UN needs 'complete leadership overhaul', says British study

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By Steven Edwards,

Postmedia News

March 28, 2011

UNITED NATIONS — The United Nations is proficient at raising money from governments in times of emergency, but "very disappointing" in its ability to respond to the actual disaster, according to an independent review commissioned by the British government.

"There is rarely a vision beyond fundraising, and rarely an organizing narrative that draws together the disparate capacities," says the 61-page report, released Monday. "What is needed is a complete overhaul of strategic and operational leadership in the UN."

The study highlights shortfalls that are likely to also raise alarm bells among Canadian politicians and others focused on the Ottawa's contributions to UN humanitarian efforts.

It was led by Paddy Ashdown, former leader of Britain's Liberal-Democrats, who also served as UN high representative to Bosnia and Herzegovina.

"Regrettably, the leadership, management and co-ordination of the international community's efforts have not risen even to the challenges we currently face." Ashdown says in the foreword to his Humanitarian Emergency Response Review. "Unless we radically improve the quality of the leadership of the international effort in humanitarian crises, we will not succeed in dealing with what is ahead."

The study drew its conclusions after studying responses to a series of recent humanitarian disasters, including flooding in Pakistan, the earthquake in Haiti, and famine in Niger.

It says governments have come to look at the UN as the "only legitimate authority" in situations where a government of an affected country is unable to mount an effective humanitarian response.

But it adds: "In all but one of the case studies for this review, UN leadership was poor. This was especially true in the larger disasters. It is true at a strategic level and at an operational level. It is true across the international system, and in individual crises."

The report praises the World Food Program — to which Canada is the world's third-biggest contributor after the United States and the European Commission — for "rapidly delivering food to seven million people in flood-hit Pakistan." It also says UNICEF, the children's agency, was efficient in supplying infant food throughout Niger.

But it highlights the UN's "inability to treat and contain" the cholera outbreak in Haiti last year. More widely, it hints at unhealthy competition between the UN agencies by saying they "need to work more collegially."

Britain's 10-month-old Conservative-led coalition government called for the study to review how Britain responds to humanitarian emergencies.

A significant part of the report focused on the UN because the organization and its agencies are among the world's biggest deliverers of emergency help.

Ashdown led a task force of humanitarian experts from inside and outside government who began their study six months after the Haiti earthquake at the beginning of 2010.

UNPAN applauds Canada's open data strategy - the question is when would DESA's UNPAN open itself up to the world on its own project data?

Civil servants forge ahead with open data strategy

OTTAWA— Civil servants are forging ahead with an open-data strategy for the federal government while politicians drag their heels on a formal policy.

A parliamentary committee has been studying the issue since last April and resumes debate this week, but documents obtained under Access to Information show that bureaucrats started drafting a plan in July.

Unlike the United States and Britain, Canada has no formal federal policy of making raw, taxpayer-funded data freely available to the public.

Civil servants have realized that needs to change.

At the July meeting to kick off the strategy, they drafted a five-point plan.

The goal was "to create economic opportunity and promote informed participation by the public by expanding access to federal government data," said a copy of the presentation.

Part of the plan was expected to launch last fall.

It would include a common "front door" to government data, a searchable catalogue and easy downloading, said a report to a set of OECD meetings on public governance, held in Venice in November.

"It will also encourage users to develop applications that re-use and combine government data to make it useful in new and unanticipated ways, creating new value for Canadians," said the Canadian chapter of the OECD report.

But the roll-out has bogged down over issues such as bilingualism, licensing and security.

"We are not able to confirm timing of the launch at this time," said an email from Pierre-Alain Bujold, a spokesperson for Treasury Board, which oversees the project.

Liberal MP Shawn Murphy, chairman of the Commons committee studying open data, said he was unaware of the plan.

"They haven't told us yet," he said.

"But that doesn't surprise me. There is an appetite in the public to get this done."

Part of the committee's work includes seeking submissions from the public.

Advocates for open data have made their positions clear -- two of the top three ideas submitted to the federal government's digital economy consultations were for more access to public sector and data.

Supporters say greater access would save the government money.

"Canadians often pay multiple times for the same data, since each level of government also purchases the same data, federal departments purchase these data from each other," wrote Tracey Lauriault, a researcher at Carleton University who also runs a blog about open government.

The fact that the bureaucracy is moving ahead without clear political direction isn't that unusual, suggested David Eaves, a leading advocate for more transparency in government information.

"We already have a policy infrastructure for dealing with most of the open data that's out there because we already have open data," he said.

The July presentation suggested the strategy begin simply with the data already in the public domain.

At a website called datadotgc.ca, Eaves has set up a clearinghouse for government information that's available online now.

Natural Resources Canada leads the way with 222 sets, but after that it's only dribs and drabs of what's available for free.

But it's not just about creating a portal to what is there, suggested Alberta Senator Elaine McCoy.

"You can find a lot of stuff just using Google," she said.

"What excites me is having the raw data in machine-readable form, so that I could just quickly capture it with my computer in a nanosecond and then be immediately able to mash it up."

McCoy and a group of programmers tried to create such a mashup out of data from the Harper government's Economic Action Plan.

They wanted to track stimulus spending across the country to see how it was being used, but the plan failed when the data wasn't available.

What's holding back the data isn't technology, but the desire of both the political leadership and the civil service to control their messages, McCoy said.

"You can't do that if your databases are wide open, because somebody can come in and take a look at them and say excuse me, I think your interpretation is not the correct one."

At the municipal level, Edmonton, Ottawa, Calgary, Vancouver and London, Ont., are leading the way in opening up databases.

The information released has been used for everything from mapping restaurant inspections to the development of applications that track transit arrival times.

While it's trickier to think of daily uses of federal data, that doesn't mean it shouldn't be available, Eaves said.

"The great thing about this stuff is you don't know what people are going to find that's going to be successful and innovative and adding value," he said.

"If we knew, then we'd be doing it, but we don't and we don't even get a chance."

Britain's Weather Office Proposes Climate-Gate Do-Over

By George Russell

- FOXNews.com

At a meeting Monday of 150 climate scientists, representatives of Britain's weather office proposed that the world's climatologists start all over again and produce a new trove of global temperature data that is open to public scrutiny and "rigorous" peer review.

After the firestorm of criticism called Climate-gate, the British government's official Meteorological Office has decided to give its modern climate data a do-over.

At a meeting on Monday of about 150 climate scientists in the quiet Turkish seaside resort of Antalya, representatives of the weather office (known in Britain as the Met Office) quietly proposed that the world's climate scientists start all over again on a "grand challenge" to produce a new, common trove of global temperature data that is open to public scrutiny and "rigorous" peer review.

In other words, conduct investigations into modern global warming in a way that may help to end the mammoth controversy over world temperature data that has been stirred up in the past few years.

The executive summary of the Met Office proposal to the World Meteorological Organization's Committee for Climatology was obtained by Fox News. In it, the Met Office defends its historical record of temperature readings, along with similar data collected in the U.S., as a "robust indicator of global change." But it admits that "further development" of the record is required "in particular to better assess the risks posed by changes in extremes of climate."

Among other things, its older data is maintained on a monthly basis, and the Met Office proposal says that is "grossly inadequate" to providing information on a daily and "sub-daily" basis.

A Met Office spokesman, Dave Britton, declared that the decision to re-do the data collection had been gestating for "a long time," then added: "But it would be naïve to say that [the Climate-gate controversy] didn't have an impact." He added: "It's not something that we can do alone."

As a result, the proposal says, "we feel that it is timely to propose an international effort to reanalyze surface temperature data in collaboration with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), which has the responsibility for global observing and monitoring systems for weather and climate."

The new effort, the proposal says, would provide:

• "verifiable datasets starting from a common databank of unrestricted data"
• "methods that are fully documented in the peer reviewed literature and open to scrutiny;"
• "a set of independent assessments of surface temperature produced by independent groups using independent methods,"
• "comprehensive audit trails to deliver confidence in the results;"
• "robust assessment of uncertainties associated with observational error, temporal and geographical in homogeneities."

Click here to read the executive summary.

The Met Office proposes that the new international effort to recalibrate temperature data start at a "workshop"' hosted by its Hadley Climate Research Centre, which maintains data in collaboration with the controversial Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at Britain's East Anglia University. The Met Office would invite "key players" to start the "agreed community challenge" of creating the new datasets. A Met Office spokesman said the new effort would take about three years to complete, but would not estimate the cost.

The Met Office proposal asserts that "we do not anticipate any substantial changes in the resulting global and continental-scale ... trends" as a result of the new round of data collection. But, the proposal adds, "this effort will ensure that the datasets are completely robust and that all methods are transparent."

Those strongly underlined assurances put the Met Office in strong contrast to the accusations that have been hurled at its collaborator, CRU, epicenter of the Climate-gate controversy. Among other things, the CRU had stonewalled climate skeptics who demanded to know more about its scientific methods in establishing a dramatic record of global warming, especially in the 20th century. (An inquiry established that the institution had flouted British freedom of information laws in refusing to come up with the data.)

The stonewall began to crumble after a gusher of leaked emails revealed climate scientists, including the CRU's chief, Phil Jones, discussing how to keep controversial climate data out of the hands of the skeptics, keep opposing scientific viewpoints out of peer-reviewed scientific journals, and bemoaned that their climate models failed to account for more than a decade of stagnation in global temperatures.Jones later revealed that key temperature datasets used in Hadley's predictions had been lost, and could not be retrieved for verification.

Jones stepped down temporarily after the British government announced an ostensibly independent inquiry into the still-growing scandal, but that only fanned the flames, as skeptics pointed out ties between several panel members and the East Anglia center. In an interview two weeks ago, Jones also admitted that there has been no "statistically significant" global warming in the past 15 years.

The Met Office's desire for more robust and transparent data could also prove to be a blow for Rajendra Pachauri, head of the United Nations-backed International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), whose most recent report, published in 2007, has been exposed by skeptics as rife with scientific errors, larded with un-reviewed and non-scientific source materials, and other failings.

As details of the report's sloppiness emerged, the ranks of skeptics of the work have swelled to include larger numbers of the scientific community, including weather specialists who worked on the sprawling IPCC report. Calls for Pachauri's resignation have come from organizations as normally opposed as the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the British chapter of Greenpeace. So far, he has refused to step down.

The Met proposal argues says that its old datasets "are adequate for answering the pressing 20th Century questions of whether climate is changing and if so how. Bet they are fundamentally ill-conditioned to answer 21st Century questions such as how extremes are changing and therefore what adaptation and mitigation decisions should be taken."

Those "21st Century questions" are not small and they are very far from cheap. At Copenhagen, wealthy nations were being asked to spend trillions of dollars on answering them, a deal that only fell through when China, India, and other near-developed nations refused to join the mammoth climate-control deal.

The question after the Met Office's proposal may be whether environmentalists eager to move those mountains of cash are also ready to stand down until the 21st century questions get 21st century answers.