Africa - INTER PRESS SERVICE

Schoolteacher Marta Pérez stands in front of her house near the solar thermo panel that has allowed her and her family to enjoy hot water again, because the high cost of electricity made it unaffordable in the past. There are a total of 70 beneficiaries of the solar water heater project in the town of Renca, to the north of Santiago, Chile. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

By Orlando Milesi
SANTIAGO, Oct 29 2021 (IPS)

More than 90 percent of Chile’s 17.5 million people have access to electricity. But many live in energy poverty because they do not have access to hot water, have unsafe connections, houses without thermal insulation and with indoor pollution, or can’t afford to pay the monthly bill.

This description came from Nicola Borregaard, who holds a PhD in natural resource economics and is manager of EBP Chile, a sustainability consultancy in the field of energy, water resources and climate change. The consultancy takes on projects that range from strategic to concrete initiatives that reflect what is happening around the country.

Borregaard is promoting a Latin American energy inclusion programme (PIE) that aims to address energy poverty reflected in low thermal comfort, high energy costs, risk of fire and electrocution, respiratory diseases and lack of access to clean energy.

She explained in an interview with IPS that the consultancy applies financial engineering to address the needs and requirements with alliances and connections through networks with different actors, in order to make the projects viable.

In Chile “we are very close to reaching 100 percent access to electricity. This does not always mean that people have access 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Many have intermittent access that lasts a couple of hours, with interruptions,” she said.

For Borregaard, energy poverty is a multifaceted issue and is not only overcome by having access to electricity.

“More than 10 percent of the population does not have access to hot water. And there is no electrical safety…. in many homes there is a risk of electrocution and fire due to poor installations,” she said.

She added that “66 percent of homes do not have adequate thermal insulation. They suffer from heat and cold and spend on heating and air conditioning. The most vulnerable do not have adequate houses and suffer from the heat. And there are no parks in most of their municipalities.”

“The other kind of energy poverty is the inability to afford to pay the bill which often is huge, with as much as 20 percent of a family’s income going towards electricity and gas,” she added.

The picture is completed “with indoor pollution because many people heat with coal, wood or kerosene in very small spaces and this contributes to respiratory diseases.”

Solar water heaters

Marta Pérez, a 50-year-old primary school teacher, lives with her parents in the low-income Nueva Victoria neighbourhood in the municipality of Renca, on the northern outskirts of Santiago, some 22 kilometres from the city.

“I had health problems. We have an electric water heater, but because the bills were so high we disconnected it….but because the water was so cold I got pneumonia. I got really sick. That was until last year when they installed a solar thermal panel in my house. Since December I have been using hot water to bathe,” she told IPS at her home.

Her family used to pay 125 dollars a month on their electricity bill, but now they pay 75 dollars a month. In Renca, the project installed 40 solar systems consisting of a solar panel and a tank that holds 80 litres of hot water.

Each beneficiary family paid approximately 250 dollars for the installation and received the thermo panel – which costs 1,125 dollars – as a donation.

A total of 70 households made up of 292 people received five types of energy improvements aimed at energy efficient homes. In addition to the thermo panels, other families received refrigeration and thermal insulation systems for their homes.

“I wish that all of Chile could have access to a solar thermo panel, and that they could become widespread for showers and basic needs. It is the energy of the future and takes advantage of what we have most: sunlight,” said Pérez.

“And I hope they soon install solar panels on the rooftops because it cuts down the electric bill and harnesses the sun’s energy for power. We must use sources such as wind, geothermal and solar energy. That would be a present with a vision for the future of humanity,” said the kindergarten teacher.

On two hectares of this rugged land in Rungue, a town of 1,200 inhabitants some 54 km from the Chilean capital, a community Renewable Energy Cooperative hopes to install rows of solar panels close to the electricity grid in order to transfer the surplus. The 50 kW photovoltaic plant will generate 102,000 kWh per year and will initially lift 40 families out of energy poverty. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

Cooperative to the rescue

In Rungue, a village 54 kilometres north of Santiago, EBP Chile promoted the creation of a cooperative for low-income households to install a community solar plant.

The solar panel plant will have a nominal capacity of 50 kW and will generate 102,000 kWh per year, providing energy for 40 households.

“We started two years ago, with the encouragement of a pioneer, to help alleviate the costs paid by the most vulnerable families,” said Leandro Astudillo, the 41-year-old manager of the Rungue Renewable Energy Cooperative.

At a meeting with IPS in Rungue, he explained that “based on people familiar with the needs of local residents, the Cooperative organised people born and raised in this community. The Neighbourhood Council, the school’s Parents’ Centre, the Housing Centre, the sports club and Rural Potable Water are represented, all of them sensitised to the project.”

“We have already registered 40 families who will benefit. Priority was given to senior citizens who have very small pensions and to people who find it difficult to pay their electric bill. Also to women and single mothers with large families,” he explained.

Each beneficiary is supposed to pay a little over 300 dollars, but the Cooperative is taking steps to waive this payment and reduce each beneficiary’s monthly contribution to zero.

The dry, arid village is still suffering the consequences of a metal refining plant called Refimet, which is no longer operating but contaminated with arsenic the waters of a dam and reservoir built in the 1950s for the irrigation of local agriculture.

Rungue is home to 1,200 people who mainly work in nearby companies and in several markets set up in the area, because there is almost no local agricultural production anymore.

View of the Santiago Solar Photovoltaic Park near Rungue, on the freeway linking the cities of Santiago and Valparaíso in central Chile, which the members of the local renewable energy cooperative are seeking to partially imitate. The Park takes advantage of the strong sunlight in the area by means of 33,600 solar panels installed on 202 hectares, with nine MW of power and a generation capacity of 210 GWh. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

Energy inclusion and clean sources

To address the energy insecurity in Renca, Rungue and numerous other Chilean localities, Borregaard proposes an energy inclusion programme aimed at affordable, sustainable, safe, equitable and clean energy.

“Energy inclusion implies identifying, networking, implementing concrete projects, fomenting and promoting. The idea is to scale all of these up,” she said.

The EBN programme, she said, “is carried out in partnership with several institutions, including the Swiss Embassy, the Energy Poverty Network (RedPE), the EGEA (Emprendimientos y Generación de Energías Alternativas – Alternative Energies Generation and Ventures) foundation, and numerous companies in the energy sector, including ENEL (an energy holding company) and AME (focused on solar energy and gas).”

Borregaard explained that “energy inclusion projects seek to democratise investment in renewable energy, accelerate the energy transition, reduce energy consumption and costs, encourage investment in projects with an environmental impact and contribute to sustainable development.”

Non-conventional renewable energies (NCRE) represent 24.5 percent of Chile’s energy mix. In September 2021 they accounted for 31.8 percent of electricity generation. In total there were 2071 GWh of generation, of which 952 came from solar power and 767 from wind power.

Installed NCRE capacity totalled 10,842 MW in September.

Distributed or decentralised generation, which allows self-generation of energy based on NCREs and efficient cogeneration, reached 95.3 MW in August in 8759 installations throughout Chile, of which 2354 are in Santiago.

Borregaard proposes raising the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions reduction tax from five to 30 dollars for each ton of polluting gas emitted to generate offset projects or finance pilot initiatives such as those of Renca, Rungue or similar ones.

Other ongoing initiatives

One example of such projects is a community modular refrigeration plant on Juan Fernandez Island, 800 kilometres off the coast of the city of Valparaiso in central Chile.

It consists of a refrigeration system using solar energy to preserve marine products and foment sustainable artisanal fishing. It was built in conjunction with the Confederation of Artisanal Fishermen of Chile and is aimed at the conservation of lobsters, fish, octopus, and crab.

The facilities have 3015 Watts of installed power and the refrigeration chamber is 10 cubic metres with 1.5 HP equipment.

In towns near Mamiña, in the desert region of Tarapacá in the extreme north of the country, there is an adaptive infrastructure project to promote community resilience and optimise the management of resources, based on water, energy and waste.

In the indigenous communities of Quipisca and Macaya, near the Cerro Colorado mine in the same region, the plan is to install solar panel systems to exchange surplus energy.

Monitoring systems and flexible battery systems are aimed at reducing the cost of energy, providing access to clean energy efficiently and generating new ventures.

In all the localities where the projects are being carried out, the objective is the same: to provide greater autonomy and reduce energy poverty through community empowerment and improved resource management capacity in this long, narrow South American country sandwiched between the Andes mountains and the Pacific Ocean.

Taliban violations of the rights of women and girls are uniquely extreme. No other country openly bars girls from studying on the basis of gender. Credit: 2017 Paula Bronstein for Human Rights Watch

By Heather Barr
LONDON, Oct 29 2021 (IPS)

Secondary schools have reopened for boys but remain closed to the vast majority of girls. Women are banned from most employment; the Taliban government added insult to injury by saying women in their employ could keep their jobs only if they were in a role a man cannot fill—such as being an attendant in a women’s toilet. Women are mostly out of university, and due to new restrictions it is unclear when and how they can return. Many female teachers have been dismissed.

The policy of requiring a mahram, a male family member as chaperone, to accompany any woman leaving her home, is not in place according to a Kabul official but Taliban members on the street are still sometimes enforcing it, as well as harassing women about their clothing. The Taliban have systematically closed down shelters for women and girls fleeing domestic violence. Women’s sports have been banned.

The Taliban have appointed an all-male cabinet. They abolished the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, and handed over the women’s ministry building to the reinstated Ministry of Vice and Virtue, which was responsible for some of the worst abuses against women during the Taliban’s previous period in power from 1996 to 2001.

This was the situation two months after the Taliban had regained control of the Afghan capital, Kabul, as the US and its allies departed, wrapping up their 20-year engagement in Afghanistan’s 40-year war.

Afghan women are fighting for their rights. They tried to negotiate with the Taliban, and when that failed, they protested. The Taliban broke up their protests, beating protesters and the journalists covering the protests, and then banned unauthorized protest.

The US and the whole international community seem a bit stunned and unsure of what to do. It forms a sadly perfect bookend to the days after the 9/11 attacks, when the US and its allies grieved and raged and then emphasized Taliban abuses of women and girls to help them build support for their invasion of Afghanistan.

The US has long had an uneven—and self-serving—track record on defending women’s rights abroad. But the US is not alone being unsure of what to do to protect the rights of women and girls under Taliban rule.

Even governments priding themselves on their commitment to women’s rights have struggled to find solutions. They have also struggled to make the rights of Afghan women and girls a top priority at a moment when troop-contributing nations are licking their wounds, and concerns about Afghanistan again becoming a host to international terrorist operations could overshadow concerns about human rights.

 

Humanitarian crisis

Taliban attacks on rights are not the only problem women and girls are facing. Afghanistan’s economy is in free fall, set off by widespread lost income, cash shortages, rising food costs, being severed from global financial systems, and an abrupt halt to the development assistance that made up 75 percent of the previous government’s budget.

This crisis, like most humanitarian crises, will cause the most harm to women and girls. Officials with the UN and several foreign governments are warning of economic collapse and risks of worsening acute malnutrition and outright famine. Surveys by the World Food Program (WFP) reveal that over nine in ten Afghan families have insufficient food for daily consumption, with half saying that they ran out of food at least once in the previous two weeks. One in three Afghans is already acutely hungry.

In December 2020, the UN Children’s Fund, UNICEF, had already warned that an estimated 3.1 million children—half of Afghanistan’s children —were acutely malnourished. Other United Nations reports warn that over 1 million more children could face acute malnutrition in the coming year. By mid-2022, 97 percent of Afghans may be below the poverty line.

Healthcare workers and teachers, many of them women, have not been paid for months, and the healthcare system is collapsing. Where schools for girls are open, few students attend, out of fear that they cannot move to and from school safely, along with financial problems, and a sense of despair about their future. And unpaid teachers may or may not teach.

 

Weak international response

Even as it became increasingly clear over the course of years that cheerful US and NATO statements about their progress in defeating the Taliban were papering over huge and growing cracks, few could imagine a Taliban return as abrupt as the one that took place in August 2021. Few would have predicted this level of humanitarian crisis and collapse of essential services within weeks of the end of a 20-year military, political, and development engagement by at least 42 countries costing an estimated $2.3 trillion.

The early weeks of resumed Taliban rule seemed marked by indecision and slow response by the international community, in spite of a G7 pledge on August 24, following an emergency meeting, that “We will work together, and with our allies and regional countries, through the UN, G20 and more widely, to bring the international community together to address the critical questions facing Afghanistan.”

A special session of the UN Human Rights Council on August 24 produced no meaningful progress. The UN Security Council in September renewed the mandate of the UN mission in Afghanistan but did not take specific steps to strengthen the mission’s human rights work, which faced staffing gaps and problems after some staff left their posts or were evacuated.

A subsequent meeting of the Human Rights Council produced agreement to appoint a special rapporteur on human rights in Afghanistan, with a mandate including monitoring and advocating for the rights of women and girls. This is a less powerful mechanism than the fact-finding mission a broad coalition of human rights organizations had called for.

The resolution creating the role of special rapporteur provided the person with greater staffing resources than most special rapporteurs but did not accelerate the on-boarding process. Under the standard timeline, the rapporteur and their team won’t be in place until mid-2022.

An announcement by the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor called into question the role that body will play in protecting human rights in Afghanistan. The court’s Office of the Prosecutor had been considering action in Afghanistan since 2007 and opened an investigation in 2020.

Alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity within the court’s jurisdiction in Afghanistan include: attacks against civil servants including female officials; attacks on schools particularly girls’ schools; and rape and other sexual violence against women and girls. The investigation was suspended nearly as soon as it was opened, however, while the Office of the Prosecutor considered a request from the former Afghan government to defer to national proceedings.

The prosecutor on September 27, 2021, announced that he would seek authorization from the court to resume investigations in the absence of any prospect of genuine national proceedings, but would focus on crimes committed by the Taliban and Islamic State and “deprioritize” other aspects of the investigation.

This approach sends a message that some victims in Afghanistan are more entitled to justice than others, and risks undermining the legitimacy of the court’s investigation.

There is significant variety in the views of key countries about engaging with the new Taliban authorities in Afghanistan. Regional politics are fraught and complex. China and Russia may see themselves as benefitting from a shift in global power dynamics due to the US defeat in Afghanistan, and they and others including Pakistan and Qatar seem more ready than countries that contributed troops to engage with the Taliban. China, Russia and Pakistan were among only five countries that voted against the Human Rights Council resolution to establish a special rapporteur.

 

“Feminist foreign policy” and the Taliban

Women’s rights activists have made important progress around the world in the 20 years since the Taliban were previously in power, from 1996 to 2001. These advances make the Taliban’s violations of the rights of women and girls even more cruel and intolerable than they were in 2001 and should help spur action by countries that have made progress to right these wrongs.

In recent years, several countries—including Sweden, Canada, Mexico, and France—proclaimed that they have a “feminist foreign policy.” According to the Swedish government, a feminist foreign policy “means applying a systematic gender equality perspective throughout the whole foreign policy agenda.”

Feminist foreign policy is also a recognition that you cannot have human security when half the population is oppressed and living in fear. As Germany’s foreign minister wrote in 2020, “Numerous studies demonstrate that societies in which women and men are on equal footing are more secure, stable, peaceful, and prosperous.”

 

What Concerned Governments Should Do

How should a world increasingly embracing “feminist foreign policy” respond to Taliban violations of the rights of women and girls in 2021?

The first step is to muster political will. Lack of political may be a particular challenge in the wake of the withdrawal of foreign troops, but it is not a new problem. During the decades of international presence, troop-contributing nations paid lip service and contributed funding toward women’s rights, but rarely political capital, and over time the lip service and cash dwindled too.

In 2011, the Washington Post reported that efforts to support women’s rights were being stripped out of US programs, quoting an official who said, “All those pet rocks in our rucksack were taking us down.” In a disturbing indication of lack of focus on women’s rights, many government and aid organizations have in recent weeks sent all-male delegations to meet with the Taliban, undermining any efforts they are making to press for greater respect for women’s rights.

Then there is a need for the international community to reach as much consensus as possible about what the problems are and what should be done. There are signs that even countries that have been more open to engaging with the Taliban have been disappointed by their unwillingness to appoint an inclusive government and their violations of women’s and girls’ rights.

The Taliban government excludes not just women but also largely excludes religious minorities and most non-Pashtun ethnic groups. Even China, Russia, Pakistan and Iran have all called for the Taliban to form an “inclusive government.” Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan has said that banning girls from education in Afghanistan would be “un-Islamic.” Qatar’s foreign minister called the Taliban’s ban on girls’ education “very disappointing.”

The Taliban’s unbending stance on the rights of women and girls is so extreme that this, and its opposition to an inclusive government, may drive broad concern about their actions and help the international community build consensus about how to engage. The US may not be the most able leader for this process and may prefer not to lead.

Other countries and institutions, including countries that have pledged to have a feminist foreign policy, majority Muslim countries, and organizations like the EU, should consider taking on greater leadership than they have so far, in response to a weak response from the US.

Next comes the need for a plan. Whatever the plan is, it should avoid any actions that would worsen Afghanistan’s deepening humanitarian crisis and disproportionately affect women and girls. There are signs of emerging agreement for humanitarian assistance and essential services, with the United Nations Development Program having made arrangements to pay salaries of healthcare workers on a temporary basis.

But major issues remain unresolved, suffering from a lack consensus by the international community, including how to respond to Taliban efforts to exclude women from working for aid agencies . Women workers are essential to ensure that aid reaches women and women-headed households. so permitting women humanitarian workers to do their jobs is not setting a condition on humanitarian assistance so much as an operational necessity to be able to deliver that assistance.

The international community has struggled to identify what leverage they have that can be used to influence the Taliban. The situation has been complicated by opaqueness on the Taliban side. Governments and donors need to figure out what the Taliban want from the international community, how much and where the Taliban are willing to compromise to get what they want. And they need to identify what other pressures—including the demands of their own members and the risk of Taliban fighters defecting to the Islamic State—constrain the Taliban from compromise.

Equipped with this knowledge, the international community should recognize that almost every country on the planet—except six, conspicuously including the US, plus Iran, Palau, Somalia, Sudan, and Tonga—has ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). Afghanistan ratified the convention in 2003. The convention requires countries to “pursue by all appropriate means and without delay a policy of eliminating discrimination against women.”

This promise has not been fulfilled in any country; no country has achieved full gender equality and disparities in access to education and employment, wage gaps, and failure to adequately respond to gender-based violence are common around the world. But even in that context, Taliban violations of the rights of women and girls are uniquely extreme.

No other country openly bars girls from studying on the basis of gender. It is shocking to see a country intentionally destroy its system for responding to gender-based violence and dismantle institutions such as the Ministry of Women’s Affairs that were designed to strengthen compliance with CEDAW.

The leverage the international community has to influence the Taliban needs to be deployed in defense of the rights of women and girls. Doing this will be a complex, difficult, and long-term task. But as

CEDAW members, and, in many cases, countries that used women’s rights to sell a war and spent 20 years promising eternal solidarity to Afghan women and girls, the international community owes them this effort.

Excerpt:

Heather Barr is associate women’s rights director at Human Rights Watch

The abundance of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere once again reached a new record last year, with the annual rate of increase above the 2011-2020 average, according to the World Meteorological Organization. Credit: Bigstock

By Baher Kamal
MADRID, Oct 29 2021 (IPS)

Another Year Another Record! The emissions of greenhouse gases continue to rise, the land and sea temperatures are higher than ever since there are records, and the ecosystems could fail their role as vital sinks absorbing carbon dioxide and as a buffer against larger temperature increases.

“The abundance of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere once again reached a new record last year, with the annual rate of increase above the 2011-2020 average. That trend has continued in 2021.”

This is how the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) warns in the Greenhouse Gas Bulletin, released just five days ahead of the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) (31 October – 12 Novembre) in Glasgow. In it, the world organisation reports that the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) –the most important greenhouse gas– reached 413.2 parts per million in 2020 and is 149% of the pre-industrial level.

 

But what is carbon dioxide

Carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for centuries and in the ocean for even longer. The last time the Earth experienced a comparable concentration of CO2 was 3-5 million years ago, when the temperature was 2-3°C warmer and sea level was 10-20 meters higher than now

Carbon dioxide is the single most important greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, accounting for approximately 66% of the warming effect on the climate, mainly because of fossil fuel combustion and cement production.

As long as emissions continue, global temperature will continue to rise. Given the long life of CO2, the temperature level already observed will persist for several decades even if emissions are rapidly reduced to net zero, warns WMO.

 

And what is methane?

Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas which remains in the atmosphere for about a decade, the world organisation explains.

Methane accounts for about 16% of the warming effect of long-lived greenhouse gases, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Approximately 40% of methane is emitted into the atmosphere by natural sources (for example, wetlands and termites), and about 60% comes from anthropogenic sources (for example, ruminants, rice agriculture, fossil fuel exploitation, landfills and biomass burning)

Methane (CH4) is 262% and nitrous oxide (N2O) is 123% of the levels in 1750 when human activities started disrupting Earth’s natural equilibrium.

 

What is nitrous oxide?

According to the World Meteorological Organisation, nitrous oxide is both a powerful greenhouse gas and ozone depleting chemical. It accounts for about 7% of the radiative forcing by long-lived greenhouse gases.
N2O is emitted into the atmosphere from both natural sources (approximately 60%) and anthropogenic sources (approximately 40%), including oceans, soils, biomass burning, fertilizer use, and various industrial processes.

 

Will ecosystems fail their role as sinks?

The Greenhouse Gas Bulletin flags concern that the ability of land ecosystems and oceans to act as “sinks” may become less effective in future, thus reducing their ability to absorb carbon dioxide and act as a buffer against larger temperature increases.

And it shows that from 1990 to 2020, radiative forcing – the warming effect on our climate – by long-lived greenhouse gases increased by 47%, with CO2 accounting for about 80% of this rise.

 

But what are carbon sinks?

See what the World Meteorological Organisation says:

— Roughly half of the CO2 emitted by human activities today remains in the atmosphere. The other half is taken up by oceans and land ecosystems. The part of CO2 which remains in the atmosphere, is an important indicator of the balance between sources and sinks. It changes from year to year due to natural variability.

— Land and ocean CO2 sinks have increased proportionally with the increasing emissions in the past 60 years. But these uptake processes are sensitive to climate and land-use changes. Changes in the effectiveness of carbon sinks would have strong implications for reaching the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement and will require adjustments in the timing and/or size of the emission reduction commitments.

— Ongoing climate change and related feedbacks, like more frequent droughts and the connected increased occurrence and intensification of wildfires might reduce CO2 uptake by land ecosystems. Such changes are already happening, and the Bulletin gives an example of the transition of the part of Amazonia from a carbon sink to a carbon source.

Ocean uptake might also be reduced due to higher sea surface temperatures, decreased pH due to CO2 uptake and slowing of the meridional ocean circulation due to increased melting of sea ice.

“The Greenhouse Gas Bulletin contains a stark, scientific message for climate change negotiators at COP26. At the current rate of increase in greenhouse gas concentrations, we will see a temperature increase by the end of this century far in excess of the Paris Agreement targets of 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels,” said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas.

 

Off track

“Carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for centuries and in the ocean for even longer. The last time the Earth experienced a comparable concentration of CO2 was 3-5 million years ago, when the temperature was 2-3°C warmer and sea level was 10-20 meters higher than now. But there weren’t 7.8 billion people then,” said Taalas.

WMO concludes that, alongside rising temperatures, the world would witness more weather extremes including intense heat and rainfall, ice melt, sea-level rise and ocean acidification, accompanied by far-reaching socio-economic impacts.

Enough reasons to worry? And to act? Before judging, please know that Governments plan to double the production of energy from fossil fuels!

 

Credit: United Nations

By Norman Solomon
SAN FRANCISCO, Oct 29 2021 (IPS)

When world leaders gather in Scotland next week for the COP26 climate change conference, activists will be pushing for drastic action to end the world’s catastrophic reliance on fossil fuels.

Consciousness about the climate emergency has skyrocketed in recent years, while government responses remain meager. But one aspect of extreme climate jeopardy — “nuclear winter” — has hardly reached the stage of dim awareness.

Wishful thinking aside, the threat of nuclear war has not receded. In fact, the opposite is the case. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has been moving the “Doomsday Clock” ever closer to cataclysmic midnight; the symbolic hands are now merely 100 seconds from midnight, in contrast to six minutes a decade ago.

A nuclear war would quickly bring cataclysmic climate change. A recent scientific paper, in sync with countless studies, concludes that — in the aftermath of nuclear weapons blasts in cities — “smoke would effectively block out sunlight, causing below-freezing temperatures to engulf the world.”

Researchers estimate such conditions would last for 10 years. The Federation of American Scientists predicts that “a nuclear winter would cause most humans and large animals to die from nuclear famine in a mass extinction event similar to the one that wiped out the dinosaurs.”

While there’s a widespread myth that the danger of nuclear war has diminished, this illusion is not the only reason why the climate movement has failed to include prevention of nuclear winter on its to-do list.

Notably, the movement’s organizations rarely even mention nuclear winter. Another factor is the view that — unlike climate change, which is already happening and could be exacerbated or mitigated by policies in the years ahead — nuclear war will either happen or it won’t.

That might seem like matter-of-fact realism, but it’s more like thinly disguised passivity wrapped up in fatalism.

In the concluding chapter of his 2017 book The Doomsday Machine, Daniel Ellsberg warns: “The threat of full nuclear winter is posed by the possibility of all-out war between the United States and Russia. … The danger that either a false alarm or a terrorist attack on Washington or Moscow would lead to a preemptive attack derives almost entirely from the existence on both sides of land-based missile forces, each vulnerable to attack by the other: each, therefore, kept on a high state of alert, ready to launch within minutes of warning.”

And he adds that “the easiest and fastest way to reduce that risk — and indeed, the overall danger of nuclear war — is to dismantle entirely” the Minuteman III missile force of ICBMs comprising the land-based portion of U.S. nuclear weaponry.

The current issue of The Nation magazine includes an article that Dan Ellsberg and I wrote to emphasize the importance of shutting down all ICBMs. Here are some key points:

** “Four hundred ICBMs now dot the rural landscapes of Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota and Wyoming. Loaded in silos, those missiles are uniquely — and dangerously — on hair-trigger alert. Unlike the nuclear weapons on submarines or bombers, the land-based missiles are vulnerable to attack and could present the commander in chief with a sudden use-them-or-lose-them choice.”

** Former Defense Secretary William Perry wrote five years ago: “First and foremost, the United States can safely phase out its land-based intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) force, a key facet of Cold War nuclear policy. Retiring the ICBMs would save considerable costs, but it isn’t only budgets that would benefit. These missiles are some of the most dangerous weapons in the world. They could even trigger an accidental nuclear war.”

** “Contrary to uninformed assumptions, discarding all ICBMs could be accomplished unilaterally by the United States with no downsides. Even if Russia chose not to follow suit, dismantling the potentially cataclysmic land-based missiles would make the world safer for everyone on the planet.”

** Frank von Hippel, a former chairman of the Federation of American Scientists who is co-founder of Princeton’s Program on Science and Global Security, wrote this year: “Strategic Command could get rid of launch on warning and the ICBMs at the same time. Eliminating launch on warning would significantly reduce the probability of blundering into a civilization-ending nuclear war by mistake. To err is human. To start a nuclear war would be unforgivable.”

** “Better sooner than later, members of Congress will need to face up to the horrendous realities about intercontinental ballistic missiles. They won’t do that unless peace, arms-control and disarmament groups go far beyond the current limits of congressional discourse — and start emphasizing, on Capitol Hill and at the grassroots, the crucial truth about ICBMs and the imperative of eliminating them all.”

At the same time that the atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases have continued to increase, so have the dangers of nuclear war. No imperatives are more crucial than challenging the fossil fuel industry and the nuclear weapons industry as the terrible threats to the climate and humanity that they are.

Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the author of many books including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 and 2020 Democratic National Conventions. Solomon is the founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.

 

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By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 29 2021 (IPS)

When over 100 political leaders meet in Scotland next week for the UN Climate Change Conference, the very future of our planet seems to hinge on the outcome of the summit which is scheduled to take place October 31-November 12.

The 26th Conference of Parties (COP26) meets amid wildly-changing weather patterns worldwide– including the devastation caused by wild fires in 13 states in the US, plus Siberia, Turkey and Greece, heavy rains and severe flooding in central China and Germany, droughts in Iran, Madagascar and southern Angola– all of them warning of a dire future unless there are dramatic changes in our life styles.

The United Nations says rich industrialised G20 nations account for 80% of global emissions—and their leadership is needed more than ever. The decisions they take now will determine whether the promises and pledges made in Paris in 2015 are kept or broken.

And at least four countries– China, Australia, Russia and India – have yet to make new pledges to cut their emissions. Australia, however, came up with an eleventh-hour announcement this week.

The impending hazards also threaten animal and plant species, coral reefs, ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica, and projects a sea-level rise that threatens the very existence of the world’s small island developing states (SIDS) which can be wiped off the face of the earth.

Will COP26 come up with concrete commitments? Or will the summit be another try in a lost cause?

Addressing a press conference October 26, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres predicted a “catastrophic global temperature”.

“Less than one week before COP26 in Glasgow, we are still on track for climate catastrophe even with the last announcements that were made. “

The 2021 Emissions Gap Report shows that with the present Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and other firm commitments of countries around the world, “we are indeed on track for a catastrophic global temperature rise of around 2.7 degrees Celsius.

Now, even if the announcements of the last few days will materialize, “we would still be on track to clearly more than 2 degrees Celsius. These announcements are essentially about 2050 so it is not clear how they will materialize but even if these recent announcements would materialize, we would still be clearly above 2 degrees Celsius.”

Everyone has the right to a healthy environment, free of pollution and its harmful consequences. Credit: WHO/Diego Rodriguez

As the title of this year’s report puts it: “The heat is on.” And as the contents of the report show — the leadership we need is off. Far off, he said.

“We know that humanity’s future depends on keeping global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2030. And we also know that, so far, parties to the Paris Agreement are utterly failing to keep this target within reach.”

And the report also shows that countries are squandering a massive opportunity to invest COVID-19 fiscal and recovery resources in sustainable, cost-saving, planet-saving ways.

So far, the report estimates that only about 20 per cent of recovery investments will support the green economy.

As world leaders prepare for COP26, this report is another thundering wake-up call. How many more do we need? Guterres asked

Juan Pablo Osornio, Senior Portfolio Manager, Global Climate Politics, at Greenpeace International, told IPS: “The science is very clear, we need urgent, dramatic and constant emission reductions if we are to stay with the 1.5 oC limit.”

When governments come to Glasgow, he said, they will feel the pressure to act. Nations facing existential threats and a movement composed of Indigenous Peoples, front line communities and youth change the political cost equation and will make sure concrete commitments are made to reduce emissions.

“Glasgow is essentially about who the world belongs to and who we are as human beings”.

He pointed out that negotiations in Glasgow will be about drafting the rules to implement the Paris Agreement.

“The rules should protect the livelihoods of the communities that are most exposed to climate impacts, facing existential threats now and youth, not the bottom line of the industry that created the climate crisis in the first place”.

Rules agreed at Glasgow, he said, should send a clear message that the age of fossil fuels is over and set forward a path for governments to cooperate in the transformation needed to meet the Paris Agreement goals.

“Although worth mentioning that some governments like Gambia already have. We certainly expect political will to bend towards enhancing commitments that will get us closer to halving emissions by 2030 and set us on a path within the 1.5 oC limit.”

Glasgow will create momentum for governments to announce higher targets and follow-up at home with the necessary policies at home to implement them.

He said civil society will bear witness and call out any greenwashing from these announcements, messages that make those talking look responsible, while doing little to nothing to change their polluting ways.

Asked about the four countries – China, Australia, Russia and India – not making new pledges to cut emissions, he said: “Yes, it is very likely that we see these countries come up with new pledges, while China is likely to submit a new NDC, Australia will announce its anodyne net-zero target, followed by something similar from Russia and India”.

“Long-term pledges are not worth the paper they are written on, unless they are anchored on national policy, backed by enforcement, and motivated on action: on coal plants being shut down and wind farms being open; on no more internal combustion engine cars on the street, replaced with a safe, comfortable, fast and carbon free transportation system; and on abundant, lush and diverse ecosystems all over the world,” he declared.

Asked about the 1.5 degree pathway, Matthew Reading-Smith, Communications Coordinator at CIVICUS, based in Johannesburg, told IPS that it was highly unlikely.

Even in the most optimistic scenarios, the 1.5 degree target is increasingly out of reach. The current NDCs are a collective failure and do not meet the scale of the crisis we face.

At this stage, he said, the only country that has submitted a Nationally Determined Contribution consistent with the 1.5 degree goal is The Gambia.

“These negotiations need accountability, and there is an inherent power imbalance within the UN talks, between industrialised countries and countries in the global south. This has only been compounded by the health crisis, and the communities most affected by the climate crisis are also suffering an artificial shortage of vaccines,” said Reading-Smith.

These communities will largely be left out of the physical negotiations, which are critical in holding the high polluting member states to account.

A practical and critical area where industrialised nations need to be held to account is over their failed commitment to deliver US$100 billion a year to countries in the global south to help them adapt to climate change and mitigate further rises in temperature, he noted.

“Meeting this goal is an important litmus test in raising the trillions of dollars needed annually to halt global warming and bring net carbon emissions to zero”.

Like all COPs, there will be a flurry of far-in-the future pledges and declarations, including from countries that have yet to share updated carbon reduction targets.

Based on the 110+ national plans that have already been submitted, we can expect remaining pledges to be light on actionable detail and woefully insufficient in limiting global heating to 2C, he added.

As there has been a lack of public consultation in the design of these national roadmaps, any pending pledges from countries like China, Russia, Australia and India are more likely to reflect business interests rather than the advice and ambition from civil society groups, he declared.

Meanwhile, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet said, on the eve of COP26: “It is time to put empty speeches, broken promises, and unfulfilled pledges behind us. We need laws to be passed, programmes to be implemented and investments to be swiftly and properly funded, without further delay.

Only urgent, priority action can mitigate or avert disasters that will have huge – and in some cases lethal – impacts on all of us, especially our children and grandchildren.

States attending the COP-26 meeting in Glasgow need to fulfil their existing climate finance commitments, and indeed increase them — not ignore them for a second year in a row. They need to immediately mobilize resources to mitigate and adapt to climate change, said Bachelet.

 

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The Madrid climate summit in 2019, COP25, left important pending issues that the conference in Glasgow, which begins on Sunday Oct. 31, will have to resolve. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Oct 29 2021 (IPS)

The climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, the most important since 2015, may go down in history as a milestone or as another exercise in frustration, depending on whether or not it resolves the thorny pending issues standing in the way of curbing global warming.

If successful, it could be placed on a par with the 2010 Cancun meeting, which rescued the negotiations after the previous year’s failure in Copenhagen, and Paris, where an agreement was reached in 2015 which defined voluntary emission reductions and a limit to global warming.

But if the summit fails, it will be compared to Copenhagen (COP15), the 2009 conference, and Madrid (COP25), the 2019 summit, whose progress was considered more than insufficient by environmental organisations and academics.

Former Mexican climate negotiator Roberto Dondisch said it is difficult to predict success or failure at the 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which will take place in Glasgow in the northern UK Oct. 31 to Nov. 12.

“This time we are not seeking an agreement, but trying to work out unresolved issues. The same thing happened in Paris, but a space was created to solve it. The reports are not very promising in terms of where we are at and what we must do. The conditions are very complicated; the will is there, but not the results,” Dondisch, a distinguished fellow at the Washington, DC-based non-governmental Stimson Center, told IPS.

Climate governance has come a long way since the first COP.

Background

In 1992, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, held in Rio de Janeiro on the 20th anniversary of the first U.N. Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972, brought together political leaders, scientists, representatives of international organisations and civil society to address the impact of human activities on the environment.

One of the results of the so-called Earth Summit was the creation of the UNFCCC, at a time when there was already evidence of global warming caused by human activity.

In fact, as early as 1990, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), created by the U.N. General Assembly in 1988 and composed of scientists from all over the world entrusted with the responsibility of assessing the existing scientific knowledge related to climate phenomena, released its first report.

Report after report, the IPCC has become a key part of the global climate framework for understanding and addressing the crisis of rising temperatures and their impacts.

Seven years later, in 1997, the member states of the UNFCCC negotiated the Kyoto Protocol (KP), signed in that Japanese city during COP3, which established mandatory emission reduction targets for 36 industrialised countries and the European Union as a bloc, listed in Annex II of the agreement.

In Kyoto, the nations of the developing South were exempted from this obligation in Annex I of the pact.

After the first compliance period (2008-2012), the parties agreed on another period for 2013-2020, which in practice never entered into force, until the protocol was replaced by the Paris Agreement.

The KP, which came into effect in 2005 – without the participation of key countries such as the United States and Russia – also has its own Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (CMP), which oversees its implementation and takes decisions to promote its effective implementation.

A view of the main venue for COP26 in Glasgow. Expectations are high for the outcome of the conference, but the two-week discussions and meetings must negotiate an obstacle course to reach concrete results in keeping with the severity of the climate emergency. CREDIT: UNFCCC

The relatively uneventful COP19 in Warsaw in 2013 served to testify to the birth of the Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage associated with Climate Change Impacts (WIM), whose rules of operation and financing will be central to the Glasgow discussions.

Climate policies will be the focus of COP26, co-chaired by the United Kingdom and Italy, which had to be postponed for a year due to covid-19 pandemic restrictions.

COP26 will address rules for carbon markets, climate finance for at least 100 billion dollars annually, gaps between emission reduction targets and necessary reductions, strategies for carbon neutrality by 2050, adaptation plans, and the local communities and indigenous peoples platform.

But missing from the agenda of the two weeks of discussions will be the goal of hundreds of billions of greenbacks per year, which has been postponed to 2023 – a sign that funding for mitigation and adaptation to climate change is the hot potato for the parties.

Complex architecture

The UNFCCC entered into force in 1994 and has been ratified by 196 parties, with the participation of the EU as a bloc, the Cook Islands and Niue – South Pacific island nations – in addition to the 193 U.N. member states.

The parties to the binding treaty subscribe to a universal convention that recognises the existence of climate change caused by human activities and assigns developed countries the main responsibility for combating the phenomenon.

The COPs, in which all states parties participate, govern the Convention and meet annually in global conferences where they make decisions to achieve the objectives of the climate fight, adopted unanimously or by consensus, especially after the KP failed to reach the negotiated goals.

In Paris, at COP21, member countries agreed on voluntary pollution reduction targets to keep the temperature increase below 1.5 degrees Celsius, considered the indispensable limit to contain disasters such as droughts and destructive storms, with high human and material costs.

These targets are embodied in the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), in which countries set out their 2030 and 2050 goals. Only 13 nations have submitted a second version of their measures since they began submitting their actions to the UNFCCC Secretariat in Bonn, Germany, in 2016.

The Paris Agreement, in force since 2020 and so far ratified by 192 states parties, has its own Meeting of the Parties (MOP), which monitors compliance and takes decisions to promote compliance.

Each COP also draws thousands of business delegates, non-governmental organisations, international organisations, scientists and journalists.

In addition, a parallel alternative summit will bring together social movements from around the world, advocating an early phase-out of fossil fuels, rejecting so-called “false solutions” such as carbon markets, and calling for a just energy transition and reparations for damage and redistribution of funds to indigenous communities and countries of the global South.

Sandra Guzmán, director of the Climate Finance Programme at the non-governmental Climate Policy Initiative – with offices in five countries – foresees a complex summit, especially in terms of financing.

“No one knows for sure how loss and damage will be covered. Developed countries don’t want to talk about more funds. The scenario for political agreement is always difficult. The expectation is that the COP will move forward and establish a package of progress and build a good bridge to the next meeting,” she told IPS from London.

For 30 years, the parties to the UNFCCC have been doing the same thing, without achieving the desired reduction in emissions or control of global warming. If COP26 follows the same mechanics, the results are unlikely to change at the end of the two weeks of discussions and activities in which more than 25,000 people will participate.

Meeting of the Working Group on the National Mental Health Strategic Plan, January 2020

By Saima Wazed and Nazish Arman
DHAKA, Bangladesh, Oct 28 2021 (IPS)

Mental health and treating mental health conditions involves not only treating an individual’s ability to manage their thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and interactions with others, but also ensuring that the social, cultural, economic, political, and environmental conditions are in place through effective national policies, social protections, adequate living standards, working conditions, community social support, and a tiered system of care through a robust network of health services. In Bangladesh, the Mental Health Act 2018 and the National Mental Health Policy 2021 were developed with the above in mind.

The Act and the Policy have also directed the development of the National Mental Health Strategic Plan for the country. The Strategic Plan document has been developed at the request of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare’s Department of Non-Communicable Diseases. This document has been prepared with funding from the Department for International Development, and technical support from the World Health Organization’s Regional Office for South-East Asia and the Shuchona Foundation. It is envisaged that the strategic plan will allow the incorporation of required priorities of the Government within the broader framework of the policy including appropriate resource allocation with an effective monitoring and evaluation mechanism.

The National Mental Health Strategy 2020-2030 embarks to establish a comprehensive, inter-sectorial, integrated, and responsive system to ensure access to and utilization of quality mental health and psychosocial wellbeing services and information. The mission of the strategic plan is to establish a sustainable, rights based, holistic, inclusive, multi-sectoral framework. This will ensure provision of information and quality services for promoting mental health and psychosocial wellbeing, prevention, treatment, as well as rehabilitation of mental health conditions throughout the life course of the people of Bangladesh.

The strategy development process included a series of reviews of program evaluation reports, literature search, evidence, strategy, and policy documents by consultants, focus group discussions with relevant professional societies, ministries and division, semi-structured interviews with experts, technical group meetings, field visits and stakeholder consultative workshops for consensus building on critical issues and finalization. The core values and principles in the strategic plan are guided by the National Mental Health Policy 2021 (currently pending final approval), the Mental Health Act 2018 and several global plans and charters including the WHO Comprehensive Mental Health Action Plan 2013-2020, UN Principles for the Protection of Persons with Mental Illness and the Improvement of Mental Health Care, the Rights of Persons with Disabilities which have been ratified by the Government of Bangladesh.

Snapshot of Stakeholder consultation with members of the Bangladesh Association of Psychiatrists, October 2020. Some stakeholder consultations were held virtually due to the pandemic.

Four general objectives have been envisioned in this strategic plan which are derived from the ‘WHO Comprehensive Mental Health Action Plan 2013 – 2020’:

1) To strengthen effective leadership and governance for mental health.
2) To provide comprehensive, integrated, and responsive mental health and social care services in community-based settings.
3) To implement strategies for promotion and prevention in mental health.
4) To strengthen information systems, evidence, and research for mental health.

The Strategic Plan has been organized in a manner such that, there is a breakdown of specific objectives indicated against each of the General Objectives of WHO’s Mental Health Action Plan 2013-2020, along with global and Bangladesh’s country specific indicators and targets. The mental health strategic plan also outlines Core Responsibility, Collaborative Partners, Advised Activities, Resources, Output Indicators and Funding Allocation for each of the specific objectives.

The Strategic Plan also highlights the different factors across the lifespan that are associated with mental health and provides an overview on how they are linked. There is consistent evidence worldwide that there is a link between mental health and physical health and in fact, one can easily say that they coexist since many of the risk factors of poor physical health are also risk factors for poor mental health. The key factors highlighted in the Strategic Plan include noncommunicable diseases, poverty, nutrition, violence, childhood and adolescence, humanitarian crisis, substance abuse and suicide, amongst others.

In conclusion, it is clear that an effective strategy for mental health, requires a multi-sectoral approach with specific considerations for the needs of vulnerable groups of the population. In order for such a plan to be implementable, sustainable and relevant, it is imperative that stakeholders, especially those with lived experience, provide important insight from their point of view. The goal of the current plan, once approved, is to ensure that not only those living with mental health conditions receive timely and effective treatment, but that the treatment approaches are not further stigmatizing, harmful and threaten their basic human needs and rights. It is hoped that the strategy which has been developed can be easily implemented and will result in a plan of action that will enable greater understanding of mental health in the community and enable greater psychosocial well-being for the people of Bangladesh.

Saima Wazed, a licensed School Psychologist, is currently Clinical Instructor for the Department of School Psychology at Barry University. Additionally, she is Advisor to the Director General of WHO on Autism and Mental Health, Member of WHO’s Expert Advisory Panel on Mental Health, Chairperson of the National Advisory Committee on Autism and NDDs in Bangladesh, Thematic Ambassador for “Vulnerability” of the Climate Vulnerable Forum, and Chairperson of Shuchona Foundation.
Nazish Arman is Lead Content Developer of Shuchona Foundation.

Shuchona Foundation is a non-profit organization focusing on advocacy, research, and capacity-building, specialising in neurodevelopmental disabilities, and mental health. It aims to construct an effective bridge between national and international researchers, policy makers, service providers, persons with NDDs and their families, to promote inclusion nationally, regionally, and globally. The Foundation is a member of the UN ESCAP Working Group on disability as of May 2018, and holds special consultative status with UN ECOSOC since 2019.

Shuchona Foundation was the member of the Working Group on the National Mental Health Strategic Plan; and Saima Wazed was its Chief Advisor.

Excerpt:

[Second of a two-part article]

More than 6,000 plant species have been cultivated for food. Now, fewer than 200 make major contributions to food production globally, regionally or nationally. A sea of soy is seen near the city of Porto Nacional, on the right bank of the Tocantins River, Brazil. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

By Baher Kamal
MADRID, Oct 28 2021 (IPS)

Can yet another dispendious world gathering find a way to halt the ongoing suicidal war on Nature, which is leading to the destruction of all sources of life?

The answer appears to be a bold “no” in view of the business-oriented practices, which deplete biodiversity, pollute the oceans, rise sea levels, cause record temperatures, provoke deadly droughts and floods, and push millions to flee their homes as climate refugees, in addition to more millions of conflict and poverty displaced humans.

Our war with nature includes a food system that generates one third of all greenhouse gas emissions and is also responsible for up to 80 percent of biodiversity loss,
 António Guterres, UN Secretary General

The gathering is scheduled to take place between 31 October and 12 November 2021, in Glasgow, in the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26), hosted by the United Kingdom in partnership with Italy.

Although the premises would sound good as the Conference presidency has proposed a Delivery Plan led by Germany and Canada, to mobilise 100 billion US dollars per year for climate finance, past experiences show that one thing is to promise and a totally different thing is to meet the promise.

Anyway, and regardless of whatever will come out –and be implemented– the scenario appears gloomy.

Take the case of the loss of the variety of life system–biodiversity as just one example.

 

Food system, responsible for 80% of biodiversity loss

‘“Our war with nature”, says the UN Secretary General  António Guterres, includes a food system that generates one third of all greenhouse gas emissions and is also responsible for up to 80 percent of biodiversity loss.

On this, the Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (CGRFA) explains that thousands of species and their genetic variability make up the web of life and are indispensable to adapt to new conditions, including climate change.

It also explains that biodiversity for food and agriculture is the diversity of plants, animals and micro-organisms at genetic, species and ecosystem levels, present in and around crop, livestock, forest and aquatic production systems.

 

What is Biodiversity?

This year’s State of the World’s Biodiversity for Food and Agriculture assesses biodiversity for food and agriculture and its management worldwide.

It says that biodiversity includes the domesticated plants and animals that are part of crop, livestock, forest or aquaculture systems, harvested forest and aquatic species, the wild relatives of domesticated species, and other wild species harvested for food and other products.

Biological diversity also encompasses what is known as “associated biodiversity”, the vast range of organisms that live in and around food and agricultural production systems, sustaining them and contributing to their output.

And it supplies many vital ecosystem services, such as creating and maintaining healthy soils, pollinating plants, controlling pests and providing habitat for wildlife, including for fish and other species that are vital to food production and agricultural livelihoods.

Despite their vital importance for the survival of humankind, many key components of biodiversity for food and agriculture at genetic, species and ecosystem levels are in decline, warns The State of the World’s Biodiversity for Food and Agriculture.

State of the World’s Biodiversity for Food and Agriculture highlights a set of key facts:

— More than 6,000 plant species have been cultivated for food. Now, fewer than 200 make major contributions to food production globally, regionally or nationally. Out of these, only 9 account for 66 percent of total crop production.

— Overall, the diversity of crops present in farmers’ fields has declined and threats to crop diversity are growing.

— Nearly a third of fish stocks are overfished and a third of freshwater fish species assessed are considered threatened.

— The proportion of livestock breeds at risk of extinction is increasing.

— 7,745 local breeds of livestock are still in existence, but 26 percent of these are at risk of extinction.

While the sharp loss of biological diversity is caused in a high percentage by the dominating industrial mono-culture, agriculture and food system, there is a frequently under-reported link between this and the continuous looting of genetic resources.

Apart from State-owned genetic banks aimed at conserving genetic resources, this process is practiced by giant corporations which collect, mostly in poor countries, seeds and genes of plants, animals, forest and aquatic varieties to patent them as their own property and stock them in their so-called genetic resources banks.

 

What is the diversity of genetic resources?

The diversity of genetic resources for food and agriculture (i.e. plants/crops, animals, aquatic resources, forests, micro-organisms and invertebrates) plays a crucial role in meeting basic human food and nutritional needs, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

Plant genetic resources for food and agriculture consist of a diversity of seeds and planting material of traditional varieties and modern cultivars, crop wild relatives and other wild plant species. These resources are used as food, feed for domestic animals, fibre, clothing, shelter and energy.

Forest genetic resources are the heritable materials maintained within and among tree and other woody plant species that are of actual or potential economic, environmental, scientific or societal value.

Trees are the foundation species of forest ecosystems and many of the world’s 60,000 tree species are also an important component in other ecosystems, such as savannas and agricultural landscapes.

Animal genetic resources for food and agriculture encompass the variability of genes, traits and breeds of the different animal species that play a role in food and agriculture.

Aquatic genetic resources for food and agriculture include DNA, genes, chromosomes, tissues, gametes, embryos and other early life history stages, individuals, strains, stocks, and communities of organisms of actual or potential value for food and agriculture.

This diversity allows organisms to reproduce and grow, adapt to natural and human-induced impacts such as climate change, resist diseases and parasites, and continue to evolve.

 

Mother Earth is self-organised

But perhaps a sound way to summarise the alarming loss of biodiversity, is what the well-known Prof. Vandana Shiva wrote in her recent Rewilding Food, Rewilding our Mind & Rewilding the Earth.

According to this physicist, ecofeminist, philosopher, activist, and author of more than 20 books and 500 papers, Mother Earth is self-organised. Mother Earth has created and sustained Diversity.

“Colonialism transformed Mother Earth, Vasundhara, Pachmama, Terra Madre, into Terra Nullius, the empty earth. Our living, bountiful earth, rich in Biodiversity and Cultural Diversity was reduced to an empty earth.”

“The Biodiversity of the earth disappeared in the minds of men who reduced the earth to private property to be owned…”

 

By External Source
Kabul / New York, Oct 28 2021 (IPS-Partners)

Immediately following the first all-women UN mission to Afghanistan since takeover by the de facto authorities, Yasmine Sherif, Director of Education Cannot Wait – the United Nations global fund for education in emergencies and protracted crises – appealed to donors to significantly increase financial support for a robust collective humanitarian-development nexus response. This includes urgent scaled up funding to UN agencies and NGO partners delivering life-saving education to vulnerable children and adolescents on the ground.

Amid an escalating health and nutrition crisis for children, with cold winter temperatures dropping quickly, a national economic meltdown, and the impacts of prolonged drought and years of conflict, the World Food Programme (WFP) has warned that over half the population in Afghanistan – 23 million people – will struggle to put food on the table during the upcoming winter; the largest number ever recorded. Additionally, nearly 10 million girls and boys depend on humanitarian assistance to survive. All this against a backdrop of two decades of development programming severely impacted in the past two months.

“Salaries have not been paid for months, money and goods are no longer circulating in the country, entire communities and families have lost their livelihoods and struggle to make ends meet. Those who suffer the brunt of this acute crisis are the most innocent and vulnerable: girls, boys, adolescents and youth,” said Yasmine Sherif. “UN member states, donors and humanitarian organizations, as well as crisis-sensitive development organizations, must remain engaged and act together now to support children, teachers, educators and the Afghan people – with education at the center of the response – because education is their future and the future of the country. An estimated $1 billion dollars is urgently required by organizations working in the education sector.”

While the majority of schools were closed in Afghanistan during 2020-2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, most primary schools for both girls and boys have reopened since the takeover of power in August. According to UN and NGO partners on the ground, with regards to secondary education, girls’ education has resumed in some provinces to date.

“For the millions of children living through the turmoil of today’s Afghanistan, education and learning is a lifeline that must be supported. Not only does it give girls and boys the tools to lead a healthy and productive life, but it also keeps them protected and safe,” said Alice Akunga, UNICEF’s Deputy Representative in Afghanistan. “We are asking the international community to come together to prevent the collapse of the education system and safeguard the gains made for children over the past two decades.”

During her three-day mission, Sherif met with the de facto authorities in Kabul, stressing the importance of increasing access to quality education for all children, with an emphasis on adolescent girls, throughout the country. Sherif also visited a girls’ school in Kabul and met with a wide range of education partners, including the UN-SRSG, UN agencies, international and national civil society organizations, and members of the education in emergency working group to take stock of the situation on the ground and identify additional opportunities to expand ECW emergency education investments and scaled up funding for UN and NGOs in the education sector.

Working with a direct execution modality through UN agencies and civil society organizations, ECW has been supporting the delivery of education programmes for the most vulnerable girls and boys in Afghanistan since 2018.

“Through community-based education and accelerated programmes, we have been able to operate in the most challenging contexts with tangible education results, including our focus on female teachers and girls’ education,” said Sherif. “Our partner UNICEF, other UN agencies, and national and international NGOs continue to operate in the country. They are ready to scale up and expand their work to new areas that have become accessible. But to do so, enormous financial resources are urgently needed.”

To date, ECW has invested US$45 million to support the education of girls, boys and adolescents in Afghanistan. This includes US$36 million for the first Multi-Year Resilience Programme (of which US$24 million has already been disbursed), previous First Emergency Response grants of US$4.6 million, and a recent First Emergency Response grant of US$4 million in response to the recent escalating needs.

These whole-of-child education approaches have proven effective and yielded promising results, including in areas not under the previous government’s control. According to ECW’s 2020 Annual Report, 58% of beneficiaries supported by ECW-funded interventions are girls, with programmes implemented in some of the hardest-to-reach provinces in Afghanistan such as Herat, Kunduz, Kandahar and Uruzgan.

Even before the most recent humanitarian crisis, 4.2 million children were not enrolled in school in Afghanistan; around 60 per cent of them are girls. Rural areas of the country, particularly, also lacked adequate infrastructure and educational materials – with conflict, large-scale population displacement, and inequalities of access to quality education exacerbating the situation, particularly for girls, children with disabilities and marginalized communities.

“With our UN and civil society partners, ECW has a proven model of delivering access to quality education in crisis-impacted countries around the world,” said Sherif. “I call on our strategic partners and donors to support ECW and our UN and NGO partners in sustaining and urgently scaling up our programmes for all girls and boys in Afghanistan. Education is their inherent human right and every girl’s right. We have a moral, legal and ethical obligation to not abandon them at this crucial time in their young lives, especially at this critical point in Afghanistan’s history. It is a test of our own humanity.”

 

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Climate Change is one of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 13), but t’s becoming increasingly clear that climate change plays a role in many, if not all of the SDGs, and that achieving the 2030 Agenda will be impossible without making serious inroads into tackling the problem. Credit: United Nations

By Meena Raman
PENANG, Malaysia, Oct 28 2021 (IPS)

It is well-known that all the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) added together, even those that have been updated, will not help to place the world on a 1.5 degree C pathway.

The latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on the ‘Physical Science’ shows that for a 50% probability of limiting temperature rise to a 1.5 degree pathway, taking into account the historical and cumulative emissions, there is a remaining carbon budget of 500 gigatons of CO2 left and the world emits about 42 gigatons of CO2 per year.

Which means that within a decade, this budget would be exhausted, leading to difficulty in limiting temperature rise to 1.5 degree C.

Hence, it is important to recognise and acknowledge that the developed countries in particular, have not shown their leadership in taking on their fair share of the emission cuts needed.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and COP 16 in 2010 in Cancun, acknowledged that the largest share of historical global emissions of greenhouse gases originated in developed countries and that, owing to this historical responsibility, developed country Parties must take the lead in combating climate change and the adverse effects thereof.

We do need to understand that under the UNFCC and the Paris Agreement, the principles of equity and ‘common-but-differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities’ (CBDRRC) are fundamental in understanding the differentiated obligations between developed and developing countries.

Moreover, developed countries have failed to reduce their emissions despite the decisions taken.

Failure by developed countries to deliver on promised emissions reductions

First commitment period (1CP) under the Kyoto Protocol from 2008 to 2012 only saw aggregate emissions of Annex 1 countries to be cut by 5% compared to 1990 levels. Despite this very low ambition, the United States (US) left the Protocol.

Promise in 2012 by developed countries in the 2nd commitment period to revisit their emission reduction targets by 2014 from 18 per cent by 2020 to at least 25-40 per cent was never realized.

The goal post shifted by developed countries calling all countries to plug the emissions gap –which turns the CBDR-RC principle on its head to ‘common and shared responsibilities’, with no reference to historical responsibility or equity between the North and South.

In fact, between 1990 and 2018, developed countries on aggregate achieved only 13% emissions reductions between 1990 and 2018.

Countries in Western Europe, United States, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada have not managed to reduce their aggregate emissions between 1990 and 2020. Instead, their aggregate emissions slightly increased from 13,227.97 MTCO2eq in 1990 to 13,331.23 MTCO2eq in 2020.

So, instead of undertaking real deep emissions cuts to real zero by now, developed countries are announcing distant net-zero targets with 2050 as the target year, which again reflect reductions which are too little too late and that will exhaust the remaining carbon budget very soon.

Hence, we must demand real and rapid zero from developed countries, not distant targets. Moreover, net zero targets mean that there will be reliance on carbon-offsets, where developed countries will pay developing countries to do the emission removals, which will then go to the credit of developed countries.

This will mean that developing countries will have to do even more emissions cuts in their countries, as the offset credits sold to developed countries cannot be counted as part of their NDCs, as there cannot be double-counting and double-claiming of carbon credits.

There is no more room for offsetting, and what needs to happen urgently in the rich world is for very deep and rapid de-carbonisation.

Then, there is the much-needed finance and technology transfer that has to be delivered to developing countries to enable their transition to low-carbon pathways as soon as possible.

The USD 100 billion per year by 2020 which was promised by developed countries has fallen short and Glasgow has to see actual delivery and timelines for this goal to be realised.

Even this USD 100 billion per year target is a far cry from what is needed by developing countries, who have indicated the need for USD 5.8-5.9 trillion to implement their NDCs up to 2030.

As has been pointed out earlier, the G20 as a group is not recognised under the UNFCCC and the PA but what is recognised is developed and developing countries. It is not the leadership of the G20 that is needed but the leadership of the G7 — as per the Convention and the PA.

The developed and developing countries in the G20 cannot be viewed as having the same responsibility, leadership ability and capabilities. That will be contrary to the equity and CBDRRC principles of the UNFCCC and PA.

Actually, it is the decisions taken in Paris that have to be honoured and respected, and not a shifting of the goal posts by the developed world as pointed out above. It is true that developed countries in particular have to do their fair share of the emission cuts and also provide the finance and technology needed as payment of their climate debt.

Also, we have to remember that it is not only emissions reductions or mitigation that are important. Also critical is adaptation and addressing loss and damage (which goes beyond adaptation, as in for e.g. an extreme weather event that wipes out an economy of a country).

These are critical issues for developing countries, where real action on adaptation and loss and damage are enabled on the ground, including in scaling up finance in this regard.

China has announced a carbon-neutrality target of 2060. India is expected to announce an updated NDC. We cannot put China and India on the same footing as the developed world. China’s and India’s emissions are large due to their population. On a per capita basis, they are still much less than the developed countries.

We do not know about Australia and Russia. It is quite clear that these countries are not going to phase out from their dependence on fossil fuels anytime soon.

In fact, instead of the rich developed countries phasing out fossil fuels, what we see is the continued production and expansion of fossil fuels, as made clear by the UNEP Production Gap report.

This is indeed worrying, as the developed world has no excuse to delay action. It is their delayed action mainly that is responsible for the current global warming, as made clear by their historical overuse of the carbon budget, as shown by the AR 6 of the IPCC.

Meena Raman is Head of Programmes at Third World Network – headquartered in Penang, Malaysia.

 

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To reduce hunger, food systems must be transformed to prevent 17 percent of total food production from being lost, as is currently the case. Credit: FAO

By Mario Lubetkin
ROME, Oct 27 2021 (IPS)

During October, the World Food Month, there has been a huge increase in the number of qualified voices promoting new ways to transform food systems that would allow to reduce and eliminate hunger, of which more than 811 million people in the world are already victims.

Based on the conclusions of the Food Systems Summit, held virtually on September 23, as well as its “hybrid” preparatory phase that took place in Rome in July, with the physical presence of 540 delegates and virtual presence of more than 20,000 people around the world, a growing number of personalities continue to advance into these reflections.

Globally, about 14 percent of food produced is lost between harvest and retail sale, equivalent to a loss of $ 400 billion per year, while food waste is estimated to reach 17 percent of total production: 11 percent is wasted in homes, 5 percent in food service establishments, and 2 percent in retail trade

This should pave the way to new avenues paths that will fulfill the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) foreseen by the international community by 2030, for which the eradication of hunger and poverty are considered to be priorities.

The transformation of agri-food systems must begin with normal consumers and the decisions they make about the food they consume, where it is bought, how it is packaged, where it is discarded, on the basis that all this will have an impact on the future of the planet, so it is necessary to reduce food loss and waste.

Globally, about 14 percent of food produced is lost between harvest and retail sale, equivalent to a loss of $ 400 billion per year, while food waste is estimated to reach 17 percent of total production: 11 percent is wasted in homes, 5 percent in food service establishments, and 2 percent in retail trade.

Pope Francis, in his message addressed during World Food Day on October 16, recalled that “currently we observe a true paradox in terms of access to food: on the one hand, more than 3 billion people do not have access to a nutritious diet, while, on the other hand, almost 2 billion people are overweight or obese due to a poor diet and a sedentary life.”

“Our lifestyles and daily consumption practices influence global and environmental dynamics, but if we aspire to a real change, we must urge producers and consumers to make ethical and sustainable decisions, and educate younger generations on the important role they play to make a world without hunger a reality,” stated the pontiff.

And for that, he emphasized, we must begin “with our daily life and simplest gestures: knowing our common house, protecting it and being aware of its importance, which should be the first step to be custodians and promoters of the environment.”

According to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, the way food is produced, consumed and wasted “is having a disastrous consequence for our planet”, and “this is putting historical pressure on our natural resources and the environment” and “it is costing us billions of dollars every year”, underlining that “the power of change is in our hands”.

The Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), QU Dongyu is convinced that efforts must be accelerated towards the achievement of the SDGs foreseen for 2030 “with a view to halving food waste in the world and reducing food losses in the production and supply chain, including post-harvest losses,” noting that “there are only nine seasons (harvests) left to do so.”

The Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), Inger Andersen, recalled that food loss and waste “are the origin of 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions”, which means that “valuable land and water resources are being used for nothing.”

She added that reducing food loss and waste will slow “climate change, protect nature and increase food security at a time when we desperately need that to happen.”

Dr QU, FAO’s head, agreed and considered that “it is not possible to continue losing 75 billion cubic meters of water per year in the production of fruit and vegetables.”

Experts from FAO estimate that it will be necessary to invest between 40 and 50 billion dollars annually to end hunger by 2030.

In particular, they highlighted the implementation of low-cost and high-impact projects that can help hundreds of millions of people to better meet their food needs, mainly with research, as well as with development and digital innovation to achieve advanced technology agriculture.

These thoughts and initiatives are added to those already made by the Foreign Ministers of the Group of 20 (G20) in Matera, Italy, in June, and the G20 Ministers of Agriculture in Florence, Italy, in September.

In those meetings, they emphasized the value of creating coalitions of countries together with civil society organizations, the private sector, particularly agricultural producers, academics and scientists, as well as other actors to exchange ideas and solutions in this phase of Covid-19 pandemic.

And in turn, to project the post-Covid scenario that helps relaunch countries with sustainability and resilience in strategic areas such as agriculture and food.

Excerpt:

Mario Lubetkin is Assistant Director General at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)

Yasmine Sherif, Director of Education Cannot Wait, is welcomed by a student at a girls’ primary school in Kabul, Afghanistan. Credit: Omid Fazel/ECW

By Naureen Hossain
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 27 2021 (IPS)

Education Cannot Wait Director Yasmine Sherif urged the world to support their efforts to provide education to children living in Afghanistan – in what she called the “biggest humanitarian crisis” on earth.

“Their education cannot wait. Action cannot wait across all sectors. Financing and funding cannot wait. And our own humanity cannot wait,” Sherif said at a press briefing from Islamabad Airport at the conclusion of an all-women UN delegation to Afghanistan to assess the educational needs in the country.

The ECW mission was a joint effort with UNICEF Afghanistan to assess the situation and the capacity for UN agencies and their partners based in the country to respond to issues.

Sherif stated that to support education efforts in Afghanistan, attention must also be given to the other crises within the country. Afghanistan was at risk of an “economic meltdown” and on the “brink of collapse” that would disproportionately impact its citizens. To add to their woes, they were about to go into a devastating winter, and so dire was the situation that teachers had not been paid.

“About 20 years of development and the gains we have made are about to be lost if we don’t take immediate action,” Sherif said. There is an urgency to provide aid and continue running the programmes that work directly with the affected populations, including communities in the hardest-to-reach regions.

She emphasized the need to increase funding for UN agencies, NGOs and regional partners to carry out their work. UN agencies such as UNICEF, UNHCR, and UNWOMEN can negotiate access for children, especially girls, to attend school across all education levels and even pay for teachers’ salaries. UN field agents based in Afghanistan already have the experience and awareness to navigate the systems that would allow them to negotiate access.

Yasmine Sherif is welcomed by teachers and students at a girls’ primary school in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Credit: Omid Fazel/ECW

The ECW has previously provided US$45 million to support education for boys and girls, including a first response emergency grant of US$4 million in the wake of changes in ruling authorities. Sherif stated that an estimated US$1 billion would be needed to cover the cost to run programmes by the UN agencies, including ECW. In addition to education, this would also be distributed to programmes targeting other areas, including but not limited to food security and water sanitation. In this regard, she stated that food insecurity and access to hygiene would influence citizens and impact their quality of life. It would also affect women and children and their access to specialized health.

Sherif urged that it was more important than ever to continue implementing the SDGs in the middle of the current humanitarian crisis. “Education sits at the heart of all the SDGs,” she said.

She advised that a “direct execution modality” approach that would send funds directly to the UN agencies and partners would be critical as it would ensure funding went directly to the agencies that worked with affected communities. Sherif said it was important to maintain an “apolitical approach” to reach the people affected by humanitarian crises.

Access to education in Afghanistan has been challenged due to pre-existing factors such as accessibility to schools, lack of infrastructure and particularly challenging topography, which mean that many live in hard to access rural areas. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic also posed an issue for schools and communities, forcing schools to close in 2020.

A study from UNICEF found that 3.7 million children in Afghanistan are out of school, 60% of which are girls. Sherif stated that shrinking this significant gap would require a collective effort from UN agencies on the field with civil society organizations, non-government organizations, the private sector, and local, regional, and national authorities.

Sherif revealed at the press briefing that some primary schools in Kabul and the northern and southern regions of Afghanistan had reopened to both boys and girls. Some high schools have also had mixed classes with both boys and girls. In rural areas, partner agencies such as UNICEF will continue to support the Community-Based Education (CBE) programmes, which help establish Community-Based Schools and other alternative pathways to learning for children and adolescents based in hard-to-reach regions.

Concerns over girls’ access to education were raised when the Taliban assumed power on August 15, 2021. While they established a channel for communication with foreign groups, they have sent conflicting messages regarding education. They declared that high schools would reopen for their male students but did not mention when girls would return. This was interpreted as an effective ban on girls’ right to school.

The ECW-UNICEF team met with the authorities to determine the steps needed to promote access to education for girls. The authorities have allegedly expressed an interest in preserving women’s rights and access to education. They have stated that they are formulating plans but would need time. Sherif expressed that she was “cautiously optimistic” about the Taliban’s openness to negotiation.

The extent of the reforms and actions needed to improve access to education will remain to be seen. What is more urgent at this stage, Sherif reiterated, is immediate action and funding to agencies and partners to address different issues before it is too late.

 

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• Education Cannot Wait for Refugee Children in Crisis, says Yasmine Sherif

Every day, dozens of migrants from Central America, Haiti and Venezuela come early in the morning to the offices of the governmental Mexican Commission for Refugee Aid in downtown Mexico City to apply for asylum. Mexico is overwhelmed by the influx of migrants, to whom it has begun to apply harsh restrictions. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Oct 27 2021 (IPS)

In September, 31-year-old Yesenia decided to leave her home on the outskirts of the northern Honduran city of San Pedro Sula, driven out by violence and the lack of water.

“The maras (gangs) were threatening me, and it hadn’t rained, there was very little water. I had to leave, I had to go somewhere, anywhere. I want to stay wherever they let me,” the mother of a seven-year-old girl, who was a homemaker in one of the most violent cities in the world, told IPS.

It was the first time she had left her country. She reached the southern Mexican state of Chiapas (bordering Guatemala), and continued on by bus and hitchhiking. “We slept in the bushes, walked, went hungry, got rained on and sometimes froze,” she said, describing the journey she made with her daughter.

Yesenia, who is short and dark-haired with a round face, now lives in an area that she does not name for security reasons, and is applying for refugee status in the capital of Mexico, a country that has historically been a huge source of migrants to the United States as well as a transit route for people from other countries heading there as well. It has also become, over the last decade, a growing recipient of undocumented migrants.

Due to the large number of requests for asylum, which has stretched Mexico’s immigration and refugee system to the limit, it takes a long time for cases to be resolved. Although immigration advocacy organisations provide assistance in the form of money, food, lodging and clothing, these resources are limited and the aid eventually comes to an end.

Driven out by poverty, lack of basic services, violence and climate-related phenomena, millions of people leave their countries in Central America every year, heading mainly to the United States, to find work and to reunite with family.

But in the face of the increasing crackdown on immigration in the U.S. since 2016 under the administrations of Donald Trump (2016-January 2021) and current President Joe Biden, many undocumented migrants have opted to stay in places that were previously only transit points, such as Mexico.

The problem is that Mexico also tightened the screws, as part of the role it agreed with the U.S. to perform during the times of Trump, who successfully pressured the governments of Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-December 2018) and current President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to step up their own anti-immigration measures. And this has not changed since Biden took office.

Like the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean, Mexico and the so-called Northern Triangle of Central America (Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador) are highly vulnerable to the effects of the climate crisis. Drought and devastating hurricanes drive people from their homes to safer areas or across borders in search of better lives.

Honduras is one illustration of this phenomenon. Since 1970, more than 30 major tropical storms have hit the country, leaving a trail of deaths and billions of dollars in property damage. Hurricanes Eta and Iota struck in 2020. For this year, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) predicted 17 hurricanes on the Atlantic side before the official end of hurricane season on Nov. 30.

In early September, Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández also declared a drought emergency, another increasingly recurrent and intense phenomenon in Central America.

The refugee club

Caribbean island nations such as Haiti are also suffering from the climate emergency. The country was hit by Hurricane Elsa in June and by Tropical Storm Fred and Hurricane Grace in August, on top of an Aug. 14 earthquake measuring 7.2 on the Richter scale that claimed thousands of lives.

In 2017, a particularly lethal year, hurricanes Harvey and Irma struck Haiti. As a result, Sadaam decided to leave, heading first to Chile that year and now to Mexico, where he has applied for humanitarian asylum.

“Things got very difficult. The hardware store where I worked had to close because of the rains and I couldn’t work. I can do any kind of job and that’s all I ask for: work,” the 30-year-old Haitian migrant told IPS.

Tall and lean, Sadaam, originally from Port-au-Prince, also arrived in Mexico in September, with his wife and his son, as well as his brother and sister-in-law and their daughter. They are living temporarily in a hotel, with support from humanitarian organisations.

On Oct. 6, the Mexican government deported 129 Haitians to Port-au-Prince on a chartered flight from Tapachula, a city in the southern state of Chiapas. The measure was criticised by social organisations, while the U.N. called for an evaluation of the need for protection of Haitians and the risks of returning them to their country. CREDIT: INM

Climate disaster = displacement

Recent studies and migration statistics show that the paths followed by migrants and climate disasters in the region are intertwined.

Between 2000 and 2019, Cuba, Mexico and Haiti were the hardest hit, by a total of 110 storms which caused 39 billion dollars in damage, affected 29 million people and left 5,000 dead, 85 percent of them in Haiti, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

In 2020, internal and external displacement due to disasters soared in El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti and Honduras. But the international migratory framework has not yet accepted the official category of climate refugee, despite growing clamor for its inclusion.

Armelle Gouritin, an academic at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences-Mexico, told IPS that the scientific community has linked the sudden events to the climate emergency, whose influence on internal and external migration flows is growing.

“There is evidence that they are increasing. It is quite difficult to say to what extent the volume of migration is growing, because there is little quantitative data. It is hard to compare. It tends to be invisible, especially because of slow onset processes such as drought and desertification,” she explained.

In her 2021 book “The protection of internal climate migrants; a pending task in Mexico”, the expert described scenarios linked to migration, such as gradual-onset phenomena, sudden-onset disasters (hurricanes or violence generated by water shortages), relocations decided by the authorities, sea level rise and the impact of renewable energy megaprojects.

As Mexico has become a magnet for migration, measures against immigration have been stiffened. This year, through August alone, immigration authorities detained 148,903 people, almost twice as many as in all of 2020, when the total was 82,379.

Of the current total, according to official data, 67,847 came from Honduras, 44,712 from Guatemala, 12,010 from El Salvador and 7,172 from Haiti.

Deportations are also on the rise, as up to August, Mexico removed 65,799 undocumented migrants, compared to 60,315 in the whole of 2020. Of these, 25,660 were from Honduras, 25,660 from Guatemala, 2,583 from El Salvador and 223 from Haiti.

The Haitian influx was triggered after the United States announced in August that it would halt deportations of those already in the country because of the earthquake, which drew thousands of Haitians who were in Brazil and Chile, where they had migrated earlier and where policies against them had been tightened.

In Mexico, according to official figures refugee applications increased from 70,406 in all of 2019 to 90,314 this year up to and including September, of which 26,007 were filed by Haitian migrants. Migrants from Honduras, Haiti, Cuba, El Salvador, and Venezuela account for the largest number of applications.

Despite the large rise in applications, Mexico only approved 13,100 permanent refugees in September: 5,755 from Honduras, 1,454 from El Salvador, 733 from Haiti and 524 from Guatemala.

On the night of Oct. 7, a military checkpoint found 800 migrants from Central America in three truck trailers on a highway in the state of Tamaulipas in northeastern Mexico, bordering the United States, where they were headed. CREDIT: Elefante Blanco/Pie de Página

Fleeing the climate emergency

The World Bank study “Groundswell: Acting on Internal Climate Migration” warns that Mexico must prepare for the confluence of climate disasters and migration flows, and projects 86 million internal climate migrants in the world by 2050, including 17 million in Latin America.

The report, published on Sept. 13, estimates that the number of climate migrants will grow between 2020 and 2050, when between 1.4 and 2.1 million people will migrate in Mexico and Central America. Mexico’s central valley, where the capital city is located, and the western highlands of Guatemala will receive migrants, while people will flee arid, agricultural and low-lying coastal areas.

Although several international bodies link migration and the climate crisis, the concept of climate migrant or refugee does not exist in the international legal framework.

Gouritin understands the international reluctance to address the issue. “There are three narratives for mobility: responsibility, security and human rights. States are not willing to head towards the responsibility narrative. The security narrative predominates, we have seen it with the caravans from Central America (on the way to the United States through Mexico),” she said.

Few countries are prepared to address the climate dimension of migration, as is the case of Mexico. The general laws on Climate Change, of 2012, and on Forced Internal Displacement, of 2020, mention climate impacts but do not include measures or define people internally displaced by climate phenomena.

In the United States, undocumented Mexicans are experiencing the same thing, as deportations of Mexicans could well exceed the levels of all of 2020, since 184,402 people were deported that year compared to 148,584 as of last August alone.

Yesenia and Sadaam are two migrants who are suffering the statistics in the flesh, as victims of their own governments and the Mexican response.

“I’ll stay wherever I can get a job to support and educate my daughter,” said Yesenia. With refugee status, migrants can work freely.

Sadaam said: “I was offered a job as a cleaner in a hotel, but they asked me for a refugee card. The government told me that I have to wait for the call for the appointment. If I get a job, I will stay here.”

But above and beyond the detentions, deportations and refugee applications, migration will continue, as long as droughts, floods and storms devastate their places of origin.

Meeting of the Working Group on the National Mental Health Strategic Plan, April 2019

By Saima Wazed and Nazish Arman
DHAKA, Oct 27 2021 (IPS)

Mental health is a state of well-being when both your body and your mind are in balance, and you are able to deal with the difficulties and challenges that come your way and easily find joy, peace, and happiness once the challenge is overcome. For many people though, the challenges often remain for too long – the pain of losing someone you dearly loved, being diagnosed with a chronic disease like cancer or a heart condition, losing your family/home/job or feeling like you failed to meet expectations. All those things and more can trigger so much intense stress and maladjustment, that if it goes unchecked and untreated, it may lead to a chronic disease, a mental health disorder. WHO defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”. The majority of people are able to cope and get back to life as normal, but for the many who cannot, they begin to experience intense detachment from reality (experiencing delusions, pervasive sadness, uncontrollable fears, intense anger and/or fantasies and hallucinations). For those individuals, there is limited help and treatment in every country in the world. Those who suffer from mental health disorders and the brave professionals who learn to treat them are chronically stigmatized, under-appreciated and under-paid.

Mental health conditions, substance use disorders, suicide, and neurological disorders like dementia affect more than a billion people annually, account for an estimated third of the global burden of disability and result in 14% of global deaths. (Vigo et al., 2016). There has been increasing global recognition of the importance of mental health and the significant global burden of mental health conditions in both developing and developed countries. More than 80% of people experiencing them are living without any form of quality, affordable health care. Due to negligence and ignorance, we have high levels of mortality through suicide and increased comorbid medical conditions. According to a study published in 2016, it is estimated that 14.3% of deaths worldwide, or approximately 8 million deaths per year are attributable to mental health disorders.

The 7th Five Year Plan (FYP) and Vision 2021 of the Government of Bangladesh recognized the urgency of addressing mental health and developed a comprehensive system of care that can be implemented within our well tiered health infrastructure. This plan emphasized that proper health is essential not only for physical well-being but also for economic livelihood. To realize the vision of the 7th FYP, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare is implementing its 4th Health, Population and Nutrition Sector Programme (4th HPNSP) from January 2017 to June 2022. The 4th HPNSP’s objectives include strengthening governance, institutional efficiency, expanding access and improving quality within the universal health care system. To achieve the SDGs target, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare has committed to ensuring that mental health is a priority in the 4th HPNSP.

Saima Wazed, Chief Advisor to the Working Group on the National Mental Health Strategic Plan, at its meeting in April 2019

It is important to note that Bangladesh is among the first few countries in the WHO South-East Asia Region to place mental health as one of its top 10 priority health conditions. Mental health programming in Bangladesh has undergone several phases of evolution. Bangladesh passed a new Mental Health Act in 2018; is working on finalizing a Mental Health Policy; and has developed a National Strategic Plan after conducting a thorough situation analysis involving both professionals and those with lived experiences. The focus of the Mental Health Act is to protect the dignity of citizens with mental health conditions, provide them with healthcare, ensure their right to property and rehabilitate them. The law has 31 sections and will oversee the direction, development, expansion, regulation, and coordination of mental health related issues and duties entrusted to the Government. The National Mental Health Policy 2021 which is currently under final approval, provides an overarching direction by establishing a broad framework for action and coordination, through common vision and values for programing and mental health service delivery. Although still under review, this policy document acknowledges the significance and importance of relevant and useful local knowledge and practices, and adheres to global and regional thinking, taking into perspective the Bangladesh context.

Across the globe in most nations, mental health treatment is underfunded and lack a well-designed system of care within the health system primarily due to a limited understanding of how to treat adequately, severe social stigma, and complication of the conditions. The situation is similar in Bangladesh, where mental health has been a low priority in both health services delivery and planning for many years now. To address these issues, developing a comprehensive and multi-sectoral National Mental Health Strategic Plan was the only way forward to ensure access to quality mental health care services across the nation.

Saima Wazed, a licensed School Psychologist, is currently Clinical Instructor for the Department of School Psychology at Barry University. Additionally, she is Advisor to the Director General of WHO on Autism and Mental Health, Member of WHO’s Expert Advisory Panel on Mental Health, Chairperson of the National Advisory Committee on Autism and NDDs in Bangladesh, Thematic Ambassador for “Vulnerability” of the Climate Vulnerable Forum, and Chairperson of Shuchona Foundation.

Nazish Arman is Lead Content Developer of Shuchona Foundation.

Shuchona Foundation is a non-profit organization focusing on advocacy, research, and capacity-building, specialising in neurodevelopmental disabilities, and mental health. It aims to construct an effective bridge between national and international researchers, policy makers, service providers, persons with NDDs and their families, to promote inclusion nationally, regionally, and globally. The Foundation is a member of the UN ESCAP Working Group on disability as of May 2018, and holds special consultative status with UN ECOSOC since 2019.

Shuchona Foundation was the member of the Working Group on the National Mental Health Strategic Plan; and Saima Wazed was its Chief Advisor.

 

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Excerpt:

[First of a two-part article]

Governments, regional organizations and international agencies have failed to come up with sensible answers or effective policies to address the increasing waves of illegal migrants. Credit: Javier García/IPS

By Joseph Chamie
PORTLAND, USA, Oct 27 2021 (IPS)

Illegal immigration is a 21st century crisis that will only worsen with the consequences of climate change.

In addition to poverty, civil conflict and violence, the increasing high temperatures, widespread droughts, frequent flooding and rising sea levels are leaving parts of the world unlivable. The result will be climate-fueled instability with millions of people likely migrating for their survival.

Unfortunately, governments, regional organizations and international agencies have failed to come up with sensible answers or effective policies to address the increasing waves of illegal migrants, including caravans of thousands, arriving at borders and the growing numbers of migrants unlawfully resident.

The recently negotiated Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, for example, has done relatively little to address illegal migration. Other than fences, barriers, closed borders, pushbacks and official statements, governments appear ill prepared to deal with the growing numbers unlawfully crossing their borders.

In the coming decades climate-related migration will become an even more critical challenge. A recent landmark ruling by the UN Human Rights Committee found it unlawful for governments to return people to countries where their lives might be threatened by a climate crisis

With the assistance of social media and smugglers, thousands of migrants are arriving at borders by boat, motor vehicle and even by foot, pleading to enter the country. Refusing entry and/or deporting them to their home countries, especially when migrants claim asylum or come from failed states, have created serious dilemmas for governments.

Also, governments seem reluctant to acknowledge that visa overstayers and unauthorized migrants don’t expect to be deported. This expectation is largely based on the experiences of millions of unauthorized migrants permitted to live in host countries.

In many countries the public is displeased with their government’s handling of illegal immigration. This dissatisfaction contributes to anti-migrant sentiments, demonstrations against illegal immigration, xenophobia and violence towards migrants.

International surveys have found that approximately 15 percent of the world’s adults, or more than 800 million, want to migrate to another country. If children are included, the number of people wanting to migrate increases to more than 1 billion, or one-eighth of the world’s population of nearly 8 billion.

The preferred destinations are wealthy nations, with the United States being the top choice, followed by Canada, Germany, France, Australia and the United Kingdom. Those countries offer employment, services, opportunities, benefits, safety, human rights and security.

Among the economic, social and environmental forces influencing illegal migration are population size imbalances. For example, whereas the populations of Latin America and the Caribbean and Northern America were about the same size in 1950, today the population of Latin America is nearly double that of Northern America and is projected to remain so for the foreseeable future (Figure 1).

 

Source: United Nations Population Division.

 

Another noteworthy population size imbalance is between Europe and Africa. Whereas, in 1950 Europe’s population was double the size of Africa’s, by 2020 the demographic situation was the reverse. By 2050 Africa’s population is expected to be more than triple the size of Europe’s, 2.5 versus 0.7 billion (Figure 2).

 

Source: United Nations Population Division.

 

World population is also substantially larger than in was in the recent past. Today’s world population of nearly 8 billion is quadruple the number of people in 1921 and double the number in 1974.

Population projections point to continued demographic growth. World population is expected to reach 9 billion in 2037 and 10 billion in 2056, with most of the growth occurring in developing countries. Africa alone is expected to gain more than one billion people by midcentury (Figure 3).

 

Source: United Nations Population Division.

 

The asymmetry of human rights is also contributing to illegal immigration. The Universal Declaration of Human rights states that everyone has the right to leave and return to their country (Article 13). However, the Declaration does not give one the right to entry another country without authorization.

Lacking a legal right to emigrate, migrants turn to illegal migration with many claiming the right to seek asylum, Article 14 of the Declaration, to enter the destination country. Once in the country, unauthorized migrants believe they will not be repatriated even if their asylum claim is rejected, which is typically the case.

Of the world’s nearly 300 million migrants, the number of unauthorized migrants is likely to be no less than one-fifth of all migrants, or about 60 million. In the United States, for example, about one-fourth of the foreign-born population, or approximately 11 million, are unauthorized migrants,

The European Commission reports taking strong actions to prevent illegal migration through ensuring that each European Union (EU) country controls its own portion of EU’s external borders. Increasingly EU states are erecting walls, fences and even military force and technology to secure their borders against illegal immigration. Recently, the interior ministers from 12 member states demanded that the EU finance border-wall projects to stop migrants entering through Belarus.

Despite those actions, illegal immigration to the EU from January through August 2021 increased by 64 percent over the previous year. Along the western Balkan route, illegal crossings to the EU nearly doubled, with most of those migrants from Syria, Afghanistan and Morocco.

In the United States, illegal immigration has reached record levels. Officials detained 1.66 million illegal immigrants, including 145 thousand unaccompanied children, at the U.S. southern border in fiscal year 2021, the highest level ever recorded. The migrants were from 160 countries, with many seeking economic opportunities.

Many governments tolerate illegal immigration. Recently issued administration guidelines in the United States, for example, instruct immigration officials to no longer detain and repatriate migrants based on their illegal status alone; the focus is on those posing safety threats. Also, in Germany enforcement against illegal entry and unlawful residence is generally weak and authorities tend to look the other way regarding unauthorized migrant workers.

How best to address those unlawfully resident in a country remains a controversial political issue that most governments have been unable to resolve effectively. While some wish to offer a pathway to citizenship, others recommend repatriation and still others prefer to maintain the status quo.

Reasonable future levels of legal migration will be insufficient to absorb even a fraction of the estimated 1 billion people who want to migrate to wealthy countries. Consequently, future illegal migration will likely be many times greater than today’s levels.

In addition, in the coming decades climate-related migration will become an even more critical challenge. A recent landmark ruling by the UN Human Rights Committee found it unlawful for governments to return people to countries where their lives might be threatened by a climate crisis.

Tens of millions of people are expected to be displaced by 2050 because of life-threatening climate and environmental changes. Some estimate that as many as 143 million people in South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America are likely to be displaced due to climate change.

Among the many aspects of the illegal immigration crisis that governments need to address are three critical questions:

1. How to address the millions of unauthorized migrants currently resident in their countries?
2. How to respond to the millions of unauthorized migrants arriving at borders and attempting to enter?
3. How to address the millions of people to be displaced by climate change?

Failing to effectively address those and related issues will only exacerbate the 21st century illegal immigration crisis that will only worsen with climate change.

 

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

 

The WMO has warned that the ability of land ecosystems and oceans to act as sinks may become less effective in the future. Laudat, Dominica. Credit: Alison Kentish/IPS

By Alison Kentish
DOMINICA, Oct 27 2021 (IPS)

A few days before the international community gathers for COP26, widely considered the most important climate conference since the 2015 gathering which resulted in the Paris Climate Agreement, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO)  is reporting that despite global hits in trade and travel by the COVID-19 pandemic, the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere reached a new high in 2020.

The United Nations Agency issued its annual Greenhouse Gas Bulletin on October 25. It is the seventeenth bulletin and it concludes that from 1990 to 2020, heating of the earth by greenhouse gases spiked by 47 percent, with carbon dioxide responsible for almost 80 percent of this hike.

“Concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2), the most important greenhouse gas, reached 413.2 parts per million in 2020 and is 149% of the pre-industrial level,” the report stated, adding that “the economic slowdown from COVID-19 did not have any discernible impact on the atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases and their growth rates, although there was a temporary decline in new emissions.”

“Roughly half of the CO2 emitted by human activities today remains in the atmosphere. The other half is taken up by oceans and land ecosystems,” it added, warning that “the ability of land ecosystems and oceans to act as “sinks” may become less effective in future, thus reducing their ability to absorb carbon dioxide and act as a buffer against larger temperature increase.”

The statistics are crucial ahead of next week’s climate talks. Countries are being urged to commit to increasingly ambitious targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

“It is clear from the science that the concentration of greenhouse gases is driving climate change and if we are able to mitigate those emissions and phase out the negative trend in climate, that should be our aim,” said Petteri Taalas.

“Some features will continue for hundreds of years like the melting of glaciers and sea-level rise as we already have such a high concentration of carbon dioxide and this problem will not go away soon……..we have to start dealing with emissions in this decade. We cannot wait, otherwise, we will lose the Paris targets. The progress has been too slow,” Taalas added.

The WMO’s chief of atmospheric and environment research division Oksana Tarasova says climate commitments by nations must translate into action.

“There is no way around it. We need to reduce emissions as fast as possible. When countries are making commitments to be carbon neutral, the atmosphere gives us a very clear signal that our commitments should be converted into something that we can see in the atmosphere. If we do not see at least a decrease in the growth rate of the major greenhouse gases, we cannot declare success in the climate agenda,” she said.

The WMO greenhouse gas bulletin coincides with the release this week of the United Nations Climate Office’s updated findings on Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), which are countries’ climate action plans, including goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

They concluded that the world is ‘nowhere near’ where it needs to be to tackle the climate crisis. Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Patricia Espinosa called for an ‘urgent redoubling of climate efforts’ to ensure that global temperatures do not soar past the goals of the Paris Agreement.

“Overshooting the temperature goals will lead to a destabilized world and endless suffering, especially among those who have contributed the least to the GHG emissions in the atmosphere,” she said.
“This updated report, unfortunately, confirms the trend already indicated in the full Synthesis Report, which is that we are nowhere near where science says we should be.”
For WMO officials, a timely, ‘stark scientific message’ is being sent to the world.

“At the current rate of increase in greenhouse gas concentrations, we will see a temperature increase by the end of this century far in excess of the Paris Agreement targets of 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels,” WMO Secretary-General Taalas said.

“We are way off track.”

 

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Egyptian women protesters behind bars. Credit: VOA News

By Reem Abdellatif and Nimco Ali
CAIRO, Egypt, Oct 27 2021 (IPS)

The fate of Egyptian women and girls delicately hangs in the balance as the country continues to have one of the worst records in the world for gender equality. With oppression often state-sanctioned, Egyptian women face a daily struggle against sexual harassment and other violations of their basic human rights, including institutionalised violence.

Today, African Women Rights Advocates (AWRA) and The Five Foundation, The Global Partnership To End FGM, have come together with Equality Now, Democracy for the Arab World Now and several prominent voices from the region and beyond, to demand that the Egyptian government takes immediate steps to fix this situation.

It needs to take clear action to enhance the rights of women and girls in all areas of life, including by ending child marriage and banning articles that perpetuate sexual violence and gender discrimination in the text of the country’s laws.

The signatories to an open letter are also demanding that the Egyptian government enforces laws against female genital mutilation (FGM). With 27.2 million affected – around 90 percent of the female population – Egypt has one of the highest number of survivors of FGM in the world, yet the government is failing to act effectively.

It’s clear that if and when perpetrators are eventually arrested and convicted, they are given extremely short and suspended sentences, such as when 17-year-old Mayar Mohamed Moussa was killed in 2017 — and just over one year ago when yet another girl, 12-year-old Nada Hassan Abdel-Maqsoud, died in a private medical clinic in Manfalout.

In 2013, 13-year-old Soheir al-Batea’s killer Dr. Raslan Fadl only spent a couple of months behind bars in 2016, after evading arrest for three years. The anti-FGM law was strengthened earlier this year, but we know of first hand reports of clinics in Cairo still openly offering to medicalise the harmful and sometimes deadly practice.

Furthermore, women cannot fully claim their basic right to bodily autonomy in a state where public laws do not criminalise marital rape or virginity testing. The government has made no effort to address domestic violence in Egypt, which has been long tolerated and accepted in society.

Egyptian women and girls have had enough. In the last couple of years, they have come forward in unprecedented numbers to break the fear barrier and reveal harrowing lived experiences with sexual abuse.

Survivors demanded justice and called on the state to help end impunity for perpetrators of sexual harassment. However, their pleas for bodily autonomy fell on deaf ears when in January 2021, the Egyptian cabinet proposed a personal status bill that would strip women of their basic rights even further.

Human rights activists and grassroots women protested the regressive proposal, which would have given fathers priority over mothers in child custody. It would also have allowed fathers to prevent mothers from travelling abroad with their children.

In matters of marriage, a male guardian such as an uncle, father or brother would have had to sign a marriage contract on behalf of the wife. Although this particular draft law is now unlikely to be passed, signatories of the Open Letter want more clarity to make sure it does not reappear in a new format since the law was proposed by the government as opposed to one political party representative.

In Egypt, the internet remains one of the only public avenues of alternative expression; and yet Egyptian female social media influencers who are unaffiliated with the state or ruling elite have been targeted with arrests.

Since 2020, authorities launched a highly abusive campaign against women social media influencers and have prosecuted over a dozen of them under vague “morality” and “public indecency” laws, accusing the women of violating “family values.”

When famous influencer Haneen Hossam was acquitted after her arrest, authorities re-arrested her in 2021 and charged her with “human trafficking” for merely using social media in ways that challenged patriarchal norms.

Regional and global women’s rights activists who are familiar with Egypt’s bureaucratic and oppressive history towards women maintain that this is a state-sponsored crackdown to rein in female social media influencers by resorting to sexist “morality” charges that violate women’s rights to freedom of expression, bodily autonomy, and non-discrimination.

Donors and corporations investing in Egypt should also take note of all of these violations against its female population, and provide support where it’s critically needed – particularly to grassroots women activists.

The prosperous, fair, and peaceful vision that the United Nations and global powers hold for “Generation Equality” cannot be achieved when the Arab world’s most populous nation grossly undermines its women and girls.

Egypt must live up to its role as a beacon of hope and civilization, and so the Egyptian government must be held to account to carry through the changes that are needed so that young girls are free to live dignified and fulfilled lives.

Later this month, Egypt will have an ideal opportunity to do so, when it will be asked to be part of a review by the United Nations Committee on the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW).

Egypt’s economic transformation is already happening. It is one of the leaders in the region in terms of attracting foreign direct investment, but its potential will never be fully realised until its government allows the female half of its population to be safe, free and be able to contribute socially and economically to the country’s future.

Reem Abdellatif is Director & Chief Operating Officer of the African Women Rights Advocates movement (AWRA). Nimco Ali is CEO of The Five Foundation, The Global Partnership To End FGM.

 

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Instead of investing resources in building a solution from scratch, it’s smarter to research existing solutions and tools that can be modified for specific needs, the authors say. Credit: Unsplash / Marvin M

By External Source
Oct 26 2021 (IPS)

Today, technology has become integral to almost all aspects of work—from implementing and standardising processes and collecting data to monitoring and evaluation and helping an organisation scale. This was increasingly apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic, when all organisations turned to technologies like WhatsApp and Zoom to stay connected and deliver their programmes to communities. And yet in the nonprofit sector, tech is viewed as an overhead rather than being fundamental to the functioning of an organisation.

When building budgets for programmes, nonprofits (and donors) must change their mindsets and look at tech as core infrastructure; without this orientation, organisations lose out because they are bearing the cost of technology anyway. It makes no sense not to account for it properly.

 

We misunderstand technology

1. Tech is an enabler, not the solution

When it comes to nonprofits implementing tech, there are a few misconceptions or assumptions we have encountered during our work at Tech4Dev. The first misconception is that tech is the solution. Tech is, in fact, an enabler—it enables an effective, efficient solution. It cannot by itself solve problems. For example, using tech for mobile data collection is superb.

However, to use this technology effectively, an organisation must have the processes and systems in place to know what data to collect, the audience from whom they will collect the data, and the field staff trained in the system and reasonably knowledgeable about data collection and biases. In such a scenario, tech enables high-quality data collection, but the secret is in the organisation process.

2. It’s not about the size of an organisation

The second misconception is that there is a ‘right size’ an organisation needs to get to before implementing tech solutions. In other words, tech is not for smaller grassroots organisations. A better way to think about this would be to ask yourself: Do I currently have a solution for the problem at hand, and do I have a systematic way of implementing that solution? If the answer is yes, then size should not be a factor at all.

For instance, we’ve seen small organisations use Google Sheets extremely effectively. So you can use cheap tech at a small scale, and you can also use cheap tech on a large scale. We’ve also seen really poor tech being used in both small organisations as well as large ones.

So it’s not about size but about having a systematic approach, because even though tech makes things more efficient, it also tends to add more complexity and introduce another element that employees will have to learn and work with.

We were working with a nonprofit organisation—let’s call it Team Health—that had a large number of fieldworkers, from whom they would receive data via multiple channels including WhatsApp, emails, and phone calls. None of this data arrived in a standardised or structured manner, nor was any of it recorded. Team Health wanted to change this.

They were keen to introduce an app, assuming that all their fieldworkers would know how to enter the requisite information in the exact way that the tech required, and that would lead to them having standardised data exactly how they needed it.

But because their processes at the time were not standardised, and their fieldworkers were accustomed to a certain way of submitting data, the app would not solve their problem. In fact, it might have made things worse had they gone down that path.

3. Asking donors to ‘fund tech‘

The third misconception among organisations is that funders are hesitant to pay for tech. Instead of asking donors to ‘fund technology’, nonprofits should articulate why technology is important to the organisation’s core functioning.

They must incorporate it as such in their proposals. We need to educate the funder ecosystem as well as the nonprofit ecosystem for this to become a reality.

Take the case of an organisation—Team Sanitation—working on community toilets for the urban poor in India. They used a fair amount of technology for data collection and geographic information system (GIS) mapping in their day-to-day operations.

These tools were core to their project, and so Team Sanitation started incorporating all costs associated with using these technologies (for example, licensing and operational costs) as necessary project costs in their funding proposals.

And they haven’t got any pushback from donors for doing so. As long as organisations can demonstrate the need for tech within their programmes, most donors will not have any issues supporting such core expenses.

4. Thinking that a custom tech solution needs to be built from scratch

The fourth mistake many organisations make is to think that they need to build custom tech solutions from scratch. But before thinking about this nonprofits need to define their problems and needs.

Detailing what their top problems are, why they are important, and how they impact the work that they are trying to do can help them understand where tech might help, and where it might not. If tech is in fact the way to go, then it’s important to acknowledge that very few nonprofits have a unique problem that they need solved.

The context, communities, and resources might differ, but fundamentally the problem a nonprofit is trying to solve has likely been attempted or solved by somebody else already.

For instance, let’s take the case of an organisation that is in the business of training primary school teachers, and finds that doing this at scale, in person, is cost-prohibitive. Surely, there are others that have faced this issue of cost and scale, and have worked on a solution.

Even still, in the nonprofit sector, there is a tendency to build custom tech platforms when they are not needed. Both funders and nonprofits have been burnt by this, where a solution was built, and in some cases the investment had to be written off, and in others there was little progress to show for it.

Custom tech is not only a waste of resources, time, and effort, but it is also not scalable. For this reason, instead of investing resources in building a solution from scratch, it’s smarter to research existing solutions and tools that can be modified for specific needs.

We’ve seen multiple custom builds of mobile data collection platforms, case management systems, and customer relationship management (CRM) systems across different nonprofits, most of which were inferior and lacking compared to the current open-source and commercially available solutions. ‘Research before build’ is a mantra we follow quite religiously within Tech4Dev.

 

We need to build a culture of collaboration and sharing knowledge where everyone benefits

Given that there are existing solutions to problems that several nonprofits are trying to solve, the question arises: What are the barriers to accessing such information?

Most nonprofits do not have the technological knowledge or expertise that is helpful in thinking about what tools might be useful for their specific problem. Connecting the dots between the problem and potentially useful technologies is usually the responsibility of the software partner.

However, since software partners often have limited experience in the social sector, their approach to an organisation’s problem is to simply build a solution specifically for the nonprofit. This is far from ideal. Not only do we need software partners that are well versed with the social sector and the problems nonprofits are trying to solve, but we also need nonprofits to strengthen their understanding of tech.

In order to do this, we need to build a knowledge base for tech that everyone can learn from—nonprofits, donors, and software partners. This kind of open ecosystem will also help funders realise when they are funding similar solutions across multiple organisations, and it will help organisations learn from each other’s work.

 

We must prioritise open-source publishing of the work

To build an accessible ecosystem, the first step is to share existing knowledge with all the relevant stakeholders. Nonprofits should publish their programmes, challenges, solutions, and learning in the public domain. For example, if a nonprofit is spending 300 hours working on a project, it should spend at least 10 hours creating open-source material that helps people understand what it is that they are doing.

Creating awareness through open-sourced content is crucial for organisations in the social sector so they can learn from and support each other better. While this might not happen right away, as more and more nonprofits share their expertise, the social sector can start to build these broader ecosystems faster. Organisations must ideally move beyond the fear of sharing their ‘trade secrets’, in recognition of the fact that paying it forward will benefit them in the long run.

 

Donors and intermediary organisations have an important role to play

Organisations like IDinsight do an amazing job publishing their work on a timely basis as seen from their blog and LinkedIn pages. Sharing this information helps distribute knowledge across a wide variety of ecosystem players, hence strengthening the ecosystem.

Donors can nudge these organisations to publish their work as it is being done to help disseminate the knowledge as early as possible. We should never wait till we have the perfect, well-crafted report. Publishing things as the work is being done is another mantra for the projects we run within Tech4Dev.

In India today, the onus of facilitating the building of an ecosystem falls more on funders and intermediary organisations than it does on nonprofits. This is because nonprofits are resource-constrained and devote majority of their efforts to their programmes. Moreover, they do not have the kind of influence and clout that donors have, and might not have the skills either.

The first step that funders can take is to move away from traditional contracts that restrict sharing of content and intellectual property (IP) and towards sharing IP in the public domain. Further, given that funders typically work with multiple organisations within a specific sector, they might be better positioned to see the bigger picture here.

They can also help nonprofits choose software partners. Here, they must be sensitive to the skewed funder–nonprofit power dynamic, and play a supportive role rather than a directive one. There is a lot that funders can do to strengthen the tech ecosystem within the social sector. Unfortunately, there are very few donors and organisations focused on this ecosystem.

We need a much greater push towards building ecosystems and platforms at a much faster rate, and providing adequate support to sustain them. The social sector needs such spaces so they can integrate technology better and more smartly across the work they do.

 

Donald Lobo serves as executive director of the Chintu Gudiya Foundation, a private family foundation based in San Francisco, CA, that funds US-based nonprofits and organisations developing open-source software for the public good. 

Sanjeev Dharap is an entrepreneur and start-up adviser, and has worked in Silicon Valley for over 25 years. He holds an MTech in Computer Science from Pune University, India, and a PhD in Computer Science from Penn State University. He has been involved with Tech4Dev since early 2019

 

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

Credit: Daniel Beltra/Greenpeace Africa

By Remy Zahiga, Jennifer Morgan and Martin Kaiser
GOMA/AMSTERDAM/HAMBURG, Oct 26 2021 (IPS)

On the brink of an unprecedented environmental emergency, EU ambassadors to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) gathered earlier this month for a luxury river cruise hosted by the country’s Environment Minister, Eve Bazaiba.

Many of them represent donor countries from the Central African Forest Initiative (CAFI), in the final stretch of negotiating an estimated $1 billion ten-year DRC forest protection program. The Minister is wining and dining them to push her top priority: the lifting of a 2002 ban on the awarding of new logging concessions.

The decision to lift the ban was approved this July by the Council of Ministers, presided by Président Félix Tshisekedi, but an implementation decree is yet to be signed. In April, at Joe Biden’s Leaders Summit on Climate, Congo’s president had pledged to stop deforestation and increase forest cover by 8%.

Minister Bazaiba has responded to a letter from local and international environmental and human rights groups by saying she has no lessons to learn from NGOs. She calls criticism of the lifting of the moratorium “beyond daring for the 21st century”; the Ministry labels critics “the beneficiaries of imperialists.”

The lifting of the moratorium could open some 70 million hectares to logging – an area roughly the size of France – and its impacts would be catastrophic. With or without a “sustainability” label, the logging of the Congo Basin is a nightmare for the rule of law and a constant threat to local people.

For millions of people who depend on the forest for their livelihoods, including Indigenous Peoples, selling it off to multinationals has meant land grabs, displacement and destitution. And bulldozing the rainforest will likely mean less rain.

The Congo Basin forest is estimated to contribute more than half of the annual precipitation in Sub-Saharan Africa, an area already facing a plethora of droughts and extreme heat waves.

One of the things the EU ambassadors the Minister is schmoozing ought to remind her is that no one appears to know exactly who these multinationals are.

Nearly six months after the launch of an EU-funded legal review of logging titles, the lead auditor reported this month that his team still hasn’t been able to pull together a list of titles… He hasn’t yet glimpsed a “so-called existing” list; what there is is “very incomplete.” Ève Bazaiba took her time to sign the team’s mission order, until two months after an intervention by the EU ambassador.

Over 40 Congolese and international NGOs are still waiting for a reply to their 23 September letter to donors, warning of the impending catastrophe.

In the letter they were told that lifting the moratorium in DRC, home to about 60 per cent of the Congo Basin forest, would remove the last shreds of credibility from COP15 on biodiversity in Kunming and from COP26 on climate in Glasgow.

The Congo Basin forest has more than 600 tree species and 10,000 animal species, including forest elephants, lowland gorillas, bonobos, and okapi. Its vegetation is estimated to contain between 25-30 billion tons of carbon, equivalent to about four years of global anthropogenic emissions of CO2. Increased logging might mean greater risk of yet another pandemic.

Just how out of it are the donors? Do they really have any clue what the current logging scene is in Congo?

Over the years, one Minister after another has violated the moratorium, gratifying senior military – including an army general under EU and US sanctions for human rights abuses – and other makeshift “logging” firms.

Bazaiba’s predecessor, Claude Nyamugabo, is facing a legal challenge from Congolese civil society organisations for transferring two million hectares of illegally allocated concessions to Chinese front companies.

But by far the most surreal example of what the lifting of the moratorium would mean is last year’s award of six so-called “conservation” concessions, covering an area half the size of Belgium, to a company called Tradelink.

The only shareholder of the firm that a Greenpeace Africa investigation has been able to identify is Aleksandar Voukovitch, a Belgian expat who’s made his career in mining, oil and timber. He would appear to have no experience in conservation, and even less in the area of forest-rights protection.

In September, the Minister missed the legal deadline to respond to an administrative complaint seeking the cancellation of his contracts.

The national Institute for Nature Conservation, ICCN, has confirmed they were awarded illegally, without its knowledge. The governor of Tshuapa province has also demanded their cancellation.

The same Ministry that’s accusing national and international NGOs of being imperialist stooges has remained silent about what’s probably the biggest handover of territory to Belgian interests since independence.

Finally, over a year after the award of the Tradelink contracts – and, by sheer coincidence, two weeks before COP26 — President Tshisekedi ordered their suspension, as well as that of all other “dubious” forest concessions.

Better late than never, but it would appear that the sudden interest in good “forest governance” may simply be meant to reassure donors that the moratorium can now be safely jettisoned. No sign yet of the opening of a legal investigation to determine the responsibility of the various parties.

Are donors in the process of green lighting the lifting of the moratorium even as we speak? Will the EU taxpayer be financing a free-for-all for EU and Chinese multinationals? Now’s the time for the weekend river cruisers to take a position – a public one.

But the one billion dollar question isn’t whether foreign governments will tacitly support all of the above or simply walk away. There’s a far better path for investment for CAFI and other donors too.

The most effective and just form of forest protection is supporting the land rights of Indigenous People and local communities. In areas designated as community forest concessions, the rate of deforestation is significantly lower than the national average and almost 50 per cent lower than in logging concessions.

Community forest concessions also provide a structure that is inclusive and democratic.

The health of our planet requires ending, rather than endlessly recycling, the colonial concession system so beautifully incarnated by Tradelink. The DRC government and CAFI must extend the moratorium on new logging and invest in the protection of forest rights. They must finally decide to leave the rainforest to its rightful indigenous owners.

Remy Zahiga is a Congolese climate activist. Jennifer Morgan is the Executive Director of Greenpeace International. Martin Kaiser is the Executive Director of Greenpeace Germany.

 

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The Southern African region is particularly vulnerable to climate change while only being responsible for a fraction of emissions. It is hoped that COP26 will deliver tangible benefits to the area which has already suffered severe impacts of climate change like the effects of Cyclone Idai, Mozambique, in March 2019. Credit: Denis Onyodi: IFRC/DRK/Climate Centre

By Kevin Humphrey
Johannesburg, Oct 26 2021 (IPS)

COP 26 is almost upon us, and dire warnings abound that it’s boom or bust for a greener future. Meanwhile, everybody boasts about what they will do to cool down our planet, but there is a disjuncture between talk and action. Even Queen Elizabeth II of the host country, the United Kingdom, has grumbled publicly that not enough action is taking place on climate change.

In the Southern Africa region, the SADC’s member countries are clear that the developed countries must stump up the money to help them deliver their promises to reduce carbon emissions and carry out a raft of measures to combat global warming. All the SADC countries are signatories to the Paris Agreement.

The region has joined the cry of other African countries that the continent suffers most from climate change but hardly contributes to the causes of the phenomenon – emitting less than 4% of the world’s greenhouse gasses.
According to research undertaken on behalf of the UN, climate change adaptation needs for Africa were estimated to be $715 billion ($0.715 trillion) between 2020 and 2030.

In southern Africa, each country has its own Nationally Developed Contribution plan for dealing with climate change, including costs. Of course, funding will be needed to achieve these goals. Developing countries have pledged a $100bn annual target to help the developing world tackle climate change. All the Southern African countries will need a slice of this funding. The Green Climate Fund was established under the Cancun Agreements in 2010 as a dedicated financing vehicle for developing countries.

In the lead up to COP26, the fund is under scrutiny. Tanguy Gahouma, chair of the African Group of Negotiators at COP26, has said: “African countries want a new system to track funding from wealthy nations that are failing to meet the $100bn annual target.”

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) estimates this funding stood at $79.6bn in 2019. OECD data reveals that from 2016-19 Africa only got 26 percent of the funding.

Gahouma said a more detailed shared system was needed that would keep tabs on each country’s contribution and where it went on the ground.

“They say they achieved maybe 70 percent of the target, but we cannot see that,” Gahouma said.
“We need to have a clear road map how they will put on the table the $100bn per year, how we can track (it),” he said. “We don’t have time to lose, and Africa is one of the most vulnerable regions of the world.”

Amar Bhattacharya, from the Brookings Institution, says about the fund, “Some progress has been made – but a lot more needs to be done.”

Denmark’s development coordination minister Flemming Møller Mortensen has warned that only a quarter of international climate finance for developing countries goes to adaptation.

COP26 may turn into a squabble over money and perhaps an attack on developed countries as they are blamed for creating the problems of climate change in the first place by using fossil fuels for the last two centuries. G20 countries account for almost 80% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Again, it is all about the money. Many developed countries do not want to change; their economies (and their rich elites) are wedded to fossil fuels. There are also problems with paying for adaptation. Will the rich countries fund the developing countries to green themselves up?

Southern Africa will need to deal pragmatically with the outcomes of COP26 as it becomes crucial to deal with climate change impacts – like the vulnerability to intense storms like Cyclone Idai, which hit Mozambique in March 2019. Credit: Denis Onyodi: IFRC/DRK/Climate Centre

Professor Bruce Hewitson, the SARCHI Research Chair in Climate Change Climate System Analysis Group, Dept Environmental & Geographical Sciences at the University of Cape Town, told IPS: “The well-cited meme that Africa is the continent most vulnerable to climate change impacts is true, as is the common response that Africa needs external aid to implement adaptation and development pathways compatible to climate mitigation. However, such messages hide a myriad of political realities about the difference between what is ideal and what is likely.”

Hewitson argues that what emerges from COP26 is an exercise in hope and belief.

“It’s a tightrope walk trying to balance competing demands and self-interests. At the end of the day, Africa will need to pragmatically deal with a compromised outcome and face the climate challenges as best possible under limited resources,” he says.

If Africa goes to COP26 with a begging bowl attitude, it could face the risk of dancing to the strings of the powerful and rich nations.

“Climate change impacts Africa in a multiplicity of ways, but at the root is when the local climate change exceeds the viability threshold of our infrastructural and ecological systems. Hence, arguably the largest challenge to responding to climate change is to expand and enable the regional capacity of the science and decision-makers to responsibly steer our actions in an informed and cohesive way; Africa needs to lead the design of Africa’s solutions,” says Hewitson.

While he argues that some of the best innovation is happening in Africa, it requires resources, and the COVID-19 pandemic has decreased international funding.

“Each community has unique needs and unique challenges, needing unique local solutions that are context-sensitive and context-relevant, and this will inevitably include the pain of some socio-economic and political compromise.”
The southern African region’s climate woes chime with the problems faced by a legion of developing countries. We have Mauritius’s threatened Indian Ocean islands, Seychelles, Madagascar, Comoros and those offshore of Tanzania and Mozambique, plus many thousands of miles of coastline. We have inland waterways. We have jungles, forests, vast plains and deserts. All prey to the viciousness of global warming.

The SADC’s climate change report quotes an academic paper by Rahab and Proudhomme that from 2002 “there has been a rise in temperatures at twice the global average.”

According to the SADC, “A Climate Change Strategy is in place to guide the implementation of the Climate Change Programme over a Fifteen-year period (2015 – 2030). The plan is innovative in terms of food security, preserving and expanding carbon sinks (which play a major role in stabilising the global climate) and tackling problems in urban areas that cause global warming like high energy consumption, poor waste management systems and inefficient transport networks.

Out of the region’s fifteen member countries, South Africa is the biggest culprit when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa recently said, “We need to act with urgency and ambition to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and undertake a transition to a low-carbon economy.”

This is a big ask for the region’s economic powerhouse with entrenched mining interests, an abundance of coal and a huge fleet of coal-fired power stations.

Recently, Mining and Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe said South Africa must systematically manage its transition away from coal-fired power generation and not rush a switch to renewable energy sources.

“I am not saying coal forever… I am saying let’s manage our transition step by step rather than being emotional. We are not a developed economy, we don’t have all alternative sources.”

Angola has some of the most ambitious targets for transition to low-carbon development in Africa. The country committed to reducing up to 14% of its greenhouse gas emissions – commentators have met this with scepticism.
Mozambique, not – as yet – a significant carbon emitter, has potential, through its vast natural gas resources, to provide the wherewithal to heat the planet in a big way.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo – a least-developed country, has committed to a 17% reduction by 2030 in emissions. The DRC has the world’s second-largest tropical rainforest – a major carbon sink.

Other SADC countries that suffer from climate change but do very little to cause it are Lesotho, Swaziland, Botswana, Madagascar, which is currently suffering from a climate-induced famine; Malawi, Tanzania, Namibia and Zambia.

While talking up the need to cut emissions, Zambia’s neighbour Zimbabwe said it would increase electricity and coal supply to the iron and steel sectors, thus adding to emissions.

Mauritius, Seychelles and Comoros are all vulnerable Island economies and have a lot in common with the many other island states throughout the world and are very low carbon emitters but extremely vulnerable to climate change especially rising sea levels.

Despite all the problems emerging in the lead up to COP 26, we need to take to heart the fact that scientists and commentators worldwide are warning that COP26 must deliver a way forward that works for our planet and our people. Southern Africa and the African continent as a whole can contribute with innovation and enthusiasm by tapping into the vast potential of our youthful population.

 

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