Social Impact with Emma » water resource management : A Jamaica Gleaner Blog

WASH Your Hands in the Time of COVID-19

March 16th, 2020

I know we have all been overwhelmed by the news and the latest developments, both globally and locally. I have been veering from one press briefing to another; from late-night updates tweeted by Minister of Health and Wellness Christopher Tufton, to alarming global news on the virus. Europe seems to be the new epicenter. I […]

Cockpit Country: Is It Really All About the Boundaries?

November 29th, 2019

Ceiling fans whirred and night sounds crept through the windows of the Webb Memorial Baptist Church in Stewart Town, Trelawny earlier this evening. A Town Hall Meeting was in progress, streamed live on Facebook on the websites of the sponsors, the Environmental Foundation of Jamaica (EFJ), the Public Access Channel (PAC) and the Jamaica Gleaner. […]

Didn’t We Just Forget World Toilet Day?

November 20th, 2019

World Toilet Day is a rather awkward title for a very important day. One imagines the whole world sitting on a toilet. Of course, that is the point. The whole world is not sitting on a toilet. In fact, 4.5 billion people do not have access to proper (by proper, I mean safe) sanitation and 2.3 billion […]

Feeding Ourselves: Healthy Diets for a Zero Hunger World

October 19th, 2019

Are Jamaicans overfed and under-nourished? In Jamaica, World Food Day (October 16) was a rather low key affair. Agriculture Minister Audley Shaw attended an event in his own constituency of Christiana, Manchester, co-sponsored by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Jamaica, and there were photo-ops. According to the FAO, poor nutrition causes nearly half […]

But…Can It Be Business as Usual?

April 27th, 2019

Perhaps it’s just me, but the year 2019 seems to have been one of considerable upset for the world. A second, extremely fierce cyclone has arrived in Mozambique (the first one killed over 900 people, although it hardly received mainstream media coverage). On the beautiful island of Sri Lanka, which I visited in late 2017 and […]

Prioritising People: The Rebuilding of a Kingston Neighbourhood

October 29th, 2018

There has been a lot of public debate recently about urban development: The new Parliament building, twenty-storey buildings, road widening – and the felling of our city’s trees, which I have written and tweeted about before. It’s all quite overwhelming. What of the people who live in the midst of this sea of concrete mixers […]

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