Hasta La Gadget!

It is impossible to look out over the winding waterways and lush green wetlands of the magnificent Okavango Delta and fail to understand the importance of conserving the natural world.

A World Heritage Site teeming with plants, fish, birds and home to some of the planet’s most endangered animals, the delta is one of Botswana’s – and Africa’s – most impressive natural jewels.

It is clear that the world has a moral obligation to save areas of wild beauty like these: the planet would be poorer without them.

But it’s not only about saving nature for nature’s sake. It is also about recognising that the natural world, when looked after correctly, can contribute immensely in tackling some of the most critical problems facing humanity, from hunger to poverty, disease to climate change.

Here, in Sub Saharan Africa, more than 70 per cent of people depend on forests and woodlands for a living. Ecosystems like the Okavango Delta play a key role in Botswana’s economy, providing livelihoods for herders, farmers and fishermen alike in addition to the revenue accrued from tourism.

If we are to advance some of humanity’s highest ideals, then we need to improve the way we manage these vital ecosystems and sustainably harness the essential resources they provide us with.

Nowhere is the need for this greater than here in Africa. Reducing poverty, creating jobs, combatting climate change, ending hunger and driving sustainable economic growth on the continent – goals set out in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development – will require trillions of dollars at a time when international financial assistance to Africa is on the decline.

But, despite the daunting costs involved, the potential for real transformation is there. Africa holds 30 per cent of the world’s mineral reserves, roughly 65 per cent of its arable land and 10 per cent of its internal renewable fresh water sources. Its fisheries are estimated to be worth $24 billion and the continent boasts the second largest tropical forest in the world. These are just some of the resources that make up Africa’s vast reserves of natural capital – the environmental assets that, if managed properly, could drive the continent’s transformation.

But simply extracting these resources will not be enough to bring long-lasting change. If current population and consumption trends continue, humanity will need the equivalent of two Earths to support itself by 2030. This is clearly not viable in a world where climate change will make it even harder for the natural world to provide for our basic needs.

So, instead of simply extracting natural resources and exploiting natural capital we need to start managing them sustainably. The economic incentives for this are compelling. Africa alone could save as much as $103 billion every year by harnessing its natural capital in a sustainable way – money that could then be pumped back into alleviating poverty, providing access to clean energy and improving education and health.

There are even more savings to be made by stemming the illicit flow of money from illegal logging, the illegal trade in wildlife, illegal fishing, illegal mining practices and degraded ecosystems.

In addition, sub-Saharan Africa currently spends $35 billion every year on food imports, a vast amount when you consider that only 3.5 million hectares out of a possible 240 million hectares of land suitable for wetland rice cultivation have been exploited.

By one of the most conservative estimates, the illegal plunder of the continent’s natural resources, its food imports and the damage done to its ecosystems loses Africa $195 billion every year.

This astonishing figure exceeds the total amount of money that Africa requires every year to invest in improving infrastructure, healthcare and education, and combatting climate change – all key goals of the 2030 Agenda.

If Africa is to achieve the sustainable development goals, then it is vital that we reverse these losses. This will require governments to roll back the damage done to ecosystems and tackle illicit financial flows. We can then redirect the recovered funds back into African economies and ensure that these funds are used to boost natural capital-based sectors like clean energy and agriculture.

The benefits of doing this are clear. In Africa, simply increasing crop yields by 10 per cent equates to a seven per cent reduction in poverty. Providing access to clean energy will reduce the indoor pollution that kills 600,000 people every year on the continent. And reversing environmental degradation and prioritising healthy ecosystems not only combats climate change but also helps to tackle desertification and reduce biodiversity loss.

Strong work has already gone into laying the foundation for a future that recognises the importance of natural capital. In 2012, in Botswana, a meeting between African heads of state and public and private sector partners adopted the Gaborone Declaration for Sustainability in Africa.

The aim of the declaration is “to ensure that the contributions of natural capital to sustainable economic growth, maintenance and improvement of social capital and human well-being are quantified and integrated into development and business practice”.

Last month, at the African Ministerial Conference on the Environment in Cairo, Egypt, Africa sought to build on the momentum generated in Gaborone by focusing on how natural capital can contribute to implementing the 2030 Agenda and the African Union’s Agenda 2063 and its first ten-year plan, which aims to achieve a “prosperous Africa based on inclusive growth and sustainable development”.

These are major steps forward but they are only the beginning of the fight for a brighter, more prosperous future.To rally the world to greater action, countries like Botswana are pushing for the international community to come up with a clear plan on how best to manage natural capital in a way that fosters sustainable development and eradicates poverty.

In May 2016, countries will meet in Nairobi for the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA) – the world’s most powerful decision-making body on the environment. At UNEA, Botswana, the DRC, Kenya and Zimbabwe will table a resolution that seeks to develop policies and programmes that will enable countries to sustainably harness natural capital, crack down on illicit financial flows, reverse the degradation of environmental assets and foster international cooperation.

It is crucial that the world comes together to pass this resolution so that we can expand and diversify our economies, create jobs, achieve food security, enhance the productivity of our ecosystems and achieve a more inclusive society.

These are noble ideals that we urgently need to make a reality. This is the Africa that we want and it is the future that people all over the world deserve.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

One of the biggest problems with smartwatches, aside from trying to figure out what they’re for, is their battery life. The average smartwatch lasts only at most two days before requiring a recharge. Pebble has once lorded over other smartwatches in that are with its 7-day battery life thanks to its e-ink display. With the colored Pebble Time, however, that … Continue reading

Samsung Electronics has announced a partnership with the parent company of Alipay called Ant Financial Services Group that will expand Samsung Pay in China. Under this new partnership, users can add an Alipay account on supported Samsung mobile phones via Samsung Pay. After registering the Alipay account in Samsung Pay, users can pay with their mobile phone by swiping up … Continue reading

Doctors are about the closest thing we have to superheroes in real life. But must they also be super-human? Specifically, can people in the medical profession somehow get by on way less than the seven to nine hours a night than ordinary people require? 

That’s the operating assumption of the lifestyle expected of medical residents, med school graduates who spend three years learning the profession from supervising doctors. Under the current regulations for resident labor, these doctors-in-training work shifts up to 30 hours long.

It’s tough to imagine how sleep-deprived residents can function well, but the phenomenon has been the norm for over a century. If you’ve ever spent a night in a hospital, you’ve probably been treated by someone who has pulled an all-nighter. 

Occasionally, the issue has breached public consciousness: the high-profile case of Libby Zion, the 18-year-old college student who died after being treated by a fatigued intern and resident in 1984, is one instance. But more than 30 years later, a culture of sleep-deprived residents and doctors remains the norm.

In the past decade, American hospitals have experimented with letting residents work relatively more humane shifts, capped at 16 hours. But the efforts yielded few improvements in treatment or decreases in hospital errors. 

The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME), the nonprofit council that oversees the graduate medical training programs in American hospitals, is in the middle of a multi-year evaluation of residency work-hour limits. In January, the body said it hoped to publish its recommendations by April 2016 for public comment. But this week, it said it needs more time to deliberate. It is awaiting input from ongoing studies and 63 constituent medical groups. 

How Sleeplessness Became The Status Quo

That sleep deprivation may affect medical practice has been known conclusively for at least 45 years. A pioneering 1971 study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that interns made almost twice as many errors reading electrocardiograms after an extended (24 hours or more) work shift than after a night of sleep. They were also more likely to be depressed and unsociable. Back then, medical residency was akin to “indentured servitude,” according to one report, and 100-hour workweeks were the norm. 

Since then, other studies have shown that ultra-long shifts increase errors and attentional failures and that interns on 30-hour shifts make 36 percent more serious medical errors than those on 16-hour shifts, including things like administering drugs known to provoke an allergic reaction.

In 2003, in a significant overhaul, the ACGME reformed the schedule for all residency programs so that residents were not allowed to work more than 80 hours a week or more than 30 hours continuously. In 2011, it added a further stipulation that first-year residents could only work 16 consecutive hours and upper-year residents could only work 24 hours at a stretch. This standard continues today.

Around this time, Dr. Darshak Sanghavi, a pediatric cardiologist and medical writer, authored the article “The Phantom Menace of Sleep Deprived Doctors” in the New York Times magazine. He encapsulated the ongoing problem — which continues in 2016 — of resident labor reforms: a lot has changed relatively quickly, but it’s been nearly impossible to demonstrate their positive effects.

How Sleep Deprivation Affects Residents

In 2009, a huge study of 14 million veterans and Medicare patients under the care of residents showed no improvements in the quality of care after the 2003 reforms. This ambiguity has fueled both sides of the work-hours debate: those who believe doctors perform better with more sleep and those who say it’s fine to keep pushing their limits.

One issue with current studies is that regulations only count reported work hours, even though many residents may be working more than 80 hours off the books. In one survey of neurosurgery residents, 60 percent acknowledged that they underreport their hours, with a quarter doing so on a “regular” basis. So we may not be seeing effects of reforms simply because residents may not be observing them. 

Dr. Christopher Landrigan, a Harvard Medical School professor and leading voice for work hour reform, thinks the 2003 regulations didn’t go far enough, which is why their impact was not evident. After all, they still allowed shifts up to 30 hours, which is far beyond the workday of almost any other profession. 

“Doctors think they’re a special class and not subject to normal limitations of physiology,” he told the New York Times magazine. 

Sleep deprivation has a well-documented negative impact on cognition and memory, fine motor skills,  mood and reaction time. And that’s just acute sleep deprivation, meaning the occasional all-nighter. Long-term sleep deprivation, like the kind medical residents may experience over the course of three years, can seriously damage memory, increase the risk of heart disease and even decrease a person’s lifespan.

Still, several doctors have actually spoken in favor of ultra-long shifts, which they say is crucial to preparing doctors for their actual careers. Dr. Thomas Nasca, CEO of ACGME, maintains that long shifts are important because residents must learn to “recognize and manage” the fatigue they will encounter in their clinical practice, where hours are unregulated. But others, like Dr. Sanghavi, say there is a “yawning chasm” between the high-stress life of a resident and post-residency practice, when “most doctors practice in outpatient settings and work regular daytime hours.” 

Handing Off The Patient

A central issue in the debate of resident work hours is that of patient handoffs, when the responsibility for a patient is transferred from one resident to another. Shorter shifts mean more frequent handoffs. Advocates of longer shifts, like the author of a 2013 study on work hours, say that more handoffs could directly increase medical errors.

On the subject of handoffs, Dr. Charles Czeisler, a Harvard sleep researcher and a leading proponent of medical labor reform, suggested that the issue was a “smokescreen.” It’s not handoffs themselves that are problematic, he said, but the disparity between day and night teams at hospitals. “At night they only have one team on covering for as many as five teams,” Czeisler told The Huffington Post. He also pointed to a 2004 study that showed that handoffs in one field (anesthesia) actually improved care, “because you had a second set of eyes in the room,” he said.

Still, some argue that work-hour regulations aggravate the increased patient load at nearly every hospital in America. Their argument is that residents will rush to treat a large patient load before the end of their shift to avoid a handoff, leading to more careless work.

Another consideration is that shorter resident shifts may exacerbate the nation’s current shortage of residents. If shorter shifts for everyone mean fewer hours of work overall, hospitals would need even more residents. As it stands, there are already too few residency positions for the rising number of med school graduates.

Is There A Better Way?

Wellness is a central subject of resident labor reforms, but work limits are just one component of that. A number of techniques at forward-thinking hospitals around the country point to other ways resident wellness can improve.

Dr. Ted Sectish of Boston Children’s Hospital has pioneered educational interventions like mnemonics for better handoffs between shifts. This is important because if handoffs increase due to shorter resident shifts, handoff procedures must improve, in both accuracy and practicality.

In the tech realm, electronic handoff checklists could be more widely implemented. One such software for the iPad, called iPass, claims to have reduced handoff errors by 30 percent in trials. Fewer than 5 percent of residency programs currently use iPass, said Czeisler, but he hopes the encouraging results will prompt more hospitals to try it.

Some hospitals have also experimented with holistic wellness services for their staff. The Cleveland Clinic has a program called Code Lavender to address burnout: doctors and nurses can call on-demand “holistic nurses” who provide counseling, massages and snacks during emotionally exhausting times. And the top-ranked Mayo Clinic recently instituted a program to address physician burnout that includes mindfulness-based stress reduction, an on-campus healthy living center and opportunities for doctors to take a break and socialize together over a meal.

As research continues to probe the impact of work hours and sleep on the medical field, we will likely get more conclusive answers in the resident debate. But in the meantime, what does it mean for us, as a society, if we expect them to function as zombies? It’s hard to imagine how doctors can take care of others without taking care of themselves first. 

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Homer Simpson will be licking his lips.

That’s because beer-infused pizza is now a thing. Mmmmm.

One Pizza Hut restaurant in north London, England, is launching a one-day trial of the bizarre combo on Friday.

And if enough people dig the new pie, created by adding craft beer to its dough, the chain may roll it out across its 270 eateries in the United Kingdom.

It’s unclear whether the potentially delicious/disgusting blend will ever arrive in the U.S.

“We know that craft beers are really popular right now and we’re celebrating this not just by adding craft beers to our menus, but also by adding this to our pizza dough,” said Pizza Hut U.K.’s director of marketing Kath Austin. 

“We’re proud to be the first chain in the U.K. to trial a beer-infused dough base. We look forward to rolling these out nationwide if they prove popular.”

Customers at the chain’s Finchley Lido Hut branch will have to whisper the secret code words “I like it hop” when they order their free beer-infused Steak Feast or vegetarian American Hot pies on Friday.

But they’ll have to be quick. There’s only a limited number of pies available.

Although the new pie may sound peculiar, Pizza Hut isn’t a stranger to the weird dough game. Cheeseburger, Marmite or hot dog-stuffed crusts, anyone?

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.