Risks

The Crisis Respone Google website has created crowd-sourced maps of volunteers offering shelter in Andhra Pradesh and Odisha. Clicking on the shelter or red cross gives more details about the shelter and hospital in the area. The maps are also highlighting the intensity of the cyclone at different spots. All the data shown on the map is crowdsourced from publicly visible webpages of news websites, forums, social media, blogs, Wikipedia and government sites.

gdacs.org - October 11, 2013

Tropical Cyclone NARI-13 can have a high humanitarian impact based on the Maximum sustained wind speed and the affected population and their vulnerability.

Updated: this report is based on advisory number 11.

• Tropical Cyclone Hurricane/Typhoon > 74 mph (maximum wind speed of 185 km/h)
• from 09/10/2013 12:00 UTC to 11/10/2013 06:00 UTC
• Population affected by Category 1 (120 km/h) wind speeds or higher is 14.3 million
• Vulnerability: High

(CLICK HERE FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION)

newscientist.com - by Fred Pearce - October 4, 2013

CLICK HERE - State of the Ocean Report 2013

We know the oceans are warming. We know they are acidifying. And now, to cap it all, it turns out they are suffocating, too. A new health check on the state of the oceans warns that they will have lost as much as 7 per cent of their oxygen by the end of the century.

The cascade of chemical and biological changes now under way could see coral reefs irreversibly destroyed in 50 to 100 years, with marine ecosystems increasingly taken over by jellyfish and toxic algal blooms.

(READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

(CLICK HERE FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION)

un.org

Who is responsible for protecting people from gross violations of human rights?

Emergence of the concept

Debating the right to "humanitarian intervention" (1990s)

Following the tragedies in Rwanda and the Balkans in the 1990s, the international community began to seriously debate how to react effectively when citizens’ human rights are grossly and systematically violated. The question at the heart of the matter was whether States have unconditional sovereignty over their affairs or whether the international community has the right to intervene in a country for humanitarian purposes.

In his Millennium Report of 2000, then Secretary-General Kofi Annan, recalling the failures of the Security Council to act in a decisive manner in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, put forward a challenge to Member States: "If humanitarian intervention is, indeed, an unacceptable assault on sovereignty, how should we respond to a Rwanda, to a Srebrenica, to gross and systematic violation of human rights that offend every precept of our common humanity?"