A project that links high-tech weather forecasting with traditional knowledge is being piloted in the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu in an effort to help people cope with climate change and disasters. The idea is to strengthen people’s resilience by delivering effective weather, climate and early warning information to affected communities in local languages and in ways that will be understood and accepted by local communities. Olioliga Iosua, secretary general of the Tuvalu Red Cross Society, says this information, combined with traditional knowledge, will help people in the target community of Teone cope better with disasters. “There are old ways of coping with hardship that we need to revive, like how to dry, salt or bury food to keep it fresh, sometimes for years,” she said. “It’s in the Red Cross disaster plan. Young people are used to buying food, but older people remember these older ways.”
It’s the stuff of science fiction: machines that make decisions about who and when to kill. Referred to as “autonomous weapons”, they’re already in use to some degree. But as more sophisticated systems are being developed we wanted to an expert in the field about whether such systems comply with international humanitarian law and what it means for humanity to give machines the power over human life and death.
In this episode, we talk with humanitarian communicator Kathy Mueller who produced our first magazine podcast series, The Wildfire Diaries, about massive wildfires in Northern Canada in 2017. We talk about that series, her many international missions, and the big changes in humanitarian communications since she began with the Canadian Red Cross almost 20 years ago.
In this episode, we talk about the power of storytelling to inform and inspire. “Storytelling is a fundamental aspect of human communication,” says our guest Prodip, a volunteer and multi-media storyteller for the Bangladesh Red Crescent. “It inspires us to be a hero of our own community.” We also speak with one such community hero, Dalal al-Taji, a longtime volunteer and advocate for inclusion of people with disabilities in emergencies response. “In disasters. persons with disabilities sometimes get forgotten.”
As humanitarian groups have rushed to embrace new technologies, biometric data such as eye, finger and palm scans have become a common method for humanitarian organizations to track aid during emergencies. But is the humanitarian sector fully ready to protect this most personal form of data?
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