Visualizing the Impact of Rising Sea Levels, by Country
Climate change is already causing sea levels to rise across the globe. In the 20th century alone, it’s estimated that the mean global sea level rose by 11-16 cm.
How much will sea levels change in the coming years, and how will it affect our population?
In the below series of visualizations by Florent Lavergne, we can see how rising sea levels could impact countries in terms of flood risk by the year 2100.
These graphics use data from a 2019 study by Scott Kulp and Benjamin Strauss. Their study used CoastalDEM—a 3D graphics tool used to measure a population’s potential exposure to extreme coastal water levels—and examined rising sea levels under different levels of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Continue reading →
During the year 2018, I was fortunate to be able to take scores of photographs across three continents – Africa, North America and South America. Here are the top twelve which I have selected from the many which I really love.
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It is my hope that you have had the same pleasure viewing those Top Dozen photographs of mine, and the stories accompanying them, as I have. Best wishes to you and yours for a Prosperous 2019.
……. (The photographs)
This photograph was taken on November 29, 2018, at the Smithsonian American Postal Museum in Washington, DC. Guyana’s Ambassador to the USA, Dr. Riyad Insanally and his teenage son, Jamie, were at the time, looking up at replicas of early airplanes which are suspended above – Early airplanes which took Air Mail letters across the USA. However, they could have also been looking up to heaven to their mother and wife, Sarah, who died in September. Ambassador Riyad Insanally and his son Jamie, also viewed the World-Famous British Guiana One-Cent Magenta Postage Stamp which is on exhibition at the museum.
We come from everywhere Africa, Europe, Asia, Latin America We hide in the bowels of ships And stowaway in the cargo of planes Dodge bullets and run from dogs And get nightmares about fences and walls
We do these things and more To experience the land of liberty-and dreams And to provide for our families So they too can say they are Americans
We are no scum or dreg We heal the sick, mop the floors Tend the gardens, harvest the crops Throw out the garbage, push wheelchairs Babysit and become surrogate moms Continue reading →
Sugar in the Blood: A Family’s Story of Slavery and Empire by Andrea Stuart – review
An absorbing but uneven family memoir taking in both sides of the Barbadian slave trade and its legacy — (www.theguardian.com review)
Modern Britain was built on sugar; there is hardly a manufacturing town on these shores that was not in some way connected with the “Africa trade”. The glittering prosperity of slave ports such as Bristol and Liverpool was derived in large part from commerce with Africa.
In the heyday of the British slave trade, from 1700 to 1808, West Indians (as white sugar barons were then known) became conspicuous by their new wealth. Often they cast Barbados or Jamaica aside like a sucked orange in order to fritter their profits in England. A popular melodrama of 1771, Richard Cumberland’s The West Indian, satirised planters as drunken layabouts in ostentatiously buckled shoes and hats. Continue reading →
To make it big in Africa, a business must succeed in Nigeria, the continent’s largest market. No one said it would be easy
Aug 23rd 2014 | LAGOS |The Economist
IN 2001 MTN, a fledgling telecoms company from South Africa, paid $285m for one of four mobile licences sold at auction by the government of Nigeria. Observers thought its board was bonkers. Nigeria had spent most of the previous four decades under military rule. The country was rich in oil reserves but otherwise desperately poor. Its infrastructure was crumbling. The state phone company had taken a century to amass a few hundred thousand customers from a population of 120m. The business climate was scarcely stable. Continue reading →
Jamaican Patois becoming the youth language of choice in larger countries
In some parts of England and Toronto Canada, a dialect heavy with Jamaican and Afro-Caribbean inflections is being spoken by a significant portion of the youth population. British linguists are calling it “multicultural youth English,” or MYE.
Jamaican Creole, or JamC , what the academics are now calling the patois native to Jamaica, has become the dialect employed not just by the children of Jamaican immigrants, but also by second-generation West Indians of other national origins (i.e. of Trinidadian, Grenadian, Guyanese, etc. parentage) and simultaneously by Black youth of various African heritage. For British-born, urban Black people, JamC became a code used as a marker of Black identity with sociolinguistic functions similar to African-American vernacular English in the United States.
United Nations Pageant seeks inner beauty to promote tourism, goodwill and cultural style. Pageants typically focus on external beauty, glitz and glamour. However, the United Nations Pageant hosted in Kingston, Jamaica seeks goodwill ambassadors.
The United Nations Pageant is an international event, dedicated to identifying and showcasing the best tourism and ambassadors of humanity. Contestants are scored on inner beauty or how they relate with others, and show support towards community service. Contestants from Africa, South America, India, the United States and the Caribbean converged from July 1st through the 6th, 2014. This was an opportunity for comradery, community service and cultural expression.
Leon Williams, the United Nations Pageant president, explained “Unknown to the contestants, we had judges socialize and mingle with them during the early days of the pageant. The judges were revealed later on day three of the pageant and participated in activities with the contestants throughout the week. This provided opportunity to know each contestant personably. During this part of the process, a person can excel at the finals –but not get along with others; and this will hinder their chance to win. This opportunity offers more than a pageant title. The winners become ambassadors who foster goodwill and help those less fortunate. Retrospectively, we also look at contributions each contestant has offered in their home community. Humanitarianism is a strong indicator of good character.” Continue reading →
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The danger of a single story
Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice — and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding. About Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Coolies: How Britain Reinvented Slavery tells the astonishing and controversial story of the systematic recruitment and migration of over a million Indians to all corners of the Empire. It is a chapter in colonial history that implicates figures at the very highest level of the British establishment and has defined the demographic shape of the modern world.
Combining archive footage and historical evidence the programme includes interviews with Gandhi’s great-granddaughter, Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie, about Gandhi’s campaign to end indentured labour and David Dabydeen – author and academic – whose great-grandfather was an indentured labourer in British Guyana.
VISUAL CAPITALIST: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/sea-level-rises-2100-by-region/
An absorbing but uneven family memoir taking in both sides of the Barbadian slave trade and its legacy — (
To make it big in Africa, a business must succeed in Nigeria, the continent’s largest market.
Africa’s testing ground
To make it big in Africa, a business must succeed in Nigeria, the continent’s largest market. No one said it would be easy
Aug 23rd 2014 | LAGOS |The Economist
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