Tag Archives: instability

US

Posts misrepresent U.S. response to instability in Haiti

Leave a comment

CLAIM: The United States military is invading Haiti.

AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. While the U.S. and Mexico said Monday that they are preparing a U.N. resolution that would authorize an international mission to help improve security in Haiti, no such deployment has happened. The U.S. and Canada have sent armored vehicles and other supplies to aid the Haitian police.

THE FACTS: Haiti has been gripped by rising food and fuel prices, issues that have been exacerbated by political instability and protests, with many calling for the resignation of Prime Minister Ariel Henry. On Oct. 7, Henry and the Haitian Council of Ministers requested assistance from the U.N. to help restore security and alleviate the humanitarian crisis.

Social media users have claimed the U.S. is actively invading Haiti.

“The US is invading Haiti. It’s not in the news. At all,” reads one post on Twitter that was shared more than 13,000 times.

Another Twitter post with more than 11,000 likes reads, “Everyone else is just going to ignore that the US is invading Haiti huh?”

But the U.S. has not deployed troops to Haiti. The U.N. resolution proposed by the U.S. and Mexico that would authorize the mission is still being worked on, and has not yet passed.

“I strongly don’t believe that there is any kind of invasion taking place by the United States,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “In fact, the United States has not been keen on sending U.S. troops to Haiti at all.”

Reached for comment Thursday, the U.S. Department of State referred the AP to comments made by spokesperson Vedant Patel at a Tuesday briefing. Patel said at the briefing that the U.S. hopes the U.N. Security Council will unanimously support the resolutions and that he had no “timeline to offer.” He added that the mission would “improve the security situation and enable the flow of desperately needed humanitarian aid.”

Two resolutions concerning Haiti are being considered by the U.N. The first would enact sanctions against the influential gang leader Jimmy Chérizier, nicknamed “Barbecue.” The second, which is still being worked on, would authorize a “non-U.N.” mission that would be led by “a partner country,” according to U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, who made the announcement on Monday at an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council. The mission would have a mandate to use military force if necessary.

“This would be a limited, carefully scoped, non-UN mission led by a partner country with the deep and necessary experience required, with whom the U.S. could find ways to support,” Patel said.

Daily life in Haiti began to spin out of control in September just hours after the prime minister said fuel subsidies would be eliminated, causing prices to double, the AP reported. Gangs blocked the entrance to the Varreux fuel terminal, leading to a severe shortage of fuel at a time when rising prices have put food and fuel out of reach of many Haitians, clean water is scarce, and the country is trying to deal with a cholera outbreak. And political instability in Haiti has simmered since last year’s still-unsolved assassination of Haitian president Jovenel Moïse.

The Security Council vote on the resolution authorizing sanctions against Chérizier was called for Wednesday afternoon but has been postponed for a few days, the AP reported.

A spokesperson for the U.S. mission to the U.N. referred the AP to Thomas-Greenfield’s comments on Monday.

Since the early 1900s, there have been at least three major foreign military interventions in Haiti led by the U.S. and the U.N. The U.N.’s 2004-2017 peacekeeping mission was marred by allegations of sexual assault by its troops and staffers and the fact that peacekeepers from Nepal were blamed for introducing cholera into Haiti’s largest river in October 2010 by sewage runoff from their base, the AP reported.

Characterizing this newest potential intervention as an invasion is an “oversimplification,” said Robert Fatton, a professor specializing in Haitian politics at the University of Virginia. However, he added that the “vast majority of Haitians kind of have a love-hate relationship with the United States and they don’t want an intervention.”

“It’s very complicated because previous interventions have really failed to change the situation in Haiti,” Fatton said.

Opponents claim Henry hopes to use foreign troops to keep himself in power – a leadership he assumed last year after Moïse’s killing and that many consider illegitimate because he was never elected or formally confirmed in the post by the legislature.

“We’ve had consistent protests,” said Chantalle F. Verna, an associate professor of history and international relations at Florida International University. “There’s been clear pushback and reference to the standing government as an illegitimate government.”

___

This is part of AP’s effort to address widely shared misinformation, including work with outside companies and organizations to add factual context to misleading content that is circulating online. Learn more about fact-checking at AP.

Read original article here

World

Cuba’s enormous blaze fuels fears of instability even as flames are doused | Cuba

Leave a comment

A lightning strike, a chain of fireball explosions so huge they could be seen 65 miles away in Havana, and a lingering stench of sulphur.

The five-day blaze at Cuba’s main oil storage facility in Matanzas was sparked by lightning on Friday night. Over the following days, the flames spread “like an Olympic torch” to three more tanks containing hundreds of thousands of cubic feet of fuel, according to the region’s governor, Mario Sabines.

Only on Tuesday was the conflagration finally brought under control. By then, it had killed at least one person and injured 125 others, and dealt a critical blow to Cuba’s energy infrastructure.

And as the smoke clears, speculation is mounting that it – and the blackouts that will inevitably follow – could further destabilise the “Cuban Revolution”, already at one of the most perilous moments in its 63-year history.

Millions of Cubans – especially those in the rural provinces – have for months been living with daily power cuts that last hours. In the August heat, food rots quickly and sleep becomes all but impossible.

The situation is tense: the immediate trigger for last summer’s unprecedented protests was a 12-hour power outage.

In Matanzas, Odalys Medina Peña, 60, said she had long grown used to cooking breakfast, lunch and dinner at the crack of dawn in anticipation of blackouts.

“You’ve got to adapt and see whether the country can resolve the situation. When something like this happens, everyone comes together – because if Cuba has one thing, it’s humanity.”

But with toxic smog blotting out much sunlight in Havana over the weekend, the feeling in the capital was less stoic.

A resident sits on a sea wall as smoke rises in the background from the fire. Photograph: Ismael Francisco/AP

“I’m frightened of this horrible cloud and I’m worried about power cuts,” said Adilen Sardinas, 29, who is eight months pregnant. “How is the state going to handle this?”

Officials have not said how much crude, diesel and fuel oil has been lost in the fire, but Cubans are already bracing for an even more severe energy crisis.

Oil shipments from Venezuela have dwindled as Cuba’s South American ally struggles to refine enough oil for its own needs. The surge in global oil prices caused by the war in Ukraine has also made it harder for Cuba to buy it on the global market.

But analysts say the one-two punch of Covid, which all but shuttered tourism in 2020 and 2021, and US sanctions has been decisive.

Cuba’s “foreign exchange inflows almost halved between 2018 and 2021”, said Emily Morris, a development economist at University College London. “Despite reducing fuel and food supplies to an essential minimum, in 2021 they accounted for more than half of all import spending, with more severe cuts in all other imports, including spare parts, production inputs, capital equipment and consumer goods, so you can see what a devastating effect that was going to have.”

Despite Joe Biden’s campaign promise to reverse the “Trump policies that inflicted harm on Cubans and their families”, the bulk of the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign against the island remains.

Tankers carrying Venezuelan oil to Cuba still face sanctions. Analysts say this forces the island to pay a premium on freight.

While Venezuela and Mexico sent specialist teams and more than one hundred tonnes of fire extinguishing foam, the U.S. offered technical assistance. “So far the US has offered a phone number to an emergency local authority,” Johana Tablada, the deputy director for U.S. affairs at the Cuban Foreign Ministry, wrote on Twitter.

Fulton Armstrong, who was the US intelligence community’s most senior analyst on Latin America, said there are “fears among supporters of a return to the normalization process launched by President Obama that the [Biden] administration is … privately hopeful that the energy and other problems are a test that ‘the regime’ fails”.

Jorge Piñon, director of the University of Texas at Austin’s Latin America and Caribbean energy and environment Program, said that even before the blaze, his modelling had predicted a “total collapse” of the island’s energy grid this summer.

He also noted that a Russian tanker carrying 115,000 tonnes of petroleum was due to dock in the port of Matanzas later this week. “Where is she going to go?”

Read original article here

Science

Instability at the Beginning of the Solar System – Implications for Mysterious “Planet 9”

Leave a comment

All stars, including our sun, are born from a cloud of dust and gas. This cloud can also seed planets that will orbit the star. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The Instability at the Beginning of the Solar System

A new explanation for why our solar system is the way it is — and why others are, too.

Seth Jacobson of Michigan State University and colleagues in China and France have unveiled a new theory that could help solve a galactic mystery of how our solar system evolved. Specifically, how did the gas giants —

The findings have ramifications for how terrestrial planets like Earth developed, as well as the possibility that a fifth gas giant planet lurks 50 billion miles out into the distance.

“Our solar system hasn’t always looked the way that it does today. Over its history, the orbits of the planets have changed radically,” said Jacobson, an assistant professor in the College of Natural Science’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. “But we can figure out what’s happened.”

An artist’s rendering shows a hypothetical early solar system with a young star clearing a path in the gas and dust left over from its formation. This clearing action would affect the orbits of gas giants orbiting the star. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle (SSC)

The research, published in the journal Nature on April 27, 2022, offers an explanation for what happened to gas giants in other solar systems and ours.

It’s a Nice model

Massive, whirling clouds of cosmic gas and dust give birth to stars. The early solar system was still filled with a primordial disk of gas when our sun ignited, and it played an important role in the formation and evolution of the planets, including the gas giants.

In the late 20th century, scientists began to believe that the gas giants initially circled the sun in neat, compact, uniformly spaced orbits. Jupiter, Saturn, and the others, however, have long settled into orbits that are relatively oblong, misaligned, and spread apart.

MSU Assistant Professor Seth Jacobson

So the question for researchers now is, why?

In 2005, an international team of scientists proposed an answer to that question in a trio of landmark Nature papers. The solution was originally developed in Nice, France and is known as the Nice model. It posits that there was an instability among these planets, a chaotic set of gravitational interactions that ultimately set them on their current paths.

“This was a tectonic shift in how people thought about the early solar system,” Jacobson said.

The Nice model remains a leading explanation, but over the past 17 years, scientists have found new questions to ask about what triggers the Nice model instability.

For example, it was originally thought that the gas giant instability took place hundreds of millions of years after the dispersal of that primordial gas disk that birthed the solar system. But newer evidence, including some found in moon rocks retrieved by the Apollo missions, suggests it happened more quickly. That also raises new questions about how the interior solar system that’s home to Earth evolved.

Sean Raymond, an astronomer at the University of Bordeaux.

Working with Beibei Liu from Zhejiang University in China and Sean Raymond from the University of Bordeaux in France, Jacobson has helped find a fix that has to do with how the instability started. The team has proposed a new trigger.

“I think our new idea could really relax a lot of tensions in the field because what we’ve proposed is a very natural answer to when did the giant planet instability occur,” Jacobson said.

The new trigger

The idea started with a conversation Raymond and Jacobsen had back in 2019. They theorized the gas giants may have been set on their current paths because of how the primordial gas disk evaporated. That could explain how the planets spread out much earlier in the solar system’s evolution than the Nice model originally posited and perhaps even without the instability to push them there.

“We wondered whether the Nice model was really necessary to explain the solar system,” Raymond said. “We came up with the idea that the giant planets could possibly spread out by a ‘rebound’ effect as the disk dissipated, perhaps without ever going unstable.”

Beibei Liu, a research professor at Zhejiang University.

Raymond and Jacobsen then reached out to Liu, who pioneered this rebound effect idea through extensive simulations of gas disks and large exoplanets — planets in other solar systems — that orbit close to their stars.

“The situation in our solar system is slightly different because Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are distributed on wider orbits,” Liu said. “After a few iterations of brainstorm sessions, we became aware that the problem could be solved if the gas disk dissipated from the inside out.”

The team found that this inside-out dissipation provided a natural trigger for the Nice model instability, Raymond said.

“We ended up strengthening the Nice model rather than destroying it,” he said. “This was a fun illustration of testing our preconceived ideas and following the results wherever they lead.”

With the new trigger, the picture at the beginning of the instability looks the same. There’s still a nascent sun surrounded by a cloud of gas and dust. A handful of young gas giants revolve around the star in neat, compact orbits through that cloud.

“All solar systems are formed in a disk of gas and dust. It’s a natural byproduct of how stars form,” Jacobson said. “But as the sun turns on and starts burning its nuclear fuel, it generates sunlight, heating up the disk and eventually blowing it away from the inside out.”

This created a growing hole in the cloud of gas, centered on the sun. As the hole grew, its edge swept through each of the gas giants’ orbits. This transition leads to the requisite giant planet instability with very high probability, according to the team’s computer simulations. The process of shifting these large planets into their current orbits also moves fast compared with Nice model’s original timeline of hundreds of millions of years.

“The instability occurs early as the sun’s gaseous disk dissipated, constrained to be within a few million years to 10 million years after the birth of the solar system,” Liu said.

The new trigger also leads to the mixing of material from the outer solar system and the inner solar system. The Earth’s geochemistry suggests that such a mixing needed to happen while our planet is still in the middle of forming.

“This process is really going to stir up the inner solar system and Earth can grow from that,” Jacobson said. “That is pretty consistent with observations.” Exploring the connection between the instability and Earth’s formation is a subject of future work for the group.

Lastly, the team’s new explanation also holds for other solar systems in our galaxy where scientists have observed gas giants orbiting their stars in configurations like what we see in our own.

“We’re just one example of a solar system in our galaxy,” Jacobson said. “What we’re showing is that the instability occurred in a different way, one that’s more universal and more consistent.”

Planet 9 from outer space

Although the team’s paper doesn’t emphasize this, Jacobson said the work has implications for one of the most popular and occasionally heated debates about our solar system: How many planets does it have?

Currently, the answer is eight, but it turns out that the Nice model works slightly better when the early solar system had five gas giants instead of four. Sadly, according to the model, that extra planet was hammer-thrown from our solar system during the instability, which helps the remaining gas giants find their orbits.

An artist’s conception of Planet 9. Credit: ESO/Tom Ruen/nagualdesign

In 2015, however, Caltech researchers found evidence that there may yet be an undiscovered planet tooling around the outskirts of the solar system some 50 billion miles from the sun, about 47 billion miles farther out than Neptune.

There’s still no concrete proof that this hypothetical planet — nicknamed Planet X or Planet 9 — or the Nice model’s “extra” planet actually exist. But, if they do, could they be one and the same?

Jacobson and his colleagues couldn’t answer that question directly with their simulations, but they could do the next best thing. Knowing their instability trigger correctly reproduces the current picture of our solar system, they could test whether their model works better starting with four or five gas giants.

“For us, the outcome was very similar if you start with four or five,” Jacobson said. “If you start with five, you’re more likely to end up with four. But if you start with four, the orbits end up matching better.”

Either way, humanity should have an answer soon. The Vera Rubin Observatory, scheduled to be operational by the end of 2023, should be able to spot Planet 9 if it is out there.

“Planet 9 is super controversial, so we didn’t stress it in the paper,” Jacobson said, “But we do like to talk about it with the public.”

It’s a reminder that our solar system is a dynamic place, still full of mysteries and discoveries waiting to be made.

Reference: “Early Solar System instability triggered by dispersal of the gaseous disk” by Beibei Liu, Sean N. Raymond and Seth A. Jacobson, 27 April 2022, Nature.
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-04535-1



Read original article here

Science

Astronomers Have Discovered Why The Solar System Might Be Shaped Like a Croissant

Leave a comment

The Solar System exists in a bubble.

Wind and radiation from the Sun stream outwards, pushing out into interstellar space. This creates a boundary of solar influence, within which the objects in the Solar System are sheltered from powerful cosmic radiation.

 

It’s called the heliosphere, and understanding how it works is an important part of understanding our Solar System, and perhaps even how we, and all life on Earth, are able to be here.

“How is this relevant for society? The bubble that surrounds us, produced by the Sun, offers protection from galactic cosmic rays, and the shape of it can affect how those rays get into the heliosphere,” says astrophysicist James Drake of the University of Maryland.

“There’s lots of theories but, of course, the way that galactic cosmic rays can get in can be impacted by the structure of the heliosphere – does it have wrinkles and folds and that sort of thing?”

Since we’re inside the heliosphere, and its boundary is not actually visible, figuring out its shape is not exactly easy. But it’s not impossible. The two Voyager probes and New Horizons are three spacecraft that have traveled to the far reaches of the Solar System; in fact, the Voyager probes have even traversed the boundary of the heliosphere, and are currently making their way through interstellar space.

 

With data from these probes, scientists determined last year that the heliosphere could be shaped a bit like a weird cosmic croissant. Now, they have figured out how: neutral hydrogen particles streaming into the Solar System from interstellar space likely play a crucial role in sculpting the shape of the heliosphere.

The team set out to investigate the heliospheric jets. These are twin jets of material that emanate from the Sun’s poles, shaped by the interaction of the solar magnetic field with the interstellar magnetic field. Rather than shooting straight out, though, they curve around, pushed by the interstellar flow – like the points of a croissant. These are the Solar System’s tails.

A reconstruction of the heliosphere showing the jets. (M. Opher/AAS)

These are similar to other astrophysical jets observed in space, and like those other jets, the Sun’s jets are unstable. And the heliosphere, shaped by the Sun, also appears to be unstable. The researchers wanted to know why.

“We see these jets projecting as irregular columns, and [astrophysicists] have been wondering for years why these shapes present instabilities,” explains astrophysicist Merav Opher of Boston University (BU), who led the research.

 

The team performed computational modeling, focusing on neutral hydrogen atoms – those that carry no charge. We know these stream through the Universe, but not what effect they could have on the heliosphere. When the researchers took the neutral atoms out of their model, suddenly the solar jets became stable. Then they put them back.

“When I put them back in, things start bending, the center axis starts wiggling, and that means that something inside the heliospheric jets is becoming very unstable,” Opher says.

According to the team’s analysis, this occurs because of the interaction of the neutral hydrogen with the ionized matter in the heliosheath – the outer region of the heliosphere. This generates a Rayleigh-Taylor instability, or an instability that occurs at the interface between two fluids of different densities when the lighter fluid pushes into the heavier one. In turn, this produces large-scale turbulence in the tails of the heliosphere.

It’s a clear and elegant explanation for the shape of the heliosphere, and one that could have implications for our understanding of the way galactic cosmic rays enter the Solar System. In turn, this could help us to better understand the radiation environment of the Solar System, outside Earth’s protective magnetic field and atmosphere.

“The Universe is not quiet. Our BU model doesn’t try to cut out the chaos, which has allowed me to pinpoint the cause [of the heliosphere’s instability]…. The neutral hydrogen particles,” Opher says.

“This finding is a really major breakthrough, it’s really set us in a direction of discovering why our model gets its distinct croissant-shaped heliosphere and why other models don’t.”

The research has been published in The Astrophysical Journal.

 

Read original article here

Technology

A decade and a half of instability: The history of Google messaging apps

Leave a comment

Enlarge / Take the Google Messaging quiz! Can you name all the icons?

Ron Amadeo

Google Talk, Google’s first-ever instant messaging platform, launched on August 24, 2005. This company has been in the messaging business for 16 years, meaning Google has been making messaging clients for longer than some of its rivals have existed. But thanks to a decade and a half of nearly constant strategy changes, competing product launches, and internal sabotage, you can’t say Google has a dominant or even stable instant messaging platform today.

Google’s 16 years of messenger wheel-spinning has allowed products from more focused companies to pass it by. Embarrassingly, nearly all of these products are much younger than Google’s messaging efforts. Consider competitors like WhatsApp (12 years old), Facebook Messenger (nine years old), iMessage (nine years old), and Slack (eight years old)—Google Talk even had video chat four years before Zoom was a thing.

Currently, you would probably rank Google’s offerings behind every other big-tech competitor. A lack of any kind of top-down messaging leadership at Google has led to a decade and a half of messaging purgatory, with Google both unable to leave the space altogether and unable to commit to a single product. While companies like Facebook and Salesforce invest tens of billions of dollars into a lone messaging app, Google seems content only to spin up an innumerable number of under-funded, unstable side projects led by job-hopping project managers. There have been periods when Google briefly produced a good messaging solution, but the constant shutdowns, focus-shifting, and sabotage of established products have stopped Google from carrying much of these user bases—or user goodwill—forward into the present day.

Because no single company has ever failed at something this badly, for this long, with this many different products (and because it has barely been a month since the rollout of Google Chat), the time has come to outline the history of Google messaging. Prepare yourselves, dear readers, for a non-stop rollercoaster of new product launches, neglected established products, unexpected shut-downs, and legions of confused, frustrated, and exiled users.

Table of Contents

  • Google Talk (2005)—Google’s first chat service, built on open protocols
  • Google Talk ran Android’s entire push notification system
  • The slow death of GTalk
  • Google Voice (2009)—SMS and Phone calls get a dose of the Internet
  • Google Wave (2009)—An email killer from the future
  • Nobody knew what Wave was for or how to use it
  • Google Buzz (2010)—The non-consensual social network
  • Slide’s Disco (2011)—An independent app escapes the Googleplex
  • The Google+ Era (2011)—Google’s social panic
  • Google+ Hangouts video chat—The first Hangouts
  • Google+ Huddle/Messenger—I guess we should have some kind of DM function
  • A competitor emerges—iMessage has entered the chat
  • One more competitor—WhatsApp is now worth $22 billion
  • Google Docs Editor Chat (2013)—Just like Gmail chat, but not integrated with anything
  • Google Hangouts (2013)—Google’s greatest messaging service
  • The death of Hangouts, unified Google messaging, and hope
  • Google Spaces (2016)—A messaging app for Google I/O 2016 attendees
  • Google Allo (2016)—Google’s dead-on-arrival WhatsApp clone
  • Allo’s legacy: The Google Assistant
  • Google Duo (2016)—A video companion app for… WhatsApp?
  • Google (Hangouts) Meet (2017)—Not Zoom
  • YouTube Messages (2017)—Yes, this was really a thing
  • Google (Hangouts) Chat (2018)—Part 1: Cloning Slack is actually a good idea
  • Google Maps Messages (2018)—Business messaging, now with the instability of Google
  • Google & RCS (2019)—So we found this dusty old messaging standard in a closet…
  • RCS is bad, and anyone who likes it should feel bad
  • Google Photos Messages (2019)—You get a messaging feature! And YOU! And you!
  • Google Stadia Messages (2020)—Two great tastes that taste great together
  • Google Pay Messages (2021)—We actually learned nothing from Google Allo
  • Google Assistant Messages (2021)—Text and voice chat, for families?
  • Google Phone Messaging (2021)—Isn’t this going a little too far?
  • Google Chat, Part 2 (2021)—No wait, this is actually a consumer app now!
  • Is anyone in charge at Google?

Read original article here

World

Oil nations tipped for political instability if fossil fuels abandoned

Leave a comment

The Egina floating production storage and offloading vessel, the largest of its kind in Nigeria, is berthed in Lagos harbor on February 23, 2017.

Stefan Heunis | AFP | Getty Images

LONDON — Algeria, Chad, Iraq and Nigeria will be among the first countries to experience political instability as oil producers feel the effects of a transition to low carbon energy production, according to a new report from risk consultancy Verisk Maplecroft.

In its 2021 Political Risk Outlook, published Thursday, Verisk cautioned that countries that had failed to diversify their economies away from fossil fuel exports faced a “slow-motion wave of political instability.”

With the move away from fossil fuels set to accelerate over the next three to 20 years, and the Covid-19 pandemic eating into short-term gains gains in oil export revenues made in recent years, Verisk warned that oil-dependent countries failing to adapt risk sharp changes in credit risk, policy and regulation.

Though some countries are increasing fossil fuel investment in the short term, consensus estimates indicate that “peak oil” will be reached in 2030, after which the transition toward a low carbon economy will gather steam and force oil-producing countries to adapt their revenue streams.

Analysts suggested the worst-hit countries could enter “doom loops of shrinking hydrocarbon revenues, political turmoil, and failed attempts to revive flatlining non-oil sectors.”

Since the oil price crash of 2014, most exporters have either stagnated or reversed efforts to diversify their economies, Verisk data highlighted, with many doubling down on production in the ensuing years in a bid to plug revenue holes.

“Despite this, the majority took a hit on their foreign exchange reserves anyway, including Saudi Arabia, which has burnt through almost half of its 2014 dollar stockpile,” the report added.

Break-even costs, the capacity to diversify and political resilience were identified as the three key factors determining the severity of the impact on stability when the expected energy transition begins to bite.

“Currently, if countries’ external break-evens – the oil prices they need to pay for their imports – remain above what markets can offer, they have limited choices: draw down foreign exchange reserves like Saudi Arabia since 2014, or devalue their currency like Nigeria or Iraq in 2020, effectively rebalancing their imports and exports at the expense of living standards,” the report explained.

Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy, relies on crude sales for around 90% of its foreign exchange earnings and has devalued its naira currency twice since March last year. The IMF last month urged the country’s central bank to devalue once again, but met with resistance.

Verisk researchers suggested that recent currency devaluations were a “harbinger of the bleak options” ahead for oil-producing countries, who will have to either diversify or face forced economic adjustments.

“Many, if not a majority, of net oil producers are going to struggle with diversification largely because they lack the economic and legal institutions, infrastructure and human capital needed,” said Verisk Head of Market Risk James Lockhart Smith.

“Even when such institutions are in place, the political environment, corruption or governance challenges and entrenched interests mean some may not reform their way out of trouble, even where it is the rational course.”

The most vulnerable countries are higher-cost producers that are heavily dependent on oil for revenues, have lower capacity to diversify and are less politically stable, Verisk said, identifying Nigeria, Algeria, Chad and Iraq as the first to be hit “if the storm breaks” due to their fixed or crawling exchange rates.

Lower-cost Gulf producers with stronger economic institutions and resources that enable easier diversification, such as the UAE and Qatar, were seen as least susceptible to political upheaval. However, Lockhart Smith suggested that even they will not emerge unscathed.

“Authoritarian political stability is anything but stable over the long term and, as lower-for-longer oil prices cut into social spending, additional pressure will pile on these deceptively fragile political systems,” he said.

“Even diversification could come with its own political risks by challenging traditional petro-state social contracts: legitimacy to rule in return for hydrocarbon largesse.”

Read original article here