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Up to four billion people – over half the population of the planet – are already facing severe water stress for at least one month of the year, while half a billion suffer from permanent water stress. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Baher Kamal
MADRID, Dec 23 2021 (IPS)

Now it comes to the scary water crises, as it is estimated that, globally, over two billion people live in countries that experience high water stress.

On this, the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) also reports that ”other estimates are even more pessimistic, with up to four billion people – over half the population of the planet – already facing severe water stress for at least one month of the year while half a billion suffer from permanent water stress.”

About 71% of the world’s irrigated area and 47% of major cities are to experience at least periodic water shortages. If this trend continues, the scarcity and associated water quality problems will lead to competition and conflicts among water users

This means that about 71% of the world’s irrigated area and 47% of major cities are to experience at least periodic water shortages. If this trend continues, the scarcity and associated water quality problems will lead to competition and conflicts among water users, it adds.

 

Climate crisis aggravates the risk

“Climate change will increase the odds of worsening drought and water scarcity in many parts of the world. Drought ranks among the most damaging of all natural hazards. While droughts affect every climate zone, drylands are particularly susceptible to drought and its impacts.”

Currently, most countries, regions and communities use reactive and crisis-driven approaches to manage drought risk. To address this issue, healthy land is a natural storage for fresh water. If it is degraded, it cannot perform that function. Managing land better and massively scaling up land rehabilitation are essential for building drought resilience and water security, explains UNCCD.

“Land restoration is the cheapest and most effective solution to improved water storage, mitigating impacts of drought and addressing biodiversity loss.”

 

Not enough rain? Too much rain?

Meanwhile, the UN Convention to Combat Desertification explains that communities all over the world have suffered some of the most brutal effects of drought and flooding this year.

“Flash floods in Western Europe, Eastern and Central Asia and Southern Africa. And catastrophic drought in Australia, southern Africa, southern Asia, much of Latin America, Western North America and Siberia are cases in point. The impacts extend well beyond the individual events.”

For example, the rise in food insecurity in the Southern African region and unprecedented wildfires in North America, Europe and Central Asia.

 

What is going on?

This is much more than bad weather in some cases, and is increasingly so, adds the UN Convention.

“Extreme events, including both droughts and floods are on the rise. With more land projected to get drier and more and more people living in drylands in the future, the discussions centred on the shift more than 60 countries are making from “reactive” response to droughts and floods to “proactive” planning and risk management designed to build resilience.”

 

Production systems, so constrained

For its part, the report The State of the World’s Land and Water Resources for Food and Agriculture warns that production systems where the land and water resources supporting agricultural production are constrained to a point where their capacity to meet current and future needs is seriously jeopardised.

Constraints may be further exacerbated by unsustainable agricultural practices, social and economic pressures and the impact of climate change.

Land and water resources are central to agriculture and rural development and are intrinsically linked to global challenges of food insecurity and poverty, climate change adaptation and mitigation, as well as degradation and depletion of natural resources that affect the livelihoods of millions of rural people across the world, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)’s report.

 

Food demand to surge

Current projections cited in the report indicate that the world population will increase from 6.9 billion people today to 9.1 billion in 2050. In addition, economic progress, notably in the emerging countries, translates into increased demand for food and diversified diets.

World food demand will surge as a result, and it is projected that food production will increase by 70% in the world and by 100% in developing countries.

“Yet both land and water resources, the basis of our food production, are finite and already under heavy stress, and future agricultural production will need to be more productive and more sustainable at the same time.”

 

Increased competition for land and water

And there are warning signs. Rates of growth in agricultural production have been slowing, and are only half the 3 percent annual rate of growth seen in developing countries in the past, says the report.

In 2007 and 2008, any complacency was jolted by food price shocks, as grain prices soared. Since then, the growing competition for land and water is now thrown into stark relief as sovereign and commercial investors begin to acquire tracts of farmland in developing countries. Production of feedstock stability of land and water resources.

“Deeper structural problems have also become apparent in the natural resource base. Water scarcity is growing. Salinisation and pollution of water courses and bodies, and degradation of water-related ecosystems are rising.”

 

Waters are shrinking

In many large rivers, only 5% of former water volumes remain in-stream, and some rivers such as the Huang He no longer reach the sea year-round.

Large lakes and inland seas have shrunk, and half the wetlands of Europe and North America no longer exist. Runoff from eroding soils is filling reservoirs, reducing hydropower and water supply, it explains.

 

Groundwater, over-pumped

Groundwater is being pumped intensively and aquifers are becoming increasingly polluted and salinised in some coastal areas.

Large parts of all continents are experiencing high rates of ecosystem impairment, particularly reduced soil quality, biodiversity loss, and harm to amenity and cultural heritage values, the report continues.

 

Agriculture, a major contributor to greenhouse emissions

Agriculture is now a major contributor to greenhouse gases, accounting for 13.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions (IPCC, 2007). At the same time, climate change brings an increase in risk and unpredictability for farmers – from warming and related aridity, from shifts in rainfall patterns, and from the growing incidence of extreme weather events.

“Poor farmers in low-income countries are the most vulnerable and the least able to adapt to these changes.”

 

Also aquaculture

The steady increase in inland aquaculture also contributes to the competition for land and water resources: the average annual per capita supply of food fish from aquaculture for human consumption has increased at an average rate of 6.6 percent per year between 1970 and 2008, leading to increasing demand in feed, water and land for the construction of fish ponds.

The deteriorating trends in the capacities of ecosystems to provide vital goods and services are already affecting the production potential of important food-producing zones, according to FAO.

“If these continue, impacts on food security will be greatest in developing countries, where both water and soil nutrients are least abundant.”

“On present trends, a series of major land and water systems and the food outputs they produce are at risk.”

 

A view of India Gate, a war memorial located in New Delhi, covered by a thick layer of smog. Credit: Malav Goswami/IPS

By External Source
Dec 23 2021 (IPS)

Air pollution is a global public health crisis, and air pollution levels in India are among the highest in the world, posing a heavy threat to the country’s health and economy. According to the 2019 World Air Quality Report, India is home to 21 of the 30 most polluted cities in the world. In these cities, air quality can be as much as 10 times over the safe limits of air pollution recommended by the WHO.

Why is air pollution such a significant issue?

Loss of life

According to the State of Global Air 2020 report, air pollution was the fourth leading risk factor for early death worldwide in 2019, and is estimated to have caused 1.7 million premature deaths in India in that year. The burden of disease due to air pollution is higher in low- and middle-income countries, causing about 91 percent of premature deaths.

Economic losses

While the hazardous impact of air pollution on health is well recognised, its negative economic impact is less investigated. Lost output from premature deaths and morbidity attributable to air pollution accounted for economic losses of USD 28.8 billion and 8 billion respectively in 2019. In India, economic losses from air pollution were equivalent to 1.36 percent of the country’s GDP.

Why are children at higher risk?

According to a WHO report, every day around 93 percent of the world’s children under the age of 15 years breathe air so polluted that it puts their health and development in serious danger. Children are at greater risk than adults from the many adverse health effects of air pollution owing to a combination of behavioural, environmental, and physiological factors. Some key reasons for this higher risk include:

1. Children are more susceptible because their lungs, brain, and immune system are still developing and their respiratory tract is more permeable.
2. Children breathe more air per kilogram of body weight, so their exposure to air pollution is much greater than adults. The consequences of their exposure—through inhalation, ingestion, or in utero—can lead to illness and other lifetime health burdens.

 

What are the effects of air pollution on children’s health and development?

Air pollution is one of the leading threats to child health, globally accounting for almost one in 10 deaths in children under five years of age. Around 8.8 percent of deaths in children under the age of five in India in 2017 can be attributed to air pollution, according to a Lancet study. Some of the effects on children’s health and development include:

1. Serious respiratory illnesses

Air pollution causes more than 50 percent of acute lower respiratory infections in children under five years of age in low- and middle-income countries. It can lead to asthma, childhood cancers, chronic diseases, poor lung function, pneumonia, and other types of acute lower respiratory infection.

This study from Delhi observed a statistically significant positive association between air pollution (PM10 level) and the prevalence of lower respiratory tract symptoms. These symptoms were more prevalent in girls than in boys. Every third child in Delhi has impaired lungs due to the high level of pollutants that are present in the city’s air.

2.  Premature births, infant deaths, and a negative impact on child growth 

Pregnant women exposed to polluted air are more likely to give birth prematurely and have small, low birth-weight children. A recent study from India revealed a negative impact of exposure to air pollution during the first trimester of pregnancy on child growth indicators.

Air pollution contributed to nearly 5,00,000 infant deaths worldwide in 2019. In India, a fifth of neonatal deaths from all causes can be attributed to air pollution.

This Lancet study indicates a plausible link between air pollution and stunting in children.

3. Negative impacts on children’s neurodevelopment

Prolonged exposure to polluted air negatively impacts neurodevelopment in children. According to the WHO, new research has shown an association between prenatal exposure to high levels of air pollution and developmental delay at age three, as well as psychological and behavioural problems later on, including symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, anxiety, and depression. Air pollution affects children’s learning process by exacerbating respiratory illnesses, fatigue, school absenteeism, and attention problems.

 

What is the way forward?

India has taken the following steps at the central and state levels to control pollution and improve air quality:

1. National Clean Air Programme

Government of India’s National Clean Air Programme is a powerful step in acknowledging and resolving the problem of deteriorating air quality. It is a national-level strategy to tackle the country’s air pollution challenge, calling for a 20–30 percent reduction in particulate matter pollution by 2024.

2. Performance-based funds transfers to cities

In 2020, the central government allocated approximately USD 1.7 billion to fight air pollution in 42 Indian cities that have a population of more than one million. This is conditional on these cities reducing their air pollution levels by 15 percent every year. It is the world’s first performance-based fiscal transfer funding programme for air quality management in cities.

3. Coordinated action to improve air quality

Parliament approved a law in August 2021 to establish the Commission of Air Quality Management for better coordination, research, identification, and resolution of problems related to air quality in the National Capital Region and adjoining areas.

However, much more needs to be done. The air pollution challenge in India is inherently multisectoral. Policies and investments supporting cleaner transport, power generation and industry; energy-efficient homes, and better municipal waste management will reduce key sources of outdoor air pollution. Experiences in tackling air pollution in cities suggest three possible ways forward:

1. Disseminating information about the problem and health risks.
2. Providing incentives to cities/states and other stakeholders for tackling air pollution.
3. Building institutions that support air quality management. This requires sufficient funding and a sustained focus on capacity building.

The right combination of political will, appropriate implementation, and a strong compliance mechanism from both government and the private sector are required to move forward. Given Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent announcement that India aims to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2070, the time to act is now.

 

The author of this opinion editorial, Dr Vinod Kumar Anand, is a technical adviser for maternal, newborn, and child health (MNCH) at Save the Children India.

This story was originally published by India Development Review (IDR)

Construction of wind turbines near Tarariras, in Uruguay's Colonia department. Nearly all of the nation's electricity comes from renewable sources, but its government is exploring new financing instruments, such as a sovereign green bond, to help other sectors in the transition to net-zero. (Image: Picardo Photography / Alamy)

By Fermín Koop
BUENOS AIRES, Dec 23 2021 (IPS)

Sustainable finance continues to expand in Latin America, as governments and companies take advantage of growing interest among investors in instruments that protect biodiversity and respond to the climate crisis. In 2020, more than US$16 billion of green, social and sustainable bonds were issued in the region.

Though their purpose may vary, these bonds share similar characteristics. A company or government takes on debt, and these funds must be used exclusively to meet a specific environmental or social goal, such as developing clean transport infrastructure, expanding renewable energy or meeting the Sustainable Development Goals.

As green bonds continue to grow, Uruguay will be the first country in Latin America to borrow at an interest rate tied to fulfilment of its climate commitments

However, with the growth of sustainable finance, new and even more innovative types of debt instruments have emerged, such as one now proposed by Uruguay. The government of president Luis Lacalle Pou is working on a bond whose funds will not be designated for a specific purpose, but will instead pay for different initiatives, and at a variable interest rate.

This rate will depend on whether Uruguay meets a previously established environmental target, such as its nationally determined contribution (NDC) to the Paris Agreement. In other words, if the country reduces its emissions as committed, it will be rewarded with a lower rate. And if it does not comply, it will be penalised with a higher rate.

So far, the only country to have developed such an instrument has been Luxembourg, which issued US$1.5 billion in debt in 2020. According to the Uruguay’s environment minister, Adrián Peña, the country’s own the bond will be for an amount between US$800 million and US$1 billion, with no exact date for its issuance yet set.

Developing countries like Uruguay are especially vulnerable to the climate and biodiversity crisis, and need financial support to meet their environmental or climate commitments. This is where sustainable finance comes in, as an instrument to support the transition of their economies.

 

Sustainable finance in Latin America

Mechanisms for sustainable finance continue to grow more numerous and diverse. Argentina and Colombia, for example, have recently called for an expansion of debt-for-nature swaps, a tool already in use that would allow them to reduce their debts and also meet environmental targets. Elsewhere, finance experts have pushed for the creation of new instruments such as the bond now proposed by Uruguay.

“Debt swaps were very popular decades ago. But now the picture has changed a lot. It’s more complicated in terms of who holds the debt and how it’s traded,” said Jochen Krimphoff, WWF’s lead on green sovereign bonds. “In the long run, the more sustainably you manage your natural resources as a government, the more your economy can thrive sustainably.”

A green sovereign bond indicates a country’s commitment to sustainable growth strategies and low greenhouse gas emissions, which can stimulate private sector investment in green initiatives. It can also allow for more effective collaboration between different areas of government, as Peña pointed out.

“It seemed to us that we had a lot of knowledge to bring to the Ministry of Finance, which didn’t know so much about our issues. That’s where the idea of the bond came from,” the minister told Diálogo Chino.

In 2019, Chile became the first country in Latin America to issue a sovereign green bond, which has so far raised US$7.44 billion after successive issuances. The country has also issued social and sustainable bonds, as have Ecuador, Mexico and Guatemala, according to the Climate Bonds Initiative.

The energy and transport sectors have benefited the most from financing, as has the land use sector. In the case of Chile, funds from its green bond went towards boosting clean transport, such as Santiago’s electric buses and the construction of new underground lines.

“There are many investors who want to invest in these instruments,” Pablo Cortinez, a sustainable finance consultant, said. “The fiduciary duty and profile of investors is changing, and more and more are calling themselves green. The largest economies in the region, such as Brazil and Argentina, should bet on green sovereign bonds.”

For Marcela Ponce, Latin American climate finance lead at the International Finance Corporation, 2020 was a landmark year for green sovereign issuance, and 2021 is not far behind. “Since COP26, finance ministries in Latin America have shown great appetite for the green bond market,” she added.

 

Uruguay’s new bond

Unlike Chile, Uruguay will not issue a green bond, per se, as the funds can be used for any desired purpose. However, by linking the bond’s interest rate to the NDC, the government will create an additional incentive to direct finance towards initiatives that help it meet its climate change targets.

Uruguay submitted its NDC in 2017, in which it proposes per-gas carbon intensity reduction targets for three specific gases: carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane, with reductions of 24%, 48% and 57% respectively by 2030, on an unconditional basis. A new NDC is expected to be submitted in 2022.

About 70% of Uruguay’s greenhouse gas emissions come from the agricultural sector, two thirds of which originate from beef production, according to the most recent emissions inventory. The government hopes that better pasture management will reduce emissions significantly.

“Uruguay is taking on a high political cost with the new sovereign bond. But if it succeeds, it would be a milestone for the region,” said Sebastián Ramos, a partner in the banking and finance department of Ferrere, a law firm in Montevideo. “The learning curve is high, as it is the first in the region with a sovereign bond of this type.”

Juán Giraldez and Stephanie Fontana of international law firm Cleary Gottlieb describe the debt instrument Uruguay wants to push as “the next frontier in sovereign financing”. However, they also highlight risks and challenges given its novelty, and as something so far only developed by Luxembourg.

For the bond to be successful, governments must be able to justify to their investors the choice of the specific target to which the interest rate is fixed, over other possibilities – the NDC, in Uruguay’s case. In addition, the target must be achievable during the life of the bond and a third party in charge of monitoring the actual achievement of the target must be defined.

“With the bond we are designing, Uruguay will have a fiduciary mandate to take care of the environment and reduce carbon dioxide emissions,” said Uruguay’s economy minister Azucena Arbeleche in an interview. “The incentives of the investor and issuer will be aligned for the fulfilment of a certain indicator.”

Further details on Uruguay’s sovereign green bond, including a date for first issuance, are likely to be confirmed in early 2022. Supporters of such instruments will be hoping that, if successful, it may be a catalyst for their growth and uptake in Latin America, which could provide a boost to sustainable transitions across the region.

This article was originally published by China Dialogue

A new multi-pronged approach aims to make a strategic breach in the discrimination deadlock

By Ian McDougall
NEW YORK, Dec 23 2021 (IPS)

Systemic racism in the US has had devastating consequences for generations of individuals from diverse backgrounds. Our legal system, which is intended to be color-blind, should be an essential tool in eliminating racism. But instead—despite legislative, educational and social efforts aiming to provide equal access to justice—the US ranks only 21st in the World Justice Project Rule of Law Index 2020.

Ian McDougall

Access to justice is tragically unequal depending on one’s race. The list of injustices is long, and includes inequitable attorney and judicial behaviors, unfair bail practices, and legal outcomes decided by arbitrary factors like the defendant’s income. Furthermore, specific failures within the legal system contribute to and reinforce widespread inequities across the entire criminal justice system, including policing, pretrial detention, sentencing, parole and the collateral consequences associated with a criminal record.

Top-down legislation hasn’t succeeded in fixing these problems. The legislative process is laborious and moves at a snail’s pace; even the best intentions are inevitably diluted by partisanship and politics.

How can these problems be solved? In a word: innovate. Grassroots measures that attack and eliminate specific inequities at the ground level are needed. Those involved in these efforts to must be able to easily connect and collaborate to share expertise.

No single measure can turn the US legal profession into a body as diverse and inclusive as the population it serves. However, a new initiative by LexisNexis is aimed at developing and implementing a multitude of innovative solutions and inclusive practices that address specific racial inequities. Our hope is that this stepwise, collaborative approach will clear a path to the eliminate systemic racism across the legal community.

Advancing the Rule of Law — with equal treatment being at the root – is the right thing to do from an ethical standpoint. At LexisNexis, we produced incontrovertible evidence of the connection between strong Rule of Law and socioeconomic measures. The Rule of Law is fundamental to realizing the dream of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

In 2021, LexisNexis Legal & Professional and LexisNexis Rule of Law Foundation (LNROLF) in partnership with the Historically Black Colleges, Universities Law School Consortium, and the African Ancestry Network created a new fellowship program that aims to jump start the process of change. The 12 inaugural fellowship recipients identified some of the most pervasive practices perpetuating systemic racism in the legal system.

Studies, surveys, and recommendations in the fellowship advocacy papers address new approaches to painful but fixable issues: inequities in bail reform, racially weighted bankruptcy advice from attorneys, law school admissions processes, employment and compensation practices, gender inequalities, and racial and economic stereotyping that undermines guidance for misdemeanor defendants who represent themselves.

Easing access to law school

For example, the Blueprint Program developed by cohort member Paris Maulet aims to improve access for students from disenfranchised communities by prepping prospective law students. Maulet, whose own path was opened by a pre-law program said: “Access to a legal education and to the tools needed to become successful in the legal field are not the same for minorities as for their white counterparts. This access disparity is a disadvantage that drives down the pool of African Americans.”

Inequitable advice in consumer bankruptcy

Emony M. Robertson’s project focuses on a different but equally vexing problem: reducing racial bias in consumer bankruptcy practices. He points out that consumer bankruptcy has a clear racial disparity. African Americans are disproportionately advised by their attorneys to file Chapter 13 versus Chapter 7 petitions. “Chapter 7 bankruptcy offers many advantages, including the possibility of debt being totally discharged. Chapter 13 filings, by contrast, can result in the perpetuation of debt,” he said. Robertson created a simple solution: bankruptcy filing checklists that attorneys can review before engaging with African American clients, and literature that explains the disparate outcomes.

Failures in self-representation

When individuals charged with misdemeanors attempt to represent themselves, the attempt to save costs works against them. They are far more likely to plead guilty. The fallout can have a lasting impact on the rest of their lives, including their ability to secure housing, employment, or federal funding for upper-level education. Oscar Draughn, a student at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University College of Law developed a digital tool that teaches individuals charged with low-level misdemeanor offenses how to defend themselves when adequate counsel is not available. His app will include a knowledge database, tutorials, and interactive modules. This tool will reduce the probability of conviction for reasons unrelated to the facts of the case.

One goal, many pathways

There is no single road towards eliminating racism in the legal system. Approaching this problem from multiple angles will accelerate change. Targeted strategies, training, technology and collaboration can provide the collective power to break down the barriers of systemic racism in the legal system, once and for all.

Ian McDougall, President, LexisNexis Rule of Law Foundation

 

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Excerpt:

A new multi-pronged approach aims to make a strategic breach in the discrimination deadlock

Farah Usmani, a director at the UNFPA headquarters in New York, set about changing the stereotype of Indian Muslim Women. As a result of her efforts a book, Rising Beyond the Ceiling, documents the lives of successful Indian Muslim women. Credit: Twitter

By Mehru Jaffer
Lucknow, India, Dec 23 2021 (IPS)

It’s time the achievements of Indian Muslim women were documented to make their contribution to society visible, says international health and gender expert Dr Farah Usmani.

“The idea is to drive a new narrative about the inspiring life some of them lead today.”

Usmani was speaking to IPS in an exclusive interview in Uttar Pradesh (UP) – the largest state in India with a population of about 240 million, of which 44 million are Muslims. Half of the Muslim population in the state are women.

Usmani, a director at the UNFPA headquarters in New York, originates from UP. She wonders how such a large number of people have remained invisible in this day and age of technology.

She said that a chance remark made by a journalist in New York led her to start the Rising Beyond the Ceiling (RBTC) initiative in UP, her place of birth.

The male journalist told her that she was the first Indian Muslim woman he had spoken to in his life.

Celebrating the success of Indian Muslim women and the publication of a book, Rising Beyond the Ceiling were (back) computer science engineer Sameena Bano, and drone pilot Mohsina Mirza with (front) educationalist Dr Farzana Madni and biotechnologist Seema Wahab. Credit: Mehru Jaffer

Long after her meeting with the journalist, Usmani could not stop thinking of how millions of Indian Muslims remain unknown despite their creative contributions to society.

Colourful and inspiring images of countless Muslim women she knows flashed across her mind. She decided to share her troubling thoughts with other female friends and family members.

Usmani has over 25 years of experience in policy and programming leadership, focusing on women and girls and their reproductive health and rights. She reached out to like-minded women in UP, and within days a team of six professional Muslim women was formed.

The RBTC initiative is referred to as the team’s ‘COVID’ baby because it was initiated in early 2020 at the peak of the second wave of the deadly pandemic in India.

“Our brief was to work online and to scout and profile 100 Muslim women in UP. The purpose was to document the inspiring lives led by some Indian Muslim women,” Sabiha Ahmad, team coordinator and social activist, told IPS.

The idea of documenting the extraordinary lives of Indian Muslim women was born out of the urgent need to change the stereotypical narrative about women by women.

The team liked the idea of getting women to build an alternative narrative of each other by curating real-life stories of successful Muslim women in all their diversity.

The goal was to make these lives visible and drive a new narrative around Indian Muslim women. The result was a 173-page book. It documents the women from the state who drones and aeroplanes, weave carpets, serve in the police and army, write books and poetry, paint and bag trophies in tennis and snooker competitions.

There are profiles of politicians, trendsetters, doctors, entrepreneurs, and corporate professionals who met in Lucknow recently to celebrate the RBTC book and meet each other in person.

Usmani used her latest visit to Lucknow to release Rising Beyond The Ceiling formally. The directory details the lives of 100 Indian Muslim women whose inspiring stories shatter the stereotypical narrative a group perceived as primitive, veiled and suffering.

Faiza Abbasi, 47, contributor and co-editor, says the RBTC directory dares to write a different story. It is a step by women to celebrate each other.

“We come forward to highlight each other’s achievements and to take the road our grannies left untrodden,” smiles Abbasi.

Abbasi is an educationist, environmentalist, and outstanding public speaker with a popular YouTube channel. She recalls how her father celebrated her birth by distributing sweetmeats to family and friends. However, an elderly aunt questioned the festivities. The aunt asked why the energy and resources were being wasted, and a fuss made over the birth of a girl?

Not used to the relatively progressive environment of today, many women still hesitate to celebrate their achievements.

“We at RBTC want to celebrate and to learn to appreciate each other,” assures Abbasi.

The RBTC promises to branch out its research analysis and documentation to other Indian states to document the successes of Muslim women.

The work of RBTC is vital at a time when the majority of Muslim women in India are the most disadvantaged. Statistical and micro studies on Muslim women show that they are economically impoverished and politically marginalised.

 

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By External Source
Dec 23 2021 (IPS-Partners)

In 2020, 1.8 million people across the world died from COVID-19.

At the end of 2021 the death toll has risen to over 5.3 million.

Over 8.1 billion vaccines have been administered – more than the world’s population.

Yet less than 8% of Africa’s 1.3 billion people had been vaccinated at all.

Poorer countries are suffering disproportionately through rising poverty and inequality.

Violence against women and girls has intensified since the outbreak of COVID-19.

UNICEF called the pandemic the biggest crisis for children in its 75-year history…

…with 100 million falling into poverty.

“Extreme events are the new norm.” – World Meteorological Organization Secretary-General Petteri Taalas

Greenland’s highest summit experienced rain for the first time in at least over 140 years.

Germany suffered massive floods.

The Dixie fire was California’s biggest recorded single blaze.

China took months’ worth of rain in the space of hours.

2021 was full of bad news…

…but billionaires, big pharmaceutical and high-tech firms, as well as autocrats, did well.

Press freedom was vigorously defended in 2021 but took a hammering in many countries in Asia.

Global suffering has vastly increased vulnerabilities to human trafficking.

For every 100 victims trafficked globally, 50 are women and 20 are girls.

“I know many of you are disappointed… We are in the fight of our lives. Never give up. Never retreat. Keep pushing forward.” – UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres

 

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Siddharth Chatterjee (pictured) during the interview. Credit: Guanxin He/Beijing Daily

By IPS Correspondent
BEIJING, Dec 23 2021 (IPS)

The interview was originally conducted by Beijing Daily.

Beijing Daily: The world is paying attention to whether the Beijing Winter Olympic Games can be successfully held 6 months after the Tokyo Olympics in the face of COVID-19. How do you evaluate the preparations for the Beijing Winter Olympics? What is the key to the success of the Beijing Winter Olym-pics? What kind of signal will the successful hosting of the Beijing Winter Olympics send to the world?

Siddharth Chatterjee: Let me start by echoing the UN General Assembly Resolution 76/13 on “Building a peaceful and better world through sport and the Olympic ideal”. It expresses the expectation that “the Olympic Winter Games Beijing 2022 will be a meaningful opportunity to harness the power of sport to advance the world by fostering an atmosphere of peace, development, resilience, tolerance and understanding, and welcoming all the delegations of National Olympic and Paralympic Committees to participate in the Games.”

At a time when the world is battling against the COVID-19 pandemic, solidari-ty and friendship among nations have never been more important. Let me take this opportunity to commend Mr. Thomas Bach the President of the In-ternational Olympic Committee for his courageous and inspirational leadership. He has said, “Solidarity is not just about respecting each other, but also helping each other and being part of a community,”.

The IOC, the Beijing Organising Committee along with the Government of China have made it clear that preparations for the games are in its final stag-es and are being carried out in a safe and orderly manner, and I support the adherence to all relevant public health measures in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

It will also be critical for all Member States to observe the Olympic Truce, and ensure the safe passage, access and participation of athletes, officials and all other personnel taking part in the Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games.

Beijing Daily: The Winter Olympic Games will begin soon. Have you been doing any work related to the Winter Olympic Games recently? What will you do during the Winter Olympics? How does the success of the Winter Olympic Games or Olympics relate to the goals and objectives of the United Nations in your mind?

Siddharth Chatterjee: I am delighted my boss the UN Secretary-General António Guterres has accepted an invitation from the International Olympic Committee to attend the Beijing Winter Games. I echo his wise words, when he said that “the Olympic spirit brings out humanity’s best: Teamwork and solidarity. Talent. Tolerance.”

The UN has long recognized the contribution of sport for development and peace, and collaboration between the IOC and the UN has played a central role in spreading the acceptance of sport as a means to promote mutual un-derstanding, friendship, tolerance, non-discrimination, and achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals.

The 2008 Paralympic Games in Beijing are a prime example of how the games can affect a society. Winning the right to host the 2008 Games trig-gered action by the Government to improve the lives of people with disabilities and protect their rights as equal members of society. New legislation on ac-cessibility was passed and, in the seven years leading up to the Games, Chi-na spent more than US$ 150 million on making 14,000 facilities accessible throughout the country.

It was during the 2008 Olympic and Paralympic Games, that we also saw a key partnership between UN entities in China, including UN Volunteers and the UN Development Programme and key Chinese volunteer organizations, increasing the impact and elevating the spirit of volunteerism throughout Chi-na.

For the Beijing Winter Games, the UN Volunteers programme along with the UN Development Programme will take part in an innovative project to promote sustainable urban development through volunteer service.

Nelson Mandela once said: “Sport can create hope, where once there was only despair. It is more powerful than governments in breaking down racial barriers. It laughs in the face of all types of discrimination.” The UN family in China is ready to show its support and play its part to ensuring the success of these upcoming games.

Siddharth Chatterjee (pictured) practicing yoga in his office during lunch break.

Beijing Daily: This year marks the 50th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China’s restoration of its lawful seat in the United Nations. How do you evaluate China’s influence on the UN and the world over the past 50 years, especially in recent years?

Siddharth Chatterjee: China was one of the architects of the United Nations and was the first signatory of the UN Charter in San Francisco in 1945.

But it was only in October 1971, with the Chinese delegation led by Mr. Qiao Guanhua, that China’s representation at the UN resumed. Since that time, the UN has had the great privilege of witnessing and supporting China in achieving one of the greatest periods of socio-economic progress in world history.

Now, on the 50th anniversary of China in the UN, I am honored to serve as the UN Resident Coordinator, a post I took earlier this year.

While I am a recent arrival to China, only just beginning to understand its rich tapestry of over 5,000 years of civilization, the UN in China has had the privi-lege to shape and witness the profound economic and social transformations that have occurred since reform and opening-up.

As we commemorate a half-century of cooperation, a question naturally emerges: Which way now for the UN and China?

This is a weighty question, as China and the world are at a critical juncture. Tentatively emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic, but with many countries still struggling terribly. Staring down the threats of climate change, with rec-ord-setting heat, fires, storms, and other disasters. Counting down the years in this “Decade of Action” to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.

China’s standard-setting leadership in past decades gives me confidence that we can achieve even greater things in the years to come.

Today, China is the second-largest contributor to the UN peacekeeping budg-et and has sent more peacekeepers to UN missions than any other perma-nent member of the Security Council. China also played a vital role in shaping the consensus needed for the SDGs and the Paris Agreement.

It is now time for the UN and China to reimagine, innovate, reinvigorate, and continue in our cooperation, dedicating ourselves anew to creating lasting prosperity for the people of China and all the world.

Beijing Daily: Are you a fan of winter sports? Or what sports do you like (not necessarily winter sports)? Do you feel Chinese people love sports?

Siddharth Chatterjee: I regret to say that I have no skills in any winter sports. I grew up in a place, where we had two seasons. Hot and very hot.

However. I am an avid practitioner of yoga and running in all seasons. As a frequent runner, I also must attest to the improvements in air quality now en-joyed by Beijing residents.

Siddharth Chatterjee (pictured left) displaying the flag of the UN following a team fun run in the streets of Beijing.

The prevention of noncommunicable disease and keeping one’s body and mind sharp are just two of the many reasons that motivate my interest in sport, also emphasized by the Healthy China 2030 initiative.

Traditional Chinese culture has long regarded physical fitness as an important characteristic, as seen in the long historical association with the martial arts. In the streets and public parks of China we see these elements to this day, along with more contemporary sports such as basketball.

I think back to a mere 13 years ago where the eyes of the world turned to Beijing for the Summer Olympics and Paralympics. What we all saw was not only a proud moment for the people of China, but China asserting itself as an enthusiastic sporting nation, leading the medal tally that year.

This year we saw athletes such as Su Bingtian – who set a new Asian record in the men’s 100-meter dash earlier this year at the Tokyo Olympics and he’s often referred to as the disrupter and game-changer for Chinese runners; Yang Qian, a third-year undergraduate young girl studying economics and management at Tsinghua University who also won the very first gold medal at the Tokyo Olympics – take this spirit forwards and I am confident that the ath-letes and people of China will put their love for sports on full display during next year’s games.

However, I must also add a word of caution. China is also seeing a surge of non-communicable diseases, like obesity, diabetes, and hypertension.

Almost 10% of all adults in China – about 110 million people – currently live with diabetes. Without urgent action to reduce lifestyle risk factors like un-healthy diet and lack of physical activity, that number is expected to increase to 150 million by 2040 – with major health, social and economic consequenc-es.

As the UN we will work closely with the Government of China to achieve its vision of a Healthy China by 2030. I will surely lead by example.

 

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By Farhana Haque Rahman
ROME, Dec 23 2021 (IPS)

Between the COVID-19 pandemic and the deadly manifestations of the climate crisis, there were few places to hide for most of us in 2021.

Ageing billionaires riding booming stock markets could take their first flights into space in their own rockets, but for the rest of Planet Earth’s 8 billion people with their feet on the ground it was a year of placing hope in the hands of scientists and our political leaders to turn the tide.

Farhana Haque Rahman

Our review of 2021, as seen through the eyes of IPS reporters and contributors around the world, must begin as a year ago by paying our respects to those who lost their lives early, while also extending our gratitude to the often anonymous individuals fighting to make things better.

In 2020 the world mourned the officially reported deaths of some 1.8 million people from COVID-19, but as we approach the end of 2021 the death toll has risen to over 5.3 million. However, the true figure measured by “excess mortality” could be several million higher, according to the World Health Organization.

Scientists made extraordinary breakthroughs in quickly developing vaccines that have shown considerable efficacy in fighting the virus. Health systems in wealthier countries, including China, were equally efficient in dispensing them. Over 8.1 billion vaccines have been administered – more than the world’s population.

Yet while some countries had double jabbed over 70 percent of their citizens and were pushing boosters, less than 8 percent of Africa’s 1.3 billion people had been vaccinated at all. The disparity is as startling as it is complex in its origins and causes. But it is clear that poorer countries and sectors are suffering disproportionately through rising poverty and inequality as years of development gains are wiped out.

The ramifications are enormous, and women and girls are bearing the brunt of the problems. Girls in poorer countries are dropping out of school and early marriage is increasing. UN Women’s latest Measuring the Shadow Pandemic report said all types of violence against women and girls has intensified since the outbreak of COVID-19. UNICEF called the pandemic the biggest crisis for children in its 75-year history, with 100 million falling into poverty.

The failure of better-off and powerful countries to look beyond their national interests is not new and has deep roots. Prioritising the profits of western pharmaceutical companies by opposing the intellectual property waiver at the WTO or hoarding vaccines are just the latest manifestations.

Seen in this light, the hopes attached to the COP26 Glasgow Climate Summit were never going to be fully realised even though the planet’s build-up to the pandemic-delayed event left no doubts in 2021 in terms of floods, droughts, heatwaves and wildfires.

Greenland’s highest summit experienced rain for the first time in at least over 140 years. Its ice sheet lost some 166 billion tonnes over 12 months, making it the 25th year in a row where it has lost more ice than it gained.

Parts of Canada and the US experienced a record-breaking “heat dome”. Sicily recorded Europe’s highest temperature. Germany suffered massive floods. Wildfires ripped through Mediterranean countries and the Dixie fire was California’s biggest recorded single blaze. China took months’ worth of rain in the space of hours. Sub-tropical South America endured a second year of drought.

“Extreme events are the new norm,” said World Meteorological Organization Secretary-General Petteri Taalas, describing COP26 as “a make-or-break opportunity to put us back on track” in reducing greenhouse gas concentrations to stem the rise in global temperatures. It is likely that 2015 to 2021 will be the seven warmest years on record.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) also sounded alarm bells, warning leaders about to meet in Glasgow that “humanity has reached a tipping point” in tackling escalating climate and biodiversity emergencies.

So was the Glasgow summit “blah blah blah”, in the words of activist Greta Thunberg, or a bold step towards limiting global warming to below 2C as claimed by some? It was hard to tell. “The reality is more nuanced,” concluded Carbon Brief, a specialist website, in its extensive analysis.

It reported progress towards flattening the curve of future emissions through climate policies and falling clean energy costs but said the world was still “far from on track” to meet Paris Agreement goals of limiting warming to 1.5C or “well below” 2C.

It was the first COP summit to explicitly target action against fossil fuels, calling for a “phasedown of unabated coal” and “phase-out” of “inefficient” fossil-fuel subsidies.

But in a blow to less developed countries most vulnerable to climate change, the summit text, under pressure from the US and Europe, omitted reference to a specific finance facility, promising “dialogue” instead.

Separately however, the NDC Partnership, which helps countries deliver on their Nationally Determined Contributions to cut emissions, says it is ready to mobilise hundreds of millions of dollars.

Receiving less publicity was the mention in the final text of agroecology, an element of nature-based solutions that will be on the agenda of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Rwanda next June.

Overall, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described the COP26 texts as “not enough” and a “compromise” reflecting the state of political will in the world.

2021 was full of bad news but billionaires, big pharmaceutical and high-tech firms, as well as autocrats, did well on the whole.
Forbes’ annual list of the world’s wealthiest reported a rise of 660 dollar billionaires to an unprecedented 2,755. Among the new elite were 210 from China and Hong Kong.

Among autocrats, China’s Xi Jinping, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Iran’s hardliners consolidated control at home and flexed their muscles on the international stage. Myanmar’s military took back power, while the Taliban seized back Afghanistan. Donald Trump’s last desperate attempts to stay in power failed however, with the mob assault on the US Capitol, while US global authority further diminished.

Multiple crises also provided fertile ground for human traffickers dealing in modern slavery and forced labour. Global suffering has vastly increased vulnerabilities to trafficking. For every 100 victims trafficked globally, 50 are women and 20 are girls.

Press freedom, as ever, was both vigorously defended in 2021 while taking a hammering in many countries, notably in Asia.

On December 8 Philippine journalist Jesus Malabanan became the latest reporter to lose his life, shot in the head outside his home in an apparent extrajudicial killing. He was the 22nd journalist killed in the Philippines since Rodrigo Duterte became president in 2016.

Malabanan’s killing came just as fellow Philippine journalist Maria Ressa arrived in Norway to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, along with Russian journalist Dmitri Muratov. The Nobel Committee said the two laureates represent the “courageous fight for freedom of expression” at a time when democracy and press freedom are facing multiple threats.

Such threats make it even more vitally important that IPS Inter Press Service continues to give a voice to the voiceless and fosters evidence-based reporting of development news with a strong sense of social responsibility. In this IPS plays a unique role among news outlets, with women making up 70 percent of reporters and editors, and we are indebted to their efforts.

Just as countries battle to control the pandemic, IPS continues its extensive coverage of issues and places that might otherwise be neglected.

For example IPS reported on how the Sasakawa Leprosy (Hansen’s Disease) Initiative, a strategic alliance that links the WHO, Sasakawa Health Foundation, and The Nippon Foundation for achieving a leprosy-free world, has highlighted concerns over leprosy resurgence, particularly in Comoros in East Africa.

With Africa acutely aware of the need to establish food sustainability and security for its rapidly growing population, the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) has enhanced its Youth in Agribusiness initiatives empowering youth as actors in agriculture through training, research, employment, and entrepreneurship.

In southeast Asia the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT is partnering with WMO and DeRisk Southeast Asia to develop targeted weather forecasts to work around threats of drought and extreme rains, including provision of specially designed insurance to protect their livelihoods.

But rising sea levels and extreme events mean that the 22 Pacific Island Countries and Territories, which contribute less than 0.03 percent of the world’s greenhouse emissions, need climate finance for food security now. Their ability to respond to climate change is supported by the UN Green Climate Fund through the Pacific Community (SPC).

As we approach 2022 – in the race between vaccines and new COVID variants, with devastating tornadoes striking central US, and the threat of war looming over Ukraine — IPS and its partners pledge to keep covering the places, issues and projects that still matter but risk being left in the dark.

Farhana Haque Rahman is Senior Vice President of IPS Inter Press Service and Executive Director IPS Noram; a journalist and communications expert, she is a former senior official of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the International Fund for Agricultural Development.

 

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US President Joe Biden presiding over a virtual Summit for Democracy on December 9-10. Credit: Voice of America (VoA)

By Alon Ben-Meir
NEW YORK, Dec 23 2021 (IPS)

When my assistant handed me copy expressing my greetings and good wishes for 2022 for approval, I paused, thinking, “is that all I can say, just hope for a better, brighter new year?”

How much happier and sunnier can next year be, when we still suffer from the deep scars and bleeding wounds from the social and political malaise that 2021 left behind? We must act now. There is no time to spare because the losses will be of such a magnitude beyond our ability to comprehend.

Politicizing the pandemic

The pandemic is the most challenging crisis facing our nation in more than a century, and remains one of the fundamental human rights issues of our time. Nearly 800,000 Americans have died from the pandemic, yet only 60 percent of our fellow Americans have been vaccinated.

How sad and disheartening that we politicized a deadly virus, as Republicans are three times more likely than Democrats to refuse vaccination. Two of the most populous states, Florida and Texas, not only are refusing to institute vaccine or masking mandates, but are banning local municipalities from instituting their own mandates.

Is it any wonder then that their death tolls are the highest in the country?

To refuse vaccination is to benefit from the precaution of those who have been vaccinated without making any contribution to our collective immunity. By the spring of 2022 more than one million of our fellow Americans will have died from the virus and many Republican leaders still have the crude audacity to oppose mandatory vaccination.

It is time to recognize that each and every one of us has a moral obligation to be vaccinated and contribute to the realization of herd immunity.

Moreover, the refusal of so many Americans to be vaccinated is allowing one variant after another to arise and inflict ever more pain and hardship. Our immunity to disease is a collective resource, and none are safe until we all are.

The pandemic is apolitical and colorblind, and 2022 will be merciless and agonizingly harsh unless we rise and act as one. Vaccination should not be a choice but a requirement as long as the unvaccinated can infect others. We do not have the luxury of time.

Democracy under assault

Our democracy is under ominous assault. Republicans are tearing it down brick by brick. One state after another passes discriminatory laws and absurd rules, gerrymanders to secure electoral control, and refuses to accept the result of free and fair elections.

We are still reeling from the violent storming of the Capitol to prevent the peaceful transfer of power and accommodate a morally deranged so-called leader, whose lust for power is surpassed only by his contempt for the laws of the land.

They were ready to sacrifice the freedom and liberty for which countless Americans have died, only to bask in his authoritarian design. What does that say about America’s future, when a multitude of Republicans want to seize power at whatever cost, willingly following such a blind, unhinged, bigoted narcissist who is openly tearing our democratic institutions apart?

Our democracy is facing an unprecedented danger. We must strengthen voting rights, prevent the appointment of partisans to subvert the election, fight political corruption at every level, and make political power decreasingly dependent on money. The election of Biden gave us hope in preserving our democracy and attending to the political and social malaise that swept the nation. But maintaining the House and Senate for the Democrats in 2022 will be do or die; otherwise, Biden’s agenda will be shattered, and authoritarianism will creep in, leading to the collapse of the American institution.

We must rise in unison, hold accountable the traitors behind the insurrection on January 6, and preserve and protect America’s 240-year-old democracy that served as a beacon of hope and freedom to the global community.

Climate change denial

Climate change will not happen sometime in the future. It is happening now. We live it—the unprecedented storms, hurricanes, deadly tornadoes, and fires consuming hundreds of millions of trees every year. Sea levels are rising, beaches are shrinking, and island states are slowly submerging in front of our eyes.

Thousands of species still unknown to man are vanishing in the Amazon. Coral reefs are dying at a horrifying rate, with over 30 percent at risk of being lost within the next few decades. To be sure, climate change is an existential threat facing our planet.

The reasons for this unfolding tragedy are clear enough. Coral mining, overfishing, blast fishing, pollution, the burning of fossil fuels, and animal farming and transportation are among the major contributing factors.

Climate change continues to spark massive migration; millions have been forced to flee their homes, which have become inhospitable due to flooding, fires, and other disasters fueled by the changing environment.

And yet, we still have a multitude of climate change deniers who dismiss the indisputable scientific evidence and refuse to acknowledge what is in front of their own eyes. I applaud Biden’s commitment to address the perils of climate change and call on every public and private institution to play their part in combating climate change.

Next year will be even worse unless the country comes together. We must act now to avert the catastrophic impact of climate change before it is too late.

Unfathomable child abuse

It is hard to comprehend; in America, over 13 million children go to school hungry and one in five live in food insecure households. Black and Hispanic children disproportionately suffer from poverty.

How is it fathomable that the richest country on earth disgracefully falls in child poverty between Mexico and Lithuania? One in 11 children, nearly 6.5 million nationwide, live in extreme poverty, compounded by the fact that this age is a time of rapid brain development.

Even more damning is the trafficking of children which occurs in every state. Most trafficking victims in the US are citizens; those forced into sex work are not just runaways or abandoned youth, they are children from urban and rural areas, and of every class and race.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received over 17,000 reports of potential child sex trafficking in 2020 alone. Of the over 26,500 children reported runaways in that year, one in six were “likely victims of child sex trafficking.”

Sadly, as I write these painful words another child was just trafficked for sexual purposes. And 2022 will be just the same; it will not heal these tragic wounds unless we rise up and put an end to this unimaginable travesty in America today.

Women’s rights under assault

To this day, after decades of so-called equality, women are still discriminated against in this country. In 2020, women earned 84 percent of what men earned; it would take an extra 42 days of work for women to earn what men did in 2020.

Women of color fare even worse, and face higher unemployment than white women—nearly 9 percent for Black women and 8.5 percent for Latina women, versus 5.2 percent for white women.

And who are these men who act as judges and jurors to deny women a central component of their bodily autonomy, to pass laws that prohibit abortion? What right do they have to decide what women can or cannot do with their bodies? This is just another abhorrent manifestation of infringement on women’s inherent rights.

The presumption undergirding abortion bans is that women who become unintentionally pregnant do not comprehend the consequential weight of their actions. Those who oppose abortion rights often assume that restrictions on abortion will not adversely affect women’s healthcare, when in fact it puts women’s health at risk.

A true democracy cannot exist without gender equality. Despite our best wishes for 2022, the plight of women will not change unless we focus on this gender gap, and act decisively and level the field when it comes to women’s rights.

The scourge of guns

The scourge from which Americans suffer greatly is the pervasiveness of guns. This year upward of 40,000 Americans were killed by a firearm. Just imagine, as of 2018, Americans possess 120.5 firearms for every 100 residents—translate that to 400 million guns in the United States, enough to provide 8 firearms to every soldier in the world.

Nearly five million children live in a home where a firearm is loaded and unlocked, and women are five times more likely to be murdered by an abusive partner when the abuser has access to a gun. But there is no outrage. We shout and scream about the need for gun control laws. Gun advocates and the NRA say cynically, guns don’t kill people. But guns do kill people when there is easy access to a gun.

How many more school shootings must we endure? How many innocent children must die in vain? When will we wake up from this nightmarish, uniquely American reality? Tragically, as many if not more people will be killed by a gun in 2022, and all of our best wishes for the new year will not save any lives.

We must legislate gun control now, before another 40,000 innocent persons are shot to death. Their blood is on the hands of every lawmaker that refuses to support sensible gun control laws, as one more person killed by a gun is one too many. We must engage in massive and continuing peaceful demonstration and civil disobedience until lawmakers come to their senses and enact gun control law.

Racial and ethnic discrimination

The racial wage gap is the same as it was in the 1950s, with Black workers receiving 22 percent less in salary than whites. Even where racial discrimination should not occur, in medical treatment, doctors regularly prescribe fewer pain medications for Black patients, believing that they feel less pain than whites.

Blacks are incarcerated at more than five times the rate of whites; while they are 13 percent of the total US population, they constitute 40 percent of the total male prison population. Roughly one out of every three Black boys and one of every six Latino boys born today will go to prison in his lifetime, while for white boys it is approximately one in seventeen.

The average white family’s net worth is more than ten times greater than a Black family.

The pandemic has affected Americans disproportionately by race and ethnicity. American Indian, Alaska Native, Hispanic, and Latinos are 1.6 times more likely to contract COVID than white Americans and over twice as likely to die from the disease.

And when it comes to the right to vote, leave it to the Republicans to enact any archaic rule or law to reduce the number of people of color exercising their right, as they deem them illegitimate voters in white America.

This continuing and willful discrimination is destroying our social cohesiveness and the values that that we hold so high. Discrimination will not end in 2022, but we must begin to address this scourge, which fundamentally erodes the social fabric of our society.

Contempt for immigrants

This is a country of immigrants, who made America great—enriching our cultural diversity, contributing momentously to our scientific endeavors, and enhancing every walk of life. They farmed the land, built houses and roads, and made the land of plenty richer and better.

What happened under Trump’s tenure is beyond contempt—children separated from their parents, held in cages unfit for domestic animals, and asylum seekers removed by brutal force. All migrants are entitled to dignity and respect for their human rights. Though we all want to believe that Trump’s treatment of immigrants was an aberration, to this day we still do not have a sound immigration policy.

Not when at least 650 immigrants died this year, attempting to cross the US-Mexico border. Not when smugglers are forcing immigrants from Mexico and Central America to live in camps and work on farms in the state, an illegal enterprise akin to modern-day slavery. Not when some died, and others were repeatedly raped.

Sadly, what was once the spring of American pride, our treatment of immigrants became the source of disgrace and shame. As 2022 rolls around, no amount of wishful thinking will change this sad reality. We need a comprehensive immigration policy to bolster once again the pillars of America’s unique enterprise.

Media under attack

Although America still largely enjoys freedom of the press, the media is under serious threat. Trump’s attacks on the media were routine, calling them the “enemy of the people” and coining the phrase “Fake News,” as he viewed the media as a threat to his authoritarian design.

Unregulated social media contributes significantly to the dissemination of misinformation and promotion of violence, and major news stations such as Fox News spread lies and conspiracy theories galore.

Police continue to target journalists, such as freelance photojournalist Jeremy Portje, who was arrested and charged with two misdemeanors and a felony last month while documenting a homeless encampment in Sausalito, CA. At a Portland, OR protest, independent photojournalist Grace Morgan said she was shoved by a police officer with his gun.

Following last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests, where journalists were handcuffed, shoved, and shot at with less-lethal ammunition, at least 110 journalists were arrested or criminally charged in relation to their reporting.

Around 300 journalists were assaulted in 2020, and there were more than 930 total incidents in 79 cities. Next year will not be a banner year for American journalists unless we use our own tools and fight with the might of our pens, allowing no one to tamper with our freedom to unveil the corrupt politicians who feel menaced by the press.

After all is said and done, my faith in America will never wane. The challenges in 2022 may well be insurmountable, but then again, we have overcome so many adversities before, and can do it again and emerge ever stronger, as long as we put America’s national interests above any political partisan agenda. America’s star will never fade away, and we will always rise to the call of the hour. This is the America that I know.

And so, with pride and a deep sense of gratification I wish a happy new year to all, and may God bless America.

Dr. Alon Ben-Meir is a retired professor of international relations at the Center for Global Affairs at New York University (NYU). He taught courses on international negotiation and Middle Eastern studies for over 20 years.

 

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Countries, like the Seychelles and Belize, with coastal blue carbon ecosystems are increasingly looking to the ocean for climate change and business solutions. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

By Joyce Chimbi
Nairobi, Kenya, Dec 22 2021 (IPS)

Seychelles’ 115 islands are an exotic ocean ecosystem of beaches, coral reefs, and unique plant and animal species. Concerned with the impacts of climate change, the country has committed to decarbonize by 2050.

As climate change threatens food security, livelihoods, sustainable and inclusive economic growth, countries with coastal blue carbon ecosystems are increasingly looking into the ocean for climate change and business solutions.

Angelique Pouponneau, CEO, Seychelles’ Conservation and Climate Adaptation Trust, says for these countries, “the blue economy, sectors dependent on healthy marine and coastal resources, is at the heart of their updated Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) submissions.”

Under the Paris Agreement, countries revise their NDCs every five years to cut greenhouse gas emissions to limit the earth’s temperature rise and commit to implementing solutions to adapt to the effects of climate change.

Seychelles made a most ambitious commitment in its NDC to decarbonize its economy entirely by 2050, making it one of the few developing countries to do so.

“Seychelles developed a national blue economy road map anchored on identifying sectors of the blue economy industry that can generate wealth and sustainable management of marine resources. Priority areas include aquaculture to help build resilience among local communities and accelerate sustainable development,” says Pouponneau in an interview with IPS, adding that sustainable fishing and building ocean-based enterprises are crucial to the success of this Indian Ocean archipelago.

“Building ocean-based enterprises, providing a regulatory framework for sustainable businesses, and financing research and development activities are the three pillars of the blue economy roadmap.”

Seychelles launched the world’s first sovereign blue bond in 2018. The blue bond, Pouponneau says, is an innovative financial tool to support sustainable marine and fisheries start-ups and SMEs and the key to unlocking ocean-based sustainable business.

According to the Seychelles government, the bond is a pioneering financial instrument that raised US$15 million from international investors. The success of the bond demonstrates the potential for countries to harness capital markets for financing the sustainable use of marine resources.

Similarly, as part of the Nature Conservancy’s Blue Bonds for Ocean Conservation program, Belize signed a Conservation Funding Agreement, also known as the Blue Bond.

“Our Blue Bond is similar to Seychelles’. However, Belize’s is larger and has a more comprehensive set of targets,” Beverly Wade, the Policy and Planning Advisor in the Ministry of Blue Economy and Civil Aviation, tells IPS.

“The bond establishes a Conservation Fund of USD 180 million, to be accessed over 20 years, to support the implementation of coastal and marine conservation projects by government and non-governmental partners.”
Wade, a representative on the Belize National Climate Change Committee, says the ministry is finalizing the framework for Blue Economy for the South American country.

“This is a five-year multisectoral policy, strategy, and plan. Belize is one of the countries in the Mesoamerican Reef region involved in the Smart Coasts Project that promotes ecosystem-based adaptation and climate smarting of Marine Protected Areas and Coastal Development Plans,” she tells IPS.

Belize, a leader in marine spatial planning and habitat mapping, has updated Marine Habitat Map by processing satellite imagery and artificial intelligence to classify critical marine habitats such as seagrass and corals.

The Blue Bond, she says, will facilitate the completion of a comprehensive Marine Spatial Plan (MSP) for Belize’s entire Blue Space, an urban design term for visible water.

Overall, 163 nations have submitted their NDCs to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) under the NDC Partnership.

The NDC Partnership is a global initiative to help countries achieve their national climate commitments through financial and technical assistance through the Climate Action Enhancement Package (CAEP).

The Partnership supports countries with a coastal blue carbon ecosystem to “enhance the quality, increase the ambition, and implement NDCs, every five years since the first round of NDC were submitted in 2016. With a footprint across 62 member countries and nine institutional partners since October 2017, the NDC Partnership holds significant experience, resources, and expertise to ensure that countries achieve NDC objectives.

This support is timely and critical. World Bank data shows the global ocean economy is valued at an estimated $1.5 trillion per year. Approximately 80 percent of international trade by volume is carried by sea, and an estimated 350 million jobs across the globe are linked to fisheries.

The report, NDCs-A Force for Nature? notes that 105 out of 114 updated NDCs submitted by October 12, 2021, included nature-based solutions in their roadmap to limit global warming.

Through CAEP, launched in 2019 with the technical and financial support of 46 partners, the NDC Partnership is currently supporting 67 countries to submit enhanced NDCs and fast-track their implementation.

The CAEP aims to catalyze change towards resilient, sustainable, and low-emission development, supporting the objectives of the Paris Agreement for member countries of the NDC Partnership. It also assists developing member countries in enhancing NDCs and fast-tracking their implementation, including providing in-country technical expertise and capacity building.

The NDC policy commitment, Pouponneau says, is a “robust, realistic, measurable and achievable yardstick against which Seychelles is evaluating its progress towards climate change resilience and sustainable development.”

“NDCs are a planning, finance and resource mobilization and accountability tool. And there is a commitment right from grassroots to the international level to achieve set targets.”

Wade agrees. She explains that through the NDC updating process, the National Climate Change Office, with support from the World Wildlife Fund and PEW Charitable Trusts, a National Blue Carbon Working Group was established.

“The group provided oversight for the research activities conducted in support of establishing realistic mangrove mitigation and adaptation targets for the updated NDC,” she says.

“The NDC also identifies concrete targeted actions to meet these obligations. And provides a space for bringing together planned and ongoing activities from existing national strategies as well as plans for target achievement.”

Both local communities and most of the Seychelles’ urban areas and infrastructure are concentrated next to the shore; therefore, the country’s economic activity relies on the sustainable management of marine resources.

“The blue economy’s primary challenge is the lack of understanding between the use of ocean-based resources, climate change resilience, and sustainable development. There is a need to educate local communities on why it is no longer business as usual,” Pouponneau says. “This education will go hand in hand with financial incentives to help local communities use ocean resources sustainably.”

 

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International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. Credit: UN Women

By Divya Srinivasan and Humaida Abdulghafoor
NEW DELHI, India, Dec 22 2021 (IPS)

Marital rape has now been criminalized without exception in the Maldives, as part of a raft of significant amendments to the Sexual Offences Act (2014). The First Amendment to the Sexual Offences Act was ratified on 6 December 2021 by President Ibrahim Mohamed Solih.

The move has been welcomed by national and international women’s rights groups which have been calling for greater legal protection against sexual violence.

In the Maldives, sexual assault has traditionally been viewed as a private matter. However, research-backed evidence has enabled campaigners and survivors to build public awareness.

The ground breaking Women’s Life and Health Experiences (WHLE) study by the Maldives Ministry of Health (2007) revealed that one in five women between the ages of 15 and 49 experienced intimate partner violence and one in eight women were subjected to childhood sexual violence.

The efforts of activists have fuelled growing recognition at all levels including policy, law and public awareness that the State must do more to effectively prevent, address and respond to widespread violence against women and girls.

A high profile case involving an attempted rape on a safari boat in the harbour of Hulhumale in June 2020 resulted in public protests and increased calls for police accountability in rape cases. The outcry prompted lawmakers to propose amendments to existing sexual violence legislation, including the nullification of certain discriminatory provisions from the Sexual Offences Act.

Hailed as an important step towards ensuring access to justice for all survivors, the reforms just signed into law improve the definition of rape, sexual injury, and sexual assault, and apply such offences regardless of marital status.

Previously, marital rape was only criminalised under certain limited circumstances, specifically when the marriage was in the process of dissolution, when one of the parties had applied for a divorce, if the couple was living separately under a mutual agreement, or if the husband knowingly passed a dangerous sexually transmitted disease to the wife.

The only marital rape conviction in the country was issued by the High Court on 1 October 2020. The victim in the case died from the assault — the posthumously reached verdict was possible through the narrow definition of rape in the law at the time (as the victim was separated from her husband).

Therefore, the current amendment criminalising marital rape without exceptions is a significant milestone in sexual violence legal history in the Maldives.

New amendments to the law also specify the provision of rape evidence kits at all government hospitals and health centres, and training for staff on using the kits, including applying a “victim-centred and trauma-informed” approach.

In addition, the Maldives Police Service has been mandated to use rape evidence kits while investigating sexual offence cases. It is anticipated that the implementation of these changes will help to increase the investigative robustness of rape cases and ensure survivors have a better chance to access justice than before.

In a further improvement, certain discriminatory evidence provisions have been removed. Previously, the court could throw out rape cases on the grounds that there was a possibility of false testimony being submitted by the victim assessed based on the so-called “dignity and discipline of the victim”.

This had left the door open for the introduction of evidence relating to the past sexual history of the victim, regardless of its relevance as to whether or not she had consented to the particular sexual act in the case.

The court was also able to consider “the relationship between the parties and the transactions between them prior to the offence” and construe that on these grounds it was improbable that an offence had occurred.

Another progressive amendment is the removal of a provision which previously allowed the denial of sexual violence if there was a long delay between the occurrence of the incident and its reporting, and if the incident was not narrated to another person in the intervening time.

International human rights standards state that there should be no adverse inference due to delay in reporting since there are many valid reasons why survivors do not report rape immediately.

The deletion of these discriminatory provisions from the statute books is extremely welcome as they enabled the course of justice to be perverted, and gender stereotyping and secondary victimisation of survivors during legal proceedings.

For survivors of sexual violence, the new amendments have eliminated some of the barriers to justice identified by Equality Now and Dignity Alliance International in a joint report Sexual Violence in South Asia: Legal and Other Barriers to Justice for Survivors, which calls on the Maldives, along with Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, to take urgent action in addressing sexual violence, improving access to justice for survivors, and holding perpetrators to account.

Legally permitting impunity for rape within marriage treats women as the property of their husbands and takes away their rights over their own body. By criminalising marital rape without exception, the Maldives is now more in line with international human rights standards and aligned with other countries in the South Asian region such as Nepal and Bhutan.

However, marital rape is still not a criminal offence in Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka, where human rights activists continue to advocate for legal reform.

Uthema is a Maldivian women’s rights NGO that advocates for gender equality and has been calling for better legal protection and access to legal redress for those subjected to sexual and gender-based violence.

Uthema congratulates the Government of the Maldives on this important positive change to the law and calls on all relevant State authorities to ensure that the law is fully and effectively implemented.

The legal modifications just passed have opened up avenues to justice for survivors, and introduce a much-needed deterrent to would-be perpetrators. This is crucially needed to address the problem of underreporting of sexual assaults, which is very low due to the system-wide service and law enforcement gaps.

Ensuring public and stakeholder awareness of the amendments, improving low reporting rates for rape, and improving investigation and prosecution procedures, are now the need of the hour.

The Maldives has taken a significant and progressive step to achieve justice for survivors of sexual violence, particularly within marriage. In a socio-cultural context where conservative forces continue to advocate for unequal marital relations and archaic patriarchal notions that marriage is a contract of ownership of women’s bodies for men, this legal shift sends an important message to all Maldivian people.

That message is that women in the Maldives have an inherent legal right to bodily autonomy and dignity as a separate human person deserving of equality with men, security, safety, optimal physical and mental health and wellbeing within marriage, free from sexual or any other form of violence.

For media enquiries please contact: Tara Carey, Equality Now, Head of Media Manager, E: tcarey@equalitynow.org; M: +447971556340 (WhatsApp)

Equality Now is an international human rights organisation that works to protect and promote the rights of women and girls around the world by combining grassroots activism with international, regional and national legal advocacy. For more details go to www.equalitynow.org, Facebook @equalitynoworg, and Twitter @equalitynow.

Uthema is a women’s human rights NGO registered in 2016, advocating for gender equality and women’s empowerment in the Maldives.

Divya Srinivasan is Equality Now South Asia Consultant, and Humaida Abdulghafoor, Uthema Co-Founder and Member

 

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Women and men from the rural community of Sachac, at more than 3500 meters above sea level, build a kilometer-long infiltration ditch to capture rainwater and use it to irrigate crops in Cuzco, in Peru’s Andes highlands. CREDIT: Janet Nina/IPS

By Mariela Jara
CUZCO, Peru , Dec 22 2021 (IPS)

“When I was a little girl we didn’t suffer from water shortages like we do now. Today we are experiencing more droughts, our water sources are drying up and we cannot sit idly by,” Kely Quispe, a small farmer from the community of Huasao, located half an hour from Cuzco, the capital of Peru’s ancient Inca empire, told IPS.

She is one of the 80 members of the Agroecological School of the Flora Tristan Peruvian Women’s Center, a non-governmental institution that has worked for the recovery of water sources through traditional techniques known as seeding and harvesting water in this part of the southern Andean region of Cuzco.

Muñapata, Huasao and Sachac are the three rural Quechua-speaking communities in the province of Quispicanchi, located between 3150 and 3800 meters above sea level, that have so far benefited from the project. The feminist-oriented institution promotes solutions based on nature and community work to address the problem of water scarcity and inadequate water use practices.

“We want to boost water security as well as gender equality because they are two sides of the same coin,” Elena Villanueva told IPS. On Dec. 14 she presented in this city the results of the initiative whose first phase was carried out in 2020 and 2021, with the support of the Basque Development Cooperation Agency and Mugen Gainetik, an international association for cooperation with countries of the developing South also based in Spain’s northern Basque region.

According to the National Water Authority (ANA), Peru is the eighth country in the world in terms of water availability, with a rich hydrodiversity of glaciers, rivers, lakes, lagoons and aquifers. However, various factors such as inefficient management of water and uneven territorial distribution of the population, in addition to climate change, make it impossible to meet consumption demands.

“The lack of water severely affects families in rural areas because they depend on small-scale agriculture for their livelihoods. The melting of glaciers as well as the increase in the frequency and intensity of droughts due to climate change are reducing water availability,” Villanueva explained.

This impact, she said, is not neutral. Because of the gender discrimination and social disadvantages they face, it is rural women who bear the brunt, as their already heavy workload is increased, their health is undermined, and their participation in training and decision-making spaces is further limited.

Kely Quispe, a farmer trained at the Flora Tristán Center’s Agroecological School, holds a tomato in her organic garden in the farming community of Huasao. Her vegetable production depends on access to water for irrigation, but climate change has made water more scarce in the Andes highlands region of Cuzco in southern Peru. CREDIT: Janet Nina/IPS

“Moreover, although they are the ones who use water to ensure food, hygiene and health, and to irrigate their crops, they are not part of the decision-making with regard to its management and distribution,” she stressed.

The expert said that precisely in response to demand by the women farmers at the Agroecological School, where they receive technical and rights training, they are focusing on reviving water harvesting techniques used in ancient Peru, while promoting the equal participation of women in rural communities in the process.

She said that approximately 700 families living in poverty, some 3,500 people – about 11 percent of the population of the three communities – will benefit from the works being carried out.

Harvesting water

So far, these works are focused on the afforestation of 15 hectares and the construction of six “cochas” – the name for small earthen ponds, in the Quechua language – and an infiltration ditch, as part of a plan that will be expanded with other initiatives over the next two years.

The ditch, which is one kilometer long in 10-meter stretches, 60 centimeters deep and 40 centimeters wide and is located in the upper part of the community, collects rainwater instead of letting it run down the slopes.

The technique allows water to infiltrate slowly in order to feed natural springs, high altitude wetlands or small native prairies, as well as the cochas.

The mayor of the rural community of Sachac, Eugenio Turpo Quispe (right), poses with other leaders of the village of 200 families who will benefit from the forestation works and the construction of small reservoirs and infiltration ditches that will increase the flow of water in this highlands area that is suffering from prolonged droughts due to climate change. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

In their communal work, villagers use local materials and greenhouse thermal blankets to help retain water. In addition, they have used extracted soil to raise the height of the ditch, to keep rainwater from running over the top.

Although the ditch has been receiving rainwater this month (the rainy season begins in November-December), the ecosystem impact is expected to be more visible in about three years when the cocha ponds have year-round water availability, helping villagers avoid the shortages of the May-October dry season.

Several community members explained to IPS that they will now be able to harvest water from the ditch while at the same time caring for the soil, because heavy rain washes it away and leaves it without nutrients. Some 150 agricultural plots will also benefit from a sprinkler irrigation system, thanks to the project.

Since agriculture is the main livelihood of the families and this activity depends on rainwater, the main impact will be the availability of water during the increasingly prolonged dry periods to irrigate their crops, ensure harvests and avoid hunger, for both villagers and their livestock.

Eucalyptus and pine, huge consumers of water

The mayor of the Sachac community, Eugenio Turpo Quispe, told IPS that this is the first time that water seeding and harvesting practices have been carried out in his area. “We had not had the opportunity before; these works have begun thanks to the women who proposed forestation and the construction of cochas and ditches,” he said.

The local leader lamented that due to misinformation, two decades ago they planted pine and eucalyptus in the highlands of his community. “They have dried up our water sources, and when it rains the water disappears, it does not infiltrate. Now we know that out of ten liters of rain that falls on the ground, eight are absorbed by the eucalyptus and only two return to the earth,” he explained during the day that IPS spent in the community.

Women farmers from the rural community of Sachac show the map of water sources in their area and the uses for irrigation of their crops, for human consumption and household needs, as well as watering their animals, which they cannot satisfy throughout the year due to the increasingly long and severe dry season. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

Turpo Quispe said they had seen forestation and construction of cochas and ditches in other communities, but did not know how to replicate them, and that only through the Flora Tristán Center’s project have they been able to implement these solutions to tackle the serious problem of shrinking water sources.

In Sachac, the three techniques have been adopted with the participation of women and men in communal work that began at six in the morning and ended at four in the afternoon. “Side by side we have been planting native plants, digging ditches and hauling stones for the cochas,” the mayor said proudly.

In this community, 9,000 seedlings of queuñas (Polylepis) and chachacomos (Escallonia Resinosas) – tree species that were used in the times of the ancient Inca empire – were planted. “These trees consume only two liters of rainwater and give eight back to Pachamama (Mother Earth),” Turpo Quispe said. As part of the project, the community has built fences to protect crops and has relocated grazing areas for their animals.

“We have planted seedlings and in 10 or 15 years our children and grandchildren will see all our hills green and with living springs so that they do not suffer a lack of water,” the mayor said.

Kely Quispe from the community of Huasao is equally upbeat: “With water we can irrigate our potatoes, corn and vegetables; increase our production to have enough to sell and have extra money; take care of our health and that of the whole family, and prevent the spread of covid.”

“But just as we use water for life, it is also up to us to participate on an equal footing with men in irrigation committees and community councils to decide how it is distributed, conserved and managed,” she added.

A model shows the water sources in the rural community of Muñapata in the Cuzco region, in Peru’s southern highlands. It was made by local women and men who built a system based on ancestral techniques for the collection and management of water, as increasing drought threatens their lives and crops. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

The decade of water security

Villanueva of the Flora Tristán Center said it was important for the country’s local and regional authorities to commit to guaranteeing water security in rural areas within the framework of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The International Decade for Action: Water for Sustainable Development was declared for 2018-2028 by the United Nations and SDG6 is dedicated to water and sanitation, to ensure universal and equitable access for all, protect and restore water-related ecosystems, and support the participation of local communities in improving management and sanitation.

“At the national level, public policies aimed at seeding and harvesting water should be strengthened because they revive the communities’ ancestral knowledge, involving sustainable practices with low environmental impact that contribute to guaranteeing the food security of families,” she said.

However, Villanueva remarked, in order to achieve their objectives, these measures must not only promote equal participation of men and women, but must also be accompanied by actions to close the gender gap in education, access to resources, training and violence that hinder the participation and development of rural women.

By Philippe Benoit
WASHINGTON, Dec 21 2021 (IPS)

U.S. President Biden just hosted The Summit for Democracy to demonstrate the advantages of democracy in the global competition with authoritarian regimes. The U.S. can succeed in this competition by demonstrating to the people of developing countries (i.e., the vast majority of the world’s population) how coupling democracy and development is the best course to improve their lives.

The U.S.’s ability to deploy this potent combination is an important advantage it enjoys over authoritarian competitors. For that reason, the Biden administration should add development to its democracy initiative.

As Biden has stressed: “We are in the midst of a fundamental debate about the future and direction of our world .. between those who argue … autocracy is the best way forward … and those who understand that democracy is essential.”

Similarly, he explained to a Joint Session of the U.S. Congress: “We’re in competition with China and other countries to win the 21st century.” And in this competition, he said, democracy must prevail: “We have to prove that our model isn’t a relic of our history; it’s the single best way to revitalize the promise of our future.”

The strategy should not be anchored in merely displaying that the world’s wealthiest countries are democracies. Rather, the strategy needs to establish that these wealthy democracies and the system they embody are the best equipped to improve the standards of living of the people of the developing world

The December summit was designed to do precisely that. Over 100 countries were invited to participate, with representatives from governments, civil society and the private sector. The number of countries and breadth of representation shows the Biden administration’s ambition.

The summit was organized around three themes: defending against authoritarianism, addressing and fighting corruption and promoting respect for human rights. These are important topics when considering what a vibrant democracy can and should provide to its citizens. But there is a critical fourth theme missing from the summit: the power of democracies to improve the lives of the multitudes in developing countries suffering from inadequate standards of living.

Billions in these countries struggle to meet basic needs in food, shelter, health, education, sanitation and more. Too many families face daily threats of malnutrition, inadequate sanitation, insecurity, and generalized poverty. Too often, unreliable energy and transport systems, as well as corruption and repression, prevent families from raising their incomes to improve their lives. The terror that COVID-19 constitutes for impoverished countries illustrates the challenge.

The U.S. government needs to show the world’s people that democracies provide the best promise to improve their lives and to protect their families. The strategy should not be anchored in merely displaying that the world’s wealthiest countries are democracies. Rather, the strategy needs to establish that these wealthy democracies and the system they embody are the best equipped to improve the standards of living of the people of the developing world.

To win a global competition, it is important to speak to the global audience, and most of that audience resides in developing countries (over 5 billion people outside of China). Moreover, it is in these countries that populations will grow the most — 2 billion more people by 2050, with more than half of that growth occurring in Africa.

China has understood the importance of this audience, as epitomized by its massive trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative to finance infrastructure and other projects in developing countries. For various commentators in Washington, this initiative is less about assistance and more about Beijing’s strategy to advance its geopolitical interests to the detriment of the U.S.

Yet, irrespective of the motivation, developing countries have been taking note of both China’s growing overseas assistance, as well of its development successes in reducing poverty and raising incomes domestically.

But improving the quality of people’s lives is not only about more infrastructure or improved material conditions. It is also about social and political dimensions and, importantly, about freedoms (as reflected, for example, in the UN declaration on development).

This includes freedom from fear and oppression, the right to expression, to participate in politics and the right of minorities to the same opportunities as the majority. Importantly, these are elements that a vibrant democracy should deliver, and an authoritarian system is poorly equipped to provide.

Unfortunately, several of today’s democracies, including in many developing countries, are falling short in delivering on democracy’s promise. For example, minority ethnic groups in various countries are being discriminated against, or even oppressed, by the majority (a torment that is more prevalent in and arguably endemic to authoritarian regimes).

So, as Biden has stressed, democracies must do better: “We have to defend [democracy], fight for it, strengthen it, renew it.”  For these reasons, the three announced themes of the summit are indeed important.

And yet they are insufficient in and of themselves to win the global competition. Providing the conditions to raise people out of poverty and to promote inclusive prosperity free from fear is a critical and complementary fourth theme that would speak to people’s aspirations across the developing world.

While there was some discussion of economic development in connection with the summit, it was too limited.  So, in addition to new commitments on countering authoritarianism, etc., the democracy initiative of the Biden administration needs to catalyze substantial and meaningful action to better fight poverty and deprivation in poorer countries.

Among other things, this should include increased funding and more technical support from wealthy democracies to developing countries, but also commitments from the governments of the poorer nations to foster the conditions domestically for fair and inclusive growth.

The U.S. has historically understood the strategic importance of coupling development and democracy, sponsoring organizations such as the World Bank, UN Development Programme and the Food and Agriculture Organization.

The global wars of the last century demonstrated the benefits of a world in which the U.S. democracy surpassed authoritarian regimes — and also that the U.S. and other countries were safer in a world filled with vibrant democracies. This dynamic helps to explain why the U.S. has remained the biggest provider of overseas development assistance, notwithstanding fluctuating domestic political support. But there is growing international competition.

Democracy is a powerful system to be deployed globally to raise standards of living while promoting individual liberties and freedom from oppression. Authoritarian systems cannot stand up to that promise. Democracy’s leaders, including from many of the globe’s richest countries, need to demonstrate what they and democracy can provide to the world’s have-nots.

That is key to any strategy to win the competition of the 21st century. To this end, President Biden should, following on his earlier Leaders Summit on Climate and this Summit for Democracy, convene a “Summit for Development” that addresses the poverty and other challenges, as well as the aspirations, of the world’s disadvantaged.  

First published in The Hill on December 8, 2021

Philippe Benoit has over 25 years of experience working in international affairs and development, including in management positions at the World Bank. He is currently managing director, Energy and Sustainability, with Global Infrastructure Advisory Services 2050.

Online platform Fuzia uses positive reinforcement and creativity to support its community. Credit: Sangeeta CS/Fuzia

By Fairuz Ahmed
New York, Dec 21 2021 (IPS)

This is an age where pandemics are raging, millions live in war-torn strife, yet women are judged on their skin tones and height, says matchmaker Hirion Shah.

“It is sad and frustrating to see educated families, Ph.D. holders, even scientists from high-tech companies turning down suitable matches based on only such issues. I have over 25 years of experience in matrimony matchmaking, and it is high time we change our perspective,” Shah says in an exclusive interview with IPS.

With hundreds of successful matchmaking successes over the years, she expresses her concern about stagnant values that many families demand while looking for potential matches for their children.

“And it does not stop there: fair, dark, skinny, little chubby, tall or not tall enough, these become central traits of being judged. This is almost an epidemic when it comes to Asian communities at home and abroad,” Shah says. “I have seen hundreds of marriages ending in divorce because basic values, characteristics, and overall compatibility were given a backseat during selection, and looks were prioritized.”

According to Compare Comp, in 2020, 55% of marriages across the globe were arranged marriages, and approximately 20 million arranged marriages exist today. The divorce rate for arranged marriages globally is at 6.3%.

India has the highest rate of arranged marriages, hitting 90%, followed by China, Pakistan, Japan, and Bangladesh. It is alarming that 14 million girls get married every year before turning 18.

The UN has declared child marriage a human rights violation. According to the UNFPA, those forced into early or child marriages suffer an increased risk of pregnancy and childbirth complications.

According to IBISWorld, weddings services in the US market alone comprises a $56.7bn industry and are given a center stage in millions of families. Besides wedding expenses, a good chunk of this industry expands to beautification, enhancing and fixing body images, altering skin color or looks.

The American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery (AAFPRS) says that in 2017, more than half of their practitioners saw an increase in cosmetic surgery or injectables with clients under the age of 30. More than 80% of treatments were cosmetic non-surgical procedures, and the trend was born out of social pressures.

According to Harper’s Bazaar, the top three non-surgical treatments among brides, grooms, and wedding parties are facelifts, eyelifts, and nose jobs. Procedures like Botox, hyaluronic acid injections, and chemical peels are popular. Social media influence, peer pressure, and feeling a need to fit in were the main reasons for approaching a plastic surgeon.

Amina Banu recounts her experience of an arranged marriage.

“I grew up in a metro city. My mother has been a teacher for 30 years and my father a scientist. My older sister and brother both are engineers. I have completed a master’s from Michigan, United States,” Banu says, but none of this seemed to matter.

“It was a tiring process to get married despite our social and economic setting. I met over 25 suitors and settled down with the 26th. The process seems brutal and demeaning.”

She says she was rejected because she is 5’6”, and the suitors’ families thought the partners would look awkward.

Fuzia believe in supporting their online community through workshops, support groups and podcasts where users can understand and gain information about positive body shape affirmation and ways to develop a healthy relationship with their bodies. Credit: Ditsa Mahanti/Fuzia

“Happiness and the mental match have nothing to do with such fickle matter, but still, at our age, these are massive points to weigh in, while families look for suitable grooms or brides. The irony is that my husband is 5’4”, and we have been happily married for the past 12 years,” Banu says. She now has three sons and works in New York. She spends a lot of time promoting healthy lifestyles and body images in teens and young adults in minority communities.

The Obesity Action Coalition has found that among overweight middle-school-aged children, 30% of girls and 24% of boys experienced daily bullying, teasing, or rejection because of their size.

These numbers doubled for overweight, high school students – with 63% of girls and 58% of boys experiencing some form of bullying due to their weight and size. Most of the time, these weight-related comments sound like helpful hints. But in reality, children can feel trapped, alone, and helpless to change their situations.

Also, it is not just school bullies initiating weight teasing, body shaming, or teasing.

A study published on Wiley Online Library in September 2018 states that the victim’s friends, teachers, coaches, and even their parents often participate. They use subtle forms of bullying or relational aggression to bully and tease.

Obesity Action notes that many people bullied or shamed because of their weight suffer depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem.

Pragya Singhal, a social media associate from the online platform Fuzia, says the platform offers support sessions, podcasts and publishes blogs to help people address body image and body-shaming issues.

“The majority of our users’ ages range from teens to young adults. We try to instill the affirmation that, with positivity and a growth mindset, you can become the best and most confident version of yourself,” Singhal says.

Fuzia, which Riya Sinha and Shraddha Varma co-founded, has 5 million users. It has created a safe space where users can network, have a conversation, share their creativity, find work opportunities and study online. The platform has a clear policy about profanity and hate speech and ensures positive engagement.

The online platform uses creative avenues to seek information about mental health, learn ways to cope, ask for help, and express themselves in a safe and judgment-free way.

Shraddha Varma, Fuzia’s co-founder, says that their initiatives align with the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations of ensuring good health and well-being.   Fuzia sets up workshops, support groups, and podcasts where users can understand and gain information about positive body shape affirmation and ways to develop a healthy relationship with their bodies.

“In my opinion, body image has long been and is still considered a parameter of how one thinks about themselves and others. We all have something that we want to change about our bodies, and we have very little idea of how hugely it affects our self-esteem,” says Varma.

“Let’s accept that nobody’s perfect, and we must stop body-shaming others and ourselves. What matters instead is what our bodies can do, if we’re aware of our bodies and if we’re taking the right care of our bodies by getting a good dose of sleep, eating healthy, focusing on being strong and fit, and keeping just about a healthy weight.”

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Women have taken the helm in Lebanon’s protests, but not in the realm of formal politics. This role is symbolized in this statue of a protesting woman in Martyrs' Square, Beirut. Credit: Mona Alami

By Mona Alami
Beirut, Lebanon, Dec 21 2021 (IPS)

Despite its apparent liberalism, Lebanon scores low in gender equality, especially in politics.

According to the Gender Gap index, Lebanon ranks third last in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, with only Syria and Yemen, both plagued by war, scoring lower.

According to Reliefweb, since 2010, Lebanon has witnessed a consistent decline in its relative gender gap score – reaching close to zero in terms of political empowerment.

In November, incumbent Prime Minister Najib Mikati was criticized for saying that Lebanon’s Independence Day celebrations were similar to a “divorced woman celebrating her wedding anniversary … but let’s not forget that if she had remained understanding until her last day in the marriage, she wouldn’t be divorced…”

Rima Husseini, professor at the Lebanese American University (LAU), says empowerment in the country is superficial.

“On the surface, we are seen as an example because Lebanon has a high number of educated women, with many female entrepreneurs. In appearance, we seem more liberated, but that does not translate into political empowerment at a practical level,” she says in an exclusive interview with IPS.

There is only one woman in the current government.

In the previous election in 2018, only six of 86 women who registered to run for the 128-seat Parliament won their seats. Five of them were members of political parties, which helped facilitate their victory.

Paula Yaacoubian, ventured into politics without the usual patronage – a family name, wealth, or the support of a male political leader.

Only one, former television news presenter Paula Yacoubian ran as an independent, won a seat. Unlike other female candidates, she did not come from a political family nor backed by a local male political leader.

While under Article 7 of the Lebanese constitution, gender equality is guaranteed, personal status is often in the hands of religious communities.  Lebanon recognizes 18 religious communities, each with a different status law, which means gender equality may not apply.

“Inequality stems from the patriarchal framework of households, where family codes and communal laws see women as objects owned by their family. This reality affects women’s political participation in Lebanon,” explains Husseini.

The patriarchal system, where women educate their sons differently from their daughters, is one of the biggest challenges faced by Lebanese women. Another stems from the sectarian system, one of the most detrimental factors hindering women’s political representation, explains Yaacoubian.

More than two decades have passed since Lebanon adopted the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). Yet, it has failed so far to comply with the treaty, more specifically when it comes to the gender quota system allowing women’s integration into political life.

“Lebanon’s patriarchal system, which is built on laws that aim to control women and youth, does not allow for real citizenship, with factors of separation such as class and religion prevailing,” says Husseini. “When you think of it, there is no real Lebanese citizenship, no social contract that binds us together. Women have a great role to play but cannot because of the legal system that differentiates between men and women.”

This translates to Lebanon falling behind regarding women’s representation, with no quotas to act as a safeguard, unlike other regional countries.

In nearby Jordan, in appearance, a more conservative country than Lebanon, nine percent of women hold ministerial positions. Another 12 percent participate in Parliament, with an additional 32 percent participating in the local legislatures.

Women played a major role in recent protests in Lebanon. However, this has not translated into political power. Credit: Mona Alami

In Iraq, Women set an unprecedented historical record in the 2021 election. According to an article by the New Arab, 97 female candidates were elected to the 329-seat chamber this year, which equals 29.4 percent of the new Iraqi parliament. This represents 14 more seats than the required quota for female MPs, which is 83, or 25% of parliament according to Iraq’s electoral laws.

The New Arab estimates that the support for female candidates was so significant that 57 MPs will enter the next parliament based solely on registered votes rather than the allocated quota system.

“Conversely, women’s access to politics is restricted in Lebanon. As an example, former MP Dina Boustany only entered parliament after the death of her father. Women get into parliament due to their familial relations,” says Myriam Sfeir, Director of the LAU Arab Institute for Women. “There is a famous saying: ‘women enter parliament as a result of the death of a relative’. Then they leave political life when their male descendant comes of age. In addition, Lebanese political parties are simply more willing to fund men.”

Yaacoubian, who is the only woman to have broken the rules by venturing into politics without the sponsor of a family name, wealth, or the support of a male political leader, underlines that entering political life as a woman is not without cost in Lebanon.

“Women are treated as if they are missing some quality (that men are supposed to have). The prevailing mentality is that men know better, although studies have shown that women tend to be less corrupt and more humane in politics,” she says.

Independent political players such as Yaacoubian, explains Husseini, are often the object of bullying, with efforts made to diminish their value on a personal level or attack their reputation, which would never happen to a male political candidate.

Despite remaining on the sideline of the Lebanese parliamentary life, women have been at the helm of the 2019 protest movement.

They succeeded in easing conflict between separate sectarian regions, such as Ain Remaneh and Chiyah in Beirut, and protected protestors when the riot police attacked them.

In November, three judges, all women, handed in their resignation to protest political interference in the judiciary’s work and the undermining of decisions issued by judges and courts.

“Women are very present, especially as civil society actors. Lebanese women are demanding to be included on decision tables. They are carving a space for themselves in the political world. However, a quota system is essential to ensure better representation in the next parliamentary elections,” says Sfeir.

Women must be brave and persevere at any cost if they want to enter politics, concludes Yaacoubian.

 

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• The Ongoing Fight for Gender Parity in Lebanon
• Lebanon: How to Build Back Better after Political and Economic Crisis

The Republic of Congo received just over 300,000 doses of the COVID vaccines through the COVAX Facility in August 2021. Credit: UNICEF/Aimable Twiringiyima

By Ahunna Eziakonwa
NEW YORK, Dec 21 2021 (IPS)

We are about to start a third year of living with COVID-19. The world’s humanity and solidarity are now at its further test – and yet the implications of the absence of solidarity keep us all in the boat of mutations, lockdowns, quarantines and delayed SDGs – denied prosperity for all. 2021 has unearthed a new expression of global inequity: “vaccine nationalism” – which itself competes high with socioeconomic downturns, jobless growth, the climate crisis, and rising poverty.

As the pandemic ravages on, with Omicron on the scene, the futility of hoarding takes centre stage as even the heavy supply of boosters in advanced economies has not shielded them from the vicious cycle of pandemic-living.

While about 60 per cent of the population in the US and 76 per cent in Canada are fully vaccinated, in Africa – a continent that is home to 1.3 billion people – the number barely reaches 8 per cent.

Many have argued that vaccines’ short shelf life, hesitancy and logistic challenges weigh in. Granted. But the main issue remains the absence of global solidarity – where the rich hoard, and the weaker economies deal with vaccine famine – awaiting their turn…

Vaccine Inequality is also manifest in vaccine affordability. For high income countries to vaccinate 70 per cent of their population it will take raising their health care spending by 0.8 per cent. Lower income countries must increase health care spending by over 50 per cent, on average – to do the same.

Vaccines delayed is development denied. Estimates show that vaccine delays cost Africa up to $14 billion in lost productivity each month and making recovery more challenging – and dragging out the first-in-a-generation recession the continent is facing.

African governments have responded quickly to contain the spread of the virus – but success is overshadowed by the pandemic’s socioeconomic consequences. In 2019, Africa was witnessing record growth numbers in various sectors – like tourism, where Africa had the second-fastest growing tourism sector in the world, contributing 8.5 per cent of the continent’s GDP.

However, with the pandemic, tourism has come to a standstill, and the continent recorded a 2.1 per cent decline in economic growth in 2020. Other accompanying challenges have included general exchange rates depreciations, food insecurity and increased job losses.

Vaccine delays will cost Sub-Saharan Africa 3 per cent of the region’s forecast GDP in 2022-25. UNDP research reveals that recovery rates are strongly correlated to capacity to vaccinate – with a $7.93 billion increase in global GDP for every million people vaccinated.

Low-income countries that are severely impacted by the pandemic do not have the fiscal and financial leeway available to wealthy countries. They risk enduring the pandemic longer if they do not gain early access to COVID-19 vaccines.

This places an inordinate burden on national budgets at a time when the pandemic has decimated fiscal revenues and when higher spending is needed from governments to protect their people and cushion the socioeconomic shock caused by the pandemic.

There is a risk of seeing African countries’ budget deficit widen and it is urgent for us to support countries in developing alternative financing sources. Vaccine famine is putting millions at risk of infection, constraining economic productivity and jeopardizing socioeconomic progress.

The key question today is: Can the world afford such blatant inequality in the face of a pandemic that is sparing no region?

The path to recovery will remain long and uncertain unless we take urgent measures to overhaul the current system of vaccine production, distribution, and financing. Below are some ideas on how to get there fast – building on a consensus emerged from the recently concluded African Economic Conference in Sal, Cabo Verde.

• Development financing in Africa requires an out – of – the – box architecture. Africa will need an additional $425 billion in external funding between now and 2025 to fully recover from the pandemic. It is daunting, but not impossible. It is equivalent to the amount African countries lose to illicit financial flows over a five-year period. Economic governance and creativity can be applied: by, for instance, re-directing investments by pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, and similar institutions.

• Leveraging the continent’s natural resources is urgent. Africa’s financial presence in the international system does not reflect its real wealth. Better management and use of extractive industries is critical. Resources like energy, oil, natural gas, coal, and uranium are worth between US$13-14.5 trillion and US$1.7 trillion of potential wealth. Further resources can be harnessed from production in six key sectors: agriculture, water, fisheries, forestry, tourism and human capital. Mobilization of these resources requires governments seriously addressing deficiencies in banking and governance systems to stem illicit financial flows out of the continent. Central banks have a key role to play in unlocking idle resources and channeling them into productive investments. Over $1 trillion of excess reserves could be used to finance Africa’s development.

• International finance systems could be reviewed to become more equitable. Concessional financing should consider countries’ multidimensional vulnerabilities beyond what is reflected in their income levels. The allocation of a record amount of $650 billion SDR issued by the IMF to its country members in August 2021 is a step in the right direction. But more can be done to better support countries that need financing the most. Africa only received $21 billion of SDRs from the total envelope. Such international mechanisms could be reviewed to redress current inequalities.

• Reforming Africa’s financial system. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the critical role that financial systems have to play in supporting Africa’s development. Improvements in the quality, quantity and efficiency of financial systems are crucial for Africa’s sustainable development. More effective financial systems across the continent can promote resource mobilization and better allocation of savings to productive investments by shifting incentives for the banking system toward the core functions and advancing financial inclusion for individuals and microenterprises.

• Digital innovations are a game changer for Africa’s development financing. Financial systems that harness digital technologies and free and fair competition will be fundamental in revitalizing African economies. The pandemic has proven that digital technologies present enormous opportunities for Africa. They stimulate innovation, economic growth, and job creation in critical economic sectors by allowing better interconnection of African markets with the rest of the world. They can also increase market access and financing for the marginalized population usually excluded by the formal financial systems. However, digitization also has the potential to exacerbate inequalities and we must ensure that the means are sufficiently inclusive for no one to be left behind.

• Sustainable financing will be key. African financial institutions have a role to play in enabling Africa to transform its natural resources advantages, by leveraging blue-carbon markets, and green financing mechanisms. Climate risk-sensitive investment, de-risking, impact investment, environmentally sustainable projects, sustainable energy investment are among critical issues for sustainable financing development. Thus, the financial sector has a key role to play in re-orienting investments towards more sustainable technologies and businesses and fostering low-carbon, climate-resilient, and circular economies.

• Boosting intra-African trade is a gateway to recovery. The transformative power of the AfCFTA must be brought to bear in servicing the needs of 1.3 billion people. If effectively implemented, the AfCFTA will accelerate the continent’s path towards structural economic transformation through value – addition – based industrialization of both goods and services. Investment in trade facilitation reforms and using Regulations as a Stimulus will bring even greater dividends, saving governments money in efficiencies while placing billions directly in the hands of intra-African women and youth – led exporting enterprises.

2022 must be a year where collective global action prioritize vaccine equity and ensure a shot for all. Omicron has reminded us that there is just no other way to build forward better.

Ahunna Eziakonwa is UN Assistant-Secretary General, UNDP Assistant Administrator and Director, Regional Bureau for Africa.

 

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Credit: UNHCR

By Baher Kamal
MADRID, Dec 20 2021 (IPS)

A bit of fiction. Or maybe not. If things keep going the way they are, the result will be that such a massive flux would create instability and tensions, impact the global markets, cause record prices of fossil fuels, food and everything else, and the bankruptcy of big private financial corporations…

Already seven years ago, a former director general of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), William Lacy Swing, estimated that the number of climate migrants and refugees could reach one billion humans by the year 2050.

Such a scenario could well happen given the rapid growth of the ongoing climate emergency.

“Hazards resulting from the increasing intensity and frequency of extreme weather events, such as abnormally heavy rainfall, prolonged droughts, desertification, environmental degradation, or sea-level rise and cyclones are already causing an average of more than 20 million people to leave their homes and move to other areas in their countries each year.”

What would Europe, the US and other rich countries do then? Shall their politicians –and the growing far-right– fuel once more the fear of the “invasion” of migrants and refugees, saying that they include criminals and terrorists, will occupy the homes of honoured citizens, take all their jobs away, rape their daughters and, consequently militarise their borders?

Shall they send them to third countries in exchange for some money, like what already happens with Turkey? Or shall they just force them back to their countries of origin, which they had to flee due to floods, storms, tsunamis and famine, provoked by a climate disaster they did not generate?

 

Climate change and disaster displacement

The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) says that climate change is the defining crisis of our time and disaster displacement is one of its most devastating consequences.

“Entire populations are already suffering the impacts, but vulnerable people living in some of the most fragile and conflict-affected countries are often disproportionately affected.”

Refugees, internally displaced people and the stateless are on the frontlines of the climate emergency, it reports, adding that many are living in climate “hotspots”, where they typically lack the resources to adapt to an increasingly hostile environment.

UNHCR urges all countries to combat the growing and disproportionate impacts of the climate emergency on the most vulnerable countries and communities — in particular those displaced and their hosts.

 

1 Person Is Forcibly Displaced Every 2 Seconds due to conflict, persecution

These displacements are the result of conflict or persecution. At mid-2021, their number already reached 84 million. And there are 10 million stateless people, half of them under the age of 18.

Coincidentally, most of their countries of origin are also among the most hit by poverty and climate emergency.

 

Climate crisis is a human crisis

“The climate crisis is a human crisis. It is driving displacement and makes life harder for those already forced to flee.”

The impacts of climate change are numerous and may both trigger displacement and worsen living conditions or hamper return for those who have already been displaced.

Limited natural resources, such as drinking water, are becoming even scarcer in many parts of the world that host refugees. Crops and livestock struggle to survive where conditions become too hot and dry, or too cold and wet, threatening livelihoods, UNHCR adds.

 

Climate change, a threat multiplier

In such conditions, climate change can act as a threat multiplier, exacerbating existing tensions and adding to the potential for conflicts.

“Hazards resulting from the increasing intensity and frequency of extreme weather events, such as abnormally heavy rainfall, prolonged droughts, desertification, environmental degradation, or sea-level rise and cyclones are already causing an average of more than 20 million people to leave their homes and move to other areas in their countries each year.”

On this, the Global Compact on Refugees, affirmed by an overwhelming majority in the UN General Assembly in December 2018, directly addresses this growing concern. It recognises that “climate, environmental degradation and disasters increasingly interact with the drivers of refugee movements”.

“We need to invest now in preparedness to mitigate future protection needs and prevent further climate caused displacement. Waiting for disaster to strike is not an option,” says Filippo Grandi, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.

 

Every second 1 person is displaced by disaster

More than five years ago, in july 2016, IPS reported that, in fact, “every second, one person is displaced by disaster,” the Oslo-based Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) reported, adding that in 2015 only, more than 19.2 million people fled disasters in 113 countries.

“Disasters displace three to ten times more people than conflict and war worldwide.” See: Climate Victims – Every Second, One Person Is Displaced by Disaster

“On average, 26 million people are displaced by disasters such as floods and storms every year. That’s one person forced to flee every second.”

Further on, IPS wrote: Imagine a world with as many as one billion people facing harsh climate change impacts resulting in devastating droughts and floods, extreme weather, destruction of natural resources, in particular lands, soils and water, and the consequence of severe livelihoods conditions, famine and starvation.

Although not yet based on definite scientific projections, the proven speed with which the process of climate change has been taking place, might lead to such a scenario by 2050. If so, 1 in 9 human beings would be on the move by then, it added.

“Currently, forecasts vary from 25 million to 1 billion environmental migrants by 2050, moving either within their countries or across borders, on a permanent or temporary basis, with 200 million being the most widely cited estimate, according to a 2015 study carried out by the Institute for Environment and Human Security of the United Nations University.”

This figure equals the current estimate of international migrants worldwide.”

For its part, the UN International Organization for Migration (IOM) forecasts 200 million environmental migrants by 2050, moving either within their countries or across borders, on a permanent or temporary basis. Many of them would be coastal populations.

In an interview to IPS, the former IOM Director General, William Lacy Swing, explained that political crises and natural disasters are the other major drivers of migration today.

“We have never had so many complex and protracted humanitarian emergencies now happening simultaneously from West Africa all the way to Asia, with very few spots in between which do not have some issue.” See: Q&A: Crisis and Climate Change Driving Unprecedented Migration

 

Droughts, Desertification

Another warning comes from the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), which estimates that some 135 million people may be displaced by 2045 as a result of desertification.

Up to 12 million hectares of productive land become barren every year due to desertification and drought alone, which is a lost opportunity to produce 20 million tons of grain, adds the Bonn-based Convention secretariat.

Meanwhile, the increase in droughts and flash floods that are stronger, more frequent and widespread is destroying the land – the Earth’s main freshwater store, according to UNCCD.

 

The killing drought

“Droughts kill more people than any other single weather-related catastrophe and conflicts among communities over water scarcity are gathering pace. Over 1 billion people today have no access to water, and demand will increase by 30 percent by 2030.”

Africa is particularly susceptible since more than 90 percent of its economy depends on a climate-sensitive natural resource base like rain-fed, subsistence agriculture.

“Unless we change the way we manage our land, in the next 30 years we may leave a billion or more vulnerable poor people with little choice but to fight or flee.”

For its part, the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF), reports that extreme weather events – from floods and storms, to heatwaves and drought – are already displacing an estimated 41 people each minute, and as temperatures continue to increase, climate extremes will worsen, sea levels will rise, and the world’s most vulnerable will bear the brunt.

 

Hunger and the climate

The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) reports that the world produces enough food to feed everyone, yet, about 800 million people suffer from hunger. That is one in nine people. 60 percent of them are women.

And that about 80 percent of the world’s extreme poor live in rural areas. Most of them depend on agriculture.

“Hunger kills more people every year than malaria, tuberculosis and AIDS combined.”

Most importantly: “No other sector is more sensitive to climate change than agriculture.”

The above-cited causes of massive displacements just add to the fast-growing climate crisis, which will evidently greatly increase the number of migrants and refugees.

No matter if they will be one billion or 500 million or even 100 million. They are humans and victims of circumstances they have not created. What will rich countries do?

 

Various states, and many environmental campaign groups, suspect that carbon markets weaken the overall effort to reduce emissions. Credit: Bigstock.

By External Source
Dec 20 2021 (IPS)

One surprise from COP26 – the latest UN climate change conference in Glasgow – was an agreement between world leaders on a new set of rules for regulating carbon markets. This would allow countries to trade the right to emit greenhouse gases.

Carbon trading is part of how countries intend to meet their obligations for reducing emissions under the Paris Agreement. Unfortunately, the manner in which countries agreed these rules may hobble the Agreement in its goal of averting catastrophic warming.

Carbon markets were central to the design of the Paris Agreement’s predecessor, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which created three different mechanisms for trading carbon. Developing countries had become accustomed to attracting investment via one called the “Clean Development Mechanism” (CDM) which allowed industrialised countries to invest in projects to reduce emissions in developing countries and count them against their own targets under the Kyoto Protocol. Many industrialised countries wanted to retain this sort of flexibility in how they met their own treaty obligations.

As a result, most governments were keen to keep carbon markets as part of the Paris Agreement. In Paris in 2015, the bare bones of mechanisms similar to those in the Kyoto Protocol were agreed, but without the details needed to put them into practice.

Why then did it take six years to agree the rules which would govern these markets? This was more than the four years it took countries to do the same in the Kyoto Protocol and, in effect, they were recreating the same mechanisms. The problems in reaching an agreement this time were three-fold, and they weren’t satisfactorily resolved in Glasgow.

 

Going backwards from Kyoto

Various states, and many environmental campaign groups, suspect that carbon markets weaken the overall effort to reduce emissions. As climate change has accelerated over the past decade these concerns have become more acute. Why trade emissions if everyone is trying to get them to zero? There is considerable evidence that carbon offset projects – such as wind farms, which emissions trading can fund – have failed to deliver a reduction in overall emissions. A 2017 study led by the EU Commission found that 85% of projects funded by the CDM hadn’t reduced emissions.

There are also fundamental design issues in the Paris Agreement that make setting up carbon markets under it much more difficult. The Kyoto Protocol expressed the obligations of industrialised states to reduce their emissions as targets. These could be translated into a fixed number of emissions allowances that provided carbon markets with a clear set of accounting rules and indicators of market demand.

No such set of rules exists in the Paris Agreement. Instead, all states submit their nationally determined contributions (NDCs) – national plans for reducing emissions. They may or may not have an emissions target and they vary in how they account for emissions or which sources of emissions they include in their plans.

How can a market function if there is no clear way of measuring what is being traded? And how should a country trading with another adjust its own NDC to avoid double-counting, when the design of each country’s NDC varies so much?

And what should countries do with all the credits created in the Kyoto Protocol’s system? Should they just be rolled over to be used in the new markets? Should they be simply abandoned? Or is there some way of allowing them in but controlling their use? A lot of CDM credits in particular remain, and they could flood the new markets and undermine the integrity of the NDCs.

 

A cop out

In the first week of COP26, it looked like these issues would continue to dog the negotiations. India supported unrestricted use of CDM credits in the new mechanism while the Solomon Islands (representing the Least Developed Countries group) opposed using them at all. In week two, these issues were either fudged or hastily agreed. The carbon traders were happy, as were the managers of the COP26 process – the UN secretariat and the UK government. We can now see the cost of failing to grapple with these thorny issues.

The Glasgow decisions on both Article 6.2 and 6.4 of the Paris Agreement are extraordinarily unclear compared with the equivalent ones for the Kyoto Protocol. Specialists in this field are still decoding precisely what they mean in practical terms. It’s likely that states will be able to use this opacity to double-count and claim credit for the same emissions-reducing activities.

Countries are supposed to set new NDCs regularly. At the same time, countries will be negotiating individual emission trades. The possibility for a country to game its NDC – making it appear more ambitious than it really is by counting already agreed trades within them – is impossible to avoid. It’s hard to see how this doesn’t fundamentally weaken the ambition of countries when updating their NDCs.

Monitoring how these mechanisms work in practice and whether they have the desired effect will be important over the coming years. While heralded at the time as a breakthrough in implementing significant tracts of the Paris Agreement, the Glasgow pact on carbon markets might instead be remembered as its undoing.

Matthew Paterson, Professor of International Politics, University of Manchester

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The biodigester and part of the biogas plant of the Cocal company, surrounded by a sugarcane plantation on all sides, in the municipality of Narandiba, in the west of the southern Brazilian state of São Paulo, where sugarcane has replaced cattle ranching as the main economic activity. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
NARANDIBA, Brazil , Dec 20 2021 (IPS)

First came sugar. For four centuries, it was the main sugarcane product in Brazil. But since the 1970s sugarcane has grown and diversified as a source of energy: ethanol, electricity and biogas.

“Sugarcane is the green oil,” said André Alves da Silva, commercial and new products director of Cocal, as the company Comércio Indústria Canaã Açúcar e Álcool Ltda. is better known, which started large-scale production of biomethane, i.e. refined biogas, a renewable and clean equivalent of natural gas.

“We have a biofactory here,” he told IPS in an interview in the Cocal plant in Narandiba, a municipality located in the west of the southern state of São Paulo.

Referring to the plant whose scientific name is Saccharum officinarum as “sugarcane” has become obsolete in this region.

In addition to sugar and ethanol, electricity is generated from sugarcane bagasse, and biogas and other by-products are also created, such as biofertilizers, carbon dioxide gas and dried yeast, leftovers from alcohol fermentation, which, when processed, serve as protein-rich animal feed.

Biomethane in place of gas

The big novelty is biomethane, produced since June, as the starting point of a project that will bring gas to three closely grouped cities: Narandiba, Pirapozinho and Presidente Prudente, with a combined population of 264,000 people.

GasBrasiliano, a company of the state-owned oil conglomerate Petrobras, will be in charge of distribution and is building a 65-kilometer gas pipeline, which is scheduled to be inaugurated in June 2022.

“It is our first biomethane project, the first among many,” Alex Gasparetto, director-president of the distributor that holds the concession for piped gas in the west and north of São Paulo state, an area encompassing 375 municipalities and 9.2 million inhabitants, told IPS.

São Paulo, the richest and most populated state in Brazil, home to 46 million of the 214 million inhabitants of this enormous country, accounts for more than half of the national sugarcane production, in more than 150 agroindustrial sugar or ethanol plants next to sugarcane plantations, most of them in the GasBrasiliano concession area.

Sugarcane is the “green oil”, says André Alves da Silva, commercial and new products director of Cocal, an agroindustrial company located in Narandiba, in southern Brazil, which uses almost everything from sugarcane to produce electricity, biogas, biomethane, biofertilizers, yeast as animal feed and other gases, in addition to sugar and ethanol. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

“The potential is huge, sugarcane biomethane can replace all the diesel and liquefied petroleum gas (for cooking) consumed in the state, a privileged situation,” said Alessandro Gardemann, president of the Brazilian Biogas Association (ABiogás).

“Cocal is a demonstration project, which goes from sugarcane cultivation to the final consumer with the supply of biomethane for the entire year,” he told IPS by telephone from Londrina, a city in the southern state of Paraná where his technology services company, Geo Biogas & Tech, which promoted biogas in the sugar-energy sector, is headquartered.

Solution for seasonal limitations

Geo’s technological contribution was decisive for the Cocal biomethane project to take off. It has long been known how to make biogas from vinasse, but this liquid residue from the ethanol (or alcohol) distillery can only be used during harvest season, generally from April to November.

The vinasse is bulky and smelly, impossible to store for many days in the ponds built to collect it before it is put into the horizontal biodigesters where the organic material is broken down in an anaerobic process that produces biogas.

To ensure a year-round supply, Geo adapted a German technology to incorporate into biodigestion another waste product, cachaça or filter cake, a dark sludge resulting from the processing of sugarcane juice to make sugar. Cachaça, for Brazilians, is the name for sugarcane brandy.

A treatment process that removes impurities and part of the moisture converts this waste, which used to be discarded, into raw material for biogas. It has “10 times more organic matter than vinasse,” which is why it is more productive, Eduardo Baptista, supervisor of industrial production at the Cocal biogas plant, told IPS.

A sea of sugarcane plantations flood Narandiba and its neighboring municipalities in the southern state of São Paulo, where the agroindustrial company Cocal grows it as the raw material for its biofactory for energy, fuels and agricultural inputs. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

This innovation made it possible to overcome seasonality, as it is stored in four open-air tanks next to the two vertical biodigesters, specifically for the cachaça. “During the harvest, we use the vinasse and between harvests, the cachaça,” avoiding interruptions in the production of biomethane, explained Alves, the company’s commercial director.

A second factor in favor of the project, he said, was that there is local demand for gas that could not be met by the GasBrasiliano pipeline, whose nearest point is more than 100 km from Presidente Prudente, the main city in the region, with a population of 230,000.

Extending the existing network to this limited market would not be economically viable, but a 65-kilometer gas pipeline from Cocal is, said Gasparetto, GasBrasiliano’s director-president.

The third factor is environmental. With biomethane, Cocal seeks to reduce the greenhouse gases emitted in its ethanol production. Replacing diesel with green gas decarbonizes the activity by 95 percent. Additional reductions can be obtained with the new fuel in trucks and agricultural equipment, an alternative that is currently being tested.

In addition, the waste from which the biogas is extracted is converted into clean biofertilizers, which emit 75 percent less carbon than chemical fertilizers, said Cocal’s commercial director.

Lastly, the decision was also based on the dual use of biogas: electricity or biomethane.

“Having two options reduces the risks,” the proportions can be modified according to demand and prices, Alves said. Currently, 53 percent of the biogas is refined into biomethane and 47 percent is used for electricity generation.

The vinasse pond at the Cocal plant, in the Brazilian municipality of Narandiba, feeds the biodigesters that produce biogas, later purified and refined for use in electricity generation or conversion into biomethane, a renewable and clean fuel equivalent to natural gas. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Cocal has also been generating energy by burning bagasse since 2002. Today it can supply electricity to a city of 730,000 inhabitants, the company reports.

Social contributions

For all this energy production, Cocal has two industrial units, each with its own sugarcane fields around it. The first was installed in 1980 in Paraguaçu Paulista, 135 kilometers from Narandiba.

It employs a total of 5,500 workers in 22 municipalities and has 125,000 hectares planted to sugarcane, mostly on land leased under 20-year contracts, according to Alves. The harvest reached 8.7 million tons of cane last year.

Narandiba currently has about 6500 inhabitants, after 2000 arrived, attracted by the local operation of Cocal, inaugurated in 2008, said the town’s mayor, Itamar dos Santos Silva, who estimated at 600 the direct and indirect employees of the sugar and alcohol plant a year ago – almost 10 percent of the population.

The municipality, which had stagnated when cattle ranching dominated its economy in the last decades of the last century, has prospered again. “Sugarcane totally changed the social and economic situation in the region,” the mayor said in a meeting with IPS in his office.

Deposits of cachaça or filter cake, a residue from sugar production, proved advantageous in the generation of biogas at Cocal’s two plants in western São Paulo state, in southern Brazil. The reason is that the residue contains a lot of organic material and is available when there is a lack of vinasse between sugarcane harvests. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

In addition to offering more jobs, Cocal pays even the lowest-earning employees double what a ranch worker used to earn, he said. With the rise in purchasing power, “every day a new house is built in Narandiba” and commerce and the demand for schools, health services and recreation has grown, Dos Santos Silva said.

Tax revenue also increased, but it lagged behind the immediate demands created by the influx of new residents, lamented the mayor, whose plans include attracting industry and stepping up the training of young people for the new supply of technical jobs in the sugarcane agro-industry.

Environmental sustainability was the main motive for Liane, a company that makes food products such as biscuits and pasta, to sign the first contract for the purchase of biomethane distributed by GasBrasiliano in Presidente Prudente.

Biomethane does not pollute like fossil fuels and probably has lower costs than “the natural gas that comes to us by truck from far away,” Mauricio Calvo, Liane’s industrial director, told IPS by telephone from the company’s headquarters.

Initially, biomethane will go to companies, fuel stations, shopping malls, hotels and large restaurants, i.e. large consumers.

The supply of piped gas to households remains a long-term goal, Gasparetto told IPS by telephone from GasBrasiliano’s headquarters in Araraquara, a town 280 kilometers from São Paulo.

By Armida Salsiah Alisjahbana
BANGKOK, Thailand, Dec 20 2021 (IPS)

Countries in the Asia-Pacific region are trying their best to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic by rapidly rolling out vaccination programmes and putting in place public health interventions to reduce its impact. At the end of November, there were 262 million confirmed COVID-19 cases and 5.2 million deaths globally. About 60 per cent of all COVID-19 cases and half of all COVID-19 related deaths were in Asia and the Pacific. About 7.8 billion vaccines have been administered globally, and vaccine supply is generally improving.

Armida Salsiah Alisjahbana

However, the pandemic has exacerbated inequities between and within countries and communities in the region with regard to access to vaccines, diagnostics and therapeutics. Many countries, particularly lower income countries, are lagging in vaccinating their populations, with less than 1-in-5 of the total population fully vaccinated. This vaccine inequity is prolonging the pandemic in both developed and developing countries. The recent emergence of a new strain of the virus capable of spreading faster, threatens to derail recent efforts to open economies and borders.

We recently brought together leaders and experts from across the region to examine the reasons for the large inequities in access to vaccines, diagnostics and therapeutics, and the ways to close the gap. The Regional Conversation on Equitable Access to Vaccines, Diagnostics and Therapeutics also highlighted some important factors and pre-requisites for ending the pandemic and preventing future ones.

Firstly, while noting the many initiatives supporting countries’ efforts to contain the spread of the virus, inequities had arisen due to procurement and stockpiling of vaccines by higher income countries across the world well in excess of their requirements. Vaccine production was concentrated in selected countries (mainly developed), and “vaccine nationalism” was spreading, coupled with a lack of effective mechanisms to transfer knowledge, technology and other resources. Multilateral mechanisms like COVAX, which had emerged as a lifeline for many lower- and lower middle-income countries, had not been provided adequate vaccines or resources. For the inequity to be narrowed, it is imperative that multilateral mechanisms like COVAX be transformed from a market and charity model to a global public investment and global public goods model.

Second, vaccines and health technologies for fighting pandemics should be recognized as global public goods. Discussions and promotion of this idea at subregional and regional levels could help advance it before elevating it to the global level. At the regional level, procurement of vaccines could be pooled, and regional hubs built for the development and manufacture of vaccines; where these centres already exist they should be strengthened. Public-private partnerships in vaccine development, manufacturing and distribution must be increased. Exchanges and transfer of knowledge, know-how, technology and resources between countries, using North-South and South-South principles, must be stepped up to achieve vaccine self-sufficiency. Promoting policy coherence through regulatory and normative systems to achieve quality and set standards should be part of regional cooperation. WTO member States are discussing the possibility of intellectual property rights to certain health technologies during health emergencies like pandemics, and this needs to be expedited and supported.

Third, having efficient and well-structured vaccination programmes at the national level, with a clear and transparent strategy for reaching population groups in vulnerable situations, was critical to achieving vaccine equity within and between countries. In many high-income countries with abundant supply of vaccines, vaccination rates were lagging due to “vaccine hesitancy” because of misinformation and a lack of trust. In this context, vaccination programmes need to be rooted in strengthened health systems and universal health coverage, with equal access to high quality, comprehensive and affordable health care. More agile, anticipatory and adaptive health systems also must be developed. There should be multisectoral action for health that puts primary health care at its center. Synergies with other sectors should be harnessed to advance public health objectives and to increase public health care funding.

Building on these concrete suggestions that focus on the Asia-Pacific region, we will revisit this subject at our annual session of the Commission in May 2022, when countries will have an opportunity to consider these ideas. Until then, I remind member States and stakeholders in Asia and the Pacific that no single country will succeed in defeating the pandemic on its own. Our only chance is to work together. We require trust and solidarity within and between nations. Without these essential elements, no regional or global arrangements will hold water or succeed.

Armida Salsiah Alisjahbana is Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations and Executive Secretary of ESCAP

 

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