Kazi Fouzia in the street where she had an accident in 2010. Her shoulder sustained multiple fractures, but the only treatment she received was painkillers as she was undocumented at the time. Credit: Silvia Romanelli/IPS

By Silvia Romanelli
NEW YORK, Jul 22 2013 (IPS)

Ataur was 18 when he left Bangladesh and arrived in the United States in 1991 as an undocumented migrant. He took two jobs at the same time, earning about 35 dollars a day in total.

Vincent was smuggled into the U.S. from China in 2001. Ten years after Ataur, his working conditions were even worse. He worked in several Chinese restaurants, for 60 to 70 hours a week, six days a week, for about 300 dollars a month, an average of one dollar per hour.“When you’re late, they fire you. When you’re sick, they fire you … When you complain [about] anything, they can fire you.” -- Vincent, an undocumented worker from China

Both asked that only their first names be used.

“In New York, if you go in the street … if you ask 10 people, I’m sure at least five or six are undocumented,” Vincent told IPS, while talking in a café in New York’s Chinatown.

The U.S. is home to more than 11 million undocumented workers, and there are an estimated two million migrants working in the city of New York.

They are taxi drivers, domestic workers, restaurant, retail and construction workers. They are paid far less than the 7.25 dollars per hour that is New York’s minimum wage, and they are often mistreated by their employers.

Their lives may undergo major changes if the U.S. House of Representatives approves an immigration bill, passed by the Senate at the end of June, which offers a 13-year path to citizenship for undocumented migrants, but also reinforces border security and enables businesses to check workers’ social security numbers, under the E-verify programme.

The programme would make “every single undocumented person one click away from being notified or deported,” according to Monami Maulik, executive director of Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM), an organisation of low-wage South Asian immigrants in Jackson Heights, Queens, which counts 2,000 members.

“Our members… and many others in immigrant communities are really disappointed with this legislation. It’s turning out to be more and more repressive, harsher measures,” she said. “So we are following it very closely.”

After Latinos, she added, South Asians are among the second largest undocumented population in New York.

Stolen wages, mental pressure and fear

Employers tend to say, “I hire you even if you’re illegal, so you should say ‘thank you’, no matter how much I pay you,” Vincent told IPS.

Because there are so many undocumented migrants ready to work for extremely low wages, other needy workers are pressured to accept the same conditions, no matter what their immigration status and nationality are.

Ataur’s sister, Amana, arrived legally in the U.S., but was still paid less than the minimum wage for eight years.

Mental pressure at the workplace is also huge. “When you’re late, they fire you. When you’re sick, they fire you … When you complain [about] anything, they can fire you,” said Vincent.

“Employers often don’t pay workers for a week or months at a time. There has been a case of a year at a time. They’ll do things like hold people’s passports, threaten to call immigration if they ask for the wages that they earned,” Maulik told IPS.

In 2009, DRUM launched monthly “workers’ rights clinics”, to help migrant workers reclaim their stolen wages and raise awareness of their own rights.

In a phone interview, Sayma Khun, a Bangladeshi national, told IPS how she managed to recover, with the help of DRUM, 5,000 dollars of unpaid wages from her previous employer.

Similarly, in 2008, Vincent, together with other 35 co-workers, filed a lawsuit against their employer, in this case with the help of the Chinatown-based Chinese Staff and Workers Association (CSWA).

But as soon as the lawsuit was filed, the restaurant was shut down. It re-opened some time later in a different location under a new name, a strategy widely used by Chinese employers to avoid lawsuits, according to Vincent.

“By federal law this is not supposed to happen. Even undocumented workers are protected under U.S. labour laws around minimum wage,” Maulik told IPS.

In order to launch a neighbourhood-wide investigation on workers’ rights respect, the Department of Labour needs a certain number of individual complaints. But workers often refrain from complaining because they fear employers’ retaliation and deportation.

The husband of Nadera Kashem, a Bangladeshi DRUM member, is at risk of being deported, after he was caught, last year, during a police raid in the perfume shop he worked in. Because he was undocumented, he was sent to an immigration detention centre. He’s been there for 17 months now.

In these cases, “The employer is supposed to be punished, but it always means the worker is punished,” said Maulik.

At the local level, immigration is being enforced by police officers, often accused by migrants’ rights organisations of profiling and discrimination.

“The biggest fear an undocumented person has is the local police officer, because that’s the person who’s going to stop you, ask you for identification, possibly deport you,” Maulik said.

In June, the New York City Council passed two bills of the Community Safety Act establishing accountability mechanisms for the New York Police Department (NYPD) and allowing citizens to file claims against NYPD’s misbehaviour.

Finding the courage to speak up

“We see no future, why are we still working like slaves? So that’s why I organised my co-workers, we wanted to improve the working conditions, and not just for ourselves,” Vincent told IPS.

Before joining CSWA, he said, he didn’t even know that there was a minimum wage or what “overtime” meant.

“Organising protects you, never puts you in trouble,” is what Kazi Fouzia, a Bangladeshi community organiser who joined DRUM in 2010, says to other migrant workers to encourage them to speak up.

Fouzia used to work in a retail sari shop in Jackson Heights, Queens. Her employer owned three stores; one day he asked her to go get some clothes from another shop across the street. While she was crossing, she was hit by a car and thrown 13 feet.

Fouzia’s employer didn’t allow her to call 911 because she was undocumented. She had multiple fractures in her shoulder, but she didn’t have insurance so the only medical care she received were painkillers. The next day she discovered she had been fired.

This is not only her personal story, she told IPS, “This is every undocumented worker’s story, every one.”

With the Cambodian national assembly elections fast approaching on Jul. 28, local and international organisations are expressing concerns about the fairness and transparency of the electoral system.

According to an audit of the Cambodian voter registry conducted by the National Democratic Institute (NDI), a U.S. government-funded entity, almost 11 percent of eligible citizens wrongly believe themselves to be registered to vote.“Cambodia should rise above a mechanical application of democracy ." -- U.N. Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Cambodia Surya P. Subedi

“These citizens will show up to the polling stations on election day and not be able to vote,” Peter Manikas, NDI’s regional director for Asia, told IPS. “Further, more than 10 percent of the names listed on the voters’ list are invalid, of unknown people, presenting an opportunity for fraud on election day.”

The results of the audit haven’t been accepted by the Cambodian National Election Committee (NEC), which maintains that the number of names on the voter registry represents 101.7 percent of the eligible population, even more than the actual number of eligible citizens, in stark contrast with NDI’s findings that only show an 82.9 percent registration rate.

The extra names in the NEC registry data “could be duplicates or could be those of unknown/non-existent people,” Manikas told IPS.

Irregularities in the voter registry are also cited in a report compiled by the Phnom Penh-based Committee for Free and Fair Elections in Cambodia (COMFREL) just after the last commune council elections in June 2012, as well as in the last report of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights in Cambodia, Surya P. Subedi, dated July 2012.

Some of Subedi’s recommendations to the Cambodian government “could have been implemented within a short period of time without requiring many additional resources if there had been the political will to do so,” he told IPS.

The present electoral system requires every eligible citizen to register in order to vote, which can only be done in September and October, nine months before the election, and in the place of one’s own residency. This will potentially disenfranchise those who change their residency within nine months of the polls, as well as the homeless and evicted, who are unable to show proof of residency.

A “dire need for electoral reform” in the longer term is called for in NDI’s report. Subedi has made similar recommendations, and hopes for a more independent NEC, composed of neutral and high-level personalities able to represent all political parties in a balanced way.

A democracy trapped in patronage networks

Electoral malpractice, such as vote buying, use of state resources for political campaigns, threats and intimidation of some candidates and unequal access to media for all parties have been monitored over the years by organisations like COMFREL.

According to Trude Jacobsen, assistant director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Northern Illinois University, Cambodian political culture is deeply informed by patron-client networks, in which votes are given in exchange for protection and personal favours.

“People would vote according to whoever is at the top of their [patronage network], it has nothing to do with what they actually think about elections,” she told IPS.

“No one would do anything to change the status quo at the bottom because it is simply not in their best interest,” she said, as they rely on political patronage connections for daily needs, such as having a job or sending their children to school.

Change can only come from the future generation of political leaders who are being exposed to alternative models outside Cambodia and will hopefully be “willing to sacrifice their own self-interest for the greater good”, said Jacobsen.

Another reason for concern is the decreasing voter turnout in the last years, which could be a sign of voters’ frustration with the current electoral system.

However, according to NDI, 92.8 percent of eligible citizens plan to vote on Jul. 28, which is a notably high percentage in a country in which voting is not compulsory.

Several rallies organised by opposition parties in the last months have gathered crowds of thousands, but according to Jacobsen, participants are not all authentic political supporters. Some of them are paid to attend, a practice widely used by both governing and opposition parties.

Following the signing of the Paris Peace Agreements in 1991, which gave the U.N. the responsibility to supervise peacebuilding operations and the first democratic elections, the country embarked on a democratisation process and went seven times to the polls, for the national assembly (1993, 1998, 2003 and 2008) and commune council elections (2002, 2007 and 2012).

July’s elections will renew for another five-year term the 123 seats of the national assembly, which is the lower house of the Cambodian parliament, and the winning party will be assigned the task of forming a new government.

The current ruling coalition of the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) and the royalist party FUNCINPEC is expected to remain in power, defeating the opposition’s Cambodian National Rescue Party (CNRP) and extending for another five years the already 28-year-long tenure of Prime Minister Hun Sen.

Land has become a pivotal issue, in a country where 80 percent of the population is involved in subsistence farming but 20 percent of agricultural families are landless, due in part to the government’s scheme of leasing millions of hectares of agricultural land to mammoth multinational corporations.

“Cambodia should rise above a mechanical application of democracy … ,” said Subedi in his report, “and implement the fundamental principles and spirit behind the notion of the rule of law.”

“The country has come a long way since the Paris Peace Accords, but it still has some way to go to meet the international standards in a number of areas including the holding of transparent, free and fair elections,” he told IPS.

According to Jacobsen, “The mistake that was made was expecting people to be able to come out of a 20-year civil conflict and then adapt to Western models immediately,” with the result that the existing conception of political power as a patron-client relationship survived under the surface.

“It’s not going to be an immediate change,” she added, “and certainly not for this election.”

By Silvia Romanelli
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 26 2013 (IPS)

Women around the world are exposed to domestic violence, sexual and economic exploitation, gender-based violence, female genital mutilation and child marriage. For indigenous women and girls, however, the risk of being victims of such issues is especially high.

In light of this fact, the Philippines-based Tebtebba Foundation advocates for indigenous peoples’ rights, working to ensure that the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) is properly implemented.

Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, executive director of the Tebtebba Foundation for indigenous rights. Photo credit of Victoria Taul-Corpuz.

In an interview with IPS, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, executive director of the Tebtebba Foundation and chair of the Asia Indigenous Women’s Network, discussed how indigenous women and girls can confront discriminatory practises and how the international community can support them in doing so.

Tauli-Corpuz also worked as lead consultant on the report “Breaking the Silence on Violence Against Indigenous Girls, Adolescents and Young Women“, a joint effort of different U.N. agencies aiming at addressing “the ‘statistical silence’ around violence against indigenous girls and women”.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: In some cultures, women’s submission to men and acts of violence against women and girls are seen as part of the cultural tradition. How can this idea be addressed?

A: Violence against women and girls is a violation of human rights and should not be tolerated in any way, even through qualifying it as “part of local tradition” or as something “cultural”.

Violence is experienced by individual women, although there are situations which make women that belong to a particular group, such as an indigenous people, who are at higher risk of suffering from violence because of historical and current situations of colonisation, domination, racism and discrimination.

If there are cultural practises that promote violence against indigenous women and girls, these should be severely criticised and changed."If there are cultural practises that promote violence against indigenous women and girls, these should be severely criticised and changed."
-- Victoria Tauli-Corpuz

Q: How can effective measures against violence be implemented in indigenous groups in which the internal hierarchy of family and social obligations are particularly important?

A: Measures to address violence against indigenous women and girls can be effectively implemented if state agencies and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) take certain steps.

They can help strengthen indigenous women’s organisations to address this issue, document and monitor this phenomenon, and help local governments to implement gender and culturally sensitive ways of handling this issue and to develop programs with budgets.

They can also help raise awareness among indigenous peoples (traditional authorities, indigenous organisations, including women’s organisations) of women and children’s rights and of violence against women and girls.

Q: Colonialism has led some indigenous peoples to internalise racism and indigenous women to accept violence. Could you discuss the relationship between colonialism and violence against indigenous women?

A: Colonialism, which is linked with patriarchy, has deprived indigenous women of their basic human rights to own and control their own lands, territories and resources. It has perpetuated racism and discrimination against indigenous women to the point where some of them deny their indigenous identities and try to emulate the colonisers’ ways.

This is just one way women internalise their oppression, which makes them highly vulnerable to trafficking and prostitution.

Alcoholism and drug dependence have also been used by colonisers to dehumanise indigenous men, and colonial patriarchy has reinforced or promoted machismo among the men. These are factors that lead to violence against indigenous women and girls.

Colonisers’ efforts to extract minerals, oil and gas from indigenous territories also led them to build enclaves where male workers live and prostituted women are brought in.

Q: Sometimes the state exacerbates factors that lead to violence against women and girls and can even perpetrate some forms of violence itself, such as with discriminatory policies or culturally insensitive education and health services. In these cases, what can bodies of the United Nations do?

A: The United Nations can help facilitate possibilities and opportunities for indigenous women to use U.N. treaty bodies, like the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) or the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC), or the Human Rights Committee, to file complaints against discriminatory policies and programmes of states.

The special representative of the secretary-general on violence against women and children can also visit countries where cases of violence against indigenous women and girls are reported.

U.N. agencies and funds like the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), U.N. Women and United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), should allot more technical and financial assistance to address this issue at the country, regional and global levels.

Q: The U.N. report “Breaking the Silence” is based on the assumption that violence against indigenous girls and women should be addressed as a specific problem, within but distinct from the phenomenon of violence against women in general. Does this approach risk putting a label on these women? How can it help tackle the problem?

A: Asking that violence against indigenous women and girls be addressed as a specific problem is just stating the fact that if there are few services to address this issue for women and girls in general, this is even more so for indigenous women and girls. It does not risk labelling them. It is just naming the problem so that this can be addressed more appropriately, adequately and effectively.

It is also to clarify that indigenous women generally do not agree that culture or tradition should be used to justify the violence they suffer from and to highlight that the people who are most effective in dealing with this issue are indigenous women and girls who are empowered to assert their rights as women and as indigenous persons.

Excerpt:

The underground sex trade is closer to our everyday world than we may think.

Photo courtesy of Hsiao-Hung Pai

A brothel may be hidden inside that shabby building a few blocks away from home; the kitchen maid of our favourite Chinese restaurant may have gone into sex work to earn the money she desperately needs; a foreign student at the university we attend may do part-time sex work to support his or her studies.

These and other realities are investigated by journalist and writer Hsiao-Hung Pai in her new book “Invisible: Britain’s Migrant Sex Workers”, to be published in the United States this November.

Working undercover on exhausting shifts as a housekeeper in several brothels all over the U.K., Pai came in contact with the whole range of human stories that compose the sex trade: prostitutes, pimps, housekeepers and clients.

She collected their stories and created a book that highlights the complexity of this phenomenon, with all its political, social and human factors that sex workers themselves are not always aware of.

“They are not necessarily aware of all the factors, but … they are aware of the choices they have made in difficult circumstances and the … exploitation they are confronted with as a result of institutional failures,” Hsiao-Hung Pai told IPS, “They are also aware of their collective powerlessness.”

Entrapped in circumstance

Backing people’s stories with data and research, the book shows the multiple paths that can bring migrant women to the “choiseless choice” of sex work.

In a foreign country, with no money, little understanding of English and often no legal status, migrant women find themselves vulnerable and completely isolated.

They become an easy prey for pimps who trick them with a fake promise of help, or sometimes they decide themselves to try sex work in order “to earn as much as possible as fast as possible”, instead of keeping on with a low paid job that will never enable them to survive abroad, send money home and sometimes also pay off huge debts to those who smuggled them into the country."[Being] a neutral observer...removes the possibility of ever obtaining an entirely unfiltered account of the issues you want to write about." -- Hsiao-Hung Pai

However, as the author explains in the introduction, she didn’t want to portray migrant women as merely victims of oppression, but also to document their resistance against the circumstances of their lives.

“Only you yourself can know if it is all worth the effort. No one else can judge or evaluate it for you,” says one girl in the book.

Sending money home, doing the job as a sacrifice for a better life for themselves and their families are topics that keep coming back in the words of sex workers throughout the pages. “If you don’t bring cash back home you are nothing,” a pimp tells Pai, in a bid to convince her to take up sex work.

“Life becomes a little purposeless when you don’t have someone to look after and to earn for,” says another sex worker.

Once in the sex trade, women often end up trapped in it for years, either because of a pimp controlling them or out of a desperate need for money and the lack of any other income alternative. Locked in their work in the brothel, they become more and more isolated from society.

“Some of them like the idea that they can talk with someone empathetic outside about their lives and continue to share their stories with me [after I left the undercover job],” Pai told IPS.

“It won’t be long before I can go back, to my daughter and my parents,” says a Chinese sex worker in Bedford, in the southeast of England, in a rare pause of reflection while she works herself to the bone to make that moment come faster.

This kind of slavery is complex and cannot be read solely through the lens of sex trafficking. Policy responses that blur the difference between illegal immigration and trafficking are questioned in the book.

“With this discourse, solutions to the ills of trafficking have concentrated exclusively on immigration controls,” it says, “‘Combating trafficking’ has become entwined with cracking down on ‘illegal immigration’.”

Such an approach leads to targeting trafficking networks while avoiding looking at more systemic factors that stem from the lack of institutional protection for migrants and the police turning a blind eye to prostitution.

A frequent state response to sex trade is its criminalisation, which leads to the closing of brothels and pushes sex workers into the streets and further underground, where they become much more vulnerable.

An insider’s perspective

This is not the first time that Pai worked undercover. Before ‘Invisible’, she had already pretended to be an undocumented Chinese migrant worker in the U.K. during her research for the book “Chinese Whispers: The true story behind Britain’s hidden army of labour” (2008).

“The paradox is that sometimes we need to put on a different identity in order to understand how different social relations and identities really work. We need to deceive in order to expose deception,” she writes in the introduction of ‘Invisible’.

The idea of going undercover first came to her when a Chinese catering worker questioned her about the authenticity of reporting via conventional methods, she explained to IPS.

“Although it is a standard journalistic practice to adopt an objective stance as a neutral observer, doing so removes the possibility of ever obtaining an entirely unfiltered account of the issues you want to write about. … You lose the opportunity to build the closeness and intimacy which precondition truthfulness.

“I’d like to think that my work has done something in giving voice to the most marginalised groups of people in our society,” she said, “and hope that it will enable some change.”

By Silvia Romanelli
UNITED NATIONS, May 20 2013 (IPS)

“We live in a world where billions of citizen witnesses have cameras in their pockets. The opportunities are endless to document human rights violations,” Chris Michael, head of training and partnerships at WITNESS, tells IPS.

Courtesy of Chris Michael

Co-founded in 1992 by musician Peter Gabriel, Human Rights First and the Reebok Human Rights Foundation, WITNESS is a Brooklyn-based organisation that empowers citizens to use video advocacy to denounce human rights violations, through trainings and video campaigns in partnership with local NGOs.

In June 2012, WITNESS created, together with other organisations using video for activism, the ‘video4change’ international network.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: What is the most important thing for an advocacy video to be effective?

A: Integrating video effectively into a human rights campaign is a complex process, so it can’t be boiled down to any single variable. However, when personal stories are a driving force behind a campaign for change, and when there is a clearly defined, accessible audience with the power to help change the situation – be they policy makers, community activists, or the media – you have a powerful recipe for change.

Q: ‘Video4change’ is working to assess advocacy videos’ impact. How can this impact be measured?

A: WITNESS has worked with over 350 partners and trained over 4,500 human rights defenders in 87 countries to develop, test and hone our model of video for change. However, our model is just one of many.

Some are audience, change-driven models like WITNESS, where the goal is policy change. Others, like our allies at Video Volunteers in India, are really focused on building capacity of citizen journalists to report on pressing issues to help effect change in their community."The power of personal stories that engage, move and inspire the audiences they are intended for is what can catapult the desired action." -- Chris Michael

This research effort, led by Dr. Tanya Notley of the University of Western Sydney and Julie Fischer from the Center for Civic Media/Open Documentary Lab at MIT, is exploring eight different models of video for change that explore the methodologies of 15 leading groups and organisations.

In addition to learning how each methodology evaluates its success – be it policy change, or shift in behaviour or attitudes, for example – the research will contribute to the development of a shared set of impact indicators, methodologies and metrics tools that will enhance the quality of future video for change initiatives.

Q: In June 2012, WITNESS co-hosted in Indonesia a global gathering of organisations that use video for activism. Do you think that human rights advocacy videos are more effective in some regions/cultures than in others?

A: Context, including but not limited to region and culture, is paramount to all aspects of video advocacy. It is critical when evaluating not only if video is the right tool, but how and when it should best be used and to what ends.

Though each situation is unique – the challenges a Syrian advocate faces in documenting war crimes is drastically different than a youth organiser using video to increase funding for her library, for example – there are universal considerations around security of all involved, as well as determining the goal, audience and primary message you want to convey to your intended audience.

Q: Part of video’s communication strength lies in its power to stimulate strong emotive reactions. Do you think this can sometimes cause an oversimplified understanding of a situation, driven only by the emotion of the moment?

A: Any advocacy effort – be it in writing, in video, or in person – runs the risk of over-simplifying a complex situation. So advocacy in all forms must be very careful to convey issues responsibly.

Because it communicates on so many levels, video has a unique and powerful way of conveying a nuanced and complete picture. Video has the power to bring its audience into a specific time and place, to connect with people affected by a situation, hear their stories and learn directly from them what changes they want to see. The power of personal stories that engage, move and inspire the audiences they are intended for is what can catapult the desired action.

At WITNESS, we consider it vitally important that those affected by human rights violations are telling their own stories. We can provide training on creating videos and on building advocacy campaigns, but we cannot and should not tell the story ourselves.

Q: In your opinion, in today’s overload of data and images, do advocacy videos risk losing their power of driving attention to human rights issues?

A: In 2012, there were over 350,000 hours of Syria-related human rights footage uploaded to YouTube alone. Is that a problem? Certainly not. But it does require that we work differently.

Oversaturation is a consideration in WITNESS’ training materials – we firmly believe that careful strategy is necessary to maximise impact. We teach activists to focus on a particular audience that can take a specific action, and we train them to create videos that will affect that audience, and to get their videos in front of those eyes.

Curation and contextualisation are two other remedies. The challenge is to make sure that viewers can make sense of what happened in the footage they see. This is one reason WITNESS, in partnership with Storyful, launched the Human Rights Channel on YouTube – to verify, curate, and amplify the most powerful human rights content.

Q: What are the challenges and opportunities ahead for WITNESS’s work? 

A: The greatest challenge for our work is scaling it up to properly educate the millions of people who now have cameras in their pockets and are willing to use them to document human rights abuses.

Video advocacy has evolved in leaps and bounds with the growth of easy-to-use and affordable cameras and the explosion of video-enabled cell phones, not to mention the growth of social media and video sharing platforms. This is creating enormous opportunities for video advocates to create, curate and share stories that we may never have seen or heard previously.

Thankfully, it is harder and harder to hide human rights violations.

Excerpt:

The spoon-billed sandpiper (Eurynorhynchus pygmeus), seen here in Phetchaburi, Thailand, could be extinct within a decade. Credit: J.J. Harrison/cc by 3.0

By Silvia Romanelli
UNITED NATIONS, May 17 2013 (IPS)

Migratory birds, which play an important role in the complex web of life known as ecosystem services, are under threat as never before, with some species facing extinction within the next decade.

Ahead of the International Day for Biological Diversity on May 22, focused this year on water resources, experts are calling for greater international cooperation to find sustainable and cost-effective solutions to the problem of species loss and environmental degradation."Half of the world’s wetlands - natural water storage systems - have been lost over the past century." -- Nick Nuttall of UNEP

“Both water management boundaries and ecosystems rarely conveniently align with geopolitical boundaries,” notes the report Natural Solutions for Water Security, published by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).

According to Francisco Rilla, information and capacity building officer at the Convention on Migratory Species (CMS), an intergovernmental treaty signed in 1979 in Bonn, Germany, “The ‘Big Five’ primary causes of biodiversity loss … are habitat destruction, overharvesting and poaching, pollution, climate change and introduction of invasive species.”

Migratory species are especially vulnerable “as they depend entirely on a network of well-functioning ecosystems to refuel, reproduce and survive in every ‘station’ they visit and upon unrestricted travel,” Rilla told IPS.

The U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) notes that many migrating birds, such as cranes, storks, shorebirds and eagles, travel thousands of kilometres across flyways that span countries, continents and even the entire globe.

These birds use wetlands to rest, feed and breed along their migration routes.

However, “half of the world’s wetlands – natural water storage systems – have been lost over the past century,” Nick Nuttall, UNEP spokesperson, told IPS.

Because of the degradation of their habitats, some migratory bird species could lose up to nine percent of their populations, while others, like the spoon-billed sandpiper, could become extinct within a decade, leading to further ecosystem changes and ultimately impacting on human development.

Putting a price on biodiversity loss

In a statement ahead of World Migratory Bird Day on May 11-12, UNEP executive director Achim Steiner underlined that migratory birds “are part of the web of life that underpins nature’s multi-trillion-dollar ecosystem services,” which are the benefits and resources that nature offers to humankind. 

“[Migratory birds’] contribution to ecosystem services is increasingly starting to be measured in monetary terms,” Rilla told IPS.

In March 2007, at the request of the Group of Eight largest economies along with several developing countries, UNEP started an initiative called ‘The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity’ (TEEB), aiming at studying the economic benefits of biodiversity and incorporating them into policy-making.

As an example of TEEB’s implementation, Nuttall explained how UNEP assisted Kenya in 2012 to calculate the economic value of the ecosystem services generated by the Mau forest northwest of the capital Nairobi.

The overall value was assessed at 1.5 billion dollars a year, a consideration that led to the restoration of the forest, as well as of other ecosystems supplying water to Kenyan cities.

The advantages of using natural infrastructure like forests and wetlands instead of human-built infrastructure, such as dams, pipelines, water treatment plants and drainage systems, are highlighted in CBD’s report.

For example, strengthened coastal ecosystems can function as buffer zones that protect coastal communities from storms; rehabilitating soil biodiversity and functions can enhance water availability to crops and hence improve food security; restoring forests can reduce erosion risks and help deliver better quality water.

This approach, known as “Ecosystem-based Adaptation” (EbA), which integrates biodiversity and ecosystem services in climate change adaptation strategies – though cheaper and more sustainable than building new artificial infrastructure – is still under-utilised, says the report.

Agricultural activities, which alone account for approximately 70 percent of global water use, could apply a similar approach.

“More sustainable forms of farming can … address water issues while enhancing biodiversity,” Nuttall told IPS. “A survey of thousands of small scale farmers in Africa by UNEP and the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development found that those who had switched to organic or near organic production had seen yields on average climb by 100 percent, in part because returning organic matter to the soils had increased water retention of the soil – like a sponge – and prolonged the growing season.”

Governance matters

“We live in an increasingly water-insecure world,” stresses the CBD report.

Although there is no global water scarcity as such, there is an imbalance in its regional distribution, with only 12 percent of the world’s population consuming 85 percent of the available water.

Sound governance and equity in the distribution of water-derived benefits seem therefore important questions in the debate.

Asked by IPS about sustainable water management strategies in South Asia, one of the most water-scarce regions of the world, Michael Kugelman, senior programme associate for South and Southeast Asia at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, cited resource mismanagement as a root cause of problems.

He stressed the lack of interregional cooperation in the area, as well as of understanding of the connections between ecosystem protection and water resources.

“I think that at a government level that linkage is not made at all,” he said, “There are a lot of environmental NGOs that are bringing attention to these issues. … In some ways governments will take the lead from the NGO community.”

Water cooperation in South Asia is limited to some bilateral initiatives, such as the Indus Water Treaty between India and Pakistan.

At a global level, the main mechanisms dealing with biodiversity and water management are the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands (signed in 1971 in Ramsar, Iran) and the above-mentioned CBD, which was created at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and in 2010 adopted its Strategic Plan for Biodiversity for the period 2011-2020.

The United Nations declared 2013 the International Year of Water Cooperation.

US Army Corps of Engineers tours flooded areas in Burlington, North Dakota in 2011. Credit: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers photo by Patrick Moes

By Silvia Romanelli
NEW YORK, May 16 2013 (IPS)

Seven in 10 U.S. citizens believe climate change is real and happening now. Yet most have never even contacted a government official about the issue, let alone volunteered with an environmental organisation or taken other action.

These findings are part of an exploration of Climate Change in the American Mind issued  by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication."This is about something much deeper. It’s about identity, about values, it’s about emotions." -- Anthony Leiserowitz of the Yale Project

“They think it’s about polar bears or developing countries, not the United States… not my community, not my friends and family,” Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project, told IPS.

Researchers divided the U.S. population into “six Americas” that share similar beliefs about climate change. Seventy percent belong to three major “Americas” that believe, to a more or less strong degree, that climate change is happening, is harmful and is caused by humans.

After falling between 2008 and 2010, public awareness on the topic here has been rising again, probably because of the number and severity of extreme weather events in the last two years. The trend was confirmed by an opinion poll released in April by the Gallup Institute.

The latest dire warning came just this week, when the executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, Christiana Figueres, announced that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had passed the critical threshold of 400 parts per million.

To put this number in perspective, the last time the Earth had a similar concentration of CO2 was three million years ago during the Pliocene era, when sea levels were up to 80 feet higher.

“The main way people know about this issue is through media reporting,” Leiserowitz explained. “And when the media don’t report it, it’s literally out of sight and out of mind.”

Bringing climate change down to earth

Television weather forecasters seem ideally suited to become climate change educators: they speak to thousands or even millions of people every day, often three to four times a day, and they are already trusted by their audiences.

The Yale Project is providing them with tools and training to discuss climate change, connecting them with the climate science community and organising debates with meteorologists who hold varying opinions of climate change to foster dialogue.

The idea of making information more accessible also inspired Climate Commons, an online interactive map of the United States, launched on Apr. 22 by the organisation Internews, as part of its Earth Journalism Network (EJN).

Data on climate change indicators – such as temperature, weather events and emissions – and related news stories are visualised on the map, tracking the impact of global warming and the presence, or absence, of media coverage.

“We are hoping that journalists and other communicators, as well as the general public, can all use this visualisation and can understand better what’s going on,” James Fahn, global director of EJN, told IPS.

“Eventually we do definitely want this map to become a source for bottom-up news and information and then observations and news from the public,” he said.

Because while a “good understanding of the problem … is necessary, it’s not sufficient,” he said, adding that more spaces are needed for citizen participation in actual policy making.

Shaping environmental democracy

“Ultimately, how we protect our environment is a fundamental question of how we … exercise our democracy,” Michael Marx, director of the Beyond Oil Campaign at Sierra Club, the largest grassroots environmental organisation in the U.S., told IPS.

David Eisenhauer of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) agreed, telling IPS that “providing an opportunity for citizen input is foundational to our democracy”.

In March, the USFWS released its “Climate Adaptation Strategy” outlining nationwide strategies for the next five to 10 years to protect species and resources in a changing climate. Written in response to a 2010 call by the U.S. Congress and produced in collaboration with federal, state and tribal agencies, the strategy benefited during its draft stage from nearly 55,000 comments from individuals and organisations.

The range of actions that can be taken by ordinary citizens to address climate change is broad, and can be as simple as keeping the thermostat in one’s home on a lower setting, as one commenter suggested.

“The combination of personal behaviour choices and civic engagement and activism is a potent tool that has global scale consequences,” said Marx.

According to Leiserowitz, changing individual lifestyles in the United States could cut emissions by 10 percent. “The other 90 percent really has to come from a systemic change,” he said.

That means that public demands for change in the U.S need to be more systematic and urgent, said Leiserowitz.

On Feb. 17, the Sierra Club participated in a Forward on Climate Rally that drew an estimated 40,000 people in Washington D.C.

“We do not see the diversity and occasional conflict within the climate movement as a bad thing,” Marx said. “We accept that a democratic approach – as divisive and chaotic as it can appear – is also the most resilient and strongest [one].”

Fears of “big government”

Climate change is not only an environmental issue, Leiserowitz pointed out. It cuts across multiple aspects of society, including the economy, national security, and cultural and religious beliefs.

Some opponents of actions like mandatory emissions cuts fear they could be a pretext to usher in more intrusive government, as has been seen in other hot-button debates over issues like gun control and health care.

“They’re so afraid of the policy response that they suddenly become very sceptical of the problem itself,” said Leiserowitz.

“This is about something much deeper. It’s about identity, about values, it’s about emotions, and if you don’t know that that’s what you’re dealing with, you will eternally be frustrated when you provide them with more and more facts and they don’t respond the way you think they are going to.”

From 155 million in 1990, the number of migrants in the world today has reached 214 million, with “one in every seven persons on the globe…in a migratory status”, according to William Lacy Swing, director-general of the International Organisation for Migration (IOM).

Speaking during a panel discussion at the U.N. headquarters on Apr. 23, Swing and other speakers condemned the general misconception of migration as a negative phenomenon and underlined the need to conceive of it as “a process to be managed rather than a problem to be solved”.

Other panellists stressed the need for international, national and local coherence and coordination of policies, while recognizing migration as a cross-cutting issue, relevant to all countries and to many sectors within each country including health, employment and social welfare.

International mechanisms and institutions for coordinating efforts on migration management are already in place, but need to be improved.  “We need to question if the present division of labour between the various international bodies is still sufficiently adequate to deal with the societal, economic and political changes ahead of us,” said Johan Ketelers, secretary general of the International Catholic Migration Commission (ICMC), which submitted a five-year proposal plan on migration to the U.N. General Assembly in November 2012.

ICMC’s suggestions include: regulating migrant labour recruitment industry, protecting migrants stranded in situations of distress as wars and natural disasters, integrating migration in the post-2015 development agenda and redefining international mechanisms of migrants’ rights protection.

Ketelers called for more efficient cooperation, based on structured solidarity and shared responsibilities. “I’m not trying to advocate for a new institution, but rather for a better system, with better mechanisms that include existing actors … a system that is based … on shared responsibilities.”

Referring to the Global Migration Group (GMG), created in 2006 as an umbrella for fourteen U.N. agencies, the World Bank and the IOM, Ketelers said, “The GMG will work if the GMG is given more political power.” Integrating human mobility issues in development frameworks and policies can enhance migration’s positive impact in the countries of origin and destination.

Shamshad Akhtar, Assistant Secretary General for Economic Development at the U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA), highlighted three ways in particular to emphasise the benefits of migration on development: reducing the transfer costs of remittances; strengthening migration data collection and knowledge sharing; and lowering the costs of migration.

These issues should be addressed in a coherent manner at the international level, on the basis of multilaterally agreed objectives and criteria.  Valid migration indicators and data should be developed and shared in the international community to serve as working material for evidence-based migration policies.

The challenges for global development and cooperation in the present migration context will be the topic of the second U.N. High Level Dialogue on International Migration and Development (HLD), to be held on Oct. 3 and 4, 2013 at the U.N. headquarters. The first HLD took place in 2006, under the guidance of then U.N. Secretary General, Kofi Annan.

The global fight against malaria has now come down to a question of money, according to Jeffrey Sachs, the United Nations Special Advisor for the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), whose 2015 target date is approaching fast.

Delivering a speech at the U.N. headquarters on Apr. 17, Sachs stressed that malaria is now a “100 percent curable disease” thanks to huge progress over the last ten years.

However, the international community cannot afford to slacken its pace and every effort must be made to replenish the coffers that drive the anti-malaria programmes worldwide, finding the necessary financial resources to deliver timely treatments.

According to the 2012 World Malaria Report, issued by the World Health Organisation (WHO), malaria mortality rates decreased by 26 percent globally between 2000 and 2010.

Financial resources management has also improved. “We know how to invest our resources much more strategically than we did in the past,” said Simon Bland, chair of the board of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis & Malaria, also called the Global Fund.

But despite these achievements, malaria still claims approximately 655,000 lives in the world each year. Of these fatalities, 85 percent are children under the age of five and 90 percent occur in the African continent.

International funding for malaria control programmes rose from less than 100 million dollars in 2000 to its peak of 1.71 billion dollars in 2010, which has been instrumental in allowing the Global Fund to carry out its crucial work.

The Fund is replenished every three years by 54 donor states. As the next replenishment phase is approaching, Bland called on all countries to contribute to the 15 billion dollars needed by fall 2013. Two weeks ago the U.S. replenished one third of that amount, which means the fund still needs 10 billion dollars.

Panelists at the discussion suggested a host of alternative funding options, ranging from contributions from new economic powers to the involvement of the private sector and corporate social responsibility (CSR), as well as philanthropy and crowd funding.

“The emerging economies have a huge part to play. We’re working very closely with China, with India and others, to see how they can help,” said Bland.

Significant resources could also be collected from the private sector, leveraging its interest in improving living conditions in malaria-affected areas to the benefit of commerce and tourism.

However, the need for transparency in corporate engagement was stressed, whether it is for profit, credit returns or public image.

Joy Phumaphi, executive secretary of the African Leaders Malaria Alliance (ALMA), called attention to the profound imbalance in malaria rates worldwide: according to WHO figures, the world’s poorest regions are hit hardest by the disease.

“A lot of the tragedies that are man-made globally are driven by inequities…and injustice,” she said, “This disease is one of the biggest inequities that we have currently on the planet.”

The discussion, organised ahead of this year’s World Malaria Day on Apr. 25, was co-hosted by the U.N. secretary general’s special envoy for financing the health MDGs and for malaria and by the Roll Back Malaria Partnership (RBM), launched in 1998 by the WHO, United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the World Bank in order to coordinate global efforts in the fight against malaria.

The need to restructure global economic governance in a more inclusive and effective way was stressed at a conference sponsored by the Permanent Mission of Kazakhstan, at the U.N.Headquarters in New York.

Murat Karimsakov, chairman of the ‘Eurasian Economic Club of Scientists’ Association (EECS), presented the G-Global project. The initiative is intended to involve the greatest number of countries in the international debate, triggered by last years’ economic and financial crisis, on the effectiveness and legitimacy of global economic institutions.

“G-Global project … calls for radical expansion of the number of participants to confront the global challenges,” said Karimsakov in a statement released Monday, “The key objective of G-Global is to unite the world community under the World Anti-Crisis Conference supported by the UN General Assembly resolution on Dec. 21, 2012.”

Launched by Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev in December 2011 and run by EECS, the G-Global project aims at fostering debate about global development in its broadest sense, through conferences, meetings and online contributions. The project will see its high point on May 23 and 24 this year, with the World Anti-Crisis Conference organised in Astana, capital of Kazakhstan, during the 6^th Astana Economic Forum.

The main objective of the conference will be to draft a World Anti-Crisis Plan to be presented to the U.N. General Assembly and the G-20 Summit in September 2013. The conference will also be launched online, on the G-Global platform, through virtual roundtables and thematic debates, in order to benefit also from the contributions of those who won’t be able to physically attend the event in Astana.

The initiative hopes to “give a voice to the countries that want to contribute to the current debate,” said Mark Uzan, executive director of the Bretton Woods Committee. This broad inclusiveness should differentiate this project from other international economic groups, such as the G20, which, according to Uzan, reflects the interests of the powerful countries and is not very inclusive for the rest of the world.

The emergence of new economic powers like India, Brazil, China and South Africa has called into question the legitimacy of international financial institutions, prompting the conference organisers to ask themselves if a complete reform of the global economy architecture is needed at this point.

The world is “facing a major transition, in which you need to rebalance not only the global economy but also … global governance”, said Uzan, “What is at stake is [the] need to create a new set of institutions that will reflects a new balance of economic powers in the world.”

This restructuring could take the form, he said, either of a modernisation of the Bretton Woods institutions or of a creation of completely new institutions, possibly driven by emerging countries.

The two issues, of inclusiveness and reform of the global economic governance, will be addressed during the World Anti-Crisis Conference in May, which will take place with the support of the United Nations and the Reinventing Bretton Woods Committee, amongst other co-organizers.