Africa - INTER PRESS SERVICE

News and Views from the Global South

Updated: 2 days 6 hours ago

Indigenous Communities & Human Rights Defenders Under Siege in Colombia

Wed, 11/03/2021 - 08:24

Celia Umenza Velasco at the UN Security Council Open Debate on Women, Peace and Security. Credit: United Nations

By Celia Umenza Velasco
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 3 2021 (IPS)

On 21 October, I had the honor of addressing the UN Security Council at the annual open debate on Women, Peace and Security. I spoke as a member of Cxhab Wala Kiwe, which means “Great People’s Territory” in the Nasa Yuwe language, also known as ACIN—Association of Indigenous Councils of the North of Cauca—in Colombia.

I am an Indigenous activist dedicated to my people, our territory, the environment and the cause of peace.

I spoke on behalf of the NGO Working Group on Women, Peace and Security, and as a representative of Indigenous women and women in all their diversity—campesinas, Afro-descendant women, LGBTQI+ persons, refugee and migrant women, women with disabilities and women from countries around the world who suffer from war, poverty and discrimination.

As I said in my remarks, I continue to affirm my solidarity with the women and LGBTQI+ people of Afghanistan who continue to risk their lives fighting for their rights and equal place in Afghan society. We stand with you.

Colombia remains one of the world’s most dangerous countries for defenders of human rights and of land and territorial rights. Attacks on human rights defenders, especially women, LGBTQI+, campesino, Afro-descendant and Indigenous leaders have continued, including in response to the recent protests in Colombia against extreme inequality, violence and scant implementation of the Peace Accord.

On average, at least one Indigenous defender is killed every week. In my territory of Cauca, three Indigenous women leaders whom I worked with were killed in 2020. Their brutal murders illustrate how women often pay a terrible price for their leadership.

For an Indigenous person, land means everything to us. We are nourished by it, and it is a part of our identity and our history. Indigenous communities oppose logging, mining, agribusiness and other large-scale extractive and infrastructure projects—many of which are actively supported by the Government of Colombia—because they threaten the environment and deplete our natural resources.

Indigenous defenders in Colombia are viewed as a threat because we challenge powerful economic interests. My people are killed for protecting our waterways and forests, our flowers and fauna, when their courage and dedication should be held up as a model in the non-violent struggle for territorial rights.

Celia Umenza Velasco

Violence against our communities also demonstrates the devastating impact of militarized responses to social crises. Indigenous communities in Colombia have been calling for demilitarization for decades. Much of the war was waged on our land, and much of the violence continues in our territories today.

Although we have peace in name, lack of implementation of the Peace Accord has refueled conflict. At one point in the war, an Indigenous person was killed every 72 hours, most often caught in the crossfire between armed actors.

Today, the state continues to use militarized force through its security apparatus, particularly in rural areas. The only state presence we see in our territories is the military and the police, who often appear to protect the economic interests of powerful sectors, rather than the rights of local populations.

This represents a failure to comply with the provisions of the Peace Accord. Furthermore, during the recent national protests, police used excessive force against peaceful demonstrators across the country, particularly in Cali where a greater percentage of the population is Afro-descendant and where our Indigenous guard was attacked.

State forces have committed sexual and gender-based violence. Peaceful protestors have been subject to torture, illegal detention, disappearances and killings, echoing the violence that has marked over five decades of war. The gravity of this situation led the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to call for the overall demilitarization of the police in Colombia.

The Peace Accord, with 130 provisions on gender equality and women’s rights, was achieved due to the determined struggle of Colombian feminist movements. On paper, the Peace Accord provides the foundation for a democratic country.

However, five years since its adoption, implementation is at a standstill, especially of its gender provisions and the Ethnic Chapter. The Special Forum of Women and the High Level Forum for Ethnic Peoples are both underfunded and lack political support, and members of the Special Forum of Women have been threatened and attacked.

Implementation is most delayed in provisions for Comprehensive Rural Reform, which would give women access to land and enable them to chart a path to inclusive and holistic development for their communities.

This has allowed the expansion of extractive activities that exploit natural resources, violate territorial rights, exacerbate conflict, and increase violence against human rights defenders, especially those who defend their land.

Colombia’s Peace Accord may be unprecedented in its incorporation of international standards of gender equality—but what good are agreements and promises if they are not kept?

Threats faced by women peacebuilders and human rights defenders in one community are a threat to women everywhere. Despite ten resolutions and repeated affirmations of the value of civil society, the issue of women human rights defenders remains a critical gap in the Security Council’s implementation of the women, peace and security agenda.

Colombia is no different—although Security Council members have regularly condemned the targeting of human rights defenders and social leaders, they have not done enough to turn words into action.

Ending attacks against women human rights defenders, not only in Colombia, but in all conflicts on its agenda, and ensuring the full, equal and meaningful participation and leadership of women in all their diversity, is essential for sustainable peace.

I urged the Security Council to call on the Colombian Government to:

campesino

• Adhere to free, prior and informed consent processes with campesino, Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities, including regularly consulting with their authorities and community organizations, with regards to economic development in their territories, and ensure that development processes comply with international human rights principles and law, and with the Peace Accord.

• Address the crisis of violence against human rights defenders, including by ensuring: accountability of perpetrators when such attacks occur, and full resourcing for the development of collective and territorial self-protection measures for Indigenous, campesino and Afro-descendant communities, as well as support for their permanent presence in fora where protection policies are discussed, especially the National Commission for Security Guarantees and the Intersectoral Commission for Guarantees for Women Leaders and Human Rights Defenders.

• Immediately demilitarize the police force by moving the National Police out of the Ministry of Defense, dismantle the Mobile Antiriot Squad of the National Police (ESMAD) and redirect funding to support social investment.

• Ensure the full, equal and meaningful participation of women leaders in the implementation of the Peace Accord and in negotiations with other armed actors in Colombia.

Peace is more than the absence of war. To Indigenous women, it means an end to discrimination, respect for human rights, justice, economic equality, and transformative change with human life at its center.

As the primary international body responsible for peace and security, I urged the Security Council not to allow this year’s open debate to be yet another occasion where they listen to women civil society, but fail to act on our concerns.

The plight of Afghan women illustrates all too clearly the cost of doing so. Women around the world show daily that they have courage and the conviction to fight for peace. We call on the Security Council, and leaders at all levels, to fight for us all.

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

Categories: Africa

Mobilising the ‘Tools’ for Renewable Energy Investment in the Seychelles

Wed, 11/03/2021 - 06:44

A wind farm in Port Victoria on the main island of Mahe in the Seychelles is contributing to the renewable energy transition of the small island state located east of the African continent. Credit: Commonwealth Secretariat

By Catherine Wilson
CANBERRA, Australia , Nov 3 2021 (IPS)

Breaking the world’s reliance on fossil fuels and accelerating the global uptake of renewable energy will play a decisive role in diminishing the threat of global warming to the survival of life on earth, according to experts. But turning the vision into reality will demand unwavering political will and, critically, massive investment, which can no longer be shouldered solely by aid and development partners.

It is a challenge that the Commonwealth Secretariat, the inter-governmental organisation representing 54 Commonwealth nations, has taken on. Now it is launching an initiative at the United Nations COP26 Climate Change Conference in Glasgow to propel the ability of Small Island Developing States (SIDS) to attract major investors with sound compelling business cases.

The summit will be a key setting to leverage “the toolkit into different partner working platforms, such as the Climate Investment Platform, increase collaboration among partners and drive joint action with SIDS on energy transition ahead of other key milestones in 2022 and beyond, including the Sustainable Energy for All (SEforALL) Forum in Rwanda and Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) to be held in 2022 and COP27 to be held in Africa,” Alache Fisho, the Commonwealth Secretariat’s Legal Adviser on Natural Resources in London told IPS.

The SIDS Toolkit, a digital tool for governments, developed by the Commonwealth Secretariat and the international development organisation, SEforALL, is currently being trialled in the Seychelles, an archipelago nation of 99,000 people, located in the Somali Sea east of the African continent.

Converting the country’s energy system to renewables is imperative for future stability and prosperity, as climate change threatens development gains. “The livelihood of the islanders is being threatened here with sea-level rise. What we are seeing is greater coastal erosion, increased temperature rises and coral bleaching. We are also getting an increasing frequency of cyclones in the region,” Tony Imaduwa, CEO of the Seychelles Energy Commission in the capital, Victoria, told IPS.

The Commonwealth Secretary-General, Rt Hon Patricia Scotland QC, made an official visit to the Seychelles in June 2018. Credit: Commonwealth Secretariat

In Caribbean and Pacific Island nations, as well, air temperatures are becoming hotter, weather patterns more unpredictable, while sea-level rise is eroding finite land, destroying crops and contaminating freshwater resources.

Last year, an overwhelming 80 percent of the global energy supply was still generated by fossil fuels and only 12 percent by renewables. This puts the world on track toward a devastating temperature increase of 2.6 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, claims the International Energy Agency (IEA).

And the bill for importing oil, which comprises 95 percent of primary energy in the Seychelles, is an enormous fiscal burden on the government and its development goals. “It is a drain on our foreign exchange reserves, our earnings, and there is the whole volatile nature of the price. When the price goes up, you get the costs going up, the cost of food goes up, services go up, the electricity cost goes up, transportation goes up. There is the risk associated with the supply, too,” Imaduwa told IPS.

The Seychelles has a human development ranking of 67 out of 189 countries, the second-highest in the African region, and all citizens have access to electricity. But many other SIDS bear much higher levels of energy poverty. In the Pacific Islands, about 70 percent of households lack access to power.

It is, therefore, no surprise that clean energy, which will be more affordable to islanders, is a national priority. The majority of SIDS are committed to achieving 100 percent renewable energy by 2030.

Renewables, ideal for standalone systems, are a good fit for island nations where populations are often scattered across numerous islands separated by vast areas of the ocean. And weather conditions are a great advantage, especially for wind and solar energy. Despite clean energy only comprising 5 percent of the energy mix in the Seychelles, the momentum has begun. The first wind farm was established near the nation’s capital, Victoria, in 2013, and increasingly homes and businesses are installing rooftop solar panels.

But there are challenges to securing the large capital investment needed for complete conversion. In many cases, the lack of strong institutions, enabling regulatory frameworks and small energy markets limit the appeal of the energy sector in SIDS to the private sector and international financiers.

The Seychelles is developing its clean energy sector and blue economy with the support of the Commonwealth and other partners. Credit: Commonwealth Secretariat

“The Seychelles is no longer considered a Least Developed Country; it is an emerging economy now. So, there is a slight concern from the government that it will not be able to access concessionary loans anymore from multilateral development banks and also that there will be fewer countries that are providing overseas development assistance to the country,” Dr Kai Kim Chiang, the Commonwealth Secretariat’s National Climate Finance Adviser in the Seychelles, told IPS. “The Seychelles is a small country, so they do have challenges in attracting investors because it is a really small market here, and so then the potential for the return of investment is potentially quite small.”

Yet, about US$4 trillion will have to be injected into clean energy growth by 2030, if the global temperature rise is to be restricted to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, reports the IEA. And 70 percent of this will need to be spent in developing and emerging countries.

To this end, the SIDS Toolkit empowers governments to draft investment-grade business cases. First, key data about the economic and energy status of the Seychelles, for example, about employment, Gross Domestic Product (GDP), utility electricity cost and carbon emissions, is entered into the digital application. The toolkit then analyses the data to provide a detailed cost-benefit analysis of development and transition scenarios and identifies the state’s key investment strengths. It also pinpoints where reforms are needed to boost investor confidence, such as deficiencies in legal and institutional capacity.

“It will assist in terms of formulating strategies to unlocking investment in the energy sector in the Seychelles, and that is something that is missing for us. We are focussing on a lot of plans and policies and implementation, but sometimes we struggle on how to bring these together and create a platform that allows us to say, OK, we have a plan, yes, we want to invest in this area, but how do we do it,” Imaduwa said.

The SIDS Toolkit is designed with a broad range of potential investors in mind, including multilateral and private sector financial institutions. However, Fisho emphasised that private sector involvement is “very important”, especially as many renewable energy technologies entail large capital expenditure. “Moreover, the renewable energy technologies are fast evolving. The private sector can bring the required finance and expertise in the deployment of modern technologies,” she said.

Despite the detrimental economic impact of the pandemic worldwide over the past two years, Fisho makes a strong case for the priority of spending on the energy transition. “The pandemic has highlighted the need to transition towards clean energy in SIDS to increase energy security and economic resilience. Investment in renewable energy is consistent with supporting recover better and more resilient economic development, thereby creating more sustainable green jobs and decent income opportunities for current and future generations,” she declared.

Categories: Africa

Obtaining Water, a Daily Battle in Argentina’s El Impenetrable Region

Tue, 11/02/2021 - 20:15

Francisco Montes shows the cement tank where he collects rainwater in El Impenetrable. Scarce rainfall in the last two years has created serious trouble for the inhabitants of this four-million-hectare ecoregion, who are scattered around the Chaco region of northern Argentina. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

By Daniel Gutman
GENERAL GÜEMES, Argentina , Nov 2 2021 (IPS)

Next to the brick or adobe houses of El Impenetrable, a wild area of forest and grasslands in northern Argentina, loom huge plastic barrels where rainwater collected from the corrugated iron roofs of the houses is stored. However, the barrels are empty, because it has hardly rained for two years, local residents complain.

“Things have been very bad recently. It rained one day in September, but very little,” said Francisco Montes, who has lived for 35 years in a house in a large open area in the middle of a monotonous landscape of trees and bushes, several kilometres from his nearest neighbours.

On the dirt road leading to his house, it is rare to run into a person or a vehicle, but it is easy to come across cows, goats, horses and even pigs, since domestic animals are raised loose in this area, to roam freely in their arduous search for green pastures.

Located in the Argentine portion of the Chaco – the great sparsely forested plain covering more than one million square kilometres, shared with Paraguay and Bolivia – El Impenetrable was so named not only because of the thick brush and the scarcity of roads.

The ecosystem covering some four million hectares also owes its name precisely to the lack of water, which turns most of the vegetation a yellowish hue and is made more dramatic by the combination with temperatures that can be suffocating.

From droughts to floods

Rainfall in the area usually comes in just three months, during the southern hemisphere summer. And rains have been scarce for as long as anyone can remember in this part of the Chaco.

But for two years now the situation has been worse than usual, because the drought has been especially bad, after severe flooding in 2018 and 2019 that wrought havoc among local residents and their livestock, when it rained three times the historical average.

In the absence of piped water, Montes, who lives on his remote property with his wife, is one of the best equipped in the area to deal with the complex scenario, because in his field he not only has a large cement tank with a capacity to store thousands of litres of rainwater, which lately has been of little use. He also has an 11-metre deep well that allows them to extract groundwater.

But this is not enough either. “The water is very brackish. You would have to go at least 20 metres down to get good water,” he told IPS.

Montes, however, at the age of 73, has the resignation of someone who has lived a lifetime knowing that water is a scarce commodity. “Back then we used to take water directly from the river or from a well, when it was available,” he recalled.

He was referring to one of the branches of the Bermejo, one of the biggest rivers in the La Plata basin, which originates in Bolivia and passes about 500 metres from his field. The Bermejito – or “little Bermejo”, as the branch is known locally – is one of the few rivers in El Impenetrable, and the vegetation on its banks is a deep green colour that is not usual in this region.

Goats cross a dirt road in El Impenetrable, an ecosystem of four million hectares, where livestock is raised loose, to roam the area in search of pasture. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

A few kilometres from Montes’ home, near the entrance to the El Impenetrable National Park -a 128,000-hectare protected area created in 2014 – there is a 160 square metre rainwater collector sheet metal roof facility with two tanks that can store up to 40,000 litres.

It was built in 2019 to supply local residents, as part of the “Native Forests and Community” programme.

This Ministry of the Environment and Sustainable Development programme was supported by a 58.7-million-dollar loan from the World Bank and 2.5 million dollars from the national government and seeks to generate community roots in areas where there are no sources of employment.

Native Forests and Community benefits vulnerable rural communities, both indigenous and non-indigenous, through infrastructure works and training for the sustainable management of natural resources.

One of the programme’s priorities is to promote the use of renewable energies, and it has installed solar panels for electricity generation and solar stoves in areas where the most commonly used fuel is firewood.

According to official figures, the initiative has so far benefited 1,200 families from 60 communities in different provinces of the country, most of them in El Chaco and the rest of northern Argentina.

A community solar panel and rainwater harvesting roof installation near the El Impenetrable National Park in northern Argentina was built in 2019 by the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development, with support from the World Bank. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

Esteban Argañaraz lives only 100 metres from the rainwater collector. Sometimes he goes to fetch water from the community tanks, although he cannot get enough there either, so he resorts to buying drinking water in the nearest town, Miraflores, which is 60 kilometres from his home down a dusty dirt road.

“This year I brought an 8,000-litre water tank. It cost 700 pesos (about seven dollars), but the complicated part was transporting it, which cost 4,000 pesos (40 dollars),” Argañaraz explained to IPS, while showing the well that was dug in front of his house to accumulate water for the animals and irrigation, which is completely dry.

Argañaraz, 60, and his wife have a garden at home to grow vegetables and fruits. But they have had to practically abandon it since 2020, due to the lack of water. Skinny cows and goats are another reflection of the severe drought.

The inhabitants of El Impenetrable rarely manage to sell any animals and almost everyone survives on social assistance. This ecosystem – environmentally degraded by the extractive economy – is part of Argentina’s Northeast region, which has the highest poverty rates in the country, with 45.4 percent of the population living in poverty.

But the situation is complicated in urban areas as well. In fact, the provincial capital Resistencia, with a population of 300,000, has the highest poverty rate in Argentina, at 51.9 percent.

Unpredictability is the rule

“The main characteristic of rainfall in (Argentina’s Chaco province) is its high variability: there are cycles of dry, normal and wet years. The other important aspect is that most of it is concentrated in one part of the year: in the case of El Impenetrable, the rainy season lasts only three months,” water resources engineer Hugo Rohrmann, former president of the Chaco Provincial Water Administration, told IPS.

Jorge Luna, a family farmer raising cows, goats and pigs in El Impenetrable in northern Argentina, stands next to plastic barrels where he collects rainwater and a solar panel that provides electricity. Rainwater harvesting is a very limited solution for families in the El Impenetrable ecoregion due to the lack of rain. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

The expert pointed to another important fact: rainfall in El Impenetrable is usually between 600 and 800 millimetres per year, but evaporation, due to heat that can reach 50 degrees C in summer, is much higher – up to 1,100 millimetres.

“That is why neither wetlands nor aquifers with the capacity to supply a population are formed and there is no other choice but to collect rainwater, which is also scarce. The lack of water is becoming more and more evident and makes life more and more difficult for the local population,” Rohrmann added from Resistencia.

Constanza Mozzoni, a biologist from Buenos Aires who has been living in El Impenetrable for two years doing social work, has a categorical answer when asked what life is like for the local population, both indigenous and non-indigenous people: “Everything revolves around how to get water,” she told IPS.

Mozzoni works for the Rewilding Argentina Foundation, an environmental conservation organisation that works in and around the El Impenetrable National Park, and lives in a prefabricated house that also has a rainwater harvesting roof.

The foundation, however, provides all its staff with bottled water that is brought from the town of Miraflores, along the only safe road in El Impenetrable.

Categories: Africa

FRANCE: Translating a Harlem Renaissance Writer

Tue, 11/02/2021 - 18:18

By SWAN
PARIS, Nov 2 2021 (IPS)

Claude McKay is having something of a rebirth in France, thanks to independent publishers and to translators such as Jean-Baptiste Naudy.

Naudy is the French translator of McKay’s novel Amiable with Big Teeth (Les Brebis noires de Dieu), one of two translations that have hit bookstores in 2021, generating renewed interest in the work of the Jamaican-born writer (1890-1948). McKay was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, a “cultural nomad” who spent time in Europe during the 1920s and 30s, and the author of the famous poem “If We Must Die”.

The first of the two recent translations – Romance in Marseille (Héliotropismes) – was published under its English title last spring, while Naudy’s Les Brebis Noires de Dieu came out at the end of summer during the so called rentrée, the return to routine after the holidays.

A third McKay novel, Home to Harlem (Retour à Harlem, Nada Éditions), has meanwhile been newly translated and is scheduled for publication in early 2022.

This feast of McKay’s work has resulted in profiles of the writer in French newspapers such as Libération, with Naudy’s expert translation receiving particular attention because of the intriguing story behind Amiable with Big Teeth.

The celebrated “forgotten” work – a “colourful, dramatic novel” that “centres on the efforts by Harlem intelligentsia to organize support for the liberation of fascist-controlled Ethiopia,” as Penguin Books describes it – was discovered only in 2009 by then graduate student Jean-Christophe Cloutier while doing research. His discovery came 40 years after McKay had completed the manuscript.

Cloutier and his advisor Brent Hayes Edwards went on to confirm the authenticity of the work, and it was published by Penguin in 2017. Fully aware of this history, Naudy said it was “mind-blowing” to translate the novel, and he drew upon his own background for the rendering into French.

Born in Paris, Naudy studied Francophone literature at the Sorbonne University and design at the Jan van Eyck Academy in the Netherlands. He describes himself as a publisher, translator and “text experimentalist”, and he coordinates “Déborder”, a book series published by independent publishing house Nouvelles Éditions Place. Within this series, he has translated African Journey by Eslanda Goode Robeson (2020) and now the McKay novel.

As a writer, Naudy, under the name of Société Réaliste, has himself published two books, in addition to essays and experimental texts in journals and reviews; and as an artist he has exhibited work in both solo and group shows internationally. One can find examples of his public art pieces around Paris.

Jean-Baptiste Naudy in Paris (photo by AM)

The following edited interview with Naudy, conducted by email and in person, is part of SWAN’s series about translators of Caribbean literature, done in collaboration with the Caribbean Translation Project.

SWAN: How did the translating of Aimable with Big Teeth come about?

Jean-Baptiste Naudy: In 2019, Sarah Frioux-Salgas and I were invited by Cyrille Zola-Place, director of Nouvelles Éditions Place in Paris, to curate a book series dealing with unclassifiable texts, overreaching genres, intertwining topics. Our common interest for the internationalisation of political and poetical scopes in the 20th century, via the publication of books largely ignored by the classical Western frame of reference, gave birth to this book series, entitled Déborder (To overflow).

The first book to be included was a reprint of Negro Anthology, edited by Nancy Cunard in 1934, a massive collection of poetry, fiction and essays about the Black Atlantic, for which she collaborated with paramount artists and scholars of those years, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, George Padmore and dozens of others.

Since then, we have published five more books in this frame, like the first French translation of Eslanda Robeson’s African Journey, or Sismographie des luttes (Seismography of Struggles), a kind of world history of anticolonial journals, amazingly edited by art historian and writer Zahia Rahmani.

At the beginning of 2020, Sarah told me the story of a newfound book by Claude McKay, Amiable with Big Teeth, edited by Brent Hayes Edwards and Jean-Christophe Cloutier for Penguin Books in 2017.

Searching the archives of a rather obscure New York publisher, Cloutier had found the complete and ready-to-be-published manuscript of a completely unknown novel by McKay. The very fact that such a story was possible – to find out of the blue a full book by a major writer of the 20th century – was unfathomable to me. Nouvelles Éditions Place immediately agreed to the idea of publishing the book in French.

SWAN: Including your translation, there will be three novels by McKay published in French this year and next. Can you explain this surge of international interest in his work?

JBN: The renewed interest in Claude McKay’s oeuvre is global for sure, but also at times pretty local. The critical deconstruction of the Western ideological frame of thought has called for the exposure of another cultural grounding, a counter-narrative of modernity, other stories and histories encompassing the plurality and complexity of dominated voices, visions, sensibilities, positions on their path to liberation.

What was interesting for me was to try to understand or feel what the colonial condition was doing to the language itself. How writing or expressing oneself in a foreign language, an imperial language imposed upon a great variety of cultures, was transforming the language in return

To that extent, McKay is an immense writer, whose very life was bound to this intertwining. Like most of the key figures of the Black Atlantic, he has been largely ignored or under-appreciated by the 20th century literary canon. More than ever, he is a lighthouse for those interested in the interwoven problematics of race, gender, sexuality, and class.

But he is as well a singular figure of displacement, a critically productive internationalist, being at first a Jamaican in New York, then a Caribbean from Harlem in Europe, then a Black writer from France in Morocco, and finally back to the United States, a Black Atlantic wanderer.

Which is also the point of his renewed presence in the French contemporary cultural landscape. The very fact that one of the most preeminent actors of the Harlem Renaissance was, first, a Jamaican, and second, writing from France about the Americas and the global Black diaspora is irresistibly intriguing.

Another important factor is the crucial influence that McKay’s writings had on a number of Francophone literary figures of the 1930s, including the founders of the Négritude movement, the Nardal sisters, Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, Léon Gontran Damas, René Ménil, and many others.

In a nutshell, I would argue that McKay captivates nowadays for all those reasons at the same time. He epitomizes the Black international radical current that rose in the 1920s and 1930s, his critical scope is extremely contemporary, and he is representative of a certain blend of political and cultural cosmopolitanism that happened to exist in the French imperial metropole during the interwar years.

It is interesting to notice that the three books being published now in France deal with different periods of his life: Home to Harlem, his 1928 bestseller (translated Retour à Harlem in the new French translation to be published by Nada Éditions) is a luxurious portrait of Harlem in the 1920s, written while he was in France. Romance in Marseille, released last April by Héliotropismes, another previously unpublished novel from the early 1930s, revolves around the central themes of his most famous novel also set in Marseilles, Banjo. And thus, Amiable with Big Teeth, dating from 1941, being his last fiction and only novel ever written in the United States.

SWAN: In addition to your native French, you speak English and Spanish. Where and how did you begin learning other languages?

JBN: Where I grew up, English and Spanish were mandatory at school. So, I grasped some elements there, quite poorly. Then I had to travel. So, I learned most of my English with Ukrainian artists in Lisbon and bits of Spanish with Brazilian anarchists in Athens. How romantic…

SWAN: How did your interest in translation start?

JBN: My first encounter with the need to translate something happened I guess when I went to London for the first time, in 1997. Following a totally random move – because I liked his name – I bought a washed-out copy of Kamau Brathwaite’s Middle Passages. I had never read anything like that. For sure it sounded like street music to me, half a drunkard rant, half an esoteric psalmody, but the polyphony at work in this single text, the sound and visual poetics of patwa mesmerized me.

So, for the last 25 years, I have been trying to translate exactly that, the very sensation I had in front of this palimpsest of languages. A rant that would be a psalmody, at times unintelligible, at times neat as a scalpel slice. How language can be haunted by the spectre of the past while echoing potentially emancipated futures. What Rimbaud called “the long, immense, rational derangement of the senses”, inscribed on a page where words are sounds are signs are ciphers are colours are noises are tastes are notes and nevertheless, never more than words.

SWAN: Can you tell us more about other works that you’ve translated and how you selected these?

JBN: Last year, I translated African Journey by Eslanda Goode Robeson, and it was a delight. I have an intense admiration for Eslanda Robeson, an amazing transnational feminist networker and anticolonial advocate.

This book was a great success in the USA when it was published in 1945, the first popular book about Africa written by an African American writer. It is a travel diary, at the same time complex and honest, but I particularly liked how Robeson used this genre to create commonality between Africans and Americans.

For the anecdote, Eslanda Robeson and Claude McKay really disliked each other, their writing styles are almost opposite, as well as their social backgrounds and cultural framings; however, I think they were aiming at the same liberation and I love them both!

SWAN: How important is translation for today’s world, especially for publishing underrepresented communities? In the Caribbean, as in other regions, it sometimes feels as if countries are divided by language. How can people in the literary and education spheres help to bridge these linguistic “borders”?

JBN: When I was a student, I had the opportunity to study what we call in my country “Francophone literature”, so literature written by former and present subjects of the French colonial project. Or raised in the postcolonial remains of the French empire.

At its core, Francophone literature has a poetical abundance and a political tumult that always seemed to me in synchronization with the modern condition. Whatever be the scale and the observation point. What people from my neighbourhood in Paris, coming from all corners of the world, were doing via the vernacular popular French slang we were talking every day, the “Francophone” writers were doing the same to literature itself.

Upgrading it to a world-scale. As any other imperial language, French does not belong to French people, fortunately, and that is the main source of its current literary potency as well as the only sound reason to continue to use it.

The political side effects of this linguistic colonial and then postcolonial condition astonished me as well: how this shared imperial language allowed Caribbean peoples, Arabs, Africans, Indochinese, Indians, Guyanese, to relate and elaborate a common ground.

This tremendous poetic force and its radical cosmopolitan perspective bound me to translation, especially when I experimentally realized that the situation was exactly the same with all the other imperial languages, English, Spanish, etc. Suzanne Césaire was maybe one of the first poets to see the Caribbean not so much as separated islands (divided by bodies of water, empires, languages, political status) but as an archipelago, an extremely complex panorama whose unity is undersea and underseen. I consider that my task as a literary translator working on the Atlantic world is to help languages undersee each other. I aim to be a pidginizer.

SWAN: What are your next projects?

JBN: I am working on several translation projects. First of all, an amazingly powerful collection of short stories by South African wonder writer Stacy Hardy. Then, a beautiful and crucial book by Annette Joseph-Gabriel, Reimagining Liberation, dealing with the key role played by Black women in the decolonization of the French empire.

Finally, I will work on the first French translation of The Practice of Diaspora, an essential book by Brent Hayes Edwards, focusing on Paris as a node of the Black Atlantic culture in the interwar years. Its subtitle says it all: Literature, translation and the rise of Black internationalism. This masterwork constructs an analytical frame to relate together René Maran, Alain Locke, Paulette Nardal, Claude McKay, Lamine Senghor, George Padmore, Jessie Fauset, Langston Hughes, C.L.R. James, Tiemoko Garan Kouyaté, and so many more. As you can easily imagine, it is a mind-blowing book, and I am extremely proud to work on it. – AM /SWAN

Categories: Africa

COP26: The Many Links Between Food Systems & Climate Change: Message to Glasgow

Tue, 11/02/2021 - 11:53

Credit: Laura Berman, Global Alliance for the Future of Food, 2020

By Ruth Richardson
TORONTO, Canada, Nov 2 2021 (IPS)

Unless food systems transformation is put at the center of climate action, commitments governments have already made, and could make at COP26, will be jeopardized.

Today’s industrialized food system — which includes the growing, harvesting, processing, packaging, transporting, marketing, consumption, and disposal of food and food-related items — makes us ill, doesn’t meet the needs of the global population, and has adverse effects on climate change.

Almost a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions come from food systems. The industrialized practices — from chemical pesticide use to mono-culture crops — at the heart of the dominant global food system have also destroyed 66% of biodiversity, 61% of commercial fish stocks, and 33% of soils.

Then there’s food wastage which equates to 1.3 billion tonnes a per year and produces enough GHG emissions that, should it be a country, it would be the third-largest source of GHG emissions.

We know that waste and loss occur throughout the food supply-chain and mostly involve the waste of edible food by consumers in medium- and high-income countries and loss during harvest, storage, and transport in lower-income countries.

Both food waste and the resulting GHG emissions raise major equity and ethical considerations.

Of course, those detrimental climate impacts then come back to roost in a variety of ways, affecting weather patterns and the very land or seas that are heavily relied upon for crops, fish, and other food.

Ruth Richardson

The resulting lack of ability to grow or access food then becomes a major driver in malnutrition (in all its forms) within communities, with the impacts felt worst by the most vulnerable in our societies — smallholder farmers, the poor, and women.

The 2021 State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World estimates that around a tenth of the global population – up to 811 million people – were undernourished last year. Do we really need any other signals that the industrialized food system is simply no longer fit for purpose?

The globalized food system must be overhauled so that food production can be delivered in a way that works with, rather than destroys, our natural resources and pushes planetary boundaries.

It is precisely action on food that is critical to restoring planetary health, radically reducing carbon emissions, protecting nature and biodiversity, and also delivering on all Sustainable Development Goals, from zero hunger to good health and wellbeing for all.

Despite a diversity of evidence making this need for transformation abundantly clear — from scientific reports and peer-reviewed literature to lived experience, oral histories, and ways of knowing — the action we need is still not where it should be on the political agenda: at the top.

The risk to climate commitments

There is hardly any mention of food systems in the Nationally Determined Contribution (NDCs) plans — the non-binding national plans that highlight countries’ actions to tackle climate change — that we’ve assessed to date.

The Global Alliance for the Future of Food is a strategic alliance of philanthropic foundations working to transform global food systems. Out of eight assessments of countries’ NDCs we have done so far, none fully account for emissions associated with food imports, particularly those related to deforestation.

Research shows that, in the average European diet, a sixth of the carbon footprint comes from deforestation emissions. Meat and dairy production already use 30% of the Earth’s land surface, driving unsustainable land-use as land is cleared to produce more and more livestock and the crops that feed them.

Only Germany provides a clear commitment to move away from harmful subsidies and to promote sustainable food consumption, and, just Colombia and Kenya have put forward ambitious measures around agroecology and regenerative agriculture.

These concepts promote sustainable farming approaches that compliment nature’s systems rather than diminish them and respect human rights.

Action to be taken

Unless others follow suit, all climate efforts will be undermined and any commitments negotiated in Glasgow that lack a systemic and global approach to food systems transformation will simply be inadequate given the vast mitigation and adaptation potential that the sector holds.

Governments worldwide must look at food systems through the lens of climate action and find new and restorative ways of feeding communities, without pushing the planet to the limits. Fortunately, approaching climate adaptation and mitigation in the context of food systems broadens the range of opportunities to achieve climate goals and facilitates the consideration of systems level effects and interactions.

A food systems perspective also enables engagement of the full range of stakeholders that should be involved in food systems transformation such as those from other sectors as well as local and Indigenous groups that have knowledge of the issues.

Such a perspective is critical to addressing climate change and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, which are all linked by food as the golden thread.

Tried and tested methods of agroecology and regenerative agriculture already exist for others to roll out and replicate. For example, in India, chemical-free farming has been used by the 600,000 farmers involved in the Andhra Pradesh Community Managed Natural Farming programme to tackle soil degradation — which includes erosion, desertification, and other changes in soil that reduce its capacity to provide ecosystem services — and produce more variety of crops.

Research shows that farming without the addition of synthetic fertilizer or pesticides is leading to incredible reductions in pollution and emissions, and better wages and earnings for farmers.

Meanwhile, while in Africa, in the Luangwa Valley of Zambia, COMACO — the social enterprise promoting agroforestry — is retraining poachers to be farmers, tackling deforestation, reporting significant impacts in carbon offset, and putting an end to wildlife killing.

Alongside these ‘beacons of hope’ governments could also promote nutritious, sustainable, whole-food diets adapted to local ecosystems and socio-cultural contexts, acting on the interconnections between food and climate.

There’s a growing body of research that shows that dietary change can help tackle climate change. For example, increased GHG emissions have been associated with diets higher in animal products.

Yet, historically, this has received less consideration in climate policy than, say, the energy and transport sectors. Policymakers have it in their power to catalyze initiatives that enable and create positive food environments that provide equitable access and dietary guidance.

There are steps governments can immediately take, ready-made policies they can adopt, partnerships they can forge. We have the evidence, we have the science, we have the urgency.

What we need now is to see the political will and climate finance moving alongside bravery and connected action from our leaders so that we can all live better, as well as sustainably, on this one Earth of ours.

Ruth Richardson is Executive Director, Global Alliance for the Future of Food

Categories: Africa

Fighting Dengue Virus with Biological Weapons

Tue, 11/02/2021 - 08:57

Dr Ijaz Ali has spent the last 11 years persuading the authorities to use genetically engineered mosquitoes to fight dengue fever. The health department, however, is concerned about unforeseen circumstances that could arise from this method.

By Zofeen Ebrahim
Karachi , Nov 2 2021 (IPS)

Twenty-three-year-old Sarah Tajammal felt a sense of “impending doom” as she fought high fever, nausea, bouts of vomiting and extreme fatigue after being diagnosed with dengue two weeks back.

Living in Lahore’s DHA area, which has reported the most dengue cases “because of the damp green environment”, she may have caught it at home, or when she went on a tree plantation drive organized by her office, she told IPS over the phone from the eastern city in the Punjab province.

In Punjab, the number has crossed 11,000 and new cases continue to rise. With two and three patients occupying a hospital bed, according to news reports, many are forced to lay on stretchers in corridors.

Tajammal was lucky. Her condition did not reach that critical level. Her fever subsided in three days though nausea and vomiting continued to hound her for a week.

Two weeks later, she feels almost new and is gaining back her strength.

Pakistan has seen a rise in the number of dengue fever cases, genetically engineered mosquito has been mooted as a solution.

But if there is one lesson she has learnt, it is never to underestimate the power of the diminutive flying fly. “I’d avoid going outdoors till it gets cold enough for the mosquito to die,” she said.

It was back in 1994 when dengue was first reported in Pakistan, but it was not until 2005 when the first epidemic occurred in Karachi. Since 2010, Pakistan has been experiencing an epidemic-like situation in three provinces of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), Punjab and Sindh.

While Lahore continues to battle the dengue virus, things are not looking too good in the port city of Karachi either.

“We are seeing loads of dengue cases. It seems to have replaced Covid-19,” admitted Dr Naseem Salahuddin, heading the infectious diseases department at Karachi’s The Indus Hospital. Those with mild or moderate dengue are sent home with instructions to show up for a follow-up,” she added.

The spread of dengue from Karachi to Lahore and from Lahore to different parts of the Punjab and then to relatively temperate zones of KP in recent years indicate that Aedes mosquitoes have gone through “adaptation to relatively temperate zones”, explained Dr Erum Khan, professor of microbiology at the department of pathology and laboratory medicine at the Aga Khan University, in Karachi. She said climate change, along with a runway population, urbanization and increase in travel and transportation, is stoking it further.

“The severity of the disease has increased, but the government’s input is inconsistent and without any long term disease control strategy,” lamented Khan.

While mortality is high among patients who come in late in the course of the infection, Salahuddin said it was important to keep a close eye on the patient while keeping a “balance” between giving just enough fluid but “not overloading” them with it.

At the same time, while hospitals in Karachi can manage treatment, she feared in future, “cases are going to get more and more severe and bigger and bigger numbers and a time may come when hospitals may become overburdened”.

That is why healthcare professionals like her cannot emphasize enough for the city administration to clean up the city of garbage and pools of water from rain or overflowing gutters and broken pipelines.

Otherwise, warned Salahuddin, there is going to be another health disaster for the public. “Cleaning of the city is our only chance,” she pointed out.

“Given that majority of the population do not know about whether they were ever infected before, the situation in Pakistan can worsen in future outbreaks,” warned Dr Ijaz Ali, a virologist at Islamabad’s Comsats University.

Bad governance, the inability to understand the mosquito’s behaviour or habitat, and refusal to allow research or use established scientific methods in other countries were some of the barriers to controlling the Aedes mosquito population in Pakistan, said Ali.

“Sporadic recurrence of dengue each year and emergence of chikungunya and zika point towards the failure of existing strategies, if any, to control the vector population,” he pointed out.

The government, for its part, continues to spray insecticide across the cities and has, over the years, got better at strengthening treatment and diagnostics.

Pupa of the Aedes mosquito developing into an adult. Pakistan has seen a rise in dengue fever caused by the mosquito and the control of the disease continues to be problematic.

But said Ali, the use of insecticides has led to insecticide resistance. He particularly finds the open-air fumigation drives mere “cosmetic” and a “least effective” measure. As for treatment and diagnostics, he said it still did not address tackling the “source” of the dengue infection, the mosquito itself.

He believes a combination of chemical (insecticide spraying), mechanical (mosquito traps placed near and inside hubs of transportation such as airports and bus stations) and biological (with biological a major component) strategies would be best in combating vector-borne diseases in the long run.

For the last 11 years, he has been trying to convince both the provincial and central governments of making “billions of mosquitoes in labs”, which when released in the wild, could reduce the spread of dengue virus, but with little luck.

The released genetically engineered male (only) mosquitoes, when they mate with Aedes females (also the carrier of the virus), would produce offspring that would die while still at larvae or pupae stage, explained Ali, the only Pakistani with a doctorate in genetically modified mosquitoes. In addition, genetic modifications, he said, can also shorten the life span, cause sterility and even death of the transformed Aedes species.

However, those who can decide have dawdled for too long with the result that the virus has gone out of control, he remarked. He has been trying to draw attention but with little success. “They [government officials] tell me if word gets out the government was fighting the virus by letting loose even more mosquitoes, they will have to confront the wrath of the public!”

“Any biological intervention altering environmental ecosystem has to be very carefully weighed for its pros and cons,” said Dr Rana Safdar, director-general, health, Pakistan. “Unforeseen consequences of releasing GM mosquitoes cannot be ruled out outright,” he added warily.

“Field trials of genetically modified mosquitoes have successfully been carried out in various countries including Malaysia, French Polynesia, Brazil, Australia, Vietnam and Singapore,” said Ali adding the methods have not had any “significant impact on human and animal health or the ecosystem”.

But Safdar remains unconvinced. “Not only can genetic engineering alter the mosquito’s targeted characteristic but can go beyond.” This tampering with nature could potentially enhance the risk of other mosquito-borne diseases or become a source of another nuisance.

“Moreover, interaction of new species with pre-existing vectors in an area of intervention may lead to some new environmental challenges,” that the country may not be ready to battle with.

“I can understand the frustration of the researcher,” said Khan, but since Pakistan is a signatory to the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety to the Convention on Biological Diversity, it has to keep in mind the “biosafety concerns” on the environment and human health. “There are no clear guidelines so far. Therefore, I believe the government is reluctant,” she said.

While Khan conceded, “replacing GM mosquitoes to reduce disease was a tangible solution”, she remained wary.

“For now, I would recommend more experiments under controlled environment to be carried out to assess the impact on biodiversity before releasing GM mosquitoes in the wild, and because the study is a complex one, it should have a team comprising environmentalists, social scientists and biotechnologist working together as one health concept to get a complete picture,” she said.

But if absolutely nothing is done and the mosquito continues to live on, Ali predicted Pakistan might experience epidemics of yellow fever in the years to come.

Categories: Africa

Will Glasgow Fix Broken Climate Finance Promises?

Tue, 11/02/2021 - 08:37

By Anis Chowdhury and Jomo Kwame Sundaram
SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 2 2021 (IPS)

Current climate mitigation plans will result in a catastrophic 2.7°C world temperature rise. US$1.6–3.8 trillion is needed annually to avoid global warming exceeding 1.5°C.

Creative accounting
Rich countries have long broken their 2009 Copenhagen COP16 pledge to mobilize “US$100 billion per year by 2020 to address the needs of developing countries”. The pandemic has worsened the situation, reducing available finance. Poor countries – many already caught in debt traps – struggle to cope.

Anis Chowdhury

While minuscule compared to the finance needed to adequately address climate change, it was considered a good start. The number includes both public and private finance, with sources – public/private, grants/loans, etc. – unspecified.

Such ambiguity has enabled double-counting, poor transparency and creative accounting, noted the UN Independent Expert Group on Climate Finance. Thus, the rich countries’ Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reported US$80bn in climate finance for developing countries in 2019.

Fudging numbers
But OECD climate finance numbers include non-concessional commercial loans, ‘rolled-over’ loans and private finance. Some donor governments count most development aid, even when not primarily for ‘climate action’.

Also, the dispute over which funds are to be considered ‘new and additional’ has not been resolved since the 1992 adoption of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) at the Rio Earth Summit.

Official development assistance redesignated as climate finance should be categorized as ‘reallocated’, rather than ‘additional’ funding. Consequently, poor countries are losing aid for education, health and other public goods.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

India has disputed the OECD claim of US$57bn climate finance in 2013-14, suggesting a paltry US$2.2bn instead! Other developing countries have also challenged such creative accounting and ‘greenwashing’.

Climate finance anarchy
Developing countries expected the promised US$100bn yearly to be largely public grants disbursed via the then new UNFCCC Green Climate Fund. Oxfam estimates public climate financing at only US$19–22.5bn in 2017-18, with little effective coordination of public finance.

Developing countries believed their representatives would help decide disbursement, ensuring equity, efficacy and efficiency. But little is actually managed by developing countries themselves. Instead, climate finance is disbursed via many channels, including rich countries’ aid and export promotion agencies, private banks, equity funds and multilateral institutions’ loans and grants.

Several UN programmes also support climate action, including the UN Environment Programme, UN Development Programme and Global Environment Facility. But all are underfunded, requiring frequent replenishment. Uncertain financing and developing countries’ lack of meaningful involvement in disbursements make planning all the more difficult.

Financialization has meant that climate funding increasingly involves private financial interests. Claims of private climate finance from rich to poor countries are much contested. Even the OECD estimate has not been rising steadily, instead fluctuating directionless from US$16.7bn in 2014 to US$10.1bn in 2016 and US$14.6bn in 2018.

The actual role and impact of private finance are also much disputed. Unsurprisingly, private funding is unlikely to help countries most in need, address policy priorities, or compensate for damages beyond repair. Instead, ‘blended finance’ often uses public finance to ‘de-risk’ private investments.

Putting profits first
The poorest countries desperately need to rebuild resilience and adapt human environments and livelihoods. Adaptation funds are required to better cope with the new circumstances created by global warming.

Needed ‘adaptation’ – such as improving drainage, water catchment and infrastructure – is costly, but nonetheless desperately necessary.

But ‘donors’ prefer publicizable ‘easy wins’ from climate mitigation, especially as they increasingly gave loans, rather than grants. Thus, although the Paris COP21 Agreement sought to balance mitigation with adaptation, most climate finance still seeks to cut greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

As climate adaptation is rarely lucrative, it is of less interest to private investors. Rather, private finance favours mitigation investments generating higher returns. Thus, only US$20bn was for adaptation in 2019 – less than half the sum for mitigation. Unsurprisingly, the OECD report acknowledges only 3% of private climate finance has been for adaptation.

Chasing profits, most climate finance goes to middle-income countries, not the poorest or most vulnerable. Only US$5.9bn – less than a fifth of total adaptation finance – has gone to the UN’s 46 ‘least developed countries’ (LDCs) during 2014-18! This is “less than 3% of [poorly] estimated LDCs annual adaptation finance needs between 2020-2030”.

Cruel ironies
The International Monetary Fund recognizes the “unequal burden of rising temperatures”. It is indeed a “cruel irony” that those far less responsible for global warming bear the brunt of its costs. Meanwhile, providing climate finance via loans is pushing poor countries deeper into debt.

Increasingly frequent extreme weather disasters are often followed by much more borrowing due to poor countries’ limited fiscal space. But loans for low-income countries (LICs) cost much more than for high-income ones. Hence, LICs spend five times more on debt than on coping with climate change and cutting GHG emissions.

Four-fifths of the most damaging disasters since 2000 have been due to tropical storms. The worst disasters have raised government debt in 90% of cases within two years – with no prospect of debt relief.

As many LICs are already heavily indebted, climate disasters have been truly catastrophic – as in Belize, Grenada and Mozambique. Little has trickled down to the worst affected, and other vulnerable, needy and poor communities.

Funding gap
Based on countries’ own long-term goals for mitigation and adaptation, the UNFCCC’s Standing Committee on Finance estimated that developing countries need US$5.8-5.9 trillion in all until 2030. The UN estimates developing countries currently need US$70bn yearly for adaptation, rising to US$140–300bn by 2030.

In July, the ‘V20’ of finance ministers from 48 climate-vulnerable countries urged delivery of the 2009 US$100bn vow to affirm a commitment to improve climate finance. This should include increased funds, more in grants, and with at least half for adaptation – but the UNFCCC chief has noted lack of progress since.

Only strong enforcement of rigorous climate finance criteria can stop rich countries abusing currently ambiguous reporting requirements. Currently fragmented climate financing urgently needs more coherence and strategic prioritization of support to those most distressed and vulnerable.

This month’s UNFCCC COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland, can and must set things right before it is too late. Will the new Cold War drive the North to do the unexpected to win the rest of the world to its side instead of further militarizing tensions?

Categories: Africa

Is Asia and the Pacific Ready for the Global Climate Stage?

Mon, 11/01/2021 - 21:55

By Armida Salsiah Alisjahbana
BANGKOK, Thailand, Nov 1 2021 (IPS)

As the leaders of Asia and the Pacific prepare to head to Glasgow for the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26), they can be sure that our region will be in the spotlight: many of the most vulnerable countries to the impacts of climate change are located here; the seven G20 members from this region are responsible for over half of global GHG emissions; and five of the 10 top countries with the greatest historic responsibility for emissions since the beginning of the twentieth century are from Asia.

Armida Salsiah Alisjahbana

There is an urgent need to raise ambitions

The starting point is not encouraging, however. A joint study by ESCAP, UNEP and UN Women shows that the Asia-Pacific region is falling even further behind in its efforts: greenhouse gas emissions are projected to increase by 34 per cent by 2030 compared to 2010 levels. Getting the 30 Asian and Pacific countries that have so far updated their NDCs to drastically raise ambitions and securing adequate NDCs from the other 19 who have yet to submit will determine if the region — indeed the world — can maintain any hope of keeping the temperature increase well below two degrees.

Momentum for climate action is building

There is some reason for hope. Leaders have been lining up to make their carbon neutrality pledges, shrinking the gap from commitment to action across the sectors that drive the region’s development. With major players moving away from foreign investments in coal, momentum is building for a transition to cleaner energy sources. There is a growing share of renewables in the energy mix, and going forward we should support increasing subregional and regional energy connectivity to enable the integration of higher shares of renewable energy. However more support to exporters is needed to wean them off lucrative coal and fossil fuel reserves, supported by long-term low emissions development strategies (LT-LEDS).

The shift to sustainable transport has been slow but the EV-mobility is growing. Countries are also emphasizing low-carbon mobility in a new regional action plan under negotiation ahead of a ministerial conference on transport later this year. Local government commitments to carbon neutrality also support the greening of our cities.

The ESCAP Climate-smart Trade and Investment Index (SMARTII) and carbon-border adjustment mechanisms shows that Asian and Pacific economies have significant room to make their trade and investment more climate-smart. A growing number of countries include climate and environment-related provisions in trade agreements. More are requiring energy efficiency labelling and standards on imports. Digitalization of existing trade processes also helps reduce CO2 emissions per transaction and should be accelerated, including through the regional UN treaty on cross-border paperless trade facilitation.

The ESCAP Sustainable Business Network is crafting an Asia-Pacific Green Business Deal in pursuit of a “green” competitive advantage, while companies are responding to greater shareholder and consumer pressure for science-based targets that align businesses with climate aspirations. Entrepreneurs, SMEs and large industries in the region could adopt this new paradigm, which would also enable countries to meet their commitments for sustainable development.

Supporting ambition with the power of finance

Such ambitious climate action will require a realignment of finance and investment towards the green industries and jobs of tomorrow. Innovative financial instruments and the implementation of debt-for-climate swaps can help to mobilize this additional funding. Putting a price on carbon and applying carbon pricing instruments will create liquidity to drive economic activity up and emissions down. Mandatory climate-related financial disclosure will help investors direct their investments towards climate action solutions that will help manage risks associated with climate-related problems.

People-centred action, focusing on groups in vulnerable situations

It is clear from the science and the frequency of disasters in the region that time is not on our side. The combination of disasters, pandemic and climate change is expanding the number of people in vulnerable situations and raising the “riskscape”. Countries are ill-prepared for complex overlapping crises; the intersection of COVID-19 with natural hazards and climate change remains poorly understood and gives rise to hotspots of emerging and intensifying risks. Building resilience must combine climate mitigation efforts and investments in nature-based climate solutions. Moreover, it also requires increasing investments in universal social protection systems that provide adequate benefits over the lifecycle to people and households. The active engagement of women and girls is critical to ensuring inclusive climate action and sustainable outcomes.

The Way Forward

Without concerted action, carbon neutrality is not within the reach of the Asia-Pacific region by 2050. All stakeholders need to collaborate and build a strong case for decisive climate action. Our leaders simply cannot afford to go to Glasgow with insufficient ambition and return empty handed. Since it was founded nearly 75 years ago, ESCAP has supported the formation of strategic alliances that have lifted millions out of poverty and guided the region to enabling a better standard of life. The time is right for such an alliance of governments, the private sector and financial institutions to help turn the full power of the region’s ingenuity and dynamism into the net zero development pathway that our future depends on.

Armida Salsiah Alisjahbana is the United Nations Under-Secretary-General and Executive Secretary of the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP)

Categories: Africa

Risky business: Why Sustainability is now Central to Mitigating Risk

Mon, 11/01/2021 - 08:05

Sun sets in Madinah, Saudi Arabia. Credit: WMO/Ali Alhawas

By Lany Harijanti
AMSTERDAM, the Netherlands, Nov 1 2021 (IPS)

The COVID-19 pandemic has undoubtedly caused the largest economic and societal shock the world has experienced this century. Yet it was not unforeseen.

As far back as 2006, the annual Global Risks Report from the World Economic Forum warned that a pandemic was an ‘acute threat’ across all industries globally. This year’s WEF report expands into new dimensions of risk, such as the consequences of digital inequality and cybersecurity failure.

Meanwhile, the 2021 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change sounded a ‘code red for humanity’ – setting out in the starkest terms that the risks of inaction on climate change are now irrefutable.

What all of these risks have in common is that they threaten or disrupt not only economies but, more importantly, the wellbeing and sustainability of humanity and the planet. It’s logical, therefore, to conclude that they are challenges that demand global cooperation and societal cohesion to overcome.

Getting to grips with sustainability impacts

At the corporate-level, effective, pre-emptive, and dynamic enterprise risk management is more relevant than ever. That is why the role of risk manager is no longer confined to traditional financial risks and regulatory expectations but progressively is contributing more into how to support a sustainable business model.

The GRI Standards – the world’s most widely used and comprehensive sustainability reporting standards – enable organizations to assess and communicate their impacts, which is increasingly relevant from the perspective of risk management.

The revised Universal Standards – launched this month – re-emphasized the scope of impact needs to be inclusive of potential risk.

Credit: United Nations

The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) describes sustainability risks as uncertain social or environmental conditions that could cause significant negative impacts on the company.

As the pandemic has proven, these risks can pose existential threats to companies. Or, as former US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice put it: “sustainability is a multiplier of risk”, exponentially increasing volatility and uncertainty.

What this means is that, to be successful over the long-term, businesses must not lose sight of their sustainability risks. Against this backdrop, a recent GRI webinar, Aligning Sustainability and Risk Management, explored the ways that the integration of sustainability was shaping the role of risk managers, increasingly their relevance to the organizational transformation process.

Here we share some of the insights from the session, which was the second in our Building Leadership for Sustainable Business Expert Series.

Incentivizing risk analysis

Constant Van Aerschot, Director of WBCSD Asia Pacific, pointed out that many companies tend to treat sustainability issues separately from risk issues.

A recent WBCSD report on integrating sustainability and enterprise risk revealed that companies recognize that the material topics in their sustainability reports have a financial impact – yet these same companies often fail to address ESG-related risks in their annual risk filings.

Priya Bellino, Ernst and Young’s ASEAN Head of Sustainability and ESG for Financial Services Consulting, emphasized the role of financial institutions in encouraging companies to manage sustainability risks. The example she shared was in the real estate sector.

Climate change and extreme weather events are exposing physical assets to a much higher risk, which affects the value of real estate portfolios. As a consequence, we are seeing more incentivization through green building financing and the adoption of green certifications.

To access new opportunities, companies need to measure and monitor “investment-grade sustainability performance”. That cannot be achieved without reliable and comparable disclosure – with Priya acknowledging that GRI reporting helps the company to deliver the required ESG data.

Yet – as Tony Rooke, Director of Climate Transition Risk at Willis Towers Watson, set out – determining the right ESG data points is a crucial step on the journey to understanding risks and achieving sustainable business outcomes.

Tony went on to share that, for companies to begin to understand their role in tackling global risks, such as climate change, the market needs to further develop or create a reward system for those who transition to zero carbon business models.

The future of risk management

According to the 2020 State of Risk Oversight report, from the Enterprise Risk Management Initiative, 54% of large organizations and 58% of public companies have appointed a Chief Risk Officer (CRO). With the growth of the role, we have also seen increases in scope – helping organizations identify, analyze and mitigate their risk exposure.

So, it is clear that many organizations are recognizing effective risk management as a key ingredient to the long-term wellbeing of the business.

Where the CRO evolution can and must deepen is in the correlation between enterprise risk and sustainability risk. Having a CRO that leads on sustainability is a good sign that a company is resolute in its sustainability commitment.

The CRO does not have to be a know-it-all; more important is that they have the competencies to lead and build a team, collaborate with external stakeholders such as investors and regulators, bringing the ESG and conventional risks strands together into a single, meaningful narrative.

As Ricardo Nicanor N. Jacinto, Trustee of the Institute of Corporate Directors Philippines, articulated, the CRO is fast becoming “both the risk culture custodian and champion”. That is increasingly significant as the challenges of COVID-19 underline that we live in a volatile, uncertain and complex world.

Therefore, whatever is up next on the risk forecast – be it this pandemic, the climate crisis or a yet to be defined new threat – having the expertise to assess the multiple and concurrent sustainability risks facing the business is more essential than ever before.

Lany Harijanti is the Regional Program Manager of the GRI ASEAN Hub. She has been with GRI since 2018 and has a remit to build the capacity of sustainability reporting among first-time reporters and SMEs in Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand. Lany has worked in international development for the last 20 years, including previous roles with the UN Development Program (UNDP) and the UN Population Fund (UNFPA).

Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) is the independent, international organization that helps businesses and other organizations take responsibility for their impacts, by providing the global common language to report those impacts. The GRI Standards, which are provided as a free public good, are the world’s most widely used sustainability reporting standards.

Excerpt:

The Middle East Green Initiative launched in Saudi Arabia last month was hailed by the UN’s deputy chief as a valuable commitment and strategic vision, to transition regional economies away from unsustainable development, to a model “fit for the challenges of the 21st century”

Categories: Africa

After a 20-Month Lockdown, UN Plans to Return to Near-Normal by Mid-November

Mon, 11/01/2021 - 07:38

The UN delegate’s lounge, usually a hive of activity, has remained largely dead due to the pandemic lockdown—except during the high-level segment of the General Assembly last September. Credit: Inter Press Service (IPS)

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 1 2021 (IPS)

The United Nations, which suffered a pandemic lockdown over the last 20 months– with most staffers tele-working from their homes– is expected to return to near-normal, come November 15.

In a letter to New York-based staffers, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres says that “in the light of improved conditions” relating to the spread of corona virus infections, “the exception, which currently allows staff members to telework up to four days per week, will be discontinued, beginning November 15.”

As of that date, he says, requests for telecommuting may be authorized by managers in line with the policy on Flexible Working Arrangements, ST/SGB/2019/3, and subject to the nature of the functions being performed, as well as to work exigencies.

“Managers are encouraged to afford flexibility to staff members in line with the lessons learned over the past 20 months regarding adaptability and flexibility in our working methods. Furthermore, the requirement for core working hours will remain suspended”, the letter adds.

Last month, New York city Mayor Bill de Blasio mandated vaccinations for thousands of City employees, including police, fire fighters, sanitation workers, hospital staff and municipal employees who will be put on “no pay leave” if they are not vaccinated – either for medical, personal, political or religious reasons.

But, so far, the UN has not placed any such penalties on un-vaccinated staffers—even though some private sector employers in the US have told their employees: “Get Vaccinated or Get Fired.”

The Secretary-General’s authority, as the UN’s chief administrative officer, applies primarily to staffers, not to hundreds of diplomats, who are subject to restrictions only by the 193-member General Assembly, the UN’s highest policy-making body.

UN Spokesperson Stephane Dujarric told reporters late October “the vaccination rate for UN staff … is about 87.08 per cent that are fully vaccinated, staff in total”.

The empty racks on the UN’s third floor, home to several news organizations. Credit: IPS

In a letter to UN-accredited journalists last month, Tal Mekel, Chief, Media Accreditation and Liaison Unit (MALU) in the Department of Global Communications, was more specific.

“As the transition continues from Phase 2 to Next Normal – gradual return to the workplace at UN Headquarters– additional precautionary measures will be taken in an effort to ensure a safe work environment for everyone.”

“As you may know, COVID-19 vaccinations are now mandated for UN staff performing certain tasks and/or certain occupational groups at UNHQ whose functions do not allow sufficient management of exposure.”

All journalists were requested by MALU to send information relating to date of vaccination, location of vaccination (city) and proof of vaccination (as attachment).

Asked about the status of the un-vaccinated, Mekel told IPS: “Access is suspended until vaccination status is confirmed.”

Guy Candusso, a former First Vice President of the UN Staff Union in New York told IPS: “I believe the policy before COVID was to allow telecommuting for up to 3 days per week. But in any case, it should depend on the nature of the work.”

Asked whether it is wise to get staff back into the building when infection rates are still relatively high in New York city—and while about 13 percent of UN staff remain unvaccinated– he said: “there will never be 100% of staff vaccinated for various reasons. But of more concern is how many diplomats, consultants, office cleaners and cafeteria workers have been vaccinated.”

“Only when you look at the whole picture can you make an informed decision,” he added.

The Secretary-General’s circular says “the overwhelming majority of staff have reported that they have been fully vaccinated.”

Still, says the circular, the UN will take precautions compelling all personnel to continue to wear masks in common areas, such as corridors, elevators, and restrooms.

Masks are also mandatory in enclosed meeting spaces where the vaccination status of all participants has not been confirmed.

However, vaccinated personnel are no longer required to wear masks while working at their individual workstations. Personnel who are not vaccinated will continue to be required, at all times, to wear masks throughout UN premises and to observe physical distancing wherever it is possible to do so, he added.

Prisca Chaoui, President of the 3,500-strong staff coordinating council in Geneva, which is home to multiple UN agencies, told IPS that at the UN Office in Geneva (UNOG) “ we conducted a survey that showed that more than half of those who took part in it wanted to have the COVID pass imposed to get access to the compound.”

”But our management decided not to”.

“Other international organizations in Geneva such as WTO, WIPO, ITU and WMO are gradually imposing the pass to access the premises or a negative test within the last 48 hours.”

She said UNOG staff are required, as of 3 November, to be back in office for two days a week.

“This is a welcome step as we need to be physically back to office even though staff have never stopped to work since March 2020, but we wish it were possible to get more safety measures such as the proof of vaccination or a negative test result”.

Still, she said, some staff are concerned about the return to office without these measures being imposed.

“I believe there should be a harmonized approach as each organization is currently taking its own decision, depending on the duty station, which is normal in a way, as the epidemiological situation is different from one place to another.”

But in locations where staff have access to vaccination, such as Geneva, this shouldn’t be the case. In Geneva, which is host of many international organizations, there is a disparity in the measures adopted, which shouldn’t have been the case.

“I believe that safety measures, including the COVID pass, are important for a safe return to office.

In his circular Guterres says one of the reasons to return to near normal conditions is that conditions related to the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City have continued to improve and stabilize, and the host country is further opening for international travel starting on 8 November 2021.

In addition, the overwhelming majority of UN staff have reported that they have been fully vaccinated.

“I want to once again thank all colleagues for your efforts during this unprecedented period. You have helped ensure the uninterrupted work of the Organization and support for Member States as needed.”

Ian Richards, former President of the Coordinating Committee of International Staff Unions and Associations (CCISUA) told IPS that in a survey carried out at the UN in Geneva, staff said it wanted administration to request either proof of vaccination, recovery or a negative test to enter the building and cafeteria, like at the WTO and WMO.

Many said it would make them feel safer returning to their offices, especially as infection rates in Geneva have been shooting up, much of the building is open space and authorities are recommending teleworking, he added.

“Administration refused staff’s safety request saying that it would prevent delegates attending meetings. While we understand that there are political considerations, we don’t quite buy this argument”, said Richards.

He also pointed out that Geneva-based diplomats have all been able to get vaccinated and those travelling in from abroad will have a PCR with them or can easily get one.

“We hope the administration will reconsider its decision so we can help our offices get back to business in the safest way possible.”

Categories: Africa

COP26 – Commonwealth Chief Calls for “Highest Possible Ambition” at Climate Summit

Sat, 10/30/2021 - 19:06

Patricia Scotland

By External Source
Oct 30 2021 (IPS-Partners)

Commonwealth Secretary-General Patricia Scotland has called for all countries to deliver an ambitious and transformative outcome at the imminent UN Climate Change Conference COP26, while appealing for increased support for the smallest and most vulnerable nations.

The Secretary-General will lead a delegation to the summit, to advocate for the interests of the 54 member countries, including 32 small states, and raise awareness about key Commonwealth actions to address the climate crisis.

Days ahead of the summit, the Secretary-General said:

“I urge leaders to come to the table with the highest possible ambition and a reinvigorated determination to do all we can to keep a 1.5 degree cap on global warming. The science is clear – failing on this mission will cost us a viable, sustainable future for our children and grandchildren. We must not squander this opportunity to build back on a more sustainable path.

“I call on governments to align their COVID-19 recovery planning to the objectives of the Paris Agreement and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The developed world needs to keep its promise to deliver US$100 billion every year through to 2025 to support developing countries as they try to cope with the damaging impacts of this climate crisis. Additional financial support is also needed to address loss and damage, particularly for the most vulnerable.”

The Commonwealth Secretariat will be hosting a pavilion at the COP26 venue for the first time, with a wide range of in-person and hybrid events planned over two weeks from 1 – 12 November. An online hub containing event information, live online broadcasts and other resources is now available.

The Secretariat will also be launching a number of key initiatives at COP26, in the area of climate finance, sustainable land management, energy transition, natural resource management and ocean action.

• The Commonwealth Secretary-General and relevant spokespeople will be available for media interviews around COP26 and climate change. For media requests, please see contact information below.

• View the Commonwealth Pavilion event schedule

• Visit https://climate.thecommonwealth.org to watch events live and find more information about Commonwealth Secretariat activities at COP26

Categories: Africa

Combating Energy Poverty in Chile with Community Inclusion

Fri, 10/29/2021 - 19:33

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.

Categories: Africa

From Taliban to Taliban: Cycle of Hope, Despair on Women’s Rights

Fri, 10/29/2021 - 12:08

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

Categories: Africa

Any End to This Suicidal War? (II): More Lethal Gases and Fewer, Weaker Sinks

Fri, 10/29/2021 - 10:44

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!

Categories: Africa

COP26: Climate Emergency Includes Threat of ‘Nuclear Winter’

Fri, 10/29/2021 - 08:10

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.

Categories: Africa

COP26: the Heat is On, But Climate Leadership is Off, Warns UN Report

Fri, 10/29/2021 - 07:42

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.

Categories: Africa

COP26: The Roadmap Plotting the Way to a Historic Meeting – Or Not

Fri, 10/29/2021 - 03:26

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.

Categories: Africa

Mental Health Strategic Plan for Bangladesh: An Overview

Thu, 10/28/2021 - 20:11

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’:

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]

Categories: Africa

Any End to This Suicidal War? (I) The Destruction of the Web of Life

Thu, 10/28/2021 - 12:01

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…”

Categories: Africa

Education Cannot Wait Calls For Urgent Funding To Fulfill The Right To Education Of All Children And Youth In Afghanistan

Thu, 10/28/2021 - 10:01

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.”

Categories: Africa

Pages

THIS IS THE NEW BETA VERSION OF EUROPA VARIETAS NEWS CENTER - under construction
the old site is here
Copy & Drop - Can`t find your favourite site? Send us the RSS or URL to the following address: info(@)europavarietas(dot)org.

You are here

Africa - INTER PRESS SERVICE

Pages