Africa - INTER PRESS SERVICE

The Pacific Community’s Centre for Pacific Crops and Trees gene bank conserves more than 2,000 varieties of trees and crops in the Pacific Islands. Credit: Pacific Community

By Catherine Wilson
SYDNEY, Sep 22 2022 (IPS)

Safeguarding plentiful, nutritious supplies of food for the present generation of Pacific Islanders and those who come in the future is a frontline goal in the wake of the pandemic and the continual threat of climate extremes to island farming. But the region, where 50 to 70 percent of people depend on agriculture and fisheries for sustenance and income, is now one step ahead in that objective. The region’s agricultural gene bank, established by the development organisation, Pacific Community (SPC), is now acclaimed as world-class and a leader in building future food supplies.

The Pacific Community’s Centre for Pacific Crops and Trees manages the major research centre for plant genetic biodiversity and repository of seeds, tissue culture, and DNA. The gene bank, which currently conserves more than 2,000 varieties of trees and crops in the Pacific Islands, was the winner of the Innovative Island Research Award at this year’s global Island Innovation Awards in April. The new award program was launched last year by former President Bill Clinton and is supported by his New York-based Clinton Global Initiative.

“We won the award because of our strong research programs and our use of tissue culture to conserve plant genetic material. Through research, we are developing tissue culture as a means to sustainably conserve genetic material in the long term. Through tissue culture, we can also improve mass propagation and multiply genetic resources to meet a high level of demand. Tissue culture is also better for the safe distribution and exchange of plant materials across national borders,” Logotonu Waqainabele, Program Leader for the Pacific Community’s Genetic Resources in Fiji, told IPS.

The awards aim to reward and raise the profile of individuals and organisations who are leading positive change in people’s lives in island nations and communities around the world. They are also part of the Clinton Foundation’s mission to mobilise innovative and effective solutions to some of the most urgent challenges facing the world. This year, the twenty judges included Anote Tong, former President of the Republic of Kiribati, and James Michel, former President of the Republic of the Seychelles, along with Peter Thompson, the United Nations Secretary General’s Special Envoy for the Ocean, and Maria Concepcion, Program Manager for Oxfam America.

Pacific Community’s Centre for Pacific Crops and Trees gene bank won the Innovative Island Research Award at this year’s global Island Innovation Awards in April. The award program was launched last year by former President Bill Clinton and is supported by his New York-based Clinton Global Initiative. Credit: Pacific Community

Karen Mapusua, Director of the Pacific Community’s Land Resources Division in Fiji, believes the accolade will also bring greater certainty to the future of its work. “I think one of the important benefits will be funding and the sustainability of operations for the gene bank. To move to an increasingly sustainable funding model, we need more investment. And increased awareness of what we can provide, so that people know what we hold in the Pacific, the material, and its availability, for the world to see as well,” she told IPS.

“The broadening of our partnership base and attracting of other partners who are willing to support our programs, research and distribution will help us to achieve full food security, added Waqainebele.

The gene bank’s services are global: it supplies tissue culture, seeds, and planting materials to countries in all regions. These include all 22 Pacific Island states, but also African nations, including Ghana, Nigeria and Burkina Faso, the Caribbean and, in the Asian region, the Philippines, India and Indonesia, among others.

This year, the Pacific Community opened two new facilities to support its international distribution. A molecular laboratory, which provides pathogen testing of genetic material to international standards, and a quarantine greenhouse, which will be a reception centre for new plant imports.

Pacific Community’s Centre for Pacific Crops and Trees gene bank supplies tissue culture, seeds, and planting materials to countries in all regions, including 22 Pacific Island states, several African nations, the Caribbean, and, in the Asian region, the Philippines, India, and Indonesia, among others. Credit: Pacific Community

“A key role of the gene bank is to provide material that is safe and clean. Our molecular laboratory screens gene material, so that it is safe to send to other countries without diseases,” Mapusua explained.

The importance of SPC’s work in genetic resources cannot be overestimated. There is no food without seeds. And, looking to the future, ‘crop improvement and the delivery of high-quality seeds and planting materials of selected varieties to growers is necessary for ensuring improved crop production and meeting growing environmental challenges,’ reports the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

The Cook Islands is one of the gene bank’s beneficiaries. It’s vital to the “long-term conservation of important genetic resources of the Cook Islands. There are more than 50 clones of taro, bananas or plantain and sweet potatoes from the Cook Islands at the Centre for Pacific Crops and Trees for long-term conservation and future breeding work to improve crop genetic resources in the Pacific and other parts of the world,” William Wigmore, Director of Crops Research at the Cook Islands’ Ministry of Agriculture, told IPS.

“We also receive [from the gene bank] new varieties with higher yielding potential and better adaptability, pest, and climate tolerance. These are important food crops for food security,” he added.

Technicians at the Pacific Community’s Centre for Pacific Crops and Trees gene bank bag and test samples. The centre is gaining world recognition for food innovation. Credit: Pacific Community

Now, as the Pacific Islands strive to overcome the economic and social impacts of the pandemic, the reliable provision of seeds for food growing is even more critical. Unemployment and inflation have risen, incomes plummeted, and food supply networks widely disrupted. A World Bank survey in Papua New Guinea in 2020 found that about 25 percent of people who were employed before the onset of the virus had lost their jobs, and 28 percent of households had reduced their food consumption. In the Solomon Islands, the survey revealed that 60 percent of households with children under 5 years had cut back on their intake of essential foods.

In response, many Pacific Island governments have placed a high priority on encouraging the growing of food staples by families. For instance, in Tuvalu, workshops were organised by the government to train youths in agriculture, such as taro planting, and Fiji’s Ministry of Agriculture launched a program to provide seedlings direct to households.

“It is critical to provide the planting materials for recovery. It’s very important for maintaining food security in the region,” Mapusua told IPS. “It was very difficult during the pandemic as we had to fly these planting materials to different countries, but we were still able to sustain the collection and deliver these materials to countries.”

But, even before COVID-19 emerged, island nations were confronting numerous threats to agricultural productivity, such as high exposure to extreme climate, natural disasters, pests and diseases and a trend toward greater consumption of imported processed foods. According to the latest findings of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Pacific Island nations are among the ‘most vulnerable and exposed to climate change impacts,’ which include more frequent and extreme tropical cyclones, heatwaves and droughts, increasing water and food insecurity and the loss of marine and terrestrial biodiversity.

To address all these challenges, the Pacific Community has a long-term vision and action plan which starts with investing in plant research and crop development for the century ahead. “Our role is conservation for the future, but also the development of new varieties. For the future, climate change, food security and nutrition are the biggest issues. So, we have a big focus on conserving our plant diversity to help us develop new varieties which have a high climate resilience,” Waqainabele emphasised.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');   Related Articles

• Atoll Nation of Tuvalu Adopts ‘Cubes’ to Step Up Nutritious Food Production
• Pacific Community-Led Health Missions Arrive with Critical Support to Tonga and Kiribati Grappling with COVID-19 Surges
• Pacific Islanders: Failure to Commit to 1.5 Degrees at COP27 will Imperil the World’s Oceans

We are failing to take antimicrobial resistance seriously, perhaps because it is not glamorous and relatable. Credit: Bigstock.

By External Source
Sep 21 2022 (IPS)

Staphylococcus aureus is the source of a skin infection that can turn deadly if drug resistant. Estimates regarding the most common resistant variation, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), exceed 100,000 deaths globally in 2019.

But up until recently, we did not have a solid grasp on how much of a problem MRSA—or any other antimicrobial resistant pathogen—was in Africa. It turns out, after testing 187,000 samples from 14 countries for antibiotic resistance, our colleagues found that 40% of all Staph infections were MRSA.

Africa, like every other continent, has an AMR problem. But Africa stands out because we have not invested in the capacity and resources needed to determine the scope of the problem, or how to fix it. Take MRSA. We still don’t know what’s causing the bacteria to become resistant, nor do we know the full extent of the problem.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has repeatedly stated that AMR is a global health priority—and is in fact one of the leading public health threats of the 21st century. A recent study estimated that in 2019, nearly 1.3 million people died because of antimicrobial resistant bacterial infections, with Africa bearing the greatest burden of deaths

We are failing to take AMR seriously, perhaps because it is not glamorous and relatable. The technology that we currently use to identify resistant pathogens is not fancy or futuristic looking. Combatting AMR does not involve miracle drugs, expensive treatments, or fancy diagnostic tests. Instead, we have bacteria and other pathogens that are commonplace and have learned how to shrug off the good old medicines that used to work.

The global health and pharmaceutical industries do not seem to consider solving this problem to be very profitable. Compare that to the urgency of solving COVID-19, which has been embraced—and interventions such as diagnostics subsidized—by governments eager to end the pandemic. The COVID-19 response has been characterized by innovations popping up literally every other week.

Why can’t we mobilize resources and passion for AMR? Are resistant pathogens too boring? Is it too difficult to solve through innovations? Does this make prospects for quick wins and fast return on investment too elusive for AMR, especially when compared to COVID-19 or other infectious disease outbreaks?

The World Health Organization (WHO) has repeatedly stated that AMR is a global health priority—and is in fact one of the leading public health threats of the 21st century. A recent study estimated that in 2019, nearly 1.3 million people died because of antimicrobial resistant bacterial infections, with Africa bearing the greatest burden of deaths. A high prevalence of AMR has also been identified in foodborne pathogens isolated from animals and animal products in Africa.

Collectively, these numbers suggest that the burden of AMR might be on the level of—or greater than—that of HIV/AIDS or COVID-19. The growing threat of AMR is likely to take a heavy toll on Africa’s health systems and poses a major threat to progress made in attaining public health goals set by individual nations, the African Union and the United Nations. And the paucity of accurate AMR information limits our ability to understand how well commonly used antimicrobials actually work. This also means we cannot determine the drivers of AMR infections and design effective interventions in response.

We have just wrapped up a project that gathered data on many of the scariest pathogens in 14 countries, revealing stark insights on the under-detected and under-reported depth of the AMR crisis across Africa. Less than two percent of the medical laboratories in the 14 countries examined can conduct bacteriology testing, even with conventional methods that were developed more than 30 years ago.

While providing national stakeholders with critical information to advance their policies on AMR, we have also trained and provided basic electronic tools to more than 300 health professionals to continue this important surveillance. While a strengthened workforce is critical, many health facilities on the continent are coping with interrupted access to electricity, poor connectivity, and serious, ongoing workforce shortages.

Our work has painted the dire reality of the AMR surveillance situation, informing concrete recommendations for improvement that align with the new continental public health ambition of the African Union and Africa Center for Disease Control (CDC). The challenge is to find the funding to expand this initiative to cover the entire African continent.

AMR containment requires a long-term focus—especially in Africa, where health systems are chronically underfunded, while also being disproportionately challenged by infectious threats. More funding needs to be dedicated to the problem and this cannot only come from international aid.

We urge African governments to honour past commitments and allocate more domestic funding to their health systems in general, and to solving the crisis of AMR in particular. We also call upon bilateral funders and global stakeholders to focus their priorities on improving the health of African peoples. This might require more attention to locally relevant evidence to inform investments and less attention to profit-driven market interventions, as well as prioritizing the scale-up of technologies and strategies proven to work, whether or not they are innovations.

Containing AMR means we have to fix African health systems. The work starts now.

The authors of this opinion piece are Dr Pascale Ondoa and Dr Yewande Alimi – Dr Pascale Ondoa is the director of science and new initiatives of the African Society for Laboratory Medicine (ASLM) and Dr Yewande Alimi is the Africa Center for Disease Control (CDC) antimicrobial resistance programme coordinator.

Two refugees identified as Muhindo and his wife Harriet are among the new waves of people leaving the Democratic Republic of Congo following inter-communal clashes in South-West DRC. UN agencies have called for substantive action on refugees, especially regarding food security. Credit: UNHCR

By Juliet Morrison
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 21 2022 (IPS)

Representatives from UN agencies and several countries called for more substantive action to support refugees and internally displaced people amid the ongoing global food crisis.

Co-hosted by the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), the World Food Programme (WFP), and the Permanent Mission of Switzerland to the United Nations, a panel discussion held on September 14, 2022, also explored innovative solutions to combat the food shortage and increase the capacity of refugees. It came ahead of a UN Security Council meeting on the global food crisis and protection.

Food insecurity has become an enormous problem. In 2019, WFP estimated that 145 million people were facing acute food insecurity. Now the organization predicates 345 million people are facing insecurity. The combination of climate change shocks, COVID-19, and conflict has pushed several countries, such as Somalia, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, South Sudan, and Yemen, to a very real risk of famine.

Yoseph Kassaye, Deputy Permanent Representative of Ethiopia, and Raouf Mazou, UNHCR’s Assistant High Commissioner for Operations at the UN Headquarters in New York City. Credit: Juliet Morrison/IPS

Action on food insecurity today is “more important than ever”, Valerie Guarnieri, WFP Assistant Executive Director, said during the panel section.

Among those particularly vulnerable to the negative impacts of food insecurity are refugees and internally displaced people.

Raouf Mazou, UNHCR’s Assistant High Commissioner for Operations and moderator of the event, explained that the increased vulnerability of refugees is primarily to the nature of displacement and the loss of community safety networks that accompany it.

“When fleeing many refugees sell or are forced to leave behind their assets their journey to safety is often full of dangers. Family and community support systems breakdown. They usually lose their income and often find themselves with no option but to employ harmful strategies as coping mechanisms.”

Coping mechanisms refer to tactics a family or community employs to compensate for a loss in income. In response to COVID-19 lockdowns, UNHCR reported instances of transactional sex, early marriage, child recruitment, and trafficking in person across its operations.

For Mazou, these challenges point to a need to center protection in efforts to address food security by governments and NGOs.

Special attention must also be paid to the specific plights of women and girls, he argued. In searching for food, displaced women and girls are at an increased risk of sexual violence, intimate partner violence, and child and forced marriages.

In Somalian regions affected by drought, gender-based violence has gone up 200 percent since 2021, Mazaou noted. He pointed to several factors that may lead to violence when a community is facing food insecurity.

“Food insecurity increases the risk of violence, neglect and exploitation and abuse of children. Girls may drop out of school at a higher percentage rate than boys when families are unable to afford school fees for all their children. Household sent children in search of food work on pasture for livestock exposing them to increased risks.”

The food crisis is also affecting the ability of host countries to provide for refugees.

Ethiopia, the third largest refugee-hosting country in Africa, is on the brink of famine. The country is reckoning with the historic drought hitting the Horn of Africa region, which is severely threatening its food networks.

Yoseph Kassaye, Deputy Permanent Representative of Ethiopia to the UN, underscored the crisis and its strain on the nation’s ability to protect refugees.

The drought has wiped away important nutrition sources that refugees rely on, such as cattle and water wells. Kassaye explained that the lack of natural resources means refugees can only rely on humanitarian assistance.

Yet, this is also at risk. As a result of funding constraints, in June, the WFP had to reduce its rations for refugees in Ethiopia by 50 percent.

“It is indeed troubling to learn that the level of support by international humanitarian agencies is reported to have decreased due to the funding shortages. In our view, urgent measures are needed if we’re to respond to the people in need of assistance in a timely and effective manner,” Kassaye said.

Citing related statistics, Guarnieri emphasized the importance of more humanitarian aid. But, she also underscored initiatives that increased the capacity of refugee populations and host countries.

“We have to do everything as WFP and UNHCR, as an international community to meet these urgent food needs and these desperate protection needs, but we’re never going to be able to catch up with the situation unless we are also investing in building the resilience in supporting the livelihoods and strengthening the self-reliance of populations who have forcibly displaced population who are seeking refuge in other countries.”

She also stressed the power of collaboration across sectors. One example of this was the WFP-UNHCR’s Joint Hub, a collaboration between agencies and governments to support refugees through innovative solutions and policies.

Established in 2020, the hub has worked on several projects. One with the Government of Mauritania resulted in Malian refugees being included in its national social protection plan—making refugees eligible for cash transfer funds for vulnerable households.

Dorte Verner, the lead agricultural economist in the Agricultural and Food Global Practice with the World Bank, brought up another innovative solution to boost food production: insect farming.

According to Verner, insect farming has enormous potential for tackling food insecurity in vulnerable communities as it requires no arable land and very little water and will not lead to any biodiversity loss. These characteristics mean it can even be practiced in refugee camps, Verner stated.

“Insert farming can provide displaced people with the skills that they need to produce where they are, and they can take these skills to human capital with them to where they go afterward. [It] can contribute to alleviating the world’s food and nutrition insecurity for forcibly displaced people and the host community.”

Closing the meeting, participants coalesced around the need to leverage the commitments being made to meaningfully tackle food insecurity.

Several participants also noted the opportunity to continue the conversation at the Security Council meeting to be held later that afternoon, where more concrete action on food insecurity could be examined.

A representative from Ireland stated that overall action from the Security Council was needed to meaningfully tackle the issue at its core.

“If we don’t look at what’s driving these prices in the first place, what’s driving this insecurity in the first place? Then, you know, we’re going to be chasing our tails all the time because the problems are getting worse.”

He called for the Security Council to address the matter further.

“[The humanitarian] part of the UN system is playing its part, but the UN Security Council needs to play its part as well. That means responding early when we see the signs of crises coming, but it also means responding, particularly to protect civilians, and crises and meeting to make sure that things are put at the center of our response.”

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');   Related Articles

• UN South-South Event Highlights Power of Cooperation for Peace and Development
• UN Labour Report Highlights Employment Challenges for Youth
• Refugees Face Often Neglected Mental Health Challenges – Report

By Stefan Löfven
STOCKHOLM, Sep 21 2022 (IPS)

As world leaders gather in New York for the opening of the 77th session of the United Nations General Assembly this week, the security horizon is undoubtedly dark.

From the geopolitical shockwaves of the war in Ukraine, to military spending, nutrition and food security, to our stewardship of the planet, far too many key indicators are heading in a dangerous direction.

We can, and must, turn them around. In the words of UN Secretary-General António Guterres in his 2021 report Our Common Agenda, ‘the choices we make, or fail to make, today could result in further breakdown, or a breakthrough to a greener, better, safer future’.

Making the right choices requires political will and leadership, based on the best available knowledge. That last aspect is SIPRI’s stock in trade.

A ‘watershed moment’

The theme for the 77th General Assembly session is ‘A watershed moment: transformative solutions to interlocking challenges’.

Evidence of these interlocking challenges is everywhere: the floods in Pakistan, war and insecurity afflicting every region of the world, the erosion of arms control and stagnation in disarmament, rising hunger, the economic and political turmoil that has followed the Covid-19 pandemic, and the list goes on.

These interlocking challenges share some common features. Their consequences, and often their drivers, do not respect borders or alliances. They are characterized by uncertainty and volatility. They tend to cut across traditional policy domains.

This has a clear implication: the only realistic path towards a ‘greener, better, safer future’ on this planet lies through cooperation. Countries, societies and sectors must work together to meet global challenges, put aside tensions and political polarization, and restore their faith in institutions and the rules-based international order.

Earlier this year, Secretary-General Guterres invited me to become co-Chair of his High-Level Advisory Board on Effective Multilateralism, alongside Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and former president of Liberia.

The Advisory Board’s task is to come up with concrete suggestions for how to improve cooperation at the multilateral level, how we can ensure it is fit to meet the challenges of an unpredictable future and the urgently needed transition to more sustainable, peaceful societies. To accomplish this mission, we will rely heavily on science and expertise.

Addressing the crisis of the biosphere

SIPRI’s Environment of Peace report explores the most dangerous sets of interlocking challenges we face: the complex and unpredictable ways that climate change and other environmental crises are intertwining with more human-centred aspects of security.

Besides providing policy insights, the Environment of Peace report documents the indirect pathways linking climate change impacts and insecurity, and the interactions between climate, conflict and food security, thus continuing SIPRI’s contributions to working out how UN peace operations must adapt to climate change.

The biosphere crisis can only be successfully addressed through cooperation. Countries need to share green technologies and innovative solutions.

They need to agree on fair ways to share vital natural resources and settle disputes peacefully. There must be give and take; action in one society to mitigate impacts on another.

Countries also need to agree on fair ways to distribute the burdens, costs and benefits of a green transition. From South Asia to sub-Saharan Africa to Indigenous communities around the world, those most vulnerable to the impacts of the crisis of the biosphere are often those least responsible for causing it—something illustrated starkly most recently by the devastating floods in Pakistan.

There is a clear moral case for wealthier, industrialized countries to meet their climate finance commitments and to compensate the most affected countries for loss and damage. But there is also a strong security case for doing so. Localized insecurity can quickly spread.

From national security to common security

A logical response to such threats to their shared interests would be for countries to put differences aside and pull together. Instead, they have, by and large, followed a path of division and militarization.

Even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine this year, that was clear. SIPRI data shows large increases in global military expenditure in the last two years, as well as in arms imports to Europe, East Asia and Oceania.
All of the nuclear-armed states are modernizing or expanding their arsenals.

At the same time, we are also seeing rapid and radical developments in weapon systems, technologies and even ways of executing a conflict.
A new, expensive and risky arms race is well under way. There is an urgent need to breathe new life into nuclear disarmament, non-proliferation and arms control.

Disappointingly, the recent 10th Review Conference of the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) ended without agreement on the way forward. However, there were signs of hope.

The conference produced much to build on in the next five-year review cycle. Notably, all of the five NPT-recognized nuclear weapon states (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States) agree on the necessity of measures to reduce strategic risks.

These will be important steps. However, what is needed most of all is a shift away from the pursuit of security through military capability to investing in peace and common security. Once again, cooperation will be key.

How evidence underpins cooperation

Successful cooperation needs to be underpinned by reliable, non-partisan information and analysis. As Secretary-General Guterres declares in Our Common Agenda: ‘Now is the time to end the “infodemic” plaguing our world by defending a common, empirically backed consensus around facts, science and knowledge.’

The Secretary-General correctly characterizes ‘facts, science and knowledge’ as a public good that it is in everyone’s interest to protect. They provide valuable common ground for discussion—even when trust between the parties is lacking.

They inform effective solutions. They make it possible to verify that others are following rules and living up to commitments. They give early warning of emerging challenges and imminent dangers.

The Environment of Peace report highlights the fact that risks and uncertainty lie not just in the external challenges we face, but also in the actions taken to address them in the transition towards sustainability.

This transition needs to happen at unprecedented scale and speed, using novel solutions in an environment of uncertainty. There will inevitably be setbacks, unintended, unanticipated consequences of well-intentioned policies.

There will also be resistance, parties who need convincing that the costs justify the benefits.
To keep the transition just and peaceful will demand communication, cooperation, trust and agility to deal with unexpected risks and change course quickly to avert them.

For this, we will need to produce and disseminate even more reliable and verified information. SIPRI will continue to be a resource in this regard.

Opportunities for change

The UN General Assembly has a highly ambitious agenda for transformative change. The landmark Summit of the Future, scheduled for September 2024, has been billed as ‘the moment to agree on concrete solutions to challenges that have emerged or grown since 2015’.

The COP27—the 27th Conference of the Parties to the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change—coming in November, and the much-postponed 15th Conference of the Parties of the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity in December are other important opportunities to reduce future security risks at the multilateral level.

However important intergovernmental forums like this are, the task of tackling our interconnected challenges is continuous and society-wide. Solutions need to come at the multilateral, national and subnational levels.

And they need to engage a broad range of stakeholders, from youth to Indigenous Peoples to the private sector. Reliable information and expertise must be available to guide all of this.

I am both proud and daunted to be picking up the mantle of Chair of the SIPRI Governing Board as we confront these difficult challenges ahead.

SIPRI’s core mission as a source of freely available, reliable evidence, fair-minded analysis and balanced assessment of options, as a convenor of dialogues, and as a provider of support to the formulation and implementation of international agreements and instruments remains as important as ever.

Stefan Löfven (Sweden) is Chair of the Governing Board of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

IPS UN Bureau

 

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');  

One of the voting centers of the popular consultation held on Sunday, Sept. 18 in Asunción Mita, a town of 50,000 people in eastern Guatemala. The majority of the people who voted said no to the Cerro Blanco mine, due to its environmental impacts. CREDIt: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
ASUNCIÓN MITA, Guatemala , Sep 21 2022 (IPS)

The majority of the Guatemalan population continues to oppose mining and other extractive projects, in the midst of a scenario of socio-environmental conflict that pits communities defending their natural resources against the interests of multinational corporations.

The most recent rejection of mining projects in this Central American country took place on Sunday Sept. 18 in the town of Asunción Mita, 350 kilometers southeast of the capital of Guatemala, in the department of Jutiapa.

The “No” vote wins

Here, through a citizen consultation, 88 percent of the more than 8,503 people who voted said “no” to the operations of the Cerro Blanco gold mine, owned by Elevar Resources, a subsidiary of Canada’s Bluestone Resources.

“In my view we can’t allow this to go ahead, we are getting older, but we don’t want the children and young people to suffer from the environmental impact of the mine,” said Petronila Hernández, 55, after voting at a school on the outskirts of Asunción Mita.

Hernández added to IPS that “we don’t agree with the mine, it affects our water sources, we carry the water from the water source, and the mine contaminates it.”

Hernández was accompanied by her daughter, Marilexis Ramos, 21.

“Hopefully our ‘No’ vote will win,” said Ramos during the voting. At the end of the afternoon the counting of votes began, and by Monday Sept. 19 the results began to be clear.

Mother and daughter live in the Cerro Liso hamlet, on the outskirts of Asunción Mita, very close to the mine.

Marilexis Ramos (r), 21, voted on the continuity of the Cerro Blanco mining project, located near Asunción Mita, 350 kilometers southeast of the Guatemalan capital, in the department of Jutiapa. A full 88 percent of the more than 8,503 people who voted said “no” to the gold and silver mine. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

The Cerro Blanco underground mine was licensed to operate in 2007 for a period of 25 years, but since then it has not been able to extract gold and silver, due to unforeseen issues.

The project encountered thermal water veins in the subsoil that released heat that made it impossible to work for long enough inside the two tunnels built in the mine, activist Juan Carlos Estrada, of the Water and Sanitation Network of Guatemala, told IPS.

“The mine has been stranded for almost 15 years without extracting a single ounce of ore,” Estrada said.

However, the community struggle continues because, despite the setback it suffered in Sunday’s vote, the company still intends to operate the mine and to do so it aims to modify the original plan and turn it into an open pit mine.

People vs. transnational corporations

Guatemala, a nation of 17.4 million inhabitants, has experienced socio-environmental conflicts in recent decades as a result of the communities’ defense of their territories against the advance of mining and hydroelectric projects and other extractivist activities.

Many of the conflicts have taken place in the territories of indigenous peoples, who make up 60 percent of the total population. Members of affected communities have put up resistance and have faced crackdowns by police and soldiers.

This has earned them persecution and criminalization by the authorities.

Dalia González, of the Salvadoran movement Green Rebellion, on the banks of the Ostúa River in eastern Guatemala, talks about the impact that pollution from the Cerro Blanco mine will have on the river, which in turn will end up polluting the Lempa River in El Salvador. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

In February, IPS reported on the struggle of indigenous Maya Q’eqchi’ communities in the municipality of El Estor, on the outskirts of Lake Izabal, in the department of the same name in eastern Guatemala.

The only active mine in Guatemala operates there, as similar projects have been blocked by the communities through citizen consultations or by court rulings, after the communities requested injunctions complaining about the lack of such votes, which are required.

The nickel mine in El Estor has been operated since 2011 by the transnational Solway Investment Group, headquartered in Switzerland, after purchasing it from Canada’s HudBay Minerals.

“Almost 100 consultations have been held, in 100 municipalities around the country, and in all of them mining and hydroelectric projects, mainly, have been rejected,” said José Cruz, of the environmental collective Madreselva.

The high number of consultations expresses the level of struggle of the population and the companies’ interest in the country’s natural resources.

“The only mining project currently operating is El Estor,” Cruz told IPS. And it is still active thanks to a “mock” consultation, manipulated by the company, which apparently endorsed the mine.

The Oxec I and Oxec II hydroelectric projects have also been a source of socio-environmental conflict.

The first plant began operations in 2015 and the second has been under construction since two years later. Both are owned by the Energy Resources Capital Corporation, registered in Panama.

In 2015, local Q’eqchi indigenous communities launched a struggle against the two hydroelectric power plants on the Cahabón River, located in the municipality of Santa María de Cahabón, in the department of Alta Verapaz in northern Guatemala.

After suffering persecution for his active participation in defense of his people’s territories, Q’eqchi leader Bernardo Caal was imprisoned in January 2018 and sentenced the following November to seven years in prison by a court “without any evidence,” as denounced at the time by Amnesty International, which considered him a prisoner of conscience.

However, he was released in March 2022 for good behavior and because there was essentially no evidence against him.

An anti-mining banner hangs on the façade of the church in Asunción Mita, in eastern Guatemala. The company operating the Cerro Blanco mine called the consultation process held in the town on Sept. 18 illegal. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

Projects that pollute across borders

Although the victory of the “no” vote in Asunción Mita represents an achievement for local residents, the project still presents a pollution risk, not only for this town of 50,000 people, but also for neighboring El Salvador.

Asunción Mita is located near the border with El Salvador.

Environmental organizations in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador have warned that heavy metal pollution from the mine would end up impacting the Ostúa River on the Guatemalan side.

The waters of that river, in turn, would reach Lake Guija, on the Salvadoran side. And a segment of that lake is reached by the Lempa River, which provides water to more than one million people in San Salvador and neighboring municipalities.

The Lempa River is 422 kilometers long and its basin covers three countries: It originates in Guatemala, crosses a small portion of Honduras and then zigzags through El Salvador until flowing into the Pacific Ocean.

El Salvador passed a law in March 2017 prohibiting mining, underground or open pit, but the proximity to the Cerro Blanco mine makes it vulnerable to pollution.

“We are concerned, our main source of water is under threat,” Salvadoran activist Dalia González, of the Green Rebellion movement, told IPS.

González added that the governments of Guatemala and El Salvador have an important role to play in protecting natural resources and the health of the local population.

“Because the effects of the mines cross borders,” said the young activist on the banks of the Ostúa River, where she had arrived along with Salvadoran environmentalists and journalists after witnessing the consultation process.

González called on Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele to engage in a dialogue with his Guatemalan counterpart Alejandro Giammattei to find a solution to the problem of pollution that would also affect El Salvador.

“The situation is serious and requires urgent action,” said the Salvadoran activist.

After learning the results of the citizen consultation in Asunción Mita, the company behind the Cerro Blanco mine, Elevar Resources, called the process illegal, according to a press release made public on Monday Sept. 19.

The company’s managing director, Bob Gil, said, “this consultation process is clearly illegal and full of irregularities,” according to the statement.

In the company’s view, the process was flawed by what it called “anti-mining groups”.

“We are disappointed with the actions of these groups who use biased referendums to create doubt and uncertainty regarding responsible mining projects such as Cerro Blanco,” he added.

The consortium said the aim is to continue developing the project and to produce 2.6 million ounces of gold during the life of the mine.

Due to the problems it has had with the tunnels and the heat that prevents it from working and extracting the minerals, in November 2021 the company submitted a request to the authorities to transform the current underground mine into an open-pit mine.

The company “spoke of updating the Environmental Impact Study, but what was needed was a new study, because it was a completely different project,” said Madreselva’s Cruz.

Related Articles

• Struggle in Guatemala Offers Hope for Latin America’s Indigenous People
• Mining Grabs Up Land, Deals Blow to Agriculture in Central America

Mary Maker chairing a session on “Education in Crisis Situations – A Partnership for Transformative Actions for Learners” on the final day of the Transforming Education Summit. Credit: UN

By Naureen Hossain
United Nations, Sep 20 2022 (IPS)

Refugee youth advocate, Mary Maker, called on UN member states to honor their commitments to transform education from the foundation up to the top, starting with those living in the direst and fraught circumstances.

Maker, a South Sudanese refugee who fled her country and found hope while attending a school in Kukuma Refugee Camp in Kenya, chaired a session called “Education in Crisis Situations – A Partnership for Transformative Actions for Learners” on the final day of the Transforming Education Summit (TES).

The session focused on education and learning in crises and the forced displacement that often results from these situations.

“I am really excited about this session because this is my story. This is the story of so many other refugees,” Maker, who also supports the UNHCR, said. “And as we’ve conversed over the last few days, I hope that this Call to Action becomes actually something we can implement after this session.”

She spoke on the significance of the session, “given the increased displacement around the world, and the added need for collective effort to transform the provision and financing of quality education.”

Member states affirmed their commitment to transforming education on the third and final day of the Transforming Education Summit. The TES Leaders Day, September 19, was dedicated to the Heads of State and Government to present their National State of Commitment to the summit’s goals in Leader Roundtables. Concurrently, thematic sessions were hosted with the intent of cross-cutting priorities for transforming education and reaffirming commitments and plans for action from multiple stakeholders, including world governments, UN partners, and civil society organizations.

The session launched “Education in Crisis: A Call to Action,” a commitment to transform education systems so that they can prevent, prepare for, respond to, and recover from crises and so that all crisis-affected children have access to continuous, inclusive, and safe learning opportunities. The Call to Action asks countries, multilateral organizations, civil society groups, and education partners to work toward the agreement by improving education access and learning outcomes in equality and inclusivity; protecting and improving external financing; working together to build resilient education systems in the spirit of international cooperation; to scale and mainstream high-impact and evidence-based interventions into policy and programme efforts.

“This Commitment to Action is the result of extensive consultations with over 45 crisis-affected countries from five continents, more than 100 civil society organizations, as well as other stakeholders, including youth,” Estefania Giannini, Assistant Director-General UNESCO, said.

UN agencies, represented by its leaders, emphasized the urgency of education in crisis.

Filippo Grandi, High-Commissioner of UNHCR, spoke on the impact of compounding crises, such as climate change, famine, and armed conflict.

“Across all these underlying aspects of crises, forces of crises, you have forced displacement,” he said. “People flee or are obliged to flee their homes because there is fighting. They’re obliged to flee their homes because there is hunger, and they are now increasingly obliged to flee their homes because of climate change. More importantly, all these factors are interlinked.”

He added, “And all these faces of crisis are multipliers for vulnerability…These challenges, or crises as we should see them, challenge education.”

Due to ongoing crises, climate-induced disasters, and forced displacement, 222 million children and youth have experienced disruptions to their education, affecting their learning access or continuity.

Yasmine Sherif, Executive Director of Education Cannot Wait, is concerned that the world now has the highest number of displaced people since World War II. Credit: UN

“We have reached a historical – a sad historical – number of forcibly displaced peoples, the highest number of peoples since World War II,” said Yasmine Sherif, Executive Director of Education Cannot Wait (ECW), during a panel discussion.

“Despite the enormity of this challenge, we have to reach every one of these, and we have to make sure they have foundational learning,” said Catherine Russell, Executive Director of UNICEF.

Appealing directly to Heads of State and Government, Russell asked them to prioritize education, especially its access during times of crisis. “We need your help to deliver domestic and humanitarian funds to education. We need you to help prevent or stop attacks on education. We need your commitment to build resilient education systems so that they can withstand the future shocks that we know for sure are coming. And we need your commitment to safeguard education for the most vulnerable children.”

Member states represented in the session, including Qatar, Ecuador, South Sudan, Pakistan, Norway, Switzerland, the European Commission, and the State of Palestine, affirmed their support of the Commitment to Action, and shared their states’ implementations toward improving access to education.

“We know that education systems must be resilient enough to prevent, prepare, repel, and recover from armed conflict. Our Call to Action will hopefully do that,” said Virginia Gamba, Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict, as she closed the spotlight session.

“The alignment between national priorities and international commitments is critical to making education systems more resilient and can ensure the protection of children and their rights, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child.”

This spirit of international cooperation across multiple stakeholders will indeed be critical to transforming education on a fundamental level. In the global conversation, this will be revisited with the ECW High-Level Financing Conference, slated for 16 and 17 February 2023. The conference will take place in Geneva, with co-conveners South Sudan, Niger, Germany, and Norway.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');   Related Articles

• UN and Partners Called to Act Urgently with Education in Emergencies at Summit
• Mental Health as a Human Right Left Behind for Children in Fragile and Humanitarian Settings
• Breaking Menstruation Taboos and Leaving No Girl Behind

Between 2010 and 2020 the number of state-based armed conflicts roughly doubled (to 56), as did the number of conflict deaths, finds new report. Credit: James Jeffrey/IPS

By Baher Kamal
MADRID, Sep 20 2022 (IPS)

Day after day, the world’s scientific community, based on solid investigations, elaborates dozens of studies identifying the causes of the existing emergencies facing humanity. They also prepare understandable summaries and conclusions and propose feasible solutions to the current crises and ways to prevent major future risks.

Such studies are promptly submitted to politicians, both directly and through hundreds of summits, conferences, forums and meetings.

Are they just unable to read and understand these texts?

In combination, the security and environmental crises are creating compound, cascading, emergent, systemic and existential risks. Without profound changes in approach by institutions of authority, risks will inevitably proliferate quickly

If so, they should probably be added to the shameful finding that up to 70% of children –or nearly 250 million– are illiterate, sentenced to ignorance as revealed by numerous findings, including those of the Education Cannot Wait (ECW), the UN global fund for education in emergencies and protracted crises.

 

Unpredictable risks

Meanwhile, the world is “stumbling into a new era of unpredictable risks,” while the ongoing multiple and deepening crises have “pushed 9 out of 10 countries backwards in human development.”

Both facts unveil the failure of the world’s politicians to act for people rather than announcing decisions that end up benefiting big private businesses.

Two major reports have revealed such a stark failure. One of them was released on 8 September 2022 by UNDP–the UN Development Programme’s Human Development Report: “Uncertain Times, Unsettled Lives: Shaping our Future in a Transforming World.”

The other one “Environment of Peace: Security in a New Era of Risk” was published on 23 May this very year by the prestigious Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

 

Failure

“World leaders are failing to prepare for a new era of complex and often unpredictable risks to peace as profound environmental and security crises converge and intensify,” highlights SIPRI, the independent international institute dedicated to research into conflict, armaments, arms control and disarmament.

Its report paints a vivid picture of the escalating security crisis. For example, it notes that between 2010 and 2020 the number of state-based armed conflicts roughly doubled (to 56), as did the number of conflict deaths.

“The number of refugees and other forcibly displaced people also doubled, to 82.4 million. In 2020 the number of operationally deployed nuclear warheads increased after years of reductions, and in 2021 military spending surpassed $2 trillion for the first time ever.”

Regarding the environmental crisis, SIPRI warns that around a quarter of all species are at risk of extinction, pollinating insects are in rapid decline and soil quality is falling, while exploitation of natural resources such as forests and fish continues at unsustainable levels.

“Climate change is making extreme weather events such as storms and heatwaves more common and more intense, reducing the yield of major food crops and increasing the risk of large-scale harvest failures.”

 

Uncertain times, unsettled lives

For its part, the Human Development Report warns that the world is lurching from crisis to crisis, trapped in a cycle of firefighting and unable to tackle the roots of the troubles that confront the world.

The report argues that “layers of uncertainty are stacking up and interacting to unsettle life in unprecedented ways.”

 

Devastating impacts

The last two years have had a devastating impact for billions of people around the world, when crises like COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine hit back-to-back, and interacted with sweeping social and economic shifts, dangerous planetary changes, and massive increases in polarisation, says UNDP.

“Without a sharp change of course, we may be heading towards even more deprivations and injustices.”

For the first time in the 32 years that UNDP has been calculating it, the Human Development Index, which measures a nation’s health, education, and standard of living, has declined globally for two years in a row.

 

Universal reversal of human development

“The reversal is nearly universal as over 90 percent of countries registered a decline in their Human Development Index score in either 2020 or 2021 and more than 40 percent declined in both years, signalling that the crisis is still deepening for many.”

While some countries are beginning to get back on their feet,it adds, “recovery is uneven and partial, further widening inequalities in human development.” Latin America, the Caribbean, Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia have been hit particularly hard.

 

Scrambling

“The world is scrambling to respond to back-to-back crises. We have seen with the cost of living and energy crises that, while it is tempting to focus on quick fixes like subsidising fossil fuels, immediate relief tactics are delaying the long-term systemic changes we must make,” says Achim Steiner, UNDP Administrator.

“We are collectively paralyzed in making these changes. In a world defined by uncertainty, we need a renewed sense of global solidarity to tackle our interconnected, common challenges.”

The report explores why the change needed isn’t happening and suggests there are many reasons, including how insecurity and polarisation are feeding off each other today to prevent the solidarity and collective action to tackle crisis at all levels.

 

Insecurity and political extremism

New calculations show, for instance, that those feeling most insecure are also more likely to hold extreme political views, it also reveals.

“Even before COVID-19 hit, we were seeing the twin paradoxes of progress with insecurity and polarisation. Today, with one-third of people worldwide feeling stressed and fewer than a third of people worldwide trusting others, we face major roadblocks to adopting policies that work for people and the planet,” says Achim Steiner.

To chart a new course, the report recommends implementing policies that focus on investment — from renewable energy to preparedness for pandemics, and insurance—including social protection— to prepare our societies for the ups and downs of an uncertain world.

 

Climate and armed conflicts

The environmental crisis is increasing risks to security and peace worldwide, notably in countries that are already fragile, explains SIPRI’s Environment of Peace – Security in a new era of risk.

Indicators of insecurity such as the number of conflicts, the number of hungry people and military expenditure are rising; so are indicators of environmental decline, climate change, biodiversity, pollution and other areas, warns SIPRI.

“In combination, the security and environmental crises are creating compound, cascading, emergent, systemic and existential risks. Without profound changes in approach by institutions of authority, risks will inevitably proliferate quickly.”

Evidence shows that politicians are capable of reading and understanding those texts elaborated by economic, financial and markets experts.

Meanwhile, and despite the above and other readable – and understandable texts, they seemingly continue to neglect an essential fact, i.e., ‘By Deliberately Ignoring Risk, the World Is Bankrolling Its Own Destruction’.

 

By Anisa Ismail and Tan Yen Lian
BANGKOK / PENANG, Sep 20 2022 (IPS)

Economic recovery since the COVID-19 pandemic has been uneven amidst a cautious loosening of restrictions. But even at the height of the pandemic, it was business as usual for the tobacco industry.

Tobacco companies remain profitable, making US$ 912.3 billion in 2022 and capitalizing on the situation by promoting and selling their lethal products while convincing governments that their industry should not be penalised during the pandemic, claiming tobacco is a good investment.

This is an industry that perpetuates an annual loss of US$ 1.4 trillion in global health costs and lost productivity, amounting to 1.8% of the world’s GDP. 14% of all deaths globally (over 8 million deaths annually) are due to non-communicable diseases (NCDs) directly caused by tobacco consumption and exposure to secondhand smoke.

Yet, total healthcare spending is not prioritized enough and remains scarce in many low- and middle-income countries, leaving precious little funds for health promotion programs to counter the devious marketing tactics of the tobacco industry. In low-income countries, health expenditures as a share of government spending fell to 6.8% in 2016 from 7.9% in 2000.

Low- and middle-income countries must increase their health expenditures to achieve the SDGs. Credit: SEATCA

In addition to its destructive impact on our bodies, tobacco is also horrible for the environment. With about 1.3 billion smokers consuming an estimated 6.25 trillion cigarettes worldwide each year, tobacco smoke releases significant amounts of cancer-causing substances, poisons, and pollutants into the air.

In fact, tobacco causes significant damage throughout its cycle – from cultivation, manufacture, and distribution, to consumption and post-consumption. Cigarettes are reportedly the most pervasive single-use plastic product on Earth, costing about US$ 20 billion per year in ecosystem losses from the plastic waste that enters our oceans.

COVID-19 has been an unshakable constant in our lives for more than two years now, and it is far from over. But we cannot forget that tobacco is a pandemic too.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), investing in tobacco control offers the best returns on investment for protecting public health. The Secretariat of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) has worked with governments, the UN Development Program, and WHO to develop country-tailored investment cases that quantify the economic benefits of implementing tobacco control policy measures.

And on the flipside are the costs of inaction. Aggregated across 25 countries, these investment cases show that urgent action will potentially save 1.4 million lives and US$ 74 billion.

Tobacco control is not only essential for achieving Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Target 3.4, a one-third reduction in premature mortality from NCDs by 2030, it is also important for the achievement of all the SDGs.

182 countries are Parties to the international tobacco control treaty – the WHO FCTC – and are legally bound to allocate national funds and identify bilateral/multilateral funding sources to support the implementation of treaty measures.

However, governments are only allocating an average of US$ 15 million in annual domestic funding per country for tobacco control, only half of what is required, and mostly in high-income countries. A WHO FCTC Investment Fund was authorized in 2021 to raise additional funds to support treaty implementation as well, but finances remain tight.

Establishing a tax-based health promotion funding mechanism is an innovative way to generate sustainable and transparent financing for health and development. But it is not entirely new.

Health taxes on tobacco, alcohol, and sugar-sweetened beverages are the most cost-effective measure for reducing NCDs. These taxes reduce consumption of these products and their related healthcare costs and are a reliable domestic funding stream for health spending.

In 2021, at least 39 countries reported earmarking a percentage of tobacco taxes to be used specifically for various health promotion programs, in effect making the polluter pay for its pollution instead of cutting into existing government budgets.

Pre-emptively, dedicating tax revenues for health promotion programs can garner public support for regular tax increases. Such taxes can steadily and consistently diminish the investment gap as well as inequitable access to health promotion and disease prevention services.

In Thailand, approximately US$ 150 million in annual revenue from a 2% surcharge on tobacco and alcohol excise taxes is dedicated for the implementation of multiple health promotion plans including tobacco control, alcohol and substance abuse control, road safety, and in recent years, COVID-19 prevention.

This funding is managed by the Thai Health Promotion Foundation, an autonomous government agency formed by the passage of the 2001 Health Promotion Foundation Act.

The ThaiHealth model earmarks revenue collected from alcohol and tobacco tax surcharges for health promotion programs. Credit: SEATCA

Vietnam’s Tobacco Control Law in 2012 established the semi-autonomous Vietnam Tobacco Control Fund (VNTCF) within the Ministry of Health. VNTCF also derives its funding through a 2% compulsory contribution from excise tax levied on tobacco product manufacturers and importers.

These examples show that health promotion funding mechanisms can thrive despite a pandemic. Legislative measures are critical to establish the legitimacy of these funding mechanisms, provide transparency and accountability measures for the proper management of funds, and protect against interference from harmful businesses with vested interests.

Tobacco control makes sense from a health, economic, sustainable development, and environmental perspective. When governments are strapped for cash, dedicated health taxes are an innovative way of ensuring adequate financing for public health.

More info at: https://hpfhub.info/
#ActOnNCDs

Anisa Ismail is the Sustainability Manager & Tan Yen Lian the Knowledge and Information Manager of the Southeast Asia Tobacco Control Alliance (SEATCA).

About SEATCA

SEATCA is a multi-sectoral non-governmental alliance promoting health and saving lives by assisting ASEAN countries to accelerate and effectively implement the tobacco control measures contained in the WHO FCTC. Acknowledged by governments, academic institutions, and civil society for its advancement of tobacco control in Southeast Asia, the WHO bestowed on SEATCA the World No Tobacco Day Award in 2004 and the WHO Director-General’s Special Recognition Award in 2014.

IPS UN Bureau

 

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');  

Young climate activists from civil society organizations take part in demonstrations at the COP26 Climate Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, December 2021. Credit: UN News/Laura Quiñones

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 20 2022 (IPS)

When world leaders, numbering over 150, make their annual political pilgrimage to address the General Assembly in the third week of September, the security at the world body is exceptionally tight.

And this year is no exception.

After two years of on-again and off-again lockdowns due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the UN Secretariat is back in full swing – but in a virtual high security war zone.

The weeklong high-level meeting is scheduled to take place September 20-26, but civil society organizations (CSOs) have been barred from the UN premises September 16 through 30.

Mandeep S. Tiwana, Chief Programmes Officer at CIVICUS, the global civil society alliance, told IPS the note (http://csonet.org/?menu=86) issued by the NGO branch of UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) states that “as per standing practice”, access to the UN premises is restricted.

From 16-30 September, says the circular, UN headquarters will be accessible only to UN staff and member delegations.

“Suspension of the annual and temporary grounds passes of NGOs in consultative status with the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) during the UNGA session is not just perplexingly discriminatory but also counter-intuitive as it deprives the international community of the benefits of civil society engagement in times of immense mayhem, disruption and contestation globally,” said Tiwana.

It’s a lost opportunity for the UN and state diplomatic delegations to interact freely with civil society representatives who bring with them a wealth of expertise, on the ground experience and deep commitment to resolving global challenges in line with UN Charter principles, he argued.

“This cavalier attitude of the UN establishment once again highlights the critical need for civil society to have a champion within the system in the form of a UN Civil Society Envoy,” he noted.

Appointment of such an envoy, he pointed out, can help unblock bottlenecks that inhibit civil society engagement at the UN, promote best practices on people’s and civil society participation across the UN and also drive the UN’s outreach to civil society at the regional level.

During an event marking the 75th anniversary of the UN Charter in 2020, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said civil society groups were a vital voice at the San Francisco Conference (where the UN was inaugurated).

“You have been with us across the decades, in refugee camps, in conference rooms, and in mobilizing communities in streets and town squares across the world.”

“You are with us today as we face the COVID-19 pandemic. You are our allies in upholding human rights and battling racism. You are indispensable partners in forging peace, pushing for climate action, advancing gender equality, delivering life-saving humanitarian aid and controlling the spread of deadly weapons”.

“And the world’s framework for shared progress, the Sustainable Development Goals, is unthinkable without you”, he declared.

Still, all CSOs have been barred from the UN building during one of the most politically crucial General Assembly sessions.

Louis Charbonneau, UN Director of Human Rights Watch said: “As you know, the UN Secretariat has an unhelpful policy of barring civil society organizations (CSOs) from UN headquarters during high-level week, so we won’t be in the building. But we will be around to answer questions or do interviews, when possible, outside of UNHQ.”

“We’re also asking member states and the UN secretariat to end the senseless exclusion of civil society during one of the most important weeks on the UN calendar,” said Charbonneau.

In a subsequent email interview, he told IPS: “We have complained publicly about the terms of the UN General Assembly period ban on NGOs in the past, because it is arbitrary and sometimes extends past high-level week, which makes no sense”.

“We are now calling on the UN to end the UNGA period ban altogether.”

He said: “Our experience with the outrageous ban on civil society on the pretext of Covid when everyone else – including tourists – was allowed back in the building made us realize there’s an urgent need for civil society to push back against attempts to marginalize NGOs at the UN.”

“The way Covid was used to keep civil society out of the UN when diplomats, UN officials and journalists were allowed back in confirmed our belief that it is high time for us to push to end the UNGA high-level ban and other senseless restrictions.”

He pointed out that the Secretary-General’s “Common Agenda” is full of language about the importance of civil society.

“Now it’s time the UN made their actions reflect the rhetoric, declared Charbonneau.

Jens Martens, Director, Global Policy Forum Europe, told IPS the behavior of the UN and Member States towards NGOs has often been hypocritical.

“On the one hand, they praise NGOs and declare that engaging civil society in the work of the UN is a top priority. On the other hand, they restrict or even prevent access for NGOs, as just now during the high-level week of the UN General Assembly,” he said.

If Member States and the UN Secretariat are serious about their appreciation for NGOs, they should not treat them as potential security risks, said Martens.

“Instead, they should facilitate access and create better working conditions for NGOs at UN headquarters”.

The UN clampdown triggers the question: Are NGOs deemed security risks?

While visiting heads of state, heads of governments, foreign ministers, ambassadors and other diplomats are permitted to move around freely and avoid security checks, most UN staffers resident UN correspondents and visiting journalists are deemed security risks and their movements curtailed and subject to restrictions— while UN retirees are barred.

Incidentally, the only “terrorist attack” on the UN came from the outside, not from the inside.

When the politically-charismatic Ernesto Che Guevara, once second-in-command to Cuban leader Fidel Castro, was at the United Nations to address the General Assembly sessions back in 1964, the U.N. headquarters came under attack – literally. The speech by the Argentine-born Marxist revolutionary was momentarily drowned by the sound of an explosion.

The anti-Castro forces in the United States, backed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), had mounted an insidious campaign to stop Che Guevara from speaking.

A 3.5-inch bazooka was fired at the 39-storeyed Secretariat building by the East River while a vociferous CIA-inspired anti-Castro, anti-Che Guevara demonstration was taking place outside the U.N. building on New York’s First Avenue and 42nd street.

But the rocket launcher – which was apparently not as sophisticated as today’s shoulder-fired missiles and rocket-propelled grenades – missed its target, rattled windows, and fell into the river about 200 yards from the UN building.

One newspaper report described it as “one of the wildest episodes since the United Nations moved into its East River headquarters in 1952.”

As longtime U.N. staffers would recall, the failed 1964 bombing of the U.N. building took place when Che Guevara launched a blistering attack on U.S. foreign policy and denounced a proposed de-nuclearization pact for the Western hemisphere. It was one of the first known politically motivated terrorist attacks on the United Nations.

After his Assembly speech, Che Guevara was asked about the attack aimed at him. “The explosion has given the whole thing more flavor,” he joked, as he chomped on his Cuban cigar.

When he was told by a reporter that the New York City police had nabbed a woman, described as an anti-Castro Cuban exile, who had pulled out a hunting knife and jumped over the UN wall, intending to kill him, Che Guevara said: “It is better to be killed by a woman with a knife than by a man with a gun.”

As a longstanding former UN staffer, long retired, remarked jokingly last week: “This must be the first known instance of gender empowerment at the UN.”

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');  

By Anis Chowdhury and Jomo Kwame Sundaram
SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR, Sep 20 2022 (IPS)

Policymakers have become obsessed with achieving low inflation. Many central banks adopt inflation targeting (IT) monetary policy (MP) frameworks in various ways. Some have mandates to keep inflation at 2% over the medium term. Many believe this ensures sustained long-term prosperity.

Anis Chowdhury

The now universal 2% inflation target “was plucked out of the air”. This was acknowledged by Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ) Governor Don Brash who first adopted IT. The target was due to NZ Finance Minister Roger Douglas’ “chance remark” of achieving “genuine price stability, around 0, or 0 to 1 percent”.

IT discord
Heads of major central banks – such as the US Federal Reserve Bank (Fed), Bank of England (BoE) and German Bundesbank – committed to keep inflation at 2% soon after NZ. Although typically ‘medium-term’, IT’s high costs are portrayed as necessary, but brief. Worse, promised growth benefits have not materialized.

The Articles of Agreement of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) never endorsed any fixed inflation target. Article IV states, “each member shall: (i) endeavor to direct its economic and financial policies toward the objective of fostering orderly economic growth with reasonable price stability, with due regard to its circumstances”.

This makes clear much depends on conditions and circumstances. The sensible priority then would be to sustain prosperity with “reasonable price stability”, and not to commit to an arbitrary universal IT at any cost. Yet, many IMF officials promote the 2% target.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

During the 2008-09 global financial crisis (GFC), the IMF Managing Director appealed for more imagination in designing monetary policy, appreciating “just how intricate the global economic and financial web had become”.

For him, “Monetary policy needs to look beyond its core focus on low and stable inflation” to promote balanced and equitable growth, while minimizing adverse spill-overs on developing economies.

An IMF chief economist even asserted low inflation and economic progress was a “divine coincidence”, and insisted a 2% inflation target was too low. After the GFC, an IMF working paper argued for a long-run inflation target of 4% for advanced countries.

A Bank of Canada working paper concluded, “the current state of economic research – both empirical and theoretical – provides little basis for believing in significant observable benefits of low inflation such as an increase in the growth rate of real GDP”.

IT benefits?
Any objective consideration of actual IT experiences would have led to its rejection long ago. IT is clearly inimical to growth and equity, let alone the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Four central bank (CB) experiences offer valuable lessons about IT’s likely consequences.

The US Fed is, by far, the most important CB globally, while the BoE has been historically important. The Bundesbank has been the most inflation averse in the post-war period, while the RBNZ was the world’s IT pioneer.

NZ’s inflation during 1961-90 averaged 9%, more than the US’s 5.1% and the UK’s 8%. Yet, the mighty Fed and the venerable BoE sought to emulate the miniscule RBNZ! Germany’s well-known inflation-phobia is attributed to its inter-war ‘hyperinflation’ and its bloody aftermath. Inflation there averaged 3.4% over 1960-90, i.e., even before IT.

None achieved sustained economic prosperity despite reaching inflation targets of 2% or less. Average per capita GDP growth declined sharply in the US, UK and Germany, while rising negligibly in NZ (Table 1).

Table 1. Pre- & post-IT average per capita growth & inflation (%)

Long-term declines in their growth rates followed declining investments (Table 2). IT advocates claim high inflation causes uncertainty, thus reducing investments, but lower inflation has clearly done worse.

Table 2. Pre- & post-IT investment/GDP (%)

As the investment rate declined with IT, so did productivity growth in the UK, Germany and NZ (Table 3). While productivity growth has risen negligibly with IT in the US, it has trended down in all four economies (Figures 1-4). US hourly output grew at only 1.4% after 2004, “half its pace in the three decades after World War II”.

Table 3. Pre- & post-IT productivity growth (%)


Figures 1-4. Declining productivity growth, 1990-2021

Most advanced economies have experienced productivity slowdowns since the 1970s. With the European Central Bank’s strict IT framework, the euro zone also saw marked slowdowns in productivity growth during 1999-2019.

Declining productivity growth often becomes the pretext for depressing real wages and working conditions, compelling workers to work more to compensate for lost earnings. Productivity and growth slowdowns are seen as “secular stagnation”.

All this has been blamed on inflation. But lowering inflation has not reversed this trend, which has actually accelerated since the GFC. Many explanations have been offered, but the reasons for this failure remain moot.

IT, low inflation, tax cuts and market reforms are supposed to improve economic performance. Weaker investment and economic growth, due to contractionary macroeconomic policies, slowed US productivity growth.

Similarly, The Economist observed, “Drooping demand crimped incentives to invest and innovate”. It ascribed declining UK productivity growth to cuts in innovation investments due to “austerity policies” and “severe reduction in credit”, inter alia.

Concluding “no doubt … the cost … was huge”, it estimated, “Britain’s GDP per person in 2019 would have been £6,700 ($8,380) higher than it turned out to be” had productivity growth not fallen further after the GFC.

There is growing acknowledgement that widespread “unconditional” CB commitment to 2% inflation targets – in the face of the current inflationary upsurge – is likely to worsen slowdowns. This is likely to compound debt crises in many developing countries.

The adverse socio-economic impacts of recessions are well documented. Policy-induced recessions – supposedly to curb inflation – will compound the effects of pandemic, war and sanctions.

Pragmatism, not dogma
Central bankers should not be dogmatic. Instead, pragmatic approaches are urgently needed to address the current inflationary surges. This is especially necessary when inflation worldwide is mainly due to supply shocks.

Western policymakers must consider the adverse spill-over impacts on developing countries, already on the brink of debt crises due to protracted slowdowns. Government debt – with more higher cost commercial borrowings – has been rising since the GFC, Western ‘quantitative easing’ and Covid-19.

Almost all central bankers know it is almost impossible to achieve 2% inflation in current circumstances. Yet, they insist not raising interest rates now will cause much economic damage later.

But such claims clearly have no theoretical or empirical bases. Hence, it is recklessly dogmatic to enforce a 2% target by falsely claiming inaction would be even more harmful.

IPS UN Bureau

 

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');   Related Articles

• Stagflation Threat: Be Pragmatic, Not Dogmatic
• April Fool’s Inflation Medicine Threatens Progress
• Inflation Targeting Voodoo
• Resist Inflation Phobia Coup
• Stagflation: From Tragedy to Farce
• When Saviours Are the Problem
• Inflation Targeting Constrains Development
• Inflation Paranoia Threatens Recovery

The Mexico City government is increasing the number of electric buses in its fleet, such as the trolleybuses pictured here on a street in the south of the capital. But their energy source is still fossil fuels and the deployment of electric cars remains slow in the country. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Sep 19 2022 (IPS)

The Mexico City government began testing an elevated route for electric buses with great fanfare on Sept. 11, in a bid to promote more sustainable transport. The initiative is part of an incipient promotion of electromobility in the country, amidst pro-fossil fuel energy policies.

Mexico, a country of some 129 million people, lacks a national road transport strategy, considered vital for reducing polluting emissions and for the path to a low-carbon economy, which restricts the adoption of policies.

Experts consulted by IPS highlighted the limitations of the measures introduced regarding road transportation. “There is a lack of a coherent enabling framework and a national program to promote electric vehicles.” -- Gustavo Jiménez

“Electric mobility is still not very developed, both in terms of facilities for acquiring vehicles and infrastructure. We are not advancing as fast as other Latin American cities. There is a lack of cutting-edge projects,” Bernardo Baranda, director for Latin America of the non-governmental Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, based in Mexico City, told IPS.

Mexico City, home to more than 20 million people when its suburbs are included, seeks to promote electric public transport with the new route for an elevated track exclusively for buses. It is also pushing other initiatives, such as the conversion of buses from diesel to electric, announced in July.

Only two other major cities in the country, the western city of Guadalajara and the northern city of Monterrey, have electric public transportation buses.

In the Latin American region, capitals such as Bogota, Montevideo and Santiago de Chile have large electric public transport fleets and countries such as Chile, Costa Rica, Panama and Uruguay already have sectoral plans in the region.

The Mexican vehicle fleet exceeds 53 million units and has been constantly growing since 2000, according to figures from the National Institute of Geography and Statistics.

Sales of electric and hybrid cars are on the rise: in 2016, dealerships sold 254 electric units, compared to 1,703 in the first half of this year alone.

Self-charging hybrids that do not need to be plugged in (they use their gasoline engines to charge the batteries) have been the most popular, with the number purchased climbing from 7,490 in 2016 to 19,060 in the first half of 2022. Sales of plug-in vehicles grew from 521 to 2,263 in that same period.

Since 2018, the government’s Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) has held at least two tenders for the installation of so-called electrolineras, charging stations, in the country, where more than 2,000 points are already operating. But not all of them are working, as IPS found in a tour of several areas of the Mexican capital.

Be that as it may, the government’s plan to deploy this infrastructure has not sufficed to boost the purchase of electric vehicles.

An electric charging point in a neighborhood in south-central Mexico City. The state-owned Federal Electricity Commission has installed more than 2,000 electric vehicle charging centers in Mexico, but this and other measures have not encouraged their spread in the country. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS

Gustavo Jiménez, director of the consulting firm Grupo E-mobilitas, acknowledged “slow progress” in the deployment of public transportation, cab fleets and delivery companies, as well as vehicle assembly projects.

“For the last two years there have been no export and import tariffs for electric vehicles, which reduces the cost by 20 percent. There is also a reduction in value added tax. But progress has not been as fast as we would like. It is complicated to charge your vehicle as you drive around the country,” he told IPS.

The National Electric Mobility Strategy, which the government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador froze when he took office in December 2018, created a comprehensive framework and incentive schemes for electric vehicles.

In addition, the current government, described as “pro-fossil fuels” by environmentalists critical of its defense of hydrocarbons, maintains record levels of gasoline subsidies, which will exceed 15 billion dollars in 2022, according to official estimates.“Electric mobility is still not very developed, both in terms of facilities for acquiring vehicles and infrastructure. We are not advancing as fast as other Latin American cities. There is a lack of cutting-edge projects." -- Bernardo Baranda

Latin America’s second-largest economy is the world’s 12th biggest oil producer and 17th biggest gas producer. In terms of proven crude oil reserves, it ranks 20th and 41st, according to data from the state-owned oil giant Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex), in an industry protected by López Obrador despite the country’s climate commitments.

Among the measures of the stalled Strategy were the installation of charging infrastructure in streets and homes, the introduction of green license plates and the exemption of import and export taxes for electric vehicles.

During the 2nd Annual Meeting of the U.S.-Mexico High Level Economic Dialogue, held in Mexico City on Sept. 12, the United States invited its neighbor and trading partner to participate in an integrated electric vehicle supply chain – an essential link in the economic-environmental program implemented by the U.S. government.

White smoke

The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) lists 10 electromobility projects in the region, one of which involves the manufacture and sale of electric three-wheeled vehicles in Mexico.

Mexico City, Guadalajara and Monterrey, together with three Colombian cities and five Brazilian cities, are also participating in the TUMI E-Bus Mission project, aimed at supporting 500 cities by 2025 in their transition to the deployment of 100,000 electric buses in total.

Funded by German economic cooperation and six international organizations, the project is part of the Transformative Urban Mobility Initiative (TUMI).

The decarbonization of transportation is fundamental to the fight against the global climate crisis. In Mexico, CO2 emissions from that segment totaled 148 million tons in 2019, equivalent to 20 percent of the total, according to the government’s National Institute of Ecology and Climate Change (Inecc).

Mexico and the United States are seeking to integrate the electric vehicle manufacturing value chain. In the image, Mexico’s foreign minister, Marcelo Ebrard, shows an electric unit manufactured in Mexico in February 2022. CREDIT: Secretariat of Foreign Affairs

Estimates by the Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources put life-cycle emissions (from fuel extraction to combustion in the engine) at 358 grams of CO2 per kilometer for gasoline-burning vehicles, 166 for hybrid cars (using fuel and electricity) and 77 for solar energy users.

The study “Estimation of costs and benefits associated with the implementation of mitigation actions to meet the emission reduction targets assumed under the Paris Agreement”, presented on Sept. 13 by Inecc, indicates that six sectoral policies would contribute a mitigation of 36.5 million tons by 2030.

It also outlines 35 emission reduction actions with which the country would obtain total benefits of 295 billion dollars.

In the case of electromobility, the average cost of pollution abatement amounts to 500 dollars per ton, with an investment of nearly 5.9 billion dollars, gross benefits of 3.1 billion dollars and a reduction of 600,000 tons of CO2.

By replacing diesel buses with electric buses, the average cost would add up to 152.90 dollars per ton of CO2. The benefits of fuel savings would amount to 3.2 billion dollars.

By 2030, emissions cuts would contribute one million tons, but this potential would increase as domestic power generation incorporates more clean energy.

The CFE estimates that by 2041 some 700,000 electric vehicles will be in circulation in the country and will require 40,000 charging stations, which also means strengthening the domestic electric power grid.

Last November, during the Glasgow climate summit, Mexico adopted a voluntary goal to sell only non-polluting cars by 2035.

However, at the same time, the Mexican government has provided for the legalization of used cars coming from abroad in 2021, which experts see as a negative step in the fight against pollution.

Baranda the transportation expert said gasoline subsidies, the promotion of fossil fuels and the lack of energy transition are barriers to electromobility.

“You need public policies, at the federal and state level, such as incentives and infrastructure. Many countries are doing this. Mexico is not on the way to making good on international commitments. It’s a good opportunity to invest in electric transportation,” he said.

For his part, Jiménez questioned the current energy policy, which has an impact on sustainable mobility.

“There are no clear incentives for public transportation, significant subsidies are required. There is not so much infrastructure, there are no regulations for chargers, there are no measures for the circulation of electric cars. There is a lack of a coherent enabling framework and a national program to promote electric vehicles. Mexico has no coordination at the national level,” he complained.

The nonacceptance of the climate change crisis persists despite its increasingly visible worldwide consequences. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

By Joseph Chamie
PORTLAND, USA, Sep 19 2022 (IPS)

Many people around the world, especially those among the political far-right, do not accept the climate change crisis. Over the years their thinking, behavior, and policies dismissing climate change have largely continued and impaired global efforts to address global warming and environmental degradation.

The unequivocal findings of numerous reports on the consequences of climate change by international and national scientific committees have not been sufficient to counter climate change skepticism. On the contrary, the reactions of skeptics to the climate change reports can be summed up in the phrase “Don’t confuse me with the facts”.

The rise of right-wing populism in many countries also constitutes a potential obstacle to addressing climate change. Right-wing parties and politicians frequently voice climate change skepticism, denials, and opposition to climate change policies, such as carbon taxes.

The nonacceptance of the climate change crisis persists despite its increasingly visible worldwide consequences. It’s indeed difficult to avoid news reports of climate change events, including extreme heat, flooding, droughts, destroyed crops, wildfires, melting glaciers, rising sea levels, biodiversity loss, environmental degradation, smog, pollution, and increasing rates of human morbidity and mortality.

Even the signed petitions to government leaders from thousands of scientists from around the world warning of a climate emergency and the concerns, demonstrations, and protests of younger generations calling for urgent action have not been enough to convince skeptics of the climate change threat, especially among the political right.

In general, the majorities of most populations are concerned about the climate change crisis. A global survey by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) of public opinion in 2021 covering 50 countries and over half of the world’s population found that nearly two-thirds of those surveyed believed climate change is a global emergency.

The proportion of the population believing climate change is an emergency ranged from a low of 61 percent in sub-Saharan Africa to a high of 71 percent in Western Europe and North America. The proportions of the remaining four regions varied from 63 to 65 percent (Figure 1).

 

Source: United Nations Development Programme.

 

In addition to the UNDP study, a 2022 PEW survey of nineteen countries across North America, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region found a median of 75 percent viewing global climate change as a major threat to their country.

However, views concerning the climate change threat differed considerably across political groups. By and large, surveys find that those of the political right are less likely than those of the left to believe in the reality and anthropogenic nature of the climate change crisis.

In the 2022 PEW survey, for example, those on the political right in fourteen countries were found to be consistently less likely to consider climate change a major threat to their country than those on the political left (Figure 2).

 

Source: Pew Research Center.

 

The largest difference among those fourteen countries was in the United States where 22 percent of the political right considered climate change a major threat to their country versus 85 percent on the political left. Other countries with a large difference between those on the political right and left were Australia with 47 and 91 percent, Canada with 46 and 80 percent, and Germany with 59 and 83 percent, respectively.

Moreover, the differences in the views of political groups concerning climate change in some major countries have widened over the recent past. In the United States, for example, the difference between Republicans and Democrats has increased substantially over the past quarter century.

Near the start of the 21st century 20 percent of Republicans and 36 percent of Democrats believed that global warming will pose a serious threat in their lifetime. By 2021, the difference between Republicans and Democrats had widened substantially to 11 percent versus 67 percent, respectively (Figure 3).

 

Source: Gallup Survey.

 

Also, differing views about climate change are reflected in the statements and policies of political parties and their leaders. For example, the Vox party in Spain dismissed climate change as “a hoax”, the National Front in France promoted climate skepticism, and Sweden’s Democrats described the climate debate as “weird” in budget discussions, arguing that the seriousness of climate change is exaggerated, and scientific evidence is being distorted.

The unequivocal findings of numerous reports on the consequences of climate change by international and national scientific committees have not been sufficient to counter climate change skepticism. On the contrary, the reactions of skeptics to the climate change reports can be summed up in the phrase “Don’t confuse me with the facts”

In Germany the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) challenged the global scientific consensus on climate change, describing it as “hysteria”. In addition, the AfD abandoned the previous cross-party consensus on the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)

In the United States, the world’s second largest emitter of CO2 producing about 14 percent of the world’s CO2 emissions, the former Republican president said that he was not a believer in man-made global warming, called climate change “a hoax” invented by China, and said scientists were “misleading us” on climate change. Moreover, he dismissed federal scientific reports on climate change and sought to roll back climate regulations, including increasing U.S. coal mining and reconsidering fuel efficiency standards for vehicles.

In China, the world’s top emitter of CO2 producing about 30 percent of the world’s CO2 emissions, some report that the Communist Party’s climate change skeptics are mostly shunned and may chatter in the shadows. After decades of rejecting climate change and its visible consequences, such as choking smog hanging over most of the country, no higher-up Chinese officials are saying that climate change is a hoax and while some may have that view, they won’t say it.

In India, which the IPCC highlights as a vulnerable hotspot, some find politicians denying or ignoring climate change. They note that in the election manifestos of the two leading national parties, the Indian National Congress and the BJP, neither of them mentioned the Paris Climate Change Agreement. Also at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, India reportedly found the IPCC’s recent report too gloomy and requested a section on mitigation be removed.

A preliminary draft of the Glasgow pact called on countries to “accelerate the phasing out of coal and subsidies for fossil fuels”. In the final negotiations, however, India and China, whose coal-fired power stations provide approximately 70 and 60 percent of their electricity, respectively, said they would agree only to “phase-down unabated coal” and the phase-out of inefficient fossil fuel subsidies.

In addition, when heading to COP26, Australia, Japan, and Saudi Arabia were among those countries lobbying the United Nations “to play down the need to move rapidly away from fossil fuels”. Some wealthy nations also questioned paying more to poorer states to move to greener technologies.

In preparatory meetings for the November COP27 climate summit in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, African nations pushed back against abrupt moves away from fossil fuels. They stressed the need to avoid approaches that encourage abrupt disinvestments from fossil fuels, which would threaten Africa’s development. For example, Nigeria, Africa’s largest population, indicated that gas was a matter of survival for the country.

The latest report of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) shows greenhouse gas emissions are continuing to rise. The IPCC report also states that current plans to address climate change are not ambitious enough to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, which is a threshold necessary to avoid even more catastrophic impacts.

A number of social and psychological explanations have been offered for climate change crisis nonacceptance and skepticism, especially among the right-wing conservatives. In the past, the lack of knowledge about the causes of climate change was believed to play a major role. More recently, political ideology and party identification are believed to strongly influence how people selectively seek and interpret information about climate change.

Political beliefs and motivations have also been found to guide people’s attention, perceptions, and understanding of climate change evidence and mitigation efforts. In addition, some are not willing to accept the climate change crisis and proposed mitigation measures because they challenge their need to protect existing socioeconomic structures and traditional lifestyles, raise their anxieties about declines in living standards, and threaten development efforts, particularly in less developed countries.

In sum, it is certainly the case that the majority of most populations worldwide, especially the younger generations, are concerned about the climate change crisis. However, it is also the case that despite the overwhelming unequivocal evidence, many people, especially far-right conservatives, continue their nonacceptance of the climate change crisis.

Such a political divide with vocal opposition from the political far-right with the continuing support, political lobbying, and extensive efforts of various extractive industries is worrisome and consequential. It undermines global plans to address climate change and thwarts more ambitious efforts to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the goal set in the Paris Agreement to avert the worst effects of global warming

Joseph Chamie is a consulting demographer, a former director of the United Nations Population Division and author of numerous publications on population issues, including his recent book, “Births, Deaths, Migrations and Other Important Population Matters.”

 

UN General Assembly Hall. This year’s meeting of world leaders is scheduled to take place September 20-26. Credit: UN Photo/Manuel Elías

By James Paul
NEW YORK, Sep 19 2022 (IPS)

The high-level segment of the UN General Assembly (UNGA) is famous for its fiery speeches and the colorful personalities assembled in the GA Hall. But much more goes on beyond the hall itself –the frenzy of the press in the broadcast trucks, security personnel on every sidewalk, military aides in dress uniforms, and an endless round of receptions and parties of every kind.

One of the best-known events in this vast theater is the showy motorcade that brings the President of the United States to the UN. Motorcycles from the New York police department, fifty or more in all, roar along in advance of the main presidential limousines. Police barricades line the streets. The sirens and roar of the engines reverberate wherever they go.

The motorcade makes a great impression as it approaches UN Headquarters. No other leader comes even close to such a mighty entry scene. The UN itself faces temporary paralysis as the Presidential security system takes over.

Once, I was standing on the corner of First Avenue and 45th Street when I saw a high-level UN official hurrying up. A policeman stopped him as he tried to get past the barricade and cross the avenue.

“No one crosses the street now,” said the cop. “But I’m Under Secretary General Peter Hansen,” the man replied, “and I have a meeting in ten minutes with the Secretary General.”

“Sorry, buddy,” said the cop, “I have my orders and no one, not even God Himself, goes across this avenue until I say so.” Hansen had to wait for at least twenty minutes until the US President arrived and disappeared inside. Then the Under Secretary-General was finally allowed to go across and carry on with his business.

The impression made by a grand entry like this is well-known in the world of politics. During the colonial era in India, the British Viceroy famously entered the city of Delhi on grand occasions seated with his wife on an enormous, elaborately-bedecked elephant, accompanied by a whole cavalcade of other elephants, carrying maharajas and senior British officials.

The grandest of these events were reserved for the investiture of the British sovereign and were known as darbars. Today, motorcycles create the awe and the President gets a smooth ride in an armored limousine.

Hundreds of lunches, dinners and grand receptions take place during the high-level period. The most unusual event I ever attended was a reception held in the Central Park Zoo, in honor of Denis Sassou Nguesso, the President of the Republic of Congo.

The Wildlife Conservation Society, operator of the zoo, put on the event to “thank” the Congolese strongman for accepting a large sum of money to “protect” a part of the Congolese rainforest. The reception took place outdoors, around the famous sea lion pool. There were African drums, costumed dancers, musicians playing flutes, bright-colored spotlights and a very restricted guest list.

As I strolled around the pool, chatting with a few of the ambassadors present, I noticed a man standing at some distance from the others, apparently by himself. I walked over to speak to him when suddenly four heavily-armed security guards jumped out of the shadows and confronted me, their automatic weapons pointed menacingly.

I soon realized I was heading towards President Sassou Nguesso himself, in his military dress uniform. His scowl turned to a smile and he waved away the guards, who disappeared again into the trees as I stepped forward. After some pleasantries about protecting rainforests, I took my leave. From Fifth Avenue, as I headed home, I could still hear the drums and see the orange spotlights.

What were the sea lions thinking, I wondered?

Jim Paul was longtime Executive Director of Global Policy Forum, based across the avenue from UN Headquarters. He was founder of the NGO Working Group on the Security Council and the Working Group on Food and Hunger. He was an editor of the Oxford Companion to Politics of the World and his most recent book titled Of Foxes and Chickens: oligarchy and global power in the UN Security Council.

IPS UN Bureau

 

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');  

The leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Yasser Arafat, arrived at UN Headquarters by helicopter. A view of the helicopter as it approached the North Lawn of the UN campus on 13 November 1974. But Arafat was denied a US visa for a second visit to the UN in 1988. Credit: UN Photo/Michos Tzovaras

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 19 2022 (IPS)

When the United Nations decided to locate its 39-storeyed Secretariat in New York city, the United States, as host nation, signed a “headquarters agreement” in 1947 not only ensuring diplomatic immunity to foreign diplomats but also pledging to facilitate the day-to-day activities of member states without any hindrance, including the issuance of US visas to enter the country.

But there were several instances of open violation of this agreement by successive US administrations.

Stephen Zunes, Professor of Politics and International Studies at the University of San Francisco, who has written extensively on the politics of the United Nations, told IPS the U.S. broke its commitment to the UN by refusing to allow Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), to come to New York to speak, forcing the entire General Assembly to convene in Geneva back in 1988.

““And there is the periodic US media obsession with visits by foreign leaders Americans love to hate, such as (Iranian President) Ahmadinejad (while ignoring more moderate Iranian leaders before and since speaking of peace and reconciliation),” said Zunes.

And, of course, there are the bizarre and misleading addresses by various U.S. presidents over the years, he added

The move to Geneva was a first in UN history– but it provided a less-hostile political environment for the PLO leader— as the General Assembly, the UN’s highest policy-making body, stood defiant and delivered a resounding slap to the US, momentarily abandoning its New York city home.

Palestine is one of two permanent, non-member observer states, the other being the Holy See (Vatican).

Arafat, who first addressed the UN in 1974, took a swipe at Washington when he prefaced his statement by saying “it never occurred to me that my second meeting with this honorable Assembly, would take place in the hospitable city of Geneva”.

Meanwhile, there were reports last week that visas for Russian diplomats, including Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, were either denied or delayed in the run-up to the high-level meeting of the General Assembly September 20-26.

Asked about the complaints by the Russians, UN Spokesperson Stephane Dujarric told reporters last week: “This is an issue that we have repeatedly brought up with the Host Country”.

“This is an issue that was raised to us by the Russian Federation. I think the Secretary General feels very much that visas should be delivered to the Russian delegation and to delegations who have business to be done at the United Nations, especially during the General Assembly.”

Asked at what level this was being discussed, he said: “It’s one that we have been repeatedly raising because, as you say, it’s been going on for quite some time. The Legal Counsel is the point person on this”.

“It’s done through our legal office because they support the Host Country committee, but I know this is an issue the Secretary General, I think, has raised in a number of phone conversations with senior US officials, as well, and one that has been raised with him by Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov, as well as the Russian Permanent Representative Nebenzia.”

During his first visit in 1974, the PLO leader avoided hundreds of pro and anti-Arafat demonstrators outside the UN building by arriving in a helicopter which landed on the North Lawn of the UN campus adjoining the East River.

Arafat was escorted by security men into the UN building and to the Secretary-General’s 38th floor where he spent the night in a make-shift bedroom.

But that bedroom had not been used for years, and the color of water was brown when the bathroom’s faucet was opened. Mercifully, it was not an attempt by Israeli intelligence to poison the PLO leader.

There was also a legendary story of how Arafat, who was on an Israeli hit-list, never slept on the same bed on two consecutive nights – in order to outwit assassins trying to kill him in Israeli-occupied Palestinian territory.

But whatever the reason, Arafat spent only a single night in the UN building.

Since Arafat, several political leaders—mostly antagonistic towards the US or heading regimes under American sanctions– have either been denied visas or implicitly declared persona non grata (PNG).

As a result, heads of state from “rogue nations,” including North Korea’s Kim Il Sung, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Syria’s Hafez al Assad, never addressed the UN – and perhaps never tried for a US visa either, which may have been refused.

When former Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, accused of war crimes, was refused a US visa to attend the high-level segment of the General Assembly sessions in September 2013, Hassan Ali, a senior Sudanese diplomat, registered a strong protest with the UN’s Legal Committee.

“The democratically-elected president of Sudan had been deprived of the opportunity to participate in the General Assembly because the host country, the United States, had denied him a visa, in violation of the U.N.-U.S. Headquarters Agreement.”

“It was a great and deliberate violation of the Headquarters Agreement,” he said.

The refusal of a visa to the Sudanese president was also a political landmine because al-Bashir had been indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court (ICC).

But the question that remained answered was: Does the United States have a right to implicitly act on an ICC ruling when Washington is not a party to the Rome Statute that created the ICC?

Meanwhile, some of the military or autocratic leaders who addressed the UN in a bygone era included Fidel Castro of Cuba, Col Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya, Amadou Toure of Mali (who assumed power following a coup in 1991 but later served as a democratically elected President), and Jerry Rawlings of Ghana (who seized power in 1979, executed former political leaders but later served as a civilian president voted into power in democratic elections).

Libyan leader Qaddafi, made a dramatic appearance at the UN in September 2009.

In its report, the London Guardian said he “grabbed his 15 minutes of fame at the UN building in New York and ran with it. He ran with it so hard he stretched it to an hour and 40 minutes, six times longer than his allotted slot, to the dismay of UN organizers”.

Qaddafi lived up to his reputation for eccentricity, bloody-mindedness and extreme verbiage, said the Guardian, as he tore up a copy of the UN charter in front of startled delegates, accused the Security Council of being an al-Qaida like terrorist body, called for George Bush and Tony Blair to be put on trial for the Iraq war, demanded $7.7 trillion in compensation for the ravages of colonialism on Africa, and wondered whether swine flu was a biological weapon created in a military laboratory.

Incidentally, according to one news report, there were 112 different spellings of the Libyan leader’s name, both in English and Arabic, including Muammar el-Qaddafi, Muammar Gaddafi, Muammar al-Gathafi, Muammar El Kadhafi, Moammar el Kazzafi, Moamer, El Qathafi, Mu’Ammar, Gadafi, and Moamar Gaddafi, amongst others.

The Wall Street Journal ran a cartoon making fun of the multiple spellings, with a visiting reporter, on a one-on-one interview in Tripoli, told the Libyan leader: ”My editor sent me to find out whether you are Qaddafi, Khaddafi, Gadafi, Qathafi or Kadhafi?”

This article contains excerpts from a book on the UN—a motley collection of hilarious anecdotes– titled “No Comment – and Don’t Quote Me on That,” available on Amazon. The link to Amazon via the author’s website follows: https://www.rodericgrigson.com/no-comment-by-thalif-deen/

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');  

Aisha Khurram, a youth advocate from Afghanistan, told the Transforming Education Summit that despite suicide bombings and terrorist attacks, she continued her education. She reminded delegates that education was important as food, water, and shelter to young people.

By Naureen Hossain
United Nations, Sep 18 2022 (IPS)

Suicide bombings shattered Aisha Khurram’s school, and her university was attacked by terrorists – but despite learning in an environment where the walls were colored by blood spatter, it never shook her determination to be educated.

Khurram, a youth advocate from Afghanistan, shared her experiences at the Transforming Education Summit (TES) session on “Education and learning in periods of emergencies and protracted crises.”

The session was hosted by UNICEF, UNESCO, UNHCR, Education Cannot Wait (ECW), Global Partnership for Education, and member states South Sudan and Ecuador. It took place at the UN Headquarters in New York on the second day of the summit, dubbed “Solutions Day”.

“Don’t be surprised when I tell you that I survived by chance during all those years,” Khurram said. “My school was shattered by suicide bombing attacks multiple times, and my university was attacked by terrorists, who shot at students right in the midst of lectures. And I remember sitting in a place where windows had been shattered, and whose walls had been colored with students’ blood splashed on them.”

No matter the circumstances, she was determined to continue her education.

“But those bullets, bombs, and attacks, they never stopped us from pursuing our education. Because we knew what the consequence would be. We knew what was at stake. We have seen firsthand. How the absence of education fosters insecurity and instability in Afghanistan.”

The second day of the summit was dedicated to launching or scaling up initiatives by the UN and its partners that are in line with the five Summit Thematic Action tracks, goals that spotlight areas that require greater attention, such as designing more safe and inclusive schools and the financing of education.

In the context of education in times of crisis, the purpose of the session was to solidify commitments from member states to implement high-impact, evidence-based solutions and to mobilize partners to support member states-led actions within clearly set time frames.

Early on, the session mooted the Commitment to Action: Education in Crisis, a proposal for the measures needed to transform education across all stages of planning and implementation during times of emergencies. This would ensure education for the most marginalized and vulnerable children and youth affected by emergencies.

With its many speakers and diverse experiences what was plainly made clear was that education had to be treated and delivered with the same level of necessity and urgency as securing food, clean water, and health in times of crisis.

The session was moderated by the Director of Inter-agency Network for Education in Emergencies and Co-Chair, Geneva Hub for Education in Emergencies, Dean Brooks.

“The purpose of this session will be to see how will we generate the commitments needed from partners, and to mobilize action,” he said.

The speakers present represented the member states and their partners among UN agencies, civil society organizations, and advocates.

Khurram also spoke on the current state of education in Afghanistan in the wake of the Taliban insurrection in August 2021, reminding those present that over 60% of the 4.2 million children out of school were girls. Girls have been barred from returning to school at the secondary level, a move that has drawn the global condemnation of the Taliban.

“An education crisis is a humanitarian crisis,” Khurram said. “Education is as important as food, water, and shelter to young people.”

ECW Executive Director Yasmine Sherif called on member states and partners to recognize that education in humanitarian crises was underfunded. Credit: ECW

ECW Executive Director Yasmine Sherif told the session it was urgent that crises, like those in Afghanistan, were resolved.

“Because of the multilateralists that we have in the United Nations… we can access, we can talk to the de-facto authorities in Afghanistan. We can speak to the different warring parties, we can follow the different populations; the children and the youth are our number one,” she said. “We are able to reach those furthest left behind.”

“The UN has a three-decade-long coordination system that brings together civil society, co-led by the ministry of education, and the United Nations. So we bring everyone to work together, rather than compete, in one joint program.”

ECW research has shown that forced displacement caused by emergencies brought on by environmental or climate-induced disasters, armed conflict, and the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the education of over 222 million children. This includes 78.2 million out-of-school and at least 120 million students who are in school but are behind in their reading and mathematics proficiency.

The education sector was seriously underfunded. It only received 21% of the funds requested in 2021. In that same year, 2.5% of global humanitarian financing was allocated to education, which was below the target of 4%.

This speaks to the urgency in financing education to reach out to the most vulnerable and marginalized children and youth at this time, now more than ever. It is what makes multi-stakeholder participation and cooperation crucial to transforming education.

“Education has been underfunded in times of humanitarian crises… We need to deliver education as development in the humanitarian context. That requires ability, it requires speed, and it requires financing,” Sherif said adding that an estimated 1.5 billion USD would be needed to reach up to 20 million children by funding agencies and programs working in vulnerable areas.

Member States representatives also spoke on the necessity to protect education in times of crisis.

“Education is more than about the right to learn,” said Buthaina bint Ali Al-Nuaimi, Qatar’s Minister of Education and Higher Education. “It provides stability… We must place protection of children and youth rights.”

“We cannot see education as a separate component to health, clean water, sanitation, and food,” said Maria Brown Pérez, Ecuador’s Minister of Education.

This session will prepare member states and partners to commit to the Commitment to Action, which will pave the way for the Spotlight Session on Crisis Situations on the Leaders’ Day of the summit on September 19.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');   Related Articles

• Mental Health as a Human Right Left Behind for Children in Fragile and Humanitarian Settings
• Funding Urgently Needed for Children’s Education in Conflict Areas—ECW Director
• Urgent Global Call to Save 222 Million Dreams for Children Impacted by Crises

By Yasmine Sherif
NEW YORK, Sep 16 2022 (IPS-Partners)

Leaders from across the world are uniting at the UN Secretary-General’s Transforming Education Summit to address a global education crisis that threatens to derail decades of development gains and is depriving millions of girls across the world of their inherent human right to access a quality education.

Yasmine Sherif

As we mobilize financial resources, listen to the world’s youth, identify needs and solutions, and work collectively to elevate education to the top of the global political agenda, we must not forget the 222 million crisis-impacted children and adolescents worldwide. They are left furthest behind and they urgently need our support. Education Cannot Wait’s ground-breaking analysis highlights that about 78 million of these crisis-impacted children are out of school, and close to 120 million are in school but not learning. These shocking figures cannot be allowed to represent the 21st century.

Caught in conflicts and protracted crises, displaced by climate change, and fighting to survive in some of the harshest and most inhumane conditions on the planet, these girls and boys need our urgent and unwavering support.

We need to unite in action to deliver on the commitments that will be made at this seminal Summit to ensure girls and boys in places like Bangladesh, Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, Pakistan, South Sudan, Syria, the Sahel, Ukraine, Yemen and beyond are guaranteed their human right of a 12-year quality education.

This is our commitment to ensure and improve equitable inclusive education and learning outcomes, to protect and improve external financing, to work together in the spirit of multilateral and organizational cooperation to build crisis-resilient education systems, and to scale and mainstream high-impact and evidence-based interventions into results and sustainable impact.

Education Cannot Wait, as the UN’s global fund for education in emergencies and protracted crises, champions these transformational approaches designed to be responsive in the midst of brutal crises by delivering with humanitarian speed and developmental depth to ensure no child or adolescent is left behind.

We urge world leaders to make good on our promises as outlined in the Sustainable Development Goals, Charlevoix Declaration, Safe Schools Declaration and other international accords, and support us in realizing 222 Million Dreams for an education, and 222 Million Dreams to use that education to make the world a better one than the world in which they suffer today.

Yasmine Sherif is Director of Education Cannot Wait.

Vertical farm in Finland. Credit: Creative Commons.

By Esther Ngumbi
URBANA, Illinois, USA, Sep 16 2022 (IPS)

Cities across the world including New Jersey and  California, a State that is home to a multi-billion dollar agricultural industry, have continued to experience climate change linked extreme events including scorching temperatures, extreme heat events, heavy storms and flooding with devastating impacts on agriculture, food security,  and  food systems.

Challenges in agriculture and food systems, particularly in urban areas and cities around the world, present an opportunity to re-imagine urban agriculture and increase production and processing of food in and around urban areas.  Doing so could feed billions, but it will take investment, collaboration, research, and innovation.

The growth in vertical farming and urban farms and the accompanying research evidence demonstrating that urban farming can be highly productive is a good trend that should have support by governments, private industry, philanthropists, NGO and research institutions and universities

Promisingly, there are several innovative approaches to growing food in urban areas around the world that are already helping. One example is vertical farming that uses abandoned buildings, warehouses, and skyscrapers to grow food. Other approaches include growing food in trendy rooftop gardens.

In New Jersey, Aerofarms, for example, has the capacity to produce approximately 19,000 pounds of vegetables annually. In Chicago, Wilder Fields, a vertical farm has the capacity to produce 25 million heads of fresh lettuce.

These urban growing food approaches that are no longer a futuristic concept  have several advantages to traditional farming.  First, these approaches do not need soil. Instead, they use other growing medium such as hydroponics and other nutrient enhanced growth medium. Second, because production happens indoors with no definitive growing seasons, reliable production can take place all year round. Third, vertical farms use less water and have short production times.

Moreover, fresh food grown in vertical farms travels fewer miles to the grocery stores as opposed to conventional produce that must travel thousands of miles by plane or truck. Because the crops are shielded from several challenges that conventional agriculture faces including extreme weather events, and crop devouring insect pests, vertical agriculture could see increased yields and food production. Vertical farming can indeed meet food production needs in an environmentally sustainable way.

Urban city consumers have also contributed to an increase in vertical farms, as they are increasingly taking into consideration the ecological footprint of the food they are consuming.

Encouragingly, in recent years, there has been a gradual increase in the number of vertical farming enterprises, particularly in Asia and North America. In the US, there are several vertical farms including AeroFarms, Green Spirit Farms, BrightFarms, Gotham Greens, Freight Farms, Chicago, New Jersey, and Detroit.

The growth in vertical farming and urban farms and the accompanying research evidence demonstrating that urban farming can be highly productive is a good trend that should have support by governments, private industry, philanthropists, NGO and research institutions and universities.

To encourage continuous growth in vertical farming and growing food in urban areas, and make urban areas agricultural powerhouses, there needs to be sustained research, innovation, and funding support from diverse funding sources.

The good news is that some of the key things that need to happen to sustain growth of vertical farming are happening.  The United States Department of Agriculture, for example, convened a stakeholder workshop that solely focused on vertical agriculture and sustainable urban ecosystems  and further held small group discussion that focused on many areas that are critical to thriving vertical farms such as plant breeding, engineering and pest management.  Additionally, USDA released a call for funding, to support research on urban agriculture.

At the same time, there has been an increase in peer reviewed articles and research about vertical farming. This includes research addressing its economic feasibility, system designs and optimizations, breeding plant varieties, optimizing nutrients used in vertical farming,  use of robotics technology to automate harvesting , and  effective and best practices for management of pests.

Of course, to upscale vertical farming and to ensure that all cities, and not just a few cities, have at least one vertical farm, it will take much more. Among the things that are needed is the formation of task forces consisting of diverse stakeholders that will be charged with coming up with strategic plans, policies, recommendations, and assessments of what it will take to grow urban farms in cities. In the US, for example, the White House in conjunction with the USDA and all elected city mayors and public and private research universities can join efforts.

Complementing the above efforts is the need to keep building databases of urban agriculture initiatives, encourage more private sector funding, create policies to support the sustainable growth of urban farms including vertical farms, and launch urban agriculture research initiatives that are housed in universities that are located near cities.

Time is ripe to re-imagine urban agriculture with vertical farming. The ongoing global food crisis, particularly in urban areas, presents a unique opportunity to grow and strengthen this revolutionary and sustainable food production approach.

Dr. Esther Ngumbi is an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, and a Senior Food Security Fellow with the Aspen Institute, New Voices.

Hannah Sakamo's dead goat is surrounded by Prosopis juliflora plants. The invasive species is a threat to rural livelihoods. Photo: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

By Joyce Chimbi
Nairobi, Sep 16 2022 (IPS)

Hannah Sakamo is worried. She is about to lose yet another goat in less than a month. A pastoralist in Eldepe village, Marigat Sub-County, Baringo County in Kenya’s Rift Valley region, her household’s lifeline is at stake.

The goat in question, whose days are now numbered, has consumed pods, or the fruits of the invasive species, Prosopis juliflora, locally known as mathenge.

Mathenge is a small, prolific seeding, fast-growing, drought-resistant, evergreen tree of tropical American origin that produces masses of pods containing small tough smooth seeds. It is by far considered to be one of the world’s worst invasive plant species.

“You can tell when a goat is on its death bed by just looking at the mouth. The goat is unable to close its mouth, eat or drink water because the mouth shakes and slides from one side to the other when the goat attempts to eat. At least seven goats die every single day in six surrounding villages because of eating these pods,” Sakamo tells IPS.

The invasive species has increasingly invaded Kenya’s semi-arid and arid ecosystems significantly affecting biological diversity and rural livelihoods.

Fredrick Chege, an independent researcher in invasive wild species, says that of all livestock, goats and cattle are the most vulnerable. He tells IPS that the consumption of pods can cause neurotoxic damage to the central nervous system in mostly cattle and goats.

“Whenever affected goat attempts to chew cud per the course with the digestive process of herbivores, you will see it vomiting a green liquid and the mouth shakes uncontrollably. Digestion can therefore not be completed,” he expounds.

Once these symptoms become visible, the goat will die from starvation in a matter of days. Pastoralists do not consume meat from an animal that is either starving or ill even during a drought. It is considered taboo.

Fish from Baringo County, he says, are not spared “fishermen at Lake Baringo, and Bogoria in the Rif Valley have become accustomed to catching deformed fish. Fish without eyes because the thorns from the Prosopis julliflora species have invaded the lakes poking their eyes.”

According to research by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Prosopis juliflora is one of many invasive species in this East African nation. Research shows there are at least 34 species; 11 arthropods, 10 microorganisms, four vertebrates, and nine plant species including Prosopis julliflora.

“Mathenge is extremely difficult to control because it thrives in most soils such as rocky, sandy, poor, and saline soils. It has very deep roots that can reach the sub-surface waters. It is impossible for it to co-exist with other vegetation because it absorbs significant amounts of water,” Chege expounds.

“Even when you cut Prosopis trees above ground, they regenerate very fast, forming thorny thickets that are nearly impossible to penetrate especially along water courses, roadsides, flood plains, and generally on areas that are not inhabited or dormant land.”

Prosopis Juliflora was originally introduced to Kenya’s dry land areas as a solution to deforestation and to provide firewood. It did not take long for the solution to become a problem that has now gotten out of hand by displacing native plants and endangering pastoral economies.

Once the species has taken root, Chege says it is very difficult, labor-intensive, and expensive to successfully remove it because of regeneration from the soil seed bank as well as due to regeneration of trees from cut stems.

Prosopis juliflora seeds also pass easily through the gut of livestock and are deposited in the soil from where they thrive within a short period. Similarly, children enjoy eating pods because they are sugary and sweet and they too, deposit these seeds in the soil because they chew the pods and spit out the seeds.

Government data shows Prosopis juliflora spreads at a rate of between 4 % and 15 % per year. The average cost of clearing a Prosopis thicket three to four years old in a plot of 10X10, Sakamo indicates, falls at somewhere between $10 and $30. An expensive venture because the invasive species can begin to sprout again in a matter of four weeks.

Research shows that so prolific is the species that since the first herbarium specimen-a collection of preserved plant specimens maintained for scientific purposes- was collected in 1977 in Kenya’s coastal region, Prosopis juliflora can now be found- at varying degrees of invasion-in seven of eight regions in this East African nation.

Prosopis juliflora was declared a noxious weed in Kenya in 2008 under the Suppression of Noxious Weeds Act (CAP 325), meaning that it is considered to be harmful to the environment or animals.

Under this Act, Chege says, the Minister of Agriculture can compel land owners to remove any declared noxious weeds such as Prosopis juliflora from their land or have it otherwise removed.

Elvis Kipkoech, a charcoal trader, says that the government allowed the use of Prosopis juliflora for charcoal production as a means to control it through utilization.

This method, he tells IPS, has not worked because unscrupulous charcoal producers mix the invasive species with other tree species which has led the government to place a total ban on charcoal production in Kenya.

Against a backdrop of challenges to bring this invasive enemy under control, a solution is in sight in the form of the National Strategy and Action Plan for Management of Prosopis Juliflora in Kenya.

The strategy aims at effectively managing the invasive species through a combination of biological, chemical, mechanization, and utilization methods since Prosopis can be used not only in charcoal burning but to produce poles for furniture making and fencing.

Meanwhile, Sakamo helplessly watches as the negative effects of notorious mathenge suck the life out of her beloved goat; she urges the government to hasten access to these solutions and is hopeful that this will be her final loss.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');   Related Articles

• Building Resilience in the Philippines Through Sustainable Livelihoods and Psychosocial Support
• Mental Health as a Human Right Left Behind for Children in Fragile and Humanitarian Settings
• Unleashing Mangrove Superpower Through Soft Coastal Engineering

Vernae Gallaread speaks with a fellow The Arc San Francisco member. Credit: The Arc San Francisco

By SeiMi Chu
San Francisco, Sep 16 2022 (IPS)

Vernae Gallaread aspires to teach sign language to people with disabilities and to families who cannot afford sign language lessons for their children.

Gallaread has an intellectual and developmental disability, but that doesn’t stop her from pursuing her dreams. She initially self-taught herself sign language through a book that her mother bought.

At The Arc San Francisco, where she works as a receptionist and a board member, Gallaread develops her sign language skills through a class the organization offers.

As a board member, Gallaread can voice her opinions and discuss the organization’s policies, improvements, and participants’ ideas.

“The Arc San Francisco has impacted my life because I got to show my independence. They taught me to have confidence in myself, be a self-advocate, and speak up for myself,” says Gallaread.

The Arc San Francisco’s mission is to partner with adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities and transform communities through lifelong learning and self-determination.

The organization offers person-centered services that include workforce development, education, wellness programs, and even art and recreational programs. Workforce is one of its pillars but not the main one.

The Arc San Francisco’s workforce development program is focused on competitive integrated employment – meaning that participants get competitive jobs compensated as they would for a more traditional candidate.

Clifford Phillips received the 2019 James Latin Self-Advocacy Memorial Award from the 23rd Golden Gate Self Advocacy Conference. Credit: The Arc San Francisco

Participants go through a paid internship before deciding what field they are interested in pursuing. By collaborating with a team of specialized job developers, The Arc San Francisco encourages participants to look at their needs—whether they need full-time or part-time employment, their skill sets, and their passions. After making their decision, participants will receive help from a job developer navigating their job search.

“What we have found in the last eight to 10 years is that we have corporations coming to us, looking for talent. We’ve been pounding the pavement looking for jobs for folks. This has been an interesting development. That we’re seen as a talent pipeline, which is wonderful,” Kristen Pederson, Executive Director at The Arc San Francisco, reflecting on its workforce development program.

In addition to its workforce development program, The Arc San Francisco has an adult education program. Depending on the participant’s needs, the organization will provide individualized services for its participants and ensure that they are reaching the goals that they have set for themselves.

Clifford Phillips, a participant at The Arc San Francisco with an intellectual and developmental disability, is a member of the adult education program. He volunteers for the homeless, sings as part of the gospel choir, and shops at Safeway for his fellow participants.

Through the organization, Phillips teaches a black history class, in which Gallaread is also enrolled. He dreams of becoming a teacher who will stand up for everyone and make a change.

“People out there don’t care about us. When people tease us, I will stand up for myself. I want to help people and be a strong African American man who will stand up for everybody,” Phillips says, articulating his passion.

California is the only state that has mandated services for people with developmental disabilities. The Lanterman Developmental and Disabilities Services Act was enacted in 1969. This law states that services and supports are “available to persons with developmental disabilities, including innovative services and supports, the standard agreement contract between the department and regional centers and purchase-of-service policies, and information and training on protecting the rights of consumers at administrative hearings.”

People who have disabilities can go to regional centers in California and qualify for different services that the centers offer, such as counseling, educational training, family support, and many others.

Ramakrishna joined HopeTHRIFT in 2019. Despite his disability in being unable to walk independently, he gained confidence through interacting with strangers while working at the thrift store. Credit: Hope Services

Another organization that aids people with intellectual and developmental disabilities is Hope Services. The organization was founded in 1952 by a group of parents who had children with disabilities. They wanted to have their children at home while also giving them access to education. The organization currently serves over 3,600 individuals every year and is in eight counties in California.

Hope Services has a variety of programs that range from education to housing, but its popular program is the community employment program. The organization initially helps its participants individually by finding out what their interests and skill sets are. Afterward, it finds jobs that fit best with the participants. If extra help is needed, Hope Services has staff that can support participants on the job until they fully understand and learn the tasks and responsibilities.

“Some individuals might need long-term support. For instance, we have a group of four people that work at Home Depot right now. There is a staff that is there all the time with them and goes from one person to another to give them the support that they need throughout the day,” Cathy Bouchard, Specialty Director at Hope Services, explained.

Hope Services founded jobs for over 300 people. One of its successes includes its thrift stores, HopeTHRIFT. People can donate used goods, and HopeTHRIFT will sell those goods to generate revenue for Hope Services. HopeTHRIFT furthers Hope’s mission by providing career opportunities and job experience for its clients.

When asked about her time working at Hope Services, Bouchard described it as the best thing that happened to her. “It really solidified the fact that every individual, regardless of the level of disability, has a contribution to make and a family that loves and cares for them,” Bouchard reflected.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');   Related Articles

• Aid Workers Encounter Courage, Damage, Dislocation and Resilience in War-Torn Ukraine
• With Violence on the Rise, Asian Americans Establish Support Groups for Help

The Launch of the Equal Pay Platform of Champions at the UN General Assembly Hall six years ago – on 13 March 2016. Credit: UN Women/Ryan Brown

By Belen Sanz and Patricia Cortes
MEXICO CITY, Sep 16 2022 (IPS)

International Equal Pay Day, observed officially by the United Nations on 16 September, aims to draw attention to the gender pay gap – the difference between what a woman earns compared to a man for work of equal value – and the systemic inequalities it is rooted in.

The UN recognizes that equal pay is essential to build a world of dignity and justice for all. Yet, despite decades of activism and dozens of laws on equal pay, women globally still earn 20 per cent less than men. 1

The gender pay gap is often larger in care work, as it is often invisible, unequally distributed, underpaid or simply unpaid.

In care sectors including domestic work, the gap is often even larger, with care work invisible, unequally distributed, underpaid or simply unpaid.

This year’s 2022 International Equal Pay Day provides the opportunity to highlight that—through the recognition, reduction and redistribution of unpaid care work and the promotion of decent work for care workers and their representation2 —the care economy can play a catalytic role in these uncertain times, shifting towards a society of care.

It would support societies to overcome the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, the climate emergency and growing conflicts in different parts of the world, including the unprecedented levels of food and energy shortages, increased forced migration, and the spiralling of care needs and demands on women and girls.3

Bakery Grows with New Equipment
Employees prepare bread dough for baking in the Jenishkul Bakery in the village of Kara Koo, Kyrgyzstan. Through a UN Women Program and Kumtor Operating Company grant, implemented jointly, this bakery was able to purchase three ovens, baking sheets and a machine for flattening bread dough – all of which helped to increase its production. Credit: UN Women/David Snyder

The crisis unleashed by the COVID-19 pandemic underscored society’s reliance on care work both on the frontlines and at home. For many, poverty have put essential services such as piped water and clean cooking fuel out of reach. Such deprivations propel other gender inequalities as women spend more time on unpaid care and domestic work.4 Yet care work remained the last line of defence in the face of crisis.

The global response to lessen the care burden on women and girls was limited in face of the mounting care needs emanating from the pandemic. The 2022 report of the UNDP-UN Women COVID-19 Global Gender Response Tracker indicates that almost 60 per cent of countries and territories tracked did not take any measures to address unpaid care during the pandemic.

Among those that did respond, care measures were often out of sync with societal needs in terms of coverage, generosity and duration.5 And care work remained last in line for fair wage compensation. While the social recognition of care sector workers and the care economy may have risen during the pandemic, this recognition has yet to be translated into better wages and working conditions, including increased formalization of the care sector, and securing investments into the care economy.6

The joint WHO-ILO report titled “The gender pay gap in the health and care sector: a global analysis in the time of COVID-19” 7 shows that, despite women comprising 67 per cent of the healthcare workforce globally, the industry continues to sustain a pay gap of 24 per cent between women and men. Measures to promote pay transparency and legal instruments against pay discrimination are needed to begin to close this gap.

Against this background, the Global Alliance for Care was launched as a collective commitment emanating from the Generation Equality Forum in order to mobilize global, multi-stakeholder action towards the Care Economy Action Area of the Action Coalition on Economic Justice and Rights.

Convened by the Government of Mexico through the National Institute of Women (INMUJERES) and UN Women, the Alliance is a multi-stakeholder platform that promotes strengthening the care economy by deepening and broadening the progress secured with governments adopting regulatory frameworks.

These includes labour market regulations and standards to secure decent care work arrangements; the adoption of comprehensive care systems that will ensure access to care for people who need it and guarantee the rights of the people who provide it; the inclusion of unpaid care work in national statistics and data; and valuing and reducing unpaid care work through scaling investments in social care infrastructure and services.8

With compounded crises on the horizon, multi-stakeholder action is not only critical but the only way forward. In September 2018 ILO, UN Women and OECD launched the Equal Pay International Coalition (EPIC) to accelerate the achievement of equal pay for work of equal value. EPIC brings together leaders of the labour market (including governments, trade unions, employers’ organizations, private sector, civil society and academia) to close the gender pay gap by 2030 in accordance with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), namely SDG 8.5 and 5.

The coalition aims to achieve these ends through advocacy, knowledge sharing, facilitating cross regional and sectoral research, innovation and learning, and awareness raising.

Joint action and scaled-up investments to secure innovative solutions for the provision of care policies and services is the pathway towards women’s economic autonomy. By promoting this approach, the Care Alliance contributes to positioning the care economy as a fundamental pillar of sustainable and transformative recovery.

Together with its 78 members to date, the Care Alliance will accelerate progress on gender equality and enable care’s catalytic effect on the overall 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. It is time to care. Women and girls deserve no less!

1 ILO, 2020. Understanding the gender pay gap.
2 UN Women, 2022. A toolkit on paid and unpaid care work: From 3Rs to 5Rs.
3 UN Women, 2022. In Focus: War in Ukraine is a crisis for women and girls. March.
4 UN Women, 2022. Progress on the Sustainable Development Goals. The Gender Snapshot 2022.
5 UN Women, 2022. Government responses to COVID-19: Lessons on gender equality for a world in turmoil.
6 Ibid. UN Women, 2021.
7 World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization, 2022. The gender pay gap in the health and care sector: a global analysis in the time of COVID-19. Geneva.
8 UN Women, 2022. A toolkit on paid and unpaid care work: From 3Rs to 5Rs.

Belen Sanz is Country Representative UN Women, Mexico; Patricia Cortes is Coordinator Global Alliance for Care, UN Women.

IPS UN Bureau

 

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');