In a world faced with habitat loss and species extinction, climate change, and pollution, it’s crucial that countries develop their national action plans and create a society that lives in harmony with nature, says David Cooper, Acting Executive Secretary of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), in an exclusive interview with IPS.
The report from Amnesty International USA comes ahead of a May 8 deadline for the Biden administration to certify that Israel is complying with international and domestic laws.
Journalism is in crisis, again. The challenges to press freedom are enormous and multi-faceted and they are deepening -- in “free” and open societies as well as autocracies. And there are no simple solutions.
For individuals and entire media outlets the crisis is existential.
Diaa Al-Kahlout, the veteran Gaza bureau chief for the Qatari-funded London-based newspaper
Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, had been
covering the
Israel-Gaza war for two months when he became part of the news.
It is only fitting, against the backdrop of World Press Freedom Day, to recount the horror being inflicted on journalists and reporters around the world, which is increasing day by day. To tell the story of the mounting death of journalists in Gaza, it is essential to put into perspective the plight of journalists around the world.
The seven- month-long war in Gaza is perhaps the only military conflict in contemporary history which has claimed the lives of over 100 journalists, including targeted killings.
The last time Bahram Sintash saw his journalist father was in 2017. Qurban Mamut, an influential Uyghur editor had come to the United States for a visit but upon his return to Xinjiang in northwest China, he disappeared.
Lack of water threatens the very existence of family farming in Chile, forcing farmers to adopt new techniques or to leave their land.
The shortage is caused by a 15-year drought and exacerbated by the unequal distribution arising from the Water Code decreed in 1981 by the 1973-1990 dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, which turned water into a tradable commodity and gave its owners rights in perpetuity.
Transgender people and civil society organizations have welcomed the decision of the chief minister in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan, to allocate separate rooms in hospitals for the transgender community so they can avail themselves of uninterrupted healthcare.
“We demand that all provinces follow suit and announce facilities for more than 500,000 transgender people in the country,” Farzana Shah, president of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) Transgender Association, told IPS.
Biogas sounds like redemption, the conversion of the sinner. Its production involves extracting energy from filth, from the most disgusting environmental pollution, and at the same time avoiding the worsening of the global climate crisis.
A recent workshop of lawmakers heard that targeted interventions would be necessary to meet the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), its Programme of Action (PoA), and Lao PDR's national commitments to ICPD25 at the Nairobi Summit 2019.
The World Health Organization's African regional office and partners published over 25 peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals in 2023 as part of efforts to address the imbalance in global research and ensure that Africa was better represented in the production of health research academic literature, a new report shows.
Latin America’s workforce grew by nearly 50 percent in the two decades before the pandemic, helping boost economic growth. Now demographic trends are turning, and likely to weigh on growth in the coming years.
Just to obtain a good fertilizer it was worth building a biodigester, says Cuban farmer Alexis García, who proudly shows the vegetables in his family's garden, as well as the wide variety of fruit trees that have benefited from biol, the end product of biogas technology.
For the last three years, Sambhunath Guragain has been waking up every morning to a view he doesn't want to see: discarded agricultural land where he and his family used to grow food, including rice, but the flood in 2021 changed everything.
“We don’t have any crops now, but we are farmers,” Guragain said in November 2021, while looking towards a quietly flowing Melamchi river. This was six months after the massive flash flood in Helambu-Melamchi in Sindhupalchowk district in Nepal. After three years, the situation hasn’t changed.
A group of young girls aged between 15 and 17 sit tight, following attentively a lesson being taught by a Mualim (Islamic teacher) in a makeshift madrassah (Qur’anic school) located in one of the impoverished townships of Benin’s economic capital, Cotonou. They arrived in Benin recently, fleeing poverty, hunger, climate change, and rising insecurity in their home country, Niger, in the aftermath of the military coup that toppled democratically-elected president Mohamed Bazoum.
As we pass 200 days of war, the population of northern Gaza is teetering on the brink of mass starvation. Oxfam analysis found that the 300,000 people in northern Gaza had been forced to survive on an average of
245 calories per day from January to March—less than a single can of beans, and well below the recommended daily intake of 2,100 calories.
In December 2022, the fifteenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) saw governments worldwide unite behind a set of ambitious targets aimed at addressing biodiversity loss and restoring natural ecosystems, through the Global Biodiversity Framework – known now as the Biodiversity Plan.
Artificial intelligence provides amazing potential for advancement across fields, from medicine to agriculture to industry to the entertainment business, even as it generates
significant concerns. AI can also improve the efficiency of energy production and use in ways
that can reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
As the refugee crisis on the Belarus/EU borders approaches its fourth year, a crackdown on activism in Belarus is worsening the situation for migrants stuck in a “death zone” as they attempt to leave the country.
Groups working with refugees say the repression of NGOs in Belarus has led to many organizations stopping their aid work for migrants, leaving them with limited or no humanitarian help.
A group of senior Swiss women recently won a powerful victory offering renewed hope for tackling climate change. Earlier this month, the European Court of Human Rights
ruled that the government of Switzerland is violating human rights because it isn’t doing enough to cut greenhouse gas emissions.