Global trade - The World Trade Organization (WTO) deals with the global rules of trade between nations. Its main function is to ensure that global trade flows smoothly, predictably and freely as possible.
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El Nino is a critical part of global inter-annual climate variability, and the intensity of El Nino has major implications for rainfall-induced natural hazards in many vulnerable countries. The impact of landslides triggered by rainfall is likely to be modulated by the strength of El Nino, but the nature of this connection and the places where it is most relevant remains unconstrained. Here we combine new satellite rainfall data with a global landslide exposure model to show that El Nino has far-reaching effects on landslide impacts to people and infrastructure. We find that the impact of El Nino on landslide exposure can be greater in parts of Southeast Asia and Latin America than that due to seasonal rainfall variability. These findings improve our understanding of hazard variability around the world and can assist disaster mitigation efforts on seasonal timescales.
Connecting global climate patterns with the highly localised impacts of landslide hazards has remained challenging, in part due to limited inventories of landslide events, particularly in developing countries. This precludes consistent modelling of seasonal landslide patterns around the world. Since empirical data can be difficult to collect, model-based estimates of rainfall-triggered landsliding can help fill in gaps26. Now that close to two decades of consistent global satellite rainfall data at moderate resolution are available, we can explore at a local level where landslide exposure is most strongly modulated by the extreme rainfall caused by multi-year climate oscillations.
In this study, we exploit this recently available data, pairing an updated dataset of global exposure to landslide hazard with empirical observations of several ocean-atmosphere teleconnections, including ENSO, the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). We find that in many countries there are significant shifts in the exposure of people and infrastructure to rainfall-triggered landslide hazards depending on the current state of ENSO. Connecting climatological changes at the continental scale with the exposure of people and infrastructure to landslides represents a more complete picture of landslide hazard and exposure. Although we observe some changes in exposure with respect to PDO and NAO, their cycles have long timescales that are not captured by the 18-year rainfall record, meaning no conclusions can be drawn as to the effect of PDO and NAO on landslide exposure. We include these results in the supplementary information. Our model estimates provide for the first time indications of connections between the strength of the ENSO system and the exposure of people and infrastructure to landslide hazards.
It is important to assess whether the model outputs derived here have any reflection in observational data on landslide impacts. We are not aware of globally consistent temporal datasets of exposure to landslides that can be directly used to compare with our model outputs. However, fatalities resulting from landslides have been recorded between 2004 and 2016 by Froude and Petley18 around the world. Froude and Petley consider that their Global Fatal Landslide Dataset (GFLD) likely captures the majority of fatal landslides, with only 15% underestimation2. In order to compare this data with our model outputs, we have subdivided the landslides leading to fatalities by country. Given that the GFLD contains fewer than 5000 landslide events, there is insufficient data to split them into admin-2 districts as we have for the model output. In each country, we compare the average frequency of fatal landslides for MVEI intervals with the average landslide exposure we model. There are only 26 countries in the GFLD with more than 30 recorded events, so we exclude other countries as we suggest data is too limited to draw conclusions. From these 26, we exclude Bhutan, Italy, Japan, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, and Turkey from further discussion as these show limited or negligible trends in observations and predictions, and further analysis would lead to spurious results using the analysis method used here. The figures for these excluded countries are provided in the supplementary information. In the remaining countries, model performance varies. An example for Colombia is shown in Fig. 7; in the top part of the figure, the histograms of modelled exposure and fatalities are shown normalised to the maximum value for each parameter. Below, the relative ratio of the two is shown; a consistent value of 1 would indicate perfect predictive performance.
OPEC rose to international prominence during this decade, as its Member Countries took control of their domestic petroleum industries and began to play a greater role in world oil markets. The decade witnessed several impactful events that caused volatility in the global oil market to rise steeply. OPEC broadened its mandate with the first Summit of Heads of State and Government in Algiers in 1975, which addressed the plight of the poorer nations and called for a new era of cooperation in international relations, in the interests of world economic development and stability. This led to the establishment of the OPEC Fund for International Development in 1976. Member Countries embarked on ambitious socio-economic development schemes. Membership grew to 13 by 1975. 2ff7e9595c
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