The link between urbanization and poverty may be determined by how cities are planned and governed, according to UN reports. Credit: Benjamin Shurance/Unsplash

By Shuli Wong
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 18 2026 (IPS)

Urbanization can help concentrate jobs, services, and investments; however, it can also concentrate unaffordable housing, insecure employment, and unequal exposure to contamination and environmental threats. A recent report from the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, argues that the difference is not urbanization itself, but how cities are planned, governed, and financed.

Elena Díaz Galán’s report, Cities and Poverty, issued earlier in July and examines social exclusion and the structural drivers of poverty in cities. In it, Galán looks at how land use, housing infrastructure, public services, and participation can either exacerbate or mitigate poverty.

In an exclusive interview with Inter Press Service, Anacláudia Rossbach, UN Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director of UN-Habitat, highlighted how the report’s findings closely align with UN-Habitat’s priorities, particularly in how “the central challenge lies not in urbanization itself, but in addressing the inequalities, deprivations and climate risks that accompany it, which affect people differently based on factors such as gender, age, or socio-economic status.”

UN-Habitat’s World Cities Report 2026: The Global Housing Crisis – Pathways to Action paints a bleak picture of the global housing crisis. Worldwide, at least 3.4 billion people lack access to adequate housing, with 1.1 billion people living in slums or informal settlements. As informal settlements become home to a significant and growing share of the world’s urban population, Rossbach emphasized how “informal settlements hold significant potential to contribute to more inclusive and sustainable urban development”. Informal settlements are often characterized by inadequate housing, limited access to basic services, infrastructure deficits, and insecure tenure; however, “they provide housing, livelihoods, social networks, and opportunities for millions of urban residents.”

Addressing Galán’s point in her report that urbanization has the power to reduce poverty or deepen inequality, Rossbach shared how UN-Habitat’s Strategic Plan 2026-2029 focuses on housing, land, and basic services as the foundation for sustainable development.

“We work to ensure that urbanization contributes to improving living conditions and increasing access to adequate housing, while preventing the deepening of existing inequalities and vulnerabilities, particularly for women and other groups that face multiple and overlapping forms of exclusion,” said Rossbach.

The Cities and Poverty report illustrated how poverty and inequality appear in spatial patterns. For example, low-income individuals are often pushed into more outlying and environmentally hazardous areas, leaving them vulnerable and lacking access to services, jobs, schools, and healthcare. Examples within the report illustrated how informal settlements in Dandora and Korogocho, located near Nairobi’s main landfill, are exposed to toxic environments, including polluted air and groundwater. Cycles of poverty often reinforce themselves in informal settlements. For example, in the peri-urban areas of Woldia, Ethiopia, due to the lack of formal water, sanitation, and electricity networks, the price of water can be up to 1,645 percent more than the price paid by those with private water pipes. These examples and additional costs illustrate the unequal cost of urban life. Showing how people who have the fewest resources are often times forced to pay more for lower-quality essential goods and services.

Building off of these points, Rossbach told IPS how UN-Habitat considers participatory in-situ upgrading as the most effective approach for improving living conditions in informal settlements. Instead of focusing on the eradication of settlements, policy responses should build on the social, economic, and environmental potential in these settlements and support their progressive improvement.

As informal settlements house a growing share of the world’s urban population, they hold potential for contributing to more inclusive, sustainable urban planning. Credit: Nikko Balanial/Unsplash

Successful interventions engage residents along all phases, from design, implementation, and maintenance, to ensure that local priorities, needs, and context-based solutions are taken into account. Most importantly, successful interventions require coordinated responses to integrate informal settlements into the wider urban fabric.

“When combined with broader housing policies and planning reforms, participatory in-situ upgrading can contribute to more inclusive, sustainable, and equitable urban development outcomes,” Rossbach said.

The Cities and Poverty report discussed urbanization through the lens of the processes that lead to it and the impact on human rights. Two urbanization models were included, the first of which is the “15-minute city”. The 15-minute city is an inclusive vision of urban development which seeks to ensure that all residents have access within a short walk or bicycle ride to essential daily services and opportunities. Examples include Shanghai’s Anshan Xincun 15-minute community life circles, which have shown increased mobility in the aging population, helping to make more equitable and inclusive cities.

However, greater accessibility within these 15-minute cities can also lead to gentrification. “When neighbourhoods become more attractive and better connected, land values and housing costs can rise, potentially displacing existing residents,” said Rossbach. In order to protect existing residents and ensure that these changes do not lead to displacement or exclusion, Rossbach proposed three principles for protection:

1. Proximity-based planning should help reduce spatial inequalities, not reinforce them.
2. Neighborhood improvements need to go hand in hand with measures to protect housing affordability and tenure security.
3. The communities and residents need to be involved at all levels and should have a meaningful role in deciding what is developed and how.

“The success of a 15-minute city should not be measured only by how quickly people can reach services, but by whether existing residents can continue to live in their communities and benefit from the improvements around them,” said Rossbach.

The second urbanization model discussed was ‘smart cities’. Smart cities utilize digital technologies, big data analytics, and artificial intelligence to improve upon the management and delivery of urban services. However, the report also warns that digitization and smart cities can reinforce existing inequalities and create a sense of double vulnerability where material poverty combines with exclusion from devices, connectivity, and digital skills.

Rossbach discussed how UN-Habitat promotes a “people-centered smart cities approach that puts people and their needs, rather than technology, at the center.” In particular, services and digital services need to be designed to address the realities of low-income neighborhoods and informal settlements, many of which lack affordable connectivity, devices, digital skills, and formal addresses. Most importantly, Rossbach said, “digitization should close existing inequalities, not reinforce them.”

UN-Habitat is working to close these existing inequalities through programs such as the United Nations Innovation Technology Accelerator for Cities (UNITAC). It developed the Building and Establishment Automated Mapper (BEAM), which helps cities better understand informal settlements and fast-growing urban areas by rapidly mapping buildings from aerial imagery. BEAM provides municipalities with better information to plan infrastructure, target upgrading programmes, and improve basic services.

Nonetheless, data itself does not ensure or create more equitable cities. The Cities and Poverty report emphasized how developing human rights indicators are essential, and so are inputting monitoring tools to evaluate the efficiency of government policies and action. Rossbach added that “inclusive digital transformation is about making people visible — both in data and in decision-making”.

Rossbach and Galán, through her report, have called for urban planning that puts human rights at the center. This means promoting affordable housing in well-connected areas, secure tenure, universal basic services, and more equitable investments across neighborhoods. Implementation needs to be people-centered and measured by whether existing residents can remain in their communities and share in the benefits.

IPS UN Bureau Report

On 2 September 2026, UNICEF staff and partners are distributing recreation kits at Child-Friendly Spaces (CFS) at the holding center for children affected by the recent flash floods in Nuwakot District, Bagmati Province, Nepal. Credit: UNICEF/Laxmi Prasad Ngakhusi

By Shreya Komar
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 11 2026 (IPS)

Two weeks after devastating floods struck Nepal, communities across the country are still struggling to meet basic needs as humanitarian efforts continue. The disaster, triggered by a glacial collapse, has become one of Nepal’s deadliest in recent years, leaving widespread destruction in its wake.

As of Wednesday, 1,367 people had been confirmed dead, while 5,132 remained missing, including 587 foreign nationals. 13,646 people have been rescued, but many families are still waiting for news about their loved ones. Search operations remain ongoing, including efforts to reach people who may still be trapped in tunnels and other difficult-to-access areas.

The scale of the destruction has made delivering aid particularly challenging. Floodwaters have damaged homes, roads, bridges, and other essential infrastructure, leaving some communities isolated. The Nepalese government has been using military helicopters to drop aid into areas that remain difficult to reach, while temporary bridges are also being constructed to reconnect communities that have received insufficient assistance.

Families urgently need food, clean drinking water, shelter and access to healthcare. Health services are particularly important for vulnerable groups, including an estimated 1,600 pregnant women who are expected to give birth soon. Ensuring that these women can reach medical facilities and receive appropriate prenatal and emergency care is a major concern.

Mental health support is another pressing need that could become increasingly important as the immediate emergency begins to subside. Survivors have lost homes, livelihoods and, in many cases, family members.

On Wednesday September 9, UN Resident Coordinator for Nepal Lila Pieters Yahia, briefed reporters at UN Headquarters on the ongoing humanitarian efforts by the UN and the Nepalese government.

“People were just so depressed,” Yahia reflected after her visit to the affected communities.

Many people are also coping with the uncertainty of not knowing whether missing relatives are alive. Reuniting separated families and children has therefore become another important part of the humanitarian response.

The United Nations and its humanitarian partners launched a USD 49.6 million flash appeal last Friday to provide life-saving assistance to people affected by the disaster. The appeal is intended to support critical needs including food, clean water, logistics and other immediate relief. So far, approximately USD 22 million has been pledged, leaving a significant funding gap.

The Nepal Red Cross Society is leading much of the humanitarian response, with support from the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, the International Committee of the Red Cross and other humanitarian organizations. Aid is being distributed through a combination of government agencies, community organizations and non-governmental organizations. However, humanitarian officials continue to warn that access remains one of the greatest obstacles to reaching people in need.

Yahia described the destruction as an example of the increasingly severe losses faced by countries vulnerable to climate change. “The devastation Nepal has experienced is an extraordinary, stark illustration of the losses and damages that climate-vulnerable countries are increasingly facing,” she said.

Nepal’s experience has also renewed calls for greater international action on climate change and climate justice. As a mountainous country particularly vulnerable to changing weather patterns and the effects of a warming climate, Nepal faces a disproportionate burden.

Despite the enormous challenges, Yahia says aid is reaching many affected communities, and survivors continue to demonstrate hope. “People are still searching for family members they know they may never find,” she said, highlighting the resilience keeping people strong. Yet thousands of people remain in need, and the destruction of transportation networks means that reaching the most isolated communities will take time.

“My plea tonight to the international community: we need to demonstrate solidarity with the people of Nepal,” Yahia emphasized.

For Nepal, the emergency is far from over. The immediate priority remains saving lives and providing food, water, shelter and access to healthcare. As communities begin the long process of rebuilding, the country will also need sustained international support to recover from one of its most destructive disasters.

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Following the June earthquakes in Venezuela, UNICEF has provided on-the-ground support, scaling up supplies and services to reach vulnerable children and their families. Credit: UNICEF/Francisco Segovia

By Oritro Karim
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 9 2026 (IPS)

Two months after devastating twin earthquakes struck northern and central Venezuela on June 24, the humanitarian community has been on the frontlines, delivering lifesaving aid and focusing efforts on sustainable paths for rehabilitation.

With health and water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) systems pushed to the brink of collapse, the United Nations (UN) and its partners are currently working to restore critical services by distributing essential supplies while closely monitoring recovery conditions.

As of August 28, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) estimated that roughly 1.3 million people have been affected by the earthquakes and will require humanitarian support for the next six months. Approximately 6,509 deaths have been reported as a direct result of the earthquakes, and 60,785 homes were evacuated due to damage or destruction.

The damage to essential civilian infrastructure has been immense and widespread, with the UN reporting damage not only to residential buildings but also to schools, health facilities, and infrastructure related to food production, clean water, and safe spaces for children.

A preliminary assessment by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) places the total losses from direct damage to housing and infrastructure at around US$37 billion, while estimates from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) place the losses at US$6.7 billion— roughly 6 percent of the nation’s total gross domestic product.

Immediately following the earthquakes, UNDP activated RAPIDA—a rapid assessment system that combines satellite imagery, AI-facilitated damage monitoring, exposure databases, and seismic intensity and engineering models—to provide the national government with critical data on the scale of destruction to guide effective recovery efforts.

According to the assessment, the earthquakes generated approximately 2.1 million tonnes of rubble as of mid-July, which has since been integrated into national debris-management planning. By late August, national authorities estimated that roughly 21.61 percent of the total rubble had been cleared.

Despite this progress, living conditions remain highly precarious for millions of Venezuelans. Tens of thousands of people remain displaced across 80 temporary shelters. Rampant overcrowding, unsanitary conditions, and lack of access to basic services have made these facilities breeding grounds for disease outbreaks.

“In the coming weeks, the greatest health risks may stem not only from injuries caused by the earthquakes, but also from disruptions to health services, overcrowded conditions, deficiencies in water and sanitation, and reduced access to vaccination and routine healthcare,” said Jarbas Barbosa, director of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), adding that vaccine coverage was significantly sparse even before the earthquakes.

The UN and its partners have prioritized restoring WASH systems, underscoring the need for access to clean and safe water to prevent disease outbreaks. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) noted that despite substantial gains in access to safe water recorded over the past two months, heavy rains, limited availability of water trucking, and rising operational costs continue to jeopardize lifesaving operations.

“After the catastrophic damage the earthquakes created, the priority has been to ensure that children have access to safe and clean water. But recovery also means ensuring that families can rely on safe water both now and in the future,” said Manuel Rodríguez Pumarol, UNICEF Representative in Venezuela.

“Recovery requires sustaining what works and strengthening the services that families need over the long term. UNICEF will continue providing technical assistance, supplies and operational support so that every child can grow up in a healthy and protective environment,” Rodríguez Pumarol added.

Currently, UNICEF and Venezuela’s Ministry of People’s Power for Water Services are mobilizing efforts to rehabilitate critical water infrastructure in La Guaira—one of the hardest-hit regions. Aiming to reach up to 250,000 people, operations will commence in October and will include reinforcing the Mamo pumping station and the Naiguatá water treatment plant.

As of September 8, UNICEF’s operations have reached at least 16,661 people, including 5,079 children. Several communities so far have been provided with access to safe water, marking a critical turning point in stabilizing health, nutrition, and protection.

In recent weeks, PAHO’s response has transitioned toward immediate emergency interventions and early recovery. Key areas of focus include mental health, maternal and perinatal care, restoring interrupted services, and ongoing support for transitional shelters.

On September 4, PAHO released a situation report detailing its current operations in Venezuela, confirming that it had shipped 41.3 metric tons of medical supplies and medicines to Venezuela, reaching approximately 70,697 people. PAHO and its partners are working to support early detection and response measures while monitoring environmental risks in transitional shelters.

The organization has highlighted the Caracas, La Guaira, Miranda, and Aragua regions as the most vulnerable, noting that these regions require urgent support in prenatal care and family planning, gender-based violence prevention, and rehabilitation services. In response, PAHO has launched a US$23 million appeal to fund lifesaving health interventions for the next six months.

IPS UN Bureau

Farmer Field Day held at Mariira, to demonstrate the different Climate Smart Technologies used in farming. December 22nd, 2022. Murang'a county, Kenya. Credit: 2022 CIAT/Owen Kimani

By Ismahane Elouafi
KIGALI, Rwanda, Sep 3 2026 (IPS)

As leaders gather in Kigali for the Africa Food Systems Forum, they face an urgent question: why do so many proven agricultural innovations still fail to reach the farmers and communities that need them most?

For the first time, Africa is home to the largest number of people facing hunger. This is despite decades of agricultural innovation developed to address the continent’s food and agriculture challenges. Between 2022 and 2024, CGIAR – the world’s largest partnership dedicated to transforming food, land and water systems in a climate crisis – developed more than 470 innovations, reaching at least six million farmers across the continent.

Africa’s food systems challenges are not the result of a lack of innovation. Rather, a set of overlapping, complex and increasingly severe pressures is undermining progress at a critical point in the continent’s transformation.

Climate-driven weather impacts are becoming more frequent and severe. A predicted “super” El Niño in the coming months is forecast to create drier than usual conditions across parts of West and Central Africa. In East Africa, it is forecast to reduce normal rainfall in some regions and to lead to severe rainfall and flooding in others. According to the World Meteorological Organization, Africa is warming faster than the global average.

Escalating conflicts across several African countries are disrupting food supply chains and increasing the risk of severe food emergencies. At the same time, geopolitical instability has driven up the cost of agricultural inputs and transport, creating further barriers to sustainable farming. All this is taking place against a backdrop of reduced funding for agricultural development and an unprecedented decline in international aid to sub-Saharan Africa.

African countries are confronting this confluence of challenges as they begin implementing the new 10-year Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme Strategy and Action Plan (2026–2035), the African Union-led roadmap for transforming the continent’s agrifood systems into more resilient drivers of economic growth, food security and healthy diets.

The roadmap sets the ambition. What is missing is the architecture to make that happen: the “missing middle” between proven agricultural innovation and the large-scale public investment, partnerships and delivery capacity needed to take it to scale.

Bridging this missing middle requires development funders to rethink how they support agricultural innovation. Governments, international financial institutions, multilateral development banks and African development finance institutions must move beyond portfolios of disparate projects and invest instead in coherent innovation pathways. Science and evidence must be integrated from the outset, before investment decisions are made.

Innovation pathways provide a route for moving tried-and-tested solutions to scale. They allow governments, funders, scientific organizations and partners to work together to identify, validate, scale and measure the impact of the most promising innovations.

Bundling complementary innovations into investable packages can also help accelerate deployment and impact, opening opportunities for ambitious young Africans to build firms, provide services and create jobs within their own food systems.

African governments must remain in the driver’s seat throughout this process. That is essential to ensure investments respond to national priorities and align with country agrifood systems investment plans under CAADP.

CGIAR is working to build precisely these connections between country demand, science, finance and delivery. One example is the partnership between CGIAR Scaling for Impact with the African Development Bank to support the Technologies for African Agricultural Transformation (TAAT) and its Clearinghouse. It demonstrates how large-scale development finance and scientific expertise can be brought together to meet national agricultural priorities and deliver proven, science-backed technologies at scale.

The TAAT Clearinghouse connects country demand and AfDB financing with proven innovations, CGIAR expertise and the technical support needed for effective delivery. It is currently linking approximately US$1.5 billion in AfDB-backed investments in Nigeria, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo with science-backed technologies and expertise.

In 2026 alone, CGIAR innovations funded and scaled through the TAAT Clearinghouse are expected to reach 3.4 million farmers across the continent.

The Africa Food Systems Forum must therefore be more than a place to showcase promising ideas. It should be a critical inflection point for moving from commitment to credible investment, action and delivery. African policymakers, investors, development finance institutions and researchers should use the Forum to build a more systematic science-to-finance compact—one that places proven innovation at the heart of national investment and delivery.

In an era of less aid and greater instability, Africa cannot afford for proven science to remain stranded in pilot projects—or for billions in development finance to be invested without the best available evidence. Connecting the two is one of the fastest ways to turn Africa’s food systems ambitions into results at scale.

Dr. Ismahane Elouafi is Executive Managing Director, CGIAR

IPS UN Bureau

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Homes and roads are covered in mud in Nuwakot District, Nepal, after devastating flash floods swept through central northern Nepal. Credit: UNICEF/Laxmi-Prasad-Ngakhusi

By Oritro Karim
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 1 2026 (IPS)

On the morning of August 26, an unprecedented series of flash floods struck Nepal and the Tibet Autonomous Region of China, causing immense destruction, killing hundreds of civilians and leaving thousands missing. Entire neighborhoods have been buried underwater and beneath mud as the Nepalese government and humanitarian organizations rush to provide emergency assistance.

“My family members were swept away by the flood in front of my eyes,” Kalpana Malla from Nepal’s Nuwakot district told reporters. “They could not escape the flood; there was no chance at all. This flood took everything, but my son and I climbed the rooftop of a house and survived, but couldn’t explain how.”

Although the direct cause of the floods is currently unknown, figures from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) indicate that the floods were caused by a significant glacial collapse, after previously reporting they were caused by a magnitude 4.4 earthquake. Marking a magnitude 5.2 seismic event, the subsequent debris flow and downstream collapse of seismic waves crashed over the Nepal-China border, destroying buildings and roads along the Trishuli River.

“Initial analysis of before-and-after satellite images now suggests that part of a glacier collapsed high in the mountains,” said Professor Liz Stephens, Professor in Climate Risks and Resilience at the Department of Meteorology at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, noting that the stability of high-mountain environments is increasingly threatened by the global impacts of climate change. She adds that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has “high confidence” that similar “complex cascading events” could occur in the future if underlying climate factors are not addressed soon.

Entire regions in Nepal have been rendered inaccessible due to heavy flooding and mudslides, which destroyed at least 35 bridges, affected over 40 kilometers of roads, and disrupted telecommunications and electricity services in roughly 10 percent of the total affected areas. The hardest-hit regions are the Rasuwa district near Kathmandu in northern Nepal, the Nuwakot district in central-northern Nepal, and the towns of Timure, Rasuwagadhi, and Syabrubesi. According to figures from the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), roughly 10,000 households are in dire need of emergency assistance, with many families stripped of basic services, such as shelter, food, water supply, and access to healthcare.

Last week on August 27, Lila Pieters Yahia, the United Nations (UN) Resident Coordinator in Nepal, informed reporters during a press briefing at the UN Headquarters that at least 359 people had been killed, while 73 additional civilians had been hospitalized, though some have since been released. Yahia also stated that approximately 910 civilians remain missing, though various media outlets report the figure exceeds 1,300. Since then, Nepal officials have confirmed 900 deaths and over 4247 missing.

These numbers are projected to fluctuate in the coming days as aid personnel increasingly access isolated areas. Of those unaccounted for, Yahia noted that roughly 517 are foreign nationals spanning over 30 countries—including hundreds from China and India, alongside approximately 90 from the United States.

“Everyone in a mountain valley faces the same hazards, but tourists are more vulnerable because they may not recognize the danger or understand local warnings,” said Dr. Fatima M. Pillosu, hydrometeorologist and flash floods researcher from the Department of Meteorology at the University of Reading. “Visitors from regions where such events are rare may not appreciate how fast a mountain river can rise, nor that these valleys also face avalanches, landslides and floods from melting glaciers, even in dry weather. Knowing in advance what can happen, and what to do if it does, is one of the most useful protections.”

Children in Nepal are among the hardest-hit populations, with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimating that at least 17,000 children have been impacted. UNICEF has recorded the destruction of at least 18 schools and damage to 20. Roughly 10,000 school-age children are projected to require urgent support to continue their education, including new learning materials, access to temporary learning centers, and psychosocial support services for both children and teachers.

“Children across Rasuwa and Dhading saw their lives being literally washed away in front of their eyes in a very short span of time, with homes, classrooms, and medical facilities damaged,” said Alice Akunga, the UNICEF representative to Nepal. “Children who have survived the floods now face heightened risks of disease, malnutrition, violence and exploitation,” she said.

Yahia informed reporters that the UN and its partners are currently on the ground, providing direct support to vulnerable communities while simultaneously conducting assessments to determine the exact scale of needs. Currently, the World Food Programme (WFP) is positioned to provide equipment and emergency rations to communities on the frontlines of the crisis. Additionally, two staff members from the World Health Organization (WHO) are distributing tents, logistics support, and medical kits for about 10,000 people for roughly three months.

Although the UN has identified potential risk for additional flooding in areas of Nepal on August 27, it is working closely with the Nepalese government to scale up its life-saving operations across health, nutrition, water, sanitation, protection, and education.

In the wake of the disaster, both countries and UN entities have begun sending emergency supplies and funding for the relief efforts in Nepal. UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Tom Fletcher announced that USD 2 million would be allocated from the UN Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF).

The U.S. State Department has pledged to send a disaster response advisor along with USD 500,000 in aid. Yahia also confirmed that Switzerland has sent more than USD 600,000 for aid, and other countries such as Japan, Australia and the United Kingdom have pledged to send aid funding and supplies in the days to come. Regional neighbors, such as India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, have begun sending emergency supplies.

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Drylands landscape near Kitui, Kitui County - Kenya. Credit: Axel Fassio/CIFOR

By Éliane Ubalijoro and Salina Abraham
NAIROBI, Kenya, Sep 1 2026 (IPS)

Open a can of something fizzy and the reason the sugar doesn’t separate immediately is gum arabic, tapped by hand from acacia trees across the Sahel. Spray on perfume and the reason the scent is still there at dinner is frankincense, a resin cut from Boswellia trees on the dry escarpments of the Horn of Africa. The fat that gives a chocolate bar its snap may well be shea, gathered and pressed by women in the parkland belt of West Africa. The cashmere jumper came from goats that can only be raised on cold, dry rangelands.

These are drylands. They cover 44 per cent of the planet’s land, hold 44 per cent of the world’s cropland and half its livestock, and two billion people live in them. We have spent decades describing them as empty or unproductive. For a long list of things most of us use without thinking, they are the only places on earth that produce them at all.

It is no secret that our world is becoming hotter and drier. Three quarters of the planet’s land experienced drier conditions in the last 30 years than the previous 30. This year’s El Niño is intensifying fast, compelling the world to look back at what dryland systems already know. Nearly every model now points to a record-strength event: the US Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of a “very strong” El Niño at over 90 per cent for this fall and winter, and a 69 per cent chance it exceeds anything on record since 1950.

Drylands have been living through exactly this kind of shock-and-recovery cycle for generations, and their playbook offers real lessons. Farmers in places that have always been able to count on rain are beginning to face a question that dryland farmers answered generations ago: what do you grow, and how, when the water is not guaranteed?

Dryland systems are the longest-running operating record anywhere of producing value under conditions of scarcity, volatility and shock. These landscapes are home to generations of knowledge on how to thrive with limited water and high variability. This includes practices such as spreading risk across several crops and animals rather than betting the season on one, understanding land closely enough to move livestock before the pressure is too much, and building income that arrives at different times of the year so a bad month is not a ruined one. These are powerful lessons needed now.

Now is the time to listen and learn from dryland communities, practices, and regenerative production models. When this wisdom, data, and experience serve as our foundation, we can transition to sustainable business models and unlock investments to power our future world using knowledge that already exists in the places we have been calling marginal.

Mongolia, the host of the recently concluded UN’s COP17 talks under the Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), is a case in point. Three quarters of Mongolia’s land is already classified as degraded or at risk. However, Mongolian herders supply 40 per cent of the world’s raw cashmere, increasingly innovating to shift away from an extractive model to practices that generate diverse value, from wool to grass-fed meat, examples of what a healthy landscape can offer.

In northern Ghana, the Ojoba Women’s Shea Cooperative processes shea butter by hand in the arid Upper East Region, using a skill passed down through generations. They now supply international buyers including L’Occitane and Lush.

In both instances, the land already had value, and the skills already existed within the communities. What was missing was a route to the market willing to pay for them. These initiatives demonstrate what is possible when investment is designed around the realities and value in drylands.

Investment can take many forms: from financing cooperatives through the shift to new practices; insurance that pays out on rainfall; water and energy infrastructure that keeps a harvest sellable in extreme heat. There is growth potential beyond raw commodities too; processing into oils, powders, waxes compounds the returns. And payments for ecosystem services, from stored carbon, biodiversity and watershed protection, sit alongside that.

Donors like the European Union have already recognised the value of drylands with the €20 million Thrivelands initiative, led by Landscape Alliance, to build the coalitions and action this work needs; including innovations needed to protect and restore land. These innovations range from the tools to monitor and restore soil health accurately to the Land Degradation Surveillance Framework and the Regreening Africa app, which brings this data into the hands of farmers.

But public funding alone cannot unlock the drylands opportunities. Adapting to a drier world means restoring a broken nature finance system and closing the $700 billion finance gap to apply proven expertise across a growing area.

Many companies already depend on drylands through what they source, without having assessed how much of their supply comes from them. For those in the agrifood, textiles, and cosmetics sectors, investing in restoring and protecting these landscapes is a way to stabilise their supply chains, manage growing levels of risk and meet climate goals.

There is also the question of what inaction costs. Investing in drylands agriculture could avert a 12 per cent reduction in global food production over the next 25 years and prevent the release of about 60 per cent of stored carbon.

COP17 is a reminder of how little time is left. The UNCCD finance framework closes in 2030, with 82 per cent of the cumulative need for finance unmet. Time is running out to leverage the lessons from drylands to protect future food security. The gap between what is needed and what is being invested remains enormous.

The landscapes on which our future depends may be getting drier, but they are not devoid of opportunity. With science and innovation that enhances traditional knowledge, they are saturated with opportunities to bolster food security and climate resilience.

Dr Éliane Ubalijoro, chief executive officer of Landscape Alliance
Salina Abraham, Head of Thrivelands, Landscape Alliance

IPS UN Bureau

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Char residents crossing the Jamuna River by boat (Stock photo, 2016).

By Mohammad Zaman
DHAKA, Bangladesh, Aug 31 2026 (IPS)

Bangladesh’s riverine and coastal chars have always been landscapes of movement, but climate change is making that movement more violent, frequent, and unequal. The shifting islands of the Jamuna, Brahmaputra, Padma, and other rivers now reveal how climate stress multiplies deprivation, weakens citizenship, and forces char dwellers to absorb the costs of a crisis they did little to create.

After years of researching and writing about Bangladesh’s chars, I see them not as marginal landscapes, but as frontline climate geographies. They show how river erosion becomes repeated displacement, flooding brings livelihood collapse, and administrative neglect heightens vulnerability. Char people rebuild, migrate, and diversify under extreme uncertainty, but their resilience should not be romanticized. It is being stretched by intensifying hazards and institutions still designed for fixed land, fixed addresses, and orderly poverty. This is why the issue should be framed not simply as adaptation to hazards, but as a question of rights. The central problem is not that char dwellers fail to cope with a moving river; it is that institutions repeatedly ask them to cope without secure recognition, services, or protection.

Mohammad Zaman

Chars are marginal because state planning treats them as temporary spaces for poor and landless people. Some estimates suggest that chars cover roughly 8% of Bangladesh’s land area and are home to 15 to 20 million people. For char communities, migration is not a rupture in char life; it is a recurring way of organizing and rebuilding, often annually. But climate change is turning mobility from strategy into necessity. For many char dwellers, migration may begin as seasonal labour, become repeated relocation, and finally harden into permanent detachment from land, kinship, and legal security.

In 2024, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre’s Bangladesh country profile, monsoon floods triggered 1.3 million movements, while its disaster displacement risk reporting records more than 21 million disaster displacements in Bangladesh between 2008 and 2024. Among char people, climate change is felt through household decisions made under pressure: whether to rebuild on the same island, move to another char, keep children in school, or migrate to Dhaka for work. These choices are rational and strategic, but the field of options is narrowing under climate stress, vulnerability, and social exclusion.

Migration from char areas also reflects intelligence and aspiration: young people leave for wages, education, electricity, phones, clinics, and futures beyond subsistence and uncertainty. The tragedy is that climate-stressed households often move without skills, savings, documents, safe housing, or labour protection. The river follows them into the garment line, the rickshaw garage, the brick kiln, the domestic workplace, and the rented slum room.

How should these heightened risks from flooding and displacement be addressed? Adaptation is necessary, but it is not enough. Raised plinths, early warnings, flood-resistant crops and community preparedness may save lives, yet adaptation without land rights, education, healthcare, social protection and safe migration routes becomes a way of managing dispossession. Climate change deepens vulnerability because it strikes people who already lack secure tenure, dependable services and political recognition.

In Bangladesh, climate policy should stop treating char dwellers as humanitarian exceptions and start treating them as political subjects. Public services must be redesigned for moving landscapes through boat schools, mobile clinics, digital civil registration, portable social protection, and weather-responsive transport. Land administration must recognize erosion and accretion, while migration should be planned as adaptation through skills training, safe housing, labour rights, and social insurance. Gender must be central to this agenda. Women and girls often carry these risks most directly, through interrupted schooling, unsafe travel for work or services, increased care burdens during floods, and reduced voice in decisions about land, migration, and relief. Policies that imagine the household as a single male-headed unit misread both vulnerability and agency.

The politics of the char is the politics of who counts in a warming world. Fixed maps assume that citizenship has a stable address and that development follows roads. Char life challenges those assumptions. It shows that climate vulnerability is produced not only by hazards, but by institutions unable or unwilling to recognize lives shaped by unstable land.

Bangladesh can praise char people for endurance, or it can confront the uncomfortable truth: the river will keep moving; that is its nature. But if the rights of char people move more slowly than the river, the failure is political. Their future will not be secured by teaching them to adapt endlessly to disappearance, but by ensuring that no citizen has to prove belonging on land that may not be there tomorrow.

The experience of Bangladesh’s char dwellers shows that climate change is not only an environmental crisis, but also a crisis of rights, recognition, and governance. River erosion, floods, and displacement become devastating because they intersect with insecure land tenure, weak services, gendered risks, and limited political voice. A just response must therefore go beyond short-term adaptation and treat char communities as full citizens whose mobility, livelihoods, and claims to belonging deserve protection in a warming and increasingly unstable world.

Dr. Mohammad Zaman has lived and conducted extensive field research in the Kazipur-Sirajganj chars and has written widely on char land tenure, livelihoods, and social organization. He is the lead editor, with Mustafa Alam as co-editor, of Living on the Edge: Char Dwellers in Bangladesh (Springer, 2021). He can be reached at mqzaman.bc@gmail.com.

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Lake Chungará and Parinacota volcano in northern Chile
Credit: Gerd Breitenbach, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

By Céline Delacroix
OTTAWA, Canada, Aug 28 2026 (IPS)

This week is World Water Week, the annual conference of governments, business, and civil society on building a water-secure future as global population, climate disruptions, and water demand increase. In Washington, it’s also Water Resources Development Act season, when every two years the US Congress reauthorizes the legilslation that funds US drinking water, wastewater systems, and flood risk management projects.

Water security ought to be something everyone can agree on, and there are long traditions of bipartisanship in past WRDA reauthorizations, and of diversity and inclusiveness in World Water Week conferences. But these days, water is increasingly a trigger for division, from the public outcry over data center water usage to anti-abortion activists introducing legislation to designate the abortion medication mifepristone as a water pollutant and get the US Environmental Protection Agency to regulate it, which is another way to restrict access to it.

For the record, mifepristone is no threat to waterways. Research overwhelmingly confirms its safety and efficacy, and a Food and Drug Administration assessment found its environmental accumulation in water was less than one part per billion. The lone study alleging mifepristone is a water pollutant is junk science. It used a debunked testing method and was published in a journal run by anti-abortion activists, and then cited by other anti-abortion activists.

While the mifepristone water scare is clearly disinformation, it’s so pointedly backwards that it points up an important truth: it isn’t abortion medication that threatens water security; on the contrary, it’s attacks on it and on family planning in general that pose a real threat.

There are several reasons for this. If family planning access is curtailed or cut off and birthrates rise, so will water demand and water stress. It will be worse in places with faster population growth, and worse globally for women and girls, who are the ones who have to collect the water in 80% of households experiencing shortages. Over 2 billion people lack safely managed drinking water. Women and girls suffer disproportionately from water shortages, yet they are generally excluded from decision making bodies or leadership positions that would give them a say in managing water.

In general, research shows that where gender disparities are high, women have more babies, population grows faster, and water scarcity gets worse. But the reverse is also true: where there is investment in and access to comprehensive family planning, and where women and girls are more empowered and included in decision making about managing water resources, over time birth rates decline, water stress eases, and water resiliency grows.

It ought to be obvious that population trends, changing demographics, and urbanization influence demand for water, food, energy, and land. Yet they are strangely absent from discourse on managing environment resources, including water governance. Ditto for gender inequality, which has a strong bearing on population growth.

The UN warns of “living beyond our hydrological means” amid water crisis and reaching “global water bankruptcy,” where water degradation has largely become irreversible. Population and gender issues are not controlling factors in this per se, as their impacts depend on patterns of production and consumption, technology, inequality and governanceThe same number of people can have radically different environmental footprints depending on where and how they live.

But population trends and gender equity are still important variables in how we use water and other resources that planners should not ignore. As human numbers and consumption levels rise, our ecological footprint, including water consumption, has become overwhelming and unsustainable.

This year, the Earth as a whole reached “overshoot day” – the day past which we’re consuming more in a given year than the Earth’s resources can regenerate — on July 30. The U.S. reached it March 14.

Climate change is intensifying drought, altering precipitation and snowpack, putting pressure on groundwater and surface water. For xample, fast regional population growth and development have stressed the Colorado River, which supplies roughly 40 million people and now faces severe and persistent shortages. In other water-stressed regions of the US, agriculture is the biggest consumer of shrinking water resources. The Ogallala Aquifer, for example, is getting depleted faster than it can naturally recharge.

Population dynamics are part of this complex picture. Water resources are embedded in an intricate web of human and ecological interaction. Water governance needs to take a broad, holistic view to understand the nexus of biodiversity, food production, and human needs and health as part of the same interconnected system of planetary health. Within that, managing water requires considering how population trends, human behavior, gender equity, technology, and human-caused climate change influence water systems.

The last thing policymakers should be doing is demonizing family planning as some kind of threat to the water supply. Reproductive health services are an intrinsic matter of human right, but they have critical environmental co-benefits, too, including easing population pressures on overtaxed water resources.

Managing water is not just about pipes and pumps; it’s about complex interactions between humans and ecosystems, managing them so they respect ecological limits as well as human rights and equity, which ultimately are all part of the same complex web. Water connects everything. Policymaking should too.

Céline Delacroix is adjunct professor at the University of Ottawa’s School of Health Sciences, a Senior Fellow with the Population Institute, and Director of the FP/Earth Project.

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Photo highlighting the activities and successes of the 'Promoting Nature-based Solutions for Land Restoration while Strengthening National Monitoring Technical Working Group in Kenya: Phase 2' project funded by UK PACT. Credit: Anthony Ochieng/CIFOR-ICRAF

By Lulseged Tamene Desta and Cargele Masso
NAIROBI, Kenya, Aug 26 2026 (IPS)

Several coalitions exist today to defend the territories in which people live and work. Global leaders have long understood the importance of shared responsibility for collective security and have invested significant time in establishing networks, partnerships and alliances. In 2025, global spending on defense reached a record $2.9 trillion.

But the global community is increasingly recognizing that today’s gravest existential risks arise from a war being waged against nature itself – and our defenses are woefully fragmented and underfunded. The world is investing only about $220 billion a year for nature-based solutions, compared to $7.3 trillion for nature-negative activities.

This is not just a discrete, isolated environmental concern. The triple planetary crises of land degradation, biodiversity loss and climate change are worsening food insecurity, water scarcity and ecosystem collapse, threatening millions of lives.

Collectively, the impact of the ongoing assault on nature is amplifying conflict, worsening migration, driving inflation higher, and fomenting geopolitical instability. Unless restoration and sustainable management of resources is in place, the world is expected to lose more than US$23 trillion by 2050, while halting this trend would cost around $4.6 trillion.

Many solutions to these interconnected crises exist but have been ineffective to date. Limited coordination and collaboration between countries, sectors and disciplines, as well as insufficient resources and short-term approaches to long-term challenges, mean we are far behind the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Despite compelling evidence of the costs of degradation, investment remains far below what is needed because opportunities are rarely presented as credible, investable propositions.

To change this, two things must happen. First, governments, international agencies, academia and civil society must unite through a grand coalition to bring together those currently working in isolation to achieve greater impact than the sum of their parts – a kind of mutual pact to protect nature.

Photo highlighting the activities and successes of the ‘Promoting Nature-based Solutions for Land Restoration while Strengthening National Monitoring Technical Working Group in Kenya: Phase 2’ project funded by UK PACT. Credit: Anthony Ochieng/CIFOR-ICRAF

And second, this grand coalition must also engineer a funding paradigm shift from focusing on environmental challenges to investing in the many opportunities of conservation and restoration.

The ongoing UN COP17 desertification talks in Mongolia, where the theme is “Restoring Land, Restoring Hope”, is the perfect opportunity to progress this.

Evidence shows that integrated approaches to address landscape degradation solve multiple interconnected challenges.

For example, investment in soil and water conservation in the Adarsha watershed in southern India has been found to improve water availability, agricultural productivity, and rural livelihoods. Analysis showed that yields of maize intercropped with pigeonpea increased by 148% while households in the watershed were less affected by droughts compared to those in the non-watershed area.

In Kenya and Tanzania, the adoption of Participatory Rangeland Management improved rangeland condition and resilience to climate shocks for more than 90% of participating communities.

Despite evidence from these successes, these interventions are not being invested in and applied at the scale needed to transform the world’s food, land and water systems in ways that can build long-term, far-reaching resilience.

Countries, donors, financing institutions and civil society must come together in a grand coalition to direct the coordination, governance and investment necessary to tackle these crises where they all interconnect: at the landscape level.

A grand coalition would offer a dedicated focal point to integrate and advance the UN’s goals for climate, biodiversity and land degradation, allowing for stronger coordination and shaping the global agenda for informed decision-making. Critically, the coalition would lead the redirection away from ineffective, siloed solutions and the self-defeating environmental trade-offs they create.

A grand coalition would also create a platform for establishing the rigorous systems of governance essential to achieving global goals for nature, including fair and inclusive land tenure and governance over water systems. Understanding the true cost of landscape governance and inaction is instrumental for adequate investments.

Lastly, a grand coalition would gather the evidence to help shift the emphasis of finance for nature towards investments that benefit everyone. By identifying a menu of options for turning grand challenges into grand opportunities, the coalition would unlock the financing from banks, donors, philanthropies and other development funders needed to scale interventions globally.

The UNCCD COP17 talks in Mongolia is not just an opportunity to address the challenges facing land. It’s a moment to foster unity around a shared threat to all of our territories. CGIAR and its partners will play its part by developing an investment plan to anchor greater coordination in collaboration with the grand coalition of action for shared human and planetary outcomes.

Landscapes are where our greatest environmental and human challenges today are playing out, from declining biodiversity to the deforestation driving climate change, to increasing levels of food insecurity.

Investing in multifunctional landscapes through a unified global coalition, therefore, is not simply an environmental imperative for the world, but also a strategic one. Galvanizing support for landscape-centered solutions can simultaneously reduce future risks and strengthen economies and communities.

A global coalition for restoring and protecting landscapes would recognize a defining reality of the 21st century: protecting nature is fundamental for protecting us all.

Dr. Lulseged Tamene Desta, is Director of the CGIAR Multifunctional Landscapes Science Program
Cargele Masso, is Director of the CGIAR’s Environmental Health and Biodiversity Impact Area Platform

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Downpours flood the streets of Dhaka. Credit: Farid Ahmed/ IPS

By Mohammad Zaman
DHAKA, Bangladesh, Aug 13 2026 (IPS)

Dhaka’s recent and recurrent flooding is often treated as a natural disaster, but rain is only the trigger. The deeper causes are political, planning and ecological failure: wetland loss, canal encroachment, unplanned growth, weak enforcement, fragmented institutions and short-term engineering fixes. Dhaka is not drowning because it rains; it is drowning because it has been built as if water had nowhere to go.

Historically, Dhaka was part of a watery landscape of rivers, canals, ponds, floodplains and low-lying retention areas. These were not vacant lands; they were essential drainage infrastructure that stored rainwater, slowed runoff and carried excess water toward surrounding rivers. As the city expanded, this blue-green network was filled, narrowed or severed, leaving drains unable to cope even with moderate rainfall.

Mohammad Zaman

Drains and canals have also deteriorated. Many are clogged with waste, narrowed by illegal structures or disconnected from smaller drains. Box culverts, often promoted as modernisation, have in some places buried waterways rather than restoring them as living drainage corridors. Drainage fails not only because pipes are small, but because the wider hydrological system has been cut apart.

Climate change adds pressure through shorter, heavier and less predictable rainfall, but it should not excuse bad planning. World Bank work on urban flooding in Greater Dhaka has warned that the city already has an adaptation deficit. The real problem is that Dhaka has reduced its own capacity to absorb shocks, treating flooding as a pipe-sizing seasonal issue rather than a citywide water-management challenge.

The consequences appear first in transport paralysis. When major roads in Mirpur, Dhanmondi, Green Road, Motijheel, Shantinagar, Old Dhaka and other areas go underwater, commuters lose hours, public transport stalls and businesses suffer. The cost includes damaged vehicles and inventories, delayed logistics, lost productivity and the daily stress of moving through a city that cannot function after rain.

Flooding also deepens inequality. Low-income residents in informal and low-lying settlements face contaminated water entering their homes, loss of daily income, damaged belongings and higher disease risk. Floodwater mixed with sewage, waste and pollutants increases infections and waterborne illness. The poor pay twice: through greater exposure and weaker access to healthcare, savings and political voice.

The scale of impact shows this is not a seasonal inconvenience. A 2023 GIS and remote-sensing study found that almost 35 percent of Dhaka falls within high or very high waterlogging-vulnerability zones, with slum households disproportionately concentrated there. Recent rainfall confirms the risk: Dhaka recorded 130 millimetres of rain in six hours on 12 July 2024, while another episode brought 196 millimetres in 24 hours in 2025, submerging major roads despite large drainage investments.

Infrastructure spending has not produced resilience. The two Dhaka city corporations reportedly invested more than Tk 262 crore over four years up to 2024 to build 334.19 kilometres of drains, box culverts and related infrastructure, yet large areas still flooded. Planning data show that Dhaka lost 3,440 acres out of 9,556 acres of designated flood-flow zones, retention areas and waterbodies since the 1995 Detailed Area Plan, while central-city waterbodies reportedly fell from 20.57 percent in 1995 to 2.9 percent in 2023. The city is paying to drain water while allowing the systems that make drainage possible to disappear.

This failure is reinforced by institutional fragmentation. Responsibility is divided among Dhaka WASA, the two city corporations, RAJUK, the Bangladesh Water Development Board and others. Each controls part of the problem, but no single body manages the full catchment: drains, canals, retention areas, pumps, river outfalls and land-use control. The result is scattered action followed by renewed flooding.

Weak enforcement makes plans meaningless. Master plans and Detailed Area Plans have identified flood-flow zones, retention ponds and wetlands, yet these areas continue to disappear under housing, roads and commercial development. Encroachment survives because it is profitable, politically protected or administratively tolerated.

Accountability is also weak. Spending is reported, but outcomes are rarely evaluated. Dhaka does not need another narrow drainage project; it needs the political courage to enforce existing plans, recover waterways and protect the remaining wetlands.

The city must treat canals, wetlands, ponds and flood-flow zones as critical public infrastructure. Remaining wetlands should be protected, encroached canals demarcated and recovered, and major waterways restored as open drainage corridors connected to surrounding rivers. Dhaka also needs an integrated flood-management platform with clear authority over land-use approvals, canal recovery, drainage investment, pump operation, solid-waste control and emergency response.

Future planning must also centre vulnerable communities. Informal settlements, low-income neighbourhoods, street vendors, schoolchildren and daily-wage workers face the harshest effects but are rarely treated as planning partners. Community reporting of blocked drains, health warnings, emergency transport plans and compensation for repeated losses should be part of resilience policy. A flood-safe Dhaka requires ecological restoration, institutional discipline and social justice.

Dhaka’s flooding is a warning about planning against nature. The city has tried to engineer its way out of a crisis created by land conversion, institutional weakness and ecological neglect. Until it restores and governs its blue-green network as essential infrastructure, each monsoon will bring the same result: a megacity halted by rain it once knew how to live with. The choice is no longer between development and drainage; it is between protecting people and flooding them in the name of progress.

Dr. Mohammad Zaman is an international development consultant whose work across Asia and Africa focuses on social safeguards, displacement, resettlement and inclusive development. He lives in Vancouver, Canada, and can be reached at: mqzaman.bc@gmail.com

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By Jan Lundius
ROME, Aug 10 2026 (IPS)

World News are more or less currently fully occupied with the U.S. – Iran debacle and to a lesser degree the Gaza genocide, the on-going war in Ukraine, and to an even lesser degree the one in Sudan.

When Trump and Netanyahu recently met it is likely that the situation on the West Bank was not even on the agenda. This is the reality of international high-level politics and press reporting. Too much cannot remain in focus and certain essentials are simply forgotten, or remain under-reported. Nevertheless, this fact doesn’t hinder unrest and glaring injustice from smouldering in some places, being on the verge of exploding at any time, with devastating results. The West Bank is such a place and strangely enough do the majority of Israelis and U.S. decision makers not appear to realize the presence of an enormous powder keg of suppressed frustration that could detonate at any moment. An astonishing reality particularly considering Israel’s bloody war on Gaza, which still has not come to an end after the death of approximately 72,600 Palestinians (of which 21,280 have been children) and 2,040 Israelis.

Since 1967, the West Bank has been under Israeli occupation, a circumstance rendered illegal under international law. This unresolved situation has made 2,748,000 Palestinians prisoners in their own land, while a rising number of 670,000 Israeli settlers have illegally occupied their territory, claiming their right to drive away or marginalize the Palestinians while adhering to a belief that a land that “belonged to them” two thousand years ago now can be used as defence for ethnic cleansing.

Settler actions against resident Palestinians are generally unchallenged by the occupying Israeli administration and are creating what has been called a “coercive environment”, which compels Palestinians to leave, often followed by the establishment of new settler outposts.

A 2026 Le Monde investigation noted that since 2020 Israeli courts have not given jail sentences to any Israeli settler found responsible for killing Palestinian civilians and in 2026 The Times of Israel documented that in recent years 99 percent of complaints made against Israeli soldiers by Palestinian civilians were closed without indictment. As of 20 July, this year, 18 Palestinians have died on the West Bank during attacks involving settlers. In the last three years, from 2023 to 2025, 1,244 Palestinians – including 268 children – have been killed on the West Bank.

Many disputes between settlers and permanent Palestinian residents concern water inequality. On the occupied West Bank, Israeli settlers consume on average about seven times more water than Palestinians, whose levels generally fall below the minimum of WHO recommendations for clean water access. This leads us to Omar Mwannes Yaghi, who together with two other scientists in 2025 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. His life story reveals two aspects of Israeli treatment of Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. First, the prejudiced attacks on an entire ethnic group during which individuals are mistreated and killed irrespective if they belong to a hostile, fighting force or not. As member of a Palestinian refugee family, a person like Yaghi could easily have been killed if he had been born in Gaza, instead of in a refugee camp in Jordania. Secondly, Yaghi proves the worth of an individual irrespective of his/her ethnic origin. In the future, the achievements of Omar Mwannes Yaghi might prove to be inconceivably much more important for the survival of humankind than those of a Netanyahu, or a Trump.

Omar Mwannes Yaghi was in 1965 born in a refugee camp outside of Amman, within an impoverished crowded household with many children, all living in a single room that also housed the family’s cows and goats. What in particular tormented them was their limited access to clean water.

As a young boy, who recently had learned to read and write, Omar happened to visit a library where he became fascinated by the coloured plates illustrating chemical bonds, an experience that made him decide to become a chemist. He did very well in school and already as a fifteen-year-old he received a royal grant making it possible for him to travel to the U.S. and study at Hudson Valley Community College, from which he graduated in 1983 with an Associate of Science in Mathematics and Science. Eventually, he ended up in Berkeley as a professor at the University of California.

Omar Yaghi is best known for his work in the field of molecular “weaving”, part of what has become known as reticular chemistry, which assembles molecular building blocks to create crystalline, large, strong bonded, and porous, metal-organic frameworks called MOFs. Such MOFs can be used to create clean energy technologies, including hydrogen and methane storage, carbon dioxide capture (that might contribute to the mitigation of climate change), and the harvesting of water from desert air, thus reducing the world’s ever-increasing thirst for clean water.

In July 2026, Omar Yaghi left the U.S. to lead an artificial intelligence and material science research institute at Tsinghua University in Beijing. One important reason for this was the increasingly insecure federal funding to research in the U.S., combined with expanding international recruitment initiatives by China.

Omar Mwannes Yaghis’ life story proves the fact that every human life matters and that a poor refugee child can grow up to become a person whose research might contribute to save the entire world from disaster and improve the wellbeing of us all. Furthermore, it highlights the extreme importance of funding and providing unbiased, international, basic and advanced research. It also proves that Palestinians, particularly children, ought to be treated with dignity and respect, deserving a place to live in peace and prosperity, with access to education, which great value has been proven by the Nobel Laureate Omar Mwannes Yaghis.

Main sources: Mandraud, Isabelle (2026) “En Cisjordanie, l’impunité absolue des colons israéliens ayant commis des crimes,” Le Monde, 17 avril. Sharon, Jeremy (2026) “Less than 1% of complaints against soldiers in West Bank lead to charges, data shows,” Time of Israel, 27 January. Yaghi, Omar (2019) Harvesting Water from Desert Air: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOOVBKWRLxk, and (2018) Reticular Chemistry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OS_VI-8sMF0

This is part 1 of an analysis of the connection between youth movements and political change; part 2 will analyze how youth-led revolutions have changed political scenarios globally.

IPS UN Bureau

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People collect signatures against the construction of a massive Mitsui Fudosan datacentre in Hino City, Tokyo, 19 April 2026. Credit: Yasushi Wada/The Yomiuri Shimbun via AFP

By Andrew Firmin
LONDON, Jul 20 2026 (IPS)

Few things unite Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters with the Democratic Party’s progressive wing, but datacentres are one of them. Across the USA, communities are joining forces across the political divide to oppose developments few want but governments seem determined to impose.

Michigan residents are among those who’ve come together across party lines to oppose plans for over a dozen datacentres. Polling shows just 28 per cent of the state’s population support the proposals. Local communities are fighting back, and similar struggles are unfolding across the world.

Datacentre impacts

Datacentre construction is booming, driven by AI use, demanding increasing computing power that requires huge amounts of electricity and water for cooling.

A single question to an AI chatbot can use 10 times more energy than a conventional search. Generating an AI image takes around a thousand times more energy than generating text. The International Energy Agency (IEA) projects that datacentre electricity demand will double by 2030.

In Utah, despite thousands of objections, authorities recently approved one of the world’s largest datacentres. It will need more power than the entire state currently uses. The development will construct a gas-fired plant.

AI growth is driving the construction of such gas-powered plants, meaning that more datacentres cause more greenhouse gas emissions. According to the IEA, coal is currently the top energy source for datacentres and over half of all current datacentre power comes from fossil fuels. The agency expects renewables to eventually provide a bigger share of growing needs, but warns that datacentre demand is driving growth for fossil fuel-generated electricity.

Tech companies once pledged to be climate leaders, but that no longer rings true. Google promised to become net zero by 2030, but its greenhouse gas emissions leapt 48 per cent from 2019 to 2023 as it embraced gas-fired electricity for datacentres. In Mumbai, India, two coal plants due to close in 2024 have had their operational life extended to meet demand from Amazon datacentres. Last December, Irish authorities decided that datacentres can keep using fossil fuel electricity for six more years. The UK intends to burn gas to power over 100 planned new datacentres.

Fossil fuel corporations lobby for datacentres almost as hard as tech companies, because they help perpetuate a destructive business model otherwise threatened by the shift to renewables. Fossil fuel corporations were among Donald Trump’s top campaign backers, and they’re benefiting from his administration’s rollback of regulations and ambition to achieve ‘unchallenged global technological dominance’.

Water supplies are coming under greater strain. One large datacentre can use as much daily water as a town of 50,000 people, yet datacentres are being built in some of the world’s driest regions. Amazon plans to open new datacentres in Aragon, Spain, even as the regional government seeks European Union help for drought. Similar concerns surround plans for one of the world’s biggest datacentres in the United Arab Emirates.

Civil society resistance

The struggle against tech companies and their lobbying riches is an unequal one, but civil society is mounting an increasingly credible response.

Climate litigation is an established civil society tactic, and recent research indicates that lawsuits are an emerging response to datacentre developments, with recent examples in Ireland, the UK and the USA. Civil society groups are also filing objections in planning processes, including one recently lodged against a huge proposed datacentre in Cape Town, South Africa.

Legal action by two UK organisations forced the developer of a huge new datacentre in Buckinghamshire to commit to binding environmental impact mitigation measures. Lawsuits are also exposing how datacentre impacts are often understated and inadequately measured. A 2022 case forced Google to publish accurate water consumption figures for an Oregon datacentre.

Protests and campaigning are bringing successes. In 2023, protests driven by a recent drought forced Google to change plans for a datacentre to reduce water use in Uruguay. Similar protests in Chile caused Google to pause its plans. As of last year, public pressure had led to over US$42 billion worth of datacentre projects being changed, delayed or cancelled in Europe, and US$77 billion worth in the USA.

In the USA, civil society groups have forged alliances with sub-national administrations to develop stronger local environmental and accountability standards. While established politicians aren’t listening, there are signs that US local politics are shifting. Some candidates opposed to datacentres have won, and several local administrations have introduced bans or moratoriums.

Campaign successes are bringing new threats. US industry lobbyists have smeared activists as agents of foreign influence determined to sabotage the country’s technological supremacy. US government documents show a growing focus on what they call ‘anti-technological extremism’, suggesting that security forces may be gathering intelligence on campaigners, and peaceful protesters could be targeted for surveillance on national security grounds.

Tech companies that are driving datacentre development often present themselves as free speech champions. They should prove it by ensuring that wherever they develop, people are able to protest, and hold them to environmental standards. There’s widespread public opposition and no shortage of people bearing the climate and environmental costs of the datacentre boom. Their voices must be heard.

Andrew Firmin is CIVICUS Editor-in-Chief, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

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A Rohingya family is relocated by boat from a flooded refugee camp in Cox's Bazar on July 6 while men fish nearby. Credit: Mohammed Zonaid

By Mohammed Zonaid
COX’S BAZAR, Bangladesh, Jul 10 2026 (IPS)

Landslides and flooding triggered by heavy monsoon rains swept through the world’s most densely populated concentration of refugee camps this week, killing at least 14 Rohingya refugees, most of them women and girls.

Three girls and their teacher were killed in an Islamic learning center hit by a landslide on July 8. At least 10 more refugees were killed in separate landslides in six camps.

Thousands of families in the camps in Cox’s Bazar, southeast Bangladesh, have been relocated to safer places, mostly at learning centers. Hundreds of ‘homes’ – tarpaulin and bamboo shelters – have been destroyed and flooded.

Tragically such disasters are commonplace, especially in the cyclone and monsoon season. The deaths have also prompted the predictable response by aid agencies to call for more funding.

But beyond the immediate effort of rescuing survivors, what is now really needed is an urgent focus on how the money available is actually spent – as revealed in the alarming findings of an audit by the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS).

OIOS Report 2025/084 raises serious concerns over UNHCR’s Rohingya response in Bangladesh in project planning, procurement, monitoring and effective use of humanitarian resources.

Mohammed Ahsom, 22, points to the site of a landslide where he rescued a child and helped to recover bodies in a Cox’s Bazar camp for Rohingya refugees on July 6. Credit: Mohammed Zonaid

As reported recently by the Bangladeshi newspaper New Age, millions of dollars were spent on infrastructure that remained unused; projects overlapped; procurement processes lacked sufficient oversight, and several programs failed to achieve intended objectives.

All this at a time when humanitarian aid is shrinking even while thousands more stateless Moslem Rohingya displaced by ongoing conflict in neighbouring Myanmar continue to arrive, joining a mass exodus of some 700,000 Rohingya who fled a brutal crackdown by the Myanmar military in Rakhine State in 2017.

Among the findings of the audit, a specialized hospital in Ukhiya costing US$1.5 million was built but remained unused. A 20-bed inpatient facility in Bhasan Char, with $140,000 of solar equipment and a $74,301 X-ray machine was also unused. In addition $18,000 was spent on honour boards, $23,000 on staff uniforms, and $27,000 on producing a documentary. The audit highlighted these expenditures as unnecessary while humanitarian needs remained urgent.

Perhaps most shocking, UNHCR spent $182,028 on cutlery (spoons, forks, knives etc) that refugees largely do not use because we traditionally eat with our hands. I have lived in one of the Cox’s Bazar refugee camps since 2017 and never found such things distributed to us.

In contrast, food assistance for most Rohingya refugees has been reduced from $12 to $7 per person per month— the cost of a couple of cups of coffee in many countries where those humanitarian staff are based and making decisions on cuts in food rations.

Informal learning centers that once provided at least a bit of education have in many cases become empty playgrounds. Hospitals built with millions of dollars often provide only basic, low-cost medicines such as paracetamol and omeprazole. A personal example — last year I had to buy Antozal nasal medication for my daughter from a local pharmacy after we waited hours in line to see two highly paid doctors. Later when we went with the prescription, we were told the drugs were not available because of funding cuts.

The audit also found that UN partners spent $4.2 million on shelter materials that UNHCR had already procured. Solar and energy projects costing $194,000, and medicines and medical equipment amounting to $800,000, were also duplicated because of faulty procurement.

The audit noted that eight years into the Rohingya crisis, 67 percent of funding had been spent on immediate humanitarian relief, while only 17 percent was allocated to empowerment and long-term solutions.

As yet UNHCR has not responded to questions by the media over the audit – not for the first time. UNHCR has often been criticized for responding only during major emergencies, such as large fires in the camps that attract international attention and are seen as moments to justify appeals for more funding spent on sustaining UN staff, their salaries and organizational costs.

Major international human rights organizations and international news outlets also show little interest.

Since the Myanmar military and allied Buddhist militia launched the killings and mass displacement of the mostly stateless Rohingya minority in August 2017, the international community has provided more than $5 billion in aid funding. The latest appeal by the Joint Response Plan (JPR) for 2026 is for $710 million.

Yet if you visit the refugee camps today you will find that there is still no formal education system, medical services remain inadequate, and durable shelters have not been built.

Refugees exist in shelters in hilly areas mostly denuded of trees and prone to catastrophic floods and landslides. Around 200,000 newly arrived refugees since 2024 have not been provided with shelter and live in extremely vulnerable conditions.

So my question is simple: Where did the billions of dollars go?

This is not just about the Rohingya in Cox’s Bazar. The JRP for the Rohingya Humanitarian Crisis is led by the government of Bangladesh, the UNHCR and IOM and includes scores of UN agencies and international and national NGOs.

Each year the JRP is supposed to allocate some 20 to 30 percent of its funding to benefit Bangladeshi host communities.

However, many local residents living even within the camp perimeter have never received a bag of rice or an LPG cylinder. Their children have not benefited from livelihood or skills training programs. Many are not even aware that funding has been allocated for host communities.

The time has come to establish independent Quality Assurance and Financial Audit Committees for Rohingya camp operations. These committees should include representatives from relevant UN bodies, the government of Bangladesh, donor countries, independent human rights organizations, and the Rohingya diaspora. Their role would be to ensure that every project is genuinely needed by Rohingya refugees and Bangladeshi host communities, and that they are properly implemented.

Humanitarian assistance should go to the people it is meant to serve—not become a system that primarily sustains thousands of jobs and does not provide for proper independent oversight.

Aid organizations should not be able to evade responsibility, as in these recent disasters, by blaming deaths on lack of funding.

Transparency, accountability, independent oversight and measurable impact must become the foundation of the Rohingya humanitarian response for as long as we Rohingya are not able to return to Myanmar with our rights, safety and dignity.

Mohammed Zonaid is an award-winning Rohingya journalist and photographer, in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh.

mohammedzonaid7@gmail.com

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On 26 June 2026, groups search through rubble in the state of La Guaira, Venezuela, after two major earthquakes on 24 June caused homes and buildings to collapse. Thousands remain unaccounted for, and many may still be searching for loved ones trapped beneath the debris. Credit: UNICEF/Rosali Hernandez

By Oritro Karim
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 7 2026 (IPS)

In recent weeks, Venezuela’s humanitarian situation has deteriorated sharply following the twin earthquakes on June 24. Marking the strongest seismic event since 1990, the earthquakes and subsequent aftershocks have resulted in a significant loss of life, widespread damage to critical infrastructure, and considerable disruption to livelihoods and humanitarian response efforts.

Before these earthquakes, Venezuela was already in the midst of a severe humanitarian crisis defined by economic collapse, political instability, and the disintegration of basic services. As of June 2026, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) estimated that nearly 8 million civilians were in dire need of humanitarian assistance, while the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported over 7.6 million forced displacements due to persistent insecurity.

The earthquakes have severely compounded these preexisting vulnerabilities, with power outages, access constraints, and communications blackouts obstructing emergency, life-saving operations and preventing millions from accessing basic needs. According to figures from the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the total number of civilians in urgent need of humanitarian assistance has skyrocketed to nearly 1.8 million since the earthquakes, including roughly 680,000 children.

According to figures from the Venezuelan government, as of July 5, the death toll stood at over 3000, while over 16740 people have been injured and 17000 have lost their homes. On June 29, Gianluca Rampolla, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Venezuela, told reporters during a press briefing that the death toll “will unavoidably and sadly keep on growing as the search-and-rescue operation continues, and as we are able to detail further assessment of the impacts and quakes.”

Local authorities have recorded 942 aftershocks in the days following the initial earthquakes, with the latest recorded on July 4. La Guaira has been among the hardest-hit regions, with humanitarian experts describing entire neighborhoods reduced to rubble and displaced civilians living in makeshift camps for survival.

“Families across the affected states are in urgent need of safe water, as well as access to health care,” said UNICEF Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean, Roberto Benes. “Many are sleeping outside, afraid of more aftershocks. These supplies will help us reach children and families with what they need most right now…But the needs on the ground are far greater than what’s arrived.”

Doctors and humanitarian experts have raised alarm about the thousands of displaced civilians now residing in overcrowded, unsanitary camps. With civilians facing limited access to clean water and a healthcare system on the brink of collapse, experts warn that the emerging medical crisis will claim more lives if urgent intervention is not secured soon.

“It’s very hot, and there’s a lot of concern about potential vector-borne diseases,” said Veronique Durroux, the Head of Information and Advocacy, Regional Office for Latin America and the Caribbean at OCHA. “Waste management is an issue. Debris management, when you see the scale of devastation, it’s very concerning.”

“The issue we foresee just around the corner is the infections that patients who have been exposed to the disaster for the longest time might bring,” added Eugenio Cova, the head of the trauma unit at Hospital del Oeste Dr. José Gregorio Hernández in Caracas. “We’ve already gone through a period of complex trauma — which will continue to occur — but now it’s complicated by infections.”

Local authorities report that the earthquakes damaged 38 hospitals across the nation, further depleting an already severe shortage of medical personnel, emergency responders, ambulances, and medical equipment. Dr. Huníades Urbina, a board member of the Venezuelan Pediatrics Association, told reporters that the country has only half the number of physicians recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) to meet its needs. He noted that these earthquakes have only further emphasized “the Venezuelan government’s inability to provide an adequate healthcare system that meets the needs of the Venezuelan people.”

A preliminary assessment by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) shows that the earthquakes caused approximately USD 37 billion in direct physical damage to buildings and critical infrastructure. This includes USD 24 billion in direct losses from damage to residential, commercial, industrial, educational, healthcare, and government buildings. Another USD 13 billion in losses was attributed to damage to critical infrastructure, including water and sanitation, telecommunications, roads, railways, energy, ports, airports, oil, and gas.

These losses do not account for indirect production losses, emergency response costs, or costs associated with reconstruction or recovery. Experts project that it will take significant time and a sustained flow of aid to allow for recovery and reconstruction. UNICEF estimates that approximately $52 million is urgently required to adequately respond to the crisis, as part of its 2026 Humanitarian Action for Children Appeal for Venezuela, which has been funded by only 35 percent.

The UN and its partners have been on the frontlines of this crisis since the onset of the earthquakes, helping vulnerable communities access essential services. In La Guaira, OCHA is providing beds, tents, water and sanitation services, primary healthcare, and psychosocial support.

Additionally, OCHA is planning a Rapid Needs Assessment to determine which areas and groups require prioritized assistance. Furthermore, the data collected by this initiative will be used to inform the next phase of the humanitarian response. The Humanitarian Response Plan for Venezuela has received USD 274 million, while over USD 32 million was contributed by the private sector for humanitarian support.

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Farmers planting paddy in Helambu, Sindhupalchowk. Their farming is dependent on precipitation and snow-fed rivers in the region. Credit: Bhagirathi Pandit

By Tanka Dhakal
KATHMANDU, Jul 3 2026 (IPS)

Monsoon season in South Asia, including Nepal, is a period of frequent rainfall, extreme heat, and a busy time of the year for farmers. Most farmers in Nepal depend on monsoon rain to plant paddey, the main source of food.

Puspa Subedi, a farmer from Pokhara‑31, Talbesi, Kaski, in Gandaki Province, is ready for the rice‑planting season.

“In our area, we primarily grow raithane (a local breed of rice), which is more resistant to drought than hybrid species, so we are less concerned about the forecasted dry monsoon,” he said. “Drought does impact our production, but the effect on farmers who are planting hybrid seeds would be more dire.”

Subedi, the coordinator of Sundaridanda Community Seed Bank in Kaski, where they conserve 53 local species of rice seeds, mentioned that monsoon drought is a major concern for most farmers in Nepal.

According to the regional seasonal weather forecast, the Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH) region, also known as the ”Third Pole’, is heading toward a dry monsoon, which will impact agricultural activities in the region, including Nepal. The recently published HKH Monsoon Outlook 2026 projects lower‑than‑normal rainfall and above‑normal temperatures in countries across the region, including Nepal, India, Bhutan, and Pakistan. Scientists warn that intense rainfall in short bursts, rising temperatures, and increasing water stress could make this monsoon particularly dangerous.

“The outlook points to a drier monsoon overall, but that does not mean lower risk,” said Manish Shrestha, a hydrologist at the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD). “Short, intense rainfall events can still trigger serious hazards.”

The map shows the seasonal mean anomaly for the 2026 monsoon in the HKH region. Source: HKH Monsoon Outlook 2026.

This week the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said that El Niño conditions are developing and are set to influence global temperature and rainfall patterns, increasing the risk of extreme weather over the coming months. This weather phenomenon generally brings a dry monsoon to Nepal. Unusually warm ocean waters in the tropical Pacific were fuelling the development of El Niño, which was set to influence global temperature and rainfall patterns and increase the risk of extreme weather over the coming months.

“The science is clear: El Niño is arriving on our doorstep in the coming months with 90% certainty.  The world must treat it as the urgent climate warning it is. El Niño conditions will pour fuel on the fire of a warming world.  Impacts will hit even harder, travel even farther, and cross borders with devastating speed.  The only effective response is climate action equal to the crisis – ending the addiction to fossil fuels, accelerating the shift to renewables, protecting the most vulnerable, and delivering early warning systems for all,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres.

Impacts on agricultural 

The regional forecast expects the combination of erratic rainfall and rising temperatures to increase both drought and flood risks during the season. Long dry spells may be followed by sudden heavy downpours, creating conditions for flash floods and landslides, particularly in mountain areas. Monsoon drought directly impacts farmers, while rainfall‑induced floods may also affect frontline communities, including farmers.

The outlook warns that higher temperatures and lower water availability can lead to heat stress in crops and livestock, “reduce yields, and shorten growing seasons, particularly in the already marginal mountain farming system.” High temperatures can also cause the loss of soil moisture by intensifying evaporation.

In Nepal, and in most places in the HKH region, farmers depend on rain‑fed and snow‑fed water sources for agriculture. Last winter, snow persistence across the region was observed to be below the long‑term average – and with rising temperatures, “river flows, groundwater levels, and spring water availability may decline substantially during or after the monsoon season”, the regional weather outlook notes.

Lower snow persistence further weakens the region’s natural water buffer, making river systems and groundwater recharge more sensitive to rainfall variability. “Lower snow persistence means the region is entering the monsoon with a reduced seasonal water buffer,” said Sarthak Shrestha, co‑author of the outlook.

Farmers are already experiencing water stress, which is affecting their farming calendar. Farmers in Helambu‑7, Sindhupalchowk, are struggling to get water from a local community‑based informal irrigation system that is river‑fed. Tilak Bahadur Pandit, a local farmer, says he and his neighbours are already late in planting paddy due to water scarcity.

Source: Lenssen, N. J. L., L. Goddard, and S. Mason, 2020: Seasonal Forecast Skill of ENSO Teleconnection Maps. Credit: WMO

Dry monsoon doesn’t mean no disaster

As below‑normal precipitation is forecast, it is not expected to reduce disaster risks. Scientists warn that short bursts of intense rainfall, rising temperatures, and growing water stress could make the season increasingly dangerous.

“Even in a weaker monsoon, short periods of intense rainfall remain a major concern,” said Shrestha, a hydrologist at ICIMOD. “Communities and authorities need to closely follow short‑term forecasts and advisories.”

Experts say that drought and flood risks are interconnected and can no longer be managed in isolation. The latest State of the Climate in Asia report by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) also notes that across Asia and the Pacific, rising heat is increasing multi‑hazard risks, intersecting with food systems and public health while placing new pressures on livelihoods.

Arun Bhakta Shrestha, Senior Adviser at ICIMOD, says, “Early warning systems, short‑term forecasts, and locally driven preparedness need to work together to address increasingly complex hazards.”

The WMO on Wednesday (June 2)

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A group of children sit near a garden in Tamasgo Primary, in Burkina Faso, which is one of the most climate-vulnerable countries in the world. Credit: UNICEF Office in Burkina Faso

By Oritro Karim
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 16 2026 (IPS)

A new report from the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) highlights the vast, overlapping climate threats affecting children worldwide, which is leaving them increasingly vulnerable to escalating risks across health, security, and education.

The report, Children’s Climate Risk Report, emphasizes that while these risks are most pronounced in heavily vulnerable regions in the Global South—such as South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa—nearly half of the world’s children are exposed to at least three climate hazards, with some exposed to as many as six at once.

“Across the globe, millions of children are now facing multiple climate threats without the necessary services to cope,” said UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell. “They are experiencing extreme heat that causes heatstroke and dehydration. Their homes and schools are being destroyed by storms and floods. Devastating droughts are limiting their access to food and water. And in many cases, the intensity of these hazards is increasing with each passing year.”

“We must invest more in adapting essential services to the impact of climate change,” Russell added. “Through political will, partnerships, and collaboration with young people, the case studies in this report prove that progress is possible. But the scale and ambition of action must be rapidly accelerated to ensure that every child is protected from climate impacts.”

According to UNICEF’s findings, nearly every child globally is now affected by air pollution. Additionally, over 296 million children live in areas that are exposed to a dangerous combination of prolonged drought, extreme heat, and heatwaves, while another 115 million simultaneously face droughts, extreme heat, and tropical storms.

The agency stresses that these risks often overlap across multiple regions, noting that riverine and coastal floods, fires, and sand and dust storms have caused widespread displacement, disruptions to livelihoods and schooling, the spread of infectious diseases, or various forms of health and food insecurity.

Nowhere are the consequences of these overlapping threats more evident than in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, which have been described by climate experts as the two most climate-vulnerable regions in the world. These regions are at a heightened risk primarily due to high environmental exposure and a limited capacity to respond. The resulting shocks overwhelm local health systems, cripple fragile infrastructure, and leave entire communities deprived of basic, lifesaving services.

The report notes that over 4 million children in the Sahel region are exposed to heatwaves, extreme heat, and sand and dust storms. Meanwhile, South Asian countries like Bangladesh, Myanmar and Pakistan, face more hazards at once and at higher intensities than anywhere else in the world.

“While some countries may face a single devastating event, such as a tropical storm that can wipe out an entire island, many countries in Asia are dealing with a combination of threats, from floods and storms to extreme heat,” Rohini Sampoornam Swaminathan, UNICEF Statistics and Monitoring Manager, tells Inter Press Service. “Children may cope with one or two shocks, but after three, four or five, families’ ability to respond becomes severely strained. Moreover, risk is not only about exposure to hazards, but it is also about the availability and accessibility of essential services. For children without reliable access to health care, nutrition, or water and sanitation, even a moderate flood or heatwave can become life‑threatening.”

On 20 January 2026, an aerial view of the flooded Xai Xai village after extreme rainfall in Gaza Province, Mozambique. Credit: UNICEF/Guy Taylor

According to the report, in 2024, approximately 634 million children lacked access to safe drinking water, over 1 billion lacked access to sanitation services, and 489 million lacked access to basic hygiene services. Currently, nearly 160 million children live in areas where water systems are severely strained, and droughts are extremely pronounced, while another 270 million children live in flood-prone zones where less than half of the population has access to adequate sanitation.

As a result, the World Health Organization (WHO) projects that there could be over 250,000 additional yearly deaths by the 2030s from malaria, diarrhoea, heat stress, and undernutrition. These consequences are dire for children, particularly those living in fragile contexts where health systems and local infrastructures are strained.

In Pakistan, children face extreme vulnerability due to glacial melt and erratic rainfall patterns, which frequently trigger large-scale flooding. The historic 2022 floods affected over 33 million people—roughly half of whom were children—and stripped more than 5.4 million people of access to clean water, leaving them at a heightened risk of contracting infectious diseases and waterborne illnesses. This has been compounded by frequent heatwaves and prolonged droughts, with temperatures routinely exceeding 48 degrees Celsius, or 118.4 degrees Fahrenheit, which have caused high rates of severe dehydration and acute malnutrition, as a result of decimated crop yields.

Without urgent intervention, UNICEF projects that an additional 28 million children globally could experience acute malnutrition and stunted growth by 2050. In sub-Saharan Africa alone, approximately 10 million more children are expected to suffer from stunted growth by 2050. Over the last few years, increasingly frequent and destructive climate shocks have devastated food systems around the world, leaving roughly 66 percent of children under five—approximately 440 million—to live in severe food poverty.

Additionally, climate shocks are increasingly stripping children of their education, with UNICEF recording nearly 242 million students across 85 countries and territories who have their education disrupted by climate-induced hazards in 2024 alone. The agency has also recorded rising rates of school closures, absenteeism, and worsened school performance. Swaminathan noted that when classrooms become too hot, children struggle to concentrate, learn and stay engaged.

“Heat increases dehydration, fatigue and absenteeism, especially in schools without cooling, shade or reliable water,” she added. “As temperatures rise, schools are also closing more often. While closures protect children’s health, they expose how unprepared many education systems are for a hotter world. When children lose learning, societies lose potential. Repeated disruptions affect education outcomes, future earnings and economic growth, while deepening inequalities.”

It is estimated that disrupted education across low- and middle-income countries could yield future economic losses of up to USD 11 trillion in lifetime earnings. The report further notes that establishing climate-resilient education systems is crucial in preventing these losses and protecting children from facing adverse mental health impacts and deepened social and economic inequalities.

Furthermore, volatile climate shocks around the world continue to displace entire communities and push millions of children into insecurity. Between 2016 and 2023, UNICEF recorded over 62 million internal displacements of children as a result of climate-induced hazards—or roughly 21,000 child displacements per day.

“When families are forced to move because of climate shocks, children face heightened risks of violence, exploitation and family separation, both during the journey and in temporary settlements. These risks increase when displacement is sudden, support networks collapse, and protection systems are overwhelmed,” said Swaminathan. “Climate-related displacement acts as a threat multiplier. It weakens livelihoods, strains fragile services and deepens existing tensions.”

Child protection services around the world have been pushed to the brink of collapse as a result of the vast scale of needs triggered by climate-induced displacement. This strain has been linked to a significant rise in violence, exploitation, abuse, and childhood trauma, with many families resorting to negative coping mechanisms such as child labour and child marriage.

According to UNICEF estimates, rates of child labour have surged in recent years, particularly in areas with agriculture-dependent economies, where roughly 70 percent of this exploitation can be found. Additionally, communities frequently turn to child marriage to secure short-term financial stability following severe climate shocks. The consequences are particularly dire for girls who are married before the age of 18, who face a significantly higher risk of domestic violence, alongside severely compromised health and economic outcomes compared to those who marry later in life.

To accelerate climate action and protect millions of children from these escalating risks, UNICEF is urging global leaders and the private sector to prioritize investments in renewable energy, underscoring that this is a critical first step in reducing the intensity of climate shocks. Additionally, the agency stresses the importance of integrating climate-resilient schools, water systems, and healthcare facilities into national emergency plans and expanding climate education to ensure that the next generation has a voice in decisions that affect their lives.

“UNICEF’s message is clear: invest in children’s resilience, especially the most vulnerable. Invest in the communities they live in and the social services they depend on, and ensure these services continue to function during and after climate shocks,” said Swaminathan. “The climate crisis is a child rights crisis. We know where children are at risk and what they face. Now we must act.”

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By External Source
Jun 2 2026 (IPS)

 
2025 was one of the three hottest years ever recorded.

The years from 2015 to 2025 were the hottest eleven years on record.

The planet is now about 1.43 degrees Celsius warmer than the pre-industrial average.

The oceans are absorbing heat at a staggering rate — about eighteen times humanity’s annual energy use each year over the last two decades.

Sea levels remain near record highs.

And for people, the risks are immediate.

The IPCC estimates that 3.3 to 3.6 billion people live in contexts highly vulnerable to climate change.

The World Health Organization projects that, between 2030 and 2050, climate change could cause about 250,000 additional deaths each year from undernutrition, malaria, diarrhoea and heat stress alone.

Yet the gap between promise and action remains wide.

UNEP says current policies put the world on track for 2.8 degrees Celsius of warming this century.

Even full delivery of new national climate pledges would still leave warming at around 2.3 to 2.5 degrees.

This is why June 5th matters.

World Environment Day was established by the UN General Assembly in 1972 and is led by UNEP.

In 2026, World Environment Day is focused on climate action.

Azerbaijan will host the global commemoration in Baku, under the national campaign message:

“Inspired by Nature. For Climate. For Our Future.”

UNEP’s global call is simple:

Act #NowForClimate.

The message is not that the future is lost.

It is that choices still count.

Cleaner energy.

Stronger early warning systems.

Smarter cities.

Protected ecosystems.

Restored land.

Every action reduces risk.

Climate action is not only an environmental issue.

It is a health issue.

A development issue.

A justice issue.

And a survival issue.

This World Environment Day, June 5th, join the movement.

Act now.

Speak up.

Choose change.

For nature.

For climate.

For our future.

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Credit: Adobe stock. Source Africa Renewal, United Nations

By Cristina Duarte
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 1 2026 (IPS)

Africa holds 9 per cent of global renewable freshwater, over 600 gigawatts of untapped hydropower potential, and between 60 and 65 per cent of the world’s uncultivated arable land.

Its workforce is the youngest on the planet. Its consumer market will reach 2.5 billion people by 2050. Together, these constitute every production factor that global water, energy and food systems will need in the coming decades.

This is not a continent of scarcity. It is a continent of strategic abundance, and the African Union’s decision to anchor its 2026 theme in water and sanitation signals that the continent’s leadership is ready to govern it as such.

Consider what governed abundance looks like. The Grand Inga Dam alone could generate twice the output of the Three Gorges and electrify industries across Central, Southern and West Africa. The Lesotho Highlands Water Project already proves that African-engineered, transboundary water infrastructure can operate at scale and supply major urban economies.

Expanding managed irrigation from 3.7 per cent of sub-Saharan Africa’s arable land (the lowest figure in the developing world) to even 10 per cent within a decade would transform food security, generate millions of jobs across agricultural value chains, and cut the continent’s exposure to rainfall variability.

Every one of these investments is within Africa’s technical reach. The engineering is known. The water is there. The land is there. The workforce is there.

The question is governance. On this, Africa must be frank with itself: the prevailing approach does not match the scale of the opportunity. Governments and donors have treated water as a social service delivery challenge, a matter of boreholes and latrines managed project by project, rather than as productive infrastructure on the same footing as roads, ports and energy grids.

A hand pump installed without a maintenance budget is not development. A pit latrine built without connection to a sanitation system is not development. These interventions may register as progress on a results framework, but they do not transform economies. They are consumables, not assets.

The evidence of this mismatch is plain. Less than half of Africa’s population, or 41 per cent, has access to safely managed drinking water. Twenty-three million primary school-age children attend class hungry. Some 429 million Africans live in extreme poverty, a number projected to remain above 400 million in 2030.

These figures do not describe a resource-poor continent. They describe a governance model that treats water as charity rather than strategy, and a “build, neglect, rebuild” cycle that consumes scarce capital without producing lasting systems.

Africa can break this cycle, and I propose three shifts that would change the trajectory.

First, adopt Strategic Asset Management as a continental doctrine.

Dams, irrigation networks, urban treatment plants and transboundary systems are assets with 50- to 100-year lifespans. They demand sustained institutional stewardship, not five-year project horizons. Govern them across the full lifecycle, from planning through maintenance and renewal, with climate adaptation at every stage.

The build, neglect, rebuild pattern ends when African governments treat water systems as national infrastructure: as permanent assets to maintain, not temporary projects to hand over.

Credit: Adobe Stock

Second, launch a continental irrigation expansion.

South Asia irrigates 41 per cent of its arable land. Sub-Saharan Africa irrigates 3.7 per cent. Closing even a fraction of that gap within a decade would generate employment, build agricultural value chains, strengthen food sovereignty and reduce dependence on imported food. Water without irrigation grows nothing. Land without water feeds no one. Managed irrigation is the fastest route from endowment to economic value.

Third, build enforceable cooperative governance for shared basins.

Ninety per cent of Africa’s surface water crosses at least one national boundary. The Nile, the Niger, the Congo, the Zambezi: these are regional systems that demand regional governance. Africa already has models that work. The Senegal River Basin Development Organisation, has managed a four-country transboundary system for half a century. The task is to make cooperative governance the norm, not as diplomatic courtesy but as a strategic requirement for regional stability and integration.

Financing these shifts requires Africa to lead with its own resources. Closing the water security gap demands between $50 billion and $64 billion annually, according to the AU High-Level Panel and the African Development Bank respectively. The primary financing base must be domestic: reform tariffs progressively, protect maintenance budgets, stop the leakages, and treat water investment with the seriousness that roads and energy grids receive.

Africa must also mobilise international climate finance, which the continent has chronically underutilized, for integrated water investments. And African Governments should not consider the approval of foreign land deals without mandatory water-impact assessments. African Governments need to address land management and governance in an integrated fashion with water governance. Every crop grown on a foreign-leased African field and exported is a transfer of virtual water off the continent, water that was never priced, never accounted for, never governed. Land and water are inseparable. To alienate one is to alienate the other.

The world will develop Africa’s water and land in the coming decades. That process is already under way. Wealthier nations, facing their own water and food constraints, understand the arithmetic of African abundance and are positioning accordingly. The only question is whether this development happens on African terms or someone else’s.

Let me end on a somber note. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will not be achieved in Africa by 2030. Honesty demands we say so. But the generation after 2030 can inherit something different, if Africa’s leadership chooses now to govern water as what it already is: a driver of economic transformation, a foundation of peace, and the most important asset the continent holds in trust for its children.

Africa’s water is its future. The question is, will Africa govern it, or will it be governed by others?

Cristina Duarte is the Under Secretary-General for the Office of the Special Advisor on Africa.

Source: Africa Renewal, United Nations

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One of the biggest hidden threats to ocean health comes from biofouling — the accumulation of algae, barnacles and microorganisms on ships’ hulls that can transport invasive species across oceans. Credit: Aaron Smulktis/Unsplash

By Kizito Makoye
MAFIA ISLAND, Tanzania , May 14 2026 (IPS)

Under the warm waters off Tanzania’s Mafia Island, marine scientist Asha Mgeni hovers above a coral reef she has studied for years. Small fish dart through the currents. To most divers, the reef appears pristine. But Mgeni notices something unusual.

Tucked between coral branches are invasive organisms disrupting the reef’s natural growth and species, which were not there before, she says.

“We know these reefs,” she tells IPS. “When something new appears, it stands out immediately.”

For communities along Tanzania’s coastline, coral reefs are ecological treasures. They cradle fish stocks, soften the blow of crashing waves and support coastal economies increasingly threatened by climate change and environmental degradation.

Scientists say one of the biggest hidden threats comes from biofouling — the accumulation of algae, barnacles and microorganisms on ships’ hulls that can transport invasive species across oceans. For decades, ballast water was considered shipping’s main pathway for spreading invasive aquatic species. But maritime experts now say biofouling can no longer be ignored.

“Ballast water has certainly, historically at least, been considered the primary vector for IAS introductions,” says Will Griffiths, Project Technical Analyst at the International Maritime Organization. “However, the role played by biofouling in this regard has become more recognised in recent years, with some studies suggesting that in some locations, such as parts of Hawaii and New Zealand, it may have been the primary vector.”

Fish vendors wait for the arrival of the day’s catch along the shoreline in coastal Tanzania, where fishing sustains thousands of livelihoods. Marine scientists say invasive aquatic species linked to international shipping could disrupt fisheries and threaten food security for vulnerable coastal communities. Credit: Kizito Makoye/IPS

As global shipping expands, marine experts warn that invasive species are spreading through trade routes, disrupting ecosystems and threatening biodiversity. Scientists and regulators say biofouling can transport  marine organisms and pathogens across ecosystems, threatening fisheries and coastal economies.

“It is also worth noting that biofouling can represent a great species richness in terms of species transported by ships and also, therefore, potential pathogens,” Griffiths tells IPS.

Mwanahija Shalli, a professor of Marine and Coastal Resources Management at the University of Dar es Salaam, says marine biodiversity underpins livelihoods for millions of coastal residents through fisheries and tourism.

“Invasive aquatic species threaten ecosystems and fisheries by displacing native species,” she says. “If we fail to manage biofouling, we undermine important conservation efforts.”

A broad alliance led by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and the International Maritime Organization (IMO) is stepping up efforts to confront a major environmental threat from shipping: the spread of invasive aquatic species through biofouling.

Port and maritime officials inspect a vessel at the Port of Dar es Salaam as part of efforts to monitor the environmental risks posed by invasive marine species spread through global shipping routes. Experts say biofouling on ship hulls has become a growing threat to marine biodiversity and coastal economies. Credit: Kizito Makoye/IPS

Known as the GloFouling Partnerships Project, the initiative aims to help countries strengthen regulations, improve monitoring systems and build technical capacity to reduce the transfer of invasive species through international shipping. The project supports  efforts to meet the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals — particularly the target to conserve and sustainably use oceans, seas and marine resources — while delivering climate benefits through improved vessel efficiency and lower emissions.

Scientists say organisms nestled on ship hulls increase drag, forcing vessels to burn more fuel and produce more emissions.

“Biofouling changes the affected ships’ hydrodynamics and increases drag, meaning there is increased fuel consumption and thus increased greenhouse gas emissions,” Griffiths says. “This can also be a major issue when fouling is on the ship’s propellers, which, due to shape, require specialist cleaning.”

He says biofouling can also interfere with vessel operations.

“There is also some anecdotal evidence to suggest fouling can cause blockages in seawater intakes, affect engine performance and even firefighting systems in extreme cases, which further increases fuel consumption,” he says.

Andrew Hume, Senior Environmental Specialist at the Global Environment Facility, says the initiative builds on earlier international efforts to control invasive species transported through ballast water.

“The GloFouling project builds on a long-standing partnership between the GEF UNDP and the IMO to address shipping impacts on the marine environment,” he says.

According to Hume, the project closes a major gap by targeting hull biofouling, another key pathway for invasive species transfer.

“Keeping ships’ hulls free from just a thin layer of slime could reduce a ship’s greenhouse gas emissions by up to 25 per cent,” Hume says.

A cargo ship enters the Port of Dar es Salaam, one of East Africa’s busiest maritime gateways. As shipping traffic increases, scientists and regulators are raising concerns about biofouling — the buildup of marine organisms on ship hulls that can transport invasive species across oceans. Credit: Kizito Makoye/IPS

Marine scientists warn that invasive aquatic species can dramatically alter ecosystems, outsmart native organisms and damage fisheries that support coastal livelihoods. The issue is  raising international concern as governments struggle to balance burgeoning maritime trade with the protection of ocean ecosystems. Griffiths says the international community has made substantial progress regulating ballast water through the Ballast Water Management Convention, but biofouling controls still lag behind.

“An important aspect to consider is that there is a robust international legal framework for managing ballast water, whereas at the international level biofouling provisions are, for the moment, recommendatory and only a few countries have biofouling regulations,” he explains.

Across East Africa, rising cargo traffic has increased concern about shipping’s ecological footprint. Similar efforts are underway globally. Indonesia estimates improved biofouling management could generate up to USD 7 million annually through healthier reefs, lower fuel consumption and reduced port maintenance costs.

In Peru, authorities are building a national aquatic biodiversity database to help scientists detect invasive species before they spread along the coastline.

“Collaboration in the project enabled the authorities to develop a national aquatic biodiversity catalogue providing the baseline knowledge to detect invasive species early and undertake rapid response,” Griffiths says.

In Fiji, the results are impressive.

“Fiji reported that as a result of the GloFouling dry dock training, they had improved the technical capacity of local personnel and gained access to resources to upgrade local facilities,” Griffiths says, adding that the programme had strengthened confidence among local maritime operators and enhanced Fiji’s position in the regional maritime services market

Meanwhile, Mauritius is encouraging private-sector investment in technologies designed to protect fragile marine ecosystems. Over the past six years, countries participating in the GloFouling initiative have moved toward stricter regulation and greater regional cooperation.

Australia and New Zealand have already introduced fully enforceable national regimes requiring clean hulls, biofouling management plans, record books and inspections consistent with the IMO’s 2023 Biofouling Guidelines. Griffiths says Brazil has emerged as a leader among developing nations.

“Brazil is the newest and most explicit adopter, directly embedding the 2023 guidelines into mandatory port state law,” he says. “Unlike the IMO’s voluntary approach, however, Brazil sets an explicit enforceable standard: vessels must arrive with no more than microfouling.”

The project has also expanded into maritime training and private-sector cooperation. Through the Global Industry Alliance, companies are testing hull coatings and cleaning technologies to limit the spread of invasive species.

“One of the project’s most transformative impacts has been creating a collaborative platform where technology innovators, regulators and industry leaders jointly develop and implement solutions for biofouling,” Griffiths says.

The alliance, initially created to support the project, has since evolved into a permanent collaboration. Griffiths says the group is expanding research into hull inspection technologies and the environmental impacts of antifouling coatings.

“The continuation of the GIA and its ongoing studies offers exceptional value as a driving force for industry innovation, standard-setting and knowledge dissemination,” he says.

Hume says the initiative builds on earlier GEF-supported efforts that led to the International Convention for the Control and Management of Ships’ Ballast Water and Sediments in 2004. He says the programme has since helped develop the IMO’s 2023 Biofouling Guidelines and supported pilot projects in 12 countries.

Hume says the GEF is preparing a second phase of investment aimed at helping more countries implement the IMO’s 2023 Biofouling Guidelines and strengthen international cooperation.

“The objective is to strengthen national and institutional capacity of developing countries to implement the guidelines in order to reduce invasive species and lower greenhouse gas emissions,” he says.

A second phase of investment expected before June  aims to strengthen national capacity, expand implementation and advance discussions toward a legally binding global framework on biofouling management. Although the GloFouling project officially concluded in May 2025, Griffiths says efforts are continuing through training programmes, technical studies and industry partnerships designed to maintain momentum ahead of anticipated binding international regulations by 2030.

Experts say cleaner hulls not only reduce the spread of invasive species but also lower fuel consumption and carbon emissions. However, scientists caution that poorly managed hull-cleaning practices can release chemicals and microplastics into marine environments.

Back on Mafia Island, Mgeni says the changes beneath the water are often subtle before they become irreversible.

“Once invasive species establish themselves, it becomes much harder to restore the balance,” she says.

For communities that depend on reefs for food, tourism and protection from storms, the battle against biofouling is becoming a fight to protect the ecosystems and livelihoods that depend on the ocean.

Note: The Eighth Global Environment Facility Assembly will be held from May 30 to June 6, 2026, in Samarkand, Uzbekistan.
This feature is published with the support of the GEF. IPS is solely responsible for the editorial content, and it does not necessarily reflect the views of the GEF.

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In Guinea-Bissau, malaria continues to place a heavy burden on families and health systems, underscoring the need for prevention, early treatment and stronger development-led responses. Credit: UNDP Guinea-Bissau

By Michael Adekunle Charles and Aissata De
NEW YORK, May 7 2026 (IPS)

If you woke up with severe fever, would you stay home from work? What if the choice meant losing a week’s wages, or deciding if you could afford the trip to a doctor at all?

For families facing financial hardship, these are not theoretical choices. Malaria is not only a health crisis—it is a poverty trap. With 282 million cases in 2024 alone, the consequences are far-reaching, persistent and deeply unequal.

As Africans, we know this story well. Despite significant progress, Africa remains the epicentre of the malaria epidemic. Malaria causes up to half a billion lost workdays each year and slows GDP growth by up to 1.3 percent.

It accounts for half of preventable school absences, undermining learning and opportunity. Health systems already under strain are forced to divert scarce resources, weakening care for all.

We know malaria hinders development. But the reverse is also true: the lack of development fuels malaria.

Recent analysis in Uganda found that districts with low development indicators are five times more likely to experience a high number of malaria cases. Poverty, weak infrastructure, limited services, and environmental risk do not just coexist with malaria; they actively sustain it.

Understanding where and how this vicious cycle bites hardest can help us design smarter malaria responses and accelerate development at the same time.

In Kapelebyong district in Uganda, malaria treatment can cost households a significant 120,000 shillings a year, often requiring long journeys to clinics facing staff and medicine shortages. Even livelihoods are implicated: crops that feed families can also harbour malaria-transmitting mosquitoes, exposing farmers to infection.

“The little money gained from harvests mostly goes to managing disease,” said Paul Omaido Ojilong, a local official supporting environmental health.

Sick workers are less productive—or absent altogether—weakening the very economic activity that builds resilience and prosperity. Families and local leaders are forced into impossible trade-offs, prioritizing immediate survival over long-term prevention.

And so, the cycle continues.

For two decades, countries have delivered life-saving medical innovations that dramatically reduced malaria cases and deaths. Those gains matter—but rising cases in Africa show that health services are no longer enough.

At a time when global aid disruptions are renewing calls for stronger African health sovereignty, this is a moment to rethink how malaria is tackled.

First, integrate malaria action into broader development strategies by embedding it into key sectors such as livelihoods, education, environment, infrastructure and governance. Community leaders, health workers, farmers, educators, executives and policymakers must play a role—working together, not in silos.

Second, promote local leadership as a central pillar of malaria elimination, by empowering district councils and local stakeholders to jointly set health and development priorities, coordinate action, and hold one another accountable.

Through the Pathfinder Endeavour, this approach centres countries in malaria interventions and champions joint global and national efforts, in line with the RBM Partnership to End Malaria’s support for the Big Push.

It promises stronger coordination and national accountability, more efficient resource utilization based on reliable data, and the more effective introduction and acceptance of new malaria solutions.

In Uganda, estimates suggest that the Pathfinder Endeavour’s coordinated multisectoral action could deliver transformative results. With modest investment, about US $60,000 over three years per district, economic and social gains of 11-12 percent are possible.

Malaria incidence could fall by 14 percent, extracting far greater value from existing health spending. Accountability efforts alone account for nearly half the projected gains.

In short, local leadership and multisectoral action can rewrite the malaria story.

But the window is closing. Even with more financing, conflict, climate change and rising drug and insecticide resistance threaten hard-won progress. Promising tools like vaccines will fall short if they are not embedded in development systems that protect health over time.

The prize is enormous. Ending malaria by 2030 could add US $231 billion to African economies and boost global trade by US $80.7 billion, moving millions from vulnerability to opportunity and prosperity.

Achieving the Africa we want by 2063—inclusive, sustainable, peaceful and prosperous—means meeting this moment with new ambition and ways of working. Together, UNDP, the RBM Partnership to End Malaria, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and partners across sectors can support African leaders to write a new story—one where development and malaria elimination advance hand in hand.

Dr Michael Adekunle Charles is the CEO of the RBM Partnership to End Malaria, and
Aissata De is the Deputy Regional Director for Africa at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)

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Healthy soils teeming microbes are the foundations of resilient, sustainable and global food production ecosystems. Credit: Fabiola Ortiz/IPS

By Esther Ngumbi
URBANA, Illinois, US, May 6 2026 (IPS)

A newly published review in Nature Reviews Earth & Environment has revealed disturbing statistics on the growing environmental threats posed by global food production. The global food system, designed to feed and nourish humanity, is now a major contributor to climate change via greenhouse gas emissions, and the largest driver of freshwater depletion, biodiversity loss, and nutrient pollution.

Alarmingly, this new review brings attention to a concerning cruel twist and a deeper problem manifested through feedback loops between environmental change pressures including climate change and global food production.

In this vicious hard to break feedback loop, farmers are forced to use more inputs including fertilizers and toxic pesticides to sustain high yields, which in turn ruins and further compromises the environment while making food production harder in the long term.

In this vicious hard to break feedback loop, farmers are forced to use more inputs including fertilizers and toxic pesticides to sustain high yields, which in turn ruins and further compromises the environment while making food production harder in the long term

The central question then becomes: How do we break these vicious feedback loops that threaten to undermine our global food system in the longer term? What specific foundational strategies stand a chance of reducing environmental pressures and improving global food systems and agricultural production resillience?

First and foremost, the foundations for breaking this cruel cycle begin in the soil, by investing in revitalizing and improving the health of soils and agricultural lands that power global food production. Healthy soils teeming microbes are the foundations of resilient, sustainable and global food production ecosystems.

Healthy soils store and filter water and cycle nutrients, support the growth of nutritious food while simultaneously helping agricultural crop plants to cope with water stress, combat diseases and pests, and use nutrients more effectively, reducing the need for additional inputs such as fertilizers and pesticides.

Convincingly, smart investments channeled towards improving soil health and soil microbiome can help farmers and food producers to produce more and healthy crops with less, limit environmental damage and simultaneously break the emerging feedback loops between global food production and environmental damage.

The good news is that improving and building soil health and soil microbiomes is a top priority for many stakeholders involved in food production in the United States and around the world including farmers, researchers, governments, philanthropists, non-governmental  and non-profit organizations, research funding agencies, the African Union and the United Nations.

Excitingly, adoption of several sustainable regenerative  practices including cover cropping, crop rotation, conservation tillage, planting diverse crops, integrating livestock and agroforestry, alongside with inoculation of soils with microbes including arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi can improve soil health and quality, improving biodiversity, mitigate climate change, and extend soil longevity beyond 10,000 years. Moreover,  research is confirming that these strategies do indeed work.

Second, another intervention that can reduce environmental decline while improving global food production is investing in innovative  climate-smart agriculture and precision agriculture practices. Scientific evidence has shown that adopting these practices can sustain global food production while limiting environmental harm.

Complementing and accompanying these foundational strategies is the urgent need to prioritize breeding and developing  multi-stress and stress-resilient crops and integrating stress resilient traits from wild relatives of domesticated crops.

Additionally,  multi-stress and climate-resilient crops can be grown alongside other annual and perennial crop species while being integrated into broader sustainable and regenerative farming practices including agroforestry. Collectively, these practices can sustain food production while minimizing environmental harm, thereby breaking feedback loops.

Finally, these strategies must be paired with policies and incentives to ensure maximum adoption. Farmers who adopt regenerative and sustainable soil building, climate-smart, precision agriculture practices while planting stress resilient crops should be supported and rewarded.

Alongside policies and incentives, there is a need to ensure that farmers, who are central in global food production embrace and adopt these sustainable feedback loops breaking practices. Embracing these practices can improve agricultural productivity, resilience and efficiency.

Of course, it is critical to understand and be aware of the constraints that still hinder stakeholders in global food production including farmers from adopting these global food production and environmental pressures feedback loop breaking practices.

Feeding our growing world sustainably requires everyone to confront the vicious cycle of food production and environmental decline. Researchers, policymakers, governments, private businesses, civil society, and philanthropists must act with urgency.

We should view mitigation and adaptation as interconnected strategies to address the dual challenge of producing food while protecting the environmental systems that enable it. The most effective and sustainable solutions will strengthen agriculture and reduce environmental harm. Time is of the essence.

Esther Ngumbi, PhD is Assistant Professor, Department of Entomology, African American Studies Department, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Clean drinking water runs from a tap in Senegal. Credit: UN Photo/Evan Schneider
 
The African Union has pronounced their theme for 2026 to be: ‘Assuring Sustainable Water Availability and Safe Sanitation Systems to Achieve the Goals of Agenda 2063’. In an opinion piece, AUC Chairperson, Mahmoud Ali Youssouf explores the continent's renewed commitment to protecting and managing its vital water resources.

By Mahmoud Ali Youssouf
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia, Apr 22 2026 (IPS)

When Africa’s Heads of State and Government gathered in Addis Ababa on 14 February 2026 for the African Union’s 39th Ordinary Session, they did more than adopt another resolution. They made a choice: to place at the centre of the agenda the most fundamental, life-sustaining and strategic resource our continent possesses: water.

The theme adopted by our leaders, “Assuring Sustainable Water Availability and Safe Sanitation Systems to Achieve the Goals of Agenda 2063,” is not a bureaucratic formality. It is a declaration of intent. It reflects a simple but profound truth: without water security, there can be no food security, no industrialization, no public health, and no lasting peace or prosperity.

The scale of the challenge we face remains stark. Across Africa, water scarcity and inadequate sanitation continue to undermine economic growth and human dignity. Waterborne diseases remain among the leading causes of death in many parts of the continent. Millions of Africans, disproportionately women and girls in rural communities, still walk long distances each day to collect water instead of attending school, pursuing livelihoods, or participating fully in the life of their communities.

This is not merely an inconvenience. It is an injustice. It is also a brake on the ambitions we have set for ourselves in Agenda 2063, Africa’s collective blueprint for inclusive growth, sustainable development and shared prosperity.

The year 2026 must therefore mark a turning point: the moment we move decisively from diagnosis to delivery.

The African Union Commission’s Department of Agriculture, Rural Development, Blue Economy and Sustainable Environment has been entrusted with advancing this agenda. Yet responsibility cannot rest with one department or with the Commission alone.

Achieving water security will require sustained collaboration among member states, regional organizations, civil society, the private sector and, critically, African communities themselves.

The urgency of this task is heightened by the accelerating climate crisis. Africa is already experiencing more frequent droughts and devastating floods. Changing rainfall patterns are shrinking rivers, lakes and reservoirs in some regions while unleashing destructive flooding in others.

These disruptions threaten the livelihoods of millions of Africans who depend on agriculture and pastoralism. Sustainable water management is therefore not only a development priority; it is a resilience imperative.

Water also reminds us that cooperation is not optional. Nearly 60 percent of Africa’s freshwater resources are shared across national borders. Rivers such as the Nile, the Niger, Congo, the Zambezi and the Volta link countries and communities in complex hydrological systems that transcend political boundaries.

These shared waters can become either sources of cooperation or sources of tension. The choice is ours. Strengthening collaborative frameworks for the equitable and sustainable management of transboundary water resources must be a priority for our continent. Water, after all, recognizes no borders.

Sanitation demands equal urgency. Safe sanitation is not a luxury; it is fundamental to human dignity, public health and economic productivity. Yet millions of Africans, particularly in rural communities and rapidly expanding urban settlements still lack access to even basic sanitation facilities. In the twenty-first century, this reality is unacceptable.

Addressing these challenges will require investment, innovation and political will. It will also require a shift in how we design and implement solutions. Sustainable progress cannot be imposed from above. Communities must be involved in planning, building and maintaining water and sanitation systems. Local ownership is essential if infrastructure is to endure and deliver real benefits.

The African Union is therefore developing a comprehensive implementation strategy to support the theme of the year. This strategy will promote innovative technologies for water purification and efficient resource management.

It will encourage stronger water governance and expand access to sanitation infrastructure. It will also prioritize the participation of youth, women and marginalized communities while facilitating the sharing of best practices across our continent.

Innovation, inclusion and cooperation must guide our collective efforts.

As I travel across Africa in my capacity as Chairperson of the African Union Commission, I am reminded repeatedly that water is not merely a matter of infrastructure or policy. It is about people.

It is about a mother who no longer fears losing her child to a preventable disease caused by contaminated water. It is about a girl who can remain in school because clean water flows in her village. It is about a farmer who can irrigate crops through dry seasons. It is about an entrepreneur whose business can grow because reliable water supply supports production.

These everyday transformations form the true foundation of Africa’s development.

The African Union’s theme for 2026 is therefore a clarion call for governments to prioritize water and sanitation in national development agendas. Because water touches every sector; agriculture, health, energy, industry and education — our response must be equally integrated.

African countries must strengthen cooperation, share expertise and mobilize resources to address common challenges. Regional economic communities and river basin organizations have a crucial role to play in supporting collaborative water governance. The African Union will continue to facilitate dialogue and partnerships that promote sustainable and equitable management of shared water resources.

But governments cannot act alone. Civil society organisations, the private sector, research institutions and development partners must also contribute their expertise and resources. Investments in water infrastructure, sanitation systems and climate-resilient water management are investments in Africa’s stability, prosperity and future.

The stakes could not be higher. By 2050, Africa’s population is projected to double, placing increasing pressure on water resources and infrastructure. Ensuring sustainable water access today will determine whether our growing cities thrive, whether our agriculture can feed our people, and whether our economies can realize their full potential.

This is why the African Union’s theme of the year is not simply a slogan. It is a continental commitment.

Together, we can ensure that every African has access to safe water and dignified sanitation. In doing so, we will not only protect lives and livelihoods; we will unlock the immense potential of sustainable development across our continent.

Ultimately, our success will not be measured by the eloquence of our declarations. It will be measured by the taps that flow, the sanitation systems that function and the millions of lives transformed.

Mahmoud Ali Youssouf is Chairperson of the African Union Commission.

Source: Africa Renewal, United Nations

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A crew member with The Greater Cape Town Water Fund looks out over the landscape where the team is working to remove invasive alien plants for improved water security. Credit: Roshni Lodhia/ The Nature Conservancy

By Louise Stafford
CAPE TOWN, South Africa, Apr 16 2026 (IPS)

In 2018, Cape Town came perilously close to becoming the first major city in the world to run out of water. Known as “Day Zero”, it was more than just a crisis, it marked a pivotal moment. It made clear that water insecurity is not a distant threat, but an immediate reality.

It also revealed something equally important, water security depends not only on built infrastructure, such as dams, desalination plants and groundwater extraction, but on the health of the natural systems that sustain them. Ecological infrastructure – our catchments, rivers and wetlands – is as essential as the roads we travel and the grids that power our homes.

South Africa is in a period of structural water scarcity. According to the National Water and Sanitation Master Plan, the country could face a water deficit of up to 17% by 2030. Much of the focus has rightly been on failing built infrastructure, such as non-revenue water, ageing infrastructure, and wastewater discharge into rivers. But an equally critical, and often overlooked, part of the problem lies upstream.

Degraded catchments, driven by poor land management, erosion, invasive alien plants, river diversion, and the loss of wetlands and riparian areas, are undermining the very systems that produce and regulate water.

The Hidden Drain on South Africa’s Water

The impact of alien tree invasions on our water resources is not unknown in South Africa. Multiple scientific studies emphasized the scale of the problem. The invasion of catchment areas by alien tree species, such as pine and Australian acacias, has a significant effect on streamflow. They reduce South Africa’s water availability by an estimated 1.4 billion cubic metres every year, enough to irrigate between 140,000 and 280,000 hectares of farmland according to WWF-SA, drawing on research by the CSIR and partners.

That is water that could otherwise sustain crops, support rural economies, households and strengthen national food security. In the greater Cape Town region, these species consume around 55 million cubic metres annually, roughly equivalent to two months of the City of Cape Town’s water supply.

South Africa has taken important steps to address alien plant invasions through programmes like Working for Water and through the efforts of landowners. However, these initiatives face persistent challenges such as limited funding, uneven prioritisation, and interruptions in implementation that reduce long-term effectiveness.

Restoring catchments requires continuity and scale. Traditional public budgets cannot keep up. Short-term grants and project‑based funding cycles are mismatched with the long‑term reality of managing and restoring South Africa’s catchments. Catchments do not operate on three-year budget cycles. They require decades of commitment. To secure our water future, we must rethink how we value and finance the ecological infrastructure that underpins our economy.

Science Meets Implementation: A Proven Model

The Water Fund model has added a valuable new option to address catchment restoration. South Africa’s first, the Greater Cape Town Water Fund (GCTWF), provides compelling proof that investing in ecological infrastructure and prioritizing headwaters deliver measurable results. Over the past seven years, with support of the private sector and City of Cape Town, over 40,000 hectares have been cleared of invasive alien plants priority catchments. Importantly, the cleared areas have been followed up multiple times to prevent regrowth.

This work increases water flows into dams of the Western Cape Water Supply System by 36 million cubic meters per year. The benefits extend far beyond water. The programme creates job opportunities, reduces wildfire risk, and supports the recovery of native fynbos and freshwater ecosystems — while building resilience to climate change.

The Greater Cape Town Water Fund demonstrates that ecological infrastructure can deliver reliable, measurable returns. Yet scaling this model has been constrained by one persistent challenge namely predictable funding to plan and reach the set target of clearing 54,300 hectares to replenish the water losses.

Rethinking How We Fund Water Security

What about a new funding approach? One that can crowd in private capital while ensuring accountability for results and bridging the gap between short term and sustainable funding. This is the foundation of the FRB Cape water performance-based bond, developed through a partnership between Rand Merchant Bank and The Nature Conservancy.

The Cape Water Performance-based Bond, a first of its kind financial instrument designed to unlock non‑traditional funding sources and secure a consistent five‑year funding stream to accelerate invasive plant control in priority catchments of the Greater Cape Town region. This marks an important milestone not only for Cape Town but for South Africa as a whole, a shift toward mobilizing capital markets to invest in nature at scale.

Accountability is built in. Rigorous monitoring and data collection tracks delivery and ensures a positive return on investment. “Clearly demonstrating what an investment has achieved is the backbone of impact finance. Investment returns in the FRB Cape water performance-based bond rely on performance and so we require systems to independently verify results. This independence and transparency are critical to ensure trust in these results, and to scale nature-based impact finance products.” Chris Barichievy, Director of Science, Conservation Alpha

Taking Impact To Scale

Water security underpins economic stability. From farms to factories, every sector depends on a reliable flow of water. When systems fail, the costs are staggering. When they succeed, they quietly power equity and prosperity.

The Cape Water Performance-based Bond matters because it can be replicated. Cities across Africa face similar challenges, degraded landscapes, limited public funds, rising demand. This model offers a science-based, practical path forward that can be adapted to different contexts.

From Vision to Delivery

This is where vision meets action. Governments and other roleplayers need to recognize that healthy catchments are as essential as pipes, treatment plants and pumps. Healthy catchments enable water to reach our dams, which is the first step in securing our water supply.

The capital markets are the world’s largest funding pools. Yet the opportunity for capital markets to play a role in the water supply system has been limited – until now. Martin Potgieter from RMB said: “This Cape Water Performance-based Bond gives financial institutions and investors the opportunity to participate in the security of the water supply system. It gives investors a low-risk entry to the funding of a water catchment, while at the same time enabling a project that delivers lasting, systemic impact.”

Large and critical interventions need long-term planning and commitment, with the Cape Water Performance-based Bond providing five years of predictable funding.

Without this change, the risks to our water security will only grow. In 2018, Cape Town has shown the world what it means to be pushed to the edge. Now, it is showing the world what it means to lead. By building financing systems that match the scale of the challenge, we can secure a future where both nature and people thrive.

Louise Stafford is the South Africa Country Director at The Nature Conservancy

The GEF actively supports climate resilience and sustainable livelihoods in Zanzibar, with a specific focus on the seaweed farming sector, which is crucial for over 20,000 farmers—mostly women—in the region. Here a woman identified as Jazaa is pictured working as a seaweed farmer. She carefully attaches little seaweed seedlings to the rope that she will harvest after two months. Credit: Natalija Gormalova/Climate Visuals Countdown

By Umar Manzoor Shah
SRINAGAR, India, Apr 16 2026 (IPS)

The Global Environment Facility, widely known as the GEF, plays a central role in financing environmental protection across the world. It supports developing countries in tackling climate change, biodiversity loss, land degradation, pollution, and threats to ecosystems.

Since its establishment in the early 1990s, the GEF has grown as a multilateral environmental fund, supporting projects in more than 170 countries.

Over time, the GEF has evolved into what it calls a “family of funds”, each targeting a specific global environmental challenge while operating under a shared strategic framework.

This explainer looks at how the GEF funding works, the origins of its financing model, and the role of six major funds that channel resources toward global environmental goals.

While the GEF predates the 1992 Rio ‘Earth’ Summit, its importance as a financial mechanism grew after the summit. Here UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali opens the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, which aimed to develop a global blueprint for balancing economic development with environmental protection. Credit: Michos Tzavaras/UN Photo

Origins of the GEF Funding Model

The GEF was created in 1991, before the Rio ‘Earth’ Summit in 1992, which aimed to develop a global blueprint for balancing economic development with environmental protection; however, its importance grew after the summit.

The Rio Summit produced three major environmental conventions. These were the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Convention on Biological Diversity, and, later in 1994, the Convention to Combat Desertification. The GEF became the financial mechanism for these agreements, meaning it mobilises and distributes funds to help countries implement them.

Over the past 35 years, the GEF has expanded its mandate. Today it supports multiple conventions and environmental initiatives through a structured set of trust funds. This architecture allows the facility to coordinate funding across different environmental priorities while maintaining specialised programs for each global commitment.

The Global Environment Facility (GEF) is now focusing on solving environmental problems together instead of separately. It looks at climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution as connected issues and works with governments, international groups, civil society, and businesses to address them.

The GEF Trust Fund was initially created to support multiple environmental agreements simultaneously. Over time, countries preferred more specific funding for their particular needs.

Because of these changes, the GEF now has different funds, each designed for different purposes and methods of giving money.

Some funds – like the Trust Fund, the Least Developed Countries Fund (LDCF), and part of the Special Climate Change Fund (SCCF) – use a system that helps countries know in advance how much funding they can expect.

The GEF Trust Fund

The Global Environment Facility Trust Fund is the main source of funds for the GEF. It provides grants to support environmental projects in developing countries.

The Trust Fund finances activities across several environmental areas.

These include

• Biodiversity conservation,
• Climate change mitigation,
• Land degradation control,
• International waters management, and
• Chemicals and waste reduction.

Countries receive funding through a system known as the System for Transparent Allocation of Resources, or STAR, which distributes funds based on their environmental needs and eligibility.

Projects funded by the Trust Fund often focus on creating global environmental benefits. These may include:

• Protecting endangered species,
• Restoring ecosystems,
• Reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and
• Improving pollution management systems.

The Trust Fund operates through periodic “replenishment” cycles. Donor countries pledge new contributions every four years, which allows the GEF to finance programs during the next funding period. For example, the GEF-9 cycle will cover the period from July 2026 to June 2030 and focus on scaling up environmental investments while mobilising private capital and strengthening country ownership of environmental policies.

The Global Environment Facility (GEF) has created Integrated Programs. These are special programs designed to address multiple environmental goals at the same time in a more coordinated and efficient way.

For example, the Food Systems Integrated Program does not fund separate projects for climate change, biodiversity, and land degradation. Instead, it combines them into one unified project, which helps achieve stronger and longer-lasting results while making better use of funding.

The GEF helps fund biodiversity across the globe, helping to create conditions to prevent the further endangerment of species like the Sumatran Orangutan (Pongo abelii). Credit: Thomas Gabernig/Unsplash

Global Biodiversity Framework Fund

The Global Biodiversity Framework Fund is a relatively new component of the GEF family of funds. It was created to help countries implement the Kunming Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which was adopted in 2022 under the Convention on Biological Diversity.

The biodiversity framework sets ambitious targets for protecting nature by 2030. Its most prominent targets include the “30 by 30” target, which calls for protecting at least 30 percent of the world’s land and ocean areas by the end of the decade.  The Framework also sets a 30 percent target for the restoration of ecosystems and a target of mobilising 30 billion dollars in international financial flows to developing countries for biodiversity action.

The Global Biodiversity Framework Fund supports actions that help countries meet these targets.

Actions that are supported include the following:

• Expanding protected areas,
• Restoring degraded ecosystems,
• Protecting endangered species, and
• Strengthening biodiversity monitoring.

Another important focus is the integration of biodiversity into economic planning. Many projects supported by this fund work with governments and businesses to match financial flows with biodiversity goals. This means reducing financial support for activities that damage the environment and encouraging more sustainable farming, forestry, and fishing practices.

By providing targeted financing for biodiversity commitments, the fund helps translate global agreements into practical actions at the national and local levels.

It is also important to highlight that the fund sets a target of providing at least 20% of its resources to support actions by Indigenous Peoples and local communities. This form of direct financing is unique for a multilateral environmental fund.  To date, this target has been exceeded and mechanisms such as the Green Climate Fund and the Tropical Forest Forever Facility are considering replicating this approach.

GEF-9 biodiversity investments will bring together four interconnected pathways:

• Scaling up financial flows to close the nature financing gap,
• Embedding environmental priorities in national development strategies,
• Mobilising private capital through blended finance, and
• Empowering Indigenous Peoples, local communities, and civil society as active conservation partners.

“A renewed emphasis on the Forest Biomes Integrated Program will continue directing investment into the landscapes most critical for achieving 30×30 – ensuring that GEF financing remains focused where the stakes are highest,” said Chizuru Aoki, the head of the GEF Conventions and Funds Division.

Medicinal and aromatic plant species, such as the baobab, are often exploited; however, the Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit Sharing aims to ensure fair use of the planet’s genetic resources and secure benefits for Indigenous knowledge holders. Credit Noah Grossenbacher/Unsplash

Nagoya Protocol Implementation Fund

The Nagoya Protocol Implementation Fund supports countries in implementing the Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit Sharing. This international agreement, part of the Convention on Biological Diversity, aims to make sure that the genetic resources of the planet are used fairly and equitably, with benefits shared with those who provide them.

Genetic resources include plants, animals, and microorganisms that are used in research and commercial products such as medicines, cosmetics, and agricultural technologies. Historically, many developing countries have expressed concerns that companies and researchers benefit from these resources without sharing profits or knowledge.

The Nagoya Protocol fixes these issues by requiring users to do the following:

• Get permission from the country providing the resources, and
• Agree on how benefits (like money or knowledge) will be shared.

The fund supports countries by helping them:

• Create laws and rules for using genetic resources,
• Improve monitoring systems, and
• Build skills among researchers and policymakers.

Projects funded also support Indigenous peoples and local communities, who often hold traditional knowledge associated with biological resources. Protecting this knowledge and ensuring fair compensation is a key objective of the Nagoya framework.

Least Developed Countries Fund

The Least Developed Countries Fund focuses on supporting climate adaptation in the world’s most vulnerable nations. These countries often face severe environmental risks but lack the finances and systems to respond efficiently.

The fund supports the preparation and implementation of National Adaptation Programs of Action and National Adaptation Plans. These are country-specific strategies that identify the most urgent climate risks facing each country and outline measures to reduce vulnerability.

Typical projects include the following:

• Strengthening climate-resilient agriculture,
• Improving water management systems,
• Protecting coastal zones, and
• Building early warning systems for extreme weather events.

Because many least developed countries face multiple environmental issues at once, the fund often supports integrated projects that address climate change alongside biodiversity conservation and land management.

This funding system makes sure that the poorest and most vulnerable countries get the help they need to deal with climate change, even though they did very little to cause it.

Villagers in Nyamisati, Rufiji District, wade through muddy tidal flats to plant mangrove seedlings—part of a grassroots effort to curb saline intrusion that has begun to poison nearby rice paddies as saltwater seeps underground. The initiative reflects growing local responses to environmental degradation driven by human activity along Tanzania’s coast. The GEF supports projects like these that help mitigate the impacts of climate change. Credit: Kizito Makoye/IPS

Special Climate Change Fund

The Special Climate Change Fund supports climate action in developing countries and works alongside the Least Developed Countries Fund.

While the Least Developed Countries Fund focuses on the poorest nations, this fund helps other developing countries that are also affected by climate change.

It supports projects that:

• Help countries prepare for climate impacts,
• Include climate planning in development and infrastructure,
• Improve water management and agriculture.
• Reduce disaster risks, and
• Promote environmentally friendly technologies.

The SCCF also, in some cases, supports mitigation efforts, particularly when they involve innovative technologies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions. By financing both adaptation and mitigation initiatives, the fund contributes to global efforts to stabilise the climate system.

Capacity Building Initiative for Transparency Trust Fund

The Capacity Building Initiative for Transparency Trust Fund supports countries in implementing transparency requirements under the Paris Agreement.

Under this agreement, countries must regularly report their greenhouse gas emissions and track their progress on climate goals. However, many developing countries do not have the tools or skills to do this properly.

This fund helps by supporting:

• Training for government officials,
• Creation of national emissions data systems, and
• Better monitoring and reporting methods.

Strong reporting systems are important because they:

• Help track climate progress,
• Build trust between countries, and
• Ensure countries meet their commitments.

The fund helps developing countries improve their climate reporting so they can fully take part in global climate efforts.

How the “family of funds” works together

One of the defining features of the GEF funding model is that each part speaks to the others.

Think of it like a team of funds working together, rather than separate, isolated programs.

These funds are coordinated so they can:

• Support the same project from different angles,
• Avoid duplication (no overlapping funding for the same purpose), and
• Align with global environmental agreements.

For example:

• A biodiversity project might use:
  • The main GEF Trust Fund
  • Plus the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund
• A climate adaptation project could combine:
  • Least Developed Countries Fund
  • Special Climate Change Fund

This ‘family’ structure improves:

• Coordination, so different funds work in sync,
• Efficiency, so funds work with less waste and duplication, and
• Flexibility, so projects can tap into multiple funding sources.

Environmental problems are interconnected. A single project (like forest conservation) can:

• Reduce carbon emissions,
• Protect biodiversity,
• Improve water systems, and
• Avoid land degradation.

Because of the integrated funding system, the GEF can support all these goals at once, rather than funding them separately.

The “family of funds” is a coordinated funding system that allows the GEF to:

• Combine resources;
• Support complex, multi-sector projects; and
• Maximise environmental impact

The Future of GEF Financing

As global environmental crises grow, so does the demand for money and resources to meet climate and biodiversity needs. International assessments suggest that hundreds of billions of dollars are needed each year.

The GEF aims to play a “catalytic” role in closing this gap – in short, the GEF acts as a “catalyst” or tool for using limited public funds to unlock much larger investments.

Its funding model mobilises additional resources from

• Governments,
• Development banks, and
• Private investors.

“In practical terms, the mechanisms being supported in GEF-9 include debt-for-nature and debt-for-climate swaps, green bonds, pooled investment vehicles, and outcome-based financing structures. Each of these can serve a different purpose depending on the context – but the common thread is that they allow the GEF to use its resources strategically to unlock much larger pools of capital from the private sector, multiplying the environmental impact that public funding alone could achieve,” Aoki said.

Note: This feature is published with the support of the GEF. IPS is solely responsible for the editorial content, and it does not necessarily reflect the views of the GEF.

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A motorcycle rider riding through flood in Kolkata, India. Cities should transform into sponges to absorb flood as part of climate adaptation. Credit: Pexels/Dibakar Roy

By Temily Baker, Leila Salarpour Goodarzi and Elisa Belaz
BANGKOK, Thailand, Apr 13 2026 (IPS)

As the Pacific recovers from a severe cyclone season and Asia braces for the monsoon, flood readiness has become a defining test of sustainable urban development.

The Asia and the Pacific 2026 SDG Progress Report signals a hard truth: while poverty reduction, health and basic infrastructure have advanced, the region is regressing on climate action, disaster resilience and biodiversity—areas now decisive for long-term development.

The widespread flooding across the region in November 2025 was not merely a weather event; it was a warning and a new baseline. From Hat Yai to Colombo, dense urban districts were underwater for days, exposing millions of people and billions in assets to cascading disruption.

Across the Asia-Pacific region, climate extremes are intensifying, increasing water inflow to drainage systems by over 53%. In coastal areas, flooding can halt transport, isolate communities, delay emergency response and lead to saltwater intrusion that damages agriculture and freshwater supplies.

ESCAP’s analysis (Figure 1) examines how these threats are expected to continue to increase in the region’s low-lying river deltas, small island nations and rapidly growing coastal cities. For example, Seenu Atoll in the Maldives is expected to face a six-fold jump in population exposure to coastal flooding by 2050.

Looking across the region, Jiangsu Province in China, West Bengal in India, Khula and Marisal Divisions of Bangladesh, and Bến Tre and Bạc Liêu Provinces of Viet Nam are all expected to see hundreds of thousands of people exposed along their respective coastlines in the next 25 years.

Figure 1 – Percentage of People Exposed to Coastal Flooding of 0.5 Meters and Above in States/Provinces Across the Asia-Pacific Region and in Atolls of the Maldives (2018 Baseline vs. 2050 RCP8.5).

In the face of these risks, cities become engines of growth only when they are resilient. So, why do many cities across the Asia-Pacific region find themselves underwater while others weathered the storm with far less disruption? The answer lies in whether cities treat rain as a resource or as waste

Traditional “grey” systems, such as pipes, pumps and channels, aim to move water out fast. In a nonstationary climate and denser urban fabric, this is no longer sufficient. Sponge city design blends green-blue-grey systems (permeable surfaces, parks, wetlands, bioswales, green corridors) with modernized drainage to capture, store, and safely release rainfall at the source.

China’s national Sponge City Initiative (launched in 2015) built on international practice and showed how integrated planning can retrofit districts and guide new growth to manage water where it falls. The logic is simple: expand infiltration and storage, reduce peak runoff and use engineered conveyance when and where needed.

Results from early adopters are tangible

In Wuhan, sponge city measures contributed to a 50% reduction in locations experiencing overflow and pipe overloading during high flow years. Over the life of assets, green-blue systems can cost significantly less than like-for-like grey expansions, while delivering co-benefits that traditional drains cannot: cooler neighborhoods, improved air quality, biodiversity and accessible public space.

For cities facing rising loss and damage under SDG 11.5 (deaths, affected people and economic losses), sponge city programmes generate a resilience dividend—not just a flood fix.

Sponge city thinking is also evolving toward smart hybrid infrastructure

Nature-based systems are being coupled with engineered assets and digital tools, such as digital twins, to model urban hydrology and optimize performance in real time, enabling city planners to simulate rainfall scenarios, forecast flood hotspots and manage infrastructure adaptively, thereby improving the effectiveness of sponge-city interventions.

This pairing turns static drainage into adaptive urban water management, essential as rainfall intensity and patterns shift, reducing and managing risk through early warning, community preparedness and basin scale controls.

Urban resilience is also ecological

The Asia-Pacific region is home to an estimated 30–40% of the world’s wetlands, yet only around 22% are formally protected. As wetland buffers are drained or reclaimed, cities lose natural absorption, filtration and surge moderation, just as extremes intensify. Protecting and restoring urban and peri-urban wetlands is therefore core infrastructure policy, reinforcing SDG 15 while directly advancing SDGs 11.5 and 13.1.

Sponge city approaches are not a panacea. Their effectiveness can be constrained by governance capacity, implementation scale and maintenance requirements, land availability and high-density development. They must therefore be complemented by robust end-to-end early warning systems and coordinated disaster risk management frameworks.

To this end, ESCAP supports countries across the region by providing regional and national risk analytics through its Risk and Resilience Portal, enabling policymakers to integrate climate and disaster information directly into development planning.

These analyses and tools are tailored to regional and country needs, such as ClimaCoast, which focuses on coastal multi-hazard and socio-economic exposures. These initiatives are complemented by targeted financing from the Trust Fund for Tsunami, Disaster and Climate Preparedness, through programmes that strengthen coastal resilience in Asia and the Pacific. Together, these initiatives aim to reverse the current regression in resilience related SDG targets and help safeguard sustainable development in the region’s high risk hotspots.

Asia and the Pacific region can no longer rely on drainage systems built for a different climate and century. By adopting sponge city principles, Asia Pacific cities can embed resilience into everyday urban life—a development imperative, not just a technical shift.

Strengthening urban resilience is essential to advancing SDG 11 and SDG 13 and protecting hard won development gains that too often wash away when floods strike.

Temily Baker is Programme Management Officer, ESCAP; Leila Salarpour Goodarzi is Associate Economic Affairs Officer, ESCAP and Elisa Belaz is Consultant, ESCAP

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Artisanal miners work at a mercury-free processing site in Bushiangala, Ikolomani, Kakamega County, Kenya. Credit: Chemtai Kirui/IPS

By Chemtai Kirui
KAKAMEGA, Kenya, Apr 1 2026 (IPS)

They call this land Bushiangala. Gold has been mined here for nearly a century. In 1931, colonial prospectors arrived after traces were found in the nearby Yala River, setting off a rush that changed this quiet corner of western Kenya.

Colonial authorities quickly took control of the boom, introducing mining laws that restricted access, while companies like Rosterman Gold Mines dominated production, employing local labour even as profits flowed out of the region. When industrial operations collapsed in the 1950s, they left behind something more enduring: an informal mining economy that never disappeared.

For more than 70 years, artisanal miners, known locally as ‘wachimba migodi’, have worked these deposits by hand, digging, crushing and washing ore using techniques passed down through generations. Mercury came much later.

Josephine Liabule Mkhobi grew up around the pits. She remembers watching older miners process gold with water and pans.

“Our parents never used mercury,” Mkhobi says. “This method started around 2008.”

Introduced as a faster alternative, mercury quickly took hold, speeding up gold extraction – but leaving behind contamination that has not disappeared.

Over time, water sources across the Lake Victoria region became increasingly unsafe, with mercury in some wells reaching up to ten times the World Health Organization’s guidelines.

The contamination now stretches across a gold-rich belt that includes Kakamega — home to Bushiangala — as well as Vihiga, Siaya, Busia, and Kisumu, reaching toward Migori near the Tanzanian border.

A 2026 study published in Environmental Health found that the water and slurry used in these mining pits contain concentrations of arsenic, chromium, and mercury up to 100 times higher than local surface waters. The researchers warned that miners – and children living nearby – are in direct, frequent contact with these toxic mixtures, which eventually drain into the broader Lake Victoria ecosystem.

Mercury’s Slow Poison

Gladys Akitsa, an artisanal gold miner, mixes mercury with gold-bearing concentrate at the Bushiangala mining site in Ikolomani, Kakamega County, Kenya. Credit: Chemtai Kirui/IPS

For the miners on the ground, these toxins are no longer a matter of abstract data.

Timothy Mukoshi, a miner, remembers a colleague who slowly began to lose his memory. The man would withdraw money from the bank and later forget where he had put it.

Like many miners here, he often burnt mercury-gold amalgam to separate the metal – a process that releases toxic vapours. After he died, Mukoshi says the cause was clear: a post-mortem found traces of mercury in his brain.

“Mercury is what you call a slow poison,” Mukoshi says.

For years, the risks associated with using mercury in mining went largely unrecognised. Now, Bushiangala is trying something different.

In the same processing sites where women crush ore and wash gold by hand, miners are forming cooperatives and introducing methods that can recover gold without the toxic metal.

Miners say the shift gathered momentum after training initiatives reached the area through the planetGOLD programme — a global initiative backed by the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and led by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), with country-level implementation in Kenya by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to reduce mercury use in artisanal and small-scale gold mining.

“The planetGOLD programme stands as our leading initiative to tackle mercury use in artisanal and small-scale gold mining. By helping countries identify, test, and scale up mining and processing techniques, we not only support improved gold recovery but also empower miners to transition away from mercury use,” says Anil Bruce Sookdeo, Chemicals and Waste Coordinator and Senior Environmental Specialist at the GEF.

“Our approach is comprehensive – we facilitate sector formalisation, broaden access to financing for technology upgrades, and connect miners to formal and more reliable gold supply chains. When cleaner technologies are economically viable, financing is accessible, and there’s a dependable market for their gold, miners are much more likely to adopt mercury-free methods,” Sookdeo added.

Bringing Artisanal Miners Out of the Shadows

Women miners gather at a gold processing site in Bushiangala, Ikolomani, Kakamega County, Kenya. Credit: Chemtai Kirui/IPS

The planetGOLD Kenya project, locally known as IMKA, is partnering with the Ministry of Mining and the Ministry of Environment to tackle the root cause of the mercury crisis: informality. By bringing miners out of the shadows and into legal cooperatives, the project aims to replace toxic shortcuts with formal, mercury-free systems.

“At first, many miners were afraid of joining cooperatives,” says Mkhobi, the chairlady of the Bushiangala Women’s Mining Cooperative. “They thought it meant losing their money or being forced into something they didn’t understand. But after they understood the benefits, more people started joining.”

Kakamega currently has 24 registered mining cooperatives spread across several gold-producing sub-counties. Small welfare groups were brought together into registered cooperatives, creating a structure through which miners could access training, equipment, and formal recognition under the Mining Act of 2016.

A Capful of Mercury Replaced by Mechanical Processing

Miners stand at the entrance of a shaft at the Bushiangala mining site in Ikolomani, Kakamega County, Kenya. Credit: Chemtai Kirui/IPS

An artisanal miner uses a sluice box to separate gold from crushed ore at the Bushiangala mining site in Ikolomani, Kakamega County, Kenya. Credit: Chemtai Kirui/IPS

Women process crushed gold ore at the Bushiangala mining site in Ikolomani, Kakamega county, Kenya. Credit: Chemtai Kirui/IPS

Mechanical processing systems are replacing mercury inside the cooperatives. Miners who once relied on a capful of mercury are now learning to master gravity concentrators and shaking tables – mechanical systems that use physical force, rather than toxic chemicals, to pull gold from the dust.

At Bushiangala, a mercury-free demonstration plant now serves as a training ground for miners to practise using the new system under supervision. Technical manuals that once existed only as engineering documents are being translated into practical steps that can be applied directly in the pits.

Training sessions are conducted by technical staff from the planetGOLD programme alongside regional mining officers and cooperative leaders, combining engineering guidance with the practical knowledge miners already bring from the pits.

Oversight of the site is handled through a Joint Implementation Committee that brings together national regulators, county governments and representatives from mining communities.

By providing land and routine supervision, county governments are gradually assuming greater responsibility for the sector — an arrangement designed to ensure the effort continues even after international partners step back.

Convine Omondi, the project’s chief technical adviser, said in a 2025 planetGOLD report that involving local authorities directly helps turn what began as a donor-supported initiative into something managed and sustained at the local level.

The training materials and tools being tested here are part of a wider effort under the planetGOLD programme to share lessons between countries. Experiences from Kenya are being documented and adapted for use in other artisanal mining regions, rather than copied wholesale.

As of early 2026, Kenya had identified six demonstration sites across Kakamega, Vihiga, Migori and Narok. Fencing and sheds have already been completed, and the sites are now entering the commissioning phase. Delivery of heavy equipment and full operation are expected later this year.

Even so, progress is gradual. A site is only considered fully operational once the machinery is installed, utilities such as water and electricity are reliable, and certified cooperatives are actively using the facilities.

“First we were sensitised about how hazardous mercury is,” says Mukoshi, who has worked the Kakamega gold fields since the late 1990s and now chairs the Kakamega Miners Cooperative Union. “People realised it is dangerous. Now many sites keep registers, and miners are also learning that when you mine, you must rehabilitate the land.”

Healing the Land, Working Together

This focus on healing the land has spread beyond Kakamega. In neighbouring Vihiga County, the shift toward environmental restoration is being led by women who see the forest’s health as inseparable from their own.

“The training also introduced environmental rehabilitation, encouraging miners to restore excavated land once extraction ends,” says Shebby Kendi, chair of the Elwunza Women Cooperative Society.

But for Mkhobi, the change is not only about soil or chemicals. It is also about bargaining power. By moving from scattered pits to organised cooperatives, miners are beginning to act collectively in a trade where individuals have little influence.

“Now through the training we are learning how to organise ourselves, keep records and work as cooperatives,” Mkhobi says. “When we come together, we have more strength in the market.”

In a region where gold prices are often dictated by middlemen, that collective strength is beginning to shift how miners negotiate.

Giving Women Voice

A woman at the Bushiangala artisanal gold mine in western Kenya, where mercury is commonly used in gold processing, raises health concerns among workers. March 23, 2026. Photograph: Chemtai Kirui/IPS

“When you are one woman with a gram of gold, you have no voice,” she says. “When there are a hundred of you with a kilo, the buyers have to listen.”

For Anthony Munanga, Kakamega’s county director for environment, natural resources and climate change, that “kilo” also represents something else: control. At a recent media engagement, he said that without organised cooperatives, the gold economy remains largely invisible to regulators.

“Without organisation, there is no way to ensure compliance,” Munanga says. His department is now mapping mining areas across the county, an effort aimed at moving miners out of scattered pits and into designated zones where licensing and environmental oversight become possible.

“This process allows miners to operate safely and legally,” he says.

Changing Face of Financial Support

But legal recognition requires more than a map. It requires financing — and the local banking system is still reluctant to lend to a sector long defined by risk.

Changing how gold is produced also means rethinking how the trade is financed. In Bushiangala, this is where the constraints begin to show.

The planetGOLD programme in Kenya was launched with relatively modest public funding, despite ambitions that stretch far beyond its initial budget. At its core is a USD 4.24 million grant from the Global Environment Facility, much of which has already been allocated.

The grant has largely supported technical assistance — including miner training, policy development and institutional systems designed to formalise the sector — rather than directly financing mining equipment.

Project documents estimate the programme could mobilise up to USD 26 million in additional financing from commercial lenders and private investors to support new processing plants and upgraded mining infrastructure.

In practice, that funding has been slow to materialise.

Although the project was backed by USD 16.6 million in co-financing from government and local partners, a 2023 mid-term review found that much of this support existed on paper as in-kind contributions rather than cash available for day-to-day operations. It also pointed to delays within government financial systems and the lack of a risk-sharing mechanism to draw in private lenders, factors that have slowed implementation on the ground.

A final evaluation due in 2026 is expected to assess how far the programme has managed to address these gaps and whether it can sustain its operations over the long term.

Several structural constraints help explain the shortfall.

A government moratorium on new mining licences between 2019 and 2023 froze formalisation during a critical phase of the project. Without licences, miners could not meet standard lending requirements, and commercial banks have been reluctant to lend to what remains a largely informal sector.

Even where discussions with lenders progress, approval processes within banks can take more than a year, often outlasting key phases of the programme.

The absence of a dedicated risk-sharing mechanism has also limited participation. Without a first-loss guarantee to absorb potential defaults, lenders had little incentive to finance investments in artisanal mining.

The COVID-19 pandemic slowed procurement and field operations, but programme assessments suggest that the deeper barriers were structural — particularly the shortage of licensed miners eligible for credit and the lack of financial instruments tailored to the sector.

As a result, the programme has made measurable progress in training miners and organising them into cooperatives, but access to capital remains constrained.

Harry Kimtai, principal secretary at Kenya’s Ministry of Mining, describes the sequencing as deliberate, arguing that formalisation must come first before significant private investment can enter the sector.

Lag Between Training and Implementation

Sharon Ambale, an artisanal gold miner, holds a gold-mercury amalgam at the Bushiangala mining site in Ikolomani, Kakamega county, Kenya. Credit: Chemtai Kirui/IPS

For those on the front lines, that “deliberate sequencing” feels like a race against their own health. Merab Khamonya, a 28-year-old mother who joined the Bushiangala cooperative in 2024, is one of those caught in the lag between training and implementation.

Though she has attended planetGOLD sessions and understands the neurotoxicity of the metal she handles, her reality remains unchanged. To support her family, she still submerges her bare hands in basins of ore and mercury—a necessity for survival.

“I feel things moving inside my eyes,” she says, describing a persistent, painful irritation. “I know it harms me. I even see traces of it on my clothes when I go home to cook for my children.”

For Khamonya, the promise of a mercury-free mechanical system is a lifeline that has yet to arrive. “We are ready for the shift,” she says, “but for now, we have no other way to clean the gold. We are just waiting for the machines.”

Benefits of Mercury-Free Mechanical Systems

The economics behind the shift are straightforward. Kenya’s 2022 National Action Plan on artisanal and small-scale gold mining estimates that traditional manual methods recover only about 20 per cent of the gold in the ore. By comparison, data from planetGOLD Kenya shows that mercury-free mechanical systems can recover up to 90 per cent—potentially increasing the amount of gold recovered from each load of ore.

Miners involved in the programme say they are cautiously optimistic. They understand the problems and the solutions needed and feel best placed to judge what works on the ground.

“We have seen the difference and learned about mercury-free alternatives,” Mukoshi says. “We are ready to make the shift.”

But the obstacles, he adds, are basic.

“For these sites to work, you need water and electricity. Many of them don’t have either.”

For Mukoshi, Mkhobi, Kendi, Khamonya and their colleagues, the work has shifted to practicalities – securing water and electricity, preparing sites, and waiting on machines. The early experiments are over; what remains is making the system function.

On most days, that means clearing land, assembling equipment and negotiating with miners who are still uncertain about abandoning the mercury methods they have relied on for years.

The change taking shape in Bushiangala is small for now — one processing site, one cooperative, a handful of machines. But the model is already drawing attention beyond Kakamega.

planetGOLD’s Global Reach

In various places in Africa, governments and development agencies are searching for ways to formalise artisanal gold mining without destroying the environments where it takes place. In the Congo Basin’s Cuvette Centrale, UNEP and the planetGOLD programme are supporting a USD 10.5 million initiative aimed at protecting one of the world’s largest tropical peatland systems from mining damage.

The region spans about 167,600 square kilometres of peatlands and stores an estimated 29 billion tonnes of carbon — roughly three years of global emissions. GEF project data suggests the effort is designed to keep gold production from driving damage in a peat swamp that is crucial to climate stability.

In Zimbabwe, a parallel programme has begun introducing mercury-free processing technologies across dozens of mining sites. The effort here is more centralised, tied to the state-run Fidelity Gold Refinery and legislative reforms under the Mines and Minerals Bill.

Kenya’s system, by contrast, relies on cooperative structures at mine sites with county-level oversight through Joint Implementation Committees (JICs) and national regulation under the Mining Act — a model the African Development Bank is using as a reference point, particularly its JIC structure, for scaling mercury-free artisanal mining across the continent.

Kenya’s Experience Now a Guideline For Africa, World Expansion

According to Ludovic Bernaudat, head of the chemicals and green chemistry unit at UNEP, Kenya’s experience is now being used to guide the next phase of the programme as it expands across Africa.

He describes the country as one of the original eight members now completing its first implementation cycle – a milestone for the global initiative.

“New countries in Africa have recently joined the programme, and through the global project, UNEP will make sure that connection is made with Kenya,” Bernaudat said.

He added that the Kenyan model will be featured at the 2026 planetGOLD Global Forum in Panama, where nations share technical expertise and compare approaches to ending mercury use.

Since its launch, planetGOLD has expanded from nine to 27 countries across Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

“This growth demonstrates both the scale of the challenge and the value of a programme that integrates environmental action with support for livelihoods, inclusion, and market transformation,” says Anil Bruce Sookdeo, from the GEF.

But the final proof will depend less on policy design than on whether miners themselves decide it works.

Chasing Thin Seams of Gold Safely

Back in Bushiangala, that test is only beginning.

Miners still arrive at the pits each morning as they always have, chasing thin seams of gold buried in the red earth. What is changing — slowly — is what happens after the ore reaches the surface.

If the new system holds, the mercury that once flowed through these streams may eventually disappear. And the miners here, in this corner of western Kenya, will find a way to keep working the land without the risks that have defined it for years.

Note: This feature is published with the support of the GEF. IPS is solely responsible for the editorial content, and it does not necessarily reflect the views of the GEF.

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Kaveh Madani, Director of the UN University’s Institute for Water, Environment and Health and lead author of the report entitled “Global Water Bankruptcy: Living Beyond Our Hydrological Means in the Post-Crisis Era” briefs reporters at UN Headquarters. Credit: UN Photo/Evan Schneider

By Umar Manzoor Shah
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 25 2026 (IPS)

Professor Kaveh Madani of Iran has been named the 2026 Stockholm Water Prize laureate. The award will be formally presented by King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden in August during World Water Week in Stockholm.

The Stockholm Water Prize is widely regarded as the highest global honour in water science and policy. Often called the Nobel Prize for water, it recognises individuals and institutions for exceptional contributions to the sustainable use and protection of water resources. This year’s selection stands out for both scientific impact and the extraordinary personal journey of the laureate.

At 44, Madani is the first Muslim and the youngest recipient in the prize’s 35 year history. He is also the first United Nations official and the first former politician to receive the award.

Madani currently serves as Director of the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health. Once a senior official in Iran’s government, he later faced arrest, interrogation, and a sustained smear campaign that forced him to leave his country.

Born in Tehran in 1981, Madani grew up in a family deeply connected to Iran’s water sector. His early exposure to the country’s mounting water challenges shaped his academic direction. He studied civil engineering at the University of Tabriz before moving to Sweden to pursue a master’s degree in water resources at Lund University. He later earned a PhD from the University of California, Davis, followed by postdoctoral research at the University of California, Riverside.

By his early 30s, Madani had established himself as a leading systems analyst. He joined Imperial College, London, where his work focused on the mathematical modelling of complex human water systems. His research combined hydrology, economics, and decision sciences to improve policymaking in water management.

In 2017, he made a decisive move. Leaving a prestigious academic career in London, he returned to Iran to serve as Deputy Vice President and Deputy Head of the Department of Environment. Many viewed his appointment as a signal of reform and a bridge between Iran and its scientific diaspora.

During his tenure, Madani pushed for transparency and structural reforms in water governance. He used innovative public campaigns to raise awareness about environmental degradation. However, his efforts challenged entrenched interests.

State-aligned media accused him of espionage and labelled him a “water terrorist” and “bioterrorist”. Conspiracy theories circulated, linking him to foreign intelligence agencies and even to alleged weather manipulation schemes. His advocacy for international environmental agreements further intensified opposition.

In early 2018, a broader crackdown on environmental experts began. Madani was detained and interrogated multiple times. Several of his colleagues were arrested. One of them, Kavous Seyed Emami, died in custody under contested circumstances.

Facing mounting pressure, Madani left Iran and entered a period of exile. He joined Yale University, where he continued his research and advocacy. He began to focus more on bridging science and policy at the global level.

Madani’s academic contributions have been widely recognised. He is known for integrating game theory into water resource management. His work challenged traditional models that assumed cooperation among stakeholders. He demonstrated that individual incentives often lead to uncooperative behaviour, which makes many engineering solutions ineffective in practice.

This approach provided new tools to understand conflicts over shared water resources. It has been applied to transboundary water disputes and to policy design in regions with limited trust among stakeholders.

One of his most influential contributions is “water bankruptcy.” He introduced the term to describe a condition where water systems can no longer recover to their historical levels. Unlike a crisis, which implies a temporary disruption, water bankruptcy signals a long-term structural failure.

In a recent United Nations report, Madani argued that the world entered an era of global water bankruptcy in January 2026. The report highlighted that many river basins and aquifers have lost their capacity to regenerate. This framing has sparked debate among policymakers and researchers.

Madani uses simple financial language to explain complex ecological realities. He argues that humanity is no longer living off renewable water flows but is depleting long-term reserves. This framing has made the concept widely accessible and influential.

Beyond academia, Madani has built a strong public presence. With a large following on social media, he has used digital platforms to communicate scientific findings in accessible ways. His work includes documentaries and public campaigns aimed at increasing awareness and accountability.

He has also played key roles in international diplomacy. As Iran’s lead environmental diplomat, he participated in global negotiations and served as Vice President of the UN Environment Assembly Bureau in 2017. At the COP23 climate conference in Bonn, he called for greater attention to water in global climate agreements.

Today, as head of the United Nations water think tank, he continues to advocate for integrating water into climate and development policies. He has particularly focused on the Global South, where water stress closely links with food insecurity, migration, and conflict.

The Stockholm Water Prize Committee cited his “unique combination of groundbreaking research, policy engagement, diplomacy, and global outreach, often under personal risk” in awarding him the 2026 prize.

In an exclusive interview with Inter Press Service, Madani recalled the intense pressure and fear that defined his final days in Iran. He described repeated interrogations, surveillance, and a growing sense that his work had placed him in direct confrontation with powerful institutions.

Here are edited excerpts from the interview: 

IPS: You introduced the idea of “water bankruptcy.” How does this change how governments must act today?

Madani: Water bankruptcy is defined as a post-crisis state of failure in which the system is suffering from insolvency, meaning that water use has been more than the available water for an extended period, and also irreversibility, meaning that there are some damages to the ecosystem and the machinery of water production that are irreversible and cannot be fixed.

What that means is that some of the things that used to be just anomalies and abnormal conditions are now the new normal, and we’re no longer experiencing only a temporary deviation from what we are used to, but we have a situation that we have to get used to. Crisis management is about mitigation.

Bankruptcy management is about mitigating what can still be mitigated and adapting to new realities with more restrictions. Bankruptcy management calls for an honest confession, the admission of a confession that a mistake has been made, and the current business model is not working, so it calls for honestly admitting to the mistakes made and transforming the business model, that calls for a fresh new start and a change of course.

It is bitter. Bankruptcy is not a pleasant condition but admitting to it helps us prevent further irreversible damages and enables a future that is less catastrophic.

IPS: You faced arrest, exile, and serious accusations in Iran. What kept you going during that period?

Professor Madani: Hope. Hope is what kept me going because I had gone back there to help and at least at the start, I was trying to take what was happening to me as part of the job and as part of the adventure because I was there to make a positive impact, and if I had given up too quickly, then that would not have matched my essential motivation to help.

I knew that it would not be a very smooth path, but it turned out to be much more bumpy than what I had anticipated, and I think many also, you know, those who made that situation bumpy for me, also regret that today, but by the time they realised mistakes were made, it was too late to do anything about it.

Can you recall your arrest and interrogation? What do you remember most from that experience, and how did it affect you personally?

I think arrests and interrogations are very frustrating, especially when you haven’t done anything wrong.

What kills you is constantly worrying about what others think of you and coming up with different scenarios and conspiracy theories. Dealing with conspiracy theories and proving them wrong is not easy. Those were very hard times for me, but as you know, my background is in behaviour analysis. I was trying to put myself in the shoes of those who were suspicious of me, understand their concerns, and address them so I could help my homeland.

IPS: Many countries still treat water stress as a temporary crisis. What are the biggest policy mistakes they continue to make?

Madani: Yes, crisis management is all about mitigation. Those who deny the crisis and enter the bankruptcy state continue to borrow more from nature, build more infrastructure, dig deeper wells, add additional reservoirs and storage capacity, implement more water transfer projects and build more, and construct more desalination plants. Continuing to add to their supply, on the other hand, they think things would be temporary, and through some sort of rationing, things would be solved, but the continuation of that behaviour and the denial of that reality makes the problem worse.

They get drained into a deepening problem, and again, like the financial world, if your business model is not working and you’re in denial, you continue taking more loans and your expenses and your debt become higher and higher. By the time that people realise that there is no way out of that chaos and that failure, the cost is much, much higher. Remaining in denial would result in major significant irreversible damages that generations would have to pay for.

IPS: You combined science with diplomacy and public outreach. Which of these has had the most real impact on decision-making?

Professor Madani: It’s very hard to really say which one has the most impact, because they’re very complementary. The science is very good, but it’s not enough for decision-making. You still have to understand what the real world looks like and how incentives shape behaviour and actions and how interests promote conflicts and cooperation to be able to act.

Science, of course, opens doors and puts more solutions on the table, but still, without understanding the politics or navigating through politics, it would not work. Diplomacy is another one when it comes to the international scale; even when it comes to negotiating with stakeholders, that’s a skill that would be extremely helpful. So, in a way, these are the things that you need.

And on top of these, public outreach educates you about perceptions, how people and societies understand problems, how they judge different situations, and how their emotions and their perceptions shape their beliefs, and that tells you what you need to do when it comes to communicating your science better, changing their opinion, impacting their opinion, and even negotiating with them or convincing them that things might be different or a different pathway is required. I think they all help you create a recipe for something that might work.

IPS: Your work focuses on human behaviour in water management. Why do technical solutions alone often fail?

Madani: A lot of times, technical solutions developed by our computer models or in our labs don’t take into account the full elements of reality. When humans are involved, we deal with different motives, incentives, emotions, and psychologies, and that makes – that creates – some essentially unexpected realities that might tweak things. Simply put, a lot of times when it comes to developing a solution for a water problem or an environmental solution or a sustainability solution, we think that everyone agrees to making short-term sacrifices for the sake of long-term resilience, but that is not the case in reality because different stakeholders, different groups, farmers, urban users, and industrial users also have short-term goals.

They maximise profit, make sure that the quality of life is not impacted, and so on, which makes them non-cooperative to an extent. And if you miss this reality, then you think that the solution, the optimal solution, is very practical and everyone would cooperate, but then you get very disappointed.

Yet, you can take that into account to the extent possible, try to understand the behavioural element and incorporate those into your assessment and projections to be able to align those incentives and motives with the long-term interest to offer a solution that is more attractive and win-win.

IPS: You now advise governments globally. What is the one urgent action every water-stressed country must take in the next five years?

Madani: I think that by now, countries must understand the importance of water as an essential resource for establishing peace, national security, justice, prosperity, and development. I mean, it supports human development, health, and long-term resilience in society. So, countries must not take it for granted and understand that technological solutions would not be sufficient to address shortages.

They must revisit their practices. They must do a proper accounting to understand what, what’s, and how water is currently being spent and if it’s strategic – strategically speaking, that is the right way of doing things when it comes to matters of national security and long-term resilience. Bankruptcy management starts with accounting and transparency.

That’s something that is missing in many water-stressed and non-water-stressed countries, and I think that’s something that we can focus on, put the lens of science on, and not be afraid of accounting and measuring and monitoring what is happening in the system because that knowledge is required if you want to make improvements.

IPS: Thank you very much for taking the time and speaking to IPS  and congratulations again for the well-deserved award.

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Excerpt:

A number of households are settling along the bank of a river in West Java, Indonesia. Geospatial data are critical in improving the management of water resources. Credit: Pexels/Tom Fisk

By Kareff Rafisura, Orbita Roswintiarti and Huang Qi
BANGKOK, Thailand, Mar 20 2026 (IPS)

Across Asia, new initiatives are showing how satellite Earth observation data and AI-powered technologies can turn fragmented water-related data into actionable insights for managers and policymakers in line ministries and local governments.

Only about 3% of global water quality measurements (around 60,000 out of 2 million) come from the world’s poorest regions, according to the United Nations, highlighting a persistent water data gap. Even where data exist, they are often scattered across agencies, with monitoring stations sparse and datasets rarely analysed together.

Integrating satellite observations with cognitive digital technologies, including artificial intelligence, can bring these fragmented sources into a single data and analytical pipeline, turning environmental data into timely insights that strengthen water governance and accelerate progress toward SDG 6.

Guiding smarter water infrastructure investments

One example is from Cimanuk–Cisanggarung River Basin in West Java, Indonesia. Rapid urban growth, land-use change and climate variability are increasing flood risks during the rainy season and water shortages during the dry season.

Retention ponds or small reservoirs designed to capture and store excess rainwater are widely recognized as effective solutions because they can hold excess runoff during heavy rains and provide water for irrigation and communities during dry periods.

The main policy challenge, however, is optimizing investments in retention ponds: quickly identifying the best locations and making site selection more systematic and less subjective. Conventionally, planning relies heavily on field surveys and fragmented datasets, making the process slow, costly and hard to scale.

An AI-powered tool developed by Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN) and the West Java Department of Water Resources demonstrates how a single data and analytical pipeline can guide infrastructure investment decisions.

The tool combines satellite Earth observation data, including digital elevation maps, land cover maps and rainfall data, with georeferenced drainage networks and soil type information to identify locations where retention ponds can provide the most benefits for flood control and drought resilience. Socio-environmental filters exclude protected areas or sites that might cause social or legal conflicts.

To ensure the tool supports operational decision-making, the results were validated through field assessments and consultations with local stakeholders. Additionally, a mobile-based application is being developed to enable field technicians to access the outputs directly on site, improving the speed and practicality of retention pond planning.

Applying this tool shifts infrastructure planning from subjective judgment to transparent and evidence-based prioritization. Supported by capacity-building activities for local institutions, this approach enables governments to allocate resources more efficiently while enhancing the long-term resilience of water systems.

Monitoring lake ecosystems from space

While the Indonesia example shows how digital technologies can guide infrastructure investments, similar approaches are also transforming how water ecosystems are monitored and protected.

Water quality monitoring in Songkhla Lake, Thailand’s largest lagoon system and a critical resource for fisheries and aquaculture, has traditionally relied on periodic sampling at fixed stations. Expanding the coverage and frequency of monitoring data could improve early warning for ecosystem management and aquaculture.

A project, implemented by Prince of Songkla University in collaboration with local authorities, is exploring this potential on Ko Yor Island in Songkhla Lake. The initiative combines multi-source satellite remote sensing data, historical monitoring records and machine learning models to estimate key water quality parameters, such as turbidity and biochemical oxygen demand.

Satellite-based remote sensing expands the coverage and frequency of water-quality monitoring, enabling near-monthly maps rather than quarterly point measurements.

This effort draws on more than a decade of operational experience from Poyang Lake, the largest freshwater lake in China. There, Jiangxi Normal University developed a comprehensive monitoring and early warning platform integrating satellite Earth observation, drone, ground and lake-surface sources, combined with ecological data simulated by models to track the lake’s dynamic ecological security issues and overall health.

The system supports water management and the conservation of flagship species and their habitats, including migratory birds and the Yangtze finless porpoise.

From pilots to regional transformation

These pilots highlight an important trend: many of the innovative technologies needed to address water data gaps are already available. Earth observation satellite-derived data can complement ground-based observations by expanding environmental monitoring, while cognitive technologies integrate datasets into decision-ready insights.

Scaling these innovations is not only a technological challenge. As emphasized in ESCAP’s report Seizing the Opportunity: Digital Innovation for a Sustainable Future, digital innovation is a socio-technical transformation that requires the skills, institutions and partnerships to integrate technology into governance systems.

Experiences from Indonesia and Thailand illustrate how integrating satellite-derived data, geospatial analysis and artificial intelligence can simultaneously strengthen climate resilience, livelihoods and water governance. With supportive policies, stronger digital capacities and sustained regional cooperation, such approaches could be adapted and replicated in suitable contexts.

These pilots, along with exchanges of technical experience, including lessons from the Poyang Lake monitoring system, are supported through the Asia-Pacific Plan of Action on Space Applications for Sustainable Development (2018–2030).

The Asia-Pacific SDG Progress Report 2026 warns that progress across many Sustainable Development Goals remains off track, while data gaps continue to constrain effective policymaking. Strengthening water governance will depend not only on building infrastructure, but also on building the data systems and analytical capacities that guide where and how those investments are made.

Scaling proven digital innovations could therefore help turn fragmented water data into the actionable intelligence needed to accelerate progress toward SDG 6 and the broader 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Kareff Rafisura is Economic Affairs Officer (Space Applications), ESCAP; Orbita Roswintiarti is Senior Scientist, BRIN; Huang Qi is Associate Research Fellow, School of Geography and Environment, Key Laboratory of Poyang Lake Wetland and Watershed Research (Ministry of Education), Jiangxi Normal University, and Director of Nanji Wetland Field Research Station, Poyang Lake

Chaoyang Fang, Distinguished Professor, School of Geography and Environment and Chief Engineer, Key Laboratory of Poyang Lake Wetland and Watershed Research (Ministry of Education) of Jiangxi Normal University, also contributed insights to this piece.

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World Water Day 2026 (March 22) will be celebrated at a high-level event at United Nations Headquarters in New York under the theme “Water and Gender Equality”, highlighting the links between equitable water access, sustainable development and human rights. Source: UN News

By Lyla Mehta and Alan Nicol
BRIGHTON, UK, Mar 19 2026 (IPS)

The 2026 campaign on World Water Day’s focuses on Water and Gender – ‘where water flows, equality grows’ . While substantial progress has been achieved across a range of gender indicators spanning education, health and public participation, the situation around WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene) is still marked by deep inequalities with women and girls disproportionately affected – and this reflects the persistence of global patriarchy.

More than 2 billion people still lack access to safely managed drinking water. In households without piped water, women and girls are made to be responsible for about 70–80% of water collection trips worldwide, taking anything from 30 minutes to four hours daily. This time can instead usefully be spent on education, productive activities or even leisure and rest, but they don’t have the choice.

The situation is even more dire for sanitation with 3.4 billion people lacking access to safely managed sanitation. All this affects women’s and girl’s dignity, safety, security and the privacy and comfort needed for dignified menstrual health management. At the same time, there is poor progress on women’s economic participation.

These patterns have remained remarkably persistent despite improvements in water and sanitation infrastructure. The sheer time and labour required for poor women and girls around WASH activities, combined with gendered inequalities and power imbalances under the persistence of patriarchy not only directly affect girls’ enrolment in education but inevitably diminishes their capacity for productive economic activity, the net impact of which worldwide is a huge dent in human development progress.

Water as a weapon of war against women and girls

Not only that, but the apparent normalisation of wars and genocides wrought largely by men means almost daily violations of international humanitarian law including the weaponisation of water and sanitation infrastructure as a target of attack. Most recently, the United States’ bombing of a freshwater desalinsation plant in Iran and retaliation by Iran on another desalination plant in Bahrain set a dangerous new precedent.

When water and sanitation infrastructure become fair game in war, as we’ve seen in Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine in the last few years, existing gender inequalities around water and sanitation mean women and girls suffer most, compounding risks including sexual violence.

Male violence and malevolence are back

What we’re seeing real-time and online is something even more worrying. That is the resurgence of more explicit patriarchy desiring control over women’s lives and subjugation into traditional roles away from public life. From the slashing of Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programmes to the rollback of reproductive rights across the world from the USA to Chile, the resurgence of ‘toxic masculinity’ is forcing gender rights, feminism and equality off the agenda and they are equated with pejorative notions of ‘wokeism.’

Some institutions are already reframing debates in response. For instance, the World Bank is increasingly framing gender as about economic activity and jobs, rather than about rights. This is reflected in their new Water Mission implementation strategy that refers to employment but only mentions gender six times and women four times even though the gross inequalities in labour power and economic effects are, as stated above, so vast.

The gender backlash and reductionism in rights framings helps reinforce stereotypes and accepted norms, including the gendered division of labour in water collection, rather than confronting this more forcefully – and, at a minimum, asking why this is the case rather than accepted as a given.

If views persist that women and girls are responsible for water-related subsistence tasks, it ignores specific needs around sanitation and menstrual hygiene and increases male domination in decision-making and water management. Which is precisely what patriarchy seeking to achieve – domination and subjugation.

The rollback on funding for WASH continues

A year ago, Keir Starmer cut the UK aid budget by about 40 per cent. These cuts have been devastating for water and sanitation progress in some of the world’s poorest and most war-torn countries with direct and lasting consequences for women and girls. The cuts particularly impact countries like Sudan, Ethiopia and Palestine, already reeling from largely male-driven wars, conflicts and genocide.

It is estimated that around 12 million people will be denied access to clean water and sanitation as a result. These cuts directly affect gender equality because reduced access to water and sanitation impacts schooling, being at work and increases the risk of gender-based violence.

The UK justifies the cuts as a way to move away from direct aid around WASH to strengthening capabilities and partnerships. But these partnerships between the UK and Global South countries such as Nigeria focusing on growth, jobs and reducing aid dependency can backfire as more and more people’s health deteriorate, including more women suffering from ill health and long-term illnesses.

Ultimately, a waning collective effort to support gender equality in WASH provision opens the door to long-term decline in gender rights and economic development. Additionally, the dismantling of USAID is already having devastating consequences for gender equality and women’s health. Just when greater focus is needed on WASH projects to ensure we are not backsliding on gender rights, aid is being cut.

In sum, persistent inequalities, the gender backlash, illegal and forever wars and aid cuts lacking a moral compass have diluted global collective action on gender inequality. The least policymakers could do would be to achieve and maintain leadership that realises human rights for all in WASH provision, a substantial rationale for which has to be a big- ticket focus on the social and economic empowerment of women and girls.

Any other direction would be disastrous, enabling patriarchy and misogyny to grow even deeper roots in global society.

Professor Lyla Mehta is a Professorial Fellow at IDS and a Visiting Professor at Noragric, the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. She trained as a sociologist (University of Vienna) and has a PhD in Development Studies (University of Sussex).

Dr. Alan Nicol is the Strategic Program Leader – Promoting Sustainable Growth, at the International Water Management Institute (IWMI)

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As glaciers shrink and vanish, changes in water flows pose a growing risk to the water, food and livelihood security of billions of people. Credit: FAO

By QU Dongyu
ROME, Feb 12 2026 (IPS)

Glaciers – the world’s hidden water banks – are a source of life for billions. The seasonal melt from mountains and glaciers sustains some of the world’s most important rivers, such as the Indus, the Nile, the Ganges and the Colorado. Those and other mountain-fed rivers irrigate crops, provide drinking water for nearly two billion people, and power electricity generation.

But, as glaciers shrink and vanish, changes in water flows pose a growing risk to the water, food and livelihood security of billions of people.

In the short term, accelerated melting can trigger environmental hazards: flash floods, glacial lake outburst floods, avalanches and landslides.

In the long term, the glaciers as water sources will simply disappear.

By century’s end, most glaciers will contribute far less water than they do today, undermining agriculture in both mountain villages and sprawling lowland breadbaskets downstream.

We need policies and collaboration that address glacier-fed water systems, cross-border cooperation, and risk-sharing and early warning mechanisms – especially as rivers fed by glaciers often span multiple countries

Mountains cover more than a quarter of the world’s land and are home to 1.2 billion people, but these regions are heating up more rapidly than the global average. Mountain communities are especially vulnerable to increasing climate variability and decreasing seasonal water availability for agriculture and irrigation. With often no viable alternative water supply, the loss of agricultural production can lead to climate displacement and greater instability.

Five of the past six years have seen the most rapid glacier retreat on record, and the impacts are already being felt.

Communities from the Andes to the Himalayas are experiencing shorter snow seasons, erratic runoff, and the loss of reliable water. In Peru, dwindling glaciers have slashed crop yields. In Pakistan, reduced snowmelt threatens seasonal planting cycles. Many glaciers have already reached or are expected to reach “peak water” – the point at which meltwater runoff is at its maximum, after which flows will gradually decline – in the coming two or three decades. This means everyone who depends on glacier-fed rivers faces increasing scarcity when population growth will push water demand even higher.

Beyond science and survival, the disappearance of glaciers erases something less tangible but equally profound. For Indigenous Peoples and mountain communities across Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Pacific, glaciers are sacred. Their melting erodes traditions, rituals, identity and cultural heritage bound to mountain landscapes for centuries.

While there is still time to act, global responses remain fragmented and inadequate. That’s why the United Nations declared 2025 the International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation – a clear reminder that preserving these frozen ecosystems means protecting our future.

To ensure food and water security from the peaks to the plains, a bold shift in policy, investment and governance is urgently needed.

Broadly speaking, cutting greenhouse gas emissions, improving water management, and strengthening early warning systems, adaptative agriculture and sustainable agrifood systems are necessary.

We need to turn the challenges posed by melting glaciers into opportunities to the benefit of all.

Agriculture, both a major water user and a key sector for adaptation, can itself be a solution when developed sustainably. Techniques like terrace farming, agroecology, agroforestry and crop diversification – practiced by mountain communities for centuries – help preserve soil and water, reduce disaster risk and support livelihoods. Such adaptation efforts should be inclusive, drawing on Indigenous Peoples’ knowledge and addressing root vulnerabilities like poverty and gender inequality.

We must also mobilize investments in water and agricultural infrastructure. This includes more climate finance to support vulnerable mountain communities that struggle to access training, funding and innovation.

In addition, governments need to align strategies, policies and plans to address this critical nexus between water, agriculture and climate resilience. Mountains are often absent from national climate policies and global adaptation frameworks. We need policies and collaboration that address glacier-fed water systems, cross-border cooperation, and risk-sharing and early warning mechanisms – especially as rivers fed by glaciers often span multiple countries. This also includes reviewing basin-wide water allocation strategies, plans and investment in infrastructure to improve water use efficiency, and step up glacier monitoring and research.

Preparing for a world with fewer glaciers and less of their precious water requires innovation and coordination. In Kyrgyzstan, FAO has been helping experts construct artificial glaciers – ice towers created by spraying mountain water and that gradually melt in summer. In the region of Batken alone, this initiative has helped store over 1.5 million cubic meters of ice, enough to irrigate up to 1,750 hectares.

In Ladakh, India, the social enterprise Acres of Ice has developed automated ice reservoirs to capture unused water in autumn and winter and freeze it until spring. In the Peruvian Andes, a community-based initiative is addressing the deterioration of water quality from minerals exposed by receding glaciers through a natural filtration system using native plants.

But far more needs to be done, together. Glaciers matter because water matters. To ignore their rapid retreat is to gamble with global food and water security.

—

FAO is mandated to lead the global observance of International Mountain Day, coordinated through the Mountain Partnership Secretariat, which is financially supported by the governments of Italy, Andorra and Switzerland. The Secretariat collaborated closely with UNESCO and the World Meteorological Organization, co-facilitators of the International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation 2025.

Excerpt:

Credit: Port Vila Market, Vanuatu – Kevin Hellon / shutterstock.com

By Tobias Ide
Feb 9 2026 (IPS)

 
The Pacific Island countries are at the frontline of climate change. Their territories mostly consist of small, low-lying islands, with long coastlines and vast ocean spaces between them. Many livelihoods are based on agriculture or fishing, and importing water or food is often infeasible or expensive. This makes those large ocean nations highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, such as storms, droughts, and rising sea levels. Analysts have expressed concerns that this can result in various forms of socio-political conflict.

However, the Pacific Island countries have received scarce attention in research on climate change and conflict. This is surprising given the Pacific Island countries’ high climate vulnerability and increasing geopolitical relevance. A few years back, a Nature article did not find a single peer-reviewed study on the climate-conflict nexus in the Pacific. And while recent work added important insights on potential pathways between climate and conflict in the Pacific Island countries, the region remains understudied.

A new study tackles this knowledge gap by systematically collecting data on conflict events (such as protests, riots, and communal violence) in Fiji, Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu. It then determines statistical associations between the occurrence of such conflicts—protests, riots, communal violence etc.—and climate extremes like storms, heatwaves, and floods. The results are surprising.

Climate extremes do not drive conflict risks

The researchers found that climate disasters are not a significant predictor of conflict events. This is true for both cities and rural areas. In cities, high values of (and competition for) land, immigration after disasters, and opportunities for political mobilisation have long been considered to make climate-related conflicts more likely, yet no such statistical signal was detected. Even when looking only at conflicts around natural resources like water or forests, climate extremes are not a good predictor.

These findings could nuance common wisdom about climate change and conflict. Experts from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have concluded that climate change increases conflict risks, even though other conflict drivers are more important. Such a linkage is particularly likely in climate vulnerable regions with a history of political instability, and it is also more applicable to low-intensity conflicts like protests (as compared to large-scale violence like civil wars). Yet, the study focuses on such smaller-scale conflict. Fiji, Solomon Island, and Vanuatu are also highly vulnerable to climate change and suffered through political instability (coups, civil war, and unrest) in the past.

How to make sense of the absence of conflict

As a starting point, it is important to clarify three things. First, the absence of conflict does not necessarily imply peace, particularly if those least responsible for climate change suffer most from its consequences. Second, the study focuses on visible and collective forms of conflict. Disasters, but also competition for disaster-related support schemes, might well result in lower-level, less visible forms of conflict, such as household and intimate partner violence or lower social cohesion within communities. Studying these forms of conflict is certainly a key task for future work. Third, evidence is not perfect. The new study, for instance, covers only the period 2012 to 2020, studies just three Pacific Island countries, and could not include rainfall anomalies due to a lack of data.

That said, the absence of a correlation between climate extremes and socio-political conflict events is still noteworthy. It indicates the Pacific Islands have significant levels of agency and resilience. This is not to romanticise local communities and national governments—as everywhere in the world, they have their share of tensions and shortcomings. But the Pacific Island countries possess well-established traditional institutions and, at least in some areas, strong community and civil society networks. Given their remote location, tropical climate, and oceanic geography, they have plenty of knowledge and experience in dealing with climate extremes like droughts, floods, and storms as well. These are important assets for coping peacefully with the impacts of climate change.

Consider the example of Vanuatu after cyclone Pam in 2015. Despite being one of the most intense storms to ever hit the South Pacific, the death toll was relatively low, and the country recovered rather quickly from its impacts. This was the case because local community structures and NGO-led Community Climate Change Committees coordinated well, and they thus played a key role in preparing for the storm and in delivering disaster relief and recovery. These activities did not just utilise but also strengthened traditional social networks. Furthermore, state institutions effectively utilised the inflow of international aid to deal with the cyclone’s impacts, thereby increasing trust in the government. Consequentially, no major conflicts erupted in the aftermath of Pam.

Avoid doomsday thinking – and provide tailored support

Which insights can decision makers draw from these findings?

It is important to avoid doomsday scenarios when thinking about climate change in the Pacific. For sure, the respective countries are highly exposed to and quite vulnerable to climate change. But if policy makers and media portray the Pacific Island countries as helpless victims of climate change and prone to conflict, the consequences are problematic: a lack of economic investment, external support mostly focussed on relocation, and an ignorance of local capacities.

By contrast, emphasising how Pacific communities successfully deal with and maintain peace in the context of climate change provides different perspectives. It highlights how local communities and state institutions (despite not being perfect) have significant capacities for climate change adaptation and bottom-up peacebuilding. National governments and international donors should utilise those capacities by providing tailored support, responding to the needs and priorities of those on the frontline of climate change. Rather than preliminary resignation or relocation, this can support the building of climate-resilient peace.

Related articles:
There Is No Security Without Development, Anything Else Is a Distraction
Do We Need a Pacific Peace Index?
The Trump Presidency and Climate Security in the Indo-Pacific Region

Tobias Ide is Associate Professor in Politics and International Relations at Murdoch University Perth. Until recently, he was also Adjunct Associate Professor of International Relations at the Brunswick University of Technology. He has published widely on the intersections of the environment, climate change, peace, conflict and security, including in Global Environmental Change, International Affairs, Journal of Peace Research, Nature Climate Change, and World Development. He is also a director of the Environmental Peacebuilding Association.

This article was issued by the Toda Peace Institute and is being republished from the original with their permission.

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Lead author Prof. Kaveh Madani
 
Flagship report calls for fundamental reset of global water agenda as irreversible damage pushes many basins beyond recovery.

By UN University’s Institute for Water, Environment and Health
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 21 2026 (IPS)

The world is already in the state of “water bankruptcy”. In many basins and aquifers, long-term overuse and degradation mean that past hydrological and ecological baselines cannot realistically be restored.

While not every basin or country is water-bankrupt, enough critical systems around the world have crossed these thresholds, and are interconnected through trade, migration, climate feedbacks, and geopolitical dependencies, that the global risk landscape is now fundamentally altered.

The familiar language of “water stress” and “water crisis” is no longer adequate. Stress describes high pressure that is still reversible. Crisis describes acute, time-bound shocks. Water bankruptcy must be recognized as a distinct post-crisis state, where accumulated damage and overshoot have undermined the system’s capacity to recover.

A group of women fetching water from a dam in Taha, Northern Region of Ghana. Credit: Evans Ahorsu. Source: UN University’s Institute for Water, Environment and Health

Water bankruptcy management must address insolvency and irreversibility. Unlike financial bankruptcy management, which deals only with insolvency, managing water bankruptcy is concerned with rebalancing demand and supply under conditions where returning to baseline conditions is no longer possible.

Anthropogenic drought is central to the world’s new water reality. Drought and water shortage are increasingly driven by human activities, over-allocation, groundwater depletion, land and soil degradation, deforestation, pollution, and climate change, rather than natural variability alone. Water bankruptcy is the outcome of long-term anthropogenic drought, not just bad luck with hydrological anomalies.

Water bankruptcy is about both quantity and quality. Declining stocks, polluted rivers, and degrading aquifers, and salinized soils mean that the truly usable fraction of available water is shrinking, even where total volumes may appear stable.

Managing water bankruptcy requires a shift from crisis management to bankruptcy management. The priority is no longer to “get back to normal”, but to prevent further irreversible damage, rebalance rights and claims within degraded carrying capacities, transform water-intensive sectors and development models, and support just transitions for those most affected.

Governance institutions must protect both water and its underlying natural capital. The existing institutions focus on protecting water as a good or service disregarding the natural capital that makes water available in the first place. Efforts to protect a product are ineffective when the processes that produce it are disrupted.

Recognizing water bankruptcy calls for developing legal and governance institutions that can effectively protect not only water but also the hydrological cycle and natural capital that make its production possible.

Water bankruptcy is a justice and security issue. The costs of overshoot and irreversibility fall disproportionately on smallholder farmers, rural and Indigenous communities, informal urban residents, women, youth, and downstream users, while benefits have often accrued to more powerful actors. How societies manage water bankruptcy will shape social cohesion, political stability, and peace.

Water bankruptcy management combines mitigation with adaptation. While water crisis management paradigms seek to return the system to normal conditions through mitigation efforts only, water bankruptcy management focuses on restoring what is possible and preventing further damages through mitigation combined with adaptation to new normals and constraints.

Water can serve as a bridge in a fragmented world. Water can align national priorities with international priorities and improve cooperation between and within nations. Roughly 70% of global freshwater withdrawals are used for agriculture, much of it by farmers in the Global South. Elevating water in global policy debates can help rebuild trust between South and North but also within nations, between rural and urban, left and right constituencies.

Water must be recognized as an upstream sector. Most national and international policy agendas treat water as a downstream impact sector where investments are focused on mitigating the imposed problems and externalities. The world must recognize water as an upstream opportunity sector where investments have long-term benefits for peace, stability, security, equity, economy, health, and the environment.

Water is an effective medium to fulfill the global environmental agenda. Investments in addressing water bankruptcy deliver major co-benefits for the global efforts to address its environmental problems while addressing the national security concerns of the UN member states.

Elevating water in the global policy agenda can renew international cooperation, increase the efficiency of environmental investments, and reaccelerate the halted progress of the three Rio Conventions to address climate change, biodiversity loss, and desertification.

A new global water agenda is urgently needed. Existing agendas and conventional water policies, focused mainly on WASH, incremental efficiency gains and generic IWRM guidelines, are not sufficient for the world’s current water reality. A fresh water agenda must be developed that takes Global Water Bankruptcy as a starting point and uses the 2026 and 2028 UN Water Conferences, the conclusion of the Water Action Decade in 2028, and the 2030 SDG 6 timeline as milestones for resetting how the world understands and governs water.

Global Water Bankruptcy: Living Beyond Our Hydrological Means in the Post-Crisis Era | UN University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH) (20 January) (press release)

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The rainwater harvesting cistern is everywhere in Brazil's semi-arid region, a social technology that reduced water scarcity for its inhabitants. Elizabete Sousa Soares wanted to leave Jatobá when her daughter Maria was born 11 years ago, but decided to stay in her small rural town thanks to the cistern and other social technologies that have improved her life. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

By Mario Osava
USERRA DAS ALMAS, Brazil, Dec 29 2025 (IPS)

“The work of collecting seeds saved me from depression,” caused by her daughter’s suicide at the age of 29, said Maria do Desterro Soares, 64, who lives in the poor rural community of Jatobá in northeastern Brazil.

She drew her younger sister, Maria de Jesus Soares, 45, who lost her husband in a car accident and also struggles to avoid falling into depression, into the activity. The two walk together for nearly two hours to reach the forests where seeds abound.“The reserve is a great water reservoir. A study we conducted on avoided runoff showed this 6,285-hectare area can retain an astonishing 4.78 billion liters per year” - Gilson Miranda.

They only earn some 1,000 reais (US$185) in a “good year,” but “it’s my work, my pleasure, it’s what I want and I like doing it,” claimed Maria do Desterro, who also makes ice cream and medicines for flu and other illnesses with locally sourced juices, teas, peels, and honey.

She is one of the 121 people trained by the Caatinga Association (AC) through 2023 for the collection and management of seeds from native plants of this biome exclusive to Brazil, as a way to generate income and restore forests.

The association, founded in 1998 to protect the caatinga, the biome of the semi-arid region in the Brazilian northeast, manages the Serra das Almas Natural Reserve (RNSA) and disseminates social technologies for coexistence with the semi-arid ecoregion in surrounding communities.

The caatinga occupies 10% of Brazil’s vast territory and is home to 27 million people. Its vegetation is generally low, with twisted branches and trunks, appearing dead in the dry season and turning green just days after rain. It also features large trees that reach heights of tens of meters.

Maria de Jesus Soares and her older sister, Maria do Desterro Soares, extract seeds from the buriti coconut, a palm tree also known as moriche, found in several parts of Brazil, including its exclusive caatinga biome. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Coexistence, instead of fighting against nature

To coexist, rather than fighting droughts, is a guiding principle of the actions that are improving life in Brazil’s poorest region, the Northeast, offering a climate lesson for the country and the world.

This slogan, set in motion by civil society organizations, spurred several social technologies as solutions for water scarcity. Best known is the rainwater harvesting cistern for domestic use, with over 1.2 million units built since 2003.

Cisterns, bio-water (a system that cleans household water for reuse in planting), green septic tanks (a concrete tank with soil, filters, and a banana plant base), solar ovens, and eco-efficient stoves are the five tecghnologies being disseminated.

The AC website reports that 1,481 of these “technologies” have been implemented.

The AC has the RNSA for environmental education and as a source of income through eco-tourism. It works in 40 communities nearby where some 4,000 families live, implementing social technologies and supporting the conservation of the reserve and the entire caatinga.

Headquartered in Fortaleza, the capital of the northeastern state of Ceará, and in Crateús, in the west of that same state near the RNSA, the association stands out from other non-governmental organizations by having this conservation unit of 6,285 hectares of dense forests and four streams.

The green septic tank, also called a biosepitic bed, treats wastewater from toilets with microorganisms that process the waste, leaving the water ready to irrigate crops in the semi-arid region of Northeast Brazil. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

The caatinga mitigates climate change

“The reserve is an open-air laboratory, where research on fauna, flora, carbon, and water takes place, so we can understand the importance of this area, and of the entire caatinga,” explained Gilson Miranda, a biologist and manager of the RNSA for the Caatinga Association.

In 2015 – 2022, the caatinga was responsible for nearly 40% of the carbon removed from the atmosphere in Brazil, he said, based on a study by São Paulo State University on greenhouse gas capture.

This is because the rapid regreening of the vegetation, an indicator of intense photosynthetic activity when it rains, makes the caatinga a major greenhouse gas sink, different from the Amazon, which is an immense carbon reservoir.

“That is why preserving and conserving the caatinga is strategic in a climate adaptation scenario,” said Miranda in an interview with IPS.

This biome, exclusive to Brazil, covers an area of 844,453 square kilometers.

Water is another wealth of Serra das Almas, which was designated a Private Natural Heritage Reserve (RPPN) in the year 2000.

“The reserve is a great water reservoir. A study we conducted on avoided runoff showed this 6,285-hectare area can retain an astonishing 4.78 billion liters per year,” said Miranda.

Around the springs, there are very tall, green trees that differ from the usual biome. The gameleira (Ficus gomelleira), can reach up to 40 or 50 meters, according to Jair Martins, the tourist guide on hikes along the six trails of Serra das Almas.

This water, retained in the soil by the forests, actually drains slowly. The four springs preserved in the reserve do not dry up, but are unable to sustain year-round the streams that feed the Poti River, whose course passes to the east and north of Serra das Almas.

Nor is this moisture enough to keep the caatinga vegetation green, which is very dry in December, with the green of some shrubs or trees more resistant to water stress.

Maria Clemente da Silva was only able to cultivate her garden when she gained access to bio-water, because the public water supply is limited to three hours a day in Jatobá, a poor community in the Brazilian caatinga. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Mitigated drought

In the surroundings of the RNSA, the drought is harsher.

Maria Clemente da Silva, 59, relies on bio-water to supplement the water she uses to irrigate her small garden. The public water supply only operates for two to three hours per day, which is not enough for cultivating vegetables, such as lettuce and onions, or fruit trees like papaya, banana, acerola, orange, and cashew.

About 100 meters behind her house, a forest of tall, very green trees reveals that, with water, the caatinga vegetation gains exuberance. It is the moisture that remained in a low-lying area of a river that practically dried up due to deforestation and fires set to “clear” the land, explained Elisabete de Souza Soares.

Water is the most keenly felt shortage, according to Souza and other women who spoke to IPS and a group of journalism students visiting the Jatobá community, in the municipality of Buriti dos Montes, in the state of Piauí, where the AC’s socio-environmental actions benefit the population and the protection of the RNSA.

All of them received cisterns, the small three-burner ecological stove, and other “technologies” that reduced difficulties in their lives. “Before the cistern, we would fetch water from a public fountain about a kilometer away, carrying cans on our heads,” recalled Souza.

When she was pregnant with her daughter Maria, 11 years ago, she thought about moving away from the community where she had always lived in search of water. “Now I won’t leave here, where I was born,” she said.

The dry vegetation in December, the peak of the annual dry season, displays some resistant shrubs and trees that maintain green patches in the caatinga forests of Brazil’s Northeast region. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

The Caatinga Association adopted a comprehensive conservation model with broad participation from the local population, including in the economic benefits of work within the RNSA, such as guiding ecotourists and providing other services.

The AC’s approach is always socio-environmental, a main component in protecting the reserve and the caatinga in general, stated Miranda.

Inside the reserve, there is a modest hotel that can accommodate up to 36 people. Local tourism tends to expand due to promotion by the governments of the states of Ceará and Piauí, which share the Serra das Almas Natural Reserve.

The nearby Poti River flows through a 140-kilometer-long canyon and has become a major tourist attraction.

The reserve is a legacy of the US Johnson family, owners of the SC Johnson company, which, because it uses vegetable wax for its furniture cleaning and conservation products, imported carnauba wax, a palm abundant in Ceará, Piauí, and Rio Grande do Norte, another Northeastern state.

In 1998, the leader of the family’s fourth generation, Samuel Johnson, repeated an expedition to Ceará that his father had made in 1935 and decided to establish a Caatinga Conservation Fund, using part of his fortune. This led to the RNSA and the Caatinga Association, composed of environmental specialists in the biome.