Environment

Indigenous Peoples — An Antidote in a World of Crisis

By Jamison Ervin and Anna Giulia Medri
This year’s Equator Prize winners are the antidote we need in a world of crisis. Earlier this year, the World Economic Forum released its annual Risk Report. The key findings highlighted the inescapable trend over the past decade that we are facing a global polycrisis, in which problems of biodiversity loss, climate change, inequality, water scarcity and conflict are increasingly indivisible, simultaneous, and systemic.

Pacific Community Photographic Winners Bring Impacts of Climate Change to Life

By IPS Correspondent
The Pacific Community’s photographic competition winners reflect the devastating climate impacts on beautiful and sensitive environments, documenting the most pressing issues the communities who live on the islands face today.

Explainer: Why Kenya is Considered a High Climate Risk for Development Banks

By Joyce Chimbi
Kenya contributes less than 0.1 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions every year, yet development banks have flagged the East African nation as a high climate risk. This is due to extreme weather changes that are increasingly threatening the country’s development agenda, widening socio-economic inequalities, and deepening rural poverty and hunger.

Water Stories: The Well Seven Families and 400 Buffaloes Rely On

By Tanka Dhakal
In the rural village of Khardariya in the Dang district of Nepal, access to clean water is a major issue. Villagers depend on one poorly managed well for drinking water, cleaning, and feeding livestock. Anjana Yadav stood near the well while a neighbor walked toward it to fetch a bucket of water.

ECUADOR: ‘We demand that the violation of the rights of nature be recognised and reversed’

By CIVICUS
CIVICUS speaks with Darío Iza Pilaquinga, president of the Kitu Kara People of the Kichwa nationality of Ecuador, about a historic court ruling that applied a constitutional provision recognising the rights of nature.

Pivotal Shift at Seabed Authority: Nations Rally for Deep-Sea Mining Moratorium

By Patricia Roy
The International Seabed Authority (ISA) Assembly meeting concluded last week with no mining authorized, an unprecedented number of States calling for a moratorium or precautionary pause and a new Secretary-General elected.

ECOWAS at 49: Successes in Regional Integration, Despite Emerging Challenges

By Kingsley Ighobor
The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) was founded in 1975 to promote economic integration in the region. Forty-nine years later, the regional bloc boasts significant successes in integration, peace and security and good governance, but also faces some challenges.

The Demise of Democracy and Human Rights Violations in Bangladesh: International Financial Institutions’ Culpability

By Anis Chowdhury and Khalilur Rahman
The International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank and Asian Development Bank (ADB) are complicit in the gross human rights violations and death of democracy in Bangladesh. They continued to supply financial blood line to the regime, well-documented for its corruptions, human rights violations – such as forced disappearances and tortures in custody – and riggings of votes, including politicization of state institutions in its slide into autocracy. This is despite their professed commitment to transparency, accountability and good governance (IMF, World Bank, ADB).

Chilean Fisherwomen Seek Visibility and Escape from Vulnerability

By Orlando Milesi
The number of organisations that bring together fisherwomen who seek to be recognised as workers, make their harsh reality visible and escape the vulnerability in which they live is growing in Chile.

How Women Volunteers Are Shaping India’s Water Future

By Manipadma Jena
“Daily squabbles at the lone water point in Bhubaneswar’s slums, where hundreds of households depended on this single non-potable water source, have now receded into the past,” says Aparna Khuntia, a member of a large cohort of water volunteers who have played an important enabling role in ensuring households in the eastern India city now have their own on-premises potable running tap water available all 24 hours.

Partnering for Progress: Maldives’ Sustainable Ocean Initiatives

By Bradley Busetto and Bjorn Andersson
The ocean is our lifeline, covering 70 percent of the earth’s surface, it is the source of half of the oxygen we breathe, and it absorbs 26 percent of the carbon dioxide we produce. It is home to millions of marine species, contains 97 percent of all of the water on our planet and offers humankind immense resources. 

Cambodia’s Young Environmental Activists Pay a Heavy Price

By Andrew Firmin
It’s risky to try to protect the environment in authoritarian Cambodia. Ten young activists from the Mother Nature environmental group have recently been given long jail sentences. Two were sentenced to eight years on charges of plotting and insulting the king. Another seven were sentenced to six years for plotting, while one, a Spanish national banned from entering Cambodia, was sentenced in absentia.

The Price Women Pay for Climate Change

By Oritro Karim
Global warming, widely believed to be a universal crisis, will actually impact girls and women far more than boys and men. It is already known that we live in a patriarchal world, one in which men are afforded far greater opportunities for success while women generally hold less societal power and have access to fewer resources. This especially pertains to developing countries in which agriculture related work, usually delegated to females, depends on a variety of environmental factors and subsequently, significantly hurts their livelihoods.

Sportwashing Allegations at Africa’s Top Football Tournament

By Promise Eze
Following the recent Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) tournament in Ivory Coast, a continent-wide campaign has emerged on social media challenging the tournament's main sponsor, TotalEnergies, over its involvement in the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP).

SUMMIT OF THE FUTURE: ‘The UN Secretary-General Underestimated the Difficulty of Reaching Consensus’

By CIVICUS

 
CIVICUS discusses the upcoming Summit of the Future with Renzo Pomi, who represents Amnesty International at the United Nations (UN) in New York.

Life or Energy: The Hydroelectric Dilemma in Amazonian Brazil

By Mario Osava
The decade-and-a-half-long battle for life in the so-called Volta Grande (Big Bend) of the Xingu river, a stretch of the river dewatered by the Belo Monte hydroelectric power plant in the Brazilian Amazon, has a possible solution, albeit a partial one.

UN: Extreme Heat a Global Issue With an Unequal Impact

By Naureen Hossain
“The world must rise to the challenge of rising temperatures," says the UN Secretary-General as he launches a call to action on extreme heat and its impact on society and the environment.

Belém Improving to Host 2025 Climate Summit in Brazil

By Mario Osava
Hotels and other amenities may be lacking for participants at the 30th Conference of the Parties on Climate Change (COP30), in this northern Brazilian city in late 2025, but the bottom line is they will have a unique experience in the Amazon.

More Poverty for the Poor

By Jomo Kwame Sundaram
Many low-income countries (LICs) continue to slip further behind the rest of the world. Meanwhile, people in extreme poverty have been increasing again after decades of decline.

Southern African Drought: Extreme Hardship, Hopefully Only in the Short Term

By Kevin Humphrey
Heading into the traditional dry period of winter in southern Africa, there was significant consternation due to the drastically below average rainfall the region has been experiencing since January 2024.

Silenced: Women’s Many Layered Struggles for Climate Justice in Nepal

By Tanka Dhakal
A group aligned with the mayor of Chhayanath Rara Municipality in the Mugu district of Nepal’s Karnali Province physically attacked Aishwarya Malla for simply asking for a budgetary review of the local government. “As a deputy mayor, I have the right to know where the budget is allocated, but the mayor’s team attacked me,” Malla said. “They did it only because I’m a woman, but they forget I’m also an elected representative with a responsibility to serve people, especially women and marginalized sections of our society.”
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