

OMM/Daniel Pavlinovic
Desastres hídricos ou relacionados ao tempo e ao clima ocorreram praticamente todos os dias, nos últimos 50 anos, matando em média 115 pessoas diariamente

Desastres hídricos ou relacionados ao tempo e ao clima ocorreram praticamente todos os dias, nos últimos 50 anos, matando em média 115 pessoas diariamente. A informação está em um atlas lançado pela Organização Meteorológica Mundial, OMM, nesta quarta-feira, englobando o período de 1970 a 2019. 

Com a mudança climática, o número de desastres aumentou nas últimas décadas, mas o total de mortes diminuiu, graças a melhorias nos sistemas de alerta e de gestão dos riscos de desastres.

ONU Mulheres/Mohammad Rakibul Hasan
As enchentes estão aumentando no mundo todo por conta da mudança climática

Prejuízos  

O Atlas da Mortalidade e das Perdas Econômicas por Extremos Climáticos, Hídricos e do Tempo registra mais de 11 mil desastres do tipo pelo mundo, que causaram mais de 2 milhões de mortes e geraram perdas de US$ 3,64 trilhões. 

Segundo a OMM, o documento é o mais abrangente já feito. 91% das mortes por eventos climáticos entre 1970 e 2019 ocorreram em países em desenvolvimento.

Unicef/Mukwazhi
Seca ocorrida em 1981 em Moçambique foi o sétimo desastre natural mais fatal do mundo com 100 mil mortes

Seca em Moçambique 

A seca ocorrida em 1981 em Moçambique foi o sétimo desastre natural mais fatal do mundo com 100 mil mortes. Em primeiro lugar, está uma outra seca, ocorrida em 1983, na Etiópia, que causou a morte de 300 mil pessoas. 

Temperaturas extremas na Rússia, em 2010, também estão entre os eventos mais fatais, quando mais de 55 mil pessoas morreram. No geral, as secas (650 mil mortes), as tempestades (577 mil óbitos), as enchentes (58,7 mil mortes) e as temperaturas extremas (55,7 mil mortes) estão entre os desastres mais fatais.

ONU News/Anton Uspensky
Temperaturas extremas na Rússia, em 2010, também estão entre os eventos mais fatais, quando mais de 55 mil pessoas morreram

Furacões nos Estados Unidos

Em relação às perdas econômicas, as tempestades geraram prejuízos de US$ 521 bilhões e as enchentes, de US$ 115 bilhões. No topo da lista, estão seis furacões ocorridos nos Estados Unidos, incluindo Katrina (em 2005, com prejuízo de US$ 163 bilhões), Harvey, Maria e Irma, em 2017. Juntos causaram 35% das perdas econômicas entre os 10 piores desastres naturais do mundo. 

O secretário-geral da OMM, Petteri Taalas, prevê que os eventos extremos do clima serão cada vez mais frequentes em várias partes do mundo. Com isso, haverá mais ondas de calor, secas e incêndios florestais.

NASA
Furacão Dorian visto da Estação Espacial Internacional, em 2 de setembro de 2019

Recomendações 

Segundo a Organização Meteorológica Mundial, apenas metade dos 193 países-membros têm sistemas de alerta precoce sobre eventos climáticos. A OMM confirma que muitas vidas têm sido salvas assim, mas pede mais cooperação internacional para “combater o problema do grande número de pessoas que ficam desalojadas, todos os anos, devido a enchentes, tempestades e secas”. 

A OMM também quer mais investimentos em programas de gestão de risco de desastres e faz ainda uma série de recomendações. Uma delas é reforçar os sistemas de financiamento de riscos, especialmente para os países menos desenvolvidos e as pequenas ilhas em desenvolvimento. Outra indicação é para a criação de políticas integradas para desastres que ocorrem de forma lenta, como as secas.

Pnud/Arjen van de Merwe
As nações do leste e do sul da África enfrentaram um aumento nas enchentes, secas e outros eventos relacionados ao clima nos últimos anos.

Situação na África e Europa 

O atlas da OMM também traz informações sobre os continentes. A África teve mais de 1,6 mil desastres naturais entre 1970 e 2019, ou 15% do total mundial. 

As enchentes estão no topo da lista, mas foram as secas que causaram 95% das mortes no continente. Na América do Sul, as cheias representaram 59% dos desastres naturais, causando a maior parte das mortes e dos prejuízos financeiros na região. Já na América do Norte, os furacões estão no topo da lista. 

A Europa enfrentou principalmente enchentes e tempestades, mas foram os eventos extremos do clima que causaram mais mortes: 93%, com mais de 148 mil vidas perdidas nos 50 anos.

Fonte: https://news.un.org/pt/story/2021/09/1761602

The U.S. is reviewing its trade policy with China, says USTR Katherine Tai

Katherine Tai, U.S. President-elect Joe Biden’s nominee to be U.S. Trade Representative, speaks after Biden announced her nomination during a fresh round of nominations and appointments at a news conference at his transition headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, December 11, 2020.

BEIJING — Seven months since U.S. President Joe Biden took office, his administration has yet to establish a trade policy with China.

U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai said Tuesday the “Biden-Harris Administration and USTR are conducting a comprehensive review of U.S.-China trade policy,” according to a readout of a virtual meeting with two business associations, the U.S. Chamber China Center Advisory Board and the U.S.-China Business Council.

She acknowledged the significance of the U.S.-China trade relationship, and said the U.S. remains committed to “addressing China’s unfair trade policies and non-market practices that undermine American businesses and workers,” the readout said.

Michael Hirson, practice head for China and Northeast Asia at consulting firm Eurasia Group, has pointed out that Biden was able to persuade major G-7 countries to make strong statements against China.

However, Biden has “not yet articulated a trade strategy or another approach that would really be effective in countering China’s economic strength,” Hirson said.

Trade tensions between the world’s two largest economies escalated under former President Donald Trump. A dispute that began with tariffs on billions of dollars’ worth of goods from both sides has since spilled over into technology and finance.

American companies and other foreign businesses have had longstanding complaints about unequal access to the Chinese market, lack of intellectual property protection and forced technology transfer.

China’s Ministry of Commerce said last week the two countries remained in “normal communication” regarding trade, according to a CNBC translation.

Trade between the U.S. and China has grown despite the political tensions.

China’s exports to the U.S. for the first seven months of the year rose 36.9% compared to the same period in 2020, while imports climbed 50.4% year-on-year in the January to July period, according to customs data accessed through Wind Information.

China’s trade surplus with the U.S. rose further in July to $35.42 billion, despite Trump’s efforts to reduce that surplus.

Fonte: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/25/us-is-reviewing-its-trade-policy-with-china-says-ustr-katherine-tai.html

US economic decline not as bad as feared

The US economy shrank by 3.5% last year faring better than many other countries despite the heavy economic toll caused by the pandemic.

However growth slowed in the last three months of the year, as a resurgence of virus cases prompted a fresh pullback in activity.

Output increased at an annual rate of 4% in the last three months of 2020.

That was slower than many analysts had expected – and down sharply from the rebound seen in the prior quarter.

The overall fall in 2020 reported by the US Commerce Department was the sharpest decline since 1946, when the US was demobilising after World War II. Compared to the fourth quarter of 2019, output was down 2.5%.

But the contraction was not as bad as many had feared in the depths of the lockdowns last spring, when spending on activity like dining and travel plummeted.https://buy.tinypass.com/checkout/template/cacheableShow?aid=tYOkq7qlAI&templateId=OTBYI8Q89QWC&templateVariantId=OTV0YFYSXVQWV&offerId=fakeOfferId&experienceId=EXAWX60BX4NU&iframeId=offer_0e763acc7b457c03340a-0&displayMode=inline&widget=template

And despite soaring unemployment numbers and a sharp increase in poverty, the US was not hit as badly as many other parts of the world.

The International Monetary Fund estimates that the UK economy, for example, shrank by 10% last year, while Canada, Japan and Germany all dropped by more than 5%.

China is the only major economy that has reported growth, with gross domestic product (GDP) up 2.3%.

US economic growth “was still down by 2.5% on a year earlier, but that still represents a much faster recovery than we would initially have expected given how grim things looked in mid-2020,” said Paul Ashworth, chief US economist at Capital Economics.

“With effective vaccines offering the possibility of a return to normalcy later this year and the Biden administration intent on more fiscal stimulus, we think GDP growth will be as high as 6.5% this year.”

Leia a matéria completa em: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-55844807

US-China trade war is a ‘lose-lose’ situation for them and the world, warn UN economists

A cargo ship at the port of Ningbo, China.

According to data from the first six months of the year, most of the cost of higher US tariffs on China has been passed down to US consumers and firms.

“US consumers are paying for the tariffs …in terms of higher prices,” said Alessandro Nicita, an economist at the UN trade agency, UNCTAD. “Not only final consumers like us, but importers of intermediate products – firms which import parts and components from China.”

Tariffs ‘cost China $35 billion in first half of 2019’

But the US-initiated measures – put in place in the middle of last year – have also hit the Asian giant, to the tune of $35 billion.

Its firms have seen exports of these targeted products fall by a quarter over the same period on average, with other competitors – notably Taiwan – picking up some of the slack ($4.2 billion in the first half of 2019).

Other trade winners from the measures include Mexico ($3.5 billion), the European Union ($2.7 billion) and Viet Nam ($2.6 billion) and the positive effects for them “have increased over time”, UNCTAD said.

Korea, Canada and India also benefited, with “substantial” gains ranging from $0.9 billion to $1.5 billion.

Other South East Asian countries scooped up the remainder of the tariff-induced casualties, UNCTAD said, while noting that African countries saw only “minimal” benefits.

Of the $35 billion Chinese export losses in the US market, about $21 billion (or 63 per cent) was diverted to these countries and others, while the remaining $14 billion was either lost or captured by US producers.

Chinese manufacturers bearing costs

The UN agency also noted that there is early evidence that Chinese exporters may have started to bear part of the costs of the tariffs by lowering export prices.

The hardest-hit Chinese manufacturing sector has been computers and other office machinery, and communications equipment, where exports from China have declined by $15 billion.

Other areas that have “dropped substantially” include chemicals, furniture, precision instruments and electrical machinery, the UNCTAD report shows.

It nonetheless underscored the resilience of Chinese firms, which maintained 75 per cent of their exports to the US, despite the “substantial” tariffs imposed.

Leia a matéria completa em: https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/11/1050661

Biden administration approves its first arms sale to Taiwan

Taiwanese soldiers fire self-propelled howitzers during military exercises in Hsinchu in September 2015. Photo: AP

The Biden administration has approved its first arms sale to Taiwan, a potential US$750 million deal, amid rising tensions with China.

It calls for selling Taiwan 40 new M109 self-propelled howitzers and almost 1,700 kits to convert projectiles into more precise GPS-guided munitions, according to a State Department notification to Congress on Wednesday.

The proposed sale must go through a congressional review process and then through negotiations between Taiwan and contractor BAE Systems Plc, which is also providing the US Army with the latest version of the howitzer, before a contract is signed and delivery times are hashed out.

Although the new proposed sale is not especially large in scope or ambitious in the weaponry provided, it is certain to be denounced by China.

China sees Taiwan as part of its territory and has not ruled out the use of force in the pursuit of unification. President Xi Jinping called his country’s quest to gain control of Taiwan a “historic mission” in a speech marking the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party.

Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin has labelled China the key threat guiding US defence spending priorities.

China’s warplanes made incursions into the southern part of Taiwan’s air defence identification zone on 87 days in 2020 – more than in the previous five years combined – and have surpassed that number already this year.

Leia a matéria completa em: https://www.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article/3143859/biden-administration-approves-its-first-arms-sale?module=perpetual_scroll&pgtype=article&campaign=3143859

China says Taiwan Strait crossing by US warship shows America as ‘biggest destroyer of peace’

Guided-missile destroyer the USS Benfold sails through the Taiwan Strait on Wednesday. Photo: US Navy

China accused the United States on Thursday of being the single biggest cause of friction and threats in the Taiwan Strait, soon after a US warship crossed the waterway for the seventh time this year.

The frequent passage of American vessels through the strait showed that “the US is the biggest destroyer of peace and stability … and the biggest maker of security risks across the Taiwan Strait”, according to a statement from the People’s Liberation Army Eastern Theatre Command.

It said Eastern Theatre troops were ready to respond to all threats and provocations and would defend national sovereignty and territorial integrity.

The PLA’s Eastern Theatre is mainly responsible for operations in the Taiwan Strait – the narrow waterway that separates the Chinese mainland and the self-ruled island of Taiwan, which Beijing sees as part of its territory.

The statement came after the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Benfold sailed through the Taiwan Strait on Wednesday. The US Seventh Fleet said the warship’s transit through the Taiwan Strait showed America’s commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific and that the US military “flies, sails and operates anywhere international law allows”.

Two weeks earlier, the USS Benfold made its first “freedom of navigation operation” within 12 nautical miles of the disputed Paracel Islands – claimed by Beijing, Hanoi and Taipei – in the South China Sea. Beijing responded by driving away the ship, and said it “had seriously violated China’s sovereignty and undermined the stability of the South China Sea”.

The US military has ramped up freedom of navigation operations in the region over the past five years, according to the South China Sea Strategic Situation Probing Initiative, a Beijing-based think tank. In 2016, three US warships sailed within 12 nautical miles of Chinese-controlled islands in the South China Sea. There were four patrols in 2017, five in 2018, eight in 2019 and nine in 2020.

A similar pattern has been seen in the Taiwan Strait. According to a list compiled by Collin Koh, a research fellow from the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, US warships conducted 15 transits in the Taiwan Strait last year, up from nine a year earlier.

Taiwan has become another source of tension in the fraught US-China relationship, with Beijing angered by Washington moving closer to Taipei in recent years. Beijing has become more assertive about its claims over Taiwan, ramping up military pressure on the island with frequent sorties into its air defence identification zone and naval activities in the Taiwan Strait

Leia a matéria completa em: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/3143003/china-says-taiwan-strait-crossing-us-warship-shows-america#_=_

US-China relations: Beyond the ‘Cold War’ cliche

The Cold War was a zero-sum political struggle where each side denied the legitimacy of the other. While the US and the Soviet Union rarely came to blows, huge numbers of lives were lost in proxy conflicts around the world. In the final analysis, one side was actually defeated – the Soviet system was swept away on the tide of history. And many fear that seeing the US-China rivalry in these stark ideological terms could lead to miscalculation on both sides, and give Beijing in particular all the more reason to go to potentially catastrophic lengths to avoid a possible defeat.

China, though, is not the Soviet Union. It is significantly more powerful. At its peak the Soviet GDP was some 40% of that of the US. China will have the same GDP as the United States within the decade. China is a more powerful competitor than anything the US has faced since the 19th Century. And it is a relationship that is going to have to be managed for perhaps decades to come.

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This is the essential rivalry of our times. Cliché and false historical analogy must be set aside. This is not “a Cold War mark II” – in fact, it is something far more dangerous. China is already a peer competitor of the US in many areas. And while not yet a global superpower, it is very much a military rival to the US in the areas that matter most to China’s own security.

President Biden’s China problem is complex. His foreign policy goals prompt conflicting approaches to Beijing. How do you press China on introducing fairer trade practices, on democracy or on human rights, while still hoping to cooperate on tackling climate change and ensuring stability in the Asia-Pacific region? It is going to be all about managing strategic competition.

But while the nature of the competition should not be understated, neither should it be overstated. The lazy cliché of a rising China and a declining US – like all clichés – has an element of truth. But it does not tell the whole story.

Can the US recover from the Trumpian chaos and revitalise its own democracy? Can it convince its allies that the US is permanently back as a dependable player on the world stage? And can the US rapidly expand its own educational and technological base?

Beijing has in many ways stolen a march on Washington. But will its authoritarian drift hamper its economic progress? Can China cope with slowing economic growth and an ageing population? And will the Communist Party be able to retain the loyalty and support of Chinese society in the long-term?

China has many strengths but also many vulnerabilities. The US has great weaknesses but also a remarkable dynamism and capacity to re-invent itself. But as the Covid-19 pandemic has demonstrated in stark terms, what happens in China does not stay in China. It is a world player that matters to all our lives.

Buckle up! It’s going to be a bumpy ride. And it’s only just beginning.

Leia a matéria completa em: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-56382793