Online meeting: Green Sustainable Cuba
Birmingham
Thursday, 8 October 2020, 7:30pm
CSC Birmingham presents: Green Sustainable Cuba:
Thursday 8th October 7.30pm - 9pm.
Speaker: Wendy Emmett
Wendy is a member of the national Cuba Solidarity Campaign Executive Committee and of the Sheffield CSC group. She has travelled to Cuba several times, often visiting environmental projects, including renewable energy, reforestation, agriculture and national parks. The meeting will cover how Cuba has achieved the designation ‘The most sustainable country in the world’ - using the SDI - Sustainable Development Index
There will also be a brief update on Cuba and Covid19, the international health missions, and the campaign to award the Nobel Peace Prize to the Henry Reeve Emergency Health brigade. There'll be some music too!
Zoom registration link :
When: Oct 8, 2020 19:30 London
Register in advance for this meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZModOygqDwpH9FRijI7EGJhWvqiwQl5_ZLi
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
For more info please contact CSC Birmingham group bhamcsc@gmail.com
More info on the Sustainable Development Index (SDI) :
CUBA is the most sustainably developed country in the world, according to a new report launched on December 2nd 2019
The socialist island outperforms advanced capitalist countries including Britain and the United States, which has subjected Cuba to a punitive six-decades-long economic blockade. The Sustainable Development Index (SDI), designed by anthropologist and author Dr Jason Hickel, calculates its results by dividing a nation’s “human development” score, obtained by looking at statistics on life expectancy, health and education, by its “ecological overshoot,” the extent to which the per capita carbon footprint exceeds Earth’s natural limits.
Countries with strong human development and a lower environmental impact score highly, but countries with poorer life expectancies and literacy rates as well as those which exceed ecological limits are marked down.
Based on the most recent figures, from 2015, Cuba is top with a score of 0.859, while Venezuela is 12th and Argentina 18th. The SDI was created to update the Human Development Index (HDI), developed by Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq and used by the United Nations Development Programme to produce its annual reports since 1990.
The HDI considers life expectancy, education and gross national income per capita, but ignores environmental degradation caused by the economic growth of top performers such as Britain and the US.
“These countries are major contributors to climate change and other forms of ecological breakdown, which disproportionately affects the poorer countries of the global South, where climate change is already causing hunger rates to rise,” Mr Hickel said.
“In this sense, the HDI promotes a model of development that is empirically incompatible with ecology and which embodies a fundamental contradiction: achieving high development according to HDI means driving de-development elsewhere in the world. For a development indicator that purports to be universal, such a contradiction is indefensible.”
Britain, ranked 14th in 2018’s HDI, falls to 131st in the SDI, while the US, 13th in the ul Haq index, is 159th out of 163 countries featured in the new system.
Mr Hickel added: “The SDI ranking reveals that all countries are still “developing” – countries with the highest levels of human development still need to significantly reduce their ecological impact, while countries with the lowest levels of ecological impact still need to significantly improve their performance on social indicators.”
The SDI is available at sustainabledevelopmentindex.org
