Dry growing seasons predicted Central American migration to the US from 2012 to 2018.

Controlling for factors such as criminal violence and poverty, we tested if drier than usual growing season weather was a predictor of emigration from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras to the US between 2012 and 2018. We focus on growing season weather because agriculture is a primary transmission pathway from the effects of climate change upon migration. We secured the migration apprehensions data for our analysis through a FOIA request to US Customs and Border Protection. Border Patrol intake interviews recorded the original home location of families that arrived at the southern US border. We used this geographic information to measure recent weather patterns and social circumstances in the area that each family departed. We found 70.7% more emigration to the US when local growing seasons in Central America were recently drier than the historical average since 1901.

Understanding the Anemic Global Response to COVID-19.

The COVID-19 outbreak is the most serious test of the international system since the 2008 global financial crisis. Rather than cooperate to contain and respond to a common threat, the world's leading powers-the United States and China-have increasingly blamed each other through wildly speculative theories about the origins of the virus. The World Health Organization sought to coordinate a global response, but it has been hamstrung and has come under attack. Given past cooperation between major powers to mobilize and eradicate smallpox and previous US leadership to fight HIV/AIDS and the 2014 West African Ebola crisis, the limited cooperation and lack of leadership are puzzling. What explains the anemic global response to date? This article draws from structural international relations theory to suggest a partial but somewhat dissatisfying answer. International organizations are inherently weak and now face opposition by major powers. The international system simultaneously incentivizes states to cooperate and address common threats, but it also encourages countries to take care of themselves, potentially at the expense of others. Which of these motives dominates cannot be explained by structural theory, thus requiring us to look to other factors such as the attributes of states and leaders themselves.

Framing global health as human rights: learning from the case of HIV/AIDS

Framing is a central mechanism in the social movements literature. Human rights frames are thought to be an especially potent form of rhetorical communication because human rights are thought to trump other objectives. However, the proliferation of rights-based claims could potentially be counter-productive if overused, as rights may come in to conflict or devalue the concept. Advocates have sought to frame a variety of global health concerns as human rights, but the rights discourse is more contested for social and economic rights than it is for civil and political rights. There has been some research suggesting that efforts to frame access to antiretroviral AIDS drugs as a human right were successful. However, it remains an open question the extent to which a human rights frame is more persuasive than normative, moral rhetoric and whether a human rights frame, when applied to global health issues, resonates equally in different national contexts. This article provides an overview of arguments for and against the potential utility of a human rights frame as an advocacy strategy in access to health campaigns. The article also provides some preliminary experimental evidence from several surveys from the United States and India, in which access to medicines campaigns framed in moral terms were equally compelling as a campaign framed in terms of health as a human right. (AU)