Environment

Mideast: Growing Urbanisation Worsens Water Scarcity, Food Imports

By Baher Kamal
Conflict and insecurity remain the key barriers to development progress in the Middle East and North Africa. In Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen, about half the population—around 40 million people—require humanitarian assistance. Across the region, countries depend heavily on food imports. As their populations urbanise and grow, the need for imports will increase.

Community Seed Banks: Securing Diversity for Climate Change Adaptation

By Elena L. Pasquini
For thousands of years, farmers have used genetic diversity to cope with weather variability and changing climate conditions. They have stored, planted, selected and improved seeds to continue producing food in a dynamic environment.

World to Cut Emissions With or Without Trump

By Zofeen Ebrahim
In a last-ditch effort, Germany and China are trying to influence the United States not to walk away from the Paris climate change accord it signed along with 194 nations.

A Grisly Tale of Children Falling Easy Prey to Ruthless Smugglers

By Baher Kamal
Don’t read this story if you are a parent or have children relatives. It is the bloodcurdling story of over 300,000 unaccompanied refugee and migrant children who are just a small part of millions of children that are innocent, easy prey for smugglers and human traffickers worldwide.

Unique Sandbar Coastal Ecosystem in Cuba Calls for Climate Solutions

By Ivet González
A battered bridge connects the centre of Baracoa, Cuba´s oldest city, with a singular dark-sand sandbar, known as Tibaracón, that forms on one of the banks of the Macaguaní River where it flows into the Caribbean Sea in northeastern Cuba.

At the UN Oceans Forum in June, Will the US Play a Bit Part?

By Lori Silberman Brauner
In just a few weeks, the United Nations is convening a world gathering to discuss the health of the world’s oceans and seas, with member states, government and nongovernmental organizations, corporations and members of the scientific community and academia signed up to take part.

Mapping and Responding to Climate-Induced Migration

By Tharanga Yakupitiyage
As the world focuses on conflict-related migration and displacement, with an unprecedented 60 million fleeing from war and persecution, others are pointing to a less discussed trigger of population movements: climate change.

Defence of Right to Water Drives Call for Land Reform in Chile

By Orlando Milesi
Water at high prices, sold as a market good, and small farmers almost a species in extinction, replaced by seasonal workers, are the visible effects of the crisis in rural Chile, 50 years after a land reform which postulated that “the land is for those who work it.”

Climate Change Has Changed the Geography of Honduras’ Caribbean Coast

By Thelma Mejía
In Balfate, a rural municipality that includes fishing villages and small farms along Honduras’ Caribbean coast, the effects of climate change are already felt on its famous scenery and beaches. The sea is relentlessly approaching the houses, while the ecosystem is deteriorating.

Kenya’s Drought: Response Must Be Sustainable, Not Piecemeal

By Siddharth Chatterjee

 

A malnutrition emergency Food security in Kenya has deteriorated significantly since the end of 2016. UNICEF reports a significant increase in severe acute malnutrition. Nearly 110,000 children under-five need treatment, up from 75,300 in August 2016.

World Lags on Clean Energy Goals

By Stephen Leahy
It may be the 21st century but more than three billion people still use fire for cooking and heating. Of those, one billion people have no access to electricity despite a global effort launched at the 2011 Vienna Energy Forum to bring electricity to everyone on the planet.

SLIDESHOW: Drought Highlights Ethiopia’s IDP Dilemma

By James Jeffrey
Displaced pastoralists gather around newly arrived drums of brown water as a water truck speeds off to make further deliveries to settlements that have sprung up along the main road running out of Gode, one of the major urban centers in Ethiopia’s Somali region.

Falling Between the Sun-Scorched Gaps: Drought Highlights Ethiopia’s IDP Dilemma

By James Jeffrey
Displaced pastoralists gather around newly arrived drums of brown water as a water truck speeds off to make further deliveries to settlements that have sprung up along the main road running out of Gode, one of the major urban centers in Ethiopia’s Somali region.

African Migrants Bought and Sold Openly in ‘Slave Markets’ in Libya

By Baher Kamal
Hundreds of migrants along North African migration routes are being bought and sold openly in modern day ‘slave markets’ in Libya, survivors have told the United Nations migration agency, which warned that these reports “can be added to a long list of outrages” in the country. The International Criminal Court is now considering investigating.

When It Comes to Fracking, Argentina Dreams Big

By Daniel Gutman
Since a US Energy Information Administration (EIA) report announced in 2011 that Argentina had some of the world’s biggest shale oil and gas reserves, the dream of prosperity has been on the minds of many people in this South American nation where nearly a third of the population lives in poverty.

Global Climate Policy in an Uncertain State of Flux

By Martin Khor
Global climate change policy is in a state of flux, with all other countries waiting for the United States to decide whether to leave or remain in the Paris Agreement.

Collective Amnesia in Famine Response and Resilience-Building

By Suresh Babu
The emerging drought-induced humanitarian crisis—prevailing in countries from Niger in West Africa to Somalia in East Africa—and conflict-driven famine conditions in South Sudan, Somalia, and Northeast Nigeria, have become a regular phenomenon.

Flying Green in Bangladesh

By Sohara Mehroze Shachi
New technology could be the answer to reducing negative climate impacts of aviation - one of the fastest-growing sources of greenhouse gases. And a recent quantitative research at North South University (NSU) of Bangladesh has found that upgrading the existing navigation system will reduce fuel use, hence decreasing carbon emissions as well as costs.

Social Forum Calls for Fight Against Corruption, to Defend the Amazon

By Milagros Salazar
Corruption has penetrated the Amazon rainforest like an illness that infects everything, said Ruben Siqueira, coordinator of the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), during the VIII Panamazonic Social Forum (FOSPA), which brought together in the Peruvian Amazon jungle representatives of civil society from eight Amazon basin countries.

The Very Survival of Africa’s Indigenous Peoples ‘Seriously Threatened’

By Baher Kamal
The cultures and very survival of indigenous peoples in Africa are seriously threatened. They are ignored, neglected and fall victims of land grabbing and land dispossession caused by extractive industries, agribusiness and other forms of business operations.

Caribbean Rolls Out Plans to Reduce Climate Change Hazards

By Desmond Brown
Climate change remains inextricably linked to the challenges of disaster risk reduction (DRR). And according to the head of the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR), Robert Glasser, the reduction of greenhouse gases is “the single most urgent global disaster risk treatment”.
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