You may have heard the news that the richest 22 men in the world have more combined wealth than all 325 million women in Africa. This is according to a widely reported recent Oxfam study that highlighted how global economic inequality is intimately tied to gender and race.
Gender, division of labor, and pay
Source: Time to Care Report, Oxfam
Women and girls worldwide contribute an estimated $10.8 trillion to the global economy that they are not paid for. They collectively spend 12.5 billion hours per day on unpaid care work. Care work includes occupations like child care, healthcare work, teaching, and domestic labor. Though this kind of work is often left out of national economic equations, the monetary value of it is triple the worth of the global tech industry, according to an Oxfam report. Women around the globe, particularly those who live in poverty, do more than 75% of all unpaid care work. Despite its social importance and economic value, this labor is persistently undervalued and taken for granted by governments and companies around the world.
It manifests in different ways. In the United States, teachers, nurses, child social workers, day care workers, and other "care" jobs, which have been historically dominated by women, are underpaid. Furthermore, on an average day, women in the U.S. spend nearly 40 percent more time on unpaid care, like household duties, than men. Zoom out to a global scale and these issues are magnified in less wealthy nations like Africa where women aren't paid at all for this work. They end up trapped in poverty, unable to get an education and achieve financial security. They are also barred from government positions in which they can influence social and economic policy.
Economic and political inequality
Though men around the world are certainly suffering under the widening income gap and facing poverty, there is clearly a systemic gender disparity when most billionaires are men and most of the people occupying the lowest paid or unpaid jobs are women. Globally, men own more than 50% more wealth than women, and they also control government and economic decisions that could fix this system. Women make up only 18% of cabinet ministers around the world and 24% of parliamentarians.
The result has been a global economy designed by men, for men, that undervalues work done primarily by women, and especially marginalized women in already economically disadvantaged nations.
"When 22 men have more wealth than all the women in Africa combined, it's clear that our economy is just plain sexist," Oxfam GB's chief executive Danny Sriskandarajah said.
He noted that if world leaders care about reducing poverty and inequality, they need to invest in public services like care that make life less grueling for people with care responsibilities and hold back women and girls. Yet, closing the growing wealth gap is not on the top of the agenda of most world leaders. In fact, many of them continue to facilitate policies that widen it, such as tax cuts for billionaires, cuts in public spending, and privatization.
We need solutions now
Source: Time to Care Report, Oxfam
What it boils down to is a gendered discrimination of values in which neoliberal economic values are prioritized above social values like education and healthcare. The Oxfam report warns that aging populations, cuts in public spending, and the climate crisis will exacerbate gender-based economic inequality. Part of the solution is taxing the wealthy and learning to value care.
"Getting the richest 1% to pay just 0.5% tax on their wealth – just on their wealth, not their income – would create enough money over the next 10 years to pay for 117m jobs, in education, health and elderly care," said Katy Chakrabortty from Oxfam GB.
When we invest in social values, women are helped economically, but everyone reaps the benefits. Caregiving is going to be more valuable than ever in the next ten years. It's estimated that by 2030, 2.3 billion people will be in need of care. That's 200 million up from 2015 according to the Oxfam report. Part of this has to do with the climate crisis, which is deeply entangled with issues of human care. Over the next five years, it's estimated that 2.4 billion people will be living with water shortages. Already, women and girls are disproportionately affected by this because they need to walk further to find water to nourish their communities, adding to their unpaid workload.
By thinking beyond profit and choosing to invest in water, infrastructure, and child and health care, governments can improve quality of life and liberate laborers from hours of work per day. As of now, many of them are only bolstering a system under which billions of people, disproportionately women, are suffocating under the mass of concentrated wealth held by a small group of men who grow richer and richer.
- The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, delivers warm water from the Gulf of Mexico to Europe, stabilizing its climate.
- Increasing rainfall and glacial meltwater could seriously disrupt the current, which has been slowing down for the past 150 years.
- Not all of the effects of an AMOC shutdown are clear, but it is likely that Europe will begin to see far colder winters should the current cease.
Despite its frequent rain and cloudy skies, the weather in London rarely dips into the truly miserable. In the wintertime, London is, at its coldest, only 5°C (41°F). During the summertime, it doesn't typically get much hotter than 23°C (74.5°F). Yet, if we were to travel westward, we'd arrive in the far chillier Newfoundland.
The reason why London enjoys such regular temperatures while Canadian cities that are equally as far north are forced to shiver in the cold has to do with ocean currents—specifically, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC. The portion of AMOC that most are probably familiar with is called the Gulf Stream, or the North Atlantic Current.
This massive current transports warm water from the Gulf of Mexico towards Europe, stabilizing much of northwestern Europe's climate.
"The oceans store an immense amount of energy and the ocean currents have a strong effect on the Earth's climate," said University of Groningen mathematician Fred Wubs in a statement.
However, human-driven changes to the climate are changing how oceans store energy. Correspondingly, this could change how AMOC functions. Modeling the impact of meltwater from Greenland and excessive rainfall, Wubs and his colleagues discovered that this current could temporarily halt within the 100 years, significantly impacting Europe's weather in the process.
More ice-skating on the Thames
A topographic map of a portion of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation depicting the circulation of surface currents (solid curves) and deep currents (dashed curves). Colors of curves indicate approximate temperatures.
R. Curry, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution/Science/USGCRP
The AMOC has been weakening for the past 150 years and is currently at its weakest point of the past 1,500 years. This has spurred researchers to assess the current's future. Concerns over a complete failure of the AMOC inspired the 2004 film The Day After Tomorrow — although the events that took place in that film are clearly hyperbole.
Wubs and colleagues calculated that the possibility of a temporary shutdown of AMOC stood at 15 percent over the next 100 years, a one-in-six chance. Fortunately, however, the same model predicted that there was virtually no chance of a complete shutdown over the next 1,000 years.
For North America and Europe, this would mean colder winters, as well as hotter summers in Europe. More worryingly, this would also reduce the ocean's ability to absorb carbon dioxide, exacerbating the effects of climate change.
The AMOC has fluctuated over Earth's history, and when it has slowed down stopped in the past, massive cooling events typically followed. For instance, an AMOC slowdown has been implicated in the rise of the Little Ice Age, a period between 1200 and 1850 when temperatures in Europe dipped by about 1°C. Some researchers suggest that the Younger Dryas, an abrupt cooling period that took place between 12,900 and 11,7000 BP, occurred in part due to a change in AMOC, dropping the Earth's climate by 2 to 6°C in a matter of decades.
While the exact impacts of a temporary shutdown, especially under modern climate conditions, aren't entirely clear, such a shutdown would definitely spell colder winters for Europe. "Previous studies have shown that a shutdown of the AMOC would considerably affect the climate of the North Atlantic, and, more in general, of the Northern Hemisphere: the temperatures may drop by a few degrees, depending on the location," co-author Daniele Castellana told Newsweek. Their findings "strongly depend on the background state of the climate," he added.
It's important to note that even though an AMOC slowdown or shutdown will cool much of the northern hemisphere, higher levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will still result in higher global temperatures over the long term. In fact, one study even suggested that an AMOC shutdown could result in extremely rapid increases in global temperatures, since the churning ocean current would be less able to store heat in the deep ocean, releasing it onto the surface instead.
If anything, recent findings into the AMOC's role in the global climate underscore just how large and complicated the Earth's systems really are. The AMOC has only been continuously monitored since 2004, so more research is needed before we can definitively say what is happening to it and what a temporary shutdown would mean for the rest of the world.
By now, everybody has heard of solar and wind energy. You're probably familiar with hydroelectric energy as well, and maybe even geothermal energy. But few are familiar with osmotic energy.
Osmotic energy plants are fairly rare as one of the key components in their use — a semi-permeable membrane — tends to break down, requiring frequent replacement and driving up operational costs. Now, new research has uncovered a better, more durable membrane that may lead to significantly better returns for this kind of renewable energy.
What exactly is osmotic energy?
An image taken inside of the world's first osmotic power plant at Tofte, Norway, 2009. The project has since been shelved due to its high operating costs, highlighting the need for better, more efficient technology.
POPPE, CORNELIUS/AFP via Getty Images
Osmotic energy takes advantage of the differences in pressure and salinity between fresh and seawater to generate electricity. Its only waste product is brackish water, which is simply water that is saltier than freshwater but less so than seawater. While it doesn't generate large amounts of energy compared to other renewable energy sources, it is remarkably consistent. The energy derived from wind turbines and solar panels fluctuates tremendously with the weather, time, and local climate, but osmotic energy works more or less the same year-round wherever fresh and saltwater meet.
Osmosis, in general, is the process by which liquid moves from a dilute to a concentrated solution through a semi-permeable membrane. It occurs in your body all the time, as its critical for fundamental biological processes.
Osmotic power plants typically use one of two major techniques. In pressure-retarded osmosis (PRO), freshwater is gathered in one tank while saltwater is kept in another. In between, a membrane separates the two. This membrane has special properties that only permit freshwater to pass through, but not saltwater. As a result, the freshwater is drawn through the membrane, diluting the saltwater in the corresponding tank but also raising the pressure. From this pressure, we can derive energy.
The other technique, reverse electrodialysis osmosis (RED), takes advantage of the fact that saltwater contains more positive and negative ions than fresh water. Normally, these ions would travel into the freshwater, balancing out the solution. But when harvesting osmotic energy, a membrane can selectively allow only the positive or negative ions to pass through, turning tanks of salt and fresh water into a kind of battery that passively generates electricity.
Inspired by bone and cartilage
But the reason why we don't see more of either of these plants is because of the membrane. Osmotic membranes are delicate and must retain specific characteristics in order to remain semi-permeable. Exposed to the elements, they tend to degrade over time.
Recent research described in the journal Joule presents a new, durable membrane inspired by bone and cartilage that lasts. This membrane would be used in RED applications.
Bone is a very strong material, but it doesn't permit the transportation of ions, while flimsier material like cartilage permits ions to pass through easily. A membrane for osmotic energy would require both strength and the ability to transport ions.
Using this as inspiration, the researchers developed a membrane consisting of layers of boron nitride and aramid nanofibers. Boron nitride had shown promise in previous membranes but tended to develop cracks over time. To address this, the researchers investigated the use of a class of synthetic fibers frequently used in Kevlar: Aramid nanofibers. By layering boron nitride and the aramid nanofibers, the researchers had developed a material that was sturdy enough to last while remaining flexible and efficient in transporting ions.
The researchers found that not only does this generate power to a similar degree as commercial RED osmotic power plants, but it also performs for a remarkably long time. They cycled the membrane 20 times, observing its efficiency over the course of 200 hours, and found no drop in performance whatsoever.
Moreover, the membrane can function well in a wide range of pH and temperatures. Other membranes only perform well under specific conditions and need to be regularly replaced, increasing the amount of energy they require to be maintained. Implementing a more durable, longer-lasting membrane in a power plant would mean in effect that the plant could generate more power, as it would require less energy to maintain.
While the study only served as a proof of concept, it does show that we're getting better and better at addressing the problems with renewable energy. Not only that, but it highlights how much energy available to us is out there — so long as we're willing to think creatively and look in the right places. With any luck, we might start to see more osmotic energy plants operating at the mouths of the world's rivers.
All across India, high-rise developers and construction companies are building hotels, businesses, and homes, turning the country's horizon to a skyline. Over the next 20 years, $650 billion is expected to be invested in urban infrastructure alone. The construction industry employs 35 million people, the second largest sector in India after agriculture. All those buildings, after all, need people to build them.
However, the vast majority of those buildings are being constructed with concrete — and that's a problem. One of the main constituents of concrete has become so valuable in India that the excess mining of this material is destroying local ecosystems, damaging crops, and drying out rivers.
Mining practices around this material is being carefully regulated, but it's worth so much that loosely-formed criminal organizations have formed to skirt the government's rules and extract this substance from the earth, regularly relying on violence to ensure its steady supply.
But this isn't any particularly rare substance: it's sand.
Surprisingly dangerous
Kashmiri boatmen collect sand along the banks of the Jhelum River.
Photo credit: SAJJAD HUSSAIN / AFP / Getty Images
At first blush, sand mining might not seem like it could do all that much damage. However, sand plays an important role in any environment with a river, lake, or coastline. As sand is removed from the environment, the water table drops lower and lower. This makes it difficult for people to get access to clean drinking water and it destroys the environments that various animals — and plants — need to survive.
The gharial crocodile in India, for instance, is on the brink of extinction, partially due to sand mining practices that have destroyed its nesting sites. The same is true of the Ganges River dolphin. When dunes or other coastline barriers are mined for their sand, sometimes nearby communities can be flooded. Ironically, although deserts have an abundance of sand, the sand grains found in such environments have been rounded by the wind, causing them to bind poorly and rendering them ineffective for use in concrete.
Sand mining is regulated, but its difficult to enforce regulations when it is so easy for individuals to gather sand in their local river. For this reason, India's sand mafia differs from a traditional mafia in the sense that its much more distributed and less hierarchical. Illegal sand mining can be carried out independently or as part of small group of sand miners. One can participate in the illegal sand mining industry by mining directly, transporting the material, accepting bribes to ignore the law, acting as a middleman between the miners and developers, and so on.
A Ganges River dolphin swimming near Bangladesh. Image source: worldwildlife.org
However, sand mining also includes individuals we would think of as more traditional gangsters. For instance, consider how one man who owned an illegal sand mining operation described encounters with the police in an interview with The New York Times: "If there are a lot of police and only a few men, then we run. […] If the police are few and the men are many, then we get into it with them. We fire shot for shot."
Violence is not uncommon in the illegal sand mining trade. Another individual, Paleram Chauhan, 52, was shot dead after speaking out against the sand mining that was going on in his village. His son, Akaash Chauhan, decided to continue his father's crusade against the illegal sand mining industry. "My father's fight has become my fight," he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. "Sand mining is ongoing — my father was against it, I am against it and so is my family."
A lucrative industry
Indian laborers extract sand from the Meshwo river bed, near Mahemdabad.
Photo credit: SAM PANTHAKY / AFP / Getty Images
There's good reason illegal sand mining is so violently defended. Conservatively, the illegal sand mining industry is worth $250 million a year, which translates to significant sums for workers who would only receive poor wages elsewhere. One individual who had worked at a bank was paid 400 rupees per day, or $5. Working in the middle of the night, mining and carting away sand netted him five times that amount, a sum of money that goes a long way in impoverished Indian communities.
Sand mining is a necessary practice that will continue so long as there are buildings to be made. In India, there is enough sand to do so in a sustainable way when mining is targeted at the right areas, but corruption makes enforcing industry regulations quite difficult. At humanity's current population and industrial scale, even extracting something as ubiquitous as sand can have drastic environmental consequences, underscoring the need for effective regulation.
These maps are both data-rich and absolutely gorgeous. You're looking at watershed maps, showing the flow of tributary streams into main rivers, and of those water courses into the sea (or final destinations inland). The streams are shown in the Strahler Stream Order Classification, which uses width to indicate the hierarchy of streams. Watersheds (a.k.a. drainage basins or catchment areas) are grouped together by color.
The maps are the work of Hungarian cartographer Robert Szucs, 33, who combines expertise in GIS with a passion for beautiful maps. "GIS is short for Geographic Information Systems. It's a collective word for anything using spatial or geographic data — from monitoring changes in forest cover with satellite data to creating crime density maps for the police," Szucs explains. "In this case, I've used GIS to create artistic maps, which is a beautiful hybrid of the artsy and geeky sides of my personality."
The world
Can you spot the world's ten largest drainage basins? In order of magnitude: Amazon, Congo, Nile, Mississippi, Ob, Parana, Yenisei, Lena, Niger, Amur.
Image source: Grasshopper Geography
Africa
Africa is home to the rivers with the world's second- and third-largest catchment areas: the Congo (in blue), with a basin of 1.44 million square miles (3.73 million km2), and the Nile (in red), with basin area of 1.26 million square miles (3.25 million km2). The Nile is the longest river in Africa, though (4,130 miles; 6,650 km), followed by the Congo: 2,900 miles (4,700 km). The Congo River's alternative name, Zaire, comes from the Kikongo nzadi o nzere ('river swallowing rivers'). Image source: Grasshopper Geography
Europe
The Volga (in yellow) is the river with the biggest catchment area in Europe (just under 545,000 square miles; 1.41 million km2). It flows exclusively through Russia, and the catchment area is entirely within Russia as well. Europe's number two is the Danube (in orange), which flows through 10 countries — more than any other river in the world. Its drainage basin (just over 307,000 square miles; almost 796,000 km2) includes nine more countries. Image: Grasshopper Geography
Germany
The hydrographic map of Germany is dominated by just four major drainage systems: the Danube (in orange) in the south, the Rhine (in blue) in the west, the Elbe (in purple) in the east and the Weser (in green) between the latter two. In Antiquity, the Rhine was the border between the Roman Empire and the Germans. Rome once attempted to shift the border to the Elbe, which would have radically altered the course of history, but it suffered a massive defeat in 9 CE at the Teutoburger Wald (roughly between both rivers). Image: Grasshopper Geography
Great Britain and Ireland
Both Ireland and Great Britain are islands, as a result of which neither boasts a continental-class river. Twenty of the 30 longest British rivers are less than 100 miles (160 km) long. The longest river in Britain is the Severn (220 miles, 354 km), its catchment area shown in blue in the southwest. Ireland's longest river is the Shannon (224 miles, 360 km). Even combined they're not as long as France's Seine (483 miles, 777 km). Image: Grasshopper Geography
United States
Spread-eagled across the central part of the United States, the Mississippi's drainage basin covers all or parts of 32 U.S. states (and two Canadian provinces). The easternmost point of Ol' Man River's catchment area is really far east: Cobb Hill in northern Pennsylvania. Here rises the Allegheny, tributary of the Ohio, which in turn flows into the Mississippi at Cairo, Illinois. Image: Grasshopper Geography
Washington State
Even leaving out the Mississippi, there's enough going on in the rest of North America to keep the eye occupied. Here's a drainage map of Washington State. The big fish in this much smaller pond is the Columbia River (drainage area in blue), the largest river in the Pacific Northwest. Only in the western third of the state is there a colourful counterpoint, in the multitude of smaller river basins that are draining into the Pacific or into Puget Sound. Image: Grasshopper Geography
Australia
At 1,558 miles (2,508 km), the Murray is Australia's longest river. It is often considered in conjunction with the Darling (915 miles, 1,472 km), the country's third-longest river, which flows into the Murray. The Murray-Darling basin (in blue, in the southeast) covers just under 410,000 square miles (1.06 million km2), or 14 percent of Australia's total territory. Don't let that spidery network of river courses in the interior fool you: Australia is the world's driest inhabited continent (Antarctica, bizarrely, is drier). Image: Grasshopper Geography
Russia
Four of the world's largest drainage basins are in Russia: the Ob, Yenisei and Lena (origin of Vladimir I. Ulyanov's nom de guerre, Lenin) entirely and the Amur, shared with China. The Volga may be Europe's longest river, but 84 percent or Russia's surface water is east of the Urals, in Siberia. The sparsely-populated region is traversed by 40 rivers longer than 1,000 km. Combined, the Ob, Yenisey and Lena rivers cover a drainage area of about 8 million km2, discharging nearly 50,000 m3 of water per second in the Arctic. Image: Grasshopper Geography
Szucs has managed to parlay his love for beautiful maps into a job designing them:
"I made a huge elevation map of Eurasia which was used in a documentary about horses and their migrations. There's also a 12-foot wide mural in the making at Louisiana State University, based on one of my maps. And I made some maps for the BBC after they reached out, saying my work inspired a show on rivers. I'm not saying I was jumping on my bed from excitement after any of those requests, but maybe I was."
Szucs is not just a theoretical map enthusiast, but also a practical one. He tries to move to a different country every few months, "donating" his mapmaking skills to worthy causes. He's worked with archeologists on St. Eustatius, an island in the Caribbean, with marine biologists in Alaska, and for an orangutan conservation programme on Borneo, among other destinations.
"My moves are always temporary, linked with volunteering for an NGO. It's a way of developing my skills, but also of seeing the world and experiencing new cultures," Szucs said. Meanwhile, new map ideas bubble up. "My current favourite map as yet only exists in my head as an idea. I might have to learn a few new software applications to make it. Let's hope I can find a way to make it happen. After that, I hope to be back in Alaska for a few months, working with whales again."
Many thanks to Mr. Szucs for sending in these maps. See more at Grasshopper Geography.
Strange Maps #959
Got a strange map? Let me know at strangemaps@gmail.com.
