Geog a Blog

Poor economics is a long-term research project undertaken and written up by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo. It outlines the “surprising truth about life on less than $1 a day”. The authors outlined 5 key lessons that emerged from their lengthy research. Firstly, the poor often lack critical pieces of information and believe things that are not true. An example of this is not knowing how much fertilizer to use, therefore using twice as much, eating into their already small profit margins. Uncertainty about knowledge such as the benefits of vaccinations leads to procrastination hence a large percentage of the population are not immunized. Their conclusion to combat this was information campaigns that:  say something people don’t already know,  are in a simple attractive fashion, and  must come from a credible source. Secondly, the poor bear responsibility for too many aspects of their lives. The poor don’t have access to government cleaned and chlorinate...

Geoengineering - large-scale interventions in environmental systems designed to counteract climate change The struggle to tackle global climate change is one of the defining issues of the 21st century. The overwhelming majority of scientists now recognise the link between anthropogenic changes to the global carbon cycle and a rise in global temperatures; in the words of the IPCC, “The problem of global warming is real and potentially very dangerous”. However, how to counteract or even reverse some of these changes is hotly disputed, not least as there is significant uncertainty around the likely magnitude of impacts associated with climate change which will in turn affect how much economic resource should be allocated to climate change prevention or mitigation. Most efforts thus far have focussed on reducing carbon dioxide emissions, culminating in the Paris accords of 2015. But many are sceptical that such a framework will ever yield sufficient success. Geoengineer...