Daily current affairs: Mains

Rising seas in India and the world

Relevance: Mains: G.S paper III: Environment

According to a research published in Nature Communications, the number of people in India threatened by rising sea-levels is at least seven times more than previously estimated.

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Researchers of Climate Central, an independent organisation of climate scientists, have developed a new tool that measures elevation of land from mean sea levels with much greater accuracy than earlier models.
Their new tool, called CoastalDEM (or Coastal Digital Elevation Model), which uses artificial intelligence and machine learning on 51 million data samples, brought down this error to less than 2.5 inches on an average.

Details

Around 300 million people, and not 80 million as estimated earlier, across the globe were currently living in areas that were below the annual coastal flood line.
Almost 80 per cent of these 300 million people live in China, Bangladesh, India, Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand. China alone accounted for 43 million.
Around 36 million people along the Indian coastlines currently live on land that will fall below the annual flood level by 2050, exposing them to risks of flooding, damage to infrastructure, loss of livelihood, or permanent displacement. The previous estimate was of 5 million people.
West Bengal and coastal Odisha are projected to be particularly vulnerable, as is the eastern city of Kolkata.
Except for some areas near Kakinada, the threats to the coastlines of the southern states have not been affected by the new measurements.

Relevance: Mains: G.S paper II: International institutions and rankings

The Harvard Business Review (HBR) released ‘The Best-Performing CEOs in the World, 2019’, a list featuring top 100 Chief Executive Officer (CEOs) in the world.

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Since 2015, HBR’s ranking has been based not only on financial performance but also on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) ratings.
The HBR took into account three metrics for each CEO’s tenure – the total shareholder return (including dividends reinvested) adjusted by country and by industry and change in market capitalisation (adjusted for dividends, share issues, and share repurchases), measured in inflation-adjusted USD.

Key Findings:

the list has been topped by American technology company NVIDIA’s CEO Jensen Huang.
Among the top 10 chief executives on the list, three spots have been occupied by the Indian-origin CEOs. On the 6th spot is Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen, followed by MasterCard CEO Ajay Banga, ranked 7th and Microsoft chief Satya Nadella on the 9th spot.
The list also features India-born CEO of DBS Bank Piyush Gupta on the 89th spot.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who has been the top CEO every year since 2014 on the basis of financial performance alone, failed to make this year’s list owing to Amazon’s relatively low ESG scores.

Strategic Partnership Council

Relevance: Mains: G.S paper II: internal relations

During the visit of Indian Prime Minister Modi to Saudi Arabia, the two sides have agreed to establish a Strategic Partnership Council to coordinate on important issues, taking the bilateral relationship to the next level.

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The Council will be an all encompassing bilateral mechanism which will cover an entire spectrum of relationship between the two countries.
It will be headed by the top leadership on either side.
The two sides re-affirmed their deep commitment to strengthen the strategic partnership envisaged in the ‘Riyadh Declaration’ of 2010.

List of MoUs/Agreements signed during the visit of Prime Minister to Saudi Arabia

Strategic Partnership Council Agreement
MoU on Cooperation in the Field of Renewable Energy
Agreement on Security Cooperation
MoU for Cooperation in the field of combating illicit trafficking and smuggling of narcotic drugs.
MoU for collaboration in military acquisition, industries, research, development and technology
MoU for Cooperation in the field of Civil Aviation
MoU for Cooperation in the field of medical products regulations
Letter of Intent between Small and Medium Enterprises General Authority (Monshaat) of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Atal Innovation Mission (AIM), NITI Aayog, of the Republic of India
Cooperation Programme between Foreign Service Institute, MEA and Prince Saud Al Faisal Institute of Diplomatic Studies (IDS) of Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Saudi Arabia
MoU between Indian Strategic Petroleum Reserves Limited (ISPRL) and Saudi Aramco.
MoU for Cooperation between National Stock Exchange (NSE) and Saudi Stock Exchange (Tadawul)
MoU between National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) and Saudi Payments