A civil society protest at COP 31 demands a transition from fossil fuels. Credit: UN Climate Change/Kubilay Ciftci

By Umar Manzoor Shah
ANTALYA, Türkiye, Nov 14 2026 (IPS)

The shift away from fossil fuels is made more difficult by the powerful, often overlooked role of national oil companies. These companies are deeply embedded in their countries’ economies and political systems.

During the COP31 climate summit in Antalya, Inter Press Service (IPS) spoke exclusively with Amir Shafaie, Legal and Economic Program Director at the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI), about the role of state-owned oil companies in the energy transition, the financial risks of continued fossil fuel investments and the policies governments need to adopt to meet global climate goals.

Shafaie said national oil companies produced 54 percent of the world’s oil and half of its gas in 2025. Their share of global production could rise to around 62 percent by 2050 if current trends continue.

Excerpts from the interview: 

Amir Shafaie, Legal and Economic Program Director at the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI). Photo: Supplied

IPS: National oil companies account for nearly half of global fossil fuel production. How significant is their role in the global transition away from fossil fuels, and why have they received less attention in climate negotiations?

Shafaie: National oil companies are even more significant than the question suggests. In 2025 they produced 54% of the world’s oil and half its gas, and their share is projected to reach around 62% by 2050. Last year (2025) NOC capital expenditure was around US$240 billion — more than three times what the oil majors spent. So, the pace of the transition away from fossil fuels will be significantly shaped by these state-owned companies.

NOCs are also politically sensitive. They often have a massive role in the national political economy and significant influence over government: they fund national budgets and public services and are often bound up with national identity.

Given their importance, it’s time to stop treating them as a footnote in transition conversations.

They deserve to be a headline.

IPS: What specific steps should national oil companies take to align their business strategies with the global goal of limiting temperature rise to 1.5°C?

Shafaie: There is no single model — NOCs differ widely in mandate and capability — but every NOC needs a deliberate strategy of transformation to navigate the energy transition, and government owners of NOCs need to ensure that is the case.

As a first step, NOCs must stop treating business as usual as a neutral option and start to seriously assess the risks – and opportunities – presented by the global energy transition. Every NOC should test its planned investments against various demand scenarios, including those in which countries meet their climate pledges and oil and gas demand falls — and publish the results. Many projects that NOCs view positively today may not pay back. In 2023, NRGI analysis found that NOCs plan about US$1.8 trillion of upstream spending over the 2023-2032 period and that roughly a quarter, about US$425 billion, of that public money would be lost if oil demand falls in line with governments’ climate pledges.

Moreover, in these assessments, NOCs shouldn’t assume a pivot to gas eliminates risk: demand destruction from the recent crisis, with countries switching to renewables that can be cheaper and less geopolitically volatile, works against that; and there is still a lot of gas and LNG coming on to the market in coming years, so projects will need to be competitive.

Governments and NOCs also need a credible plan for the new business areas NOCs pursue, identifying sectors and technologies in which the NOC holds genuine comparative advantages.

Finally, NOCs are not only commercial entities—in many producing regions they are anchor employers and service providers, and their transformation carries real consequences for workers and communities. Governments and NOCs must anticipate the just transition needs of different regions as NOCs transform.”

IPS: How can governments persuade state-owned oil companies to reduce fossil fuel production while balancing energy security, economic growth and employment concerns?

Shafaie: Balancing these various concerns is not easy, but governments need to weigh all the factors (energy security, economic growth, employment concerns and production plans), not focus on just one or some of them. Governments are also well placed to do this with NOCS.

They own these companies or hold large stakes in them, so this is less about persuading NOCs than about setting a clear policy, including around how much revenue can go back into new oil and gas and requiring investments to be tested against different demand scenarios.

And there is room to balance these factors. The recent energy crisis shows that energy security and energy transition are not opposites: oil dependence is itself a security and cost-of-living risk, and NOCs often end up absorbing the cost, as Pertamina has with subsidised fuel prices.

The challenge also looks different for NOCs in net-importing and net-exporting countries. In net importers such as Thailand, producing more at home offers little protection from world prices, so the energy security gains come from cutting demand and diversifying supply. In large net exporters such as the UAE or Norway, the main risk is volatile revenues, and today’s windfalls are an opportunity to diversify their economies. Many NOCs, including Pemex, Pertamina, NNPC and increasingly Ecopetrol in the case of gas, sit in between and face both challenges at once, so governments need mandates that address both.”

IPS: What risks do continued investments in new oil and gas fields pose to developing countries, particularly in terms of stranded assets, public finances and long-term energy security?

Shafaie: The risks are significant, and they fall on ordinary people in producing countries. Our 2023 analysis finds that if governments meet their existing climate pledges, around a quarter of NOCs’ planned upstream investments for 2023–2032 may never break even. For some — Uganda’s UNOC and Cameroon’s SNH — the figure exceeds 80%.

When a state company’s assets lose value, the hit lands on public balance sheets, leaving less for health, education and diversification. Current high oil prices can mask these vulnerabilities in the short term, but they don’t remove them. The longer-term dynamics from the energy transition are still there. It is particularly important for NOCs and the government to exercise fiscal discipline in the current context, where market signals may lead them to take greater risks. As UN Secretary General Guterres said at COP31 ‘taxpayers should not underwrite investments that lock in fossil fuel dependence’.

IPS: The COP30 roadmap seeks to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels. What concrete policy measures, financial incentives and accountability mechanisms are needed to ensure national oil companies become part of this transition rather than obstacles to it?

Shafaie: The Brazil COP roadmap is a significant step forward in taking the “transition away from fossil fuels” from an abstract idea to a basis for national planning. What happens at the national level is what really matters now.

The roadmap rightly asks countries to start now and equitably recognises that what this means in each country will differ, depending on exposure and capacity. The approach looks different in each country and can range from starting the phase-out of licensing and production in rich Global North producers to starting serious transition risk – and opportunity – assessments and associated planning in low- and middle-income producer countries.

The COP30 Presidency Roadmap also rightly recognises the distinctive role of NOCs at the intersection of public revenues, energy security and industrial development. Accordingly, for countries with NOCs, discussions around the NOC’s future should be central from the start if transition plans are to be credible.

International cooperation can also play a vital role in supporting NOC transformations through peer learning around scenario-based planning, disciplined investment decisions, decarbonisation and methane emissions abatement and finance for credible diversification into renewable energy and other business areas.

IPS UN Bureau Report

Members of the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA) gather at the COP31 climate summit, calling on governments to prioritise zero-waste solutions and methane reduction over waste-to-energy incineration in Antalya, Türkiye, on November 10, 2026. Credit: Nipe Fagio

By Chemtai Kirui
ANTALYA, Türkiye & NAIROBI, Nov 13 2026 (IPS)

Plans to build waste incineration plants across Africa risk undermining efforts to curb methane emissions, zero-waste campaigners have warned, as world leaders and climate negotiators gather in Antalya, Türkiye, for the COP31 climate summit.

Waste management and methane reduction are among the issues under discussion at the summit, with campaigners saying that governments should prioritise waste separation, composting and recycling over investment in incineration infrastructure.

Weyinmi Okotie, executive director of the Green Knowledge Foundation, said only 55% of municipal solid waste was collected across Africa, with just 4% recycled.

Organic material accounts for as much as 70% of municipal waste in some African cities, Okotie said, much of which ends up in dumpsites and landfills.

As it decomposes in oxygen-poor conditions, the waste releases methane, a greenhouse gas with about 80 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period.

Food waste accounts for up to 14% of global methane emissions, according to a 2026 report by the UN Environment Programme

Mary Nyambura Kanyui at her recycling aggregation yard on Juja Road in Nairobi’s
Eastleigh area, where she buys recyclable materials from waste pickers. Credit: Chemtai Kirui/IPS

and UN-Habitat. The report estimated that 1.05bn tonnes of food were wasted in 2022, even as 783mn people faced hunger.

A ministerial declaration issued at COP31 by countries participating in the Global Methane Pledge called on governments to prevent organic waste from being sent to landfill, expand resource recovery, and capture methane emissions where avoidance is not yet possible.

The declaration reaffirmed the Global Methane Pledge‘s goal of cutting global methane emissions by at least 30 per cent below 2020 levels by 2030. It was endorsed by seven countries: Belgium, Canada, Germany, Indonesia, Norway, the UK and the Federated States of Micronesia.

The declaration was issued as ministers and private-sector representatives met to assess progress towards the target.

Existing commitments are projected to deliver only 10–11 per cent of the emissions reductions needed by 2030, participants warned, and they called for stronger policies, improved emissions monitoring, and increased public and private investment.

They called for stronger policies, improved emissions monitoring and greater investment to accelerate methane reductions across the energy, agriculture and waste sectors.

Global municipal solid waste is projected to rise from 2.1bn tonnes in 2023 to 3.8bn tonnes by 2050, according to the UN Environment Programme (UNEP). The annual cost of managing waste, including the effects of pollution, ill health and climate change, could reach US$640.3bn by then if current trends persist.

A shift towards a circular economy, in which materials are reused rather than discarded, could instead generate net annual economic gains of US$108.5bn by 2050, UNEP estimates.

Türkiye’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, urged governments to embrace zero-waste initiatives, saying efforts to reduce rubbish and increase recycling could help cut emissions and tackle the climate crisis.

His call came as Türkiye’s COP31 presidency urged countries to halve the projected growth in global annual waste generation by 2035. The proposed target shifts the focus from waste collection and disposal towards preventing waste at source, extending the life of materials and reducing emissions from discarded organic matter.

Sherphine Apiyo Kochiyo, a monitoring and evaluation officer at Kenya’s Centre for Environment Justice and Development (CEJAD), attends the COP31 climate summit in Antalya, Türkiye. Credit: GAIA

Wednesday was designated Zero Waste Day at COP31, with discussions focusing on circularity and methane reduction.

But campaigners warned that the growing promotion of waste-to-energy incinerators in African countries risked locking cities into costly infrastructure and diverting investment from waste prevention, composting and recycling.

An average of USD 4.1bn a year in climate finance was tracked for methane reduction in the solid-waste sector in 2021–22, but 94 per cent of that funding — USD 3.86bn — went to projects involving undifferentiated waste incineration, according to the Climate Policy Initiative.

Just USD 223m went to targeted waste-management measures, such as landfill-gas capture and food-waste anaerobic digestion. A further USD 22m was directed to organic-waste management. Sub-Saharan Africa received 57 per cent of the funding for targeted projects, the analysis found.

A report by the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA), published in October, identified 15 waste-to-energy incineration projects and proposals across 10 African countries, with combined estimated capital costs exceeding US$4bn.

Public funding was the largest identified source of finance. Yet only one project — the Reppie plant in Ethiopia — was operational. Two others were under construction, while the remaining 12 were at various stages of approval, financing, planning or proposal.

Chythenyen Devika Kulasekaran, a researcher at India’s Centre for Financial Accountability, said companies were increasingly promoting incineration in Africa after pushing the technology in parts of Asia.

Waste workers with the Nipe Fagio waste collection service sift through compost to remove larger particles during the production of organic fertiliser in Bonyokwa, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, 2023. Credit: Nipe Fagio

Kulasekaran cited a proposed plant in Casablanca, Morocco, which would be the largest incinerator in Africa if built. An agreement for the project was signed in August, he said, although details of its financing remained unavailable.

Desmond Alugnoa, programme manager for zero waste and climate at GAIA, said governments facing waste-management problems and electricity shortages were attracted by the prospect of generating power from rubbish.

But incinerators required large upfront investments and a constant supply of waste to operate, he said. Alugnoa cited Ethiopia’s Reppie plant, which he said had received substantial public investment but generated relatively little electricity for the national grid compared with its operating costs.

Such projects also risked diverting public money from efforts to reduce waste before it was discarded, Alugnoa said.

Across eastern, western and southern Africa, community-based waste workers are already recovering organic waste and recyclable materials that might otherwise end up in dumpsites and landfills.

In Ngong, located on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya, Michael Wangombe collects food waste from markets and nearby businesses and supplies it to a black soldier fly project, where larvae convert the organic material into fertiliser.

Collectors are paid about KSh80 (US$0.62) for each bucket of waste collected. The material is weighed before being fed to the larvae, while the remaining residue is processed into fertiliser for agricultural use.

Wangombe is a member of the Ngong Social Justice and Environmental Centre, whose members have received protective equipment and support in finding buyers through the Danish Refugee Council’s Fair Recycling project.

Maurice Onzere, project manager of the Danish Refugee Council’s Fair Recycling project, said the initiative was helping waste pickers move from informal collection into more structured recycling businesses.

Participants receive training in waste segregation, financial management and market access, and are linked to aggregation centres where they can sell recovered materials to recycling companies.

Further along the waste-recovery chain, Mary Nyambura Kanyui runs an aggregation yard on Juja Road in Nairobi’s Eastleigh area, buying recyclable materials from waste pickers and selling them to recycling companies.

Kanyui spent three years collecting waste before setting up the business nearly six years ago. She now employs five workers, each earning KSh600 ($4.57) a day.

The Danish Refugee Council has helped her establish links with buyers, including recycling companies.

Onzere said women accounted for 57% of the waste pickers engaged by the programme in December 2025, up from less than 12% in 2021. The project works with about 4,000 waste pickers, including refugees and members of host communities.

In Tanzania, the environmental organisation Nipe Fagio works with waste pickers in Dar es Salaam to turn organic waste into fertiliser using black soldier fly larvae. The organisation is also working with the city of Zanzibar on plans for a zero-waste island.

A similar model is being pursued in Ghana, where a project established with Alugnoa’s support converts food and other organic waste into compost for urban farmers. The initiative also works with farmers to demonstrate its use. Despite operating across several municipalities, it processes less than 70 per cent of the city’s organic waste, Alugnoa said.

Durban, South Africa offers another approach. At Warwick Market, a project diverts unsold food from traders for use as animal feed, with the remaining waste sent for composting.

These initiatives were among the approaches discussed at the COP31 Food and Agriculture Pavilion, where practitioners from Tanzania, Uganda and Indonesia shared experiences of using black soldier fly larvae, biogas and composting to manage organic waste and reduce methane emissions.

Piotr Barczak of Africa Circular presented the BUGS project, which supports the development of black soldier fly systems across Africa. Representatives of Tanzania’s Nipe Fagio, Uganda’s Collect Village and GAIA Asia Pacific in Indonesia also outlined how these approaches were being applied in their respective countries.

But expanding such initiatives and the wider systems that support waste recovery requires investment.

Kanyui said she could make a profit of KSh10,000–15,000 (US$77–116) on days when she sold plastic after paying her workers. But banks were reluctant to lend to her because they did not consider the materials and equipment at her yard sufficient collateral.

“Someone goes to the yard the first time and sees rubbish,” she said.

Kanyui said access to a loan would allow her to buy more recyclable materials and that she would be able to repay it quickly.

Kenya’s Sustainable Waste Management Act, passed in 2022, requires waste to be separated at source and makes producers responsible for the environmental impact of products they introduce to the market. Regulations gazetted in November 2024 established an extended producer responsibility (EPR) framework, requiring companies to finance the collection and recycling of waste from their products.

Companies can meet these obligations individually or through producer responsibility organisations (PROs), which collect contributions from members and arrange for the recovery and recycling of discarded materials.

Dorothy Adhiambo Otieno, a programme officer at Kenya’s Centre for Environment Justice and Development (CEJAD), said some PROs had initially subsidised recycling companies buying recovered materials before shifting their support to aggregators, who collect materials from waste pickers and supply them to recyclers.

Some PROs were now exploring direct payments to waste pickers, Otieno said. But workers operating informally faced documentation requirements, including obtaining personal identification numbers from the Kenya Revenue Authority, which could make it difficult for them to receive payments.

Figures published by the Kenya Extended Producer Responsibility Organisation (KEPRO) show that its subsidy framework for September–December 2026 allocates 30 per cent of funding to recyclers, 25 per cent to aggregators, 15 per cent to transporters and the remaining 30 per cent to waste collectors.

Individual waste pickers and community-based organisations can participate through contracted aggregators. Guidance issued by the National Environment Management Authority (Nema) also provides for direct payments to waste pickers at collection points and material recovery facilities.

Producers are required to publish the rates they pay for waste collection services, the guidance says.

Sherphine Apiyo Kochiyo, a monitoring and evaluation officer at CEJAD, said the framework was welcome, but its effectiveness would depend on whether funding reached the workers recovering the waste.

Speaking on the sidelines of COP31, Kochiyo called for greater investment in community-based waste management, including separate collection vehicles for organic and dry waste, support for compost standards and certification, and funding to help community organisations participate in developing waste-management policies.

Campaigners warned that expanding incineration capacity risked diverting investment from waste reduction, recycling and composting. Kulasekaran said the plants’ need for a steady supply of rubbish could also lock cities into long-term dependence on incineration, rather than encouraging efforts to reduce waste at the source.

UN secretary-general António Guterres urged governments to move beyond pledges and increase investment in waste collection, composting and circular infrastructure. Citing projects in Durban, Dhaka and Kampala that convert organic waste into compost, fertiliser and animal feed, he said such initiatives could create jobs and lower costs.

“The era of pledges is over. The world needs action,” Guterres said.

IPS UN Bureau Report

Speaker of the House of Peoples' Representatives, Ethiopia, Ahmed Shide, told the African and Asian Parliamentarians’ Meeting on Policy Dialogue: Population, Development, SRHR, and Gender Equality that Africa’s young population and Asia’s varied demographic needs call for sustained investment in health, education, and decent employment, especially for young people and women. Credit: APDA

By Cecilia Russell
ADDIS ABABA & CAPE TOWN, South Africa, Nov 12 2026 (IPS)

Although Africa and Asia face different demographic challenges, they share a common imperative: ensuring that legislation, policies and budgets translate into tangible improvements in people’s lives.

This was the central message of Dr Abdul-Rashid Hassan Pelpuo, Ghana’s Minister of State for Special Initiatives and President of the African Parliamentary Forum on Population and Development (FPA), in his opening address to the two-day Africa–Asia Parliamentarians’ Conference on Population and Development, held earlier this month in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

The conference opened with a moment of silence in honour of former Japanese Prime Minister Fukuda Yasuo, Honorary Chair of the Asian Population and Development Association (APDA), who was remembered for his contributions to international cooperation, particularly in population, development and sexual and reproductive health.

The opening session also featured addresses by Shibata Hironori, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Japan to Ethiopia, and an opening statement by Ahmed Shide, Speaker of the House of Peoples’ Representatives, Ethiopia.

A recurring theme was the importance of reliable demographic data to guide policies, budgets and long-term planning.

Shibata Hironori, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Japan to the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, said Japan has supported international cooperation and development efforts in Africa and Asia. Credit: APDA

Summing up the conference, Dr Claudia Shilumani, Africa Regional Director of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), noted that Africa’s population was expected to grow by one billion by 2050, yet only about half of births were registered. She urged parliamentarians to advocate for modernised data systems, stressing that reliable information and transparent reporting were essential to measuring progress.

But data alone was not enough.

Dr Ikegami Kiyoko, Vice-Chair and Secretary-General of APDA, drew on Japan’s experience of an ageing population to demonstrate the importance of anticipating demographic change.

“Understanding population trends today helps parliamentarians anticipate future needs,” she said.

Her presentation also brought a deeply personal perspective to policymaking. Recounting her mother’s recovery from a stroke, she described how home-based medical care, rehabilitation, nursing and family support had helped her mother regain some independence and remain connected with her family.

Dr Claudia Shilumani, Africa Regional Director of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), succinctly summarised a central message of the African and Asian Parliamentarians’ Meeting: Policy Dialogue on Population, Development, SRHR and Gender Equality, stating that rights need resources and resources need accountability. Credit: APDA

“Policies are ultimately about the people’s lives and dignity,” she said, emphasising that Japan’s goal was not simply to extend life expectancy but to enable people to remain healthy and independent for as long as possible.

The conference also showcased how cooperation between Africa and Asia was translating development commitments into practical interventions.

Mr Koffi Kouame, UNFPA Country Representative, highlighted an initiative involving the Ethiopian Government, UNFPA, Japan, JICA and Japanese private-sector companies to improve menstrual health while creating economic opportunities for women and girls.

Seng Nhak, an MP from Cambodia, outlined an ambitious programme to equip 1.5 million young people with vocational skills, including free training and financial support for disadvantaged participants at the African and Asian Parliamentarians’ Meeting: Policy Dialogue on Population, Development, SRHR and Gender Equality. Credit: APDA

ITOCHU Corporation provided technical training in producing absorbent sanitary shorts, while JICA, Safaricom and Sumitomo Corporation supported digital solutions, including smartphones and mobile money services that enabled women to purchase materials, manage finances and market their products.

The initiative has trained 485 women in sanitary shorts production and menstrual health management, with nearly 45 000 shorts produced across 17 workspaces in Amhara and Tigray. Approximately 33 000 people received training on reproductive and maternal health, rights and gender-based violence, while 500 women are now producing and selling the products in their communities.

Investing in young people emerged as another critical priority, particularly for Africa, where a rapidly growing youth population presents both opportunities and challenges.

UNFPA’s Jacques Emina noted that Africa’s population could reach 2.5 billion by 2050, with approximately 60% under the age of 25. He warned that youth unemployment and the mismatch between education and labour-market needs could undermine the continent’s prospects of harnessing a demographic dividend.

Drawing on South Korea’s experience, Young Hong, Deputy Regional Director, UNFPA ESARO, emphasised that building human capital required sustained investment over decades, rather than short-term projects. She highlighted how long-term investment in education, voluntary family planning and primary healthcare had contributed to the country’s economic transformation and helped break cycles of intergenerational poverty.

Yakushi Hiroyuki, Chief Representative, JICA Ethiopia Office, and Koffi Kouame, Country Representative of UNFPA, gave delegates at the African and Asian Parliamentarians’ Meeting: Policy Dialogue on Population, Development, SRHR and Gender Equality examples of pilot projects that benefit youth and women. Credit: APDA

Presentations from Ethiopia and Cambodia demonstrated how countries were working to equip young people with marketable skills.

Safaricom Ethiopia Foundation’s Bethlehem Tameru reported that more than 1 000 young people had completed foundational digital-skills training and over 1 700 had completed advanced training.

However, she stressed that success should be measured not simply by the number of people trained but by whether they secured employment, started businesses or improved their livelihoods.

“Training should not be the end of the intervention. It should be the beginning of the pathway.”

Seng Nhak, Cambodia’s MP, outlined an ambitious programme to equip 1.5 million young people with vocational skills, including free training and financial support for disadvantaged participants. He reported that 80% of graduates found employment in the companies where they had trained within six months, illustrating the importance of linking skills development directly to labour-market opportunities.

Across the presentations, a common message emerged: demographic change can create opportunities, but realising them requires sustained investment, effective partnerships and policies informed by reliable evidence.

Ultimately, as delegates repeatedly emphasised, the success of these commitments will be measured not by the promises made at international conferences but by the improvements they bring to people’s lives.

Note: The Policy Dialogue on Population, Development, SRHR and Gender Equality was organised by the Asian Population and Development Association (APDA) in collaboration with the African Parliamentary Forum on Population and Development (FPA). It was hosted by the House of Peoples’ Representatives of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia. The UNFPA East and Southern Africa Regional Office (ESARO), the Japan Trust Fund (JTF) and the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) supported the meeting.

IPS UN Bureau Report

People wade through flooded streets in Lekki, Lagos, Nigeria, with vibrant mural art on buildings. Credit: Ben Iwara/Pexels.

By Ignatius Banda
ANTALYA, Türkiye & BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Nov 12 2026 (IPS)

Floods. Extreme heat. Droughts. African communities have experienced it all and more.

And as has come to be expected, humanitarian agencies have responded by providing essential emergency assistance such as food aid and other critical needs for affected communities amid increasingly dwindling funding.

Amid those challenges, researchers are now calling for a shift in how African governments and aid agencies respond before and after extreme weather events by focusing on mental health challenges that emerge as a direct result of floods.

According to the Africa Centre for Strategic Studies, 27 African countries “experienced unusually heavy rainfall in 2024” and affected 11 million people. Floods left more than 2,500 dead, four million displaced, and communities lost hundreds of thousands of livestock.

The extent of such losses is enough to break the stoicism of families already struggling to make ends meet in a continent where millions live in extreme poverty.

A cohort of African researchers in diverse fields that include psychiatry, epidemiology, climate science and medicine are pointing to these figures to investigate the impact of extreme weather on the mental health of flood and extreme weather victims.

And ahead of COP31 underway in Türkiye, the link between climate change and mental health in countries on the receiving end of what is considered human-driven nature’s fury is gaining traction as researchers explore the resilience of flood victims beyond relief aid.

While this year’s Conference of the Parties has “resilient health infrastructure and climate-resilient cities” as part of “action agenda priorities”, African researchers are pushing for the inclusion of mental health and psychosocial support as a critical flashing point that demands more attention in climate change discussions.

The new study led by Professor Collins Iwuji of the Africa Health Research Institute under a project called Weather Events and Mental Health in Africa (WEMA) that brought together academics and nongovernmental organisations provides insights into the devastating effects of floods in Burkina Faso, Mozambique, Kenya and South Africa.

Members of civil society demonstrate in the corridors. Credit: UN Climate Change/Kubilay Ciftci

“There is a need to explore the lived experiences of people and communities impacted by climate change, especially those living in communities facing social and structural vulnerabilities,” the study found.

WEMA researchers say the findings are not representative of the whole African continent but “broaden the evidence on flooding and mental health across these regions.”

It raises questions about how the continent is handling the psychological impact of flooding on vulnerable communities with families losing their homes and livelihoods and how they deal with grief.

Last year, research by the United for Global Mental Health consortium found that “mental health was not included in the majority of national adaptation policies and, when it was included, it was often mentioned superficially and with no corresponding adaptation action.”

Dr Sanae Okamoto, a researcher at the United Nations University in Maastricht specialising in climate change and mental health, has observed that globally, governments were only allocating “around two percent of their health budgets to mental health, a number that will need to increase as climate change intensifies.”

Amid that deficit, WEMA scientists say the study seeks to change this situation, especially as the link between climate and mental health is also attracting the attention of European experts who are intensifying their research on the psychological effects of climate change.

And with the spectre of a super El Nino, preparing for climate-induced mental health challenges has become even more urgent.

The WEMA study notes that “the risks and impacts of climate change on mental health are already rapidly accelerating, resulting in several direct, indirect, and overarching effects that disproportionately affect those who are most vulnerable and marginalised.”

This report also comes as other researchers say new ideas such as “climate change anxiety” have entered the lexicon as part of efforts to understand the wider psychological impact of extreme weather.

“Across four countries we found that individuals exposed to flooding have a higher burden of mental disorders compared to individuals that were not,” said Professor Collins Iwuji of the Africa Health Research Institute, the WEMA research project lead.

“If you took away flooding, you would reduce the number of mental disorders in our study population by 25 percent,” Iwuji told Bhekisisa Centre for Health Journalism, the WEMA media partner.

A 2021 study covering young people aged between 16 and 25 years carried out in Australia, Brazil, Finland, France, India, Nigeria, the Philippines, Portugal, the UK, and the USA found that “climate change has important implications for the health and futures of children and young people, yet they have little power to limit its harm, making them vulnerable to climate anxiety.”

WEMA says the study was carried out because the “limited data on the specific effects of EWEs on mental health in Africa highlights the need for more research to guide policy and practice.”

“Mental health support must be integrated into disaster preparedness and response and the provision of psychological first aid in the immediate aftermath of these events, not six months later,” Owuji said.

Meanwhile, Oxfam reports that there have been more than 8,000 flood deaths this year (the highest level since 2013) and that monthly temperature records are being recorded in more than 100 countries, despite the toll 87 private jets have so far landed at Antalya Airport during the UN climate summit (COP31).

It says the carbon pollution of a person in the richest 1 percent has contributed 34 times more to today’s extreme heatwaves than the average person and 100 times more than someone in the poorest 50 percent. 

“These records are not accidents of weather. They are the foreseeable consequences of a fossil-fuelled economy in which those who pollute most are also the best protected from its consequences,” said Oxfam International Executive Director Amitabh Behar. 

Oxfam’s analysis of data from Polluterjet reveals that 87 private jets have landed at Antalya Airport since 7 November, emitting an estimated 777 tonnes of CO₂, which is equivalent to flying around the world more than three times.

Nigerian billionaire Aliko Dangote’s private jet flew approximately 4,370 kilometres from Lagos to Antalya, emitting an estimated 30 tonnes of CO₂, which is roughly the same as the average person emits in six years. During COP30 last year, 66 private jet journeys were recorded.  

IPS UN Bureau Report

Campaigners protest against nuclear energy at COP31 in Antalya, Turkey. Credit: Farai Shawn Matiashe/IPS

By Farai Shawn Matiashe
ANTALYA, Türkiye, Nov 11 2026 (IPS)

Gabriel Sheunopa Manyangadze holds a placard reading “No nuclear spin, let renewables win” as a campaigner leads protesters against nuclear energy in Africa at the United Nations climate summit in Antalya, Turkey.

The activists warned African leaders of the investments required to establish nuclear energy and the dangers its waste poses.

“We have realised that when people put nuclear forward as a solution, they are only looking at it from a short-term perspective. They do not look at the long-term effects that include pollution,” Manyangadze, a food and climate justice manager at the Southern African Faith Communities Environment Institute based in South Africa, told IPS during a protest against nuclear energy as a climate solution at the ongoing Conference of the Parties, or COP31.

South Africa is the only country on the continent that has a commercial nuclear power plant.

Located in Melkbosstrand near Cape Town, the Koeberg Nuclear Power Station has an installed capacity of around 1,854 MW, providing roughly 5% of the country’s electricity. Its units will operate until the 2040s.

But there are concerns about the sustainability of this nuclear power plant.

False Climate Solution 

Manyangadze said the power generation company is struggling to dispose of nuclear waste.

“They are dumping the liquid waste and the solid waste that is being generated from the power plant in a place called Vaalputs, but the area is still radioactive, affecting the environment in the surrounding areas,” he said.

The Vaalputs National Radioactive Waste Disposal Facility is South Africa’s primary and only radioactive waste disposal site in the Northern Cape. The 10,000-hectare site handles near-surface disposal of solid and solidified low-level and intermediate-level radioactive waste from Eskom’s Koeberg Nuclear Power Station. Nuclear waste remains radioactive for up to 300,000 years.

Though the National Nuclear Regulator (NNR) licenses and regulates it, with continuous environmental and seismic monitoring showing no detectable radiological impact outside safe limits since operations began, farmers fear leaks into nearby water could affect agricultural productivity.

Manyangadze said that communities who live around this area have not prepared for a disaster. “We work with the people around the nuclear facility, and they are not clear on what to do in case of a disaster,” he says.

There are concerns about the capacity of African governments to handle and prevent a nuclear disaster.

There have been major nuclear disasters around the world after explosions released radioactive materials into the environment, affecting thousands of people and polluting the environment.

The Chernobyl Disaster in Ukraine on 26 April 1986 involved a flawed safety test combined with operator errors that caused an uncontrolled power surge, triggering a steam explosion that released massive amounts of radioactive isotopes across Europe, leading to the deaths of dozens of people and the permanent evacuation of over 160,000 people.

An earthquake and tsunami caused the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster on 11 March 2011. The floods knocked out active cooling systems and backup diesel generators, resulting in explosions, the deaths of dozens of people and the displacement of 164,000 people.

Some parts of Africa are facing climate change disasters like floods, mudslides, landslides, and storms, which are becoming more frequent. Such weather poses a threat to power plants, as happened in Fukushima.

At the United Nations climate summit in the Mediterranean country, the COP31 presidency is pushing for a global target to increase electricity’s share of final energy consumption to 35%, up from the current 20%, by 2035.

Proponents of nuclear energy are pushing for investments and the expansion of nuclear reactors to generate electricity to meet this global electrification target.

Rachitaa Gupta from the Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice said that nuclear energy is not the solution that is needed to fix the energy crisis in the Global South.

“Most of this nuclear energy is being pushed on indigenous lands. It is our communities that are subjected to uranium mining and its devastating consequences,” she said.

“Our lands are being destroyed for nuclear energy plants, but the power does not even go to the people. It powers data centres that are being promoted by big technology companies. This is not for the people but for corporations.

South Africa’s Eskom and the Department of Electricity and Energy plan to procure an additional 5,200 MW to 10,000 MW of nuclear capacity by 2039 under the Integrated Resource Plan 2025. They plan to start public consultations in late 2026.

Togo, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Morocco, Ghana and Egypt are some of the African countries that are also considering nuclear energy.

Russia’s Rosatom is constructing a four-unit El Dabaa Nuclear Power Plant, 320 kilometres northwest of Cairo. The first nuclear power plant in the country and in the region, El Dabaa, will generate 4,800 MW of electricity.

Amos Wemanya, a senior climate advisor at Power Shift Africa, a research group in Kenya, said that nuclear power is not the best energy option for Africa right now because it takes a long time to set up, while the continent needs energy quickly.

“These people need access to electricity as soon as possible so that this power can help them power their development, power their prosperity. It takes a very long time to build a nuclear power plant,” he said.

“So we cannot be investing our limited resources at the moment in an energy system that is not going to help our people achieve our development as soon as possible.”

Nuclear energy requires high upfront investments running into billions of dollars, which are relatively lower once the plant is operational. A kilowatt is $5,300, or about $6bn more for a single large-scale reactor, estimates the World Nuclear Association. This is beyond the reach of most African countries that are struggling to service their debts and provide services like health, jobs and education.

Manyangadze said nuclear energy will ruin the South African economy.

Alternatives 

About 600 million people lack access to electricity in Africa. Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for roughly 85% of the global population lacking electricity.

Gupta said they protested that if there is a push for energy, it needs to be clean, renewable energy, and not polluting energy, like nuclear energy.

“The model must not be the same as the fossil fuel energy systems, which are exploiting our communities,” she said.

Wemanya said that Africa needs an energy source that can transform the lives of communities.

“We need an energy system that is easy to deploy. There are so many alternative sources, renewable sources such as solar, that are easy to deploy and can benefit off-grid communities,” he said.

He said that wind and solar are cheaper alternatives compared to nuclear energy. “We cannot afford to invest in a nuclear energy system that is not fit for purpose for our continent,” he said.

According to the IEA, Africa contains 60% of the world’s best solar resources.

“And in most of the countries, particularly from where I come from in Southern Africa, we have the sun, and we can actually build our energy around renewables like the sun and the wind,” Manyangadze said.

IPS UN Bureau Report

A dairy farmer holds her Kallari cow in the Solapur district of the western Indian state of Maharashtra. Credit: Rina Mukherji/IPS

By Rina Mukherji
PUNE, India & ANTALYA, Türkiye, Nov 9 2026 (IPS)

Dairy farmer Sagar Pawar has to buy water and fodder at inflated rates to feed his brood of two buffaloes, three Guernsey cows and a calf. He lives in the Solapur district, which is already drought-prone, but now has to deal with the impacts of a strong El Niño as well.

Pawar was interviewed in the days leading up to the 31st Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP31), which opened today in Antalya, Türkiye.

The opening coincided with the release of the World Meteorological Society’s new report, which confirms that 2026 will be one of four warmest years on record.

“The year 2026 continues the protracted streak of exceptional global temperatures, melting ice and rising sea levels, with a very strong El Niño event set to unleash even more heat and extreme weather well into 2027,” the report confirms, highlighting the knock-on risks to the environment, economy, and everyday life.

“Extreme weather has made headlines throughout 2026. Behind the headlines and the statistics in this report are people who suffered the loss of loved ones, threats to their health and safety, flooded homes, failed harvests, empty shelves, lack of water and choking air,” said Celeste Saulo, WMO Secretary General.

“The past four years have been the warmest in the 177-year observational record, and the heat in the oceans is breaking records for the tenth year in a row. The ongoing El Niño is forecast to be one of the strongest on record, and the heat it releases from the ocean will continue to fuel high temperatures and extreme weather into 2027. Forecasts underpinned by sustained observations are more important than ever to monitor our rapidly changing climate and help navigate the increasing risks to societies and economies.”

UN Secretary-General António Guterres reacted to the report, noting, “We have entered a new age of climate extremes. A supersized El Niño is colliding with a planet already superheated by manmade climate change. Climate records keep falling. The human costs keep rising. And those least responsible are suffering first and worst. Leaders must get serious by cutting emissions faster, accelerating a just transition from fossil fuels and delivering the finance and protection vulnerable countries need.

Those among the most vulnerable live in the Solapur district in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, which has long been semi-arid. Rainfall here averages between 427 and 552 mm during the monsoon months of June to September, with few major rivers for farmers to rely on.

Impact on Most Vulnerable

Farmers here have always cultivated millets, alongside gram, lentils, horticultural crops, and fodder, which require limited amounts of water. Dairy farming and horticulture have not just supplemented rural incomes here but are the mainstay of the (rural) economy.

This rain-shadow district, as well as the Marathwada and Vidarbha regions of the state, is familiar with droughts, especially this year due to a strong El Niño.

However, groundwater depletion has hit 47% more wells than in 2015, which was a drought year. In fact, there are many more talukas facing drought this year, including some in districts like Pune, which are not drought-prone.

Solapur district and its talukas (sub-divisions) remain the worst-hit. The entire Solapur district is parched and thirsty, except for a few villages near the Seena River in and around the pilgrim town/taluka of Pandharpur, with parts like Mohol receiving as little as 193.2 mm. Sangola, renowned for its pomegranate production, is one of the 305 talukas declared drought-stricken by the state government.

As against a normal average rainfall of 468.3 mm during the monsoon months, Sangola received just 229.1 mm, amounting to a 52 per cent deficit this year.

Even millets could not be sown this year because the soil lacked the minimal moisture, as Lalit Babar, founder of the Dr Ambedkar Agricultural Development and Research Institute, a non-governmental organisation focused on agricultural research, explained to me. A few farms that planted pomegranates last year are in a poor state, with stunted plants.

Normally, dairy farmers grow their fodder here. But this year, farms were unable to yield any fodder.

In fact, the entire state is facing a fodder crisis, with some districts left with only 63-65 days of fodder. The government is helping households with drinking water. But no water is being supplied for livestock.

Dairy farmer Sagar Pawar tells me, “The Gram Panchayat (rural self-governing body) gives us one tanker of water, amounting to 2 000 litres, once every four days. It is hardly enough.”

The Pawars have a borewell on their land, which is 400 metres deep. But water runs for just two minutes, the first minute yielding only muddy water. What is pumped out is just sufficient for the household.

Hence, Pawar has to buy water and fodder at inflated rates to feed his brood of two buffaloes, three Guernsey cows and a calf.

“The fodder in the market comes from the neighbouring state and is of very low quality, but beggars cannot be choosers,” he rues.

The Waghmode brothers – Raju and Deepak – own 17 animals, including four buffaloes, seven Guernsey and 3 Killari cows, besides five calves.

Alike other dairy farmers, they are compelled to buy their own fodder and water for their animals.

“We are trying to store fodder and water to safeguard ourselves. But our storage capacity is limited,” Raju Waghmode tells me. Hanumant Kadam is the biggest dairy farmer in Dongarwadi village in Sangola, with 60 milch animals – 54 Guernsey cows, two Killari cows, and four Jaffrabadi buffaloes.

In addition, he also breeds 40 sheep and a goat. His 8-acre farm normally grows fodder for his animals, besides a little millet for family consumption. The drought has hit him hard.

“I can only buy limited amounts of the required fodder and protein feed for my animals; hence, I feed them just enough for survival.”

Kadam needs an average of 5000 litres of water daily for his animals, which, at inflated rates, amounts to a colossal sum. This means feeding a Guernsey cow just 15-20 kg of fodder, as against its normal requirement of 30 kg per day.

The same applies to his Indian killari breed, buffaloes, goats, and sheep. Consequently, milk yield has dropped. His Guernsey cows now yield only 5 litres per day, as against the normal 11 litres per day, while the milk yield from his Killari cows stands at 1 litre, as against 3 litres daily.

A dairy farmer needs fodder, protein feed and water for every animal to profit from his brood. With inflated costs, most farmers cannot afford to keep their livestock. Dairy farmer Battu Waghmode had to sell off his 30 cows and buffaloes at a throwaway price. The Atpadkars’ 3-acre farm cannot yield fodder for their buffaloes, goats and sheep.

“Our borewell can yield water for only an hour daily, which is just enough for our family,” Chandan Atpadkar tells me. Hence, they have decided to sell all their animals for now.

Rural distress can be assessed from the fact that non-banking financial institutions (NBFCs), which are major players in rural India, are curbing all lending as a cautionary move.

Government Relief for Villagers

The state government has announced an examination fee waiver for students in the 305 talukas declared drought-stricken to help the affected people. Financial relief has also been announced for the affected population, with water tankers being arranged for drinking purposes through urban local and rural self-governing bodies.

However, livelihood issues have been generally overlooked, as farmers point out, although the government has announced plans for a fodder bank to provide for future emergencies. The government has sought drought-mitigation proposals from district collectors within a fortnight while seeking immediate information on fodder and water availability at the village level.

There is also a move to grow spineless cactus as a substitute fodder for cattle across the drought-prone Marathwada region. But farmers remain sceptical. “We need immediate relief, right now.”

In Dongarwadi village in Sangola, water can be accessed only by 15 percent of the population, since water tankers cannot reach families who live on their farms, away from the asphalt roads of the main village settlement. Hence, water tankers arranged by the grassroots development organisation, Dr Ambedkar Sheti Vikas va Sanshodhan Sanstha, are the only lifeline for locals.

Role of Climate Finance

The drought in Maharashtra has come at a time when some other natural disasters have also struck South Asia. Massive floods in Northeast India and flash floods in Nepal have devastated wide swathes of land. These natural disasters have once again emphasised the necessity of climate finance for adaptation and mitigation, as well as for building resilience in the Global South, which the forthcoming COP 31 aims to address.

This issue assumes especial importance in view of the forecasts made by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) for the October-December season, given the high global sea surface temperatures. Sea-surface temperatures reflect strengthening El Niño.

Notably, the commitment by developed countries to mobilise US$100 billion annually in climate finance for developing countries, which was reinforced at the 2010 Cancun climate conference and incorporated into the 2015 Paris Agreement, was not achieved by the original 2020 deadline. Despite the establishment of the Green Climate Fund (GCF) and a Climate Finance Delivery Plan, the target was only reached in 2022, when developed countries provided and mobilised US$115.9 billion.

However, developing countries maintain that this amount falls far short of their needs. The NEED’S Report, or UNFCCC’s Second Report on the Determination of the Needs of Developing Country Parties, published in 2025, estimates that between US$5 trillion and US$6.9 trillion is required to implement the climate adaptation and mitigation measures identified in developing countries’ Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) by 2030. The report notes that this figure does not capture the full extent of their climate finance needs.

As Shravan Shankar, a climate finance expert and CEO of CLIMAKE, explains, the original thinking was that prioritising emissions reduction would help limit the future costs of adapting to climate change.

“Adaptation was acknowledged, but it was still seen as a ‘future’ need,” he says. “The idea was that if we mobilise enough towards mitigation, we will be able to sufficiently reduce emissions, reduce the impact of climate change, and consequently reduce adaptation and resilience needs.”

However, the scale and urgency of the climate challenge have since changed considerably. Countries’ net-zero commitments mean that mitigation must now extend beyond renewable energy and clean mobility to more complex areas such as industrial decarbonisation and agricultural emissions reduction. These sectors are harder to commercialise and cannot necessarily follow the same investment pathways as renewable energy.

More significantly, the consequences of climate change are already being felt, making adaptation and resilience an immediate priority rather than a future consideration.

“Arguably the most significant development is that the effects of climate change are clear and present, and they are devastating,” Shankar says.

This presents a particularly difficult challenge for low-income developing economies, which often lack the financial resources and institutional capacity to protect their populations and economies against increasingly severe climate impacts. Adaptation requires investment in practical measures, from climate-resilient seeds and agricultural inputs to irrigation systems, reliable water access and improved farming practices to prevent food losses.

As Shankar points out, these countries need resources to implement measures that can protect livelihoods and strengthen resilience to drought, water stress and rising temperatures. Yet these investments often struggle to attract private capital because, unlike many renewable energy projects, they do not necessarily generate direct commercial returns.

Echoing Shankar’s views on the global emphasis on mitigation so far, Arun Krishnan, Program Director of Climate Finance at the World Resources Institute (WRI) in India, feels the need to look at adaptation and mitigation separately.

Much of the mitigation, such as utility-scale solar in favourable markets, has become commercially bankable and can attract mainstream finance without concessional support. The financing challenge lies increasingly in adaptation and in areas of mitigation that are not yet commercially viable.

“Developing countries need finance for adaptation and hard-to-finance mitigation at a much greater scale and on far better terms. Adaptation remains one of the most underfunded areas because it generates benefits largely through avoided losses rather than direct revenue,” Krishnan said.

Yet it is often vulnerable communities that experience climate impacts first and most acutely.

Emphasising the need for accessibility to climate finance for those who need it most, he calls for more grants and concessional finance. Calling for blended finance, guarantees and risk-sharing mechanisms to mobilise private capital herein, Krishnan advocates a stronger role for regulators like central banks, as well as development banks and rural and cooperative lenders, to channel finance to farmers and small businesses.

The challenge for the Global South is not merely to bridge the enormous gap between financial commitments and estimated requirements but also to distinguish the incremental costs of climate change from pre-existing developmental deficits and vulnerabilities that amplify disaster impacts, says Dr Nilanjan Ghosh, Vice President, Observer Research Foundation (ORF), and a distinguished ecological economist with expertise in climate finance.

“Adaptation finance must, therefore, be embedded within a broader framework of development resilience, encompassing water governance, ecosystem restoration, climate-resilient infrastructure, institutional preparedness and disaster-risk reduction.”

These discussions are even more urgent, as the WMO State of the Climate Update 2026 shows that the past 12 years have individually been the warmest on record, with the past four years being the top four. The global average surface temperature for January–September 2026 was about 1.47 °C above the pre-industrial average. This figure is likely to rise through the end of the year due to the warming effect of El Niño, which has been intensifying since August and is expected to be the strongest on record by December.

Earth’s energy imbalance is rising, and the earth system is accumulating heat at an accelerating rate. The imbalance reached its highest level since monitoring began, as greenhouse gases trap unprecedented amounts of heat and upset the equilibrium between incoming energy from the sun and outgoing energy. The ocean absorbs 90% of this excess heat, and 2026 is on track to be the tenth successive year of record ocean warmth.

Sea level is the highest on record, and sea-surface temperatures hit monthly records during 2026. The long-term retreat of glaciers continues, with the annual mass loss of ice in 2025 filling five Olympic pools every second of the year. Freshwater storage has been dwindling since 2014.

The report commented on several natural disasters across the world caused by climate extremes including the Indian monsoon rainfall deficit from June to September, which affected about 705 000. The monsoon began with June rainfall around 40% below normal. All-India rainfall was around 12% below normal by 30 September, raising concerns for agriculture and water resources.

Additional reporting: Cecilia Russell
IPS UN Bureau Report

Excerpt:

Around the venue of COP31 in Antalya, Türkiye. Credit: Kiara Worth/UN Climate Change

By Yamide Dagnet
ANTALYA, Türkiye, Nov 8 2026 (IPS)

As the world heads toward COP31 Türkiye starting this week, I’ve been reflecting on how I think COP31 could prove to be a more revealing “Transition COP”. Let us remember that the Paris Agreement came from a series of “institutional heartbeat” COPs – NOT from annual blockbuster headlines.

Yamide Dagnet, Senior Vice President, International at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Credit: COP30

Every five years, countries face a “moment of truth”, as they are legally required to submit updated, increasingly ambitious national plans and measurable commitments on paper. To inform these submissions and make them more ambitious, countries agreed on some sort of “mid-term stocktaking exercise to audit collective progress” (the so-called Global Stocktake).

This design divides COPs into high-stakes political moments (like the one last year) and rigorous, technical “working” sessions in between, like COP31. This means that mid-cycle COPs are not failures if they lack a historic declaration. Instead, they serve as the vital connective tissue to fuel implementation on the ground.

Yet, I do believe COP31 will be an interesting litmus test for international cooperation in the midst of a rapidly changing geopolitical landscape in front of us, shifting alliances, growing competition over energy, technology, and critical minerals, and an impending transition in global leadership at the UN.

I believe three questions will define its identity and success:

1. Who is shaping the next chapter of climate leadership?
2. Can COP31 strengthen accountability ahead of the next Global Stocktake?
3. Can the transition be both fast and fair? 

The climate landscape is evolving. The question is not just who is at the table but whose priorities ultimately drive outcomes. Countries across the Global South are increasingly shaping the agenda and advancing solutions grounded in development realities.

In the end, COP31’s story will not be written only inside negotiating halls. The conversations, partnerships, and momentum generated outside the formal process may ultimately be just as important as the negotiated outcomes themselves.

What is exciting is that we will not be alone. My Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) team and I look forward to seeing our partners, friends, and many of you on the ground in Antalya!

IPS UN Bureau Report

Tharaka seed custodians pray for seeds at Kibuka shrine ahead of 2026 planting season. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

By Isaiah Esipisu
NAIROBI, Nov 6 2026 (IPS)

As the world prepares for the 31^st United Nations Conference on Climate Change (COP31) in Antalya, Türkiye, Kenya’s priorities for the negotiations are being shaped by lived experiences of communities who are on the frontline of the climate crisis.

At the recently concluded annual Tharaka Biocultural Festival in Tharaka-Nithi County, farmers gathered to showcase, exchange and celebrate traditional seeds, some which were already on the verge of extinction, and traditional foods that were celebrated by their ancestors over generations.

“This is a semi-arid region, and there were those seeds that our ancestors used to plant, which could easily survive such tough climatic conditions without fail,” said Simon Mitambo, the Chief Executive Officer at the Society for Alternative Learning and Transformation (SALT), the convener of the annual festivals.

“We have been convening these festivals every year for the past 10 years, and as a result we have been able to revive some of the most important seeds, such as the canton melon, which many young people think is a new crop because they had never seen it, yet it was one of the most important fruits in Tharaka, used to prepare Kathongo, the main staple food that fed our forefathers for generations before maize came in to interrupt those diets,” he said.

The community has also been able to revive the communal grazing system to enhance biodiversity recovery, support natural vegetation cover, and aid climate adaptation. They have also managed to recover traditional millet varieties such as Mugeeta (white millet) and pearl millet, multiple indigenous varieties of sorghum, including Mukuumbu, and local, climate-adapted cowpea varieties.

And now, civil society organisations from Kenya, through a workshop that brought Kenyan negotiators along, want such indigenous grassroots adaptation measures to be presented on the climate negotiations table in Antalya.

“Such community-led actions provide a practical pathway to climate adaptation, restoring locally adapted crops that can withstand prevailing environmental conditions and give farming communities renewed hope for reliable harvests,” said Anym Khan, the Acting Chair of the Kenya Climate Change Working Group (KCCWG) during the Pre-COP workshop.

Apart from such lived experiences, the workshop condemned the emerging new narrative observed during the Pre-COP conference in Nadi, Fiji, and the recent IPCC meeting in Addis Ababa, that due to limited resources, the available finance should focus on Least Developed Countries (LDC) and Small Island Developing States (SIDS).

“This is a dangerous narrative for our country because communities living on border lines share climatic conditions naturally, and using the borderline to determine who receives climate finance and who doesn’t is discriminative,” said Lydia Kimani, the Executive Director, Agribusiness for Africa Markets.

For example, in Busia, which is on the border of Uganda and Kenya, people living in Busia, Uganda, will be favoured because Uganda is categorised as an LDC, while those in Busia, Kenya, will miss out on such funding because Kenya is a Lower Medium Income Country (LMIC). Yet the impacts of climate change within the Busia community are exactly the same in both countries.

“We are calling on our negotiators to be so vigilant to avoid that kind of narrative in the negotiations,” said Kimani. “Let the funding continue targeting developing countries, or if the language has to change, then it should be LDC, SIDS and Africa,” she said.

Another concern is the proposal listed by the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice as agenda item 15, “Promoting sustainable dietary practices, reducing animal-based diets and transitioning to plant-based diets.”

“We will need to argue against that agenda item because Article 2.1b of the Paris Agreement clearly states that adaptation should happen without threatening food security,” said Michael Okumu, one of the country’s lead negotiators.

The article on adaptation and resilience states that “enhancing adaptive capacity, fostering resilience, and promoting low-emission development without threatening food production.”

According to Kimani, livestock in Kenya and the entire continent go beyond animal-based diets. “It is from our livestock that we get organic manure, which has kept our soils healthy and productive for generations,” she said.

In Tharaka, livestock, particularly goats, are considered to be very important domestic animals that support culture in terms of performance of sacred rituals; they are used during bridal ceremonies, they provide milk and meat, they are a source of income, particularly for smallholder farmers, and most importantly, they are resilient to tough climatic conditions.

Pastoral communities in the country, such as the Maasai, Borana, Rendile and Kenyan Somalis, depend on livestock entirely for their livelihoods, making it one of the most important sectors in the country and across Africa.

The team also pointed out that transition to low-emission development must address inequality, protect livelihoods and ensure that affected communities participate meaningfully in decisions.

“Energy transitions and critical-mineral extraction must not transfer environmental and social costs to local communities, while agriculture and food systems must be recognised as integral to a just transition,” observed Jacqueline Kimeu, the Senior Climate and Energy Advisor at Christian Aid.

According to the United Nations University, COP 31 must show whether political commitments can translate into more predictable, accessible and effective financial support, particularly for adaptation and countries facing the greatest climate risks.

IPS UN Bureau Report

Houses damaged by the flood in Trishuli Bazaar, Nuwakot. Credit: Sharada Bashyal/Oxfam

By Umar Manzoor Shah
NAIROBI & SRINAGAR, India, Nov 5 2026 (IPS)

The world’s wealthiest people are driving a disproportionate share of climate pollution while poorer communities bear the heaviest costs of floods, heatwaves, food insecurity and other climate disasters, according to a new report by Oxfam International.

The report, Disaster Divide: How Climate Chaos Deepens Inequality and Enriches the Few, published on October 27, 2026, argues that climate change is not simply an environmental crisis. It is also deepening existing economic and social inequalities, leaving people with the fewest resources struggling to survive and recover from increasingly destructive events.

The report highlights a widening divide between those who contribute most to global emissions and those who are most exposed to their consequences. Wealthy households can often afford safer homes, insurance, private transport and alternative accommodation when disasters strike. Poorer families, meanwhile, may lose their homes, livelihoods and savings, sometimes without the means to rebuild them.

“The richest 0.1% of people generate more consumption-based emissions than the poorest 3.5 billion combined,” says the report, highlighting the enormous gap between the environmental footprints of the wealthiest and the world’s poorest populations.

Oxfam argues that addressing the climate crisis requires more than cutting emissions. Governments must also confront the concentration of wealth, improve access to climate finance and ensure that disaster recovery policies protect vulnerable communities rather than disproportionately benefiting those who are already wealthy.

Mateo Adarve Zuluaga, Global Research and Advocacy Lead at Oxfam GB. Credit: Oxfam

In an exclusive interview with IPS, Mateo Adarve Zuluaga, Global Research and Advocacy Lead at Oxfam GB, said that the report shows that wealth can buy protection from the climate crisis. He said that the richest can purchase safer homes in better-protected communities and easily absorb rising food and water costs, while billionaires go as far as buying islands and building underground bunkers.

“California’s wildfires illustrate this starkly. Early warning systems alert wealthy residents, who hire private firefighters and evacuate by helicopter to five-star hotels, often with bills prepaid by their insurers. Those insurers charge up to six-figure annual premiums, and such policies are typically available only for properties valued above US$1 million.”

According to Zuluaga, poorer communities cannot cope in the same way, and in Altadena, a historically Black and brown middle-class community with a legacy of generational home ownership, many homeowners had no insurance or only partial cover.

He said that when the 2025 wildfires struck, countless families lost their homes, and with them, the main source of wealth built over decades. Desperate, many sold their ruined properties at discounted rates to predatory real estate companies, giving up both financial security and community ties.

“More broadly, for people already living in poverty, every flood, drought, wildfire or heatwave strips away scarce resources, destroying livelihoods and homes and pushing many into debt, displacement or homelessness. Hit by successive shocks, they struggle to recover and fall deeper into poverty. The report calls climate disasters “inequality machines”: a vicious cycle in which inequality creates the conditions for disaster, and disaster in turn deepens inequality. This is the disaster divide.”

When asked if the report estimates that the richest 1% have been responsible for around 20% of global warming since 1990 and that what policy measures should governments introduce to ensure that the wealthiest individuals and major polluters bear a fairer share of the costs of climate change? Zuluaga said  that the emissions of the super-rich and major corporations are driving the climate crisis, and together with historically high-emitting rich countries, they carry a responsibility to cut emissions first and fastest.

He added that they must also help redress the damage they have caused, including its impact on low-income countries and people living in poverty.

According to Zuluaga, governments should begin by adopting ambitious national climate plans aligned with the Paris Agreement and the fair share principle, cutting emissions fast enough to keep warming to 1.5°C.

He said that under this principle, the richest countries and the richest individuals, whose emissions far exceed everyone else’s, must lead the way with rapid, deep reductions.

“Taxation is the second key tool. Governments should impose permanent progressive taxes on the wealth and income of the richest 1% and introduce a permanent rich polluter tax on fossil fuel corporations so that profits above a low benchmark face a higher rate. Wealth and income from polluting investments should be taxed at additional higher rates, alongside windfall taxes on excess profits gained through market control. Punitive taxes on high-emitting luxury items and activities, such as private jets, would further discourage the most extreme emissions,” Zuluaga said, adding that finally, governments should regulate corporations and investors to cut emissions radically and fairly.

This means compelling them to disclose their Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions across operations and supply chains, report regularly on progress, and set ambitious science-based targets with clear pathways for reducing emissions across all scopes in line with the Paris Agreement.

When asked if the research done in the report highlights the role of billionaire investments in high-emission industries and that how governments can hold wealthy investors accountable for climate damage without allowing corporations to shift the costs onto workers and low-income consumers?

Zuluaga termed it part of the just transition dilemma, and it can be addressed by making the wealthiest and most polluting actors pay for their pollution.

“Governments should introduce a polluter profits tax on fossil fuel companies, ensuring renewables become more profitable than fossil fuels, with revenues funding climate action in the Global South. Since the richest 1% have seen their wealth surge by US$33.9 trillion since 2015 while billionaires pay only around 0.3% in real taxes, taxing the super-rich is both feasible and fair. Governments should also end tax abuse by multinationals through effective global tax reforms,” he said.

To protect workers and consumers, energy should be treated as a human right and public good, with public and community ownership, transparency and community oversight guarding against elite capture. Finally, governments should shift away from the “Wall Street Consensus”, which socialises risk and privatises profit, so costs do not fall on ordinary people.

Activists at COP30. Credit: Karelia Pallan/Oxfam America

Speaking about the safeguards governments should introduce to ensure that public disaster-relief funds reach vulnerable people rather than reinforcing existing inequalities,

Resilience, according to Zuluaga, should not be measured by how much hardship people can endure but by how well societies look after one another. For too long, he said, the burden has fallen on the poor while the wealthy escape responsibility. To change this, governments must curb corporate power and ensure that climate response serves human needs rather than shareholder profit.

“First, governments should regulate corporate conduct in emergencies through enforceable codes and standards. Profit ceilings or excess profits taxes can prevent firms from profiteering on emergency contracts, while permanent windfall taxes on crisis profiteers, including a polluter profit tax, can fund climate action and be reactivated whenever disaster strikes. Temporary caps on prices and margins for essential goods during declared disasters would protect people at their most vulnerable. Insurance markets also need oversight to prevent excessive premiums or withdrawal of coverage, supported by tools such as government-backed reinsurance, catastrophe pools and affordability programmes.”

Second, he said, food systems require particular attention, and that the governments should stop further market concentration in agricultural inputs and commodities through windfall taxes, ban or tightly regulate speculative trading in food during crises, and cap the prices of essential food and farming inputs in emergencies.

“Finally, the public sector must be strengthened to lead disaster response and recovery, reducing reliance on private contractors. Public finance should take priority over private finance and be delivered as grants rather than loans, so relief does not deepen the debt of affected communities.”

Pubudini Wickramaratne, Land Rights Policy Lead at Oxfam International. Credit: Oxfam

Pubudini Wickramaratne, Land Rights Policy Lead at Oxfam International, in an interview with IPS said that Nepal is a powerful example of one of the greatest injustices of the climate crisis: those who have done the least to cause it are often suffering its worst consequences.

She said that despite contributing less than 0.1% of global greenhouse gas emissions, Nepal is experiencing increasingly severe climate impacts, from glacier melt and flooding to extreme heat and landslides.

“This reflects a much wider pattern across South Asia and the world. The people and countries most exposed to climate disasters are often those with the smallest carbon footprints. Meanwhile, a relatively small, wealthy segment of the global population is responsible for a disproportionate share of emissions. Our report sh

ows that the richest 1% account for around 17% of global emissions, while the richest 0.1% have contributed nearly 400 times more than the poorest half of humanity to the increased likelihood of the extreme heat events we are experiencing today,” Wickramaratne said.

Meanwhile, Oxfam argues that funding should prioritise vulnerable populations and not create additional debt burdens for countries already struggling with climate-related losses.

The report also challenges governments to examine the role of public policy in determining who benefits from economic growth and who bears its environmental costs.

Reducing emissions, it argues, must be accompanied by measures that make societies fairer and better prepared for climate shocks.

The report does not present climate disasters as isolated events that affect everyone equally. Instead, it describes a cycle in which inequality increases exposure to harm, disasters deepen poverty, and the resulting economic losses make future recovery more difficult.

It says that breaking that cycle will require both climate action and policies that address the distribution of wealth and resources.

With climate-related disasters becoming an increasingly pressing challenge for governments worldwide, Oxfam argues that the measure of an effective response should not be limited to the amount of money spent or infrastructure rebuilt.

It should, as per the report, also consider whether people who have contributed least to global warming can access the protection and support they need  and whether they are able to recover without being pushed further into poverty.

IPS UN Bureau Report

Dr Lindon Havimana from Solomon Islands National University (SINU) and Dr Christopher Cornwall from Victoria University of Wellington collect intertidal samples from the rocky shore for incubation experiments during PIOAC training in Wellington.

By Sera Sefeti
SUVA, Fiji, Nov 4 2026 (IPS)

The Pacific Ocean connects thousands of islands, and understanding how ocean acidification is unfolding across the region requires more than individual research projects or monitoring stations.

Scientists need observations from different island environments, collected over time, to understand how seawater chemistry is changing and what those changes could mean for marine ecosystems and the communities that depend on them.

The work is being strengthened through regional collaboration, with Pacific scientists sharing data, technical knowledge and research experience to build a more complete picture of a changing ocean.

Dr Katy Soapi, director of the Pacific Islands Ocean Acidification Centre (PIOAC) and a Pacific scientist, says the broader scientific community is aware that ocean chemistry is changing. The priority is now building local evidence to understand how those changes may affect different island environments.

“What Pacific scientists are now doing is building the local evidence needed to understand how those changes may impact our different island environments,” Soapi said.

“At many of our monitoring sites, we are seeing considerable natural variability in pH over days, months and seasons, which is normal,” she said. “It is important to capture this data over time because coastal waters are influenced by temperature, rainfall, freshwater inputs, biological activity, land-based pollution and local oceanographic conditions.”

PIOAC members with Salesa Nihmei from SPREP and a representative from the Asian Development Bank (ADB) at the 6th International Symposium on the Ocean in a High-CO₂ World, Tākina Wellington. Credit: SPC

Monitoring programmes are at different stages across the region. Fiji has an established programme, with monitoring in the Suva area since 2023 and data that contribute to Sustainable Development Goal 14.3.1 reporting.

Samoa has received support through access to monitoring equipment, training and technical advice, while the Solomon Islands programme is newer, with scientists from Solomon Islands National University receiving regional and in-country training as they establish the technical capacity for long-term monitoring. Kiribati and Papua New Guinea also have their own monitoring histories and research priorities.

These differences matter when comparing observations across the Pacific.

“This variation is important; a harbour in Fiji, a lagoon in Kiribati, coastal waters in Samoa or reef environments in Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea can experience very different combinations of temperature, rainfall, freshwater input, current, biological activity and human pressure,” Soapi said.

“The Pacific is connected, but it is not environmentally uniform.

“This is why local monitoring is important and why we cannot rely solely on regional or global averages.”

Manibua Rota from the Ministry of Fisheries and Ocean Resources (MFOR), Kiribati, presents on ocean acidification monitoring in Kiribati at the 6th International Symposium on the Ocean in a High-CO₂ World, Tākina, Wellington. Credit: SPC

Connecting the Science Across the Pacific

The Pacific Islands Ocean Acidification Centre (PIOAC), established in 2021, supports efforts to connect national monitoring programmes and strengthen scientific capacity across the region.

The Centre brings together the SPC, the University of the South Pacific, the University of Otago and Earth Sciences New Zealand, formerly NIWA.

PIOAC’s work spans the Pacific, through joint work and ongoing discussions with nine Pacific Island countries and territories: Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Tuvalu, Kiribati, Samoa, Tokelau and New Caledonia.

Its work includes providing monitoring equipment, technical advice, training, sensor troubleshooting, data management and quality assurance. It also connects Pacific researchers with international monitoring networks and supports countries in contributing data to regional and global reporting processes.

For scientists working in small teams across geographically dispersed islands, this support helps build the technical capacity needed to maintain monitoring programmes and generate reliable data over time.

Azaria Pickering, an ocean monitoring and technical officer at SPC in Fiji, says regional cooperation has changed how scientists approach monitoring.

“We’ve moved from monitoring our waters as individual countries to building a collective understanding of what’s happening across our Pacific Ocean,” she said.

“Through the Pacific Islands Ocean Acidification Centre and regional partnerships, we’ve created a community where knowledge is shared and challenges are solved together.”

She said the use of common equipment, methods and training was helping countries strengthen their monitoring programmes at home.

“We’re beginning to close critical data gaps across the region and use that evidence to engage our governments, shape national priorities and bring the Pacific’s experience of ocean acidification into global conversations, including at COP.”

For Dr Aleluia Taise of the National University of Samoa, the research is closely connected to the future of Pacific communities.

“As Pacific Islander marine scientists, we believe it is our responsibility as citizens and custodians of the Pacific Ocean to address priority issues affecting our livelihoods and wellbeing,” she said.

Taise says there remains a critical lack of scientific evidence needed to understand the effects of ocean acidification on coral reefs and coastal ecosystems.

“Research must be supported by stronger institutional backing, policy alignment and collaboration with regional and international partners to ensure it can continue.”

Azaria Pickering from SPC selects macroalgae from the holding tank for the biological incubation tests during PIOAC training at the Victoria University of Wellington Coastal Ecology Lab (VUCEL). Credit: SPC

From Measuring Seawater to Understanding Marine Life

While monitoring seawater chemistry provides information about changing ocean conditions, scientists also need to understand how these changes affect marine organisms.

This is the next area of research being developed by Pacific scientists.

In Wellington, scientists from Fiji, Samoa, the Solomon Islands and Kiribati took part in biological experiments training from 5 to 9 October, gaining practical experience in studying how marine organisms respond to ocean acidification and higher temperatures.

The training is intended to strengthen research connecting changes in seawater chemistry with their potential effects on corals, shellfish and other marine organisms.

Soapi said biological research would help scientists develop studies around locally important species and better understand the implications for reefs, fisheries and livelihoods.

“Monitoring seawater chemistry tells us how conditions are changing, while biological research helps us understand what those changes could mean for the organisms that support our reefs, fisheries and livelihoods,” she said.

For Dr Lindon Havimana of Solomon Islands National University, the research is also about ensuring scientific knowledge reaches communities before the impacts become more pronounced.

His interest in ocean acidification research stems from a responsibility to understand, anticipate and communicate changes taking place in the ocean and to consider how communities can prepare for a threat whose impacts may not yet be fully visible.

“I believe that the greatest value of science lies not only in understanding environmental change but also in ensuring that knowledge reaches people early enough to make a difference,” Havimana said.

“As scientists, we have a responsibility to bridge the gap between scientific discovery and community preparedness, transforming evidence into awareness, awareness into action, and action into resilience.”

He said the implications extended beyond ocean chemistry to the health of marine ecosystems, coastal fisheries, food security and the continuation of traditional practices.

Participants from Samoa, Kiribati and Solomon Islands remove their monitored species after a 30-minute incubation at different pH and temperature conditions on Day 1 of the experiment during PIOAC training. Credit: SPC

Taking Pacific Research to the International Stage

These regional efforts were represented at the sixth International Symposium on the Ocean in a High-CO₂ World, held in Wellington, New Zealand, from 13 to 16 October.

The symposium brought together the international scientific community under the theme Moving from Understanding to Action using Multiple Knowledge Systems.

Discussions examined ocean acidification alongside ocean warming, deoxygenation and other pressures affecting marine ecosystems, with a focus on strengthening scientific understanding and connecting research with action.

For Pacific scientists, participation provided an opportunity to present regional research, exchange knowledge and strengthen relationships with the international scientific community.

It also highlighted the challenges facing island countries, including limited monitoring coverage, equipment maintenance, technical expertise and sustained funding.

Dr Kim Currie, an ocean acidification consultant working with SPC, said access to scientific resources differed across Pacific countries.

“Some countries like Fiji, Samoa and the Solomon Islands have the resources to do the careful measurements that are needed, but other countries do not yet have the scientist and equipment necessary to do this work,” she said.

“Working with regional and overseas partners to share knowledge and skills is one important step towards understanding how the Pacific Ocean will cope in the future.”

For Soapi, the importance of that support is also shaped by her own experience as a researcher.

Reflecting on her early work in ocean acidification, she recalled the challenges of deploying monitoring equipment and working in a field where regional scientific support was limited.

“I had received training, but I was nervous about deploying equipment – this was all part and partial of being isolated and being new in a field,” she said.

That experience has stayed with her and influenced her commitment to supporting other Pacific scientists, particularly those working in small teams across large distances.

“For me, coming together means building a Pacific community of scientists who can support each other, share knowledge and collectively understand the changes taking place across our ocean.”

The work underway across the region is still developing. More monitoring, biological research, technical training and sustained support are needed to strengthen the evidence available to Pacific countries.

But by connecting national research programmes and bringing scientists together, the region is building a stronger foundation for understanding ocean acidification.

The aim is not to produce one picture of the entire Pacific but to bring together the different observations and experiences that explain how a changing ocean is affecting individual islands, ecosystems and communities.

IPS UN Bureau Report

Excerpt:

Satik Badeyan, president of the Center for the Territorial Development and Research NGO, which has been chosen as a partner in the restoration efforts on Lake Sevan, stands in front of a glamping site. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Stella Paul
YEREVAN & GEGHARKUNIK PROVINCE, Armenia, Nov 2 2026 (IPS)

The midday sun shines brightly over Lake Sevan. In the still waters, a flock of cormorants drifts silently, their black feathers glistening in the autumn light.

Above them, another flock of black-and-white birds wheels effortlessly through the crisp late-October air. These are Armenian gulls; a species closely associated with the lake.

“For us, these cormorants and Armenian gulls are a matter of national pride,” says Luba Balyan, an ornithologist from the Scientific Center of Zoology and Hydro Ecology, Armenia, who is stationed at Norashen Reserve, a Ramsar-designated wetland on the lake’s shores.

According to Balyan, the gulls used the lake as an important breeding ground but abandoned their nesting sites for nearly 50 years because of hunting and pollution.

“The temperature has changed, and illegal hunting increased. But we worked very hard to restore the habitat and bring the birds back. They first returned around 2010-2011, and now their population has increased,” she tells a visiting group that includes officials from Armenia’s Ministry of Environment, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Global Environment Facility (GEF), which has just approved funding for a major restoration project in Lake Sevan.

The funding – USD 1.4 million – was approved by the GEF at the 17th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD COP17) in Yerevan under the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund (GBFF). This initiative is one of three projects approved recently for restoring and protecting biodiversity in Armenia under various funds.

The Lake Sevan project offers a glimpse of how biodiversity finance announced at international negotiations can reach local communities. The funding will be channelled through the Asian Development Bank, Armenian government agencies, UNDP and local NGOs to support activities ranging from habitat restoration and anti-poaching patrols to ecotourism, sustainable agriculture and alternative livelihood programmes designed to reduce pressure on the lake’s biodiversity.

New Boost for an Ongoing Restoration Effort

Spanning over 450 square miles, Lake Sevan stands at an altitude of 1,900 metres above sea level, making it one of Eurasia’s largest freshwater high-altitude lakes and the largest lake in Armenia and the Caucasus region. The lake is broadly divided into two categories: small Sevan and big Sevan.

The new funding announcement comes as Armenia steps up its efforts to restore the Lake Sevan Basin through a series of conservation programmes backed by international donors and development agencies. The lake ecosystem has been under stress from overfishing, illegal fishing, contamination from dumping of garbage and uncontrolled tourism. The project aims to protect wildlife, improve the management of land and water resources, and support the communities whose lives and incomes depend on the basin.

The project covers the regions of Gegharkunik and Vayots Dzor and six communities around the lake: Martuni, Vardenis, Chambarak, Yeghegis, Vayk and Jermuk. By 2028, it is expected to directly benefit nearly 66,000 people and improve the management of grasslands, farmland and forests across the basin. It also seeks to better connect protected areas with surrounding landscapes, helping wildlife and ecosystems adapt to growing environmental pressures.

The Armenian government has already launched a range of conservation measures, including monitoring illegal fishing and hunting through a special environmental enforcement unit known as Eco Patrol. The local staff has been trained and equipped to identify and protect priority areas that are habitats for endemic species such as Sevan trout and Armenian gull.

Many of these activities are already underway through earlier conservation investments in the basin. Officials say the new GBFF funding will help expand them and bring them to additional communities.

“Lake Sevan is special to us. It’s a crown jewel for Armenia, the biggest freshwater reservoir in the region. So, when we had an opportunity, we decided to ask for funds for restoring Lake Sevan. I am very glad that it was approved for the amount,” said Armenian Environment Minister and COP17 President Hambardzum Matevosyan.

At Norashen Reserve, authorities are developing ecotourism programmes and biodiversity-friendly livelihood opportunities for local communities, according to Deputy Environment Minister Aram Meymaryan. He said these efforts, together with stronger patrolling and monitoring, are intended to generate economic benefits for local people while reducing pressure on fragile ecosystems.

Communities Become Partners in Restoration

Satik Badeyan is the president of the Center for the Territorial Development and Research NGO, which has been chosen as a partner in the restoration efforts on Lake Sevan. Under Badeyan’s leadership, the communities here have been carrying out multiple activities to control tourist flow by redirecting tourists to new attractions.

One example is a cluster of glamping tents in Tsovagyugh – a community on the northern edge of the lake. These glamping sites offer visitors a bouquet of experiences – designed by the community members themselves – including cycling and eating food cooked by locals, learning about the lake and its cultural and historical importance to local communities.

“Here, visitors can see us as a community and the value of the lake beyond its beauty or photogenic appeal; they can build a cultural bond with the community by attending different events inside the youth centre that we have built here, enjoying food cooked by local women in a sustainable way, riding a bike and buying handmade souvenirs, all of which benefit the community. These activities reduce the burden of uncontrolled tourism and lead to further restoration of the lake ecosystem.

Creating Alternatives to Illegal Fishing

According to her, a fresh lease of funding would further help the community develop and promote a culture of ecologically responsible living and environmentally sustainable economic activity, especially among their youth. It can also help address illegal fishing in Lake Sevan, which is driven by tourism demand and economic pressure on local communities.

“The illegal fishing here mostly occurs during the breeding season when fishing is banned. But if you tell someone, ‘Don’t catch fish,’ it doesn’t work because fishing has been their main occupation and only source of income for centuries, what are they supposed to do? In other words, you need to offer an alternative if you want to protect nature,” she said. “This is why we are building these glamping sites, creating alternative income opportunities for community members and slowly moving to a more sustainable lifestyle,” she says.

Karina Bruchyan of Chambarak said her family traditionally depended on fishing. Today, she earns income from beekeeping after receiving training and support through the Lake Sevan restoration programme. She now sells honey in local markets and at the eco-tourism centre in Tsovagyugh. For conservationists, such alternative livelihoods are key to reducing pressure on the lake’s fish stocks while creating new economic opportunities for local residents.

The restoration project will also support irrigation infrastructure, livestock watering points and forest nurseries to reduce land degradation and encourage more sustainable farming practices in lakeside communities.

As Armenian gulls circle once again over Lake Sevan and communities diversify their livelihoods beyond fishing, conservationists hope the latest investment will help secure the future of both the lake and the people who depend on it.

IPS UN Bureau Report

Excerpt:

Land may be assessed primarily for its potential commercial or residential value, overlooking the food, livelihoods and environmental services it already provides. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Zhimin Wu
ROME, Oct 30 2026 (IPS)

A field at the edge of a growing city may be worth far more than its market price suggests. It may produce vegetables sold in nearby markets, support local livelihoods and provide green space in an increasingly built-up environment. It can also help cities manage water, adapt to climate shocks and strengthen local food supplies. As municipal authorities decide where new homes and infrastructure should go, understanding what their land already contributes can help them plan for housing and food together.

This question lies at the heart of World Cities Day, which the United Nations will mark on 31 October under the theme “Regenerating the City: Adequate Housing for All.”

This does not mean protecting every agricultural plot from development. Cities urgently need more homes, and housing must remain a priority. The task is to make better-informed decisions about where development should proceed and where maintaining productive agricultural land can offer lasting benefits

According to the United Nations, cities are now home to 45 percent of the world’s population and are projected to account for two-thirds of global population growth between now and 2050.

Accommodating this expansion will require enormous investment in housing, infrastructure and public services. It also presents an opportunity to reconsider how food production and urban development can support one another.

Agriculture is already an integral part of the life and economy of many cities around the world. Within urban areas and along their expanding boundaries, farmers cultivate vegetables, fruits and other crops that supply local markets, generate employment and income, particularly for small-scale producers, and improve access to fresh and nutritious food.

Beyond food production, urban and peri-urban agriculture can also strengthen climate resilience, contribute to the restoration of urban ecosystems and support the development of greener, healthier and more sustainable cities.

The proximity of farms to consumers can be especially valuable for perishable produce. Proximity to markets can reduce transport distances and, when supported by adequate handling and storage, help limit losses of perishable produce. Urban and peri-urban agriculture can also diversify food supply chains, giving cities additional sources of food when longer distribution networks face disruptions.³

Yet the contribution of these farms is not always adequately recognized in urban development decisions. Land may be assessed primarily for its potential commercial or residential value, overlooking the food, livelihoods and environmental services it already provides.

As cities expand, these wider benefits deserve greater consideration. Agricultural land can help absorb rainfall, support biodiversity and contribute to urban green infrastructure. With appropriate safeguards, farming can also make use of suitably treated wastewater and safely processed organic resources. Once agricultural land is converted to other uses, such benefits can be difficult to recover.

This does not mean protecting every agricultural plot from development. Cities urgently need more homes, and housing must remain a priority. The task is to make better-informed decisions about where development should proceed and where maintaining productive agricultural land can offer lasting benefits.

Rosario, Argentina, illustrates how municipal policy can bring these objectives together. Following the country’s economic crisis in 2001, the city developed an urban agriculture programme that transformed vacant and underused land into productive spaces. It created opportunities for low-income households, supported fresh-food production and brought agriculture into municipal development planning.

Municipal authorities established arrangements to connect producers with available land, including public and private plots. Rosario subsequently incorporated agriculture into municipal planning and, in 2016, introduced a Green Belt Project to support agroecological production around the city.

Its experience demonstrates how local governments can integrate food production into wider efforts to improve urban livelihoods and the environment.

The lesson extends beyond Rosario. Urban agriculture cannot replace rural farming, which remains indispensable for feeding cities. Its particular contribution lies in complementing rural production, especially through fresh produce, diversified supply chains and stronger connections between urban markets and surrounding agricultural areas.

Realizing these benefits requires sound management. Producers need access to suitable land and safe water, alongside effective food-safety safeguards. Water-efficient irrigation, protected cultivation, improved logistics and the recovery of nutrients from organic waste can help cities use scarce resources more effectively. The most useful innovations are those that local farmers can afford, operate and sustain.

This broader approach is reflected in the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations’ Green Cities Initiative, launched in 2020 with the ambition of improving health and well-being in 1,000 cities by 2030.

The Initiative connects urban and peri-urban agriculture with forestry, green infrastructure and sustainable natural-resource management. Through the Green Cities Network, municipalities can exchange experience, build partnerships and identify practical solutions suited to their circumstances.

World Cities Day offers an occasion for municipal authorities to act. Two measures would make a practical difference.

First, cities can integrate food and agriculture into urban and territorial planning. Mapping agricultural land, identifying its producers and understanding its connections to markets and surrounding rural areas can help governments make more informed decisions about housing, infrastructure and land use.

Second, municipalities can create conditions that encourage sustainable agricultural investment through appropriate zoning, secure access to land, improved market infrastructure and technical support. Rosario demonstrates how municipal policies can help make agriculture a lasting part of urban development.

The cities of tomorrow will need more homes, better infrastructure and thriving economies. They also stand to gain from the agriculture that sustains their populations. Recognizing its full value can help cities make better decisions about what to build, what to preserve and how to grow.

Zhimin Wu is Assistant Director-General and Director of the Forestry Division at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

Diego Mesa, GEF CEO and chairperson, addresses media on the status of finance mobilisation at COP17. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Stella Paul
YEREVAN, Armenia, Oct 30 2026 (IPS)

The second week of COP17 was dominated by discussions on biodiversity finance, with new pledges announced and donor outreach intensifying. Yet as the summit approached its close, the financing gap for implementing the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF) remains largely unchanged.

Prior to COP17, the first global review of progress toward the KMGBF, often called the global biodiversity review, painted an alarming picture: the commitment to mobilise USD 200 billion annually for biodiversity was still far from being achieved. The conference therefore opened amid growing pressure on governments over missed targets, corporate responsibility and Indigenous rights.

Against that backdrop, finance has become one of the most closely watched issues in the negotiations.

“We started the replenishment cycle number 9, for 2026 to 2030, and the initial contributions were announced in June in the General Assembly of the Global Environmental Facility (GEF) in Uzbekistan’s Samarkand. And those initial contributions came at USD 3.9 billion for the next four years,” said Diego Mesa, the recently appointed CEO and Chairperson of the Global Environment Facility, at a press conference.

New and Emerging Donors, Including Cities

Since the adoption of the KMGBF, a notable financing trend has emerged: cities and provinces have begun contributing directly to biodiversity finance mechanisms.

The trend started two years ago when Quebec, the Canadian province that hosted COP15 in 2022, independently donated USD 1.4 million to the GBFF.

At COP17, the trend continued. On Oct 26 – observed as Finance Day, the City of Berlin pledged EUR 50,000 (USD 56,000) to the GBFF, while Quebec announced a second contribution of CAD 1.5 million.

Collectively, national and sub-national governments pledged more than USD 60 million to the GBFF. According to GEF sources, this included contributions from Germany (EUR 50 million), Iceland (ISK 160 million) and Monaco (EUR 1.5 million).

While the expanding donor base is an encouraging sign, the world still needs an estimated USD 200 billion annually by 2030 to halt and reverse biodiversity loss under Target 19. The current pace of finance mobilisation, therefore, remains far slower than what is required.

Mesa acknowledged these concerns about the biodiversity finance gap but argued that GEF funding has a catalytic effect, attracting additional public and private investment. He noted that each dollar committed through the facility typically mobilises several more dollars from other sources, and many donor countries also provide biodiversity finance through bilateral programs outside the GEF system.

“We obviously, you know, are concerned. We’ve read the (global) review report. But what we also need to highlight is that, in addition to the funds that come through the GEF, we have to take into account what I mentioned about being able to mobilise additional funds, whether it’s, you know, a multiplier of 8 or 8.2, on average, if we take GEF 8 as a baseline or blended finance, which is about 18.5,” he said.

Astrid Schomaker, Executive Secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity, stressed that progress remains insufficient despite some gains.

“We all know that a lot of commitments were made four years ago in Montreal (including) mobilising at least USD 200 billion a year for biodiversity from 2030, from all sources. Reduce harmful incentives by at least USD 500 billion a year and align public and private financial flows with a framework. We have seen biodiversity finance increase quite substantially, but also from very, very low levels. Some figures suggest that we would have achieved USD 19 billion in 2024. That would be close to the 2025 milestone of 20 billion. But we also know that aid budgets are a lot under pressure, so that progress is not yet secure, to say the least,” Schomaker said in an address to the delegates on the Finance Day.

“From the side of the Secretariat, we would point to three questions or priorities that we hope you can discuss at this COP and move forward on. First, bring national biodiversity strategies and action plans into national budgets. Second, reform harmful incentives. And third, make public and development finance go further,” Schomaker said.

New Coalition Targets Harmful Subsidies

While much of the discussion centred on mobilising new biodiversity finance, negotiators also stressed the need to curb environmentally harmful spending. In that context, momentum grew around efforts to reform harmful subsidies with the launch of a new coalition of countries committed to Target 18.

Known as the “Friends of Target 18”, the coalition focuses on the KMGBF target to reduce harmful incentives by at least USD 500 billion per year while scaling up positive incentives for biodiversity.

Led by Colombia and Finland, and supported by the CBD, the coalition also has backing from the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the United Nations Development Programme’s Biodiversity Finance Initiative (UNDP BIOFIN).

“Our work here in Yerevan can influence how natural resources are used, how goods are produced and consumed, and where public and private financial resources are directed,” said Hambardzum Matevosyan, Minister of Environment of the Republic of Armenia and COP17 President.

So far, only five countries have joined the initiative. However, Marina Von Weissenberg, Senior Ministerial Adviser of Finland and co-chair of the Friends of Target 18, expressed confidence that more countries would follow.

“We don’t need to spend more to close the biodiversity funding gap, we need to spend better. Governments have a real opportunity here to reshape public spending with future generations in mind, but they can’t do it alone. International coordination is key to giving governments the confidence to lead change,” she said.

Meanwhile, GEF continues to focus not only on raising new money but also on broadening the donor base.

“This is exactly what we were doing with this pledging session, with the USD 5 million going to the GEF Trust Fund, and with the 60 million going into the GBFF. But also expanding the donor base. And that’s why we were very pleased to announce that we have a total of nine new contributors to the GEF family of funds,” Mesa said to IPS.

GEF Keeps Pledging Window Open

In an effort to attract additional support, GEF has made a significant change to its replenishment process.

Traditionally, pledging windows close when a replenishment cycle ends. Under that system, pledges for the ninth replenishment cycle would have closed earlier in June, when GEF held its Assembly in Samarkand.

This year, however, the window remains open, allowing countries to make contributions throughout the year.

“This is the first time that we kept the window open for pledging. And this is to respond to requests to be more flexible from the donor side. So, we will have, hopefully, one additional pledging session in the UNFCCC COP (COP31) next month,” Mesa told IPS.

“But we also expect additional contributions to take place in the next calendar year. So, the window will remain open,” he added.

IPS UN Bureau Report

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Indigenous leaders from Brazil, DRC, Indonesia, Gambia, Peru and Thailand are named the Indigenous People’s Ambassadors for Primary Forests at COP17. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Stella Paul
YEREVAN, Armenia, Oct 29 2026 (IPS)

At the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) COP17, the presence of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs) is impossible to miss. Indigenous representatives speak at side events, participate in contact groups, advise negotiators and engage across multiple forums shaping the future of global biodiversity policy.

Yet amid this growing visibility, one message resonates throughout the conference halls: implementation of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF) will fall short unless Indigenous peoples are meaningfully involved at every stage, from decision-making and policy design to implementation and monitoring. 

Many Indigenous leaders attending COP17 say that reality remains far from that goal. While governments increasingly acknowledge the role of IPLCs in protecting nature, participation is often limited to consultation rather than genuine partnership, they argue. This is particularly concerning because many biodiversity policies directly affect Indigenous territories, traditional knowledge systems, food sovereignty and cultural practices.

For communities that have stewarded ecosystems for generations, the challenge is no longer visibility. It is influence.

Against this backdrop, COP17 offered a rare moment of celebration. Six Indigenous leaders from Brazil, Peru, Indonesia, Thailand, The Gambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo were named Indigenous Peoples Ambassadors for Primary Forests in recognition of their efforts to protect some of the world’s most ecologically important forests.

Leading the Good Fight for Nature

The awardees, Maimuna Jawara, Pirawan Wongnithisathaporn, Puyr dos Santos Tembé, Joseph Itongwa Miukumo, Julio Cusurichi Palacios and Herkulanus Sutomo Manna, share a common mission: protecting, restoring and stewarding forest ecosystems that sustain biodiversity, store vast amounts of carbon and support traditional ways of life.

The recognition came through the inaugural Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities Award, a joint initiative of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and the United Nations Forum on Forests (UNFF). The six winners were selected through an open nomination process that attracted 73 nominations from 27 countries.

Organisers said the award seeks to spotlight individuals whose leadership has helped safeguard primary forests while strengthening the rights and resilience of the communities that depend on them.

“Today we recognise six of these leaders, several of whom the GEF has had the privilege of working alongside in their territories. Their leadership offers important lessons, and we look forward to continuing to learn from it across all our work,” said Diego Mesa, Chief Executive Officer of the Global Environment Facility, during the award ceremony.

The recognition also reflects growing scientific evidence linking Indigenous stewardship with successful conservation outcomes.

“Evidence has shown that securing Indigenous Peoples’ land rights and recognising and respecting traditional knowledge are among the most effective ways to protect forests and biodiversity. Yet Indigenous-led conservation is about more than environmental results; it is about recognising rights, upholding dignity and delivering justice,” said Grethel Aguilar, Director General of IUCN.

Farming, Forests and Cultural Knowledge

For Maimuna Jawara of The Gambia, environmental stewardship begins with everyday life.

Jawara, one of the award recipients from Banjul, is the founder of 1802lab, a research and design laboratory exploring the connections between cultural identity, ecological knowledge and sustainable futures for African fashion. Yet the role she identifies with most deeply is that of a farmer and community agroecology educator.

Growing up in a farming family, Jawara learned to read the seasons, save seeds and care for the soil from an early age. Living close to nature, she came to see environmental stewardship not as a profession but as a way of life.

“As I got older, I realised that agroecology is just remembering how to live in harmony with nature,” Jawara said.

Earlier this year, she was named a Transformative Partnership Platform (TPP) Agroecology Ambassador.

Jawara’s recognition comes at a difficult moment for her country. The Gambia no longer has any primary forests. Studies have attributed their disappearance to fuelwood collection, land clearing for livestock, hunting and advancing desertification.

While the government has enacted laws promoting sustainable natural resource management, implementation remains challenging because of limited financial and human resources. Conservation regulations are also often poorly understood by rural communities.

Yet there are signs of hope. According to Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) figures, forest cover in The Gambia has increased in recent years through plantations and community-led restoration efforts.

For Jawara, the award is both an honour and a responsibility.

“I hope to amplify voices from the ground and contribute to a transition that is not only ecological but also socially just, inclusive, and rooted in dignity,” she said.

Protecting Ancestral Forests

Another recipient, Herkulanus Sutomo Manna of West Kalimantan, Indonesia, represents the Dayak Iban Menua Sungai Utik Indigenous community, which has gained international recognition for protecting its ancestral forests.

For Herkulanus, protecting forests is inseparable from protecting Indigenous identity, culture and livelihoods.

The community’s struggle dates back to 1998, when it initiated participatory mapping efforts in response to increasing threats from illegal logging. Those efforts helped document customary lands and strengthened the community’s ability to defend its territory from encroachment.

Over time, the initiative became an important example of how Indigenous communities can use traditional knowledge, customary governance and local leadership to conserve forests while maintaining cultural continuity.

Receiving the award at COP17, Herkulanus emphasised that the recognition belonged not only to him but to the broader Indigenous movement. He urged Indigenous communities around the world to continue protecting and managing their ancestral territories, stressing that safeguarding forests today is essential for the survival and well-being of future generations.

Indigenous Voices Across Continents

Among the award recipients was Puyr dos Santos Tembé of Brazil, a leader from the Tembé People and the Alto Rio Guamá Indigenous Territory in the Brazilian Amazon.

Tembé’s work supports ecosystem restoration through native species, community seed collection, agroforestry initiatives and sustainable livelihoods connected to standing forests.

Unlike many Indigenous leaders, she has also developed a strong social media presence and uses digital communication platforms to raise awareness about Indigenous peoples, their cultures and their rights among broader audiences.

Pirawan Wongnithisathaporn is a Karen Indigenous leader who works through the Asia Indigenous Peoples Pact (AIPP), a regional network representing Indigenous communities, including those displaced from their ancestral lands and living in exile.

She serves as a bridge between these communities and regional and global biodiversity and climate negotiations, advocating for Indigenous rights, community forestry, environmental governance and more.

Other recipients included Joseph Itongwa Miukumo of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a leading advocate for Indigenous and community-conserved territories, and Peru’s Julio Cusurichi Palacios, whose work has advanced forest protection and Indigenous participation in national decision-making.

Recognition Amid Continuing Frustrations

While the awards were welcomed as an important recognition of Indigenous leadership, they also highlighted a wider debate unfolding at COP17 over the place of Indigenous peoples within biodiversity governance.

Many Indigenous representatives attending the conference point out that, despite repeated commitments from governments and international institutions, Indigenous communities remain excluded from many key decisions affecting their territories and livelihoods.

That frustration has surfaced repeatedly during discussions around implementation of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.

At COP16 in Colombia, parties agreed to establish a permanent body for Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities to help ensure their effective inclusion across all aspects of the framework’s implementation. The decision was widely hailed as a breakthrough for Indigenous participation.

Two years later, however, many delegates argue that progress has been slow.

IPLC representatives say they continue to face exclusion from decision-making processes at local, sub-national and national levels. Concerns have also intensified around the implementation of the framework’s flagship 30×30 target, which seeks to conserve 30 percent of the world’s lands and waters by 2030.

Many Indigenous organisations argue that their rights over traditional territories are still not being adequately respected as governments pursue conservation commitments.

The debate raises a broader question: can recognition of individual Indigenous leaders help shift political realities on the ground?

For some participants, initiatives such as the Indigenous Peoples Ambassadors for Primary Forests programme could help bring greater visibility to Indigenous leadership and strengthen advocacy for rights-based conservation. Others caution that recognition alone will not address the structural barriers that continue to limit Indigenous participation in decision-making.

“Announcing the new cohort of Indigenous Peoples Ambassadors for Primary Forests is only the beginning. We will continue to partner with and elevate the ambassadors and their communities,” said Paula Prist, Senior Programme Coordinator at IUCN.

IPS UN Bureau Report

Credit: Shutterstock

By James Alix Michel
VICTORIA, Seychelles, Oct 28 2026 (IPS)

On 21 September 1976, less than three months after independence, Seychelles took its seat in the General Assembly of the United Nations. We became the 145th member of the Organisation. For a young nation of scattered islands in the Indian Ocean, with a small population and no army to speak of, it was far more than a ceremony. It was a promise that, in the family of nations, size would not decide whose voice was heard.

Fifty years later, I still believe in that promise. But I also know that it has never been kept automatically. It has to be renewed by every generation of leaders, and it now faces one of its hardest tests.

On 24 October, the United Nations marked its 81st anniversary. In his final United Nations Day message as Secretary-General, António Guterres reminded the world that the UN is not only an organisation but an idea: that humanity’s future depends on our ability to work together to advance peace, development and human rights.

Those words land at a sobering moment. Wars continue in several regions, often with civilians paying the highest price. The climate crisis is accelerating faster than our responses to it. Inequality is widening within and between nations. New technologies are advancing more quickly than our ability to govern them. And the UN itself is under severe financial strain, while its Security Council is too often paralysed by the very powers entrusted with keeping the peace.

It is in this climate that the Security Council is now deliberating, through its private straw polls, on who should become the tenth Secretary-General when Mr Guterres’s term ends on 31 December. For small island states, it matters more than most people realise.

Why should a small island care so deeply about who leads the United Nations? Because for nations like ours, multilateralism is not a matter of preference. It is a matter of survival.

We will never be the largest economies or the strongest military powers. Our protection has always been the rule of law, the strength of partnership and a seat at the table where every nation, large or small, has one vote. When the rules hold, a nation of just over 100,000 people can stand beside a nation of a billion and be heard. When the rules weaken, the small are the first to be pushed aside.

The UN has given small states some of their greatest achievements. The Law of the Sea gave island nations sovereign rights over vast ocean territories. The Paris Agreement set the aim of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees, a line that small islands fought hard to draw. And in January this year, the High Seas Treaty entered into force, bringing nearly two thirds of the world’s ocean, for too long a lawless frontier, under a framework for conservation and shared benefit. None of these would have been possible without the patient, often frustrating, work of multilateral diplomacy.

Yet I will not pretend the system is working as it should. A Security Council designed for the world of 1945 does not reflect the world of 2026. Africa, home to more than a quarter of the UN’s members, still has no permanent seat. Climate finance promised to vulnerable nations arrives slowly, in complicated forms, and often as loans that deepen debt.

The answer to an imperfect system of cooperation, however, is better cooperation, not less.

So what should the world, and especially its smaller nations, ask of the next Secretary-General?

First, courage. The Secretary-General has no army and a limited budget. The office’s greatest power is moral authority: the willingness to speak plainly to the powerful, to name injustice and to stand with those who have no other platform.

Second, the ability to build bridges. In a world divided between rival blocs, the UN’s leader must be trusted in Washington and Beijing, in Moscow and Brussels, but also in Victoria, Suva and Port Louis. Small states, which cannot afford permanent enemies, understand this better than most.

Third, a commitment to put the climate and the ocean at the centre of global security. For island nations, rising seas, coral collapse and extreme storms are not distant environmental issues. They are threats to our existence. In October, the International Union for Conservation of Nature warned that 96 percent of the world’s shallow-water coral reef ecosystems face an extremely high risk of collapse by 2075. Here in Seychelles, October storms have reminded us how fragile our coastlines and communities are. The next Secretary-General must treat the health of the ocean as the foundation of peace, food security and prosperity, and must ensure that the High Seas Treaty moves quickly from text to action as its first Conference of the Parties approaches.

Fourth, reform that people can feel. That means more than reorganising departments in New York. It must mean a fairer Security Council, a financial architecture that rewards resilience instead of punishing vulnerability, and a UN that delivers on the ground, where families, farmers and fishers live.

There is also a question of history. In 81 years, the United Nations has never been led by a woman. Without favouring any candidate, I believe it is time for the Organisation to show, at its highest level, the equality it rightly asks of its members.

Fifty years ago, Seychelles came to the United Nations as one of its smallest members, full of hope. We came because we believed that the ocean which surrounds us connects us to the world rather than isolating us from it. That belief has not changed.

The next Secretary-General will inherit a divided world and a weary institution. But they will also inherit the most important idea humanity has ever agreed upon: that our future is shared, and that no nation, however small, should face it alone.

Dialogue over division. Cooperation over confrontation. Solidarity over fear. Those words deserve to be more than a message for one day in October. They should be the test of the next ten years.

James Alix Michel is a former President of Seychelles, a Blue Economy pioneer and a champion of ocean protection.

IPS UN Bureau

Farwiza Farhan speaks about saving the Leuser Ecosystem at a Global Tipping Points Conference 2026. Credit: Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS

By Zofeen Ebrahim
KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 28 2026 (IPS)

Forty-year-old Farwiza Farhan’s eyes light up instantly when she talks about the Leuser Ecosystem – a national strategic area encompassing a national park, a wildlife reserve, protected forests and other land uses.

“It’s rare to have such a large landscape remain intact despite continuous encroachment by developers, which is shrinking the habitat of the tiger, the elephant, the rhino and the orangutan,” she says. At 2.7 million hectares, Leuser remains a rare stronghold for wildlife in a country where many forests have been decimated. “Leuser still stands, and the wildlife thrives there,” she says with a certain pride. “This is why the landscape is so incredibly special,” she says.

Farhan, a Sumatran forest conservator who heads Forest, Nature & Empowerment Aceh (HAkA), spoke to IPS on the sidelines of the Global Tipping Points Conference 2026, held at Sunway University, Kuala Lumpur, from October 12 to15. HAkA works to protect and restore the Leuser through conservation campaigns and meaningful community participation.

“If we don’t pay heed, we will push these animals closer to extinction,” she warned. “There are fewer than 250 tigers and maybe just 100 rhinos left.”

Corporations are shrinking wildlife habitats, says Farhan, pointing to large-scale gold mining and palm oil plantations, some spanning up to 10,000 hectares. “They’re located next to one another and compete for more space than anyone could ever,” she explained.

But wildlife is not the only thing losing space. According to Farhan, 500,000 people live within the ecosystem, and five million live outside it. Their lives are closely tied to the forest, which they use sparingly – consuming what they grow, unlike mining companies and corporations that extract resources on a large scale.

“Many concessions are located near towns and transport routes, making it easier to move commodities. But when forests are cleared, downstream communities bear the consequences, while upstream communities lose access to their land. Palm oil companies often take over land outside protected areas and push the communities living there further away,” said Farhan.

The costs of forest destruction, however, extend beyond the loss of wildlife. Women in communities that depend on the forest often bear a disproportionate burden.

“They are not scared of big multinational companies; they are truly militant in the way they respond to corporations they know will take away their land and forests. They feel the companies will slowly destroy their lives, so they might as well die fighting to stop them from bulldozing their village,” she said.

Farhan saw how women responded when disaster struck last year.

“Disasters force people to relocate, and that’s when women face immediate security concerns. In crowded camps, they may lack safe access to water and sanitation, and their privacy is often compromised. Yet they continue to shoulder the bulk of care work — looking after children and the elderly — while often losing their livelihoods and income.”

She says she has “massive respect and appreciation” for these women.

Sadly, these same women, who have a deep connection with the forest, are often excluded from policy-making forums where their voices matter most, she said.

Orangutan and infant. Credit: Anton Leddin/Wikimedia

She witnessed their knowledge and role in decision-making during Aceh’s catastrophic floods and landslides last November, triggered by torrential rains. “They understood local realities and were the first to mobilise and respond,” she pointed out.

And while many people see women huddled together as gossiping, Farhan playfully calls it “stakeholder mapping”.

“They know who’s doing what, which community members have betrayed them by taking bribes from corporations, and they know exactly what to do when that happens. Elderly women are the best: they have wisdom and respect, and they’ve seen it all before. They are the ones who hold the fort for their communities. Sometimes, an elderly woman will approach a young man engaged in illegal logging and ask, ‘Whose son are you?’ The question carries enormous weight.”

Working with communities has humbled Farhan.

“Our education taught us to speak in certain way, but not to listen. I think we need to invest more time in really listening to communities. We feel that because we are educated, we are there to educate, but in reality, the local people know and understand their problems and have the solutions.”

Spending a day alone in a village was all it took for her to realise how out of her depth she was. “Being left alone in the forest made me realise how quickly I could get lost without appropriate tools.”

Although her ancestry is Acehnese, she is uncomfortable identifying herself as indigenous because she and her family have not experienced the discrimination and lack of opportunities faced by indigenous communities.

“I can’t say that I shared those experiences directly,” she says, acknowledging that her education has given her privileges others have not had. “Identity-wise, I’m confused.”

Yet, she says, she understands their struggle and stands with them. However, she would not use that ‘Indigeneity’ card to gain access to funding and opportunities meant to expand opportunities for Indigenous peoples, as it is “unfair to the people who are actually going through the struggles and working hard to get the opportunities.”

A marine biologist by qualification, she also enrolled in a PhD programme in anthropology, which she later gave up. “I built the organisation while I was doing my PhD, but it died in the process,” she admits. “The work to protect forests was a lot more interesting,” she says with a smile.

But forests were not always her focus. By her own admission, her initial motivation was to protect the ocean because of her love for the underwater world.

Her degree in marine biology helped her understand ocean ecosystems better. She returned to the place where she had first fallen in love with the ocean, only to find it destroyed.

“In 2007, in a remote part of Aceh, Pulau Weh, I saw for the first time how El Niño had devastated an entire coral reef. I felt powerless,” she recalls. Realising how little she could do as an individual, she turned her attention to the forests. “Maybe protecting forests would be easier,” she thought.

But that was easier said than done. When she was hired to work for the government’s forest agency and the Leuser Ecosystem Management Authority, she accepted the offer without asking about the salary or her job description.

“I just wanted to work in conservation. I thought I’d be running around under the canopy of trees, going on patrol and watching wildlife. It turned out to be anything but that. I was stuck behind a desk with a computer in front!”

The job turned out to be in public relations. She was the spokesperson but rarely got the opportunity to speak.

“It was a very confusing place; I got sent to meetings to speak about forest allocations, spatial planning, environmental impact assessments…things I did not learn at university, things I was not equipped to deal with.”

Fate had other plans. All these experiences helped her understand power imbalances and conflicting interests. She also saw firsthand how people tasked with protecting forests could end up destroying them.

She stayed on until the government agency was shut down after its efforts to stop powerful interests from destroying forests met with opposition. She then joined her “stubborn and persistent” colleagues to help find HAkA.

She recalls countless half cups of coffee at cafés, bought because they could barely afford more, as they used the cafés’ Wi-Fi to brainstorm.

“We were not going to give up on protecting the Leuser ecosystem,” she said.

In 2011, Farhan and her organisation were among the environmental campaigners who challenged the government in court over its decision to grant concession to a palm oil company, in Aceh’s Rawa Tripa peat swamp forest (also in Leuser), despite a two-year nationwide moratorium on new concessions having been imposed three months earlier.

PT Kallista Alam, the company, pursued a series of appeals all the way up to the Supreme Court. In 2013, the apex court rejected the appeal and ruled in favour of the community. Yet it took until 2015 for the company’s USD 26.5 million fine to be upheld, and a decade for the company to pay the fine for the environmental damage caused by using fire to clear ten square kilometres of land.

“The company has paid part of the fine to the Ministry of Finance but not to the community,” said Farhan, a campaigner who witnessed the fire.

But she added many actors contributed to the victory, including people who trained judges and attorneys to better understand what it meant to quantify environmental loss in economic terms.

“Judges don’t come from biology or ecology backgrounds,” she said, explaining that judges in Indonesia undergo environmental training to understand that burning forests and replacing them with monoculture plantations is not reforestation.

Farhan’s work is far from over. As long as the extractive economy persists, the threats will remain. If it isn’t palm oil plantations, it will be gold mining or attempts to redraw boundaries.

Her organisation challenges these threats through legal action, spatial planning and, at times, by helping the government evaluate permits across districts and landscapes.

“There are times when government decisions need to be criticised and challenged, and we do that,” she said.

IPS UN Bureau Report

Members of the Global Catholic Congress pose with a poster supporting an end to child marriage. Credit: JRC

By Kizito Makoye
ROME & DAR ES SALAAM, Oct 27 2026 (IPS)

The message from Just Rights for Children (JRC) was clear: protecting children must take precedence over customs used to justify their marriage.

The Global Catholic Congress, representing 44 countries, has endorsed JRC’s campaign to end child marriage by 2030. Announced in Rome on 22 October, the commitment brings influential faith leaders into a global effort to end a practice that continues to deprive millions of children, particularly girls, of their childhood.

“Every child deserves a childhood filled with dignity, education, safety and hope,” said Rajeev Kochuparambil, president of the Global Catholic Congress, announcing its support for the campaign.

“Ending child marriage is a collective moral responsibility that calls upon families, communities and faith institutions to stand together.”

Welcoming the congress’s support, JRC founder Bhuwan Ribhu said faith leaders could play a decisive role in preventing child marriage.

“When faith stands with justice and the protection of children, child marriage can end in one day,” he said.

His words convey a sense of urgency that global progress has yet to match.

UNICEF estimated in 2023 that 640 million girls and women alive at the time had married in childhood. About one in five young women aged 20–24 had married before turning 18, down from nearly one in four a decade earlier. Despite this progress, the rate of decline remained insufficient to eliminate child marriage by 2030.

Behind these figures are girls whose marriages can interrupt their education, restrict their independence and limit their future economic opportunities. UNFPA describes child marriage as both a consequence and a driver of gender inequality, with girls from poorer households and rural communities disproportionately affected.

For the JRC campaign, religious leaders provide a way to reach families and communities where they make decisions about marriage.

According to JRC, the Rome gathering brought together senior Catholic clergy, bishops, archbishops and community leaders from across several continents, including India, the United States, Canada, Africa, Australia, Singapore, the Middle East and Europe. Participants signed a joint pledge to help end child marriage and mobilise faith communities to protect children’s dignity, safety and freedom.

The commitment places responsibility on institutions whose relationships with families extend beyond wedding ceremonies. The campaign seeks to encourage faith leaders to challenge harmful social norms, engage parents and mobilise communities to intervene before a child marriage takes place.

The alliance reflects the international reach of the challenge. UNICEF’s assessment found that South Asia accounted for 45 percent of the world’s child brides, followed by sub-Saharan Africa with 20 percent. India alone accounted for approximately one-third of the global total.

JRC’s approach combines community mobilisation with intervention when a child faces an imminent marriage. According to the organisation, its work involves engaging parents, faith leaders and those involved in wedding ceremonies through counselling and persuasion, with legal action where necessary. Children, friends and relatives can also alert its teams to planned marriages.

The organisation also seeks to address the pressures that can lead families to arrange early marriages by connecting vulnerable households with government assistance and scholarship programmes.

This broader approach matters because changing the law alone cannot address all the social and economic pressures that sustain child marriage. The World Bank has highlighted the importance of combining legal reform with education, economic opportunities and efforts to change social norms.

The Rome pledge comes amid wider international efforts to end child, early and forced marriage. On 4 September 2026, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution establishing 27 November as the annual International Day for the Elimination of Child, Early and Forced Marriage. The first observance will take place next month. Ribhu has been among those advocating for the establishment of the international day.

IPS UN Bureau Report

By Mandeep S.Tiwana
NEW YORK, Oct 27 2026 (IPS)

Notwithstanding last minute shenanigans and the possibility of backroom deals by powerful states, two women from Latin America are leading contenders in the race for the UN’s next Secretary-General. After 80-plus years of men-only leadership, momentum is building to break the glass ceiling at the global institution dedicated to saving future generations from the scourge of war.

Design flaws in the somewhat opaque appointment process that bestow arbitrary veto powers on the five permanent UN Security Council members could, however, torpedo the aspiration for equitable representation for women at the helm for the world body. But there is still time to build public pressure on governments to do the right thing by appointing a feminist woman leader from Latin America and the Caribbean in deference to the principle of regional rotation.

UN in crisis

The next Secretary-General will preside over a fractious UN facing one of its hardest tests. Russia and the USA, which as Security Council permanent members are supposed to maintain international peace and security, are actively violating the UN Charter’s ban on aggression. Their ill-conceived invasions of Ukraine and Iran are causing large-scale death and destruction.

The USA has also recently imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court, making it harder to pursue justice for the Israeli genocide of Palestinians and conflicts fuelled by powerful states in Congo, Sudan and Yemen. China, another permanent Council member, continues to provide cover for crimes against humanity committed by Myanmar’s brutal military junta, currently embroiled in a civil war against dissidents.

Demands on the UN are increasing. Over 100 million forcibly displaced people need the UN’s support. But the institution faces a deep financial crisis caused by delays in payments of dues by bigger countries and an unnecessarily complicated funding model. The funding crisis comes as the challenges are mounting up. Climate commitments are being undermined by fossil fuel lobbies and petrostates as the world hurtles towards tipping points. Repressive states are pushing to reverse hard-won human rights that the UN is supposed to protect, including sexual and reproductive freedoms for women. Some two-thirds of Sustainable Development Goals targets, which seek to promote social progress and better standards of living, are not being met, driven by a combination of inadequate resourcing and escalating attacks on civic space.

The UN needs a leader who can break the mould by being much more than a bureaucrat beholden to states. The next Secretary-General should seek to derive legitimacy by representing the needs and aspirations of over eight billion people around the world. With confidence in multilateralism at breaking point, the exercise of feminist leadership principles that combine active listening, courage, consensus building and empathy for victims of abuses, will be crucial.

She must be able to bravely stand up for the UN Charter and its commitment to human dignity and justice under international law. When Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev demanded that Dag Hammarskjöld resign as Secretary-General in 1960, he reminded the UN General Assembly that big powers are not the ones that need the UN for protection: “it is all the others.” In 2004, Kofi Annan had the courage to call the US invasion of Iraq illegal in a rebuke to US President George W. Bush.

Given the pressures, it may be a good idea for the next Secretary-General to declare they will stand for only one term, thereby avoiding the trap of being overly cautious towards the most powerful states in their first term so they can be re-elected. Security Council permanent members have shown they will block re-appointments if a Secretary-General does not do their bidding. In 1996, Boutros Boutros Ghali was denied a second term because of a US veto.

Civic engagement needed

A deep commitment to human rights and the quest for transparency, accountability and participation will determine how the next Secretary-General will be remembered by future generations in how approached this hard and often thankless job. Civic engagement should be at the heart of the UN’s agenda. Just 75 of 193 UN member states, accounting for only seven per cent of the world’s population, respect their people’s freedoms to organise, speak out and protest peacefully.

To start changing this, in her first 100 days, the next Secretary-General should appoint a UN Civil Society Envoy to drive the UN’s outreach to people and civil society around the world, elevate the issue of reprisals against activists who engage with the UN and highlight unfair blocking by states of civil society organisations that seek to participate in the UN’s work.

From the time of its founding in 1945 amid the ruins of war, oppressed people have looked to the UN to be the conscience of the world. In the second half of the 20th century, the UN, through leaders like U Thant, championed the aspirations of discriminated and colonised peoples for self-rule and dignity. The next Secretary-General should prioritise the voices of excluded peoples by bringing the voices of those on the sharp end of repression into rooms where decisions are made. She can build consensus the feminist way, by never letting a door close.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis in the early 1960s, U Thant kept communication channels open with both the world’s superpowers, proposed the standstill that helped pull the world back from the brink of nuclear war and then persuaded Cuban leader Fidel Castro to de-escalate the situation. The next Secretary-General’s moral clarity can shape the world of tomorrow. She must be mindful of the needs and aspirations of young people who have the greatest to gain from a functioning UN but have the least voice.

Her leadership must be bold, inventive and unafraid to fail. Dag Hammarskjöld invented the UN’s peacekeeping role during the 1956 Suez crisis, going beyond the UN Charter. He died in 1961 attempting to broker a ceasefire in the Congo. Kofi Annan publicly owned the UN’s failures in Rwanda and Srebrenica, then turned those lessons into the Responsibility to Protect. The world’s first woman Secretary-General must help the UN win back legitimacy and trust among the world’s people. To do that, she will need to be creative and not be constrained by tradition or fear of failure.

Mandeep S. Tiwana is the secretary general of civil society alliance, CIVICUS. He also serves as CIVICUS’s representative to the UN headquarters in New York.

IPS UN Bureau

IPS UN Bureau

Manvel Arzumanyan, retired veterinarian, says animal movements have been impacted by the conflict. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Stella Paul
YEREVAN and SHIKAHOGH STATE RESERVE, Armenia, Oct 26 2026 (IPS)

Less than 100 metres from military positions facing each other across the Armenia-Azerbaijan border, the forest suddenly disappears.

On 22 October, I travelled to Shikahogh State Reserve, a biodiversity hotspot in southern Armenia near the Azerbaijan border. At one point I stood less than 100 metres from military positions facing each other across the frontier. Looking across the landscape, what struck me most was not the presence of soldiers but the absence of trees.

Large patches of hillside were barren, interrupting what should have been continuous forest cover. From several points inside the reserve, stretches of land appeared stripped of vegetation. Armenian military positions and Azerbaijani posts were visible across the landscape, reminders that one of the South Caucasus’ richest ecosystems now sits at the edge of a heavily militarised frontier.

The reserve, located in Armenia’s Syunik Province, was founded in 1958 and spans almost 30,000 acres, about 94 percent of which is forested.

It is home to rare animals such as the Caucasian leopard, the Bezoar ibex, the brown bear, the Armenian viper and numerous bird species. It also has 1,100 plant species (70 of which are listed in the IUCN Red Data Book) and is regarded by conservationists as one of the ecological jewels of the Caucasus.

Yet today, biodiversity is only part of the story.

Local Armenian officials, led by Marat Harutyunyan, Deputy Mayor of Kapan, the municipality closest to the reserve and the Azerbaijan border, said the environmental changes have become more visible since the 2022 fighting that affected parts of southern Armenia.

Harutyunyan alleged that Azerbaijani forces had cleared sections of forest for military positions and access roads. The full extent of this clearing has not been independently verified. Visible signs of tree cutting and earthworks could also be seen on the Armenian side near military installations, although officials declined to discuss their purpose or scale.

Vladik Agatelyan and Harut Marzynyan talk about the impacts of war on the locals’ livelihood and wildlife. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

Competing Environmental Claims

While Armenian officials and local residents in Syunik have linked environmental changes in and around the Shikahogh State Reserve to militarisation and forest clearance, Azerbaijani environmental representatives argue that environmental concerns in the region extend beyond forest loss and should be viewed more broadly.

No Azerbaijani government officials were present at COP17 to respond directly to questions about conditions in Shikahogh. Azerbaijan is not participating in the conference. However, Amin Mammadov, co-founder of the Environmental Protection First (EPF) Coalition and Chairman of the Public Council under Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources, said Armenia was selectively drawing attention to environmental problems in the region.

Mammadov argued that while Armenian authorities focus on alleged deforestation and ecosystem damage in border areas, they have remained largely silent on what he described as pollution of transboundary rivers resulting from mining activities within Armenian territory.

Referring to a statement recently issued by the coalition, Mammadov said the group had called on the COP17 Presidency and participants in the Leaders’ Summit to encourage Armenia to adopt “concrete and measurable decisions” on the protection of transboundary rivers, improved management of mining operations, transparent environmental monitoring mechanisms, and public access to environmental information.

Another coalition member, Mugabil Bayramov, Chairman of the Azerbaijani Cartographers Public Union, said the group had prepared a Geographic Information Systems (GIS)-based digital map in 2024 titled Mineral Raw Materials Resources of the Republic of Armenia. According to Bayramov, the map identifies mineral deposits, mining enterprises and rivers allegedly affected by industrial pollutants.

The competing allegations highlight how environmental issues in the South Caucasus are increasingly intertwined with political tensions and unresolved disputes. Independent verification of many claims remains difficult because of restricted access, security concerns and the absence of comprehensive cross-border environmental monitoring.

Installations and clearing of a large tract of forests along the Armenia-Azerbaijan border at Shikahogh State Forest Reserve. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

Livelihood Along a Militarised Border

Harutyunyan said Azerbaijani forces occupy several heights overlooking parts of the reserve and surrounding communities. According to him, that has changed how residents use the landscape.

“People are afraid to go to certain places,” he said, often due to the fear of landmines in parts of the border.

Vladik Agatelyan, a 60-year-old farmer, said a mine blast killed two of his cows. “The risks are too many, so I have stopped raising cattle,” he said. Some of his neighbours still do, but they no longer graze livestock closer to the forest.

Whether the danger is widespread or localised, fear itself appears to be creating a social and economic impact, as pastures are abandoned and traditional livelihoods are slowly disappearing. For example, Agatelyan’s wife, also a senior citizen, took up a job to teach in a village school as income from their farm declined.

“The salary is very small (100 dollars a month), but it helps us to get by,” he said.

A Wildlife Corridor Under Pressure

Among those concerned about the reserve’s future is Manvel Arzumanyan, a retired veterinarian in his seventies. For decades, he worked with livestock in the region and closely observed the surrounding landscape. He remembers a time when bears, wild goats and other species moved freely through the forests and mountains around the village. The area, he said, served as an important ecological corridor linking habitats across Armenia, Azerbaijan and Iran.

Today, such sightings appear less frequent.

Harut Marzynyan, a zoologist at Shikahogh State Reserve who oversees wildlife monitoring, echoed his observations. Marzynyan said the conflict has made fieldwork increasingly difficult, limiting researchers’ ability to track animal movement and conduct regular surveys.

He noted that expanding roads, military infrastructure and fragmented landscapes can disrupt wildlife corridors and isolate animal populations. However, the reserve has been unable to carry out comprehensive studies because of security concerns and restricted access linked to the conflict.

Evidence From Another Frontline

The concerns emerging from Shikahogh are difficult to quantify. But scientists studying other conflict zones say the patterns sound familiar.

George Mitri, Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of Balamand in Lebanon, said the environmental footprint of the ongoing Israel-Hezbollah conflict extends far beyond areas directly affected by fighting. More than 11,000 hectares have been affected by conflict-related fires, while thousands more hectares have suffered damage from explosions, military activity and vegetation loss.

“The ecological impact of war on biodiversity is much broader than the area directly affected by bombing,” Mitri told IPS.

Similar concerns emerged during an interview with Jen Maman, Senior Policy and Campaign Strategist at Greenpeace, the international environmental campaigning organisation.

Drawing on Greenpeace assessments and partner research, Maman said at least 65,000 olive trees have been burned during recent hostilities in southern Lebanon.

She said environmental damage extends beyond forests to include agricultural land, water resources and soil quality.

Maman also highlighted concerns surrounding the use of white phosphorus, which can ignite vegetation and potentially leave pollutants in soils and water sources. Maman shared some investigations that found elevated concentrations of phosphorus and heavy metals in some affected areas of Lebanon, raising concerns about long-term environmental impacts.

According to Maman, the consequences extend well beyond biodiversity. Environmental destruction has affected agriculture, fisheries, livestock production and food security, illustrating how ecological damage can quickly become an economic and humanitarian crisis.

Restoring Nature After Conflict

According to Mitri, meaningful restoration is an urgent need and must begin with “systematic documentation through satellite imagery, photographs, field surveys and scientific assessments”. Those records are critical not only for understanding the scale of destruction but also for future accountability and recovery efforts.

“Restoration must involve a wide range of specialists, including ecologists, biodiversity experts, hydrologists, soil scientists and toxicologists, to understand habitat loss, contamination and ecosystem disruption,” he said.

Displaced residents often possess detailed knowledge of ecological changes occurring in their landscapes and can provide information that may not appear in scientific datasets.

“The community has to be re-established where they were,” Mitri said, arguing that environmental recovery and community recovery are inseparable.

COP17: The Missing Finance Conversation

Restoration, however, raises another question that remains largely absent from international biodiversity negotiations: who will pay for it?

Restoring conflict-damaged ecosystems can require substantial investments in mine clearance, soil remediation, habitat restoration, reforestation, biodiversity monitoring and support for affected communities.

Mitri argues that environmental assessments must eventually be linked to compensation mechanisms, recovery planning and international financial support if damaged landscapes are to have a realistic chance of recovery.

Yet despite growing evidence of environmental destruction caused by armed conflicts in Lebanon, Gaza, Ukraine and the South Caucasus, conflict-related ecosystem restoration remains largely absent from biodiversity finance discussions.

At COP17, governments are debating how to mobilise billions of dollars to implement the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. But despite a packed COP agenda with 50 items, there is little discussion of dedicated funding mechanisms for ecosystems damaged by war or of how affected countries and communities should finance their recovery.

An Overlooked Threat to Biodiversity

At COP17, Astrid Schomaker, Executive Secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), declined to comment directly on the Armenia-Azerbaijan environmental dispute. However, during the conference’s opening ceremony, she stressed the broader significance of biodiversity loss.

“No nation, no economy, no society is immune from the impacts of biodiversity loss,” Astrid Schomaker told delegates. She also warned that “even the best decisions that you will take at this meeting will be meaningless if there is no capacity to implement, monitor, make informed decisions and manage risks.”

As negotiations enter their crucial second week, it remains unclear whether the environmental consequences of armed conflict and the challenge of restoring ecosystems affected by it will receive greater attention in biodiversity negotiations.

Yet for communities living along contested borders, the impacts are already visible. In Shikahogh, trees have disappeared from parts of the landscape, access to land has become more restricted, and residents describe livelihoods that are increasingly difficult to sustain.

For many conservationists, scientists and communities living in conflict-affected regions, the lesson emerging from Armenia, Lebanon and other frontlines is increasingly clear: biodiversity protection cannot be separated from the environmental costs of conflict.

IPS UN Bureau Report

Excerpt:

The Sámi, Europe's last recognised Indigenous community, continue to have their livelihood and lifestyle threatened. Credit: Johan Mikaelsson/IPS

By Johan Mikaelsson
SÁPMI, Norway, Oct 21 2026 (IPS)

The Sámi, Europe’s last recognised Indigenous community, have faced threats to their existence throughout history. Norway, in 2024, apologised for its forced assimilation policy following the findings of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission report, and in September 2026 Sweden has recently been told to do the same.

Despite the growing understanding of how their culture and economic livelihoods have been threatened, their precarious lifestyle is again under threat, ironically from something that is usually considered positive: the ‘green revolution’.

Kautokeino, in Norway’s far north, feels like a capital of Sápmi, the homeland of the Sámi people. The region is associated with the Scandinavian mountain range and the vast territories traversed by reindeer. Much of it lies above the Arctic Circle, stretching across Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Kola Peninsula in Russia.

In Kautokeino, 95 percent of the population are Sámi, and Northern Sámi is the main language. One in every two inhabitants owns reindeer. So does municipal council leader Anders S. Buljo, who once worked full-time in reindeer herding, a livelihood his son has since taken over.

“Right now, the reindeer are in the higher mountains closer to the coast and out on the islands,” Buljo explains, standing on a hilltop with a 360-degree view across the vast landscape.

In September, the reindeer move inland to their winter grazing grounds. The Sámi were once nomadic, following the reindeer’s seasonal movements across the landscape. Reindeer herding remains deeply intertwined with Sámi culture, and both reindeer-herding Sámi and those who rely on hunting and fishing maintain a strong connection to nature.

Beyond the houses clustered in the settlement, the landscape is largely untouched: tens of kilometres of tundra and rolling hills dotted with low trees, marshes, lakes and flowing streams. Rounded, barren mountains stretch towards the horizon, where higher peaks remain covered in snow and ice throughout the year.

The reindeer were once wild, hunted by the Sámi with bows and arrows and spears. Traces of trapping pits, used for thousands of years, can still be found in the terrain.

Over time, the Sámi began gathering reindeer into herds at certain times of the year, separating them and slaughtering selected animals. As the Sámi were brought under state administration, Sámi reindeer-herding communities were established. Each has hundreds or thousands of reindeer, yet the obstacles facing the livelihood continue to mount.

“Wind power, mines and holiday villages are taking up more and more space. At least here, tourism is manageable, as there are no large ski resorts,” says Buljo.

Forestry, agriculture, mining, construction, hydropower, snowmobile trails, ski-lift systems and a growing network of roads and railways are increasingly affecting Sápmi. Helicopters ferry hunters and skiers into the mountains, and skiing from mountain peaks by helicopter is permitted in Sweden.

“It is incredible how little people know about the Sámi and Indigenous peoples, especially further south. We need to build understanding,” Buljo says.

The wind farm at Fosen is a telling example. In 2021, Norway’s Supreme Court ruled that the wind turbines built there were illegal because they infringed on the reindeer herders’ right to practise their culture.

“They build first and ask questions afterwards. The courts established that it was a human rights violation. But the wind turbines are still there,” Buljo says.

Like Indigenous peoples across the Americas, nation states forcibly displaced the Sámi through violence and legislation.

“This continued into the 1970s. We see similar tendencies even today, as the Fosen case shows.”

Anything associated with the “green transition” is often presented as inherently positive. Yet beneath the rhetoric lie the economic interests of states and corporations.

“How green is the transition, really? When the last ore has been extracted from the mountains and the last peak has been fitted with a wind turbine, there will be no reason to stay,” Buljo says.

His municipality can nevertheless influence the direction of development and, for example, prevent mines from opening.

“In 2019, the Supreme Court recognised reindeer husbandry as a traditional use of the land, improving its legal position. And we have come a little further in Norway than in Sweden and Finland.”

In 1979, Karesuando in Sweden’s far north hosted the Davvi Suvva festival, which brought together Indigenous people from around the world. In the opening speech, preserved in the documentary We Are All Brothers and Sisters, Oula Näkkäläjärvi, spokesperson for the Sámi, said:

“We, Indigenous people, have one thing in common: we want to live in harmony with nature, and we can.”

That conviction remains. Yet technological progress and economic growth are transforming lives everywhere, with profound consequences for Indigenous peoples. The price of “development” is an escalating climate crisis. Above the Arctic Circle, the changes are increasingly visible: milder winters, warmer summers and shrinking glaciers. Flora and fauna are being affected in front of us.

Norway and Denmark are among the 24 countries that have ratified the International Labour Organization’s Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention, 1989 (No. 169). Neither Sweden nor Finland has signed this key instrument for the protection of Indigenous rights.

The genocide of Indigenous peoples in North America began with colonisation and continued well into the 20th century. Neither the United States nor Canada has ratified ILO Convention 169. In the Nordic countries, the Sámi did not put up armed resistance. Living dispersed across the region, they were gradually pushed off lands they had inhabited for millennia.

In Norway, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission worked from 2018 to 2023. Alongside an official apology to the Sámi people, concrete measures have been taken. Finland’s Sámi Truth and Reconciliation Commission published its report in December 2025. In Sweden, the Truth Commission for the Sami People presented its report on 30 September 2026.

The auditorium at Mid Sweden University in Östersund was filled. Hundreds of Sámi had travelled from across Sápmi to witness a historic moment, one that many hoped would mark the beginning of something new.

“Sweden’s assimilation policy has been very successful,” says Marja-Kristin Skum, her remark edged with irony.

Skum is Sámi, a reindeer owner, teacher and language researcher at the Sámi University of Applied Sciences in Kautokeino. As part of the Truth Commission’s work, she interviewed people willing to share their experiences. Most were between 60 and 70 years old, but even children gave testimony. The accounts leave little doubt that state policies have left deep scars.

“Here is the truth. But what does reconciliation look like? This is not just about us Sámi. The majority population and the state also have work to do. How are we to repair all the damage that has been done? This wound has never healed,” Skum says.

Although policies in Norway, Finland and Sweden have differed, the three countries face many of the same questions about their past and present. Liv Inger Somby, rector of the Sámi University of Applied Sciences in Kautokeino, travelled more than 1,000 kilometres to Östersund to attend the presentation of the Swedish report, which calls for “an official apology, compensation, and national redress for historical injustices.”

“Of course, what is happening in Sweden is being followed in Norway, too. We essentially have no borders in Sápmi, and we need to keep working across national boundaries. It is very important that we stand strong together,” Somby says.

From the 18th century onwards, farmers from southern Sweden were granted land in the north, where timber, silver, iron ore, gold and other natural resources awaited exploitation. From the 1950s onwards, numerous hydropower plants with huge dams were built, submerging large areas of land under water.

Well into the 20th century, the Sámi were prevented from speaking their own language and forbidden to practise their religion and spirituality, both deeply intertwined with nature and the landscape. In the 2020s, Sámi culture is experiencing what some describe as a “boom”, with growing visibility in film, literature and music and recognition in the cultural sphere.

Ol-Ánte Sikku, chairman of The Gaaltije Foundation, a South Sami cultural centre and museum in Östersund, reflects on what comes next.

“A truth commission cannot be repeated, and its report cannot simply be put on a shelf. Something has to come of it. If it does not happen now, it never will,” he says. Sikku also notes that the political and social climate has become harsher since the commission began its work.

“With mining and resource exploitation, the ‘green transition’, defence, rearmament and space initiatives, Sámi interests can be seen as obstacles.”

When political leaders suggest, implicitly or explicitly, that the Sámi are standing in the way of development, they fuel hostility.

Whether Sweden’s Truth Commission will lead to concrete action remains to be seen. Its report now passes into the hands of a new government. Sweden held a parliamentary election on 13 September, but negotiations to form a government may take time.

A possible left-green-centre coalition is expected to place greater emphasis on environmental protection than the outgoing right-wing government. Economic interests, however, continue to carry considerable weight.

The pressure on Sápmi is intense. Proposals and applications range from extensions to ski-lift systems to large wind farms and mines. Even foreign companies can obtain permits for test drilling. Sweden is often described as a country covered in forest, but 90 percent is managed land, planted with spruce or pine and harvested after 80–120 years.

There is a Sámi saying: “If the Sámi take care of the reindeer, the reindeer take care of the Sámi.”

Today, this relationship involves far more than the practical work of herding. For Sámi reindeer-herding communities, it also means a constant struggle through legal and administrative processes, with documents to read, prepare and respond to.

The recently approved establishment of another mine near Kiruna is a case in point. The project will affect the Gabna Sámi reindeer-herding community, once again restricting the reindeer’s ability to move freely through the landscape.

IPS UN Bureau Report

When you grow up on a small island, the ocean is not scenery. It is your neighbour, your livelihood, and the measure of time itself. For decades, as I walked the beaches of Seychelles, I watched the subtle shifts that scientists were warning the world about. The tide crept a little higher up the sand each year. After a warm season, vibrant coral gardens turned ghost-white. Storms that once belonged to rare memory began arriving with unsettling regularity.

James Alix Michel

No one can afford that illusion anymore.

What began on our island shores has arrived at the heart of every continent. The floods that submerge towns, the relentless heatwaves across Asia and the Americas, the droughts parching African farmlands, and the wildfires darkening the skies of the northern hemisphere all tell the exact same story. Small islands were never a separate case; we were simply the planet’s early warning system. Today, the alarm bell is ringing in every home. No nation, however vast its territory or deep its treasury, can build a wall high enough to shut out a warming world.

Next month, from 9 to 20 November, world leaders and negotiators will gather on the Mediterranean coast in Antalya, Türkiye, for the 31st United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP31). The summit carries an unusual and promising diplomatic architecture: Türkiye will host the gathering and hold the Presidency, while Australia leads the negotiations, fresh from partnering with Fiji and Tuvalu to host the Pre-COP meetings in the Pacific. Having Pacific island voices help shape the road to Antalya is a welcome sign.

Yet as the countdown begins, the overarching question hanging over COP31 is not whether the world can draft another eloquent communiqué. It is a much simpler, sharper question: will we finally keep our promises?

Türkiye’s Presidency has rightly framed Antalya as an “Implementation COP”. That label must mean something in practice, because the global climate process is facing a profound test of trust. Across the Global South, and especially among small islands and least developed countries, there is a deep and justified fatigue. Summit after summit produces historic pledges—on cutting emissions, on adaptation funds, on compensating for loss and damage—only for those commitments to stall in a maze of bureaucracy and broken timelines.

Trust in international diplomacy is not built by the grandeur of a pledge made before television cameras. It is built when resources actually reach the fishing village rebuilding its sea wall, or the farmer adapting to shifting rains. If Antalya is to restore faith in multilateralism, three imperatives must guide the leaders gathering there on 11 and 12 November.

First, climate finance must move from paper to people. For too many vulnerable countries, accessing climate funds feels like running an obstacle course designed for them to fail. Initiatives like the new Climate Implementation Bridge—developed by the Presidency and the UN Development Programme to connect national climate plans with real financing—are a step in the right direction. But we need speed, simplicity, and scale. Adaptation and loss and damage funding are not acts of charity from the rich to the poor; they are investments in global stability.

Second, we cannot talk honestly about climate resilience without confronting the crushing burden of sovereign debt. It is a cruel paradox of our time that the nations which contributed least to global emissions are forced to borrow heavily just to rebuild after climate disasters they did not cause. How can a government invest in a green transition or coastal defences when its revenues are swallowed by debt servicing?

We already know that innovative solutions exist when there is political courage. In Seychelles, we pioneered the world’s first sovereign debt-for-nature swap designed for ocean conservation, alongside the world’s first sovereign Blue Bond. We showed that you can relieve fiscal pressure while legally protecting vast stretches of marine territory. What small islands proved on a modest scale must now become a standard tool of the international financial system.

Third, the ocean must move from the margins of climate negotiations to the very centre. For too long, the ocean was treated as a silent victim of climate change rather than our greatest ally in stopping it. The sea covers more than 70 percent of our planet, absorbs the vast majority of excess heat, and locks away immense quantities of carbon in its mangroves, seagrass meadows, and marine ecosystems.

COP31 has dedicated a thematic day on 18 November to oceans, coastal resilience, and the blue economy. That is encouraging, but the ocean cannot be confined to a single day on the calendar. Protecting marine biodiversity, unlocking blue carbon finance, and connecting the UNFCCC process with the new High Seas Treaty (BBNJ) are essential if we want to keep the 1.5-degree goal alive.

During my years in public life, and in the years since, I have learned that leadership is ultimately tested when the gap between words and reality grows too wide to ignore. We are at that moment now.

In Antalya, small island states will once again raise their voices with clarity and determination. We will speak of our reefs, our coastlines, and our children’s heritage. But make no mistake: we are not pleading only for ourselves. The ocean that washes the shores of islands is the same ocean that regulates the climate of London, Istanbul, Sydney, and New York.

The tide is rising for all of us. COP31 is our chance to show that humanity can rise to meet it—not with another round of promises, but with the courage to deliver.

James Alix Michel is a former President of Seychelles, a Blue Economy pioneer and a champion of ocean protection.

IPS UN Bureau

Tanzania’s vice-president inspects a drainage channel in Dar es Salaam as authorities step up preparations for heavy El Niño rains expected during the October–December rainy season. Credit: Kizito Makoye/IPS

By Kizito Makoye
DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania, Oct 20 2026 (IPS)

Nearly three decades have passed, but Japhet Gimbi still remembers the rain.

He was a Form 2 student in Tabora, western Tanzania, when the 1997 El Niño flooded the town. As the rain kept falling, fewer students made it to school. That was a super El Niño, one of the strongest on record. Since then there have been five other events including the 2014-2016 “super El Niño”.

“It just kept raining. Day after day, the rain wouldn’t stop,” Gimbi, who now lives in Dar es Salaam, recalled.

But his strongest memory is of food running short at home.

“We would only eat Ugali without vegetables,” he said.

At Kwihara village, Hatibu Halfan remembers the same season differently. He was a 27-year-old farmer when the rains initially seemed a blessing. His rice crop flourished.

Then the ground became waterlogged. Cassava and sweet potatoes rotted. Homes in low-lying areas flooded.

Twenty-nine years later, East Africa is again preparing for “super” El Niño. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) expects it to intensify toward the end of 2026, with forecasts showing a nearly 100 percent chance of persisting through February 2027. But WMO cautions that a strong El Niño does not necessarily mean severe impacts in every country.

For East Africa, the concern is heavy rain. The October-to-December season is crucial across much of the region, with forecasts pointing to wetter-than-normal conditions that could bring floods, landslides, infrastructure damage, and disease outbreaks. In parts of Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi, the season delivers up to 40 percent of annual rainfall.

The East African Community (EAC) Partner States are calling for more predictable, accessible and grant-based climate finance as they prepare to take a common regional position to the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP31) in Antalya, Türkiye, next month.

They plan to call on developed countries to meet their public climate finance obligations, triple adaptation finance by 2035, improve direct access to climate finance, and provide greater support for adaptation and loss and damage, all without increasing the debt burden on vulnerable countries.

“The common COP31 messages further call for the full capitalisation of the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage, direct access to its resources by national institutions and support for both economic and non-economic losses. The EAC is also calling for full funding of the Santiago Network, which provides technical assistance to countries vulnerable to loss and damage, as well as stronger cooperation on disaster risk reduction and early warning systems.

The common position calls on developed countries to meet their public climate finance obligations, triple adaptation finance by 2035, improve direct access to climate finance and provide greater support for adaptation and loss and damage without increasing the debt burden of vulnerable countries.

In Dar es Salaam and other fast-growing cities, however, the danger is not simply how much rain falls. It is where it falls—and who lives in its path.

In Southern Africa, the concern is drought, with its impacts on food security, the potential for wild fires, and water shortages. The country will use its participation at the COP31 to ask for increased adaptation finance.

Cities at Risk

“The main impacts we should expect from floods range from possible loss of lives and the number of people displaced, damaged houses, waterborne diseases, loss of employment, and disruption of livelihoods,” Romanus Opiyo, Policy and Engagement Lead for Sustainable Urbanisation at the Stockholm Environment Institute, told IPS.

In Dar es Salaam, neighbourhoods have expanded along rivers, valleys and low-lying land where housing is relatively affordable but drainage and other basic services often lag behind population growth.

Among the places Opiyo identifies as particularly exposed are Tandale, along the Sinza river system, and Jangwani, in the Msimbazi valley.

“The most vulnerable are the urban poor, especially those living near riparian areas such as those settlements in low elevations and near riparian areas,” he said.

Flooding does not affect all city residents equally. Low-income households living on daily earnings often have few savings, little or no insurance and limited options for moving somewhere safer.

A Dar es Salaam resident clears vegetation and debris from a drainage channel as communities prepare for heavy rains associated with El Niño. Credit: Kizito Makoye/IPS

When Drains Become Sewers

In crowded settlements, blocked drains sit alongside pit latrines, rubbish and open sewers. Floodwater can carry all three through homes and streets.

WMO’s regional outlook warns that excessive rainfall could increase water- and vector-borne disease while damaging roads and disrupting access to health and nutrition services.

Lessons From 1997

The 1997 El Niño brought torrential rain and widespread flooding across East Africa.

By February 1998, about 10 million people across the region needed emergency assistance, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.

Tanzania suffered extensive damage to roads and railways. Communities were cut off, crops and food stocks were lost and relief efforts were hampered by damaged infrastructure.

The effects, however, varied from place to place. Rain replenished water supplies and improved pasture in some areas, and national food production rebounded in 1998. But hundreds of villages were isolated, and thousands of people were left homeless. FAO and the World Food Programme estimated that about 300,000 Tanzanians would still need targeted food aid.

Since 1997, East African cities have expanded rapidly into wetlands, river valleys and other flood-prone land. Riverbanks have been settled and open ground replaced by roads, buildings and concrete.

Opiyo says weak development control is worsening the risk.

“The major gap remains the allocation of adequate resources (finance, human, and infrastructure resources) to deal with the problem,” he said.

Tanzania Prepares

Tanzania has begun preparations for the October-to-December rains, with forecasters warning that a very strong El Niño could bring heavier rainfall to much of the northern coast, northeastern highlands, Lake Victoria basin and northern Kigoma.

The government has activated a National Emergency Plan and issued 13 directives, ordering authorities to identify high-risk areas, designate emergency shelters, clear drains, prepare rescue equipment and strengthen measures against disease and damage to infrastructure.

The government estimates that 730 billion Tanzanian shillings could be required to implement activities before, during and after a major El Niño emergency. The figure is an estimate of potential requirements, not money already set aside. The 2026/27 budget provides 10 billion shillings for activities under the plan across sectors.

Community flood mapping, identifying households that may need help evacuating, clearing drains and establishing safe routes can also reduce risks.

Beyond El Niño

Seasonal forecasts describe probabilities, not individual storms, and WMO stresses that even a very strong El Niño does not guarantee catastrophic impacts everywhere.

But the problem will outlast El Niño: each rainy season exposes many of the same neighbourhoods.

Rivers overflow and drains clog. Households move possessions onto beds, raise furniture on bricks and wait for the water to recede.

Opiyo says recurring flooding in informal settlements is also an urban-planning problem.

“The informal urban community’s vulnerability requires a collaborative approach in terms of data, creative and inclusive methodology and honest dialogue to address the recurring problem.”

Nature-based measures include protecting wetlands and river corridors, restoring vegetation and preserving areas where floodwater can spread without reaching homes.

But in cities where safe land is expensive, telling people not to live beside rivers does little for families who cannot afford to live anywhere else. Clearing a drain may reduce flooding this season; it does not resolve insecure housing, weak sanitation or the absence of affordable serviced land.

In 1997, Gimbi watched his classmates disappear from school as the rains continued and food ran short at home. Halfan watched his rice flourish before waterlogged fields began destroying other crops.

Twenty-nine years later, governments have better forecasts, satellite observations, flood maps and early-warning systems.

They can see the rain coming.

The question is whether the people living closest to the water will be safer when it arrives.

IPS UN Bureau Report

Iyá Patrícia d’Xangô (Mãe Patrícia) and her husband, Ogan Cézar d’Oxalá (Cézar Paulo Fogolari), cleaning their religious site three months after the mudslide in 2024.

By Carla Ruas
PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil, Oct 19 2026 (IPS)

In 2024, as floodwaters approached Lutalo Canti’s home in Porto Alegre, Brazil, he lifted some furniture off the floor and left in a hurry. Extreme rainfall in the country’s southern region had caused local rivers to overflow. The flooding would eventually reach more than 400 municipalities and impact over 2 million people.

When waters finally receded, Canti, 61, was shocked to see the damage to his house, which also served as a terreiro—a sacred space for the practice of Afro-Brazilian religions.

These beliefs, which date back to enslaved Africans and their descendants, have around 1.85 million followers in Brazil, per the latest national census. Terreiros are at the heart of these traditions, serving as spaces where religious leaders honor deities and spiritual entities.

Between water damage, sewage contamination, and mold, he estimates losses to the house around US$15,000 (R$80,000). About half the damage was to his home, and the rest to religious objects, including ceremonial clothing and sacred figures.

Lutalo Canti estimates flood losses of around US$15,000 to his home and terreiro, which is pictured here before the flood. Credit: Lutalo Canti

Two years later, Canti still hasn’t recovered everything lost and feels largely left out of donations and other recovery efforts. “We have received no help. Nothing,” he told IPS. He blames religious racism.

A new study shows that Canti is not alone. Since the floods, researchers from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) and the region’s Council of Terreiro People have been surveying the regional terreiros. The findings, which are just now being published, document widespread reports of discrimination during and after the disaster.

“Terreiros experienced severe religious racism,” said Cláudia Pires, one of the researchers involved in the study. “That includes difficulties accessing food and water, lack of access to their own spaces, as well as delays or a complete lack of response from public authorities to their needs.”

Immediately after the disaster, out of 711 terreiros surveyed, almost all (94.1%) reported structural damage—with more than half of those completely destroyed.

In the months that followed, more in-depth interviews with 241 terreiro leaders indicated an ongoing crisis. Follow-up data shows that more than 80% of those leaders reported emotional harm and forced displacement.

As they struggled to recover, many of them suspended religious gatherings for months, while 3.5% closed permanently. “That was the saddest finding for us,” said Tanara Furtado, a co-author of the study. “It may seem like a small number, but it represents the disappearance of history, ancestry, and traditions. For Afro-Brazilian religions, that is profound.”

Lutalo Canti lost religious objects, including ceremonial clothing and sacred figures, in a severe flood. Credit: Lutalo Canti

Barriers to Receiving Aid

The study shows discrimination reports beginning in the early days of the disaster.

While many flood victims were evacuated to shelters, Afro-Brazilian religious practitioners often did not feel welcome in these spaces. “When people saw their guias (sacred necklaces), they were treated badly,” Furtado said. “Many ended up staying in friends’ and relatives’ homes, sometimes 25 people sharing a house with a single bathroom and no running water.”

And even as donations poured in from across Brazil, several reported much of that aid failed to reach them.

In a telephone interview, Pai Valdir de Oxalá, 55, recalled the challenges of accessing basic supplies. The babalorixá, or Afro-Brazilian religious leader, is the president of the Council of Terreiro Peoples of the State of Rio Grande do Sul (CPTERGS).

After his own terreiro was flooded in the municipality of Guaíba, he arranged for an out-of-state organization to send food, water, and other supplies to around 400 followers of nearby terreiros.

“When the truck arrived, they noticed our religion and refused to leave the donations unless I said a Christian prayer,” he recalled. “This goes against my beliefs and is an aggressive form of religious racism. But I had no choice. People didn’t have what to eat, drink, or wear. So I prayed.”

Iyá Paty de Xangô, also known as Mãe Patrícia, says she continued to face discrimination long after the disaster. The floods triggered a landslide that buried her religious site in the municipality of Feliz. The property includes several residences, ritual spaces, and a library.

“We submitted more than 40 official requests to city hall asking for help,” she said. “Even though we are a public-utility institution, it took them two months to come over with machinery, while other private properties were being cleared.”

In 2024, a technical report by Brazil’s Federal Public Defender’s Office (DPU) concluded that the local government showed “resistance to providing emergency assistance and repairing the damage” at her site. The document also found that public authorities had been “selective in providing assistance to religious entities.”

At the time, the municipality of Feliz attributed the delay in assistance to the scale of the disaster. In a letter, officials stated that they did “not have sufficient personnel and machinery to respond to all requests immediately.”

Patrícia eventually turned to the courts. In July 2025, she sued the municipality, the state government, and the owners of a neighboring property, seeking measures to protect her site from future landslides.

Religious Racism in a Changing Climate

Baba Hendrix, a theologian and babalorixá spiritual leader, argues that the climate crisis is amplifying vulnerabilities that have long existed in these communities. “This is simply the continuation of a historical process,” he said. “Since at least the 19th century, Afro-Brazilian religious traditions have faced persecution.”

He believes the root of this racism lies in Brazilian society’s extreme “Christian-centrism,” which he says has led to intolerance toward other religions. He also points to longstanding anti-Black racism. “When Christian-centrism and racism converge, they produce this religious racism that we are seeing.”

Hendrix says this discrimination now spans across many parts of society. “We have faced persecution from the police to the medical establishment,” he said. “Laws against quackery and charlatanism were even created specifically to persecute Afro-Brazilian religious traditions.”

The UFRGS study suggests these experiences remain widespread. Of the 241 religious leaders interviewed, 70.8% said they had suffered religious racism from neighbors, public authorities, police, Evangelicals, Catholics, and others. Of those, 47% said they experienced it frequently.

Researchers argue that this discrimination has in turn made these communities more vulnerable to climate disasters. Pires said many terreiros have been pushed to peripheral areas that are overlooked in city planning. “When it rains, these peripheral areas end up being sacrificed,” she said. “I think sacrifice is a very important word here.”

Super El Niño

As a powerful El Niño brings more extreme weather to southern Brazil, the researchers continue monitoring terreiros across the region. Since August, almost 100 have reported damage related to extreme weather.

“This is our new normal,” said Furtado. “We have terreiros that were affected by the 2024 floods and are already being affected again by winds, rains, and floods.”

In the municipality of Canoas, babalorixá Júlio César Santos, 47, has been watching the weather closely. In 2024, his terreiro, where he practices Umbanda among other Afro-Brazilian traditions, was completely submerged. Nearly two years later, the space remains unfinished, despite more than US$15,000 (R$80,000) spent on repairs.

“When it rains, I get very nervous,” he said. “It’s a fear that stays with us.”

Santos has thought about leaving his house due to the risk of future flooding but says he does not have the funds to buy a new home. He was found ineligible for a housing assistance program for flood victims. “It’s not as simple as finding another house,” he said. “I need land and access to nature to practice my religion.”

He also needs the approval of orixás—spiritual deities—to move his terreiro to another location. “It is the orixá who will choose,” he said. “It is not me, Júlio, who decides.”

IPS UN Bureau Report

UNICEF unloads emergency humanitarian supplies in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in response to the Ebola outbreak. The shipment includes protective equipment, hygiene kits, medicines, and medical supplies to support frontline health workers and nearly 100,000 people. Credit: UNICEF/Ndomba Mbikayi

By Ignatius Banda
BULAWAYO, Oct 16 2026 (IPS)

An Ebola death last week in Kenya is highlighting the urgency of Africa’s public health emergency preparedness and how the continent’s governments are committing their national budgets to the health sector.

The Kenya case is serving as a call to arms in the fight against Africa’s public health emergencies and how locally coordinated efforts are adequately equipped to contain the spread of communicable diseases.

“Health emergency preparedness gives us a head start, and Kenya has put important outbreak control measures in place,” Janabi said in a 6 October media brief, which was in stark contrast to concerns raised in the DRC that life-saving medical supplies only arrived ten days later from neighbouring countries, effectively allowing Ebola to leave a trail of death.

As the disease surges at its north Kivu epicentre in the Democratic Republic of Congo, questions have returned about how the shuttering of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has devastated public health emergency responses across Africa.

Last week, Doctors Without Borders warned that the current Ebola strain was spreading so fast for emergency health workers “it was like fighting a megafire,” further raising concerns over how the DRC and neighbouring countries will tackle the crisis amid increasingly limited resources.

Despite being often cited as having vast mineral wealth, the DRC’s Ebola response has been plagued by an under-funded health sector where international humanitarian agencies are struggling to provide basic medical care.

As the new Ebola strain took root in the DRC’s east, Amadou Bocoum, CARE International’s DRC Country Director, lamented that “with proper funding, we would have had prepositioned stock and begun distributing critical supplies like PPE from day one, but instead, we started with nothing and lost 10 days.”

These funding concerns would be raised weeks later by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) at the 76th Session of the WHO Regional Committee for Africa in Addis Ababa in August.

UNECA noted that “Africa’s health financing model remains structurally fragile,” with governments failing to allocate adequate budgets for the health sector.

African governments and other health sector players have already raised alarm over the Trump Administration’s decision to ice the USAID, which triggered a continent-wide shortage of anything from condoms to malaria and HIV/AIDS drugs.

At the WHO Regional Committee conference, UNECA raised concerns that “external health assistance was down almost 30 per cent,” and as Ebola spreads, the effects of that deficit are being felt with catastrophic consequences.

The impact of the reliance on overseas development assistance was made clear by Aboubakri Diaw, who leads UNECA’s Sustainable Financing Initiative, who told the gathering that “Africa does not have a reform deficit. It has a sustainable financed-reform deficit.”

“Health financing strategies sit on shelves. Insurance schemes are legislated but struggling to be capitalised. Benefit packages are defined but not costed into medium-term expenditure frameworks. A reform without a budget line does not constitute a policy,” Diaw said.

Yet it is a commitment African governments made in 2001 at the Abuja Declaration to allocate 15 percent of national budgets to health, but countries have fallen short, with some allocations ranging between as little as 2 percent and 12 percent, according to the World Health Organisation.

To address the public health funding crisis, UNECA says what remains crucial is “a fundamental reset in how African governments and their finance ministries fund health systems” in a continent where millions lack access to and cannot afford basic medical care.

“External aid covered more than 30 per cent of health expenditure, and in some 13 countries the ECA has looked at, households pay more for health than their own governments do,” Diaw said, adding that “many countries on the continent now spend more on servicing debt than on public health.”

Amid these challenges and competing public spending priorities, it is not yet clear how governments will navigate these new public health funding realities, as pressure from international lending institutions for African countries to repay billions of loans still remains.

Analysts however see the funding crisis as part of Africa’s broader political architecture where short-term planning by sitting governments prioritises projects closely linked to the election cycle.

“Governments have to balance health against infrastructure, security, education, social protection and other priorities,” said Pakhani Mhazo, a public health researcher based in  South Africa.

“However, health preparedness often produces benefits that are not immediately visible to voters. For example, if you invest in disease surveillance, laboratories and emergency systems and successfully prevent an outbreak from becoming a crisis, there is no obvious event that voters can see as the result of that investment,” Mhazo told IPS.

Meanwhile, without any clear or immediate sources to fill the funding gaps left by international aid, African governments have their work cut out, and as Claver Gatete, UNECA Executive Secretary, reminded African ministers during the High-Level Forum on Sustainable Health Financing in April this year, “Health is not expenditure; it is investment – in people, in productivity and in prosperity.”

IPS UN Bureau Report

Singer-songwriter Yusuf ‘Cat Stevens’ Islam speaks during the closing session of the Global Tipping Points Conference in Kuala Lumpur. Credit: Zofeen T. Ebrahim

By Zofeen Ebrahim
KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 16 2026 (IPS)

With the city enveloped in a cloak of haze, the urgency of tackling the climate crisis could hardly have been clearer as the four-day Global Tipping Points Conference 2026 drew to a close at Malaysia’s Sunway University on Thursday.

At the conference, speakers stressed the need for humanity to remain within planetary boundaries, or the “safe operating space”.

Crossing these boundaries could have catastrophic consequences, warned Professor Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and one of the conference organisers.

He highlighted the dangers of triggering irreversible changes in major Earth systems. Some of the bulwarks have already been breached, manifesting themselves in the form of collapsed ice sheets, bleached corals, shrinking wildlife habitats and the slow death of rainforests.

Dong Wang’s park in Bangkok. Credit: Zofeen T. Ebrahim

‘Tipping points’ conference brings together climate scientists, activists, and finance gurus; highlights success stories from around the world

All of this threatens food security, causes displacement, damages human health and destabilises economies.

With plenty of reasons to be pessimistic – social and political polarisation, rising inequality and poverty, and wars among them – the message was nevertheless one of urgency rather than despair. “The science has matured, evidence is there… it is time for action… that’s the natural step,” said Sultan Nazrin Shah of Perak.

But there is another side to the tipping-point story.

Professor Timothy Lenton, chair of Climate Change and Earth System Science at the University of Exeter and one of the organisers, spoke about “positive tipping points.” Lenton, who has studied tipping points since the 1990s, argued these could help societies move towards more sustainable futures. Citing Pakistan’s solar boom and Norway’s rapid adoption of electric vehicles, he pointed to transformative shifts that can happen within a relatively short period.

But protecting ecosystems is as important as technologies, said Acehnese forest conservator Farwiza Farhan, while making a compelling case for the protection of the Leuser Ecosystem – a tropical rainforest reserve in Sumatra and one of the last places on Earth where tigers, elephants, rhinos and orangutans coexist in the wild.

Others turned to imagining the future. Anab Jain, co-founder of London-based Superflux, described Mitigation of Shock, an immersive installation set in a fictional 2050. Visitors enter an imagined apartment shaped by a future in which some of the most severe impacts of climate change have already occurred. More than 100,000 people have visited it since 2017, she said.

Professor Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, broadened the discussion to social, economic and political tipping points. If these systems tipped in the wrong direction, he warned, they could trigger a “cascade of devastating consequences.”

Planetary changes and social, economic and political conditions are deeply interconnected, said Sachs, making cooperation essential to averting disaster. He repeatedly pointed to poverty and inequality as forces that could deepen instability but argued that all was not lost. The tools for change – economic wellbeing, social inclusion, environmental sustainability, and peace and cooperation among nations – already exist, he said.

Discussions also covered deforestation, land-use change, governance failures and the rise of artificial intelligence. Turning tools into action, however, requires money, policy and political will.

“But where’s the money?” many asked, urging encouragement for supportive policies and a pipeline of “bankable projects” that protect nature, so that economic incentives favour regeneration over extraction. One such approach came from Dr Ralph Chami, founder of Blue Green Future, who outlined his concept of “regenerative GDP”, i.e. recognising the value of “living nature” and accounting for it on the balance sheet.

Timothy Lenton explaining the positive tipping points. Credit: Zofeen T. Ebrahim

“Why kill the goose that lays the [golden] egg?” he asked, contrasting a living coral reef in the Maldives – which provides a habitat for fish and plays a role in the marine carbon cycle – with a bleached one that can threaten both tourism and fisheries.

But money and markets are only part of the equation. Dr Jemilah Mahmood, executive director of the Centre for Planetary Health at Sunway University, insisted on channelling youth energy. “Give them space at policy [discussions], send them to COPs not as tokenism, but let them negotiate. It’s their future,” she said.

As an example of what young people can achieve, Mahmood pointed to Pacific Island law students whose campaign helped bring climate change and human rights before the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Their efforts contributed to a landmark advisory opinion in July 2025, clarifying states’ legal obligations on climate change. Climate litigation and the role of legal action in holding governments accountable also featured in the wider conversation.

The highlight of the conference was definitely the success stories from around the world that offered the most tangible hope.

For example, Chinese urban planner Dong Wang, who specialises in sponge cities and ecological planning, shared a low-cost, low-maintenance and replicable project in the heart of Bangkok – the transformation of a former tobacco factory into the 102-acre Benjakitti Forest Park, to which more than 200 bird species have since returned.

Eva Gladek of Metabolic, who spoke about NetZeroCities, showed how 17 old houseboats in Amsterdam were retrofitted with clean technologies and transformed into energy-efficient offices and workspaces.

Mumbai-based Sheela Patel, director of the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres, drew on five decades of work with people living in informal settlements to highlight another kind of urban resilience. Through the ‘Roof Over Our Heads’ campaign, women supported by young professionals are helping make homes more resilient to rain, strong winds and extreme heat.

And these efforts are not simply one-off experiments. Patel said the work has been documented and shared, with more than 100 labs established across 20 countries to help communities test and replicate solutions. Gladek, meanwhile, is helping 100 European cities work towards climate neutrality.

The thought-provoking conference had opened on a note of faith, with Sultan Nazrin Shah speaking of humanity’s responsibility to care for the planet, which he said “comes with privilege and obligation” but is “not a burden to be feared”.

It ended on a rather philosophical and spiritual note, with British singer-writer Yusuf ‘Cat Stevens’ Islam urging people to become the change rather than expecting the world to change. “Never stop being a child, as there is light in their eyes and they see hope,” he said, also stressing the need to bring spirituality into education. “Look how the curriculum has been colonised.”

For positive tipping points to hold, science alone will not be enough, concluded Mahmood. It will also need the voices of those whose futures are at stake.

Note: Published with the permission of Dawn.

IPS UN Bureau Report

UN DESA Assistant Secretary-General Bjørg Sandkjær (right) and Rashmi Banga, Chief of the Development Research Branch, brief journalists at UN Headquarters on the launch of the 2026 World Social Report, emphasizing the need for social inclusion as economic, digital, and climate transformations widen existing divides. Credit: UN DESA / P. Vasic

By Oritro Karim
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 16 2026 (IPS)

The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA) new report, which addresses the rapid global transformations driven by artificial intelligence (AI), demographic shifts, climate change, and conflict, highlights the widening disparities in employment, social inclusion, and access to services.

The report titled The New Economics of Social Inclusion: Making Transformations Work for All was released on October 5.

Despite decades of progress in income, health, and education that drove development worldwide, the report warns that millions of people risk falling behind. Drawing on data collected over 25 years and across 168 countries, this year’s edition introduces a new Socially Inclusive Transformation (SIT) dashboard, which examines how a nation’s economic, digital, and energy transformations align with social and economic inclusion.

“On one hand, rapid transformations are reshaping our world: digital technologies, artificial intelligence, renewable energy, and the demographic and economic transition,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres during a press briefing at the UN Headquarters coinciding with the report’s release. “On the other hand, these transformations are not working for all. Poverty and deprivation are widespread. Billions are locked out of opportunities because of income, gender, age, disability, ethnicity, or many other fault lines that undermine equality.”

In 2025, UN DESA found that roughly 58 percent of workers were informally employed, while approximately 27 percent of young women aged 15 to 24 were neither employed nor in education or training programs. The same year, UN DESA estimated that around 26 percent of the world’s population, or 2.2 billion, still lacked internet access. Roughly 730 million people lacked access to electricity. The report underscores that even among digitally connected communities, affordability and service quality continue to hinder meaningful participation.

Between 2000 and 2024, the agency reported that more than 50 countries experienced rising income inequality, including in 23 high-income countries. These gaps continue to stifle productivity and weaken community resilience to economic shocks from technological shifts, climate disasters, and geopolitical tensions.

Marginalized groups—including women and girls, youths, disabled persons, migrants, and Indigenous peoples—disproportionately experience limited access to essential resources, economic opportunities, and decision-making processes.

Rashmi Banga, Chief, Development Research Branch, Economic Analysis and Policy Division at UN DESA, stressed that transformations do not automatically translate into inclusion. She noted that none of the top five best-performing countries in transformation, specifically Malta, Ireland, the U.S., Singapore, and China, rank among the top five in inclusiveness, which mainly consist of European countries. The report reveals that numerous African countries continue to fall behind, especially with the proliferation of new digital technologies and the energy transition.

The report highlights the compounding climate crisis as a major driver of social exclusion, noting that approximately 887 million of the 1.1 billion people living in multidimensional poverty are also exposed to at least one major climate hazard. These impacts are most pronounced in regions entrenched in humanitarian crises, where communities have the fewest resources to adapt, significantly threatening long-term economic resilience.

Guterres warned that cascading global shocks, such as the Middle East crisis, are compounding existing threats through rising food, fertilizer, and fuel prices, resulting in more than 100 countries lowering their gross-domestic product forecasts this year alone.

UN DESA also identifies the growing digital divide driven by artificial intelligence as a major threat to social inclusion. While the report shows AI’s potential in enhancing agricultural productivity and generating meaningful gains for rural communities, it warns that significant threats remain. Entire communities with limited affordable, digital connectivity, coupled with insufficient digital skills, risk falling further behind.

Bjørg Sandkjær, UN DESA’s Assistant Secretary-General for Policy Coordination, told reporters that AI often reproduces “biases that exist in the world today” during hiring processes. She warned that this has severe implications for employment, particularly for women.

Banga added that equitable and effective AI governance is critical in preventing these biases and fostering economic and social inclusion. She highlighted India and China as examples of countries implementing AI education into school curriculum, while France has established access to digital infrastructure as a legal right.

Additional data from the report reveals that delaying social inclusion carries a “measurable economic cost.” UN DESA estimates show that if investments in social protection mechanisms are delayed by another decade, countries could face a potential decline in economic output by roughly 12 percent compared to countries that invested early. Conversely, efforts to include young people in employment could raise national GDP by 9.6 percent over the next decade.

“Inclusive societies are more productive, resilient, and prosperous,” said Guterres. “The report urges investments in education, job creation, and skill training, so all people can benefit from technological advancements and the growth of new industries. It calls for inclusive institutions and policymaking to ensure all voices are represented, and it advocates equity-focused approaches to labor markets and taxation to open opportunities for all people, no matter who they are or where they live.”

Banga emphasized that national investments alone cannot achieve adequate social inclusion without strong international cooperation. Multilateral support is pivotal in expanding fiscal space, providing long-term development financing, and widening access to digital infrastructure. Sandkjær called on governments to reframe social inclusion not only as an economic imperative, but as a strategic investment in long-term stability, resilience, and productivity. She also urged for greater integration of social commitments into macroeconomic planning.

“As transformations gather pace, there is no time to be lost by bringing social commitments into the heart of economic policymaking; we can unleash a virtuous cycle of greater inclusion and stronger growth,” said Sandkjær.

IPS UN Bureau Report

A new report on deforestation reflects the persistent gap between global ambitions to conserve and restore forests and enduring practices that continue to destroy them. Credit: UN Climate Change/Diego Herculano

By Umar Manzoor Shah
BERLIN, Germany/WASHINGTON, D.C., USA , Oct 14 2026 (IPS)

The world lost more than 7 million hectares of forest to deforestation in 2025, a modest improvement on recent years but still far from what is needed to meet global forest protection targets by 2030, according to a new assessment of international conservation efforts.

The Forest Declaration Assessment 2026, prepared by a coalition of civil society organisations and researchers and released worldwide on October 14, says deforestation remains stubbornly high despite international commitments to halt and reverse forest loss. The average annual area cleared since 2021 has exceeded 8 million hectares, highlighting the gap between government promises and progress on the ground.

Ivan Palmegiani, senior consultant at Climate Focus and one of the key report authors, told Inter Press Service in an exclusive interview that a key reason deforestation remains so high is that commitments have not been matched by the scale of action needed, and where action has been taken, it has not always been sufficient to deliver lasting impact.

“We have seen what is possible under dedicated political leadership, such as the Lula administration in Brazil, where targeted policies, enforcement, and political will reduced deforestation within a single term. However, these successes remain the exception rather than the norm, and they can be quickly reversed when priorities change.”

He added that at a deeper level, forest commitments have not been translated into the structural transformation in how natural resources are governed and used. Forests, Palmegiani said, continue to face strong economic pressures from agriculture, infrastructure, extraction, and other land uses, while decision-making systems and incentives still frequently favour the powerful few, who are physically and emotionally disconnected from forests, rather than the many who depend on them for their livelihoods, well-being, and cultural identity. “Until our societies, political and economic systems change how decisions about forests and other ecosystems are made, forest loss is likely to remain high despite global pledges.”

Ivan Palmegiani, senior consultant at Climate Focus and one of the authors of the Forest Declaration Assessment 2026. Credit: Supplied

The report also found that at least 65.4 million hectares of forest worldwide lost ecological integrity in 2024 because of human activities. The figure highlights a problem that extends beyond the complete removal of trees. Forests can remain standing while losing biodiversity, carbon storage capacity and their ability to sustain wildlife and local communities.

“Both figures reflect a persistent gap between global ambitions to conserve and restore forests and enduring practices that keep destroying them,” the report says.

The assessment examines progress on forest protection, sustainable production, finance and governance. It finds that some initiatives are moving forward, including efforts to improve forest monitoring and recognise Indigenous land rights. But these developments have not yet produced the scale of change required to reverse forest destruction.

More than 140 countries pledged under the Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration on Forests and Land Use, announced at the 2021 United Nations climate conference, to halt and reverse forest loss and land degradation by 2030.

Five years later, the latest assessment suggests that the world remains far from achieving that objective.

Tropical forests face particular pressure from agricultural expansion, infrastructure development and commercial activities. The report says these pressures are reinforced by weak enforcement of environmental laws and economic incentives that continue to favour activities associated with forest destruction.

‘We No Longer Look at Country-Level Figures’

Tropical Latin America recorded the largest absolute area of deforestation among the regions assessed but also made the most significant progress compared with the 2018-20 baseline. Deforestation there fell by 33 percent in 2025.

Tropical Africa, however, experienced a continued rise in forest loss. Annual deforestation in the region reached about 2.4 million hectares in 2025, comparable to the 2.5 million hectares recorded in tropical Latin America.

Tropical Asia lost approximately 1.6 million hectares of forest in 2025. That represented a 12 percent reduction compared with the 2018-20 baseline, although the report cautions that the underlying causes of deforestation remain largely unchanged.

The assessment describes tropical Asia’s progress as ambiguous. Two consecutive years of modest declines may indicate that the worst recent peaks have passed, but they do not establish that the region is on a sustained path towards forest recovery.

Tropical Oceania was the only tropical region assessed as being on track to meet its 2030 forest goals. Its relatively small share of global tropical forest area and lower current pressure on forests partly explain this difference.

The findings underline how national policies, commodity production and enforcement capacity can produce sharply different outcomes across regions.

When asked which countries have contributed most to this progress and what challenges continue to prevent deeper reductions in terms of deforestation, Palmegiani said, “We no longer look at country-level figures because the global datasets used for our calculations can sometimes misrepresent national trends. In fact, to avoid overstating the precision of the data, we only publish regional and global aggregates for our indicators.”

He added, ”That said, independent analyses and regional initiatives suggest that Indonesia and Malaysia have been important contributors to the decline in deforestation observed across tropical Asia. Despite this progress, the region continues to face significant economic pressures. These include growing demand for critical minerals, particularly nickel, of which Indonesia is the world’s leading exporter, as well as broader economic uncertainty linked to geopolitical conflicts and disruptions in global markets. When these pressures intensify, short-term economic priorities can outweigh environmental considerations, and forests often bear the cost.”

Agricultural Expansion and Commercial Interests

Agriculture remains a major driver of forest loss, with commercial production and growing demand for food, animal feed and bioenergy putting pressure on natural ecosystems.

The report says between 61 and 94% of tropical deforestation linked to commercial agriculture may be illegal. It estimates that environmental crime, including illegal deforestation and timber and wildlife trafficking, generates as much as US$281 billion annually.

Such activities often overlap with other criminal enterprises.

A 2025 study by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, cited in the assessment, found links between environmental offences and crimes including drug trafficking, illegal mining and human trafficking.

The scale of these activities presents a major challenge for governments seeking to protect forests while regulating international commodity supply chains.

The assessment also points to gaps in corporate accountability. Companies in sectors linked to forest loss have increasingly adopted sustainability commitments and reporting systems, but disclosure and implementation remain uneven.

Financial institutions have begun to recognise deforestation as an environmental and financial risk. Yet the report says many regulatory frameworks lack detailed guidance on how banks should assess and manage those risks.

More than 60 percent of the countries assessed had yet to establish disclosure requirements covering deforestation-related risks for banks or insurance companies.

The report’s findings suggest that voluntary commitments and corporate reporting need to be accompanied by stronger enforcement and clearer requirements if they are to produce measurable changes in production and investment.

Forest Finance Remains a Major Challenge

The assessment identifies the scale and distribution of finance as another obstacle to forest protection.

Although international funding commitments have increased, financial support for conservation remains difficult to reconcile with the economic incentives that encourage activities harmful to forests.

The report estimates that subsidies linked to the production and use of fossil fuels reached $921 billion in 2024. Emergency measures introduced in 2026 to ease high energy prices could push the global total above $1 trillion this year.

The assessment warns that such subsidies can undermine efforts to shift to less harmful energy sources.

It also highlights the potential benefits of redirecting public support to activities that restore nature.

“Every dollar of agricultural support that is repurposed to support farming practices that restore nature, such as agroforestry, silvopasture, and low-carbon agriculture, can generate up to USD 30 in economic benefits, especially for rural communities,” the report says.

The findings point to an opportunity for governments to reform existing spending rather than rely entirely on new funding.

However, the report notes that international forest finance does not consistently reach the Indigenous peoples and local communities who manage and protect forest territories.

Community-led funding mechanisms can help direct resources towards local priorities, but they remain secondary recipients of direct funding from governments and multilateral institutions.

Indigenous Rights and Participation

The assessment identifies recognition of Indigenous land rights as an important part of effective forest governance.

At the 2025 United Nations climate conference, known as COP30, an intergovernmental commitment involving 16 countries and one subnational jurisdiction pledged to recognise or strengthen rights over an additional 160 million hectares of Indigenous lands and territories.

The launch of the Tropical Forests Forever Facility also created a provision reserving 20 percent of country-level payouts for direct transfers to Indigenous and local community organisations.

These developments represent progress, but the report says participation in international policymaking does not necessarily translate into decision-making power.

Indigenous coalitions have stressed that their increased presence at COP30 remained largely consultative. Indigenous peoples still lack formal standing in the United Nations climate negotiations, such as COP 31, which will take place in Antalya, Türkiye, from November 9 to 20.

National climate plans also frequently mention Indigenous peoples and local communities without specifying how they will participate in designing or implementing policies.

A 2026 review of 84 national climate plans found that 61 referred to under-represented groups, including Indigenous peoples and local communities. However, the assessment says most references were descriptive rather than linked to concrete measures.

The report argues that meaningful participation requires more than recognition in policy documents. It requires secure land rights, opportunities to influence decisions and access to the financial resources needed to manage territories.

Environmental Defenders Face Continuing Threats

Forest protection also carries serious risks for people who challenge illegal activities and defend community land.

The assessment cites Global Witness data showing that at least 124 land and environmental defenders were killed in 2025. More than half of the documented killings were linked to land disputes, and nearly three-quarters of the victims were Indigenous people, small-scale farmers or people of African descent.

Front Line Defenders separately reported that at least 358 human rights defenders were killed in 28 countries in 2025. Those working on land, environmental and peasant rights, as well as Indigenous rights, were among the groups that were frequently targeted.

Erin Matson, a lead consultant of Climate Focus and report author, told IPS in an interview that the statistics from Global Witness that we cite each year are always humbling. It’s important to remember that that figure is likely a significant underestimate, as many killings and disappearances go unreported.

Erin Matson, a lead consultant of Climate Focus and one of the authors of the Forest Declaration Assessment 2026. Credit: Supplied

“There are many factors at play, most of which are rooted in governance. The vast majority of environmental defenders are killed over land disputes, for example, when a mining operation encroaches on Indigenous territories. If those Indigenous communities do not have secure, recognised tenure rights to their territories, it makes it that much harder for them to resist operators who are acting illegally.”

She added that, therefore, securing tenure rights is a major step that governments need to enable. Next, Matson added that an environment of corruption and impunity allows actors to literally get away with murder. “In locations where government actors and law enforcement are under the sway and on the payroll of special interests, they will look the other way when people are harmed. Rooting out corruption, therefore, and instituting reforms to corrupted systems is essential. It must be ensured that public officials are paid well for their services so that they won’t be susceptible to corruption in the first place.”

The report identifies weak enforcement, limited government capacity and impunity for powerful actors as major obstacles to effective forest governance.

It also warns that environmental defenders face forms of intimidation beyond lethal violence, including criminalisation, threats and harassment.

Improved technology is helping authorities detect illegal forest clearance. Satellite monitoring, traceability systems and new investigative tools can help identify offences and strengthen cooperation across borders.

In Guatemala’s Maya Biosphere Reserve, for example, researchers are testing artificial intelligence-powered acoustic sensors designed to recognise chainsaws, gunshots and engines. The technology can alert rangers to potential illegal logging in remote areas that are difficult to patrol regularly.

But the report stresses that improved detection must be matched by fair and effective enforcement. Otherwise, small-scale producers and local communities may carry a disproportionate share of the burden while more powerful actors escape accountability.

The report reveals further that deforestation in 2025 was lower than in much of the preceding decade, and forest finance has increased. Monitoring systems have also improved, while several countries have taken steps towards recognising Indigenous land rights.

But the report cautions against interpreting these gains as evidence of a lasting turnaround.

It says the reduction in deforestation may partly reflect temporary factors, including stronger enforcement in some jurisdictions, changing commodity prices and economic conditions that slowed land conversion.

“These wins should not be mistaken for the transformation still needed,” reads the report.

IPS UN Bureau Report

Photos of the Rasuwa flood missing line the walls of the Teaching Hospital, Tribhuvan University. Credit: Brandon Kohrt

By Diwash Gahatraj
KATHMANDU, Oct 12 2026 (IPS)

Nearly three decades ago, in the final stretch of Nepal’s civil war, Dr Brandon Kohrt sat with parents whose sons had been conscripted as child soldiers and never returned.

Nobody could tell them what had happened, whether their sons were alive somewhere, whether they were dead, or even where to begin looking. That absence of an answer, Kohrt says, never really left those families. It is the same absence now facing thousands of households across Nepal, after catastrophic floods swept away entire communities.

On August 26, floods and landslides tore down the Bhotekoshi and Trishuli river valleys in Nepal’s Rasuwa district, killing well over a thousand people and leaving thousands more missing, one of the deadliest natural disasters in the country’s recent history.

Kohrt has spent nearly 25 years in Nepal, long enough to watch the country move through this same unresolved grief again and again, first during that war, then after a devastating earthquake, and now, once more, before a wall of missing-persons photographs at Kathmandu’s Teaching Hospital.

Only a small fraction of the recovered bodies have been identified so far. These missing men and women are not just numbers — they add up to a history that stretches back decades in Nepal to that same conflict and the earthquakes that followed it, when entire families waited years for people who never returned. Tracking these disappearances and the psychological toll they leave on families and Nepali society at large has occupied Kohrt ever since.

Kohrt is a professor of psychiatry, global health, and anthropology at George Washington University and has served since 2006 as a technical advisor to the Transcultural Psychosocial Organization Nepal.

Much of his work centres on ambiguous loss, the specific, suspended grief that comes when someone is gone but there’s no body, no confirmation, and nothing to mourn against. The term was coined in the 1970s by Pauline Boss, an American family therapist who began studying it through the wives of US soldiers missing in action in Vietnam, women who couldn’t say for certain whether they were married or widowed.

Boss found the condition wasn’t confined to one culture or one kind of disaster. Researchers have since studied it among families of the disappeared during Argentina’s military dictatorship, families of migrants lost crossing borders in Europe and Africa, and among the families with whom Kohrt sat decades ago. He has worked directly with Boss for over a decade and has applied her framework in Nepal for years before this disaster ever struck.

In the weeks since the floods struck, that gap between the dead and the missing has filled with people. Nepali families search alongside Indian, American, Ukrainian, and Malaysian families thousands of miles away, all waiting on the same uncertain word.

IPS spoke with him about what that grief looks like this time, what’s changed for him after his years of returning to the same wound, and what he’s learned, watching people find ways to keep living without an answer.

Dr Brandon Kohrt, professor of psychiatry, global health, and anthropology at George Washington University and technical advisor to the Transcultural Psychosocial Organisation, Nepal.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

IPS: For readers encountering the term for the first time, what is ambiguous loss?

Kohrt: It’s an important psychological concept, and I want to say at the outset, it is not a mental illness. It’s something anyone can go through. It’s when you still have the psychological sense of someone’s presence in your life, typically a loved one, but there is no physical evidence of either their life or their death. There’s no phone call, no video, nothing to prove they’re still living. But there’s also no body, no proof that they’re deceased.

Nearly every culture has rituals around a body that help us mourn and accept a loss. When there’s no body, we’re stuck in emotional limbo, caught between hope and despair. Some people jump right away to accept their loved one is gone, even without confirmation. Others maintain hope beyond even expectations of reality. We’re all on a different spectrum, and it’s very personal, very individualised. Ambiguous loss is also a real risk factor for what we call complicated grief, a longer, more psychologically difficult kind of mourning, with a higher risk of depression and anxiety.

With 6,145 people still missing in Nepal and only a fraction of recovered remains identified, that state of unresolved uncertainty isn’t abstract. It’s the present condition of thousands of families right now. IPS asked Kohrt how Nepal has faced this same experience before.

IPS: You’ve now worked in Nepal through the Maoist conflict, the 2015 earthquake, and this flood. What connects them?

Kohrt: I first came to Nepal in 1996, right at the start of the civil war. Toward the end of it, I worked with an organisation here, TPO Nepal, on the mental health needs of former child soldiers. Some of those parents never found out what happened to their children. Ambiguous loss was part of the psychosocial reality here even then, decades before this flood, and those families often carried an added burden – communities sometimes treated them with suspicion or blame simply for having a missing relative linked to the conflict, something families searching after this flood aren’t facing in the same way, since so many communities have been affected together.

After the 2015 earthquake, most bodies were recovered, and families were able to do funeral rites, but there are still villages, not far from where this disaster has struck now, where landslides buried people who were never found. This isn’t Nepal’s first experience with this exact kind of unresolved loss in some of these same communities.

A house damaged by the Rasuwa flood. Credit: Brandon Kohrt

IPS: In Nepal specifically, are there rituals that help families cope when there’s no body?

Kohrt: There’s a ritual called Kush Kriya, using grass to essentially perform a substitute funeral when there’s no body. It’s very helpful, but people need to be ready for it. Some may feel like they haven’t exhausted every possible avenue to find their loved one, and they’ll refuse to do it. There’s also a different ritual, Bakal Garne, more like a promise or a wish, maybe to a temple, maybe releasing fish into a river. That one doesn’t require accepting death. You can do a Bakal Garne hoping for your loved one’s safe return or simply hoping to find their body so you can do the cremation you need to do.

Even without an old ritual to lean on, Kohrt says, people still need something to actively do.

IPS: You mentioned people in Nepal are giving DNA samples right now, sometimes more than one, in different countries. What does that process do for a family psychologically?

Brandon Kohrt: Providing a DNA sample has a symbolic meaning that goes beyond its forensic purpose. You’re taking a piece of yourself and giving it in hopes of finding your loved one. Even if the result never confirms anything, the act itself becomes almost another form of ritual. People need to feel active and engaged, rather than passive and helpless.

That instinct, to act rather than wait, is something Kohrt has watched play out across every disaster he’s worked through in Nepal.

IPS: Does arriving at a disaster site feel different to you now than it did 25 years ago, or does something in you brace the same way each time?

Brandon Kohrt: With the earthquake, you could walk through neighbourhoods and see and touch the destruction right in front of you. But with the flood, when I arrived in Nuwakot, I could see some destroyed buildings and others submerged in mud. What you can’t see are all the buildings, bridges, vehicles, and people that were taken by the flood and washed away. This is much more a disaster of absence than a typical disaster of ruins. This will be something much more common with climate change-related disasters, where places gradually and abruptly disappear.

Professionally, the biggest difference is going from being hands-on in the response to being more of a supportive observer. Foreign expertise really isn’t needed anymore; there’s such a strong local Nepali mental health emergency response community now, from psychiatrists to community psychosocial workers.

One colleague, who I first hired at TPO Nepal twenty years ago, is now leading donor coordination and setting out a vision for what’s needed over the next three years. If foreign aid and development is successful, you should get to a point where disaster response is led locally, like we’re seeing in Nepal now.

IPS: You described the photo wall at Teaching Hospital. What does it do to you personally, standing there again?

Kohrt: It was really difficult standing in front of the wall of photos. What is so hard is thinking that behind each photo there are so many family members and friends wondering what happened to this person. Some are holding out hope; some are trying to accept the loss and move toward grief. Each face represents someone who was a sister, a mother, a daughter, a friend, a neighbour, or a coworker to all these other people. For every face we see, there are scores of people suffering.

A house damaged by the Rasuwa flood. Credit: Brandon Kohrt

IPS: Do you find yourself getting better at holding this kind of grief over the years, or does it stay just as hard each time?

Brandon Kohrt: I would say I am better at connecting with grief, acknowledging and sharing in others’ grief. A year after the earthquakes, I was in Nepal when one of my brothers died in the United States. I didn’t make it home in time to see his body before he went to the hospital morgue and was cremated.

I remember how hard it was grieving without having seen his body. That pales in comparison to the ambiguous loss thousands of families in Nepal are experiencing as the search for bodies continues. But it’s something that comes up for me when I talk to grieving families and hear their stories. It cracks open a window to allow the flow of empathy.

IPS: After all these years, what have you learned about how people manage to keep living when there is no answer forthcoming?

Brandon Kohrt: It’s how people move on. People have an incredible ability to carry a lot inside of them – pain, loss, unfulfilled hope, and grief – and keep moving forward in life. A lot of what people went through with the flood will be something they carry with them psychologically, but day-to-day survival requires focusing on taking care of children, caring for elderly relatives, and finding a new place to live. This shouldn’t be confused with recovery or resilience. It’s just getting by, which so many people do after a disaster. What good psychosocial and mental health support does is be available for those moments when some of that pain and grief can surface so that when people are ready, they have that support waiting for them.

IPS UN Bureau Report

By Madhu Rao and Tyson Miller
SINGAPORE, Oct 9 2026 (IPS)

When governments gather in Yerevan this month for the 17th UN Convention on Biological Diversity, they will weigh a promise nearly 200 countries adopted six years ago: to effectively conserve at least 30 percent of land, inland waters, and sea by 2030. Achieving the ambitious 30×30 target is essential to sustaining the systems humanity relies on for survival—including crop pollination, purification of water and air, and climate regulation—as well as the biodiversity that underpins food production, fisheries, and tourism.

Unfortunately, the world is not on track to achieve this target. Moreover, the emphasis on the quantitative dimension of the 30×30 target has often overshadowed its more critical objective: ensuring that areas of high biodiversity value are protected, conserved, and connected through effective and equitable management.

The struggle to deliver on international commitments reflects a fundamental challenge. The Global Biodiversity Framework requires countries to halt and reverse biodiversity loss while pursuing economic growth, and businesses are increasingly expected to mitigate nature-related impacts. The ongoing expansion in infrastructure, mining, and the energy transition places additional pressure on biodiversity-rich ecosystems, creating difficult trade-offs that must be carefully managed.

The fundamental question remains: how do we reconcile economic development with meeting biodiversity commitments?

A new analysis of tropical countries contains insights vital to answering that question. Most importantly, it found that oil and gas concessions overlap nearly 61 million hectares—roughly two and a half times the size of the United Kingdom—of protected and conserved areas. Mining concessions overlap another 43 million hectares. Such conditions can turn protected and conserved areas into ‘paper parks’: places protected in law but vulnerable to extractive industries in practice.

What the Maps Reveal

The analysis examined a wide range of some of the world’s most vital ecosystems and the industrial pressures closing in on them—oil and gas, mining, industrial logging, and large-scale agriculture—across the Amazon, Central America, the Congo Basin, and Southeast Asia, with further examples from the Global North. The report focused on the tropical forests and marine ecosystems that not only harbor irreplaceable biodiversity but also remain at the center of conflicts between extraction and conservation.

Senegal, for example, is close on paper to protecting 30 percent of its territory, yet oil and gas blocks cover 99 percent of both the country’s protected areas and identified Key Biodiversity Areas. The remaining undisturbed forest in Cambodia largely lies inside protected areas, yet a fifth of those areas face mining concessions and most contain land of interest to oil and gas companies. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, nearly three-quarters of the ambitious new Kivu-Kinshasa Green Corridor overlaps with oil and gas blocks included in a recent licensing round.

This contradiction between conservation in policy and extraction in practice can also be seen in high income countries. The United States has opened Bears Ears National Monument to mining and is threatening new oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and the UK also allows fossil-fuel companies to drill in protected areas.

There is further tension. Some of the mining pushing into protected areas is for minerals fueling the energy transition. Securing a stable climate and securing nature are both essential, and one should not be pursued by quietly sacrificing the other.

We need to consider not only how much additional territory must be brought under protection by 2030, but whether areas already counted as protected and conserved are genuinely conserved, effectively managed, and delivering meaningful biodiversity outcomes.

The Path Forward

High-integrity implementation of 30×30 means prioritizing places that matter most for biodiversity and ensuring they remain ecologically intact, connected, effectively conserved, and equitably governed. It means upholding Indigenous Peoples’ and local community rights and protecting these places from incompatible extractive and large-scale industrial activities.

There are four critical components. The first is the mitigation hierarchy, which calls for avoiding harm whenever possible before considering other measures. Areas of highest biodiversity value, including strictly protected areas, should be no-go zones for extractive industry.

The second is policy coherence. A protected area sits with a ministry of environment while a mining concession sits with a ministry of mines or energy, and unless biodiversity is built into the decisions of every economic sector, the two will keep colliding.

The third is biodiversity-inclusive spatial planning, which enables governments to clearly recognize where nature is protected and where development can proceed. Protect here, develop there.

Finally, effective and equitable governance, including rights-based approaches, is essential. Indigenous peoples and local communities steward some of the world’s most intact and biodiverse lands, including many areas of global importance for biodiversity. Their rights, knowledge and leadership are central to effective conservation.

With only four years left, the commitment worth making in Yerevan is durable protection for the areas that matter most, so they remain intact, connected, and free of the industries that would undermine them. We must make sure that 30×30 is not a promise that only exists on a map, but is a pathway to true biodiversity protection for our collective survival.

Madhu Rao, Chair of the IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas and Tyson Miller, Executive Director of Earth Insight

IPS UN Bureau

An IPES-Food report warns that workers in the global food system face high exploitation in keeping the world fed. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Oct 6 2026 (IPS)

A new report reveals widespread labour exploitation among food system workers, warning that keeping the world fed comes at the cost of human dignity.

More than 1.4 billion people work in the food industry – the largest employer in the world – and are the most abused, according to a report, Food Work: The workers behind our food and the exploitation they face, published this week by the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food).

The global food system exploits more workers than any other economic sector, and the report notes that this exploitation is not accidental but rather ingrained in a business model that keeps labour cheap while maximising profits.

Abuse All Round

“Often hidden from view, food workers face low pay, wage theft, forced labour, human trafficking, discrimination, sexual violence, dangerous working conditions, and exclusion from social safety nets,” the report found.

“From farmworkers, fishers, and slaughterhouse staff to delivery drivers, restaurant and supermarket employees, and domestic workers, labour abuse is rife at every link in the food chain.”

The report highlighted that migrants, women, refugees, and racialised workers are funnelled into the worst conditions, where speaking up risks job loss, deportation and blacklisting.

IPES-Food co-chair Olivier De Schutter said what was most surprising about the findings of the report was the deep hypocrisy of governments concerning migrant farmworkers. With many countries relying heavily on migrant labour, especially for fruit and vegetable production, as witnessed during the Covid-19 pandemic, governments often grant migrant workers short-term, seasonal stays.

“These workers are routinely subject to forms of exploitation and abuse that would be unimaginable if they were natives – housed in poor conditions, paid poverty wages, and working in often dangerous conditions,” said Olivier De Schutter, a former UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food.

De Schutter argued that because migrant workers were considered unskilled, they were treated like second-class workers and that they had no or minimal connections to the communities in countries that host them; they barely complained in cases of abuse.

This practice is a form of trafficking in human beings, except that it’s legal and officially encouraged, De Schutter told IPS.

According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the gross value of global agricultural production is estimated at just over $5 trillion, while the World Bank estimates agricultural value-added at about $3.2 trillion.

The global food system is valued at more than $8 trillion, yet those who produce and market the food survive on poverty wages, which calls for a change.

De Schutter identified three mutually reinforcing challenges which include loopholes in the current legislation which does not apply minimum wage or on working hours, poor law enforcement and the difficulty of organising workers where unions are discouraged or even repressed.

“Governments routinely take the position that, where workers are informal, labour legislation does not apply, and labour inspectorates have no role to play,” he said, describing this situation as absurd.

‘It’s like saying that if you don’t have a driver’s licence, you can ignore the traffic rules. In fact, international human rights law requires that basic labour legislation be extended to informal workers and that incentives be given to employers to register their workers to ensure informality does not pay and that formalisation instead be rewarded.”

IPES-Food co-chair Olivier De Schutter. Credit: IPES-Food

Systemic Exploitation

“Unfair employment arrangements, off-the-books work, and lack of basic job security all combine to entrench worker vulnerability,” he said. “Governments directly enable this abuse through legal carve-outs that explicitly exempt food and farm workers from basic protections on wages, workplace safety, and union rights.”

The report highlighted that even where protective laws exist, weak public enforcement and pervasive informal employment leave millions of workers unprotected.

Migrant workers are essential to today’s food systems, yet they face some of the highest rates of workplace abuse, wage theft, forced labour, injury, and death, the report noted.

Worsening Conditions

Compounding these structural abuses, a dangerous convergence of emerging forces was making food work increasingly hazardous and exploitative.

“Climate change is becoming a workers’ rights crisis,” said Mamadou Goïta, IPES-Food panel expert. “Farmworkers already face poverty wages, toxic pesticides, and gruelling conditions. Now climate change is turning up the heat and making their work even more dangerous.”

Goïta said governments were still failing to guarantee workers even basic, lifesaving protections like shade, rest, and drinking water.

“The people producing our food should not have to risk their health or their lives to earn a living,” said Goïta.

The impacts of extreme heat and drought are usually measured in lost crops and harvests. But the human toll on the world’s 928 million agricultural workers was also mounting, with heat stress being the most common health threat facing farmworkers, the report noted.

The consequences of health threats include dizziness, vomiting, and exhaustion from heat stroke and kidney disease. In the US, farmworkers were 35 times more likely to die from heat stress than other workers.

Agricultural regions across Africa, the Americas, and southern Europe now experience up to 50 more days of dangerous heat each year than in the 1970s. In Africa, 93% of workers were exposed to dangerous heat, most of whom work in food systems, said the report.

The report warned that while climate change was exposing workers to extreme heat, severe weather and toxic wildfire smoke, corporate power was suppressing wages, undermining collective bargaining, and shifting risks onto workers, which meant prioritising shareholder returns over decent work.

“At the cutting edge, digital technologies are creating new frontiers of exploitation: gig-based platform work, automation, algorithmic management, and workplace surveillance are isolating workers, intensifying productivity pressures, increasing injury rates, and eroding worker bargaining power,” said the report.

Organise or Agonise

But workers are fighting back. They are forming unions and cooperatives, staging strikes, litigating for rights, and building alliances to demand comprehensive labour standards that recognise their worth and dignity.

The report shows that comprehensive labour standards, living wages, and the right to collective bargaining can shift the world’s largest workforce from the food system’s most invisible victims to resilience.

The report emphasised that in achieving lasting transformation in the food systems industry, there must be a strong policy and power shift across five key priorities. These include building the power of workers by strengthening trade unions and expanding collective bargaining. In addition, legal carve-outs for food and farm workers must be eliminated and equal rights for migrant workers guaranteed.

Policies that criminalise migrants must be scrapped, while employer-tied visa schemes must be dismantled to guarantee equal labour rights and social protections regardless of status, the report said, urging for a curtailment of corporate power so that companies are held accountable for labour abuses throughout their supply chains.

“The people who feed the world deserve safe, fairly paid, and dignified work,” said the report. “Food systems must never depend on low wages, hazardous conditions, or invisible labour. Achieving this requires changing who holds power, who profits, and who bears the costs.”

IPS UN Bureau Report

A community health worker examines a pregnant woman inside her home while family members look on, highlighting the growing challenges mothers face as extreme heat and climate-related pressures strain access to healthcare in vulnerable communities. Credit: Wellcome

By Umar Manzoor Shah
SUVA, Fiji & SRINAGAR, India, Oct 5 2026 (IPS)

Extreme heat is increasingly threatening pregnant women and newborn babies around the world, with almost all maternal health professionals surveyed across five continents saying they have cared for women or infants whose health was affected by high temperatures.

The findings, released as climate ministers gathered in the Pacific ahead of the COP31 climate summit, provide an extremely distressing picture of how global heating is affecting maternity wards, delivery rooms and newborn-care units.

A survey of 1,001 healthcare professionals in Australia, Brazil, India, the United Kingdom and Zimbabwe found that 98 percent had personally cared for a pregnant woman whose health they believed was adversely affected by extreme heat.

Some 99 percent said they had cared for a foetus or newborn whose health, in their professional judgment, had been affected by extreme heat.

Almost three-quarters, 73%, said heat-related cases or complications affecting pregnant women had increased over the previous five years. The proportion rose to 76% when health workers were asked about complications involving foetal health, childbirth or newborn babies.

The survey was commissioned by the global health foundation Wellcome and conducted among obstetricians, gynaecologists, doctors, midwives, nurses and other maternal-health professionals between September 17 and October 1.

The findings were released in Fiji at the launch of Birthright, a global campaign seeking greater protection for pregnant women, babies and healthcare workers as temperatures rise.

Speaking at the event, United Nations Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell said climate change was creating a new and potentially deadly risk around pregnancy and childbirth.

“The picture is clear and very disturbing: as extreme heat worsens, pregnancy and birth are now a new faultline in the global climate crisis, and one which is potentially fatal,” Stiell said.

“This faultline must not become another deep chasm of climate-driven suffering, inequality and injustice.”

The survey offers detailed evidence of what healthcare professionals say they are already witnessing.

Among pregnant women,

• 25% reported seeing muscle cramps or muscle aches that they believed extreme heat had contributed to or worsened
• 24% reported severe fatigue, sleep problems or a reduced ability among pregnant women to carry out daily activities
• 23% reported breathing difficulties or worsening respiratory symptoms
• 23 percent reported pregnancy complications requiring additional monitoring or treatment, while an equal proportion reported hypertensive disorders, including pre-eclampsia
• More than one in five reported mental distress, anxiety or stress linked to heat
• 21% said they had encountered severe maternal illness requiring medical attention or hospital care
• 20% reported dizziness, fainting or loss of consciousness, while 19 percent reported preterm contractions, labour or birth
• Nearly 18% said they had observed pregnancy loss or stillbirth in circumstances where, in their professional judgment, extreme heat had contributed to or worsened the problem.

The survey did not attempt to establish that heat alone caused individual complications. The responses provide information about the professional judgment and clinical experience of the healthcare workers questioned.

Protect Life at Its Most Fragile

The findings involving babies were similarly worrying.

• 36% of health professionals reported dehydration or heat-related illness among newborns during the pregnancy-related care they provided
• 34% reported low birth weight or restricted foetal growth
• 33% had observed breathing, feeding or temperature-regulation difficulties
• 28% said babies required additional monitoring, treatment or neonatal care, and a similar proportion reported preterm birth
• During the newborn period, 38% of respondents reported low birth weight or restricted growth
• 36% reported dehydration or heat-related illness, and another 36% reported breathing, feeding or problems regulating body temperature
• Almost 30% said heat-related conditions resulted in babies needing additional monitoring, treatment or neonatal care
• 9% percent reported stillbirth or neonatal death during the newborn period in cases where they believed extreme heat had contributed to or worsened the condition.

Stiell said the findings showed that rising temperatures could no longer be treated simply as an environmental issue.

“The climate policy process is measured in degrees, targets and finance,” he said. “But a deep test of climate action is far simpler: whether we protect life at its most fragile.”

He said the world was entering conditions for which many health systems had not been designed.

“We are in a new, hotter world, as the world continues to burn planet-heating fossil fuels, overwhelmingly in G20 economies,” Stiell said.

“The last eleven years smashed records.”

He said rising temperatures meant “rising danger in pregnancy”, citing evidence linking extreme heat to premature birth, stillbirth, low birth weight and maternal complications.

A healthcare worker cradles a newborn baby at a maternal health facility, illustrating frontline efforts to protect mothers and infants amid mounting concerns over the impact of extreme heat on pregnancy, childbirth and newborn health. Credit: Wellcome

No One Is Immune

The survey also revealed significant differences between countries.

Zimbabwean health workers were among those reporting the sharpest increases.

Eighty-five percent of respondents in Zimbabwe said heat-related cases or complications affecting pregnant women had increased during the previous five years. The figure was 79% in Australia, 74% in Brazil, 66% in the United Kingdom and 62% in India.

When respondents were asked about foetal or newborn health, 89% of Zimbabwean health professionals reported an increase in heat-related cases or complications. The corresponding figure was 79% in Brazil, 78% in Australia, 68% in the United Kingdom and 66% in India.

The results suggest that the effects are being felt across countries with very different climates, incomes and healthcare systems.

Concern was also widespread.

More than 92% of all respondents said they were concerned about the impact of extreme heat on the health and well-being of pregnant women in the areas where they worked and 90% expressed concern about foetal health during pregnancy and childbirth, as well as the health of babies during the newborn period.

Zimbabwe recorded some of the highest levels of concern, with 97% of respondents concerned about foetal and newborn health.

Stiell said no country or family could consider itself completely insulated from the risk.

“No one is immune,” he said. “But the risks and impacts are not shared equally.”

The survey showed that extreme heat was also disrupting the healthcare systems expected to protect women and infants.

• 29% of health workers said they had seen increased urgent or emergency presentations during extreme heat
• 28% reported difficulties safely storing or using medicines, supplies or medical equipment
• 27% said pregnant women and their families found it harder to travel to or access healthcare
• 25% reported increased demand for advice, monitoring or treatment, while another quarter reported staff illness, fatigue or a reduced ability to work safely
• 24% had experienced interruptions to electricity, water, cooling systems, medical equipment or other essential services
• A similar proportion reported healthcare services becoming overburdened or having insufficient capacity
• Nearly one-quarter said temperatures inside healthcare facilities had become unsafe or uncomfortable.

The findings highlight a basic problem in responding to extreme heat. Advising pregnant women to stay cool may be of little practical value when families lack air conditioning, cannot afford electricity, work outside, or live far from medical services.

“‘Staying cool’ is simply not an option when there is no cool place to go,” Stiell said.

“A safe birth is already too often shaped by geography, income and access to care. Without action, extreme heat will widen that injustice.”

The survey asked health professionals what most limited pregnant women’s ability to protect themselves and their babies.

• 26% cited limited awareness or understanding that extreme heat could affect health during pregnancy
• 24% cited the need to work outdoors or in hot conditions
• About 23% pointed to limited support from family or the wider community
• The same proportion cited limited access to cooling or air conditioning
• 23% identified the cost of electricity, water or other protective measures.

Other barriers included existing health conditions, inadequate access to safe drinking water, homes that were difficult to keep cool, lack of employer support and difficulties travelling to healthcare facilities.

Only 0.4 percent said no factors limited women’s ability to protect themselves from extreme heat.

Stiell said such conditions meant that climate change risk was increasingly intertwined with inequality.

“Someone working outdoors, living in unregulated housing, travelling far to a clinic, or relying on facilities without water, power or cooling, cannot be protected by advice alone,” he said.

Harm that is not counted is too easily ignored

For Pacific Island countries, the issue is particularly sensitive.

Many small island states have contributed only a tiny fraction of historic greenhouse gas emissions but face rising sea levels, intensifying storms, heat and pressure on food, water and health systems.

“Here in the Pacific, climate change is no abstraction,” Stiell said.

“It is felt in homes, villages, farms, fisheries and clinics, in journeys for care, and in the availability and cost of food, water, power and transport.”

The Fiji event was held as ministers and climate officials gathered for the pre-COP meeting hosted by Australia and Fiji from October 5 to 8.

The meeting is intended to advance negotiations ahead of COP31 in Antalya, Türkiye, and give greater prominence to Pacific Island perspectives and climate solutions. Tuvalu was hosting a leaders’ event as part of the Pacific meetings.

Despite the growing risks, the survey suggests many healthcare workers believe they need more support to respond effectively.

• An overwhelming 92% said they wanted additional training and resources to help pregnant women during periods of extreme heat.
• 55% said clearer national or international guidance on protecting pregnant women from extreme heat would help them perform their jobs better
• When asked what would most improve their ability to protect women and babies, 33% selected practical information and materials for pregnant women and families
• 31% called for improvements to buildings, cooling, ventilation, water or electricity
• 29% wanted stronger referral pathways and better coordination between health services
• A similar proportion called for improved data and surveillance on heat, pregnancy and newborn health, as well as better local heat alerts and communication
• 28% said more staff, time or funding during periods of extreme heat would help
• 28% called for greater community outreach to people who may otherwise be difficult for health services to reach.

Stiell urged governments to make maternal and newborn health an explicit part of national climate adaptation and heat-response strategies.

“What is not named in a plan is too often not funded, not measured and not protected,” he said.

He outlined three priorities.

The first was to make pregnancy and newborn care part of national adaptation, health and extreme-heat planning.

That would require resilient clinics, dependable electricity and water supplies and properly trained health workers.

The second was to convert scientific evidence into direct protection, including improved guidance, professional training, heat alerts, safer medical facilities and health systems prepared before extreme weather strikes.

The third was better monitoring.

“Harm that is not counted is too easily ignored,” Stiell said.

“As temperatures rise, data must show where risks are growing, which interventions work, which communities are exposed, and where finance and technology support is needed.”

The survey found broad support among health workers for stronger policy action.

• 81% agreed that without further action, extreme heat would increasingly endanger maternal, foetal and newborn health during the next five years
• 82% said protecting pregnant women and babies from extreme heat should become a higher priority for health-system leaders and policymakers
• Another 82% agreed that better evidence on heat, pregnancy and newborn health would help drive effective action.

Stiell linked the issue to broader international climate finance negotiations.

He said commitments on adaptation finance agreed at COP30 in Brazil needed to be implemented and called for governments and the international financial system to help mobilise $1.3 trillion annually for developing nations.

“For small islands and other nations that did practically nothing to cause this climate crisis, it underscores the need for support at scale,” he said.

He also pointed to the Belém Gender Action Plan and Belém Adaptation Indicators as mechanisms that could help governments measure climate-related health risks and build more resilient health services.

Stiell praised Türkiye’s COP31 presidency and Australia, which is serving as President of Negotiations, for putting health on the agenda ahead of the Antalya summit.

For Stiell, the issue ultimately goes beyond climate-negotiating language.

“I am a parent, but I cannot pretend to know what it feels like to carry a pregnancy through those conditions,” he said.

“Mothers, midwives, doctors, nurses and families speak from lived experience. We should listen.”

The survey suggests those voices are already delivering a clear warning.

Pregnant women are struggling with heat exposure. Babies are requiring additional care. Health workers are seeing more complications. Facilities are facing pressure on electricity, water, medicines and staff. And many doctors, nurses and midwives say they lack the training and resources they need.

“Pregnancy should be a time of hope,” Stiell said. “But for millions, it is becoming a time of anxiety, as climate impacts fill everyday life with risk.”

He ended with an appeal for governments to treat protection of mothers and babies as a basic test of climate policy.

“A changing climate must never be accepted as a reason pregnancy and birth become less safe,” he said.

“A newborn’s healthy start must never depend on a family’s ability to escape the heat.”

“This work is urgent, deeply human, and we all share the responsibility to drive it forward together.”

IPS UN Bureau Report

At the Africa Food Systems Forum in Kigali, Rwanda, experts explored how renewable energy can ease the burden on farmers. Here Shifra Ainomugisha poses beside a solar-powered irrigation system in Uganda. She was named the 2026 Commonwealth Young Person of the Year for the development of AI and solar-powered agricultural technologies. Credit: Solar Farm Uganda

By Farai Shawn Matiashe
KIGALI, Oct 2 2026 (IPS)

Post-harvest losses, particularly in rural areas, threaten the gains Africa is making in agricultural production and export capacity.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, up to 40% of farm produce is lost because of a lack of cold storage, according to industry players.

Highly perishable farm produce, like fruits and vegetables, can go as high as 70%.

With agriculture accounting for one-third of the Gross Domestic Product and employing over 60%, such a loss threatens jobs and the livelihoods of millions of people.

Farmers in Africa grapple with a lack of reliable refrigeration, an underdeveloped cold chain and unreliable power storage, leaving harvests to heat and spoilage.

Poor road networks and limited refrigerated transport options also worsen the situation. Farmers transport fruits long distances to processing centres under non-ideal conditions, resulting in losses.

Renewable Energy Offers an Opportunity

At the Africa Food Systems Forum in Kigali, Rwanda, experts are exploring how renewable energy can ease the burden on farmers who often turn to diesel generators to cool their farms’ fresh produce.

Olamide Niyi-Afuye, Chief Executive Officer at Africa Minigrid Developers Association (AMDA), an industry association working to improve the operating environment for mini-grids, said the biggest gap is not awareness but aggregation and intentional market design.

“We already see individual examples of mini-grids powering agro-processing, cold storage and other productive activities,” he said.

“The challenge is that these are still too often treated as individual projects rather than part of a scalable commercial model.”

Mugwe Manga, a Climate Finance Lead at Financial Sector Deepening Kenya (FSD Kenya), an independent trust supporting micro and small enterprises, said energy presents a tremendous opportunity for smallholder farmers to capture more value from what they produce.

“Solar, increasingly combined with battery energy storage, is particularly important because it is modular, increasingly affordable and can be deployed relatively quickly in rural areas,” he said.

“Solar-powered irrigation, cold storage, drying, milling, cooling and agro-processing can reduce post-harvest losses, increase productivity, improve product quality and allow farmers to sell into higher-value markets.”

Manga said energy can become an important enabler of both climate resilience and higher farmer incomes.

“The productive use of energy for cold storage, solar-pumped irrigation, and agro-processing is critical to value capture, climate resilience, and adaptation that will strengthen smallholder farmers,” he said.

Nigeria, one of Africa’s largest economies, lost between $2.3bn and $3.3bn to post-harvest inefficiencies in 2025, according to industry players.

The food wasted due to poor storage and transport networks amounted to up to 40 million metric tonnes.

South Africa loses an estimated 10.3 million tonnes of food annually, about 19% of its fresh produce, according to a 2021 report titled Waste Research Development and Innovation Roadmap Research.

Funding Cooperatives Is a Better Funding Model

Renewable energy offers reliable and accessible solutions to cold storage and processing problems in Africa, but funding remains a major challenge.

Though prices of solar panels and batteries shipped from China have been declining in recent years, current prices remain high for many farmers, particularly smallholders in rural areas.

With low capital amid limited access to grants and loans, many cannot afford solar-powered agro-processing and cold storage facilities.

Experts said that clean energy is the cheapest technology to deploy when farmers work together.

“Due to the capital expenditure of some of these, it is important for farmers to organise themselves and come together as a collective in order to take advantage of economies of scale and the power of aggregation that can use energy for all, as opposed to rolling out these solutions to individual smallholders that may not be cost-effective,” said Manga.

Niyi-Afuye said there is a need to bring energy developers and agribusinesses together much earlier, aggregate demand across agricultural value chains, and structure projects around credible productive loads from the outset.

“The opportunity is to stop treating energy and food systems as two separate investment cases and start building bankable opportunities at the intersection of both,” he said.

Manga said one of the key lessons from distributed energy is that the economics are often stronger when players move away from financing individual assets for individual farmers and instead aggregate demand.

“Farmers can organise through cooperatives, producer organisations, aggregators or rural enterprises and invest in shared infrastructure that serves many producers,” he said.

“This creates economies of scale, improves asset utilisation and creates a stronger and more predictable revenue base.”

Manga said aggregation also makes these projects more attractive to financiers by reducing transaction costs and perceived risk.

“Rather than lending against hundreds of individual smallholders, investors can finance a productive asset with an identifiable operator, clear cash flows and an aggregated customer base,” he said.

Niyi-Afuye said the better model is to aggregate projects into investable portfolios, combine commercial capital with appropriate credit enhancement and risk-sharing mechanisms, and increase access to patient, local-currency financing.

“Financing infrastructure in dollars while the underlying customers earn in Nigerian Naira or Kenyan shillings creates a structural mismatch,” he said.

Pratik Patel, Bureau Chief for East and Southern Africa at AfriCatalyist, a global development advisory firm headquartered in Senegal, said a public-private-producer partnership is the model that can make renewables affordable.

“Instead of a cold storage facility or cold chain operator trying to stand alone as a single commercial enterprise, it’s embedded in a collective plan that covers the full journey from farm to table, production, aggregation through farmer cooperatives, storage, processing, and market access, with clear roles and coordination at each stage,” he said.

He said the approach matters for financing because it gives investors what a standalone facility cannot, such as a defined use case, identified long-term clients, and a credible route to market.

“When responsibility for each link in the chain is assigned to the actor best suited to manage it, the plan becomes legible and de-risked, which is what ultimately builds investor confidence,” he said.

IPS UN Bureau Report