Environment

Climate Collapse Is Not Inevitable But ‘Great Leap’ Needed

By Paul Virgo
In 1972 the Club of Rome alerted the world to the harm human economic systems were doing to the health of our planet in its seminal, best-selling report, The Limits to Growth. With the devastating impacts of the climate crisis hitting home harder than ever, especially in the Global South, that warning about the dangers of exponential economic growth has been fully vindicated.

Developing Countries Must Grow More Food
Climate change and war on Ukraine a wake-up call

By Trevor Page
As our planet continues to heat up, extreme weather has affected many of us. From the west coast of North America across Europe, the Middle East and Asia to Pakistan and New Zealand, wildfires and flash floods have destroyed homes and property and disrupted the daily lives of millions.

How Development Banks Put Communities at Risk – PODCAST

By Marty Logan
A 2021 World Bank-financed project in Uganda was supposed to help communities to sustainably manage local areas and to cope with the impacts of Covid-19. But at one site, the Toro Semliki Wildlife Reserve, the funding emboldened the Uganda Wildlife Authority. A government body, and the project’s implementing agency, the UWA has long prevented indigenous communities from reclaiming their land near the wildlife reserve.

Sand Poachers Fueling Environmental Harm in Zimbabwe

By Jeffrey Moyo
In Chitungwiza, right next to the highway, 36-year-old Nesbit Gavanga and his five colleagues use shovels as they load trucks with sand. The six apparently are in the business of sand-poaching and openly explain that every other day they engage in running battles with environmental officials who seek to curtail land degradation here. The group’s informal sand quarry lies 25 kilometers southeast of the Zimbabwean capital Harare.

Pakistan’s Climate Catastrophe: Lessons for the World

By Robert Sandford
Monsoon flooding has occurred often in Pakistan but never to the catastrophic extent presently happening. A distinguishing feature of this disaster is that no one blames the flooding’s unprecedented intensity and destructiveness on anything but climate heating. The clear link between the warming atmosphere and the frequency and duration of extreme weather events of this scale should not be lost on the rest of the world.

Eight International Development Priorities for the new UK Prime Minister

By Melissa Leach
The UK’s new Prime Minister (and former Foreign Secretary), Liz Truss, enters Downing Street with a full and urgent in-tray, dominated by the highest inflation rate for 40 years and concerns across the country about the cost-of-living crisis.

The Right Policies Can Protect the Workers of Asia and the Pacific

By Armida Salsiah Alisjahbana
Most of the 2.1 billion strong workforce in Asia and the Pacific are denied access to decent jobs, health care and social protection but there is an array polices and tools that governments can use to remedy these deficiencies and ensure that the rights and aspirations of these workers and their families are upheld and that they remain the engine of economic growth for the region.

Biomethane, the Energy that Cleans Garbage in Brazil

By Mario Osava
The increasing productivity with which humankind generates waste has gained at least one sustainable counterpart: the extraction of biogas from landfills, a growing activity in Brazil.

Special Economic Zones: A Nod Towards Capitalism in Venezuela

By Humberto Márquez
Venezuela is preparing to replicate the experience of Special Economic Zones (SEZs), a mechanism with which more than 60 countries have tried to draw investment and accelerate economic growth, while under its avowedly socialist government a "silent neoliberalism" is gaining ground.

Transforming Girls’ Education, Changing The World

By Helen Grant and Yasmine Sherif
As we approach this year’s Transforming Education Summit, global leaders can and must prioritize expertise and mobilize political will to support efforts to ensure inclusive and quality education for all, especially girls. This is at the heart of Sustainable Development Goal 4 in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, as well as the commitments made in the Charlevoix Declaration and the G7 Declaration on Girls’ Education.

From Worm Composting to Biofuels, the Caribbean Seeks Solutions to Seaweed Influx

By Alison Kentish
In June 2022, swathes of matted, putrid seaweed took over the shores of beaches across the Caribbean. It was the worst seaweed influx reported since 2011, when ocean currents began depositing tons of the brown seaweed, known as Sargassum, across the region, leaving authorities grappling with the severe ecological and economic fallout.

Air Pollution Kills Millions Every Year: Action Needed

By Felix Horne
Tarik, age 42, lives in a village adjacent to a decades-old coal power plant in Bosnia and Herzegovina. On the day we visited, Bosnian cities were some of the most polluted places on Earth. Describing the devastating health toll the air pollution took each year on the village’s older residents he voiced his fear for his aging parents, who had lived there for over 40 years: “The older people in this village are desperate. They put up with this air for months. They don’t get out, they don’t socialize, they can’t get groceries or medication. It’s a terrible existence.”

Monster Monsoon: “Pakistan and Its People Are Paying the Costs of What They Are Not Responsible For.”

By Zia ur Rehman
Pakistan has been going through the worst time of its recent history due to unprecedented colossal monsoon rains and devastating floods. The current floods would have been expected less than once a century, but climate experts claim that what we are seeing today is just a trailer of what’s in store for us if we don’t pay heed to climate change. More than 112 districts are currently afffected and around 30 million people; their property and land are totally devastated. Across the country, where hundreds of thousands of cattle died due to the Lumpy Skin Disease, now more than 727,000 have perished due to floods and rains. The number is increasing rapidly.

Latin America Looks to COP27: ‘The Time to See Ourselves Only as Climate Victims is Over’

By Alejandra Cuéllar
Latin America is already one of the world’s regions hit hardest by the impacts of climate change. Extreme weather events such as droughts, heatwaves, tropical cyclones and floods have caused scores of deaths and severe damage to crop production and infrastructure, as underlined in a recent regional report by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).

Africa Should Trade its Carbon Credits to Fund Renewable Energy – UNECA

By Busani Bafana
Africa needs to trade in carbon credits to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, finance the transition to renewable energy, and boost economic development, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) says.

Humanitarian Crisis Unfolds With Pakistan in the Eye of Fiercest Climate Change Storm

By Zofeen Ebrahim
The heavy and incessant monsoon downpours across Pakistan in the last two months have triggered floods wreaking havoc across the country, submerging entire villages and vast tracts of land and entrapping people. Anything coming in the way of the relentless water is being destroyed, including roads, bridges, and standing crops.

A Tale of the Spanish Neckties and Other Made-in-Europe Things

By Baher Kamal
Shortly before the 25 August approval by the Spanish Parliament of the government’s plan to save energy, the country’s right and far-right opposition parties revived their debate about an earlier suggestion of not wearing neckties in the Spanish Congress and Senate and other official institutions.

Argentina Seeks Elusive Investment to Fully Exploit Shale Gas

By Daniel Gutman
Argentina, which has one of the largest unconventional hydrocarbon deposits in the world, has been forced to import gas for 6.6 billion dollars so far this year.

There’s no Stopping Renewable Power in Chile, but Community Energy Is Not Taking Off

By Orlando Milesi
Renewable energies, especially solar and wind power, are growing inexorably in Chile, driven by large companies. But community generation of alternative energy is not taking off, despite a law promoting it.

Environmental Racism and Social Injustice at Camp Lejeune and Other Military Bases

By Chandler Blythe Duncan
Built in 1942 and still operating today, Camp Lejeune is a military base covering over 153,000 acres in Jacksonville, North Carolina. Shortly after it was founded, it became heavily contaminated with toxic chemicals like perchloroethylene, benzene, trichloroethylene, vinyl chloride, and later on PFAS. However, the military only realized the severity of the issue in 1982, when the Marine Corps discovered volatile organic compounds on base.

“The Worse, The Better” Doctrine and the Melting Ice

By Baher Kamal
‘There is a prevailing doctrine among the right and far-right political parties who are still in the opposition and are most likely to jump to power in those countries where they are not already ruling. It is the doctrine of “the worse things go, the better for us.”
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