Our traditional “year-ender” usually kicks off with a grim litany of world disasters and crises over the past 12 months, highlights IPS partners and contributors and culminates in a more positive-sounding finale. This time I’d like to begin on a more personal note intended also as a metaphor.

Farhana Haque Rahman

As thousands looked for the nearest exit, a young Bangladeshi diplomat saw me and instead of joining the mass scramble, he gallantly led me through the crowds to safety. Thank you Aminul Islam Zisan for demonstrating when in crisis people can come together in unique ways.

Thankfully no one was killed in the fire; talks resumed and the Conference of Parties process survived in the form of a concluding document that could be interpreted as a small step forward in the global battle to stem the climate crisis, even while making only an oblique reference to the fossil fuels that are largely creating it.

COP’s survival was not assured given the US boycott ordered by President Donald Trump who dismissed climate change as “the greatest con job” in addressing the UN General Assembly in September.

The US absence from Belem in fact inflicted more damage to the US in terms of its global standing, just as Trump’s decision to shun the G20 talks running parallel in Johannesburg only deepened its reputational harm. Salt was diplomatically rubbed into its self-inflicted wounds by the dignity of G20 host President Cyril Ramaphosa who ignored US opposition from afar and steered adoption of a declaration addressing global challenges, notably the climate crisis.

Looking back, perhaps this was the week that quietly brought the curtain down on the Age of America. Unpredictability, chaos, violence and institutionalised cruelty are the early symptoms of the dramatic shift in 2025 towards unilateralism and protectionism.

Hundreds of Palestinians, including scores of children, have been killed since the US-brokered “truce” between Israel and Hamas began on October 11. Russian air strikes against Ukrainian civilian targets have also regularly punctuated Trump’s flip-flopping efforts to end a war he said he could finish on day one of his presidency.

Sharp cuts in US aid ordered by Trump in January have “fuelled a global humanitarian catastrophe”, according to a statement by the UN Human Rights Council on July 31. Citing two independent experts on poverty, food and human rights, the Council said: “More than 350,000 deaths stemming from the aid cuts have already been estimated, including more than 200,000 children.”

Famine is spreading with the conflict in western Sudan, and lack of finance has also led to cuts in vital UN aid to South Sudan. Over one million people caught in Myanmar’s largely forgotten civil war had their lifesaving support cut by the UN World Food Programme because of funding shortfalls.

Civicus, a global alliance of civil society organizations and activists working to strengthen citizen action, says these multiple and connected crises – conflict, climate breakdown and democratic regression – are overwhelming the international institutions designed to address the problems that states can’t or won’t resolve. US withdrawal from global bodies threatens to worsen this crisis in international cooperation.

But as CIVICUS’s 2025 State of Civil Society Report outlines, civil society has ideas about how to save the UN by putting people at its heart: a theme embraced at COP30 by Open Society Foundations President Binaifer Nowrojee who endorsed Brazil’s democratic leadership for elevating Indigenous and Afro-descendant voices and bringing human rights back to the centre of climate action.

In this rapidly shifting world order, Nowrojee sees the Global South stepping forward with new ideas and a new vision rooted in dignity, fairness, and protection of the planet.

Arguably the most important agreement emerging from COP30 was the Just Transition Mechanism which aims to ensure fair development of a global green economy, protecting the rights of all people, including workers, women and Indigenous people.

Coral Pasisi, Director of Climate Change and Sustainability for the Pacific Community (SPC), highlighted at COP30 how critical the situation has become for island nations experiencing accelerating climate impacts and hoping for meaningful breakthroughs in Belem. She raised the need for stronger support from developed countries for Loss and Damage.

The Gen Z demonstrators who have rocked regimes in South Asia and Africa are certainly stepping up with their visions for fairer futures for all, their protests aimed against nepotism and corruption among entrenched elites. They have been met with bullets in Bangladesh last year, and in Nepal – where the government was forced to resign in September – as well as Tanzania where hundreds were reported killed. Gen Z protests this year also rocked Indonesia, the Philippines and Morocco.

As Jan Lundius, a Swedish researcher, wrote in IPS: “Even though specific incidents triggered these upheavals, they were all due to long-term, shared grievances evolving from stark wealth gaps, rampant nepotism, and unlimited corruption. Above all, youngsters protested against members of powerful dynasties, favouring a wealthy and discredited political elite.”

A combination of conflict and climate disasters can have disastrous long-term consequences, particularly for children’s education. Initiatives supported by IPS like Education Cannot Wait (ECW) and the Safe Schools Declaration focus on providing quality, inclusive education to crisis-affected children to prevent long-term cycles of poverty and instability.

Hurricane Melissa which swept through the Caribbean in October served as a harsh reminder that 5.9 million children and adolescents in Latin America and the Caribbean could be pushed into poverty by 2030 due to loss of education as a result of climate change if governments do not intervene soon, according to UNICEF.

The World Bank estimated the physical damage inflicted by Hurricane Melissa on Jamaica at some $8.8 billion, or 41% of the country’s 2024 GDP.

However the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) has also warned governments that they are underestimating or ignoring the inextricable links between climate change, nature loss and food security. Its latest assessment, approved by nearly 150 countries meeting in Windhoek, Namibia, warned that biodiversity is declining everywhere, largely as a result of human actions.

CGIAR, a global research partnership focused on food security, is facing a very different world from when it was founded nearly 50 years ago in terms of having to address climate change, biodiversity loss, and new conflicts, according to CGIAR Chief Scientist Dr Sandra Milach. A major focus is on equipping 500 million small-scale producers for climate resilience to protect their livelihoods and increase stable incomes.

A year-ender wouldn’t be complete in the run-up to festive celebrations without at least a mention of the major religious figures to dominate the news.

Pope Francis, one of the most outspoken pontiffs in modern times, died on Easter Monday. Chicago-born Robert Francis Prevost, 69, became his successor, the first North American elected to the role. Choosing to be known as Pope Leo XIV he called for an end to the ‘barbarity’ of the war in Gaza. He also took aim at climate sceptics and appealed for urgent actions to be taken by world leaders at COP30.

The Dalai Lama, spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, turned 90 in exile in India, and also made a call for peace in the world. To the delight of his followers, he made clear that he would be reincarnated and that only his trusted inner circle of monks would have the “sole authority” to locate his successor. China swiftly rebuffed his declaration, saying his successor must be approved by Beijing.

In 2025 the world marked 80 years since the end of the Second World War. Minoru Harada, a Buddhist monk and head of Soka Gakkai, recalled his childhood experience of the fire-bombing of Tokyo and pledged his organisation’s determination that no one should have to endure the horrors of war.

Farhana Haque Rahman is Senior Vice President of IPS Inter Press Service and Executive Director IPS Noram; she served as the elected Director General of IPS from 2015-2019. A journalist and communications expert, she is a former senior official of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the International Fund for Agricultural Development.

IPS UN Bureau

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

By Farhana Haque Rahman
NEW YORK, May 2 2025 (IPS)

Pressures on the press are piling up. Like an avalanche gaining speed yet unnoticed by most people in the valley below, freedom of the press is being relentlessly trampled over – despite the valiant efforts of a few.

Farhana Haque Rahman

On top of all this, marking World Press Freedom Day on May 3, UNESCO is aiming this year to focus thoughts on what it diplomatically calls the substantial ‘new risks’ as well as the benefits of Artificial Intelligence (AI), already widely deployed in newsrooms, and by fraudsters.

For incisive information on journalists targeted worldwide, organizations like Reporters Without Borders (RSF) not only collate the data and keep detailed records but also campaign on our behalf, as in lobbying the International Criminal Court to investigate crimes against journalists in Palestine.

In its 2024 roundup, RSF notes: “In Gaza, the scale of the tragedy is incomprehensible… In 2024, Gaza became the most dangerous region in the world for journalists, a place where journalism itself is threatened with extinction.”

RSF counts over 155 journalists and media workers killed in Gaza and Lebanon and two killed in Israel since the Hamas attacks on Israel in October 2023. This number includes at least 35 who were “very likely” targeted or killed while working, many clearly identifiable as journalists but shot or killed in Israeli strikes. “This was compounded by a deliberate media blackout and a block on foreign journalists entering the Strip.”

Sudan is described as a “death trap” for journalists caught between military and paramilitary factions. And outside war zones, seven journalists were killed in Pakistan in 2024, five assassinated in Mexico, and five killed in a violent crackdown on the July/August 2024 protests in Bangladesh.

Of the 550 reporters behind bars around the world by the end of the year, 124 were in China (including 11 in Hong Kong), 61 in Myanmar, 41 in Israel and 40 in Belarus.

Of the 38 media professionals jailed in Russia, 18 are Ukrainian. RSF dedicated its report to Ukrainian freelance journalist Victoria Roshchyna, whose family were informed that she died in captivity in Russia on 19 September. No explanation was given.

Just last month (April), a Russian court sentenced four journalists to 5-1/2 years each in prison, accusing them of extremism for working for an anti-corruption group founded by opposition leader Alexei Navalny who died in captivity in February 2024.

What’s more, all these regimes are giving a thumbs-up to the March 15 gutting of Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia, as well as the dismantling of USAid which, for example, helped support independent journalists in Myanmar.

China applauded, calling VOA “a dirty rag” and “lie factory”. Cambodian strongman Hun Sen cheered the cuts of “fake news” RFA.

RFS says press freedom deteriorated in the Asia-Pacific region, where 26 of the 32 countries and territories saw their scores fall in the 2024 World Press Freedom Index.

“The region’s dictatorial governments have been tightening their hold over news and information with increasing vigour,” RFS said, while commending regional democracies, such as Timor-Leste, Samoa and Taiwan, for retaining “their roles as press freedom models”.

But what is perhaps most alarming about the insidious deterioration of press freedom around the world is that autocratic regimes are very successfully mastering the dark arts of propaganda, while mainstream traditional media in more open societies are losing people’s trust.

The 2025 Trust Barometer compiled by Edelman, a big American PR firm, found of the 28 major countries it surveyed that China ranked highest in the “trust of media” category with a 75 percent rating, while the UK came next to last with 36 percent. This contrasts with RSF’s press freedom index which ranks China 172 out of 180 countries and territories, and the UK 23rd.

Reflecting on 25 years of surveys and referring broadly to the West, CEO Richard Edelman said media became the “least trusted” institution in 2020 as “information became a bitter and contested battleground used to manipulate, drive societal wedges, and fuel political polarization”.

Which brings us to Unesco’s words of warning over the AI revolution on World Press Freedom Day.

Yes it enhances access to and processing of information, enables journalists to handle vast amounts of data efficiently and create content, improves fact checking etc.

But, the UN agency adds: “AI also… can be used to reproduce misinformation, spread disinformation, amplify online hate speech, and enable new forms of censorship. Some actors use AI for mass surveillance of journalists and citizens, creating a chilling effect on freedom of expression.”

AI-generated fake videos posted on social media, such as images of firefighters rescuing animals in the recent Los Angeles wildfires, have already gained tens of millions of clicks.

Recent BBC research into four publically available AI assistants found 51percent of all AI answers to questions about the news were judged to have significant issues of some form. This included 19 percent of AI answers which cited BBC content introduced factual errors, while 13 percent of the quotes sourced from BBC articles were either altered or didn’t actually exist in that article.

We have been warned. And that is before the boffins perhaps succeed in birthing Artificial General Intelligence with the goal of creating machines as intelligent and versatile as humans. The very concept then of Press Freedom may no longer exist.

Farhana Haque Rahman is Senior Vice President of IPS Inter Press Service and Executive Director IPS Noram; she served as the elected Director General of IPS from 2015-2019. A journalist and communications expert, she is a former senior official of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the International Fund for Agricultural Development.

IPS UN Bureau

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Excerpt:

World Press Freedom Day 2025

Do you sometimes feel like a hamster on its wheel, or perhaps stuck on a runaway train hurtling towards the abyss? Whatever metaphor one might choose for our world looking back on 2024, rainbows don’t easily spring to mind.

Farhana Haque Rahman

The COP29 talks in Baku, Azerbaijan, were ostensibly about trying to find agreements on how to tackle the global climate crisis. Two weeks of negotiations, covered in detail by IPS, came close to collapse, ending just short of total failure.

As 2024 raced towards a place in the record books as the planet’s hottest year on record, a meaningful Baku accord on climate finance for poorer nations was once again stymied by powerful nations and their geopolitical rivalries, squabbling about accountability against a backdrop of already rising debts.

In the words of Mohamed Adow, director of climate and energy think tank Power Shift Africa, the rich world staged “a great escape in Baku with no real money on the table and vague and unaccountable promises of funds to be mobilised.” (One might also add that major emitting countries like China and India, which project power and wealth but refuse to be defined as ‘rich’, also got off lightly in Baku).

Disputes over finance for a new fund also sank the COP16 biodiversity summit held in Cali, Colombia, where exhausted delegates failed to reach consensus.

In a blow for those seeking to prevent mass species extinction, countries also failed to agree on a new framework for monitoring progress on tackling biodiversity loss.

A landmark new report by the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) warns that deep, fundamental shifts in how people view and interact with the natural world are urgently needed to halt and reverse biodiversity loss and safeguard life on Earth.

The IPBES Assessment Report on the Underlying Causes of Biodiversity Loss and the Determinants of Transformative Change and Options for Achieving the 2050 Vision for Biodiversity – also known as the Transformative Change Report – builds on the 2019 IPBES Global Assessment Report, which found that the only way to achieve global development goals is through transformative change, and on the 2022 IPBES Values Assessment Report.

Critical in terms of their contributions to humanity, but confined to the sidelines in these big power orchestrations, organizations like OCHA, the IOM and WHO act both as harbingers of doom while attempting to carry out essential repair and maintenance work amidst the wreckage.

Greg Puley, head of the Climate Team at the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) issued a clarion call for an ambitious and fair global climate finance goal at COP29. “This year alone we witnessed devastating floods in the Sahel, extreme heatwaves in Asia and Latin America, and drought in Southern Africa,” he told IPS.

Also going unheeded was an appeal to Israel in November to halt its assault on North Gaza. Fifteen UN and other humanitarian organizations described the crisis there as “apocalyptic”. In that context the World Health Organization said its second round of polio vaccinations in the Gaza Strip had been partially successful.

Analysis by the UN Human Rights Office showed that nearly 70 percent of those killed in the war in Gaza were women and children.

“Gaza is becoming a graveyard for children,” UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said on November 6. “More journalists have reportedly been killed over a four-week period than in any conflict in at least three decades. More United Nations aid workers have been killed than in any comparable period in the history of our organization,” he added.

Over 10 million people have been displaced by conflict inside Sudan while an additional 2.2 million have fled the country. Warring parties regularly attack civilians, inflicting terrible violence against women. Madiha Abdalla, an activist journalist forced to flee Sudan, wrote for IPS describing how women human rights defenders have been targeted.

Despite the scale of the suffering in Sudan, international attention is waning and aid has been blocked. Russia vetoed a UN Security Council ceasefire resolution.

As the world observed the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women on November 25, UN Women data showed almost one in three women around the world have been subjected to physical and/or sexual violence at least once in their life.

Individual activists like Abdalla are particularly vulnerable with little or no backup during conflicts. But 2024 has also seen entire organizations up sticks and leave. Haiti is an example. More than 700,000 people have been displaced there as gang violence has escalated, particularly since deployment of the underfunded Multinational Security Support mission.

Doctors Without Borders, active in Haiti for over 30 years, said it was suspending critical care in the capital Port-au-Prince following repeated threats from local law enforcement towards staff and patients. The UN also ordered the evacuation of its staff from the capital in what it somewhat euphemistically called a temporary reduction of its “footprint” in Port-au-Prince. UNICEF said an unprecedented number of children had been recruited by gangs.

Refugees from Haiti even became a weapon in Donald Trump’s US election campaign when he accused Haitian immigrants of eating the cats and dogs of residents in Springfield, Ohio. Trump’s false claim – widely debunked – apparently did nothing to derail his ultimately successful campaign in which the former president repeatedly proclaimed his intention to carry out mass deportations of undocumented migrants if elected president.

Paradoxically, his deportation plans might be spurred on further by the International Organization’s World Migration Report 2024 detailing unprecedented numbers of international migrants worldwide – estimated at 281 million. In turn this has led to a spike in remittances to their home countries worth hundreds of billions of dollars, making up a “significant” chunk of the GDP of developing countries.

Trump’s disdain for international organisations and binding commitments involved in membership makes it likely that he will repeat the drastic steps taken in his 2016-21 term in office, such as the US withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement and freezing of contributions to the WHO.

As 2024 draws to a close with the ominous spread of renewed war in Syria, a more isolationist US under Trump reminds us of the value of those lesser known organisations slipping under the radar, such as the Sasakawa Foundation campaigning to end leprosy and its stigma; IITA/CGIAR and their commitment to small farms and transforming food systems in Africa; the scientists developing a new vaccine to boost immunity to malaria.

A long and positive list this time. Even on the climate front, progress should also be recognized and nurtured, even if coming too late and too slowly, such as the expectation that the world might see a peak in annual greenhouse gas emissions in 2024, thanks in part to giant leaps in solar and wind capacity.

People do have the powers to make a difference too, whether to elect a Trump or oust a corrupt would-be autocrat, as 2024 demonstrated.

Dr Muhammad Yunus, 84-year-old Chief Advisor of Bangladesh’s interim government and Nobel peace prize laureate, spoke in his first address to the United Nations of the “power of the ordinary people”, especially the young, to forge a “new Bangladesh” after mass protests against government corruption and violence ousted then prime minister Sheikh Hasina in August.

We might be on that train heading to the abyss but we do possess the knowledge and tools to apply the brakes. If only we could learn the lessons.

Farhana Haque Rahman is Senior Vice President of IPS Inter Press Service and Executive Director IPS Noram; she served as the elected Director General of IPS from 2015-2019. A journalist and communications expert, she is a former senior official of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the International Fund for Agricultural Development.

IPS UN Bureau

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Standing high on the vertiginous edge of the future and looking down into a volcanic seething of approaching doom, it is a totally understandable desire to want to close your eyes, walk away and turn on the sports channel. If you have one.

Farhana Haque Rahman

Floods, heatwaves, wildfires, droughts and storms are already displacing millions of people across the world, and that is with average temperatures around 1.3 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels. Scientists estimate we are on a path to at least double that increase by 2100 although the Paris Agreement ‘goal’ is to stick within 1.5 degrees. The world’s annual emissions of greenhouse gases, CO2 and methane, have not even peaked yet.

But aren’t our global leaders and their vast complex of enablers – the financiers, corporates etc – holding their year-end climate crisis huddle to tackle all this? Yes, Azerbaijan’s hosting of COP29 in November means for the second year running a petro-state will be in charge of proceedings. Did you mention something about feeling alienated?

COP28 agreed vaguely last year on the need for the world to “transition away” from fossil fuels, the source of the great majority of emissions. COP29 has the main task of hardening up commitments, and agreeing on how richer countries will provide the trillions of dollars needed to help the “global south” tackle the crisis.

This new “global climate finance goal” is to come into play after 2025 and is supposed to replace the annual $100bn target set years ago that the developed world is already behind on.

Pre-COP discussions held in Bonn recently were a fraught affair. Much of the western world is already grappling with its own record high debt levels. Arguments broke out over how to define “climate finance”. The definition of “up-to-date” was also on the agenda.

Geo-politics are kicking in too. How was it, European delegates asked, that China with its space exploration program and massively expensive military development (as well as being the world’s largest emitter) is still able to cling to its ‘developing’ country status that allows it to benefit from the UN pot rather than contribute? Why don’t the fantastically rich Gulf states also contribute?

Quibbling over (admittedly meaningful) definitions does seem the contemporary equivalent of fiddling while Rome burns, a metaphor recalled by UN Secretary-General António Guterres on the eve of COP29.

“We’re playing with fire, but there can be no more playing for time. We’re out of time,” he said, commenting on research released by the UN Environmental Programme (UNEP) warning that the world is on course for a “catastrophic” temperature rise of more than 3C above pre-industrial levels. The world’s ability to remain within the target of 1.5C of global warming “will be gone within a few years” without rapid action, the UNEP stated.

“We are teetering on a planetary tight rope,” said Guterres. Is anyone watching?

The numbers are extreme but exist in plain sight – the world needs collectively to slash emissions by 42 per cent by 2030 and by 57 per cent by 2035 from 2019 levels, to keep within the 1.5C threshold, according to UNEP. Instead this year they will hit a new high, although the International Energy Agency’s latest annual review does predict an “imminent” peaking, possibly next year.

Although it can feel we are running hard just to slip even further down that burning precipice, the tectonic plates of energy trends are shifting however. The International Energy Agency pronounces encouragingly we are entering the ‘age of electricity’, driven by a surge in solar power.

Electricity generated from solar power alone is seen quadrupling between 2023 and 2030. Solar may overtake nuclear, hydro and wind by 2026, overtake gas in 2031 and then coal by 2033. Clean electricity is seen pushing coal power down by a third by 2035.

The direction of travel is clear, but it has come far too late and the pace is still far too slow. The good news is that plummeting costs of solar power – in part thanks to China – are enabling the global south to move much more rapidly towards clean energy and shun the siren calls of the corporate dinosaurs of fossil fuels.

But even before COP29 participants settle into their Baku conference seats on November 11, the knife-edge month will begin with that elephant in the ante-chamber – the US presidential election.

A victory for Donald Trump could lead (again) to US withdrawal from international climate action. Analysis by Carbon Brief researchers shows a return of Trump could lead to an additional four billion tonnes of US emissions by 2030 compared with Joe Biden’s existing plans. That’s equal to combined annual emissions of the EU and Japan.

That sense of deep malaise and alienation many of us feel about our planet’s existential crisis, exacerbated by horrendous conflict in the Middle East and Ukraine, seems to be shared by many US voters about their lot in life. Polls show a record share of three quarters of registered voters believe the next generation won’t be better off.

How can we change the messaging? Trump has channelled deep-seated anger and frustration towards his own blinkered and narcissistic ends. The purveyors of ‘hope’ have perpetuated decades of time lost. Can we accept – defiantly not passively – that this is going to be an epic struggle of many long hard battles? They may already be lost but we can recognize the glory in not giving up.

Farhana Haque Rahman is Senior Vice President of IPS Inter Press Service and Executive Director IPS Noram; she served as the elected Director General of IPS from 2015-2019. A journalist and communications expert, she is a former senior official of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the International Fund for Agricultural Development.

IPS UN Bureau

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

By Farhana Haque Rahman
ROME, May 1 2024 (IPS)

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.

Farhana Haque Rahman

Beyond the threat to life and limb, tens of thousands of media jobs were lost in 2023 and the trend this year is no better. Entire outlets have shut down, or been taken over and/or dumbed down.

In our world of enhanced digital chaos, and the font of bigotry and disinformation which is social media, audiences are as increasingly fractured as the news outlets they choose to turn to.

Bots and AI-generated deep fakes will compound all this politicised confusion and mistrust. Torrents of trivia, subtle scare-mongering and old-fashioned intimidation are a potent combination in the erosion of freedoms and democracy.

Russia has seen a mass exodus of journalists. Hong Kong is a shadow of its former self. Myanmar’s regime is a killer and jailer of reporters. But in an increasingly polarised US, by some counts, over two-thirds of Americans say they don’t trust their mass media. There is excellent reporting happening but much will pass unseen, or dismissed outright.

South Africa’s membership-based Daily Maverick shut down for an entire day in April to draw attention to how market failure was endangering independent journalism.

“Without journalism, our democracy and economy will break down,” the outlet declared.

How all these very different factors are coming together is clearly seen in the media coverage of our global climate breakdown and broader threats to our environment.

The environment is not just a highly dangerous topic to cover – sometimes akin to conflict reporting – but it has become a cesspit of corporate propaganda emitted by polluting industries, some of them giant state-owned entities, as well as their partners in disinformation ensconced in politics, academia, “non-profit” foundations AND the mass media themselves.

UNESCO is dedicating World Press Freedom Day this year to the importance of journalism and freedom of expression in the context of the current global environmental crisis. As UNESCO says: “Independent journalists as well as scientists are crucial actors in helping our societies to separate facts from lies and manipulation in order to take informed decisions, including about environmental policies.”

“Investigative journalists are also shedding light on environmental crimes, exposing corruption and powerful interests, and sometimes paying the ultimate price for doing their job.”

As India, the world’s largest democracy, holds elections 10 years after Narendra Modi first took over as prime minister, Reporters Without Borders noted that at least 13 of the 28 journalists killed in India since then were working on stories linked to the environment, mainly land seizures and illegal mining. Several were killed while investigating the so-called sand mafia, an organized crime network supplying the construction industry.

Reporters Without Borders ranked India 161st out of 180 countries in its 2023 World Press Freedom Index.

In the Global South, indigenous, local, and independent journalists and communicators are particularly vulnerable to violence and intimidation while working in remote areas without adequate backup and resources.

But in the world’s industrialized democracies – those that blazed the trail of bio-diversity mass extinction, pollution and emissions of greenhouse gases overheating our planet – major media outlets are actively aiding and abetting fossil fuel companies by partnering them.

As laid clear in a report by the outlets Drilled and DeSmog, many major media outlets have “an internal brand studio that crafts editorials, videos, even events and entire podcasts for advertisers, many of which are fossil fuel companies.”

“The likes of Politico, Reuters, Bloomberg, the NYT, the Washington Post, and the Financial Times are all creating content for oil companies that directly contradicts what their climate reporters are publishing. And we know from peer-reviewed research that at most one-third of people can actually tell the difference between advertorial content and reporting.”

Journalists, particularly those covering the climate crisis and collapse of eco-systems, also have to confront those almost intangible contradictions that thwart efforts to engage and inform the public.

How does one communicate the magnitude of the dangers facing us and our planet to a global audience already bowed down under a barrage of awfulness? How does one resist what one US political scientist referred to as the “banality of crazy”?

He was referring to Donald Trump’s violent, sexist and racist rhetoric which has been heard so often that it sometimes barely stirs a media reaction, but the phrase could be used to describe other kinds of dangerously acceptable new-normal.

There is no one easy answer to all this. Freedom of the press rests on just that. It also depends on our own integrity and credibility.

Farhana Haque Rahman is Senior Vice President of IPS Inter Press Service and Executive Director IPS Noram; she served as the elected Director General of IPS from 2015-2019. A journalist and communications expert, she is a former senior official of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the International Fund for Agricultural Development.

IPS UN Bureau

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Excerpt:

World Press Freedom Day 2024

The year 2023 has brought so much tragedy, with incomprehensible loss of lives, whether from wars or devastating ‘natural’ disasters, while our planet has seen yet more records broken as our climate catastrophe worsens.

And so as the clock ticks towards the (mostly western) New Year, readers are traditionally subjected by media outlets like ours to the ‘yearender’—usually a roundup of main events over the previous 12 months, one horror often overshadowed by the next.

Farhana Haque Rahman

So forgive us if, for 2023, IPS takes a somewhat different approach, highlighting how humanity can do better and how the big depressing picture should not obscure the myriad small but positive steps being taken out there.

COP28, the global climate conference held this month in Dubai, could neatly fit the ‘big depressing’ category. Hosted by a petrostate with nearly 100,000 people registered to attend, many of them lobbyists for fossil fuels and other polluters, it would be natural to address its outcomes with scepticism.

However, while Yamide Dagnet, Director for Climate Justice at the Open Society Foundations, described COP28 as “imperfect”, she said it also marked “an important and unprecedented step forward in our ‘course correction’ for a just transition towards resilient and greener economies.”

UN climate chief Simon Stiell acknowledged shortcomings in the compromise resolutions on fossil fuels and the level of funding for the Loss and Damages Fund. But the outcome, he said, was also the “beginning of the end” for the fossil fuel era.

Imperfect as it was and still based on old structures, COP28 hinted at the possible: a planetary approach to governance where common interests spanning climate, biodiversity, and the whole health of Earth outweigh and supersede the current dominant global system of rule by nation states.

As we have tragically witnessed in 2023, the existing system—as vividly reflected in the repetitive stalemate among the five veto-bearing members of the UN Security Council—is failing to find resolution to the major conflicts of this year, Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Gaza. Not to mention older and half-forgotten conflicts in places like Myanmar (18.6 million people in need of humanitarian aid) and in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (seven million displaced).

The unrestrained destruction of Gaza and the disproportionate killings of over 17,000, (now the death toll is “at least 20,000 people” according to Palestinian officials) mostly civilians—in retaliation for 1,200 killings by Hamas and 120 hostages in captivity—have left the Palestinians in a state of deep isolation and weighed down by a feeling of being deserted by the world at large.

The United Nations and the international community have remained helpless, with UN resolutions having no impact, while American pleas for restrained aerial bombings continue to be ignored by the Israelis in an act of defiance, wrote IPS senior journalist Thalif Deen.

The hegemony of the nation-state system is surely not going to disappear soon but – without wanting to sound too idealistic — its foundations are being chipped away by civil society where interdependence prevails over the divide and rule of the existing order. And so for a few examples encountered in our reporting:

CIVICUS Lens, standing for social justice and rooted in the global south, offers analysis of major events from a civil society perspective, such as its report on the security crisis gripping Haiti casting doubt over the viability of an international plan to dispatch a Kenya-led police contingent.

Education Cannot Wait, a global fund for education in emergencies and protracted crises, lobbied at COP28 for a $150 million appeal to support school-aged children facing climate shocks, such as the devastating drought in Somalia and Ethiopia, and floods in Pakistan where many of the 26,000 schools hit in 2022 remain closed.

Leprosy, an ancient but curable disease, had been pegged back in terms of new case numbers but the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 made it harder for patients to get treatment and for new cases to be reported. Groups such as the Sasakawa Health Foundation are redoubling efforts to promote early detection and treatment.

With 80 percent of the world’s poorest living closer to the epicenters of climate-induced disasters, civil society is hammering at the doors of global institutions to address the challenges of adaptation and mitigation.

Lobbying on the sidelines of COP28 in Dubai was activist Joshua Amponsem, co-director of the Youth Climate Justice Fund who questioned why weather-resilient housing was not yet a reality in Mozambique’s coastal regions despite the increasing ferocity of tropical cyclones.

“My key message is really simple. The clock is ticking for food security in Africa,” Dr Simeon Ehui told IPS as the newly appointed Director General of the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture which works with partners across sub-Saharan Africa to tackle hunger, poverty and natural resource degradation.

Dr Alvaro Lario, President of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), which has received record-breaking pledges in support of its largest ever replenishment, warns that under current trends 575 million people will still be living in extreme poverty in 2030.

“Hunger remains a political issue, mostly caused by poverty, inequality, conflict, corruption and overall lack of access to food and resources. In a world of plenty, which produces enough food to feed everyone, how can there be hundreds of millions going hungry?” he asked.

Empowering communities in a bid to protect and rejuvenate the ecosystems of Pacific communities is the aim of the Unlocking Blue Pacific Prosperity conservation effort launched at COP28 by Palau’s President Surangel Whipps who noted that the world was not on track to meet any of the 17 sustainable development goals or climate goals by 2030.

A scientist with a life-long career studying coral reefs, David Obura was appointed this year as the new chair of IPBES, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

“We really have reached planetary limits and I think interest in oceans is rising because we have very dramatically reached the limits of land,” says Dr Obura, “What the world needs to understand is how strongly nature and natural systems, even when highly altered such as agricultural systems, support people and economies very tangibly. It’s the same with the ocean.”

An ocean-first approach to the fight against climate change is also the pillar of a Dalhousie University research program, Transforming Climate Action, launched last May and funded by the Canadian government. Traditional knowledges of Indigenous People will be a focus.

As Max Roser, an economist making academic research accessible to all, reminds us: for more people to devote their energy to making progress tackling large global problems, we should ensure that more people know that it is possible.

Focusing on the efforts of civil society and projecting hope amidst all the heartbreak of 2023 might come across as futile and wasted, but in its coverage IPS will continue to highlight efforts and successes, big and small, that deserve to be celebrated.

Farhana Haque Rahman is the Executive Director of IPS Inter Press Service Noram and Senior Vice President of IPS; she served as the elected Director General of IPS from 2015 to 2019. A journalist and communications expert who lived and worked in Africa, Asia, Europe and North America, she is a former senior official of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization FAO and the International Fund for Agricultural Development IFAD.

IPS UN Bureau

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Another year and another UN climate change conference. As our ‘world leaders’ prepare for two air-conditioned weeks of wrangling at COP28 in Dubai later this month, forgive us for sounding underwhelmed, despairing, and even cynical about these annual jamborees where actions rarely match promises.

Farhana Haque Rahman

Some context: 2023 is almost certain to be the hottest year for Earth for some 125,000 years, and it has already seen devastating storms, floods, extreme drought, and wildfires. September and October set shocking records for monthly global temperature highs.

Earth’s systems are flashing warning signals. Immense carbon sinks in peatlands and tropical wetlands show signs of morphing instead into sources of greenhouse gas emissions; the melting of Antarctic Sea ice has accelerated; the Arctic risks total loss of late summer sea ice in the next decade; drought and deforestation in the Amazon could turn rainforest to savannah.

This year’s Conference of the Parties (COP) comes mid-way between the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement and the 2030 interim target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 45 percent from 2010 levels to reach net zero emissions by 2050 and thus keep global temperature increases within 1.5 degrees Celsius of pre-industrial levels.

But we are way off target. Based on national commitments made by governments worldwide, we are still heading towards a sizeable increase in emissions by 2030 compared to 2010.

A roadmap to accelerate climate action is desperately needed at COP28. But instead of phasing out fossil fuels – by far the major source of emissions – big and wealthy nations are, in the words of UN Secretary General António Guterres, “literally doubling down on fossil fuel production.”

In aggregate, according to the UN-led 2023 Production Gap Report, governments still plan to produce more than double the amount of fossil fuels in 2030 than would be consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 degrees C.

The report names the top 10 countries responsible for the largest carbon emissions from planned production: India for coal, Saudi Arabia for oil, and Russia for coal, oil, and gas. Major oil producers with big plans also include the US and Canada.

The United Arab Emirates is the host of COP28, due to start on November 30, and is presided over by Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, UAE industry and advanced technology minister and group CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company.

Of course, producers would not produce without customers. China, the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, approved the equivalent of two new large coal plants a week in 2022.

So, have we humans already pushed the planet to the point of no return, to a stage of cascading negative feedback loops already triggering a sixth mass extinction of species, the last being 65 million years ago when the dinosaurs were wiped out?

Perhaps not yet… quite… but maybe soon.

In the best judgment of the scientists on the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in their Sixth Assessment Report published this year, the world has a “rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all…The choices and actions implemented in this decade will have impacts now and for thousands of years.”

They said the same thing last year, but few listened then. Will they now?

Cuts in emissions must be deep and immediate, which is the crux of COP28. As Guterres and many others have shouted from the rooftops, world leaders must agree in Dubai to phase out fossil fuels and shut their ears to the lobbyists who have enabled their petro-state masters to earn billions of dollars in profit this year alone.

As the IPCC scientists also bravely note, there is, thankfully, some climate action. The rate of increase in global greenhouse emissions has slowed and may be peaking; costs of solar and wind energy and batteries have tumbled; the deployment of renewable energy has risen faster than expected; the rate of deforestation has decreased.

IPCC Chair Hoesung Lee did remind everyone last April: “We have the tools and know-how required to limit warming.”

The International Energy Agency’s latest World Energy Outlook 2023 also has some encouraging elements. An analysis of the IEA data by UK-based Carbon Brief suggests that global CO2 emissions from energy use and industry could peak as soon as this year. This is due in part to the worldwide energy crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. China’s slowing economic growth also helps.

Fossil fuel peaks are driven by the “unstoppable” growth of low-carbon technologies, but renewable energy capacity targets will be tripled by 2030, the IEA says. This has to be a key outcome of COP28, an element that China should approve of, given its dominance worldwide in this sector.

It is sad but also just that COP28 may, in the end, be best remembered for the man who will not be there.

Prof Saleemul Huq, Bangladeshi scientist and climate justice activist, died on October 28, aged 71. A man who constantly raised the great moral questions over the unequal sufferings inflicted by the climate crisis, Huq was seen as the champion of the “loss and damage” fund, which was agreed in principle at COP27 in Egypt but has yet to be implemented.

Recent preparatory talks made some progress, with developing countries conceding that the fund will be under the World Bank for an interim period. But the US still insists that contributions from wealthy nations historically responsible for the climate crisis be voluntary, while China insists on exemption given its “developing nation” status. COP28 must get this fund off the ground, and China, too, should stop playing geopolitics.

Named by Nature as one of the world’s top 10 scientists last year, Huq had penned an open letter to the UAE’s Al-Jaber urging him to pre-empt drawn-out debates by announcing the intended creation of the “Dubai Loss and Damage Fund.”

“As far as I am concerned, if all you can say at the end of COP28 is that ‘progress’ has been made on the issue of funding loss and damage, that will be the kiss of death,” Huq wrote, demanding urgent support for the “poorest and most vulnerable people on the planet,” citing by way of example the “over 2,000 climate displaced people” who arrive daily “by foot, cycle, boat and bus in Dhaka and disappear into the city slums.”

Another leftover pledge from COP26 in Glasgow was to double adaptation finance from 2019 levels by 2025. Provisions are dwarfed by needs. They are also dwarfed many times over by the subsidies given to fossil fuels, estimated by the IMF to reach $7 trillion globally last year.

Veteran scientists recently warned that Earth will cross the 1.5 degrees threshold this decade, much earlier than the IPCC fears on our current course. Either way, the trend is clear, and so are the actions needed. The world will judge harshly any failure at COP28 to redress climate injustice or declare a clear pathway to end the exploitation of fossil fuels.

Farhana Haque Rahman is the Executive Director of IPS Inter Press Service Noram and Senior Vice President of IPS; she served as the elected Director General of IPS from 2015 to 2019. A journalist and communications expert who lived and worked in Africa, Asia, Europe and North America, she is a former senior official of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization FAO and the International Fund for Agricultural Development IFAD.

IPS UN Bureau

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Peak oil was first up, followed by peak gas, gold and others, as if the world was draining natural resources like toilet roll panic buying in a lockdown supermarket. But should we now be worried about Peak Press?

Farhana Haque Rahman

World Press Freedom Day, child of the UN General Assembly, marks its 30th birthday on May 3 – still relatively young, but definitely showing signs of wear and tear.

Measuring the state of its vital organs is not an exact science. The Paris-based non-profit media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) compiles an annual and thorough medical bulletin, and the latest check-up, country-by-country, makes for mostly alarming reading.

There are common denominators in all the ailments afflicting press freedom around the world, but with each region or continent seeming to specialise in certain characteristics.

Asia is particularly worrying, with the common theme of muscle-flexing autocrats vying for absolute control of information and exercising what RSF calls a dramatic deterioration of press freedom. Post-coup Myanmar and China are the world’s biggest jailers of journalists. Afghanistan back under the Taliban is brutally repressive. North Korea brings up the rear of the rankings, again.

Hong Kong, under China’s imposition of the draconian national security law, fell 68 places in the RSF league table. Vietnam and Singapore also tightened their grip on the media.

Anuradha Bhasin, executive editor of The Kashmir Times recently wrote in The New York Times that his newspaper “may not survive Mr. Modi. His repressive media policies are destroying Kashmiri journalism, intimidating media outlets into serving as government mouthpieces and creating an information vacuum in our region of about 13 million people.”

This year Pakistan was placed at 157 among 180 countries on RSF’s World Press Freedom Index list. The country has been ruled by the military for more than half of it’s 75 years of independence since 1947. In a report last year, along with a list of global leaders who suppressed opposing voices, RSF named former Prime Minister Imran Khan as one of the “predators of press freedom”.

Repression is dressed up in legislation as seen in Bangladesh’s Digital Security Act, passed in 2018 and applied to journalists, activists and others.Two days after a journalist with Prothom Alo was detained, the UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk called on Bangladesh to suspend application of the DSA immediately.

Where Asia can be ruthless and draconian, it is lawlessness and societal fragmentation that make parts of Latin America the most dangerous place for journalists. Mexico and Haiti lead the way. At least 67 journalists and media workers were killed in 2022, an increase of almost 50 percent on 2021, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Research published by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found that 30 to 42 media workers were killed in Latin America in the line of duty.

Rocío Gallegos, a journalist and co-founder of La Verdad Juárez, an investigative journalism outlet in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, was quoted as saying the situation is desperate and complex, not just due to growing conditions for violence, but because there is “less and less support from society towards journalists and journalism.”

Courageous reporters like Gallegos and the underground citizen journalists covering Myanmar’s horrific civil war inspire us, and lend hope to the survival of the ideals of a free press.

But it is in the West, the cradle of a free media, that we can feel most cynicism over the frightening erosion of media credibility led by its very own moguls and conglomerates.

The wanton and deliberate peddling of conspiracy theories over the 2020 US election results by Fox News (among others) was laid bare by the defamation case brought by Dominion Voting Systems. Fox settled out of court for $787 million in damages. Its lies were not trivial as we know. Five people died as a result of the January 2021 storming of the US Capitol by a mob of Donald Trump’s supporters.

Democracies need truth-telling media to flourish, and it was telling that much of the media coverage focused instead on 92-year-old Rupert Murdoch and his family succession machinations.

Fox News was – and quite possibly will remain — the ultimate mainstream player in the theatre of performance media, where facts don’t get in the way of a good conspiracy.

The recent demise of BuzzFeed News and its Pulitzer-prize winning department can also be seen as marking the end of an era. The suggestion by its founder, Jonah Peretti, that there may not be a sustainable business model for high-quality online news should be ringing alarm bells everywhere.

To add to this potentially toxic mix, where social media platforms become a blurry cauldron of conspiracy theories and state-sponsored disinformation, we now have to contend with the new disruptive age of ChatGPT.

The polarisation of the press in the West and its weaponisation in superpower conflicts are highly damaging trends. Russia’s arrest of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and China’s detention of Taiwan publisher Li Yanhe are the most recent examples. A possible Biden-Trump rematch in the 2024 US elections, and the dangerous deterioration in Sino-US relations threaten to exacerbate both polarisation and weaponisation of the media.

As for Peak Oil – the world may have passed that point already, and economists are debating whether 2019 was when overall fossil fuel demand reached its zenith. There are many reasons for this historic shift, not least that the alternatives, such as renewable energy, are becoming cheaper.

But what is the substitute for a free and healthy press – the lifeblood of free and healthy societies? The alternatives are clearly on view all around us and they don’t look good.

Farhana Haque Rahman is Senior Vice President of IPS Inter Press Service and Executive Director IPS Noram; she served as the elected Director General of IPS from 2015-2019. A journalist and communications expert, she is a former senior official of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the International Fund for Agricultural Development.

https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/world-press-freedom-day-2023

IPS UN Bureau

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

A year that started with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and is ending with famine in Africa, while still spreading death and misery through an enduring pandemic and a deteriorating climate crisis — 2022 has been an apocalyptic warning of the frailty of our planet and the woeful shortcomings of humankind.

Farhana Haque Rahman

Tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians (numbers given by the UN and involved parties vary enormously) have been killed in Ukraine since Russia launched war on February 24. More than 7.8 million Ukrainians have fled the country. Billions of dollars have been spent on armaments.

But the impact of the war has been felt worldwide, driving up prices of basic commodities such as oil, gas, grain, sunflower oil and fertilisers. Somalia, now in the grip of the worst drought to hit the Horn of Africa in 40 years, used to import 90 per cent of its wheat from Russia and Ukraine.

Commodities have been weaponised. Countries slipped back into recession, just as they were slowly recovering from the economic distress of Covid-19 lockdowns. A deepening relationship between sanctioned Russia and an energy- hungry China exacerbated existing tensions with the US over Taiwan. The result? China broke off climate cooperation efforts with the US in the run-up to the COP27 climate conference hosted by Egypt in November with 200 countries and 35,000 people attending.

Against the backdrop of devastating floods in Pakistan and West Africa, and with 2022 on its way to becoming one of the five hottest years on record, agriculture and food security joined the COP27 agenda. Talks ran into extra time, as they tend to, and countries of the global South emerged with the landmark creation of a special fund paid by wealthier countries to address the Loss and Damage caused by climate change in the most vulnerable nations.

“After 30 contentious years, delayed tactics by wealthy countries, a renewed spirit of solidarity, empathy and cooperation prevailed, resulting in the historic establishment of a dedicated fund,” said Yamide Dagnet, director for climate justice at the Open Society Foundations, reflecting a sense of hard fought victory among developing countries.

Still unresolved however is which countries will give money and to whom. China in particular seems uneasy over which category it belongs to. However COP27 joined its 26 forerunners since 1995 in not reaching a binding agreement on cutting fossil fuel burning which has continued to rise globally, except for a brief pandemic dip. For this, many branded it a failure. “Humanity has a choice: cooperate or perish. It is either a Climate Solidarity Pact – or a Collective Suicide Pact,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the opening plenary session. By the end, many felt the conference had concluded with the latter. Rather than falling, the latest estimates from the Global Carbon Project show that total worldwide CO2 emissions in 2022 have reached near-record levels.

Victims of devastating floods, heatwaves and forest fires, and severe drought in Central Sahel and East Africa surely needed no confirmation from the final decision text of COP27 which recognises “the fundamental priority of safeguarding food security and ending hunger” and the vulnerability of food production to climate change.

In this respect, COP27 recognised the importance of nature-based solutions – a theme driven by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in ringing alarm bells on the degraded soil, water sources and eco-systems caused by intensive agriculture with overuse of fertilisers and pesticides. According to FAO, more than 25 percent of arable soils worldwide are degraded, and the equivalent of a football pitch of soil is eroded every five seconds. The planet’s bio-diversity is being devastated as a result. As highlighted by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) in stressing the vital connections between Nature and people, a landmark report in July found that 50,000 wild species provide food, cosmetics, shelter, clothing, medicine and inspiration. Many face extinction. As international agencies and NGOs (and media outlets) jostled and competed for funding to deal with the fallout from wars and climate emergencies, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) which is active in the Sahel cautioned that only 1.7 per cent of all climate finance reaches small-scale producers in developing countries and as little as 8% of overseas aid goes to projects focused primarily on gender equality. Women’s empowerment has been made a major focus of ASAP+, IFAD’s new climate change financing mechanism.

Women and girls are paying “an unacceptably high price” among communities hit by severe drought in the Horn of Africa, according to the UN Population Fund (UNFPA). It launched a $113.7 million appeal to scale-up life-saving reproductive health and protection services, including establishment of mobile and static clinics in displacement sites.

Also overshadowed by wars and pandemics in 2022 were marginalised communities lacking a voice, suffering diseases such as leprosy or exploited in the form of child labour.

Yohei Sasakawa, WHO Goodwill Ambassador for Leprosy Elimination, says many issues have been sidelined because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Society has the knowledge and means to stop and cure leprosy, he says in the ‘Don’t Forget Leprosy’ campaign by the Sasakawa Leprosy Initiative.

“When people are still being discriminated against even after being cured, society has a disease. If we can cure society of this disease—discrimination—it would be truly epoch-making,” he told IPS.

A similar message was delivered by Nobel Laureate Kailash Satyarthi who told the 5th Global Conference on the Elimination of Child Labour that a mere $53 billion per annum – equivalent to 10 days of military spending – would ensure all children in all countries benefit from social protection. International Labour Organisation and UNICEF statistics from 2020 show at least 160 million children are involved in child labour, a surge of 8.4 million in four years. Children denied education became a burning issue in Afghanistan in March when the Taliban declared that girls would be banned from secondary education. The UN said 1.1 million girls were affected. The late-night reversal of a decision by Taliban authorities to allow girls from grades 7 to 12 to return to school was met with outrage and distress, inside and outside Afghanistan. Denial of human rights to girls and women has fuelled the desire of many to get out of Afghanistan and seek a better life elsewhere, adding to the millions around the world forced to flee their homes because of conflict, repression or disaster. The Ukraine conflict has displaced more than 14 million people, about a third of the population.

A UN Office on Drugs and Crime report on trafficking warns that refugees from Ukraine are at risk of including sexual exploitation, forced labour, illegal adoption and surrogacy, forced begging and forced criminality.

As they come over border crossings into Poland, refugees – including victims of rape – are greeted with posters and flyers carrying warnings about jail terms for breaking local abortion laws, images of miscarried foetuses, and a quote from Mother Theresa saying: “Abortion is the greatest threat to peace”.

UNDP, which is assisting the Ukraine government in getting access to public services for IDPs, says in its 2022 report, Turning the tide on internal displacement, that earlier and increased support to development is an essential condition for emerging from crisis in a sustainable way.

“More efforts are needed to end the marginalization of internally displaced people, who must be able to exercise their full rights as citizens including through access to vital services such as health care, education, social protection and job opportunities” said Achim Steiner, UNDP Administrator.

Nearly one million Rohingya refugees languishing in refugee camps in Bangladesh after being driven out of Myanmar in waves since 2016 would surely agree.

Asif Saleh, executive director of BRAC, said to be the world’s largest NGO and founded by Sir Fazle after the independence of Bangladesh in 1972, says work needs to “shift towards a development-like approach from a very short-term humanitarian crisis-focused approach”. But the only solution for the Rohingya refugees is their sustainable and voluntary repatriation to Myanmar. As 2022 closes, that unfortunately looks highly unlikely as the military junta that seized power in 2021 fights ethnic armed organisations on multiple fronts.

There was one seismic milestone event that happened in late 2022 although no one is quite sure exactly where and when. The few people to witness it were not aware either – not that it prevented the UN from declaring it a special day. The birth of the 8 billionth person was celebrated on November 15. The world’s population has doubled from 4 billion in 1974 and UN projections suggest we will be supporting about 9.7 billion people in 2050. Global population is forecast to peak at about 10.4 billion in the 2080s.

Inger Andersen, executive director of the UN environment programme, sent a message to the baby, and the rest of the world, as countries meet in Montreal for the COP15 biodiversity conference this month.

“We’ve just welcomed the 8 billionth member of the human race on this planet. That’s a wonderful birth of a baby, of course. But we need to understand that the more people there are, the more we put the Earth under heavy pressure,” she said.

Farhana Haque Rahman is Senior Vice President of IPS Inter Press Service and Executive Director IPS Noram; she served as the elected Director General of IPS from 2015-2019. A journalist and communications expert, she is a former senior official of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the International Fund for Agricultural Development.

IPS UN Bureau

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

By Farhana Haque Rahman
TORONTO, Canada, Apr 29 2022 (IPS)

Empowered by a global pandemic and the drum beats of war, the strongest despots are growing more despotic, and criminal cartels even more brazen in their violence. Extremists of various hues are also stepping out of the shadows.

Just when the world most needs press freedom to thrive, the liberties that societies only really treasure when they are emasculated are coming under more pressure from different directions, old and new.

Farhana Haque Rahman

Lest you think that this deterioration is the preserve of less developed countries under autocratic rule, RSF noted an increase in attacks against journalists and arbitrary arrests in Germany, France, Italy and several other European states.

This year –as we approach World Press Freedom Day on May 3 — is measurably worse already, notably in Russia and China, but also in Mexico with an escalation of targeted killings of journalists by suspected drug traffickers.

Some 200 Russian journalists and several dozen foreign reporters have left Russia since the passing of a draconian media law on March 4 which criminalises “deliberately false” information. It outlaws calling the invasion of Ukraine a “war”. In addition Russia is still applying its “foreign agents” legislation to punish and intimidate critical media outlets, including PASMI dedicated exclusively to fighting corruption.

“The Russian authorities’ crackdown on independent media is escalating at breakneck speed. Evidently unsatisfied with merely blocking critical news sites or forcing reporters into exile, the Kremlin now seeks to incarcerate journalists who report on anti-war protests or Russian soldiers who refuse to fight in Ukraine,” Amnesty International said on April 14 commenting on the arrests of two journalists in the Russian republics of Altay and Khakassia.

“Apart from state propaganda, there is no media landscape in Russia,” Journalist Alexey Kovalyov, now based in Riga, told Al Jazeera. The power of that propaganda must not be underestimated. Accounts are widespread of people living in Ukraine telling relatives in Russia that they are being bombed by the Russian army but their own family members refuse to believe them.

The “world’s biggest jailer of press freedom defenders”, reports RSF, is however China, with 115 men and women currently incarcerated. China ranks 177 out of the 180 countries and territories surveyed. “Media freedom in China is declining at breakneck speed,” the Foreign Correspondents Club (FCC) stated in January. China has labelled the FCC an “illegal organisation” and appears in its rhetoric to be encouraging an exodus of foreign journalists.

Free media in Hong Kong, once among the freest in Asia, has been almost completely dismantled, according to Hong Kong Watch, a UK-based advocacy group. Its recent report followed the HK FCC’s announcement it would suspend its Human Rights Press Awards as it risked violating the city’s national security law imposed by Beijing in 2020.

Whereas Russia and China are deploying “lawfare” against independent journalists and big companies in developed countries are stifling the press with “vexatious” lawsuits, it is more a legal wasteland or absence of the state that is killing journalists in Mexico, among others.

A wave of murders has targeted at least eight journalists so far this year, with seven killed in all of 2021, making Mexico under populist President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador one of the most dangerous countries for the press. Journalists, in the words of Adela Navarro Bello, director of the Tijuana weekly Zeta, are “caught in the crossfire between the threats and bullets of narco-traffickers and organised crime and the threats and verbal attacks and attempts to morally annihilate us from the federal and state governments”.

International human rights organisation Article 19 says the Mexican government’s denial of what is happening “results in no urgent measures being taken to stop this brutal spiral of violence”.

A similar pattern is seen in Bangladesh where suspected narco-traffickers killed Bangladeshi journalist Mohiuddin Sarker Nayeem on April 13.

The Committee to Protect Journalists publishes an annual Global Impunity Index and notes that no one has been held to account in 81% of journalist murders worldwide over the past 10 years. Somalia tops the list, with Mexico ranked 6th and Bangladesh 11th.

State-sponsored or tolerated violence and political persecution aside, world press freedom is also being eroded in an insidious way in places where such freedoms are commonly understood to be vital in sustaining well-functioning democracies. Coupled with the apparently unstoppable rise of social media as a source of information – some surveys suggest 50% of adults in the US and UK get their news from social media – the state of much of the traditional press, digital or not, is far from healthy.

The annual Digital News Report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found the US ranked last in media trust, at 29%, among 92,000 news consumers polled in 46 countries. (Finland came top).

Governments must not be passive while the same powerful corporate lobbies that have spent fortunes over decades spreading climate dis/misinformation in traditional media now feed on the rapacity of Big Tech social media, which are failing to disclose comprehensive policies to combat this. Climate disinformation as a threat to climate action is highlighted in the latest UN Climate Reports.

Press offices of international organisations, particularly the UN and large INGOs, also have a particular responsibility to uphold media freedom by eschewing the corporate dark arts of delay, denial and obfuscation.

A new proposal by the EU executive to protect journalists and campaigners from so-called vexatious lawsuits is highly welcome. The move would target “strategic lawsuits against public participation” known as Slapps, where the rich misuse legal means to silence troublesome investigative reporters and NGOs.

No press freedom, no democracy. Just like freedom of speech, that does not mean a free press can publish whatever it wants. Both need to be defined and, in these very dark times, defended.

Farhana Haque Rahman is Senior Vice President of IPS Inter Press Service and Executive Director IPS North America, including it’s UN Bureau; she served as the elected Director General of IPS from 2015-2019. A journalist and communications expert, she is a former senior official of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the International Fund for Agricultural Development.

IPS UN Bureau

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Excerpt:

Ambassador Cindy Hensley McCain, Permanent Representative of the United States to the food and agriculture organizations of the United Nations is pictured here with a community involved in an FAO climate smart agriculture project. Credit: FAO

By Farhana Haque Rahman and Sania Farooqui
Rome, Mar 21 2022 (IPS)

In an exclusive interview with IPS, Ambassador Cindy Hensley McCain, Permanent Representative of the US Mission to the food and agriculture organizations of the United Nations in Rome, Italy, shares her thoughts on food security, sustainable food systems, the impact of climate change on food production, conflicts and the ongoing crisis in Ukraine, and her plans while working with the Food Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO), International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and World Food Programme (WFP) with Farhana Haque Rahman and Sania Farooqui.

The Biden Administration swore in Ambassador Cindy Hensley McCain to serve as Permanent Representative of the US Mission to the UN Agencies in Rome on November 5, 2021.  She has dedicated her life to improving the lives of those less fortunate both in the United States and worldwide. She is the former Chair of the Board of Trustees of the McCain Institute for International Leadership at Arizona State University, where she oversaw the organization’s focus on advancing character-driven global leadership based on security, economic opportunity, freedom, and human dignity, as well as chairing the Institute’s Human Trafficking Advisory Council.

In addition to her work at the McCain Institute, she served on the Board of Directors of Project CURE, CARE, Operation Smile, HaloTrust, and the Advisory Boards of Too Small To Fail and Warriors and Quiet Waters. She was the chairperson of her family’s business, Hensley Beverage Company, one of the largest Anheuser-Busch distributors in the US.  McCain is the wife of the late US Senator John McCain.  Together, they have four children.

IPS: There has been a dramatic worsening of world hunger since 2020. While the pandemic’s impact is yet to be fully mapped, according to WHO, more than 2.3 billion people (or 30 percent of the global population) have lacked year-round access to adequate food, and malnutrition continues to persist in all its forms, with children paying a high price. What are your concerns on this crisis, and what can be done to achieve food security and improve nutrition within reach of all those impacted?

UN Mission Embassy, Ambassador of the United States to the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture, Cindy McCain.
Credit: UN/Cristiano Minichiello.

Cindy McCain: In my new role as US Ambassador to the UN Agencies in Rome, my top priority is to bring high-level attention to the urgent food security crisis that you mention, one that is being felt particularly in places like Afghanistan, Yemen, the Horn of Africa, the Sahel, and now Ukraine. I also want to raise the alarm about the broader, far-reaching threats to our global food systems—and to work together with other members of the United Nations to build resilient, sustainable food systems for everyone.

IPS: The FAO has said that the land and water resources farmers rely on are stressed to a ‘breaking point’, and there will be two billion more mouths to feed by 2050. What are your thoughts on this, and what can be done to find sustainable solutions and adapt to these changing climate challenges?

McCain: To meet these challenges, we need to dramatically ramp up innovation and cooperation to both mitigate and adapt to climate change, particularly in agriculture.  Our food systems are vulnerable, and the sector must urgently adapt.

Agriculture must also be part of the solution to climate change.  Food production and food systems, in general, are responsible for a quarter to a third of greenhouse gas emissions. We need new technologies, products, and approaches to food production, consumption, and food loss and waste.

At COP26, the UAE and the United States announced the creation of the Agriculture Innovation Mission for Climate, or AIM4C, with the goal of accelerating the search for breakthrough solutions in the agricultural sector.  AIM4C is promoting significantly increased investment in support of climate-smart agriculture and food system innovation.

Already, more than 40 countries and over a hundred partners – including Lightworks at Arizona State University – my home state, and the FAO – have joined forces under AIM4C.

Additionally, President Biden launched the Global Methane Pledge at COP26 with the goal of reducing global methane emissions at least by 30% by 2030, the minimum required to keep 1.5C within reach. The Pledge now has over 110 country participants, including six of the top eight emitters of agricultural methane.

We can cut agricultural emissions through measures that also enhance agricultural productivity in developing countries—which has the added benefit of reducing global pressure to convert rainforests to farms. For example, typical US and EU dairy operations produce milk with 1/8th the emissions of typical Indian and African operations.  Increasing productivity in developing countries benefits farmers while tackling climate change by cutting methane emissions and deforestation – it’s a win-win.

IPS: Climate change is threatening food production, which means there is a need for more investments, including creating new jobs to adapt to climate change to help small-scale farmers currently producing food for 2 billion people – or global stability is at risk. What is your view about IFAD’s new investment programme to boost private funding of rural businesses and small-scale farmers?

Ambassador Cindy McCain with women at an IFAD financed women’s cassava cooperative. Credit: IFAD

McCain: Truly sustainable food systems must be economically, socially, and environmentally sustainable.  IFAD is right to consider the private sector an indispensable partner in improving smallholder farmers’ access to markets, capital, technology, and innovation – the same tools producers in developed countries rely on.  These partnerships bolster rural resilience in the face of increased conflict, COVID-19, climate change, and other acute and systematic threats. The United States is proud to be IFAD’s largest current and historical donor.  We appreciate IFAD’s focus on the livelihoods of rural, smallholder farmers in the world’s least developed countries, who account for the majority of the world’s poor.

IPS: More than 800 million people across the globe go to bed hungry every night, most of them smallholder farmers who depend on agriculture to make a living and feed their families, many of whom are also women. What can be done to close the present global gender gap in agriculture and build sustainable futures for women farmers?

McCain: Women play a critical and potentially transformative role in agriculture, especially in developing countries where they make up over 48 percent of the rural agricultural workforce. They also make a crucial contribution to nutrition and food security by feeding their families and contributing to their communities.

Nonetheless, women continue to face persistent obstacles and economic constraints.  The FAO notes that, given the same tools as men, women could increase yields on their farms by 20–30 percent. This could raise total agricultural output in developing countries up to 4 percent, and production gains of this magnitude could reduce the number of hungry people in the world by 12–17 percent. That’s huge. We need to provide rural women and girls with greater access to the assets, resources, services, and opportunities that are available to men – especially land. Women still account for less than 15 percent of agricultural landholders in the world.

We know the promise women hold in agriculture, and we are acting on it.  Empowerment of women is a strong focus of Feed the Future, the US food security initiative with programs equipping women with the right tools, training, and technology to increase their production, improve their storage, and give them access to markets.

In the same way, all FAO, IFAD, and WFP programs have a strong focus on women.  Gender is an essential component of their work, providing extension services, technical and financial training, helping them to become successful producers, marketers, and entrepreneurs.  If we want to improve our food systems to be more productive and sustainable, we must invest in women farmers.

IPS: According to the World Bank, between 88 and 115 million people are being pushed into poverty due to the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. In 2021, this number was expected to have risen to between 143 and 163 million. Millions of people worldwide have been suffering from food insecurity and different forms of malnutrition because they cannot afford the cost of healthy diets. What could be done to build resilience to such shocks?

McCain: To achieve lasting food security for everyone, even the world’s most vulnerable people, we must strengthen and safeguard the entire food system – the land, the local economies, the supply chain, the farmers, and the communities that all depend on one another to thrive.  And we must reach for all the tools in the toolbox to build resilience and give people a chance to not just survive the emergencies but also grow and thrive in their wake.

That includes investing in cutting-edge technology, promoting climate-smart and water-efficient agricultural solutions, capitalizing on private-sector resources, expertise, and partnership, and improving access to financing, training, and markets. Building resilience, making our food systems more sustainable, doing more with less: this is the challenge before us, and it demands a united, global effort.

IPS: Conflict drives hunger. According to WFP data, there are almost 283 million people marching towards starvation, with 45 million knocking on famine’s door. Why do we urgently need humanitarian action towards the ongoing conflicts around the world?

McCain: We must continue to provide urgent humanitarian action to save lives wherever they are at risk.  As you noted, conflict is the biggest driver of hunger around the world today.  Sixty percent of the world’s hungry live in conflict areas. The food security situation is particularly dire in Yemen and South Sudan and in the northern areas of Ethiopia and Niger, where people are facing starvation.  And now we have a rapidly unfolding crisis in Ukraine, to which USAID and the UN agencies are all responding with emergency assistance.

The Ukraine crisis also risks exacerbating hunger in other regions of the world as wheat supplies from one of the planet’s major breadbaskets are disrupted.  That means markets must adjust, driving up the cost of wheat and other staples, which will affect relief operations in other parts of the world where people are desperately in need of food assistance. We must do our best to address and help resolve these conflicts by joining forces with other countries and the UN to push for diplomatic solutions.

IPS: The ongoing crisis in Ukraine is worsening every day, which could push thousands into a state of poverty and hunger. What are your thoughts on this?

McCain: Russia’s unprovoked and unjustified attack on Ukraine was a flagrant violation of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine.  It has unleashed a humanitarian crisis in the heart of Europe, with over 2.5 million refugees so far and probably many more to come. We have a longstanding partnership with the people of Ukraine and are very focused on the urgent humanitarian needs there.

The US Agency for International Development (USAID) has deployed a Disaster Assistance Response Team – our nation’s finest international emergency responders – to the region to support the Ukrainian people as they bear the brunt of Russian aggression.

On March 10, 2022, US Vice President Kamala Harris announced nearly $53 million in new humanitarian assistance from the United States government, through the USAID, to support innocent civilians affected by Russia’s unjustified invasion of Ukraine. This additional assistance includes support to the WFP to provide lifesaving emergency food assistance to meet the immediate needs of hundreds of thousands affected by the invasion, including people displaced from their homes and who are crossing the border out of Ukraine. In addition, it will support WFP’s logistics operations to move assistance into Ukraine, including to people in Kyiv.

The United States is the largest provider of humanitarian assistance to Ukraine and has provided $159 million in overall humanitarian assistance to Ukraine since October 2020, including nearly $107 million in the past two weeks in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This includes food, safe drinking water, shelter, emergency health care, and winterization services to communities affected by ongoing fighting.

IPS: Lastly, what is your take (personal thoughts) on your appointment by the Biden administration? Do you plan to visit some countries where the FAO, IFAD, and WFP are currently working? What are your thoughts on the current crisis in food and hunger, and what do you see happening by the end of your term? Are you optimistic?

McCain: I am honored President Biden appointed me to this role and very proud to be serving my country in my capacity as Ambassador to the UN Agencies in Rome. The work we do on food security here in Rome is crucial, and we need food security to be in the spotlight because, the fact is, everything else depends on it. I will be doing my best to bring the necessary attention to the challenges we are facing.   It is time for food security to take center stage in global security discussions everywhere.

I do indeed plan to do many visits to the field to see FAO, IFAD, and WFP at work.  In fact, I just returned from Madagascar, where a sustained drought is severely affecting the population in the south of the country, and to Kenya to see the work of our UN partners there.

Am I optimistic?  Actually, I am. The momentum around food security right now gives me great hope. At the Munich Security Conference this year, food security was finally recognized as a crucial part of global security. I participated in a food security town hall – a first and definitely not the last – at the conference. The UN Food Systems Summit last fall was an important recognition that food security is a systemic issue, that we all must work together to ensure we have sustainable and equitable food systems. At that summit, the United States committed 10 billion US dollars towards food security efforts at home and abroad, 5 billion US dollars of which we’re investing through Feed the Future, America’s initiative to end hunger and malnutrition.

With the newly released Global Food Security Strategy to guide the United States’ efforts, we’re increasing investments in partnerships and innovation to catalyze inclusive agriculture-led growth, eradicate malnutrition, and help people adapt to the perils of climate change.  There is a renewed focus on the need to address food insecurity, and we are putting tools in place to do just that.

Farhana Haque Rahman is Senior Vice President of IPS Inter Press Service and Executive Director IPS Noram; she served as the elected Director-General of IPS 2015-2019. A journalist and communications expert, she is a former senior official of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN and the International Fund for Agricultural Development.

Sania Farooqui is a New Delhi-based journalist, filmmaker, and host of The Sania Farooqui Show, where she regularly speaks to women who have made significant contributions bringing about socio-economic changes globally. She writes and reports regularly for IPS news wire.

IPS UN Bureau Report

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

By Farhana Haque Rahman
TORONTO, Canada, Mar 4 2022 (IPS)

For decades women’s demands for political and economic inclusion have placed them centre-stage in mass struggles against dictatorships across the world. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its indiscriminate attacks on civilians now put women’s movements firmly on the front line of war, autocrats and fossil fuels.

Farhana Haque Rahman

As Erica Chenoweth and Zoe Marks powerfully illustrate in their essay, Revenge of the Patriarchs – Why Autocrats Fear Women, this patriarchal backlash is also playing out in “illiberal democracies headed by aspiring strongmen”, such as Brazil, Hungary, Poland, India, the Philippines and even the United States under former president Donald Trump and still in some Republican-controlled states.

“Aspiring autocrats and patriarchal authoritarians have good reason to fear women’s political participation: when women participate in mass movements, those movements are both more likely to succeed and more likely to lead to more egalitarian democracy.”

Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who has basked in a hyper-masculine strongman image perhaps only outdone by Trump’s casual misogyny, has raged against Russia’s falling population and seen the answer in eroding women’s reproductive rights. Dealing women’s rights a further blow, domestic violence was decriminalised in Russia in 2017. Russian propaganda in Ukraine for years has also sought to erode the position of women in society, relegating them to “traditional” roles.

Just as women are resisting this patriarchal backlash, and literally taking up arms in Ukraine, so too they are on the frontline of the climate crisis, as recognised by the theme this year for International Women’s Day on March 8: “Gender equality today for a sustainable tomorrow.”

In the words of UN Women, a UN entity dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women which is also active in the Ukraine crisis: “Advancing gender equality in the context of the climate crisis and disaster risk reduction is one of the greatest global challenges of the 21st century…Those who are amongst the most vulnerable and marginalized experience the deepest impacts. Women are increasingly being recognized as more vulnerable to climate change impacts than men, as they constitute the majority of the world’s poor and are more dependent on the natural resources which climate change threatens the most.”

But women and girls are also protagonists, active as effective and powerful leaders and change-makers for climate adaptation and mitigation. “Without gender equality today, a sustainable future, and an equal future, remains beyond our reach.”

Which brings us back to tyranny and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

This is not a war for resources but it is about oil and gas, which Putin has weaponised to advance his expansionist goals. Europe is dependent on Russia for 40 percent of its natural gas supplies. Global gas prices, already rising because of the post-pandemic economic rebound, were driven further by Russia tightening supplies to Europe ahead of the invasion. Russia can also soften the blow of western economic sanctions with sales of gas to China.

Put simply, the more demand there is for oil and gas, the more money there is for Putin, which explains why countries like Russia and Saudi Arabia – waging war in Yemen with western support – are far from enthusiastic about combatting climate change. Russia’s gas industry is also a major emitter of methane, a highly dangerous global warming gas.

“As current events make all too clear, our continued reliance on fossil fuels makes the global economy and energy security vulnerable to geopolitical shocks and crises,” UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres declared on February 28.

Guterres was responding to the release of the devastating climate crisis report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which he described as “an atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership”.

“This abdication of leadership is criminal. The world’s biggest polluters are guilty of arson of our only home,” he added. “Fossil fuels are a dead end – for our planet, for humanity, and yes, for economies.”

All these elements were illustrated in dramatic fashion last week in a virtual meeting of IPCC scientists and government representatives to approve the report.

Oleg Anisimov, a Russian scientist, was reported as apologising “on behalf of all Russians who were not able to prevent this conflict”. The attack on Ukraine had no justification, he said.

Ukrainian scientist Svitlana Krakovska, speaking from Kyiv, had to cut short her participation in discussions because of the invasion but was reported as telling her colleagues:

“Someone could question us that IPCC is not a political body, and should only assess science related to climate change. Let me assure you that this human-induced climate change and war against Ukraine have direct connections and the same roots. They are fossil fuels and humanity’s dependence on them.”

Krakovska, who later expressed her concern for the safety of her Russian colleague, said while greenhouse gas emissions were impacting the planet, the easy use of coal, oil and gas had changed the balance of power in the human world. “We cannot change laws of the physical world but it is our responsibility to change laws of human civilization towards a climate resilient future.”

Osprey Orielle Lake, leader of the Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN), has echoed those words in her response to the IPCC report:

“From countries around the world, we must listen to frontline and Indigenous women leaders and their communities, who are not only experiencing the worst impacts of climate change right now, but who also carry knowledge and expertise necessary for real climate action, solutions and adaptation grounded in justice, human and Indigenous rights, and the protection of vital biodiverse regions.”

Indigenous, Black and Brown women and women from the Global South bear a heavier burden from the impacts of climate change. We stand in solidarity with all women who, like Krakovska in Ukraine, stand on these frontlines.

Farhana Haque Rahman is Senior Vice President of IPS Inter Press Service and Executive Director IPS Noram; she served as the elected Director General of IPS from 2015-2019. A journalist and communications expert, she is a former senior official of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the International Fund for Agricultural Development.

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Excerpt:

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

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

Farhana Haque Rahman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Whether desperately trying to get a place on the last evacuation flights out of Kabul or trekking to the borders with neighbouring Pakistan and Iran, tens of thousands of Afghans are fleeing their country once more.

Events are unfolding at speed. The Taliban are establishing a central government in the capital to fill the void of the collapsed western-backed administration, but they do not control all the country as the protracted civil war enters a new stage. The UN refugee agency UNHCR says that in its “worst case scenario” it is preparing for around 500,000 new refugees in the region by the end of this year. As with many past estimates that could prove optimistic.

Farhana Haque Rahman

Since the Soviet invasion of late 1979, Afghanistan has seen millions of refugees exiting its borders in waves, creating diasporas near and far. In periods of relative calm many have returned.

But this latest exodus faces a far more hostile world. The tide of international opinion, often driven by rejectionist nationalism, has been turning against refugees in general. Only just recently some western countries were deporting Afghan refugees. Newly erected barriers – whether fences or walls – are becoming the international norm. Refugee quotas have been slashed.

Turkey, already sheltering some 3.7 million registered refugees, has warned Europe it will not become its “refugee warehouse” again after the deal negotiated in 2016 to accept Syrian refugees in exchange for aid. Pakistan and Iran, already host to an estimated total of some five million registered and unregistered Afghan refugees, do not want any more. Britain, with all its historic connections, is opening its doors to only 20,000 Afghans over the next five years. President Joe Biden has authorised $500 million in refugee spending but it is unclear how many refugees might find a home in the US itself. Ottawa pledged to resettle 20,000 Afghan refugees threatened by the takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban. “Offering refuge to the world’s most vulnerable speaks to who we are as Canadians, particularly in times of crisis,” said Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino.

Worldwide refugee numbers keep rising and are at their highest since the Second Wolrd War. UNHCR’s Refugee Population Statistics Database shows that by late June there were 82.4 million forcibly displaced people worldwide, of whom an estimated 35 million are children under the age of 18. Nearly 70 percent of the total are from five countries: Syria, Venezuela, Afghanistan, South Sudan and Myanmar.

Yet it is the images and personal stories that carry so much more impact than the bare statistics. For Syria possibly the most devastating, and also far reaching in political terms, was the picture of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi lying lifeless on a Turkish beach, drowned trying to reach Europe with his family. Those pictures of Afghans packed into a US military transport plane have defined the chaos in Kabul, soon followed by the carnage of a suicide bombing.

But stories that do convey hope also make it seem possible to the public and donors that something can be done to help, even with relatively small amounts of money.

Naturally everyone displaced by conflict has his or her own story, although it must be recognized that some would rather not tell theirs for reasons to be respected. I have my own to share, briefly.

I first became aware of Afghanistan when, as a young child in the ‘60s in what was then East Pakistan I read in Bangla, Rabindranath Tagore’s short story “Kabuliwalah”. The tale of the kind, compassionate man who periodically left his family behind to sell goods he carried in a large sack and make loans to Bengalis made a deep impression, as did his sense of humour and his attachment to a little girl Mini, clearly a cherished substitute for his own children back in Kabul. He was at first a rather frightening figure, giving her treats from his sack, but he slowly gained her and her father’s confidence and respect.

My next contact with Afghanistan was more direct, fraught with danger. While a student in an all-girls British run college in Lahore, Pakistan, my country of birth Bangladesh became independent. I fled what was then West Pakistan, avoiding camps and a protracted repatriation, to reach the newly independent country, taking a hazardous route by ‘tanga’ horse drawn carriages, trucks and buses across inhospitable terrain and mountain through Quetta and the border crossing of Chaman into Afghanistan. Along the way, in no man’s land, armed smugglers extorted more money from our group of about 40, some of them families with children, and one night we had to trek over mountains, exhausted to the point of hallucination. Fearing death but quite ignorant of the danger of rape, dressed in a white ‘burqa’ throughout the perilous journey, monitoring with piercing eyes the movement of those who were temporarily my guardian angels, I made it to the Indian embassy in Kabul after spending days in a dilapidated farmhouse in Kandahar, and, with Indian ID papers, we were flown to New Delhi then on to Kolkata by train, eventually making it to Dhaka after 23 harrowing days. I was fortunate to make it; the new country was still reeling from a war that cost millions of lives. Nearly 50 years later that is so often not the case.

“The resilience of the Afghan people has been pushed to the limit by prolonged conflict, high levels of displacement, the impact of COVID-19, recurrent natural disasters, including drought, and deepening poverty,” UNHCR spokesperson Babar Baloch told a briefing in Geneva on July 13.

As the Afghan conflict intensified earlier this year, more refugees set out on long and hazardous journeys through Pakistan, Iran and Turkey towards Europe, often paying gangs of exploitative smugglers and people traffickers. Turkey, where authorities estimate there are already some 300,000 registered and unregistered Afghan refugees, is strengthening its border network of walls and fences. Greece, which sees itself as Europe’s ‘front line’ is doing the same.

Reece Jones, a professor of political geography, has researched how in recent decades countries have become inter-connected through complex networks of transport and communication, but the purpose of borders has shifted to become the place where the movement of people is controlled.

“Border security and the construction of walls have increased dramatically in the supposedly borderless world of globalisation,” he says.

As walls and fences go up, so do the dramatic increases in migrant deaths. More than 2000 migrants have died trying to cross the Mediterranean to Europe over the past year, according to the Missing Migrants Project of the International Organization for Migration.

Countries announcing new border barriers in recent years include Austria, Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Kenya, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and the “beautiful wall” of former president Donald Trump on the US-Mexico border. Lithuania is the latest, with its parliament voting in August to erect a metal fence topped with razor wire to keep out migrants, many recently from Iraq, crossing into its territory from Belarus.

Prof. Jones says the borders of the EU are “by far the most deadly” with roughly two-thirds of all migration related deaths occurring there or on the way to the EU. The high death rate, he says, is a combination of an extremely dangerous border in the Mediterranean sea coupled with increased enforcement that drives people to use smugglers and take more risks, as tragically seen in the deaths of 39 Vietnamese found suffocated to death in a refrigerated trailer near a UK port in 2019.

Walls did not work in the past and only divert but do not prevent migrant flows, but they are powerfully effective symbols used by politicians to demonstrate they are addressing perceived economic, cultural and security threats from migrants.

The EU, says Daniel Trilling, author of Lights in the Distance: exile and refuge at the borders of Europe, has perhaps the world’s most complex system to deter unwanted migrants, spending billions of dollars on surveillance systems and patrols on land and sea.

In reality the EU tries to prevent even genuine asylum seekers from reaching its territory, as by cutting aid deals with Turkey. The Syrian refugee crisis of 2015, when one million migrants and refugees crossed into Europe, triggered bitter disputes over collective burden sharing that remain unresolved.

While the last US and other foreign troops fly out of Kabul this week, ending a two-decade military campaign, UN agencies are remaining. The World Food Programme says it is “committed to stay and deliver as long as conditions will allow” and needs $200 million to get through to the end of the year. In the first six months of this year, WFP delivered food and nutrition assistance to 5.5 million people, including those newly displaced by fighting.

UNHCR is maintaining staff in Afghanistan and says that at present it is able to access all provinces and continues to work with 18 local non-government partners. “We call on donors to remain steadfast in their support for humanitarian operations in Afghanistan and are also appealing for support,” the agency said, noting that UNHCR’s Supplementary Appeal for the Afghanistan Situation is “drastically underfunded at 43 per cent”.

Borders around the world are being sealed to migrants and refugees, but the international community cannot walk away from Afghanistan and close its eyes.

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

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

UN Secretary-General António Guterres briefs the media on the socio-economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Credit: UN Photo/Mark Garten

By Farhana Haque Rahman
ROME, Dec 23 2020 (IPS)

Despite its grim record of multiple natural disasters and a deepening climate crisis, one could be forgiven for looking back on 2019 with a degree of nostalgia. There is no disguising the extent of the calamity wrought this year by COVID-19, yet as we approach the end of 2020 we may also draw strength from positive developments emerging.

No review of 2020, as seen through the eyes of IPS reporters and contributors around the world, could begin without paying our respects to the nearly 1.5 million people who have died from the coronavirus, many of them care workers trying to save the lives of others.

But the pandemic, declared as such by the World Health Organization on March 11, has inflicted much wider damage in exposing the frailties of governments, societies, economies and health systems, particularly in those countries that chose to ignore the warnings and advice of the WHO and played down the crisis.

The US administration in particular sought to hide its shortcomings by attacking and ultimately withdrawing from the WHO, while in contrast Rwanda, for example, had set up a COVID-19 joint task force even before the pandemic was declared.

But coming on top of the climate emergency, conflict and economic decline, COVID-19 has brought at least seven countries to the brink of famine, leading the UN to earmark emergency funding for Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, South Sudan and Yemen. But with international solidarity fraying at the seams, the UN is facing a massive funding shortfall for the estimated 250 million people needing humanitarian aid around the world.

Any hopes that the pandemic might persuade warring parties to cease fire have been dashed as well. New conflicts have broken out and old ones have resumed. Thousands are believed to have died in fighting in the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan. The Horn of Africa is being destabilised again as Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, winner of the 2019 Nobel peace prize for making peace with Eritrea, launches an offensive against the region of Tigray, driving refugees into Sudan where the World Food Program, the 2020 Nobel peace laureate, is struggling to cope.

This year, the 25th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, was to have been a landmark moment for gender equality, but the coronavirus pandemic has instead widened inequalities for girls and women across every sphere. While men are more likely to die from COVID-19, women are facing the full blow of the socio-economic fallout as well as seeing a reversal in equality gains made over the last two decades, according to an all-women panel of international thought leaders, meeting virtually for an IPS Webinar.

Susan Papp, Women Deliver’s managing director for Policy and Advocacy, told IPS: “To achieve the Sustainable Development Goals and have a strong response and recovery to COVID-19, we must apply a gender lens in order to address the unique needs of girls and women, and leverage their unique expertise.”
Instead, violence against women and girls, particularly domestic violence, rose sharply in many countries.

Racism too was back on the front pages with a vengeance, driven by police killings in the US of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor which sparked a wave of mostly peaceful but sometimes violent demonstrations across the world, fuelling the Black Lives Matter movement and demands for an end to racial injustice.

Prompted by the killing on May 25 of George Floyd in Minneapolis, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres made an impassioned speech, saying the values of reason, tolerance and mutual respect were being challenged by nationalism, irrationality, populism, xenophobia, racism, white supremacism and different forms of Neo-Nazism.

With communities under such stress, large economies shrinking and freedom of movement restricted, a fall in harmful global warming emissions was one dividend to be hoped for under lockdown. Alas, not much at all. The World Meteorological Organization, releasing its annual greenhouse gas bulletin in November, said accumulated CO2 levels in the atmosphere had clearly increased despite a cut in emissions of between 4.2% and 7.5%. “The lockdown-related fall in emissions is just a tiny blip on the long-term graph,” said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas.

Against such a dire backdrop, and with hopes of a reprieve dashed by a second wave of COVID cases and the new variant in the final months of 2020, IPS reporters continued to chronicle the valiant efforts of aid workers, activists, scientists and politicians, many well away from the COVID limelight.

With Africa acutely aware of the need to establish food sustainability and security for its rapidly growing population, the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) pressed on with its Enhancing Capacity to Apply Research Evidence (CARE) project, with funding from the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD),enabling 80 young African scholars to develop workable policies to expand agribusiness and youth involvement.

Improving nutrition is vital to tackling the Non-communicable diseases which have been critical in driving the death toll from the coronavirus. The need to address nutritional challenges through food systems has never been so critical, enhancing the importance of the UN 2021 Food Systems Summit, supported by the Barilla Center for Food & Nutrition which has ranked 67 countries in The Food Sustainability Index developed with the Economist Intelligence Unit.

The battle against communicable diseases goes on too, even tackling persistent and now relatively rare relics such as leprosy. While falling worldwide, cases have increased in Brazil in recent years however, and Yohei Sasakawa, WHO Goodwill Ambassador for Leprosy Elimination, insists he will keep working for a world where people affected by leprosy and all those suffering from various forms of social discrimination all have a place in inclusive societies.

This too should have been the year of COP26, the critical climate crisis conference which thanks to COVID-19 will be staged in 2021 instead, in Glasgow. Some governments have hesitated to step up their Paris Agreement commitments to cut emissions but the Dominican Republic’s President Luis Abinader arrived at his inauguration in August in an electrically driven car as a symbolic gesture of his intentions, working with the support of The Climate Action Enhancement Package (CAEP), an initiative of the NDC Partnership.

Devastating wild fires in Australia which continued into 2020 and the summer eruption of vast blazes from California to Washington state were a stark reminder that whatever happens with the pandemic, the world is still failing to act coherently in tackling the climate emergency.

Which takes us to those year-end signs of hope. Having defeated Donald Trump in the US elections, president-elect Joe Biden appointed former secretary of state John Kerry as climate envoy for when the new Democratic administration takes office in January. Four years ago, on behalf of the US, Kerry signed the Paris climate agreement, which Trump left and Biden has promised to rejoin, along with US membership of WHO. Kamala Harris, a California senator, will become the first female vice president of the US.

Biden’s victory and the news that COVID-19 vaccines by Pfizer are now being being distributed in a number of countries have shown high rates of efficacy leading us to hope that the pandemic will be in retreat within months – though a tough northern winter still lies ahead – and the US will once again soon play a leadership role on the international stage.

High levels of global cooperation are required, not just in ensuring that vaccines are distributed all over the world, but also in preparing for the next pandemic which could prove even worse.

Coverage of Covid-19 naturally dominated the news in 2020 but lockdowns around the world did little to slow the killings of reporters in the most dangerous of countries, with Mexico remaining among the worst. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 40 journalists and media workers were killed around the world in the first 11 months of 2020, compared with 51 in all of 2019.

Globally 274 journalists were jailed in 2020.

The toxic polarisation of US politics, as witnessed by the unedifying spectacle of Trump’s refusal to concede while making unsubstantiated accusations of electoral fraud, may outlive the pandemic, however. Populist-driven politicians like Trump and Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro have also corrupted public faith in scientists and expertise in general, at the risk of undermining a broad take-up of vaccines once approved by regulatory authorities.

This disastrous decline in respect of evidence-based truth came to the boil in 2020, fuelled by a rampant and mostly uncontrolled social media (even if Trump’s tweets did have health warnings attached).

Cynical manipulations of public opinion – be they for political or financial gains – make it even more vitally important that IPS Inter Press Service continues to give a voice to the voiceless and fosters evidence-based reporting of development news with a strong sense of social responsibility. In this IPS plays a unique role among news outlets.

Farhana Haque Rahman

As we stumble into 2021 preparing to rebuild and relaunch, the UN Secretary General has clearly defined the mission that lies ahead and the science and tools to help us.

“Our planet is broken,” Guterres warned in his State of the Planet speech on December 2, defining the “central objective” of the UN in 2021 to fight the climate and biodiversity crises which will involve building a global coalition to reduce emissions to net zero by 2050.

All nations are called upon to end fossil fuel finance and subsidies, shift the tax burden from tax payers to polluters, integrate the goal of carbon neutrality into all economic and fiscal policies, and help those who are already facing the impact of climate change.

The 2021 agenda has to be ambitious and radical. As Guterres said: “The science is clear…. We face a moment of truth.”

The author, a former senior official of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the International Fund for Agricultural Development, was Director General of IPS Inter Press Service, between 2015-2019. She is Senior Vice President IPS and Executive Director IPS North America.

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

By Farhana Haque Rahman
ROME, Apr 30 2020 (IPS)

Wearing an orange jacket and face mask, Li Zehua, a Chinese freelance journalist, can be seen filming himself in a car. He is sure that state security agents have been pursuing him since he began documenting events in Hubei’s capital Wuhan, the first epicentre of the COVID-19 pandemic. A second YouTube video, circulating widely since he launched his appeal, ends abruptly when two men knock at his apartment. He has just reappeared online after two months, saying police interrogated him and put him in quarantine and that he was well looked after during this period.

Other ‘citizen journalists’ like Li have also seemingly vanished after reporting and sharing images of the Coronavirus outbreak in China – inside hospital wards, in the crematorium, on the street. “The censorship is very strict and people’s accounts are being closed down if they share my content,” lawyer-journalist Chen Qiushi told the BBC in February. He is still missing.

Human Rights Watch says Chinese authorities are putting the same effort into trying to contain the virus as in suppressing criticism. In March, the Chinese government expelled 13 journalists working for three US publications.

Farhana Haque Rahman

The index, RSF says, shows a “clear correlation between suppression of media freedom in response to the coronavirus pandemic, and a country’s ranking in the Index” of 180 countries and territories. China (177) and Iran (down 3 at 173) censored their coronavirus outbreaks extensively. Iraq (down 6 at 162) punished Reuters for an article that questioned official coronavirus figures, and Hungary (down 2 at 89) has passed a coercive ‘coronavirus’ law.

The danger and long-term risks of suppressing press freedoms have been strikingly exposed by the pandemic. As the global death toll mounts amidst an economic crisis of unprecedented proportions, China stands accused of acting too late in warning the world about the timing and extent of the threat.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chungying followed up by questioning about the speed of the U.S.’s response to the virus after banning arrivals from China on February 2. Promoting transparent and free reporting in an interconnected world is a global necessity.

This is indeed not the problem of just one country. The World Press Freedom Index illustrates the oppression of journalists from the North to the South in what appears like a pandemic in its own right, regardless of the causes and of the political system.

Even the president of the world’s most powerful democracy, Donald Trump, has described the press as “the enemy of the American people.”

Yet it’s where institutions are more fragile or conflict is rife that the dislike of governments to be held accountable takes shape in typically authoritarian ways.

In Myanmar, eNay Myo Lin was arrested on March 31 charged with terrorism for interviewing a representative of the Arakan Army, a rebel group fighting for autonomy in Rakhine state. Bangladesh, on the other side of the border is seeing increasing violence against journalists.

Democracy is not enough to guarantee media freedom either. In India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi the press “is not so free, writes the New York Times. According to non-profit Pen America, “harassing critical writers and journalists not just in India but globally is a disturbing new low for Modi’s government that’s already put Indian democracy on its heels”.

But it’s not just governments making threats. Organised crime, corrupted officials and terrorism are also constant dangers. April 18 marked the anniversary of the killing of journalist Lyra McKee by a republican paramilitary activist during rioting in Northern Ireland.

So how do we challenge this kind of oppression and abuse in a world where, as Thomas Jefferson said, “the only security of all is in a free press”?

Ultimately, just as in a pandemic, the freedom of the press can only be guaranteed by a coordinated global effort and a focus on the long-term advantages of a more critical world. This means pressure to reinforce legal frameworks, including prosecuting harassers and killers, perhaps just as the international community would persecute war criminals, while offering a global protection for journalists. Finding and promoting innovative ways of subsidizing independent media, as well as getting big tech companies to pay for the content they share, is also crucial to help a free press to thrive.

Albert Camus, writer and author of The Plague, was also a journalist. As he once noted: “A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad.”

Excerpt:

As the coronavirus pandemic shifts around the world, now stretching even the developed health services of richer nations to breaking point, here at IPS our dedicated journalists in developing countries are standing strong in giving a voice to the Global South.

This means IPS, with its far-flung network of correspondents and contributors, is committed as ever to reporting from the countries least able to resist this pandemic but which remain beyond the glare of the mainstream media.

It also means continuing our coverage of fundamental issues that have remained at the core of our mission for more than 55 years. Recent articles we have posted, beyond our coronavirus news, include HIV testing in Africa, FGM in Djibouti, impact on the war in Yemen, afforestation efforts in Zimbabwe, women’s rights, human trafficking, agriculture research, food sustainability and the global climate crisis.

This global disaster could tear apart fragile countries already depleted of resources or stable governments to respond. The consequences are not hard to imagine for those caught up in conflict, with humanitarian aid disrupted and peace efforts derailed. Geopolitical tensions are already worsening in some cases, even as there is some hope that states at war or near-war will suddenly find a way to work together in confronting a common enemy. Not knowing when and how the virus will hit worst gives added urgency to our mission at IPS.

Farhana Haque Rahman

Local ownership, authenticity and diversity of views are core values of the IPS reporting network. Since its inception in 1964, IPS has believed in the role of information as a precondition for lifting communities out of poverty and marginalisation. Raising the voices and concerns of the poorest creates a climate of understanding, accountability and participation around development, promoting a new international information order between South and North.

More than ever, organisations like IPS are vital in the development of this new participatory system of global governance involving governmental, inter-governmental and non-governmental institutions. Effectively tackling the coronavirus pandemic requires reliable and trusted channels of information that translate needs and challenges, achievements and failures to all levels and spheres of our shared global responsibility, shaping and then monitoring the global response.

With a wide network of journalists spread in about 140 countries, we are truly a global media organization and we would like to salute our courageous reporters and contributors across the world who work and look after their families at the same time. We care for your safety. Your well-being is our priority.

IPS also thanks wholeheartedly its readers and donors for their generous support. Quality reporting cannot be sustained without funds. As an organization we have overcome crises before with you by our side. More than ever we need your help and generosity to get through this critical period. The marginalized and voiceless, with all their diverse perspectives, must not be left in silence.

Stay safe with your families.

Farhana Haque Rahman is Senior Vice President, IPS Inter Press Service

By Farhana Haque Rahman
ROME, Mar 5 2020 (IPS)

The narrative surrounding women’s rights in 2020 carries much hope and possibility. A new decade is ushering in important anniversaries and milestones: 25 years since the Beijing Platform for Action, 110 years since the birth of International Women’s Day and the 10-year countdown to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Farhana Haque Rahman

These dates are all significant of course, and their impact is sure to be positive to an extent, yet there is an undertone of wishful thinking that events in themselves can ignite powerful change, and a simplicity that disregards the more complex and insidious existence of systematic inequality.

These milestone moments will be written about, documented in the news, and read by many. But the opportunity for real tangible change gets diluted as we forget that actions perpetuating gender inequality are often normalised, taken for granted, and occur in social strata globally where the news of such events seldom reaches. International Women’s Day,for example, perceived by some as an unmissable opportunity to celebrate, campaign for, and protect women’s rights, is simply ignored elsewhere.

That’s the issue with these occasions and high-level discussions attended by those with access – they create a barrier to understanding for those who aren’t even aware they are occurring. They don’t form part of everyday life for those most actively affected. Women denied education won’t understand what specific legislation means for them, and women denied the opportunity to take autonomy in their lives are not going to be the ones in attendance, or those given access to the results. Women with the privilege of being part of such occasions are likely to have already a recognisable level of emancipation from explicit forms of oppression.

Campaigns for women’s suffrage began over a century ago and the first IWD has its roots in a 1910 session of the International Socialist Congress, although March 8 became accepted as the common date some years later, and was adopted by the feminist movement in 1967. The UN designated 1975 as International Women’s Year and has consistently recognised the annual honoring of women as a call for change and celebration of progress.

Political figures with an unequivocal platform to promote equality are becoming evermore visible. Germany’s Angela Merkel is widely respected for her strong opposition to nationalist and populist movements; Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand is hailed for her stand against hate and discrimination; Bangladesh has been praised for its assistance to one million Rohingya refugees driven out of Myanmar and Sheikh Hasina has been prominent on the international stage in seeking to resolve the humanitarian crisis. All women, all leading purposefully in situations that could easily perpetuate discrimination against so many. Barack Obama’s comments on women making “indisputably” better leaders are clearly justified by these game-changers.

The point here is that while 2020 could be a landmark year for gender equality, the efforts required to reach our goal have to be deliberate and far reaching. Just the instance of these events happening won’t have any measurable result.

Positive reinforcements of achievements do plant the seeds of change. The celebration of role models who represent shattered glass ceilings, the publicised calls for action, and the spotlight on game-changers all bring this possibility of change where women and girls can access conclusions to be reached this year. Having solidarity and a purposeful connection can nurture the strength to fight for the elimination of gender inequality. The girl in Nepalforced to sleep in a tiny hut during her period should hear about the government minister’s wife who became the first menstruating women in her district to spend a night in her own house. The woman who is reluctant to demand that she be paid equal to her male counterpart should hear about other women doing that. The girl consistently told that she is bossy when trying to take initiative should hear about female politicians and businesswomen who are widely respected for their leadership styles. The list goes on.

Access to the knowledge of a possibility of change is crucial. Giving those most affected by gender inequality the solidarity of a community which knows that change is possible will have a significant effect on igniting the shift in gendered practices.

With the SDGs acting as a blueprint for global efforts to eliminate poverty and inequality by 2030, the 10 years we have to achieve this are scarcely enough. More than half of the 129 countries measured in the 2019 SDG Gender Index scored poorly on SDG 5, which calls for international gender equality and the empowerment of all women. There is a serious question to be asked whether setting such goals are operationally viable. As the UN highlights: “The emerging global consensus is that despite some progress, real change has been agonisinglyslow for the majority of women and girls in the world.”

Complete elimination of gender inequality, and the genuine expectation for this to have been met in the 25 years since the Beijing Platform for Action, may be too far-reaching to even aspire to. It risks creating a defeatist mentality, a sense we just don’t have the means to get there. At what point can we confidently say that a country has achieved full equality?

Smaller, more manageable goals with a clearer path for completion, should be adopted instead. In this context it is also important to recognise the shortcomings of setting an absolute in the first place. Such is the volatility of human behavior that there will never be ‘complete’ equality, but there is much that can be done to make the situation better for all.

One of the arguments for the SDGs is that they provide a strong framework for action to be implemented by those in a position of power, such as equal pay for the same job, and access to reproductive health facilities. While these are crucial steps in giving women equality of opportunity, identifying legislative acts as indication of progress towards equality can givethe illusion that further action is unnecessary. This in turn drives more subtle and clandestine forms of gender inequality further away from public recognition.

Yes we should be celebrating these monumental events that bring to light incredibly important issues. IWD 2020, aptly named “I am Generation Equality: Realizing Women’s Rights” which aligns with the UN Women’s Generation Equality campaign, carries this torch. But do not let such moments obscure the painfully slow pace of progress and theinsidious existence of systemic inequality.

However the coronavirus outbreak means that these landmark events are likely to be much curtailed. The first major event to be knocked off course is a March 9-20 meeting in New York of the Commission on the Status of Women. It had been expected to draw more than 7,000 attendees, but will be shortened and scaled down after the UN urged capital-based ministers and diplomats not to travel. But instead of treating this as a setback, we should seize the opportunity to really push the agenda ahead without being bogged down in the usual meaningless formalities and empty platitudes.

Excerpt:

Protesters demonstrate against direction taken by climate change talks. Credit: Ana Libisch/IPS

By Farhana Haque Rahman
ROME, Jan 6 2020 (IPS)

Let’s face what lies ahead with open eyes: 2020 is going to be a very tough year for the world, and developing countries in particular. The infant decade has already begun with the harbingers of climate disaster as thousands fled to beaches in Australia from raging bush fires, and the Middle East braced for more conflict after a U.S. air strike in Baghdad killed Iran’s top general.

But even as the world needs a concerted and decisive response to its challenges, we risk more of the backsliding and indifference towards humanity that in 2019 characterised the behaviour of many powerful governments, from Australia to the United States, from Brazil to China.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has cited wars, the climate crisis, gender-based violence and persistent inequality in warning that the world is well behind meeting the deadlines of its 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The 2019 SDG report showed momentum for positive change, but also identified several areas that need urgent collective action: the climate crisis, human suffering, quality education, and gender discrimination.

Many countries and stakeholders have indeed responded with pledges of “SDG Acceleration Actions”. But we need to be brutally honest about the gulf between past promises and action.

Warning that the world will still have 500 million people in extreme poverty in 2030, Mr. Guterres has called for this to be a Decade of Action. But he surely didn’t envisage what President Donald Trump had in mind with the drone strike he ordered that killed Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad on January 3. Iran quickly pledged “tough revenge” and “World War III” was trending on Twitter.

Even without further conflict in the region, the proxy war fought in Yemen between Iran and Saudi Arabia is expected by the UN to continue as “the world’s worst humanitarian crisis” in 2020 after nearly five years of fighting. An estimated 24 million people, or 80 per cent of Yemen’s population, will remain in need of aid.

Worldwide 168 million people will need humanitarian aid and protection in crises across more than 50 countries in 2020, according to the UN’s emergency relief coordinator. The UN humanitarian affairs coordination office (OCHA) launched its Global Humanitarian Overview 2020 with an appeal for nearly $29 billion in aid from donors. “It is the highest figure in decades,” Mark Lowcock, head of OCHA, said, blaming climatic shocks, large infectious disease outbreaks and intensifying, protracted conflicts for an increase of some 22 million people in need last year.

Armed conflicts are already killing and maiming a record number of children, with women and girls at higher risk of sexual and gender-based violence than before.

The UN Children’s Fund UNICEF has called for $4.2 billion for its 2020 emergency appeal to reach 59 million children with life-saving support in 64 countries. This is more than triple the funds requested in 2010.

“Around the world today, we’re seeing the largest number of children in need of emergency assistance since we began record-keeping. One in four children lives in a country affected by conflict or disaster,” said UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore.

UN risk assessments were blown off course by worse than expected climate crisis-related events, such as drought, flooding and tropical cyclones.

But the world’s efforts to deal with the climate emergency have been dealt a most severe blow by the policies of Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro.

Deforestation of the Amazon, the world’s largest tropical rainforest, soared in 2019 to levels not seen in a decade. Protected areas have been opened to mining and agricultural conversion, and murders of environmentalists have increased. Commenting on the global picture, Rhett Butler, founder of the Mongabay non-profit environment website, says: “After a decade of increased deforestation, broken commitments, and hundreds of murders of rainforest defenders, the 2020s open as a dark moment for the world’s rainforests.”

Farhana Haque Rahman

But Mr Bolsonaro is also joined by Mr Trump, who will seek re-election this year, in abandoning climate leadership and damaging global conservation efforts.

The latest mantra for climate scientists and UN envoys seeking to broker global agreements is that “2020 is the last best chance” to turn the tide of the climate emergency. Under the 2015 Paris Agreement countries pledged to review and, hopefully, ramp up their efforts to cut greenhouse gases by this year, meaning that a lot of effort is needed ahead of the crucial UN climate conference, COP26, to be held in Glasgow in November.

As noted by climate news site Carbon Brief, with key emitters such as the US, Australia and Brazil hostile towards international climate action, a lot now hangs on China and the EU acting as one to maintain the Paris Agreement’s momentum.

But China, along with Brazil and India, have been called out by the Association of Small Island States as actively blocking ambitious outcomes in discussions on carbon credit discussions.

Last month’s COP (Conference of the Parties) in Madrid was widely viewed by climate activists as a flop.

Protestors outside the conference hall, including Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, demonstrated the yawning gulf between their aspirations and those inside of procrastinating governments.

The diplomatic Mr Guterres said he was “disappointed” at the outcome and said the major emitters of greenhouse gases need to “do much more” in 2020.

Indeed. Much, much more.

Excerpt:

The glaciers of the Andes Mountains are threatened by global warming. Credit: Julieta Sokolowicz/IPS

By Farhana Haque Rahman
ROME, Dec 16 2019 (IPS)

By any measure this has been a devastating year: fires across the Amazon, the Arctic and beyond; floods and drought in Africa; rising temperatures, carbon emissions and sea levels; accelerating loss of species, and mass forced migrations of people.

As seen through the eyes of IPS reporters and contributors around the world, 2019 will be remembered as the year the climate crisis shook us all, and hopefully also for the fight back manifested in the spread of mass protests and civic movements against governments and industries failing to respond.

Calls to combat the climate emergency were ringing in the ears of delegations from nearly 200 countries at the annual UN climate summit that opened in Madrid on December 2. Yet despite warnings that the planet is reaching critical tipping points, fears remained that the two weeks of negotiations would end in that familiar sense of disappointment and an opportunity missed.

“Do we really want to be remembered as the generation that buried its head in the sand, that fiddled while the planet burned?” declared U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres.

But the heads of government of the world’s biggest emitters were notably absent, including Donald Trump of the US, China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who refused to host the meeting, also stayed away rather than face a hostile reception. Protests against the fires sweeping Brazil’s Amazon rainforest and the government’s encouragement of deforestation are spreading around the world, especially in Europe. Youth is the new face of activism as inspired by Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg and others.

In one of many scientific surveys ringing alarm bells in 2019, a landmark report by IPBES, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, warned that more than one million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction, many within decades.

The climate crisis and species extinction are twin challenges with far-reaching consequences. IPS this year covered how drought in some areas of Africa is leading to re-runs of famine and migration.

The expanding Sahara desert is breaking up families and spreading conflict. The Sahel on the southern edge of the Sahara is the region where temperatures are rising faster than anywhere else on Earth. Projects such as the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification’s Land Degradation Neutrality project aimed at preventing and/or reversing land degradation are some of the interventions to stop the growing desert.

Farhana Haque Rahman

While much of the Horn of Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe are being ravaged by drought, small island states, especially in the Pacific, are sinking beneath rising sea levels or becoming more vulnerable to hurricanes and typhoons.

Irregular migration is on the rise, and has driven thousands to their deaths on hazardous journeys. The thousands drowned crossing the Mediterranean has led to projects like Migrants as Messengers in Guinea launched by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) which recruits returnees to raise awareness of the dangers.

People smugglers make money out of migrants with scant regard for their safety while other vulnerable people, especially women and girls, fall into the hands of exploitative human traffickers. As a major source of migrants heading towards the United States, Central America is an impoverished region rife with gang violence and human trafficking – the third largest crime industry in the world. Human trafficking has deep roots in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador for decades and, as IPS has reported this year, it increasingly requires a concerted law enforcement effort by the region’s governments to dismantle trafficking networks and help women forced into sexual exploitation.

Over 40 million people are estimated to be enslaved around the world. Presenting her report to the Human Rights Council in Geneva, UN expert Urmila Bhoola pointed out that servitude will likely increase as the world faces rapid changes in the workplace, environmental degradation, migration and demographic shifts.

Children from rural areas and disempowered homes are ideal targets for trafficking in India and elsewhere. Credit: Neeta Lal / IPS

Eradicating modern slavery by 2030, one of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, would require the freeing of 10,000 people a day, Ms Bhoola reported, citing the NGO Walk Free.

The UN refugee agency UNHCR says more than 70 million people are currently displaced by conflict, the most since the Second World War. Among them are nearly 26 million who have fled their countries (over half under the age of 18). But the response of many countries has been to erect barriers and walls.

And the plight of some one million Muslim Rohingya refugees, driven out of Myanmar into Bangladesh, shows little sign of resolution. Paralysis at the U.N. Security Council, where veto-wielding China can protect its interests in Myanmar, has triggered interventions by both the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice which are expected to sit in judgment over the atrocities.

Bangladesh is already struggling with the impact of severe cyclones in November and, as recently reported by IPS, long-term projects are helping its own climate migrants achieve food security. Because of government interventions in agriculture, Bangladesh has already achieved sufficiency in food. According to the Food Sustainability Index 2018 of the Barilla Centre for Food and Nutrition (BCFN) many farmers have substantially reduced fertiliser use and increased yields.

The SDGs made a solemn promise to eradicate hunger and extreme poverty by 2030, and that cannot be achieved unless the world’s smallholder farmers can adapt to climate change.

But since 2016 global numbers of hungry people have been on the rise again. In September a welcome $650 million of funding reached CGIAR, a partnership of funders and international agricultural research centres and formerly known as the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research.

At the other extreme, April is Reducing Food Waste Month in the United States, as efforts mount to reduce food loss and waste, and deal with growing obesity. For the U.S. and 66 other countries BCFN has produced a food sustainability index profile that dives into all the relevant sectors, ranging from management of water resources, the impact on land of animal feed and biofuels, agricultural subsidies and diversification of agricultural system, to nutritional challenges, physical activity, diet and healthy life expectancy indicators.

The Global Commission on Adaptation Report, launched in October, says the number of people who may lack sufficient water, at least one month per year, will soar from 3.6 billion today to more than 5 billion by 2050. Climate change has a disproportionate impact on women and girls who bear the brunt of looking for water.

Nutrition is the best investment in developing Africa, experts say, with evident correlation between countries with high levels of children under five years of age who are stunted or wasted and the existence of political instability and/or frequent exposure to natural calamities. The nutritional situation is worrying in Africa, Busi Maziya-Dixon, a Senior Food and Nutrition Scientist at the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture (IITA), told IPS with research showing all forms of malnutrition, including stunting, wasting, and obesity, are growing. “We need to educate our governments to link nutrition to economic development and prioritize nutrition.”

Overall investment in Africa continued to gather pace in 2019, however. Amid IMF warnings of a “synchronised slowdown” in global economic growth, 19 sub-Saharan countries are among nearly 40 emerging markets and developing economies forecast to maintain GDP growth rates above 5 percent this year. Particularly encouraging for Africa is that its present growth leaders are richer in innovation than natural resources.

Small steps can bring big results by simply getting together. In September Manila hosted the first ever global forum for people with Hansen’s disease, commonly known as leprosy. Participants from 23 countries across Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean shared common challenges at the forum organised by The Nippon Foundation (TNF) and Sasakawa Health Foundation (SHF). Last week in Bangladesh, the country’s National Leprosy Programme, in collaboration with the TNF and SHF brought together hundreds of health workers, medical professionals and district officers to discuss the issue under the theme “Zero Leprosy Initiatives”. Prime Minister of Bangladesh Sheikh Hasina who opened the Congress said, if special attention is given to its northern region and the Chittagong Hill Tracts, it is quite possible to declare Bangladesh a leprosy free country before 2030.

All in all however, the SDGs are in trouble, with the U.N. Secretary-General warning in July that a “much deeper, faster and more ambitious response is needed to unleash the social and economic transformation needed to achieve our 2030 goals”. A 478-page study by independent experts drove the message home.

Lastly, as 2019 draws to a close, let’s pay tribute to all those reporters around the world who have bravely covered these issues, spreading knowledge and defending press freedoms despite obvious dangers and more insidious campaigns of vilification.

Excerpt:

Climate change effects, such as extreme weather events, drive up environmental remediation costs. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Farhana Haque Rahman
ROME, Dec 2 2019 (IPS)

Mass public pressure backed by the weight of scientific reports is starting to bring governments to their senses as the annual UN climate summit kicks off in Madrid today.

But despite warnings that the planet is reaching critical tipping points, the two weeks of talks with nearly 30,000 participants and dozens of heads of government attending may still end in that familiar sense of disappointment and an opportunity missed.

The annual Conference of the Parties, this year being COP25, was to have been a highly arcane if crucial process of finding agreement on carbon markets, known in the jargon as Article 6 of the ‘rulebook’ to implement the 2015 Paris Agreement on stopping the planet from overheating.

Highly contentious, and in part pitting developing countries like Brazil, China and India against others, the Article 6 debate could not be resolved at last year’s summit – COP24 in Katowice, Poland – nor at meetings in Bonn in June and hence was left for COP25 to try and fix. The other big elephant in the room – setting more ambitious national targets to reduce carbon emissions – was conveniently going to be left to be settled at next year’s COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland.

But action is needed now, and senior officials representing nearly 200 countries have been put on notice that the climate emergency in all its forms is dominating the public sphere across the world. Just last week we saw student-led demonstrations and strikes in many places that appropriately fell on Black Friday, delivering a broadside against rampant consumerism as well as government inaction.

Farhana Haque Rahman

“We have watched a string of United Nations climate conferences unfold. Countless negotiations have produced much-hyped but ultimately empty commitments from the world’s governments—the same governments that allow fossil fuel companies to drill for ever-more oil and gas, and burn away our futures for their profit.”

UN Secretary General António Guterres has told COP25 that “the point of no return is no longer over the horizon”.

“In the crucial 12 months ahead, it is essential that we secure more ambitious national commitments – particularly from the main emitters – to immediately start reducing greenhouse gas emissions at a pace consistent to reaching carbon neutrality by 2050. We simply have to stop digging and drilling and take advantage of the vast possibilities offered by renewable energy and nature-based solutions,” Guterres said.

Just last month the UN Environment Programme’s annual Emissions Gap Report warned that the Paris Agreement ambition of keeping average temperatures within 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times was “on the brink of becoming impossible”.

Global greenhouse gas emissions in 2030 would have to be under 25 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent to reach that target but, at current rates of growth, emissions are projected to reach more than double that level. Clearly drastic action is needed.

Reinforcing the sense of emergency, the World Meteorological Organization reported that atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases reached new record highs in 2018. China is the world’s largest emitter.

Spain stepped in to offer Madrid as a venue for COP25 after Chile withdrew as host because of mass anti-government unrest. However Chile is still leading the conference and together with Spain will be pushing countries to act quickly to raise the ambition of their carbon emission reduction targets. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez says the goal is for “the largest number of countries” to commit to net zero emissions by 2050.

From 2020 to 2030, emissions must be cut 7.6% a year to meet the 1.5 degrees Celsius goal, the UNEP says.

However the main negotiation process in Madrid is expected to focus on the unfinished business of the market-based mechanisms to create and manage new carbon markets under the Paris Agreement. This would allow countries and industries to earn credits for above-target emission reductions that can then be traded. Big developing countries have already accumulated huge amounts of carbon credits under the previous but now largely discredited carbon credit scheme. It is a highly complex tangle of interests.

Carbon Brief, a UK-based climate website, says the Article 6 debate has the potential to “make or break” implementation of the Paris Agreement which comes into force next year.

“To its proponents, Article 6 offers a path to significantly raising climate ambition or lowering costs, while engaging the private sector and spreading finance, technology and expertise into new areas. To its critics, it risks fatally undermining the ambition of the Paris Agreement at a time when there is clear evidence of the need to go further and faster to avoid the worst effects of climate change,” Carbon Brief explains.

While Article 6 is a highly technical area, the underlying issues are political, with some countries forming unofficial alliances to defend their own interests rather than the common good of the planet. But politicians have been put on notice that this time the world’s public is watching closely. Horse-trading cannot be allowed to put our futures at risk.

Excerpt:

Rohingya refugees carry blankets at a camp in Bangladesh. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

By Farhana Haque Rahman
ROME, Nov 25 2019 (IPS)

Statistics and stories. When aid agencies appeal for funding to tackle the latest refugee crisis and journalists do their reporting, then these are the two narratives most chosen — one impersonal and the other upfront and individual. The sheer numbers can feel overwhelming. The UN refugee agency UNHCR says more than 70 million people are currently displaced by conflict, the most since the Second World War. Among them are nearly 26 million who have fled their countries (over half under the age of 18) and 3.5 million more are registered as asylum seekers.

Just last year, 13.6 million people were newly displaced, either as refugees crossing borders or as IDPs (internally displaced peoples). Syria accounts for the largest forcibly displaced population in the world, with nearly 13 million people on the move since war erupted in 2011, including 6.7 million refugees escaping across borders. Neighbouring Turkey is the world’s top host country, with 3.7 million displaced Syrians on its territory.

But then there are the images and personal stories that carry so much more impact than the bare statistics. For Syria possibly the most devastating, and also far reaching in political terms, was the picture of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi lying lifeless on a Turkish beach, drowned trying to reach Europe with his family. And the stories that do convey hope also make it seem possible to the public and donors that something can be done to help, even with relatively small amounts of money. Naturally everyone displaced by conflict has his or her own story, although it must be recognized that some would rather not tell theirs for reasons to be respected. I have my own to share, briefly.

I first became aware of Afghanistan when, as a young child in the ‘60s in what was then East Pakistan I read in Bangla, Rabindranath Tagore’s short story “Kabuliwalah”. The tale of the kind, compassionate man who periodically left his family behind to sell goods he carried in a large sack and make loans to Bengalis made a deep impression, as did his sense of humour and his attachment to a little girl Mini, clearly a cherished substitute for his own children back in Kabul. He was at first a rather frightening figure, giving her treats from his sack, but he slowly gained her and her father’s confidence and respect.

Farhana Haque Rahman

Nearly 50 years later that is so often not the case, and that is why we should consider shifting the dominant narrative, moving beyond the statistics and the stories to convey a fuller understanding of what is happening to these tens of millions of displaced people and why, particularly in Europe.

Reece Jones, a professor of political geography, has researched how in recent decades countries have become inter-connected through complex networks of transport and communication, but the purpose of borders has shifted to become the place where the movement of people is controlled.

“Border security and the construction of walls have increased dramatically in the supposedly borderless world of globalisation,” he says.

As walls and fences go up, so do the dramatic increases in migrant deaths. The Associated Press reports that 56,800 people died or went missing crossing a border from 2014-18.

Countries announcing new border barriers recently include Austria, Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Kenya, Saudi Arabia and Tunisia. President Donald Trump’s “beautiful wall” on the US-Mexico border was a popular theme in his election campaign. Britain is spending some $200 million on border security in France, including the building of a one-km concrete wall in Calais to stop people hiding
themselves in trucks crossing the Channel.

Prof. Jones says the borders of the EU are “by far the most deadly” with roughly two-thirds of all migration related deaths occurring there or on the way to the EU. The high death rate, he says, is a combination of an extremely dangerous border in the Mediterranean sea coupled with increased enforcement that drives people to use smugglers and take more risks, as tragically seen in the deaths of 39 Vietnamese found in a refrigerated trailer near a UK port last month.

Walls did not work in the past and only divert but do not prevent migrant flows, so why are so many going up? The answer is political. Walls are effective as symbols used by politicians to demonstrate they are addressing perceived economic, cultural and security threats from migrants.

The crucial legal distinction between who a legitimate refugee and an “illegal” economic migrant is one fiercely upheld by politicians and institutions. However, as noted by Daniel Trilling, author of Lights in the Distance: exile and refuge at the borders of Europe, the system of placing people into categories does not always fit the reality of their lives. And when the system breaks down, “people are cast into a legal and moral grey zone that lasts for many months or even years”.

The EU, says Trilling, has perhaps the world’s most complex system to deter unwanted migrants, spending billions of dollars on surveillance systems and patrols on land and sea. In reality the EU tries to prevent even genuine asylum seekers from reaching its territory.

“Asylum seekers are subject to particularly complex and often violent filtering. Once they cross Europe’s frontiers, their movement is restricted: they are locked up or segregated in accommodation far from city centres. Their right to work or to access social security is denied or severely limited. While their claims are being assessed, often by a process that is opaque, hostile and inconsistent, they
live with the threat that the freedoms they do have may be curtailed at any moment.”

A sense of panic and chaos is fuelled in the public by even twists of language, just as the media dubbed the Calais migrant settlements “the jungle”. The idea of a “global refugee crisis” may provoke sympathy among some, but it is also used by populist parties to spread the sense that we are at “breaking point”. More people are displaced by conflict than before but, as Dutch sociologist Hein de Haas points out, more than one in 10 migrants entering Europe do so legally. Well over 80 percent of displaced people remain in the developing world, such as the 4.5 million made homeless by scattered conflicts within the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), or 4.6 million Venezuelans who have fled their country, its economy in tatters and under US sanctions.

Over two-thirds of the world’s refugees come from just five countries: Syria, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Myanmar and Somalia.

In the future far greater displacements of people may occur for complex and interrelated reasons — war, the climate emergency, and outbreaks of diseases like Ebola in the DRC. Rapidly changing circumstances can make refugees of people most unexpectedly. Solutions lie in policy and resources.

Can we change the narrative ?

Excerpt:

Nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented and the rate of species extinctions is accelerating. Credit: UN

By Farhana Haque Rahman
ROME, Nov 19 2019 (IPS)

Mottled and reddish, the Lake Oku puddle frog has made its tragic debut on the Red List, a rapidly expanding roll call of threatened species. It was once abundant in the Kilum-Ijim rainforest of Cameroon but has not been seen since 2010 and is now listed as critically endangered and possibly extinct.

Researchers attribute its demise to a deadly fungal disease caused by the chytrid fungus. As noted by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the skin fungus has devastated amphibian populations globally and holds the distinction of being the world’s most invasive killer, responsible for the decline of at least 500 amphibian species, including 90 presumed extinctions.

The IUCN’s Red List has expanded to cover more than 105,000 species of plants and animals, and its most recent update in July found that 27 percent of those assessed were at risk of extinction. No species on the list was deemed to have improved its status enough since 2018 to be placed in a lower threat category.

Human exploitation is often responsible, as with the now endangered red-capped mangabey monkey hunted for bushmeat while its forest habitat in West Africa is destroyed for agriculture; or the East African pancake tortoise critically endangered because of the global pet trade. Thousands of tree species now make the list too.

Farhana Haque Rahman

In its multi-faceted approach towards combating species loss, the IUCN has launched its First Line of Defence against Illegal Wildlife Trade program in eastern and southern Africa, engaging rural communities as key partners in tackling wildlife crime. But this is just a small part of a much wider challenge.

As Grethel Aguilar, IUCN acting director general, noted: “We must wake up to the fact that conserving nature’s diversity is in our interest, and is absolutely fundamental to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. States, businesses and civil society must urgently act to halt the overexploitation of nature, and must respect and support local communities and Indigenous Peoples in strengthening sustainable livelihoods.”

Jane Smart, global director of the IUCN Biodiversity Conservation Group, said the Red List update confirms the findings of the recent IPBES Global Biodiversity Assessment: “Nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history.”

More than one million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction, many within decades, “unless action is taken to reduce the intensity of drivers of bio-diversity loss”, according to a landmark report by IPBES, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.

It bleakly warns that the global rate of species extinction is already at least tens to hundreds of times higher than it has averaged over the past 10 million years, and the rate will accelerate if action is not taken.

A summary was released in May and the full report is expected to be approved soon, assessing changes over the past 50 years and offering possible future scenarios.

Frightening statistics detail how 32 million hectares of primary or recovering forest were lost across much of the highly biodiverse tropics between 2010 and 2015 alone. Put in perspective that totals an area nearly the size of all Germany.

“Ecosystems, species, wild populations, local varieties and breeds of domesticated plants and animals are shrinking, deteriorating or vanishing. The essential, interconnected web of life on Earth is getting smaller and increasingly frayed,” said Professor Josef Settele, co-chair of the report. “This loss is a direct result of human activity and constitutes a direct threat to human well-being in all regions of the world.”

Crucially, for the first time on such a scale of evidence, the report’s more than 400 authors rank the five main drivers of this global disaster. In descending order they are listed as: (1) changes in land and sea use; (2) direct exploitation of organisms; (3) climate change; (4) pollution and (5) invasive alien species.

Clearly such challenges are interwoven and cannot be tackled in isolation. Some species are affected by all of these main drivers, or a deadly combination. Researchers into the fungal diseases wiping out amphibians like the Lake Oku puddle frog believe the most important factor in the spread of the pathogens is the global trade in wildlife. Some have also suggested that local changes in climate have also enabled the chytrid fungus to flourish in new habitats.

That governments are failing to address these warnings comes as little surprise, however.

“Despite 40 years of global climate negotiations, with few exceptions, we have generally conducted business as usual and have largely failed to address this predicament,” declared 11,258 scientists grouped under the Alliance of World Scientists in a recent report, warning that the climate crisis is accelerating faster than most of them had expected and could reach potential irreversible climate tipping points, making large areas of Earth uninhabitable.

The UN Climate Change Conference, COP25, is to be held in Madrid from 2-13 December amidst severe signs of leadership stress. Brazil was to have hosted the summit but President Jair Bolsonaro ruled that out on his election and in the first nine months under his government over 7,600 sq km of rainforest were felled. The baton was then passed to Chile which pulled out because of ant-government unrest. And then this month President Donald Trump formally launched the process to withdraw the US from the 2015 Paris Agreement.

COP25 has unfinished business from COP24, held in Poland’s coal-mining area of Katowice, namely negotiating the final elements of the Paris Agreement ‘rulebook’. Work must also start on future emissions targets ahead of the crunch 2020 conference next November in Glasgow, in the knowledge that commitments submitted by governments and current greenhouse gas emission trajectories fall far short of what is needed to achieve the long-term goals of the Paris Agreement.

“Loss of species and climate change are the two great challenges facing humanity this century,” warns Lee Hannah, senior scientist in climate change biology at Conservation International. “The results are clear, we must act now on both…”

Excerpt:

The Pacific island of Kiribati is one of the countries worst affected by sea-level rise. Credit: UNICEF

By Farhana Haque Rahman
ROME, Oct 31 2019 (IPS)

Barely a week passes without alarming news of the most recent scientific research into the global climate crisis compounding a growing sense of urgency, particularly the impact on small island states from rising sea levels and extreme weather.

Latest findings suggest that several hundred million more people than previously thought are at risk of coastal flooding due to climate change. Climate Central, a non-profit research and news organisation, found data used in past calculations overstated the elevation of many low-lying coastal communities.

And for the people of the Bahamas who had just endured Hurricane Dorian, the most intense tropical cyclone on record to hit their islands, it came as little surprise when the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) soon after released its landmark special report on the planet’s oceans and frozen regions, warning of “multiple climate-related hazards” for coastal regions.

“The ocean is warmer, more acidic and less productive,” the IPCC report stated.

The “Blue Pacific” concept sees the island states establishing themselves as “large ocean states” and guardians of the region rather than “small island states”

Oceans are absorbing heat twice as fast as just two decades ago, with hundreds of billions of tonnes of melting ice raising sea levels at an average rate of 3.6 millimetres a year, more than twice as fast as during the last century.

If greenhouse gas emissions “continue to increase strongly”, the IPCC report said, then levels could rise more than a metre by 2100.

Some island states in the Pacific face becoming uninhabitable. As UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres noted while visiting Tuvalu, the sea level rise in some Pacific countries is four times greater than the world average, posing “an existential threat” to several island states.

Against this background the UN COP25 climate change summit scheduled to be held in Santiago in December had been dubbed the Blue COP, with expectations of a focus on the oceans and commitments of aid to poorer nations most at risk. So it comes as a serious blow that President Sebastian Pinera has just announced that Chile is calling off its hosting of COP25 because of mass anti-government protests rocking the country.

While the UN anxiously looks for an alternative venue (and Santiago had been the second choice after Brazil’s newly elected president, Jair Bolsonaro, pulled out of hosting it), the small island states of the Pacific will be making their voices heard as they seek to confirm themselves in the role of custodians of the world’s largest region.

It is an existential struggle but it is not a blame game however.

Farhana Haque Rahman

As Micronesia’s President David Panuelo declared last week in The Diplomat: “Rather than point fingers, we must all point the way toward solutions.”

“No single country created this problem, and certainly a small country like ours is bearing far greater responsibility for the solution than we ever contributed to the crisis in the first place. But we sit shoulder to shoulder in a coalition which has set a goal of growing economies while achieving 30 percent marine protection globally,” he wrote in a plea for action to save the oceans.

“Everyone must do more when garbage patches larger than entire countries float in the Pacific, and rising carbon dioxide levels increase ocean acidity and devastate coral reefs and marine life.”

The Pacific Community, the principal scientific and technical organisation in the region and founded as the SPC in 1947, counts 22 Pacific island countries and territories among its members who see themselves as the “tip of the spear” in terms of the impacts of climate change and their efforts to adapt.

SPC has recently established the Pacific Community Centre for Ocean Science (PCCOS) to provide the framework to “focus its scientific and technical assistance on providing solutions that will build, sustain, and drive blue economies in Pacific Island countries and territories” and support SDG 14 of conserving and sustainably using oceans and marine resources.

The SPC’s new and growing Pacific Data Hub is a public resource of data and publications on the Pacific across key sectors, from education and human rights to oceans and geoscience.

Such initiatives reflect how Pacific Island states have grown more assertive in their diplomacy, becoming more active in global multilateral forums and using their voices and votes for increased leverage rather than the old reliance on support from Australia and New Zealand.

The “Blue Pacific” concept sees the island states establishing themselves as “large ocean states” and guardians of the region rather than “small island states”. As stewards of the Pacific with their cultural identity shaped by the ocean, the Blue Pacific framework seeks to establish leadership on issues, with smart policies backed by scientific expertise and data.

As Micronesia’s president has reminded us, the climate crisis is neither abstract nor “tomorrow’s faraway challenge”. It is happening now and as the IPCC’s special report on the oceans and cryosphere warned in September the crisis is gathering speed, as seen in the recent acceleration of sea level rise.

In Antarctica the rate of ice loss tripled in the decade 2007-2016. May and August in 2019 were the warmest on record for the Arctic while this year saw the summer minimum extent of sea ice reaching a joint-second lowest in 40 years of satellite records.

As summarised by Carbon Brief, the IPCC warns that this accelerating ice loss, and the more rapid sea level rises it causes, will continue to gather pace over this century regardless of whether greenhouse gas emissions are reduced. The “likely” maximum rise of 1.1 metres by 2100 is some 10cm above the top-end estimate from its previous estimate, while a rise of 2 metres cannot be ruled out.

Such warnings were intended to provide input at COP25 for world leaders who face mounting calls to adopt more ambitious goals for carbon emission cuts. Those negotiations will not be happening in December in Santiago after all. An alternative must be found urgently.

Excerpt:

Africa Investment Forum 2018

By Farhana Haque Rahman
ROME, Oct 18 2019 (IPS)

Headwinds are blowing amid IMF warnings of a “synchronised slowdown” in global economic growth, yet Africa’s investment drive is still gathering pace, supported by intense international competition in development finance.

Despite the global slowdown, 19 sub-Saharan countries are among nearly 40 emerging markets and developing economies forecast by the IMF to maintain GDP growth rates above 5 percent this year. Particularly encouraging for Africa is that its present growth leaders are richer in innovation than natural resources.

While Akinwumi Adesina, president of the African Development Bank, admits to sleepless nights over the “headwinds” to African growth – primarily the US-China trade war – he remains excited over the continent’s prospects as the AfDB gears up for its annual Africa Investment Forum.

The November 11-13 gathering in Johannesburg follows major milestones achieved in 2019, notably the coming into force of the African Continental Free Trade Agreement, described by Adesina as a “phenomenal development”.

In May, 54 of Africa’s 55 countries became signatories to the initiative which aims to eliminate 90 percent of tariffs on goods and significantly reduce non-tariff barriers. The free trade area means to integrate Africa into a unified market with a population of over one billion and output of $1.3 trillion.

The AfDB does not gloss over the enormous challenges ahead, however, noting that 120 million Africans remain out of work, 42 percent of the population live below the $1.25 poverty line and about one in four in sub-Saharan Africa are undernourished. Africa is also most vulnerable to the global climate crisis, although it is the world’s least contributor to carbon emissions.

Akinwumi Adesina

At the UN climate crisis summit in September, Adesina announced the AfDB would double its climate financing to emerging economies to $25 billion from 2020-2025. Half would be aimed at helping governments adapt to the impacts of climate change, such as droughts and rising sea levels.

“Poor countries didn’t cause climate change, they shouldn’t be holding the short end of the stick,” the AfDB president said.

The bank will invest $20 million to help fund the Sahel’s new Desert to Power solar scheme, with Adesina seeing renewable energy as a driver of economic development and replacing all of Africa’s coal-fired power stations.

During his term the bank has increased the renewable power share of its energy portfolio to 95 percent from about 60 percent. Off-grid solar-powered energy is seen as key to connecting the 50 per cent of African households without access to electricity.

Last year’s inaugural Africa Investment Forum generated $38.7 billion in “investment interest” in infrastructure projects, and the multilateral lender is setting a target of $60 billion this year to close what it sees as Africa’s “infrastructure gap” amounting to $108 billion. As an investment marketplace which attracts heads of state, the AfDB says it will work at the Forum in conjunction with all commercial banks across Africa, as well as development finance institutions, global sovereign wealth funds and pension funds.

China’s presence at the Forum is sure to come under close scrutiny given Beijing’s focus on Africa, with President Xi Jinping’s flagship Belt and Road Initiative pledging $60 billion in financing for projects across the continent. China’s trade with Africa has soared over the past 20 years from about $10 billion to close to $200 billion. In a reflection of shifting balances of power, an analysis by Quartz found that nearly twice as many African leaders attended the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation in Beijing in September than the UN General Assembly in New York two weeks later.

Not to be outdone, Russia has invited over 50 African leaders to its first Russia-Africa summit in Sochi in late October, the culmination of a strategic push that marks Moscow’s re-entry into the continent, with its focus on military deals and oil and gas contracts. With trade and investment replacing aid, US and European multilateral lenders are also directing more funds towards Africa.

The Africa Investment Forum may also enjoy the glow of more favourable headlines for the continent in recent weeks: Mozambique held relatively peaceful presidential elections in mid-October, which followed the signing in August of a peace deal between the ruling Frelimo party and former civil war rivals Renamo; and Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed was awarded the Nobel peace prize for his role in resolving the border conflict with Eritrea, as well as promoting peace and reconciliation in Ethiopia and the wider East African region.

Farhana Haque Rahman

With foreign investors and multilateral institutions gathering at the door, the AfDB’s president is addressing fears that Africa is piling up debt and mortgaging its future.

“What’s important is that African countries get into deals that are transparent with terms of engagement that are clear,” he told Bloomberg in September.

“If there were cases where some folks got away with deals in the past because others aren’t around the table to help negotiate well — that’s changing. I don’t think any African nation should trade away its future for immediate gains. We want fair and transparent transactions.”

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

In an inaugural lecture at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, Amartya Sen began with a swipe at Queen Victoria who complained to Sir Theodore Martin in 1870 about & quote: this mad, wicked folly of ‘Woman’s Rights’ “, as in her rarefied world nobody could trample upon her rights. The world has of course changed dramatically and women’s rights are widely acknowledged but injustices persist. Our concern here is with health injustices that are widely prevalent in India. These take multiple forms: female foeticide, widespread morbidity and denial of access to good quality healthcare until a critical condition develops. Our focus here is on vulnerability of women to non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and their limited access to good quality healthcare in India.

Farhana Haque Rahman

NCDs kill 40 million annually, accounting for about 70 % of all deaths globally. NCDs are chronic in nature and take a long time to develop. They are linked to aging and affluence and have replaced infectious diseases and malnutrition as the dominant causes of ill-health and death in much of the world, including India. The major NCDs include cardiovascular diseases, cancer, chronic respiratory diseases and diabetes. These account for 42 % of deaths in India. Some of the risk factors associated with NCDs are aging, unhealthy diet, physical inactivity, smoking, excessive use of alcohol and excess weight.

The burden of NCDs shifted to the older segments of population ( 60 years), highest prevalence being amongst to the oldest men and women ( 80 years+), with higher prevalence among women.

In sharp contrast to women who recorded a significant rise, overall prevalence of NCDs among men fell significantly during 2004-14, based on the National Sample Survey data for India. Men accounted for the majority in 2004, but women did so in 2014. The majority of NCD cases were in the rural areas for both men and women. However, the prevalence among urban women was higher than among urban men in 2014.

There was a significant affluence gradient to prevalence of NCDs among men, with a sharp increase in the prevalence from the lowest expenditure quintile to the highest in 2004. This is similar to what women experienced. A similar pattern is reproduced among both men and women in 2014, but with one reversal. While the prevalence among the most affluent men was higher than among the most affluent women in 2004, the latter recorded a higher prevalence ten years later, in 2014.

Raghav Gaiha

An important issue is whether higher vulnerability of women to NCDs manifests in greater access to good quality healthcare. To assess this, we rely on the India Human Development Survey 2015. To assess the quality of health care, we distinguish between two healthcare providers: public hospitals/doctors and private hospitals/doctors. More respondents rank private healthcare providers higher in quality than public providers. Another proximate indicator of quality is location of healthcare facilities. Quality of treatment received at home and in the same village is often inferior to treatment received in another village/town/district. The point to note is that a village may or may not have a primary healthcare centre but towns and districts are much better equipped with healthcare facilities for specialized treatment of NCDs. So location is another predictor of quality of healthcare.

Public providers were chosen by just under one-third of old women suffering from at least one NCD. In a striking contrast, large majorities –about two-thirds- depended on private providers (excluding traditional faith healers) in 2012. Similar proportions are reproduced for old men. So on this quality criterion, there was little difference between old men and women.

But the distance travelled by women and men reveals a contrast.

Large shares of old women, about 45 %, suffering from at least 1 NCD had their first treatment at home and in the same village. The majority, about 55 %, travelled to another village/town/district. Large shares of men suffering from 1 NCD, about 40 %- were treated at home and in the same village while the majority, about 58 %-travelled to another village/town/district.

From this perspective, the fact that larger shares of women received treatment at home and in the same village than men with a chronic NCD suggests that women had lower access to costlier and more specialized treatment despite their greater vulnerability to NCDs; however, the difference between men and women in their reliance on private providers is not significant.

In brief, while women are more prone to NCDs, their access to costlier and more specialized healthcare is lower than that of men. So the evidence favoring discrimination against women in good quality healthcare is limited but suggestive of a bias.

Social and family norms that restrict women’s access to health care are not as rigid as generally believed. Greater awareness of equity and better recognition of women’s contribution to household and social welfare could enhance their access to health care. Besides, outside employment options for women with some bargaining power (eg, high school education) could reinforce their autonomy.

(Farhana Haque-Rahman, a journalist and communications expert, is a former senior United Nations official and Raghav Gaiha is Visiting Scholar, Population Studies Centre, University of Pennsylvania and (Hon.) Professorial Research Fellow, Global Development Institute, University of Manchester, England).

By Farhana Haque Rahman and Raghav Gaiha
ROME and NEW DELHI, Aug 6 2019 (IPS)

On a cold night in December 2012, a ghastly crime was committed in New Delhi which stunned the world. Six men dragged helpless Nirbhaya-a 23-year-old female physiotherapy intern- to the back of the bus and raped her one by one. As she kept fighting off her assailants by biting them, one of the attackers inserted a rusted rod in her private part, ripping her genital organs and insides apart. She died a few days later. One of the accused died in police custody in the Tihar Jail. The juvenile was convicted of rape and murder and given the maximum sentence of three years’ imprisonment in a reform facility, and subsequently released. The Supreme Court awarded the death penalty but legal complications have prevented its execution.

Farhana Haque Rahman

In January, 2019, a 16-year-old girl had simply decided to go to her boyfriend’s birthday party. A week later, her body was found along a highway, her head and one of her arms chopped off. Her face may have been burned with acid. In her small town in eastern India, it is forbidden for a teenage girl to date, and the police believe the girl’s father arranged for her to be killed — supposedly to protect the family’s honour.

Just as gruesome is the story of the 30-year-old Fatima who reported to UNFPA in Cox’s Bazar in southeast coast of Bangladesh in 2017, “My sister was killed after gang rape in front of me, and they threw hot water on my body. I can’t sleep, my life is a nightmare, I can’t bear the pain of losing my sister.”

Worse, minor girls remain highly vulnerable to brutal rapes and murder. In May, the same year, a ten-month-old baby girl was allegedly raped by a family member in Jamnagar district of the western state of Gujarat. Cases of brutal rapes of minor girls abound in Bangladesh too. The rape and murder of 13-year-old Ayesha Siddiqua Sumaiya, living in Rangpur, is a case in point. A student of Class VII, she was alone in her home – her parents were at a religious function – when a gang swooped on the minor, raping and then strangling her to death.

Raghav Gaiha

Report on Violence Against Women (VAW) Survey 2015, Bangladesh, paints in vivid detail high incidence of different forms of violence against women. During 2014, the most common form of partner violence was controlling behaviour, experienced by more than one third (38.8%) of ever-married women, followed by emotional violence (24.2%), physical violence (20.8%), sexual violence (13.3%) and economic violence (6.7%). Rates of lifetime partner violence (any form) were highest in rural areas (74.8% of ever-married women) and lowest in city corporation areas (54.4%). Rates in urban areas outside of city corporation areas were 71.1%, slightly lower than in rural areas.

More than one quarter (27.8%) of women reported lifetime physical violence by someone other than the husband (non-partner) and 6.2% reported experiencing such violence during the last 12 months. Rates were highest among adolescents for both lifetime (30.9%) and last 12 months (11.2%) non-partner physical violence.

Most sexual violence in India occurs in marriage; 10 percent of married women report sexual violence from husbands. The reporting percentage is low in part because marital rape is not a crime in India. Adolescent wives (13–19 years) are most vulnerable, reporting the highest rates of marital sexual violence of any age group. Adolescent girls also account for 24 percent of rape cases in the country, although they represent only 9 percent of the total female population.

Barely 1 percent of victims of sexual violence report the crime to the police in India. Similar evidence is found for Bangladesh. Notions of honour are central to the discourse on rape. The rape of a daughter, sister or wife is a source of dishonour to males within the family structure. This deters the reporting of rape to the police, reinforced by a belief in the impunity of perpetrators, the fear of retaliation, and humiliation by the police through physical and verbal abuse.

The consequences of domestic violence are grave and intergenerational: physical trauma, repeated physical assaults result in chronic disease (e.g. chronic pain); acute neurological (e.g. fainting) and cardiopulmonary (hypertension) symptoms; life-style risk behaviours (substance misuse); psychiatric disorders (depression); and children and adolescents adversely affected by witnessing domestic violence (post-traumatic stress disorder). Besides, domestic violence also results in malnutrition among women and children.

One major problem with anti-rape laws is that their enforcement is feeble and painfully slow, and thus largely inconsequential as a deterrent to sexual violence.

Dominance and control over women are set in male attributes and behaviour (“masculinity”), regarded as a shared social ideal. Violence is not necessarily a part of masculinity, but the two are often closely linked, mediated by class, caste and region.

Interventions that address masculinity seem to be more effective than those that ignore the powerful influence of gender norms and systems of inequality. Effective women-focused initiatives strengthen resilience against violence by combining economic empowerment with greater awareness of rights and women’s relationship skills. Behavioural changes are, however, slower than changes in male attitudes.

In conclusion, although rise in sexual violence against women and girls is scary and abhorrent, there are grounds for optimism.

(Farhana Haque Rahman is Director General of IPS Inter Press Service; she is a communications expert and former senior United Nations official. Raghav Gaiha is (Hon.) Professorial Research Fellow, Global Development Institute, University of Manchester, England, and Visiting Scholar, Population Studies Centre, University of Pennsylvania, USA).

Excerpt:

By Farhana Haque Rahman
ROME, Dec 20 2018 (IPS)

The year now closing, 2018, culminates an extraordinary period in the quest for a world where sexual harassment and assault are, as the words indicate they should be, rare and punished.

Farhana Haque Rahman

Equally worthy of recollection is that the MeToo phrase began in 2006 – when Myspace was more important than Facebook – by Tarana Burke, a social activist who understood how widespread sexual harassment is beyond the world of celebrities.

We must not forget just how vast “the problem” is.

I’d like to iterate strong support for all women everywhere who push back against what sometimes is described as some ancient cultural prerogative, like it or not. And especially for people in the world where IPS Inter Press Service works, that of journalism. A recent survey revealed that nearly two-thirds of female journalists have been harassed – physically, in person and often in frightening digital modes – and half of these pondered changing their career path as a result.

Everyone can only find that both appalling and a waste of human talent. Me too.

http://www.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/2018/10/announcer-iwd-2019-theme

https://wd2019.org/global-development-trends/

The theme for International Women’s Day 2019, which will take place on 8 March, is “Think equal, build smart, innovate for change”. The theme will focus on innovative ways in which we can advance gender equality and the empowerment of women, particularly in the areas of social protection systems, access to public services and sustainable infrastructure.

Excerpt:

Rohingya refugees trudge through the rain and mud as they arrive at Kutupalong camp in Bangladesh after days on foot. Credit: UNHCR/Vivian Tan

By Farhana Haque Rahman
DHAKA, Sep 13 2017 (IPS)

Dear Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi,

We learned today that you will address the Rohingya issue via television in Myanmar on 19 September – over 144 hours from now.

We also learned that you will not attend the upcoming UN General Assembly (UNGA) in New York, a world body that listened to you in rapt attention only a year ago, marvelling at your words when you spoke of peace and “our planet as a place to be shared by all.”

While your presence in Myanmar is critically important at such tragic times when the UN estimates over 1000 killed and over 400,000 dispossessed and homeless people have fled across the border in Bangladesh, the General Assembly will have the same powerful people who worked not only for your freedom but also applauded when you were honoured with the Nobel Peace Prize.

Farhana Haque Rahman

Jody Williams, Shirin Ebadi, Mairead Maguire, Leymah Gbowee and Tawakkol Karman signed a letter asking “How many Rohingya have to die; how many Rohingya women will be raped; how many communities will be razed before you raise your voice in defence of those who have no voice?”

Perhaps some personal encounters with the many who believed in you – and who will be at the UNGA – might help you to comprehend their disbelief and deep concern of what is happening to the Rohingya. Recent images from the Rakhine region are heart breaking. Amongst the innumerable horrific images of violence against the Rohingya, one shows how one-day old twins are being transported to safety in a coir basket while in another image a rickety son carries in baskets hanging at two ends of a bamboo pole his too-frail-to-walk parents. He had fear in his eyes but he did not abandon his parents to protect only himself; he is a hero.

You, too, were a hero.

Call to stop the killings now, not 144 hours later; speak for humanity, even if this means standing at the gate of your house in Yangon, an image that became a symbol of freedom when you were not free. If this leads you to being relegated again to confinement in your compound, remember the same people attending the UNGA will speak and work for your freedom.

The UNGA could be the best opportunity for you to hear all those like the Indonesians, Malaysians, Maldivians, Turks and so many others from distant parts of the world on why they are distraught and disturbed about the violence against the Rohingya in Myanmar, and in turn for them to hear from you how you are working to end the violence against innocent men, women and children and what you are doing to help them live with dignity.

Related Articles

– Secretary-General Talks Myanmar, Trump Ahead of General Assembly

– Intervene Now, Take Action

– UN chief calls for action on Myanmar and DPR Korea; launches reform initiatives

By Farhana Haque Rahman
DHAKA, Sep 11 2017 (IPS)

When you were finally able to accept your Nobel Peace Prize, you spoke eloquently of the ultimate aim of a world in which “every corner is a true sanctuary where the inhabitants will have the freedom and the capacity to live in peace.”

And you noted that “every thought, every word, and every action” that adds to this desire is a contribution to peace.

Surely now is a time for a word on the plight of the Rohingya people in western Myanmar who the United Nations has described as one of the world’s most persecuted people.

Farhana Haque Rahman

The 1991 Nobel Prize was given to honor your heroic and unflagging efforts for peace and prosperity in your country and, let’s remember, to support efforts to achieve “ethnic conciliation by peaceful means.”

You have mentioned that there is violence instigated on “both sides”. There may be some truth in that statement, but – it appears entirely lacking in a sense of scale and proportion.

We are aware you do not have uncontested power in Myanmar to order a new approach to peace in Rakhine state. However, a humanitarian catastrophe requires setting politics aside.

As you yourself noted, thoughts and words can make a difference. Please let yours be known.
 

Related Articles

– Myanmar crisis textbook example of ethnic cleansing: UN Human Rights chief Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein

– Myanmar conflict: Aung San Suu Kyi ‘must step in’

– Rohingya Crisis is Deteriorating Very Fast

– Rohingya: Testing Democracy in Myanmar

– Open Letter from Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu to Ms Aung San Suu Kyi

By Farhana Haque Rahman
ROME, Apr 26 2017 (IPS)

Rogue interests, perhaps even foreign, are said to be trying to interfere with the electoral process in the U.S. and European Union members. Senior government officials glibly endorse what they themselves call “alternative facts” and even openly describe the media as their enemy.

Farhana Haque Rahman

Social media platforms, seen as the primary distribution vector for this plague, are under pressure to police their content.

However, the history of journalism is full of stories of distortions, many of them in prestigious publications. Benjamin Franklin once produced – in wartime – a fake newspaper to distribute a fake story.

At root, the current fake-news epidemic is a symptom of growing distrust in media. It also reflects a widespread contempt for expertise, which poses a special challenge for organizations like IPS, where for decades we have sought to chronicle the complex and often slow-moving travails of development in the global South.

The press, which should by nature be profoundly aware of the tactics of all kinds of propaganda, has no choice but to see this crisis as an opportunity.

A vibrant media ecosystem requires readers who are able to discern trustworthy news from “alternative” versions. Indeed, the relative absence of such readers may be a guide to what kind of policy response is needed. Enabling such readers to thrive is analogous to the goals of development efforts aimed at lifting people out of poverty and hunger.

That goal must include safeguards against against violence directed at reporters, including civic journalists and bloggers, who are frequently targeted for abuse and often physically attacked, even hacked to death as evidenced by a string of grisly crimes in Bangladesh. Last year’s high-profile “Pizzagate” episode in the United States’ capital, in which a man fired an assault rifle in a popular restaurant he had been told by right-wing online sites was linked to an elite paedophilia ring, is a reminder that such attacks may themselves be based on fake news as well as ideological beliefs or factional interests.

Yet in the end, just as “more speech, not less,” was a rallying call for advocates of freedom of speech, today’s response should be real news, and more of it.

Excerpt:

Basic rights always need champions, and that’s truer today than it ought to be as around the world we see an unwelcome pattern of reaction to modern complexities ranging from globalization and automation to austerity and dwindling wages. One alarming example is how the agenda of promoting women’s rights, so far from completion, is being pushed back rather than forward.

Farhana Haque Rahman

Things cannot be taken for granted. Protectionism and populism are not going to contribute to the world we all need, one that rises to respond to the threats posed by climate change and to the pledge to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger once and for all. Women’s rights are key to progress on all fronts.

To celebrate International Women’s Day on March 8, 2017, IPS has invited people from all quarters, from policy makers and political and cultural influencers to ordinary people with challenging daily lives, to offer their opinions, news and views on how the women of the world – able as we’ve seen to take to the streets and argue their own case – should navigate a time of such uncertainty.

This article is part of a series of stories and op-eds launched by IPS on the occasion of this year’s International Women’s Day on March 8.

2016 has been a dramatic year for the world, and for the media. Political dysfunction appears to be on the rise, putting social media under increasing critical scrutiny even as prestigious global commercial news brands capable of acting as the fourth estate are downsizing.

Farhana Haque Rahman

Fiscal austerity in advanced economies is catalysing populist protests and a nascent form of nationalism that risks turning the international arena into a less generous space.

And yet times are even harder in conflict-riven lands such as South Sudan, drought-suffering regions in Madagascar and, for too long now, cities such as Aleppo. While robust and credible news coverage is under threat, never has it been more needed.

I would like, however, to announce some good news. A year ago, Inter Press Service was in troubled waters. Today, thanks to many stakeholders, and the fine work of the IPS team, that is less the case. I can confidently assert that we are alive and kicking. Amid tense and rapidly-changing global times – worryingly dubbed the “post-truth” era – it is a sign of hope that genuine interest in real-world problems remains vibrant, and a tribute to our contribution to keeping valuable information flowing.

While some talk of globalization going into reverse and a “new normal” of subdued prospects, the fact is – as recognized by the universal nature of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals – that the world is increasingly interconnected irrespective of how many container ships sail the seas.

The challenge of climate change is a concrete example of that interconnection. Air pollution turns out to be worse in areas that are not where it is generated. Bacteria resistant to antibiotics are adept travellers, making local practises a global concern.

Through it all, development work is being done, and tracking its success – and even its setbacks when they offer learning moments – is our critical mission. That job may be getting harder, and new challenges to media freedom may arise, but IPS will be here to do it.

The new UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who takes office on January 1, arrives with strong credentials — both as a former Prime Minister of Portugal and an ex-UN High Commissioner for Refugees.

Farhana Haque Rahman

Guterres was elected mostly on merit – with a rare unanimous decision by the five veto-wielding permanent members at a time when the Security Council is sharply divided over Syria, Yemen, Ukraine and North Korea. The consensus in the 15-member Council, and the approval of his nomination by the 193-member General Assembly, underlined a strong affirmation of his appointment.

When both the Security Council and the General Assembly gave their overwhelming support to Guterres, they side-stepped two alternative options: picking the first woman Secretary-General or the first Secretary-General from Eastern Europe.

The lobbying for a female UN chief was initiated by more than 750 civil society and human rights organizations, while the proposal for an East European as UN chief came mostly from member states.

While there was a strong case for a woman Secretary-General in a 71-year-old male-dominated world body, Eastern Europe had less of a legitimate claim. As a geographical entity, it existed only within the confines of the UN, not outside of it. After the end of the Cold War, most Eastern European states became an integral partner of the European Union (EU) or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and often both

So, in effect, Guterres overcame both campaigns, as he was anointed the fourth Western European to hold the position.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon of South Korea, who will step down on December 31 after a 10-year tenure, will leave behind two legacies: the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. But it will be left to Guterres to ensure their implementation.

A member of the Socialist Party in Portugal, Guterres spent over 20 years in government and public service before he was elected by the UN General Assembly to become the 10th High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), serving for a decade until the end of 2015.

His work with the UNHCR was nothing short of groundbreaking. As High Commissioner, he oversaw the most profound structural reform process in UNHCR’s history and built up the organization’s capacity to respond to some of the largest displacement crises since the end of World War Two.

Guterres has already pledged to serve the “victims of conflicts, of terrorism, human rights violations, poverty and injustices of this world”. Ban Ki Moon rightly complimented Guterres as a “superb choice” and said “his experience as Portuguese prime minister, his wide knowledge of world affairs, and his lively intellect will serve him well in leading the United Nations in a crucial period”.

However, he acknowledged that the election was also a disappointment as his vision of a female successor did not become a reality. Ban Ki Moon, is not alone in his sentiments, as many consider the outcome of the election to be “bittersweet”. Christiana Figueres, a Costa Rican diplomat and one of Guterres’ female rivals for the job, tweeted on 5 October, “Bitter:not a woman. Sweet: by far the best man in the race. Congrats Antonio Guterres! We are all with you”.

Guterres takes over the UN at a time when the world body has remained paralyzed over several unresolved political problems, including the five-year-old devastating civil war in Syria, hundreds of civilian killings in Yemen, Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan, and the emergence of North Korea as the world’s newest nuclear power in defiance of Security Council resolutions.

The new Secretary-General will also be entrusted with the task of resolving several lingering problems, including ongoing reports of sexual abuse of women by some UN peacekeepers and compensation for Haitian victims of cholera inadvertently brought in by UN peacekeepers, and address new challenges, such as helping muster the trillions of dollars needed to implement the 17 SDGs and the Climate Change agreement as well as ensuring a 50:50 gender parity in senior and decision-making positions in the UN Secretariat.

One of his first appointments should be to name a woman as his Deputy, preferably from the developing world.
We wish him well in his endeavors.