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The last working day before Christmas.  Time to brave the streets and get those last few presents?  Bah!  Here at Global Dashboard we’re made of sterner stuff, so naturally our thoughts are skipping over the festive season altogether and focusing instead on strategic goals for 2008 - and in particular the need, still outstanding, to [...]

While we’re on the subject of food, two interesting things to report from the Brussels conference that I mentioned a couple of posts ago:
First, it looks as though there may be pressure in Brussels for the EU to revisit its (extremely ill-advised) target for 10% of transport fuels to come from biofuels by 2020.  Avril Doyle, an [...]

As promised a few weeks back, here’s the presentation on rising food prices that I gave the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit a couple of weeks ago. 
The Strategy Unit team working on food policy haven’t yet made any of their research public, but if / when they do, it will appear on the project web page [...]

I spoke at a conference organised by the Institute for Environmental Security in Brussels earlier this week. (Here’s the speech I gave, which updates the argument from The Post-Kyoto Bidding War to take account of Bali - and in particular the US’s shift from arguing for no binding targets for anyone, to arguing that if developed countries [...]

David and I are publishing a report today entitled “Climate Change: the State of the Debate“.  It’s essentially intended to catalyse a deeper discussion about why climate change has become a big political issue; what’s driving awareness of it among diverse publics; whether climate change will stay high on the agenda; and how future perceptions [...]

This was the arresting discovery made last year by Lester Brown at the Earth Policy Institute.  How could he tell?
I know Santa Claus is Chinese because each Christmas morning after all the gifts are unwrapped and things settle down I systematically go through the presents to see where they are made. The results are almost [...]

From yesterday’s Observer:
Britian’s outgoing intelligence chief believes there is a danger of exaggerating the threat posed by al-Qaeda at the expense of equally significant security issues, such as global warming…
There was a danger, he said, of over-emphasising the spectre of international terrorism, which could play to al-Qaeda’s advantage and divide communities.
‘What we shouldn’t do is [...]

After the tragedy in Algiers, the UN hardly needs more bad news this week.  But join the dots.  In Lebanon, a senior general is murdered - while in the DR Congo, government forces backed by the UN have been beaten by a rebel militia.  Although unrelated, these events both point a strategic vulnerability for UN [...]

I love it when FT columnists get all catty.  Willem Buiter did a blog post about climate change, asking what’s the ideal temperature for the atmosphere, and since then debate has been unfolding in the comments (including yours truly).  It was all very civilised.  Friendly, even.  Until “Dave” came in with a rebuttal of Buiter’s argument:
Was [...]

We do, according to this ABC News piece (courtesy of Bruce Schneier):
A teen suspect’s snap decision to secretly record his interrogation with an MP3 player has resulted in a perjury case against a veteran detective and a plea deal for the teen.
Unaware of the recording, Detective Christopher Perino insisted under oath at a trial in [...]

Like everyone else this morning, I’ve been reading the account of the torture of cpatured AQ operative Abu Zubaydah provided by retired CIA agent John Kiriakou in an exclusive interview with ABC News (full transcript here).  What happened as a result of the waterboarding, asked interviewer Brian Ross?
Kiriakou: He resisted [for] probably 30, 35 seconds….And a [...]

Earlier today I went along to the launch of Demos’s new report, National Security for the 21st Century, by Charlie Edwards.  It’s an excellent pamphlet and anyone interested in how governments co-ordinate themselves to deal with complex risks should read it.  Anyway, at the event, Liberal Democrat leadership contender Nick Clegg made a strong call [...]

For a oil-glutted, stagnant dictatorship, Russian politics has more twists and turns than a bad Jackie Collins novel. When it looked like Putin was going to make himself prime minister and some old crony the president, as of today it looks very likely that his young deputy prime-minister, Dmitri Medvedev, will be handed the heavy burden of the presidency. Attached is an exclusive interview that Medvedev gave to me and a few other hundred journalists last year, and my impressions of the man about to stride onto the world stage.

Michael Totten is in Fallujah. “Nobody was shot last night in Fallujah. No American has been shot anywhere in Fallujah since the 3rd Battalion 5th Marine Regiment rotated into the city two months ago. There have been no rocket or mortar attacks since the summer. Not a single of the 3/5 Marines has even been [...]

(Source: PoliticalBetting.com.  Based on a poll for the Political Studies Association of 300 politics academics in UK universities.)
Oh, you thought intelligence and political conviction were necessary in order to be a good Prime Minister?  That’s so cute.

While we’re thinking about infectious disease: how I love the complexity theory boffins at the Santa Fe Institute.  This month they’ve been thinking about the role played by fear in how infectious diseases spread, under the glorious title of “Coupled Contagion Dynamics of Fear and Disease“.  Here’s the abstract:

We model two interacting contagion processes: one [...]

It should probably set alarm bells ringing automatically when you read stories that begin like this:
A mysterious fever has killed 14 people and infected 37 others in western Uganda over the last three months, a Health Ministry official said on Friday.
as this Reuters story did on November 16th.  It’s now clear that the illness is a [...]

The UN Development Programme (UNDP) and the Alliance of Religions and Conservation (ARC) have just launched a major three year programme to work with religions on climate change.  Details:
The UN Development Programme (UNDP) and ARC will manage the programme which involves major traditions in eleven of the world’s faiths drawing up seven-year plans of action [...]

FT Asia Editor Victor Mallett’s analysis piece on India yesterday is a worth a look.  Scarcity issues are slowly assuming centre stage:
It is slowly dawning on Indian policymakers that the country’s much-trumpeted “demographic dividend” – the population surge that will increase the workforce to 800m by 2016 and make India the world’s most populous nation [...]

I am reading The Black Swan.  It is exquisite.  How can you resist a book that begins like this?
The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encylopaedic, insightful, and nondull.  He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those [...]

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