Caribbean leaders are meeting in Saint Lucia for their annual summit, confronting a convergence of global and regional challenges ranging from rising living costs and climate change to crime, food security and geopolitical tensions.
A new
assessment from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) warns that the Ebola outbreak could cost Africa USD 3.6 billion, push 985,000 people into poverty, and put 300,000 jobs at risk.
For a generation, no foreign leader bet more heavily on a single American president than Benjamin Netanyahu bet on Donald Trump. Trump moved the US embassy to Jerusalem, tore up the 2015 nuclear accord with Iran, recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and in February 2026 joined Israel in the opening strikes of a war against Iran that Netanyahu had spent three decades urging Washington to wage.
When Roberto Savio begins talking about The Global Citizen Handbook, he does not begin with the book itself.
He begins with today’s young people.
A team of universities, led by Addis Ababa University, has joined forces to implement a four-year Intra-Africa academic mobility project aimed at strengthening agroforestry research and education for climate change mitigation.
Animal disease is no longer a distant concern for farmers and veterinarians alone. It is increasingly visible in household budgets: global egg prices surged
more than 60% during recent bird flu outbreaks. In South Africa, foot-and-mouth disease pushed beef prices up by 34%. These are not isolated fluctuations in price. They are reminders that when prevention falls short, families, farmers and food systems all pay the price.
Before anyone called her an innovator, before artificial intelligence entered the conversation, before solar-powered cold rooms, before the language of sustainable development, Shifra Ainomugisha knew food loss in its painful form.
It is barely noon, and a group of women sit near the beach on the outskirts of Djégbadji village, in West Africa’s Benin, sifting through mounds of salt harvested from the Gulf of Guinea’s ocean.
« James Alix Michel warns that without real finance and precaution, ocean pledges risk remaining only on paper. »
Now that the lights have dimmed in Mombasa and the delegations have gone home, a simple but necessary question remains: did the first Our Ocean Conference on African soil truly move the world from promises to protection? The conference was indeed the first held in Africa, under the theme “Our Ocean, Our Heritage, Our Future,” with a stated focus on culture, communities, livelihoods, marine protection, climate resilience and sustainable blue economies.
A record number of children were subject to grave violations by parties to armed conflicts, the highest since the UN mandate for children and armed conflict (CAAC) was established in 1996.
The United Nations June Climate Meetings (SB64) ended in Bonn with sharp disagreements between developed and developing countries over climate finance, adaptation support and emissions reductions, leaving negotiators with significant unresolved issues ahead of the COP31 climate summit in Antalya, Türkiye.
Tomorrow, Africa hosts the Our Ocean Conference on its own shores for the first time, in Mombasa.
This is more than a diplomatic milestone. It is a test of whether we, as Africans, are prepared to safeguard our ocean as a shared heritage and a pillar of our future prosperity.
The global ocean economy continues its expansion, with ocean-related trade
reaching USD 2.5 trillion as of 2025. Ocean services now make up the majority of the ocean trade, accounting for 58.9 percent of the composition, up from 47.8 percent in 2020.
Martin Luther King Jr. , when he received the Nobel Peace Prize, reminded us of “The fact that most of the time human beings put the truth about the nature and risks of the nuclear war out of their minds because it is too painful and therefore not ‘acceptable’, does not alter the nature and risks of such war. The device of ‘rejection’ may temporarily cover up anxiety, but it does not bestow peace of mind and emotional security.” I have devoted many decades of my life to not ignoring the risk of nuclear annihilation and since 1995 have attended every Review Conference of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to learn and hopefully contributed to a saner safer world.
As ongoing military conflicts in Europe and the Middle East continue with no signsof winding down, there is increasing focus on nuclear weaponsamid heightened risks of escalation.
Recent geopolitical trends threaten more food crises, especially in developing countries. A new IPES-Food report urges a strategy of ‘resilient self-reliance’, proposing available opportunities to improve equity, sustainability and solidarity.
"While pressures on public budgets are growing and geopolitical tensions rising, it can be tempting to see environmental finance as optional. It is not,” GEF Interim CEO and Chair Claude Gascon told the closing plenary of the Eighth GEF Assembly in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, today.
Ask any woman miner in the Katoro goldfield in Tanzania’s northern Geita region, and she will tell you that she touches toxic mercury with her bare hands when extracting gold from crushed ore.
In the opulent conference halls of Samarkand, far from the drought-hit fields of East Africa, Tanzanian delegates have warned that unless global climate finance is directed to rural communities, environmental destruction will only accelerate, deepening the vulnerability of those least responsible for the crisis.
As the Global Environment Facility (GEF) steps into the starting blocks of its next financial cycle, the Interim CEO Claude Gascon reflects on what he termed a “moment of transition and delivery".
Bangladesh, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guinea-Bissau, Niue, Senegal, Solomon Islands, Sudan, and Togo will receive over USD 67 million in new funding to help strengthen resilience.