A woman carries supplies through a flooded street in Cap Haïtien, Haiti. After days of continuous rains, parts of Haiti's north suffered serious flooding in 2014, leaving more than a dozen dead and thousands homeless. The Haitian government, with UN support, responded with evacuations, temporary shelters, and food and supplies distributions. Credit: UN/Logan Abassi

By Robert W. Sandford
HAMILTON, Canada, May 18 2021 (IPS)

The year 2020 will forever be notorious for the COVID-19 pandemic but it might also be known by historians for a precipitous rise in second order climate change consequences — a new elephant in the room.

Familiar first order consequences, as documented in the World Meteorological Organization’s most recent State of the Global Climate report in April (at https://bit.ly/3eyrPwU), were the ongoing temperature rise over land and sea, melting sea ice and glaciers, higher sea levels, and changes in precipitation patterns.

Also in 2020, continuing a decade-long trend: widespread drought, heat waves, wildfires, cyclones, and flooding, especially in Africa and Asia but also in South America and the United States.

All these led to the second order consequences: Greater food insecurity and an accelerated explosion in involuntary human migration and displacement worldwide.

Between 2010 and 2019, weather-related events triggered an estimated average annual 23.1 million displacements of people. And almost 10 million displacements largely due to hydrometeorological hazards and disasters were recorded in the first half of 2020.

While most displacements take place within national borders, cross-border movements are also occurring.

UNU-INWEH, marking its 25th anniversary this year, was among the first international agencies to flag environmental degradation as one of the greatest environmental challenges of our times, warning as early as 2007 of mass migrations of people driven from degraded homelands within a single generation (https://bit.ly/3hn03oK).

A prescription for policy reform at every level of government at that time included harmonizing national policies across government ministries, addressing regional transboundary river basin management and, internationally, better integrating the work of global conventions.

While climate-related disasters have driven human migration since time immemorial, what is new is the protracted nature of the many displacement situations triggered by hydrometeorological events — people are unable to return to their former homes, finding themselves without options for integrating locally or settling elsewhere.

More and more climate refugees are becoming permanently displaced.

Mozambique, for example, experienced the one-two punch of cyclones Kenneth and Idai, setting the country’s development back decades. And Mozambique is just one of many places where climate shock after shock created ever larger populations of potentially permanently displaced people.

Many vulnerable people on the move, regardless of reason, end up settling in marginal high-risk areas where they are exposed to weather and climate hazards at a range of scales.

Weather hazards and human mobility inevitably intersect with larger social and political tensions and conflicts, making multi-hazard disaster risk reduction measures harder to orchestrate and proactively implement.

As the WHO made clear, the only way through this is the application of risk-based, all-of-society approaches as outlined in the WHO Health Emergency and Disaster Risk Management Framework.

The report also makes clear the compounding effect of climate change on food insecurity, involuntary human migration and the limits of global humanitarian action. And it is at this junction that the elephant in the room starts flattening the furniture.

Nearly 690 million people, or 9% of the world’s population, were under-nourished in 2019, and about 750 million, or nearly 10%, were exposed to severe levels of food insecurity. The number of people classified as living in crisis, emergency and famine conditions has reached almost 135 million people in 55 countries.

In 2020, 50 million people were hit by both climate-related disasters and by COVID-19 pandemic disruptions to the agricultural sector and the food supply chain, elevating levels of food insecurity, malnutrition and under-nourishment

Pandemic-related mobility restrictions and economic downturns have slowed humanitarian assistance to vulnerable people on the move, as well as efforts to support the recovery of persons whose lives were put on hold by earlier shocks.

Humanity in 2020 faced – and continues to face – what amounts to a perfect storm.

And more clouds loom. Hundreds of thousands of viruses in mammals and birds could infect people, potentially making pandemics more frequent, more lethal, more easily spread, and more damaging to the world economy than COVID-19.

Such diseases are linked to altered ecosystems – aquatic and terrestrial – and biodiversity loss. With expanding urbanisation, the draining wetlands and floodplains, converting forests to agricultural fields, etc., the interactions between species from different habitats are increasing, making the leap of zoonotic viruses from animals to humans more likely (http://www.ipbes.net/pandemics).

Arresting unsustainable natural resources development and management practices and reducing risks to prevent pandemics is an estimated 100 times less costly than responding to such pandemics.

People are being subjected to repeated and frequent displacement, leaving little time for recovery from one shock to the next. While this has implications for disaster preparedness and management, it also means we need solutions that foster resilience. Without such solutions soon, becoming a refugee in parts of the world could mean being a permanent refugee, living perpetually with compound risk and vulnerability.

Creating conditions to avert or minimize displacement, enabling people to safely stay where they are as much as possible, or to anticipate and draw on the benefits of dignified migration, requires that we modernize human mobility policies and platforms for cooperation, especially now as countries make decisions that will shape our post-Covid world, if indeed such a world will ever exist again.

The writer holds the Global Water Futures Chair at the UN University’s Canadian-based Institute for Water, Environment & Health (UNU-INWEH), which is supported by the Government of Canada and hosted at McMaster University, and which marks its 25th anniversary in 2021.

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Celebrating the 75th Anniversary of The United Nations. Credit: United Nations

By Robert W. Sandford
HAMILTON, Canada, Sep 24 2020 (IPS)

As we reflect on this week and celebrate the United Nations’ rise in the war-ravaged world some 75 years ago, humanity is again being asked to lay the foundation for a new world.

As in 1945, we are asked to envision the world that emerges from a global catastrophe. Similarly, as well, in our post-pandemic world we will need to make not a partial but a full transformation, one in which human self-interest again aligns with planetary realities.

Such a global reset can produce universal benefits in the form of a healthier, more just, safer, kinder and more spirituality connected society.

As UN historian Paul Kennedy noted, it is difficult today to recapture the optimism and high spirits of those who, in the latter days of the most devasting war in history, thought that a new world order was possible, or had already arrived.

Of course, these visionaries were overly optimistic. All who roll boulders uphill are.

The lesson and inspiration for us is that they were able to look at a world reduced to rubble and see in it a transformational moment for all. If they did that then, surely, we can also do so today.

In 1945, the UN inherited the same challenges faced by an earlier experiment in global cooperation, the League of Nations. For every voice favouring the creation of institutions committed to global cooperation, there was another warning against the erosion of national sovereignty. This fierce debate continues today.

Meanwhile, the UN remains unable to escape the fundamental paradox of all international bodies. It only performs as well as its member nations.

Former U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Richard Holbrooke expressed it famously: “Blaming the UN for a crisis is like blaming Madison Square Gardens when the New York Knicks play badly. You are blaming a building.”

And, by virtue of its founding charter conditions, action against rogue states cannot be pursued if a Great Power – that is one of the five countries possessing the veto in the Security Council – is opposed.

It is impossible to understand the history of the United Nations without understanding that this tension was baked into the system at the time of its birth.

That said, even with this structural limitation, the UN has made enormous progress in domains in which individual nations could not adequately or satisfactorily act alone.

And the UN is unlikely to ever collapse because of the growing range of world issues such as climate change that cannot be addressed alone by even the most powerful member states. As is often claimed, despite its many failings “if the UN didn’t exist, we would have to invent it.”

We live on a different planet than we did in 1945. How could it be otherwise when, in the span of a single lifetime, Earth’s human population has swelled almost four-fold to nearly eight billion in 2020 — and total global production has grown from $4 trillion to more than $140 trillion in the same period, with many consequences.

It is important to acknowledge that our current global situation is not all bad. There is, for example, the growing power of international opinion to expose human rights abuses and cause even the most recalcitrant and repressive regimes to consider the consequences of their crimes. We cannot allow that pressure to let up.

If the Great Pause imposed on us by COVID-19 is to become a transformational moment, the level of change has to emerge from the hearts and collective conscience of humanity.

At minimum, that change has to manifest itself in action in the form of implementation of the UN’s existing framework for creating a more just and more sustainable world: the UN’s 2030 Transforming Our World global sustainable development agenda.

Difficult as the UN’s sustainable development goals may appear to be, and distracted as we presently are by the pandemic, we cannot afford to lose sight of what this agenda can do for humanity.

This agenda, if implemented now, may well be seen in time as the greatest gift the United Nations has given humanity.

The problems facing the UN as a world body 75 years into its mandate have not and will not deter it from trying “to save generations from the scourge of war,” “to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights,” and to promote “social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom.”

Those ambitions in the original Preamble to the founding Charter of the United Nations had it right. The question now – in this new transformational moment – is, can we finally do it? And the answer is yes, we can.

The boulder is still only half way up the mountain. To advance it further, to create the future we want and the UN we need, much effort is needed.

Just as in 1945, this truly is a transformational moment — for the UN certainly, but also for the entire world.

*The UN University Institute for Water, Environment and Health in Hamilton, Canada, is supported by the Government of Canada and hosted by McMaster University

Excerpt: