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The G7 countries aren’t just most of the world’s richest democracies. They’re also many of the world’s biggest carbon polluters.
Climate change is sure to be on the table at the annual G7 meeting in southwest England this week in particular, the need to make what UK prime minister Boris Johnson called in May “a substantial pile of cash” available for poorer countries that are bearing the brunt of climate impacts they did little to cause.
The G7 is already taking steps forward on climate
In the past two months, G7 governments have taken some important steps forward on climate finance. On May 21, the group’s environment ministers said they would “phase out new direct government support for carbon intensive international fossil fuel energy,” although they didn’t specify a timeline.
May 30, 2021
Despite speech increasingly becoming one of the main ways people interact with devices, voice technology remains largely closed off to Africa’s languages, accents, and speech patterns. Case in point: The world’s most popular voice assistants, Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant, still don’t support any African languages. The continent has more than 1,000 languages.
Common Voice, a crowdsourcing project started by the Mozilla Foundation in 2017, has been addressing this by inviting speakers of African languages to donate their voices to a free and publicly available dataset that researchers and developers can use to train voice-enabled apps, products, and services.
May 28, 2021
Close to 1.8 billion doses of Covid-19 vaccines have been administered in the single largest vaccination campaign in the history of the world.
As with any effort of this scale, it was bound to have some glitches. One of them has been the wastage of vaccine doses in transport, storage, or in clinic.
While there is no centralized database of vaccine wastage rates globally, some countries collect the data piecemeal, and major wastage events are sometimes reported in local news outlets. The available data paint a picture of a problem that may be under-reported, that varies wildly across jurisdictions, and that is almost certain to get worse.