Africa

Many people living on the banks of rivers in the Amazon rainforest live in stilt houses over the water. Water into which garbage and other waste is dumped – the same water that is used for human consumption, with important consequences on their health, whose magnitude was underlined by the Covid pandemic. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
RÍO DE JANEIRO, Oct 8 2021 (IPS)

Basic sanitation, a sector that is undervalued because, according to politicians, it does not bring in votes, has gained relevance in Brazil due to the pandemic that has hit the poor especially hard and the drought that threatens millions of people.

Brazil has made very little progress in sewerage construction in the last decade. In 2010, only 45.4 percent of the population had sewer service, a proportion that rose to 54.1 percent in 2019. Access to treated water increased from 81 to 83.7 percent in the same period.

During that time, however, hospitalisations due to waterborne diseases decreased by 54.7 percent, from 603,623 to 273,403, according to the study “Sanitation and Waterborne Diseases” by the Trata Brasil Institute, released on Oct. 5 in the city of São Paulo.

Among children under four, who represent 30 percent of the patients requiring hospital admission, the reduction was slightly more pronounced, 59.1 percent.

“The data make it clear that any improvement in the public’s access to drinking water, collection and treatment of wastewater results in great benefits to public health,” the Institute’s president, Édison Carlos, stated in the report.

Covid-19 has underscored the country’s social and economic inequalities by disproportionately affecting the poor, who for one thing are the least likely to have sewerage services.

This is reflected in the distribution of basic sanitation infrastructure by region in Brazil. In the North, only 12.3 percent of the population was served by a sewer system in 2019, the last year data was available from the governmental National Sanitation Information System (SNIS), which served as the basis for the study.

As a result, it is the region with the highest rate of hospitalisations, 22.9 per 10,000 inhabitants. It is also the region that concentrates the country’s most generous water resources, as it is located entirely in the Amazon basin.

But the presence of so many large rivers does not mean the local population has drinking water. In fact only a little more than half of the population has access to clean water.

The result is a high incidence of diarrhea, dengue fever, leptospirosis, schistosomiasis, malaria and yellow fever, all of which are waterborne diseases.

One of the favelas or shantytowns of São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city, where local residents have turned a stream into an open-air garbage dump and a source of frequent flooding due to lack of sewage and garbage collection. Nor do favelas in Brazil’s cities have piped water. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

At the other extreme, the Northeast region suffers from water scarcity in most of its semiarid territory. With only 28.3 percent of the local population served by sewer systems and 73.9 percent with access to treated water, it recorded 19.9 cases of hospitalisation per 10,000 inhabitants in 2019.

Part of the progress in sanitation in the region is due to the more than 1.2 million rainwater storage tanks that have been set up in rural areas by the Articulação do Semiárido (ASA), a network of 3,000 social organisations created in 1999.

The semiarid ecoregion, an area of 1,130,000 square kilometres (most of it in the Northeast) that is home to 27 million people, suffered the longest drought on record from 2012 to 2017, and even until 2019 in some parts.

But this time the hunger, violence and exodus to other regions triggered by similar calamities in the past did not occur.

Disparities in health

A comparison of Brazil’s 26 states reveals more alarming disparities. The northeastern state of Maranhão, on the edge of the Amazon rainforest, registered 54.04 hospitalisations per 10,000 inhabitants, far higher than its Amazonian neighbour to the west, Pará, with 32.62.

“Maranhão faces huge challenges in sanitation, as does Pará, but it has higher population density, more people living close together and in contact with dirty water in the open air, for example. Its beaches, often polluted by irregular waste, are another factor to consider,” said Rubens Filho, head of communications at the Trata Brasil Institute and coordinator of its new study.

At the other end of the scale, Rio de Janeiro stands out with the lowest rate of hospitalisations, only 2.84 per 10,000 inhabitants, even though some of its low-income municipalities are among those with the poorest sanitation coverage.

“It is possible that some municipalities do not register cases of waterborne diseases or that people do not seek medical assistance,” Filho told IPS from São Paulo, in an attempt to put the low rate of hospitalisations into context.

“Above and beyond the differences between states, Brazil still has more than 270,000 hospitalisations for preventable diseases; these are costs that could be drastically reduced if everyone had sanitation coverage,” he stressed.

Rainwater harvesting tanks are now part of the landscape in Brazil’s semiarid Northeast, thanks to recent initiatives to help people live with drought. There are some 200,000 tanks for irrigating crops, like those of farmer Abel Manto, and 1.2 million to store drinking water. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

The North and Northeast are the poorest regions in the country, despite the enormous contrast in terms of their ecosystems – rainforest vs semiarid. They are both far from the goal of near universal sanitation in the country by 2033, set by a law – the Legal Framework for Sanitation – passed in 2020.

More precisely, the aim is to bring treated water to 99 percent of the population and sewerage to 90 percent in this enormous country of 213 million people.

The three regions least affected by the lack of such infrastructure, the Midwest, South and Southeast, are suffering this year from the effects of reduced rainfall, apparently due to climate change and no longer to occasional, short-lived droughts.

The low rainfall began in 2020 and since then has caused interruptions in the water supply in cities such as Curitiba, capital of the southern state of Paraná, and an increase in forest fires in the Pantanal, wetlands on the border with Bolivia and Paraguay, and in the southern Amazon jungle.

This year, many cities in the southeastern state of São Paulo began rationing water. In the state capital, São Paulo, and surrounding urban areas, the local sanitation company reduces the pressure in the pipes at night, a measure that prevents leaks but leaves some areas without water.

The fear is that there will be a repeat of the 2014 and 2015 water shortage crisis, which was similar to other shortages that have occurred this century. Twenty years ago a similar drought caused blackouts and ushered in energy rationing for nine months, starting in June 2001.

Brazil depends heavily on rivers for its electricity supply. Even though the proportion was much higher two decades ago, hydroelectric power plants still account for 63 percent of total installed generation capacity.

Reforestation and recovery of springs and headwaters have become part of the country’s sanitation and energy policy.

The frequency of droughts in south-central Brazil confirms the role of the lush Amazon rainforest in increasing rainfall in large areas of this country and neighbouring Argentina and Paraguay.

So-called “flying rivers” carry moisture from the Amazon to South America’s most productive agricultural lands and to watersheds that play a key role in the production of hydroelectricity. But deforestation of the world’s largest tropical forest is taking its toll.

A view of the shantytown in São Bernardo do Campo, the hub of Brazil’s automobile industry, near São Paulo. A common sight in the poor neighbourhoods in Brazil’s cities: unpainted cinderblock houses are stacked on top of each other over streams, into which they dump their debris and garbage. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Lessons learned from Covid-19

Covid-19 has highlighted the urgent need for sanitation. There is a consensus among epidemiologists that the lack of sanitation is one of the factors in the unequal spread and lethality of the coronavirus, to the detriment of the poor, by limiting access to proper hygiene as a preventive measure.

With 598,152 deaths recognised by the Ministry of Health up to Oct. 4, Brazil’s death toll is second only to that of the United States, which counts more than 703,000 deaths due to Covid. But in proportional terms, 280 Brazilians have died per 100,000 inhabitants, compared to 214 in the U.S., according to the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland., which keeps a global record on the pandemic.

The need for improved sanitation infrastructure is also gaining momentum for financial reasons. Brazil’s states, whose governments control the main sanitation companies, see privatisation as a source of revenue to overcome their fiscal imbalance and possibly give the sector a boost.

The 2020 Legal Framework for Sanitation encourages the concession of the service to the private sector as a way to attract investment and meet the goal of near universal coverage.

Companies in four Brazilian states have already been privatised. In Rio de Janeiro, on Apr. 30, 2021, the sanitation services of three of the four areas into which the state was divided will be handed over to private groups for 4.2 billion dollars, 133 percent more than expected.

The fourth area is to be privatised later this year. The 35-year concession requires larger investments than the sums paid for the operation of the services.

Cleaning up rivers, lakes and bays, expanding and repairing the pipeline network, improving water quality and reducing distribution losses, estimated at 41 percent, are tasks that will fall to the new owners.

The well of the community water system in Cangrejera, in central El Salvador, is 60 metres deep, and a 20-horsepower motor drives the pump that directs the liquid to a tank four kilometres uphill. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
LA LIBERTAD, El Salvador, Oct 8 2021 (IPS)

As the saying goes, united we stand, divided we fall, hundreds of families in rural communities in El Salvador are standing together to gain access to drinking water.

The Salvadoran state fails to fulfill its responsibility to provide the resource to the entire population, and the families, faced with the lack of service in the countryside, have organized in “Juntas de Agua”: rural water boards that are community associations that on their own manage to drill a well and build a tank and the rest of the system.

It is estimated that in El Salvador there are about 2,500 rural water boards, which provide service to 25 percent of the population, or some 1.6 million people, according to data from the non-governmental Foro del Agua (Water Forum), which promotes equitable and participatory water management.

One of those community systems has been set up in the small village of Desvío de Amayo, in the canton of Cangrejera, part of the municipality and department of La Libertad, on the central coastal strip of El Salvador.

 

 

The system provides water to 468 families in Desvío de Amayo and eight other nearby villages.

“Governments have the constitutional obligation to provide drinking water in each country, but when they are not able to do it, as it happens here, the families decided to meet to take decisions and seek support either from NGOs or municipal governments to set up drinking water projects”, José Dolores Romero, treasurer of the Cangrejera Drinking Water Association, told IPS.

Created in the 1980s, this board finally obtained in 2010 a contribution of US$ 117,000 from the National Administration of Aqueducts and Sewers (Anda), the sector’s authority, for the expansion and improvement of its network infrastructure, he explained.

For more information, you can read an article on the subject of this video here.

As agreed by those involved in this effort, each family pays seven dollars for 20 cubic meters a month. If they consume more than that, they pay 50 cents per cubic meter.

“We benefit from the water, it is a great thing to have it at home, because we no longer have to go to the river, remember that we cannot go there because it overflows during the rainy season, so this community system benefits us a lot”, María Ofelia Pineda, from the village of Las Victorias, told IPS, while washing a frying pan and other dishes.

“Before, we had two or three hours of water during the day, and now we have it all day long, I am very happy for that, because I have it all day and all night,” said Ana María Landaverde.

 

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Zimbabweans readily join the COVID-19 vaccine queues, but the rollout hasn’t been smooth. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, Zimbabwe , Oct 8 2021 (IPS)

More than a month ago, she lost her parents, brother, and wife, to the coronavirus. Then her fiancé battled COVID-19, but 27-year-old Melinda Gavi said she had not contracted the disease.

Gavi joined crowds scrambling to get vaccinated at Parirenyatwa hospital in the Zimbabwean capital Harare even though she was previously sceptical about getting vaccinated against the dreaded disease.

Her parents, brother, and wife were equally sceptical of the COVID-19 vaccines before they were visited by the disease, which eventually claimed their lives.

In a country of about 15 million people, nearly 5.5 million have had at least had one dose of the vaccine the Reuters COVID-19 tracker, which assuming that each person needs two doses, represents 18.8% of the population.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) confirmed in October that Zimbabwe had received 943 200 COVID-19 vaccine doses from the global COVAX Facility in September and October for its ongoing vaccination campaign.

IPS has been following the rollout of the vaccines in various centres over the past few months, recording people’s personal experiences in the queues.

Gavi says it has taken her days to get vaccinated.

“This is my third day coming here at Parirenyatwa to try and get vaccinated,” Gavi told IPS as she stood in a long and meandering queue at Zimbabwe’s biggest hospital.

About 200 people gathered at the back of the hospital, some looking tired as they lingered in the queue. Some sat on the pavements and or flower beds, waiting for their turn to get vaccinated in the slow-moving queue.

“We have limited vaccines, and often on a day we are vaccinating just 80 people and everybody else often just goes back home without getting vaccinated,” a nurse who refused to be named as she was unauthorised to speak to the media, told IPS.

In February this year, Zimbabwe began vaccinating its citizens against coronavirus after receiving a donation of 200 000 doses of China’s Sinopharm vaccine.

But when the vaccine first arrived, it was met with growing scepticism from social media platforms like WhatsApp, Twitter, and Facebook, which fuelled the vaccine hesitancy.

This is no longer the case. Now healthcare workers have to battle hordes of people scrambling for the vaccine.

“With time, as more and more people got vaccinated without severe safety fears, the public became more assured, and demand for vaccines gradually started to rise,” said epidemiologist Dr Grant Murewanhema in Harare.

In Bulawayo, on July 8, in the presence of IPS, at the United Bulawayo Hospital, a nurse moved along the queue of people waiting to get vaccinated, counting up to 60 recipients. She told the rest to return the next day.

She told them she only had enough vaccines for 60 people.

At number 60 was 47-year-old Jimmy Dzingai, who said he was a truck driver.

“Oh, better, at least I am going to get vaccinated,” said Dzingai then as he heaved a sigh of relief, folding his hands across his chest.

Meanwhile, as they were told to leave, others did so but grumbled as they filed outside the hospital, some waving their face masks in anger, shouting at hospital authorities for turning them away.

“This is not the first time I am coming here to try and get vaccinated. I have been here four times, and this is my fifth day starting mid-June – only to get excuses,” 54-year-old Limukani Dlela, a man who said he lived in Matsheumhlope, a low-density suburb in Bulawayo, told IPS saying that at times the excuse was that there not enough vaccines available and at other times there were a limited number of vaccines.

Corruption and nepotism have characterised this Southern African country’s bitter war against COVID-19, and many people like Dzingai, the truck driver, have not been spared by the rot.

As Dzingai stood at the end of the queue, four middle-aged women strode past him and all others, going straight to the head of the queue and quickly got vaccinated and left.

According to one of the nurses who manned the queue, “the four were staff members and couldn’t wait in the queue like everybody else.”

The nurse said this even though the four women, after receiving doses, immediately left the premises just like any other ordinary person.

“I was talking to my bosses right now, and my truck has been loaded for me to take the delivery to Zambia. I have told my bosses I was getting my vaccine. Instead, you are telling me I’m not going to be vaccinated. You should get water to inject me and give me the vaccine certificate. I will not leave this place without the vaccine,” swore the truck driver.

But the nurse would have none of it.

“You won’t be vaccinated today. That won’t happen, unfortunately,” she said.

Dzingai vowed to stay put at the hospital until he was vaccinated, but because the four women who jumped the queue and got vaccinated before him, it meant he (Dzingai) and three others who had waited at the end of the queue had to leave without the jab.

With many Zimbabweans like Dzingai now eager to get vaccinated, the government has so far authorised the use of China’s Sinovac and Sinopharm, Russia’s Sputnik V, and India’s Covaxin and the U.S. Johnson and Johnson vaccines.

It has not, however, been easy for people to get the doses. Now bribery has become the order of the day at Zimbabwe’s hospitals like Sally Mugabe Referral hospital in the capital Harare.

Lydia Gono (24), from Southertorn middle-income suburb in Harare, said she had to ‘switch to her purse’, which is local parlance for a bribe, to get quickly vaccinated at Sally Mugabe hospital, the closest medical facility to her home.

“I spent close to a week trying to get vaccinated here without success, but today I just rolled a US 10 dollar note in my hand and shook the hand of a nurse who manned the queue, leaving the note in her hand. I was taken to the front and vaccinated without any delay,” Gono told IPS.

Tired of the corruption and nepotism and the delaying tactics characterising the vaccination process at public healthcare centres, many middle-income earners like 35-year-old Daiton Sununguro have opted for the private medical centres to get their vaccines parting with US 40 dollars for a single dose.

“Paying is better than having to wait for many hours before getting the vaccine at public healthcare facilities. I will still come back and pay the other US 40 dollars for my second dose,” Sununguro told IPS at a posh private medical facility in Harare’s Mount Pleasant low-density suburb.

 

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A view of the city of Bangkok, the capital of Thailand. Credit: UN News/Vibhu Mishra

By Windi Arini
JAKARTA, Oct 8 2021 (IPS)

Cities have been epicentres of the COVID-19 pandemic since 2020. City authorities have been the frontlines responders—from running testing stations, to managing food distribution, to disposing of corpses. Yet they are often under-resourced, and their critical role in policy implementation is often overlooked.

Now a growing movement of Human Rights Cities is charting the way forward through pandemic recovery plans to not only ‘build back better’ but also ‘build forward fairer.’

In many cities, structural inequalities that existed before the COVID crisis had resulted in sprawling slums, traffic congestion and pollution. Poorer residents have limited access to water, sanitation, clean cooking fuels and other amenities: COVID and lockdown measures have exacerbated those inequalities.

Loss of income opportunities and confinement to sub-standard housing, for example, have made this a worse pandemic for some than for others. Local authorities should now take concerted action to include marginalised groups such as slum dwellers, women, migrants and minorities in pandemic response and recovery efforts—as some are already doing.

In the southern city of Birgunj, Nepal, bordering the Indian state of Bihar, many were cut off from access to basic amenities when the city went into lockdown. The city authorities set a target that no one should lack food, and undertook 45 days of relief distribution.

They also made household deliveries of oxygen to COVID patients, to reduce the load on the city’s hospitals.

In Nagpur, India, to tackle rampant profiteering, the city authority introduced a single-vendor system for sales of remdesivir, a drug used to treat COVID patients.

Baguio City. Credit: John Lorenz Tajonera / Unsplash

In Baguio City, Philippines, the city has surpassed the testing average, and has now set an ambitious target of vaccinating 95% of its residents.

These cities have all allied themselves with the growing movement of Human Rights Cities in the region. Their commitment is to reframe their policies and practices to align with human rights principles and norms that originated in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

If the approach can be summed up in one phrase, it would be ‘no one left behind’ — the slogan popularised by the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals, adopted by the international community in 2015.

Asian governments are often viewed as laggards in the implementation of international human rights standards. This is unfair. While social and development challenges loom large, city authorities are often in the forefront of action for change.

The pandemic has brought opportunity for local governments to better protect human rights—as the cities mentioned here have chosen to do. However, many local government authorities need capacity building and practical guidance to “localise” human rights in ways that are relevant to their own post-pandemic context. In this effort, national authorities can give important signals and support.

In 2016, the Indonesian government’s Ministry of Law and Human Rights established a national platform on Human Rights Regencies/Cities (Kabupaten/Kota Peduli Hak Asasi Manusia). The platform enables voluntary assessment of city authorities’ performance in fulfilling people’s economic, social, and cultural rights (such as the right to water and sanitation, or the right to food) while also giving attention to some civil and political rights (such as the right to information, non-discrimination and, more recently, participation in governance).

As of 2020, 439 of 514 regency and city authorities in Indonesia had participated in the program, and 259 of them had been recognised as Human Rights Cities or Regencies.

City authorities derive prestige from the award, and have taken steps to connect international human rights norms with national laws and city by-laws, policies and programmes. The East Lampung Regency in Sumatra, for example, has highlighted its commitment to achieving an inclusive, democratic and solidarity-based society through dialogue with urban dwellers.

A mayoral decree emphasises the city’s role in safeguarding human rights, and identifies the responsible units within the mayor’s office, their tasks, and the scope of their budgets.

In Gwangju, Republic of Korea, local authorities decided to tackle the issues of poverty, high suicide rates, out-of-school children, and mobility-impaired residents. Through open forums and consultations, in which they sought to understand the situation of migrants, undocumented workers and other marginalised residents.

Based on the outcomes, they devised several action plans that included educating citizens on migrant rights, and establishing a comprehensive support network for migrants.

In October 2021, the City of Gwangju convenes local government authorities from around the world at the annual World Human Rights Cities Forum. The City of Gwangju has been at the forefront in the promotion of the Human Rights City concept, and emphasizes the importance of local government authorities taking active and responsible roles in promoting and protecting human rights.

In this year’s forum, city authorities will discuss the emergence of new social contracts for the post-pandemic recovery, and 11 local authorities from Asia will present their own projects for integrating human rights-based approaches into local policies and programmes for more resilient, fair, and sustainable cities.

Throughout the region, there is a growing realisation that protecting human rights makes for safer, greener, and better places to live. Adopting a human rights-based approach helps prioritise vulnerable groups that would otherwise be overlooked, and addresses local needs and challenges through participatory processes. City authorities hold the keys to embedding good practice and ‘building forward fairer.’

Windi Arini is a Programme Officer at the Jakarta Office of the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law. She is a specialist in the area of Inclusive Societies and holds a Master of Philosophy in Theory and Practice of Human Rights from the University of Oslo. Prior to joining RWI, she worked as a Human Rights Officer at the ASEAN Secretariat and as a Programme Manager for a law office.

 

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Six finalists will pitch their concepts to a panel of judges for the grand prize

By External Source
Oct 7 2021 (IPS-Partners)

After an unprecedented pan-Commonwealth search for innovative satellite-driven solutions to tackle the challenges of the climate emergency and ocean sustainability, the Satellite Applications Catapult and the Commonwealth Secretariat are delighted to announce the inaugural finalists of the Hack the Planet competition 2021.

The six finalists include inspiring leaders with game-changing solutions that leverage the power of satellites to make a real difference in the Commonwealth and the world.

They will now enter the final stage of the competition for a live pitch event, where they will pitch their concepts to a panel of expert judges.

There is a prize-pool of £20,000 plus over £85,000 worth of satellite data and cloud computing services for the winners of the competition.

The finalists are:

• CAPELLA (The Gambia) – an idea which combines machine learning and satellite imagery to provide data on illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing in Africa and to address the challenge of ocean plastic pollution.
• Loop Recyclers Tech (Nigeria) – this concept uses the power of geospatial data and the Internet of Things to monitor and improve recycling rates for plastics and prevent plastics reaching rivers and the ocean. The solution aims to reduce pollution levels, prevent illegal waste disposal and address public health issues.
• Marine Wildlife Tracking with Snapper GPS (UK) – an impressive and novel solution which will change the way conservationists monitor marine animals. The idea focusses on animals which only spend short periods at the surface of the ocean and are therefore normally difficult to track.
• Plastic-i: Mapping Ocean Plastics from Space (UK) – a solution which will combine data from multiple high-resolution Earth-observing satellite constellations, combined with machine learning to create a highly specific map of floating ocean plastic, to be offered open-source and updated daily.
• Project 30 (Trinidad and Tobago) – a project looking to streamline the Marine Protected Area (MPA) selection and evaluation process, using high-resolution satellite imagery, analysed via machine learning. Ultimately the team plan for their tool to be used by Governments, NGOs and conservation professionals to manage and designate MPAs.
• Terangi Team (Malaysia) – a wide-reaching idea that aims to deliver a toolbox of important environmental monitoring capabilities in a single technology platform. The toolbox includes modules for marine conservation areas, climate change monitoring, water quality, and the analysis of potential environmental threats.

The ideas and commitment demonstrated by all six finalists to delivering real-world change greatly impressed the judges, who offered them their congratulations on reaching the final stage of the competition.

Earlier in the competition, 30 shortlisted teams were invited to participate in a rigorous, knowledge exchange programme where they learnt about satellite technologies and elements of design thinking that could support their ideas, and hone these into robust, compelling pitches.

The final event will be livestreamed on 14th October from 12:00 BST. To find out more and register to attend click here.

About the Hack the Planet competition

Hack the Planet is an entirely virtual international ideas competition that brings together concepts from diverse communities living on the front-line in facing the challenges of the climate emergency and ocean sustainability across the Commonwealth, together with the technical resources to support the innovation of new solutions. It is run by the Commonwealth Secretariat and the Satellite Applications Catapult and supported by Amazon Web Services, Deloitte, Maxar and Planet Labs.

The competition aims to stimulate discussion around the development of new approaches tackling the sustainability of the ocean, incorporating satellite data and technologies. Solutions are aligned to the 10 action areas of the Commonwealth Blue Charter.

To find out more, visit http://hacktheplanetcompetition.com/

Excerpt:

Six finalists will pitch their concepts to a panel of judges for the grand prize

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Mangroves could be the silver bullet needed to mitigate climate change, however, approximately 75 percent of mangrove forests globally remain unprotected and overexploited. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

By Joyce Chimbi
NAIROBI, Oct 7 2021 (IPS)

Smelly, boggy, and full of bugs, mangroves’ superpowers are well hidden. However, there is rising confidence that mangroves are the silver bullet to combat the effects of climate change.

“Mangrove ecosystems are a habitat and nursery grounds for various plants and animals and can absorb three to four times more carbon than tropical upland forests, helping to mitigate the effects of climate change,” Dr Sevvandi Jayakody, a senior lecturer at Wayamba University of Sri Lanka, tells IPS.

Mangrove forests also act as a natural defence against storm surges, including mitigating the effects of cyclones and tsunamis, says Dr Nicholas Hardman‑Mountford, Head of Oceans and Natural Resources at the Commonwealth Secretariat.

Within this context, he says, Commonwealth countries are working together under the Commonwealth Blue Charter, an agreement made by all 54 member states, to actively work together to tackle ocean-related challenges and meet global commitments on sustainable ocean development.

The Blue Charter works through voluntary action groups led by ‘champion countries’, who rally around marine pollution and the sustainable blue economy.

The Mangrove Ecosystems and Livelihoods Action Group consists of 13 countries, including Australia, Bahamas, Bangladesh, Guyana, Jamaica, Kenya, Maldives, Nigeria, Pakistan, Trinidad and Tobago Vanuatu, and the United Kingdom, is championed by Sri Lanka.

Mangrove blue carbon could bolster climate change adaptation, mitigation and resilience efforts, experts say. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

Hardman‑Mountford tells IPS that countries exchange knowledge centred on mangrove protection, management, and sustainability within the action group. Shared knowledge includes a wide range of topics, including policy, legislation, and regulatory frameworks.

Leveraging on the protective power of mangroves, Jayakody says that Sri Lanka is actively building its second line of defence. The country’s first line of defence, the reefs, were heavily compromised by the deadly 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami – one of the worst disasters in modern history, killing nearly 230 000 people across dozens of countries.

Such was the devastation that the government of Sri Lanka estimated losses of over $1 billion in assets and $330 million in potential output.

Worse still, approximately 35 000 people died or went missing. In Sri Lanka alone, property damage included 110 000 houses, of which 70 000 were destroyed. In all, at least 250 000 families lost their means of support.

Experts say that mangroves have immense capacity to prevent such catastrophes and combat other devastating effects of climate change.

Bolstered by growing scientific evidence, Trinidad and Tobago, the dual-island Caribbean nation, has made significant strides in building its defence using mangroves.

Dr Rahanna Juman, Acting Director at the Institute of Marine Affairs, a government-funded research institute, tells IPS that in 2014, the government of Trinidad and Tobago commissioned an aerial survey of the country. Using this data, an estimate of carbon in mangrove forests across the country was ascertained.

“This information illustrated how mangrove and other hardwood forests could offset emissions and was incorporated into the Greenhouse Gas inventory of Trinidad and Tobago. Importantly, the survey conclusively demonstrated that mangrove forests store more carbon per hectare than other hardwood forests,” Juman expounds.

In 2020, the Institute of Marine Affairs received funding from the British High Commission to fund a mangrove soil carbon assessment project involving Guyana, Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago.

Dr Juman indicates that the assessment found that “the amount of carbon in the mangrove soil was many times larger than the amount of carbon above the ground. This is an assessment that could be replicated in other Commonwealth countries because we have developed a low-cost technique of undertaking this important assessment.”

Adding that Mangroves are starting to be incorporated into the United Nations Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) programme, which means countries could potentially earn money from protecting and restoring mangroves.

Meanwhile, Hardman‑Mountford cites various challenges in exploring blue carbon because it is still an evolving area of science and policy.

Sri Lanka understands this challenge all too well. After the Tsunami, Jayakody says that the government launched vast mangrove restoration projects covering over 2 000 hectares in partnership with other agencies.

Due to limited information on mangroves, she tells IPS that a majority of these projects failed. Undeterred and leveraging on scientific research over the years, Sri Lanka is today a success story in restoring and conserving mangrove cover estimated at 19 600 hectares.

Other challenges facing countries keen on mangrove blue carbon include a lack of protection for mangroves because approximately 75 percent of mangrove forests globally remain unprotected and overexploited.

Over the years, Jayakody indicates that mangroves have been at a very high risk of destruction because their power to prevent coastal erosion, protect shorelines, and provide livelihoods for coastal communities through fisheries was not fully understood.

Hardman‑Mountford agrees, adding that mangrove forests have declined globally with a loss of between 30 to 50 percent over the past 50 years from over-harvesting, pollution, agriculture, aquaculture, and coastal development.

The Commonwealth has a huge role to play in reversing this decline.

Overall, there are 47 Commonwealth countries with a coastline.

“Nearly 90 percent of Commonwealth countries with a coast have mangroves, and at least 38 of these countries with mangroves have provided some level of protection to their mangroves. In all, 16 countries have protected about half or more of their mangroves,” he says.

This is a challenge that Sri Lanka is successfully overcoming. With an estimated 40 percent of the population in Sri Lanka living along the coastline, Jayakody says that there was an urgent need to protect both livelihoods and coastlines from further degradation.

“In 2015, Sri Lanka established the National Mangrove Expert Committee, and through that, all mangroves were mapped. More so, several new areas were brought under protection, and there have been relentless efforts to improve the communities’ understanding of the importance of mangrove ecosystem,” she says.

Further, Sri Lanka recently validated the Best Practice Guidelines on the Restoration of Mangroves in Sri Lanka and the national mangrove action plan, in line with the mangrove policy adopted in 2020.

Other countries making strides in the right direction include the Australian government’s involvement with blue carbon and especially ongoing efforts to build capacity in blue carbon science, policy and economics through multi-sectoral partnerships.

“To support its efforts in blue carbon advocacy and outreach, the Australian government launched the International Partnership for Blue Carbon (IPBC) at the UNFCCC CoP in Paris in 2015,” says Ms Heidi Prislan, a Blue Charter Adviser at the Commonwealth Secretariat.

Australia is also one of the 28 countries that refer specifically to the mitigation benefits of carbon sequestration associated with coastal wetlands in its National Greenhouse Gas Inventory. In comparison, 59 other countries mention coastal ecosystems as part of their adaptation strategies.

To increase opportunities for blue carbon to participate in the national emissions reduction scheme, the Emissions Reduction Fund, the Australian government has supported research into potential mitigation methodologies that could be implemented to generate carbon credits from domestic projects.

Equally important, she says that Commonwealth member countries have collectively made 44 national commitments to protect or restore mangroves.

As the world stares at a catastrophe from the devastating effects of climate change, the massive potential of blue carbon and, more so, mangrove blue carbon to bolster climate change adaptation, mitigation and resilience efforts can no longer be ignored.

 

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Credit: UNOHCR.

By Jamile Tellez Lieberman and Joe Amon
PHILADELPHIA, US, Oct 7 2021 (IPS)

Last month, asylum-seeking families at the U.S.-Mexico border appeared to have won a victory, however temporary, in their last-ditch bid for safety in the United States. It was also a victory for evidence-based public health policy.

The 1,954-mile-long southern border has always been a magnet for debate, with deep political divides. Bolstered by Donald Trump during his presidency, long-simmering anti-immigrant rhetoric and xenophobia surrounding migration and immigration increased dramatically.

Starting in 2016, under the previous administration, thousands of migrant families who made it to the southern border were told by immigration officials that they must remain in Mexico to await their asylum decisions, rather than in the United States.

The CDC was once heralded for its apolitical, evidence-based public health policy. Sadly, this is no longer the case. The first step in restoring the CDC’s tarnished reputation is to repeal the CDC’s Title 42 order

With long waits for the processing of their asylum cases, families caught in this legal limbo were forced to make do in temporary settlements in Mexican border towns, many of which are controlled by cartels. Life in these settlements is violent, unstable and impoverished.

In March 2020, then Vice President Mike Pence directed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to use its emergency powers to effectively seal the southern border, overruling the agency’s scientists. The CDC invoked Title 42 of the Public Health Service Act which gives federal health officials the ability to take extraordinary measures to limit transmission of an infectious disease.

In practice, the “extraordinary measures,” however, did not apply equally to all travelers entering the United States, including travelers who may have been infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Nor were these measures calibrated to where COVID-19 cases were most prevalent.

These scattershot measures have no meaningful impact on the pandemic in this country. Instead, they victimize migrants attempting to cross into the U.S. from Mexico, including asylum seekers.

Despite promising that his administration would respect science, the CDC’s Title 42 order has been renewed under the Biden administration. Public health leaders, human rights advocates, and former CDC officials and academics have repeatedly called on the CDC to end the use of Title 42 in favor of evidence-based approaches that can protect migrants and the American public from COVID-19 transmission. United Nations officials have also raised concerns that the expulsions may violate the United States’ obligations under the 1951 Refugee Convention.

Even Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, weighed in on Title 42 and the recent COVID-19 surge on October 3, saying that migrants are “not the driving force of this, let’s face reality here.”

No matter the CDC’s reasoning, one thing is clear: this policy enables profound and irreparable harm to migrant families and single adults. If forced back to Mexico, they would be once again at the mercy of the violent Mexican cartels they were so desperate to escape.

Hope has come from the judiciary if not from the CDC. On September 16, 2021, a federal district court judge in the District of Columbia granted the motion to reject Title 42 and issued an order that prohibits the expulsion of migrant families, saying, “in view of the wide availability of testing, vaccines and other minimization measures, the Court is not convinced that the transmission of COVID-19 during border processing cannot be significantly mitigated.”

The CDC was once heralded for its apolitical, evidence-based public health policy. Sadly, this is no longer the case. The first step in restoring the CDC’s tarnished reputation is to repeal the CDC’s Title 42 order. This will jumpstart the overdue process of returning the CDC to its role as an exemplar in public health policy-making instead of providing cover for xenophobic immigration policies.

Beyond Title 42, the CDC must work to restore its reputation with the American public and regain our trust. This is urgent during the current public health emergency, as well as future crises. It will be a lengthy, painstaking process, but without it, the consequences to public health would be immeasurable.

The order to reject Title 42 was set to take effect on September 30, but an appeals court suspended the judge’s order on October 1, permitting border officials to expel migrants. Amidst this legal back and forth, the question we are left wondering is: Who are these measures meant to protect? The COVID pandemic in the U.S will advance and retreat regardless of immigration policy.

The CDC is turning its back on migrants, as well as science. More broadly, the Biden administration is not listening to scientists, despite his pledge to return to science-based, humanitarian, decision-making. It’s not too late to rebuild trust in science, migrants and their contribution to America, and the American people they hope to become part of.

 

Jamile Tellez Lieberman is a Doctor of Public Health candidate at the Drexel University Dornsife School of Public Health and a Global Alliance for Training in Health Equity (GATHER) Fellow.

Joe Amon is the director of global health at Drexel University’s Dornsife School of Public Health and former director of health programs at Human Rights Watch.

 

 

Water scarcity affects several African countries. The UN estimates that the number of people with insufficient access to water at least one month a year will surpass 5 billion by 2050. Credit: Orazgeldiyew / Creative Commons

By Vladimir Smakhtin
HAMILTON, Canada, Oct 7 2021 (IPS)

It is not uncommon for a water-centric research, policy or development organization or network to declare its long-term vision of the “water-secure world”. It reads nicely and feels great.

And it is intuitive and logical to perceive that a water-secure world is the one where “water security” is ensured. In every country.

The concept of “water security” has emerged on the global stage primarily over the last two decades. Its shortest and most elegant definition says water security is a “tolerable level of water-related risk to society.”

A conceptual framework of water security based on a more comprehensive definition encompasses various needs and conditions that should be taken into account — water for drinking, economic activity, ecosystems, hazard resilience, governance, transboundary cooperation, financing, and political stability.

Hence water security is not just about how much natural water a country has, although this matters a lot, but also how well the resource is managed.

Water security is considered a unifying concept that can help coordinate efforts towards a common goal. This common goal, however, remains unclear. Absolute water security simply does not and will never exist anywhere.

The devil, as usual, is in the details: how do you define “tolerable”, adequate”, “acceptable” — and other adjectives and variables that reflect the uncertainty normally associated with water security measures?

Perhaps the most advanced initiative to measure water security, started almost a decade ago with regular updates, is the Asian Water Development Outlook. It largely follows the principles of the water security conceptual framework noted above and employs over 50 indices to rate various aspects of it.

The most recent Outlook (2020) suggests that New Zealand, Japan and Australia are the most water secure nations in Asia-Pacific region, while Afghanistan is the most water insecure.

This is hardly surprising: the more developed a country is, the more effective its water management, the higher its water security ranking, even if the country’s water resources are limited.

Also, such regionally focused assessments compare a limited selection of countries and essentially reflect relative “status” rather than how close or far the countries are from achieving some global standards or milestones.

The uncertainty surrounding water security measures therefore prevails. All this has implications for development.

An obvious one is that the water-secure world we envision is either a mirage or a “nirvana concept.” The first is deceiving, the second unachievable. Either way, the focus created by imprecision is on movement, not on result, and conveniently excuses not knowing where we are going.

It may be argued, for example, that water security underpins, albeit implicitly, the global development Agenda 2030, including Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6 (entirely dedicated to water) and other water-related targets scattered through the SDG continuum.

Yet, similarly to water security itself, such SDG targets are either left “strategically vague” or simply undefined. Only SDG targets 6.1: universal (i.e. 100% in every country) water supply; 6.2: universal (i.e. 100% in every country) sanitation; and 6.3: halving (i.e. 50%, without country specifics) the proportion of untreated wastewater globally are explicitly quantitative.

Unclear, though, is whether their achievement by 2030 was politically or scientifically motivated. (The role of science, or lack thereof, in global water development is another debate).

From this standpoint, it is not surprising that the water-related SDGs set in 2015 have clearly turned out to be over-ambitious; indeed, it was conceded, even before the pandemic hit, that SDG6, for example, is off-track.

Going forward it may be more practical to define and quantify some globally acceptable water security standards — e.g. evolving, functional, optimal, or similar categories.

A country’s water status can then be seen in a context of these standards, and that, in turn, can help define action plans with a visible target.

Furthermore, the visibility horizons should be immediate short-term — five years or less — so that accountability is not passed to succeeding generations of experts, policymakers and politicians.

Water security standards need to relate directly to the number, type and scale of problems. To move from one standard to another, problems need to be eradicated, not just mitigated.

The “movement” towards nirvana water security may then become at least well-structured. Achievements and remaining gaps should be easier to see and articulate. And water science could finally play a central, practical role in the process.

Going even further, a water security philosophy may not even be necessary at all if we simply focus on solving — i.e. eradicating well-known water problems in a process designed with short steps and clearly measurable results, which should be realized in every generation.

Sadly, looking back at the last 50 years, it is hard to see a single global or regional water problem that has been, indeed, eradicated. And, accordingly, not a single country can currently boast that it is, indeed, water secure.

So much for a water-secure world.

Vladimir Smakhtin is the Director at the UN University’s Canadian-based Institute for Water, Environment and Health, which is supported by the Government of Canada and hosted at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario. The Institute marks its 25th anniversary in 2021.

 

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