News in Shorts: 07 January 2025

Net-Zero Banking Alliance

Context: Leading banks like Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, and possibly JPMorgan Chase have withdrawn from NZBA within a month.

About Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA)

• The Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) is a global initiative supported by the United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative (UNEP FI). 
• NZBA is a part of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), which brings together various financial coalitions working toward net-zero goals.
• Objective: It aims to align the financial activities of banks with the goal of achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
  • Encourages sustainable investments and prioritizes financial activities that align with net-zero targets.
• Launched in April 2021.
  • Founded by 43 major global financial institutions.
• Membership of Indian bank:  No Indian bank is a member of the NZBA.

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Twigstats

Context: Twigstats, a new method has been developed to infer genome-wide genealogies 

• The study was published in the journal Nature
• Conducted by: The study is a collaboration led by the Francis Crick Institute in the UK and other research groups across the UK, Japan, and Sweden 

About Twigstats

• Experiment: Twigstats was applied to the task of reconstructing the genetic history of 1,556 aDNA (ancient DNA) samples from northern and central Europe from 500 BC to 1000 AD on the European continent.
• Method: It uses time-stratified ancestry analysis 
• Importance: 
  • The new method boosted the statistical power of existing methods by a magnitude and reduced the statistical errors.
  • Twigstats is able to take into account the coalescence of populations in recent times.
  • To reconstruct new high-resolution genetic histories around the world
  • Nuanced Picture of Cultural History: It can enable combining genetic data with archaeological and historical evidence and proving that cultural shifts are often associated with genetic changes
  • Insights into the Genetic Legacy: Reconstruction of fine population movements and admixture events that coincided with key cultural transitions, offering new insights into the genetic legacy of groups 
• Findings:
  • Twigstats has determined with more precision individual-level ancestry at a very high resolution. 
    • Examples: Twigstats models provided direct evidence and high-resolution maps of the migration of individuals who spoke Germanic languages and had Scandinavian-like ancestry across Europe in the first century AD.
  • Bidirectional Flow of Genes: The researchers reported evidence of ancestry related to continental Europe and the British Isles in pre-Viking Age Scandinavian individuals.

Indonesia Free Meal Programme

Context: Indonesia has launched an ambitious $4.3 billion free meal programme to combat stunted growth due to malnutrition.

About the Free Meal Programme

• It is a nationwide nutrition programme for toddlers, students, pregnant and breastfeeding mothers
• Budget: The programme has a budget of 71 trillion rupiah ($4.3 billion) for the 2025 fiscal year
  • The government has allocated 10,000 rupiahs per meal, with  at least 5,000 kitchens set up across the country preparing rice, protein, vegetables and fruit for students.
• Target: The aim to deliver meals to almost 83 million people by 2029.
• Aim: The free-meal programme is designed to tackle stunting, which affects 21.5 per cent of children younger than 5
  • Indonesia aims to reduce the rate to 5pc by 2045.

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About the Republic of Indonesia

• Indonesia is a presidential republic with an elected legislature.
• Location: Indonesia is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania situated between the Indian and Pacific oceans. 
• Capital City: Jakarta is the present capital city of Indonesia
  • Nusantara is the future capital city of Indonesia, located in East Kalimantan, on the island of Borneo.
• Archipelago: Indonesia is the world’s largest archipelagic state consisting of over 17,000 islands, including the islands of
  • Sumatra, Java, Sulawesi, and parts of Borneo and New Guinea.
• Neighbours: Indonesia shares land borders with Papua New Guinea, East Timor, and Malaysia
  • Maritime Border: Singapore, Peninsular Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Australia, Palau, and India. 
    • Sumatra is closest to Great Nicobar (1,192 kms).
• Population: Indonesia is the world’s fourth-most-populous country with over 280 million people and the most populous Muslim-majority country.
  • Java Island: It is the world’s most populous island and is home to more than half of the country’s population.