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

By Isaiah Esipisu
NAIROBI, Nov 6 2026 (IPS)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IPS UN Bureau Report

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Activists at COP30. Credit: Karelia Pallan/Oxfam America

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IPS UN Bureau Report

 
CIVICUS discusses India’s Gen Z-led protest movement and civic space restrictions with Avinash Kumar, National Co-convenor of Wada Na Todo Abhiyan, a network that works on government accountability. Avinash is also a Distinguished Fellow at the Centre for Equity Studies.

Avinash Kumar

How did the cockroach movement emerge?

It started with this year’s national medical entrance exam, which was held on 3 May and cancelled on 12 May after a paper leak. The re-exam took place on 21 June, and in the meantime several students died by suicide. This was the latest failure of a highly centralised education system, in which engineering, humanities and medical entrance exams are all run centrally. The government has also pushed curriculum changes to suit its Hindu nationalist agenda.

Students’ anger needed an outlet. The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), a movement born out of satire, channelled it by demanding Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation. It could do so because the education crisis was only the tip of the iceberg. India is among the youngest countries in the world, with around two-thirds of its people under 35, yet young people face high unemployment and growing reliance on informal work. They make up about 83 per cent of unemployed people, while close to 90 per cent of all workers are in informal jobs. On top of this come a divisive communal agenda and failures on security and women’s safety.

The CJP captured the imagination of largely unorganised young people. Left-wing student organisations gave it organisational muscle, climate activist Sonam Wangchuk lent it wider legitimacy among everyday people and opposition parties led by Rahul Gandhi helped spread it. Pradhan resigned on 25 July. Although other protest movements had challenged the government before, this was the government’s first major retreat, and it resonated widely.

How did protests evolve after the minister’s resignation?

Within months, the protests widened to target the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, a nationwide review of voter lists. Civil society had been raising concerns about it for a while. But when The Indian Express and other media reported leaked disagreements within the Election Commission, the issue spread across the country and across sectors. Roughly 130 million names have been dropped from the rolls, about an eighth of the electorate. The Election Commission says it is only removing dead, duplicate and ineligible voters, but many fear it’s targeting Muslims.

The CJP became one of several organisations calling for a full rollback of the SIR, a review of recent state elections whose results are in doubt and the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. Over 300 civil society organisations have joined this campaign. In this phase, opposition parties and left-wing student groups have taken the lead, with figures such as Neha Bora of the All India Students’ Association and Aishe Ghosh of the Students’ Federation of India at the forefront. The CJP still mobilises people on the streets.

This gives the movement a much broader base than earlier ones. Past protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act and the National Register of Citizens, led by students and Muslims, as well as the 2020–2021 farmers’ protest movement, were largely seen as serving specific sections of the population. This one began with education and has expanded to the SIR, which people fear is a conspiracy to take away their votes and their basic rights as citizens. Because that threat concerns everyone, the movement cuts across classes, regions and religions.

How has the state responded?

The government has responded with massive force. In Delhi on 10 October, authorities deployed over 30,000 police and paramilitary personnel, detained more than 7,000 people and stopped many others before they could reach Jantar Mantar, the city’s designated protest site near Parliament. They shut metro stations, suspended internet services and used a sports stadium to hold detainees. Two days later, Delhi Police removed Jantar Mantar from the list of approved protest locations.

The government has turned the police into a partisan, brutal force and let pro-government mobs target protesters and independent media. Right-wing mobs have turned up at protests, and members of a group calling itself the Hindu Raksha Dal were arrested for allegedly assaulting students and manhandling women at one of them.

Women and girls have been repeatedly beaten and detained, yet they keep coming back. That resilience owes much to the anger over sexual assaults in Delhi and elsewhere, and women had already been mobilising in towns including Patna, Prayagraj and Varanasi.

How do these reactions fit into a wider pattern of civic space restrictions, and how is civil society responding?

They’re part of a longer trend. Civic space keeps worsening, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s third term has aggravated patterns set in the first two. The Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act (FCRA), which governs international funding, is choking civil society’s resources. By March 2026, over 21,900 organisations had lost their FCRA licences. A bill to amend the law would go further. If passed, it would allow the state to seize the assets of civil society organisations whose licences have lapsed or been cancelled, and require the central government’s approval before any agency investigates FCRA complaints.

Human rights defenders are jailed for years without trial. Student activists Sharjeel Imam and Umar Khalid have spent over six years in prison. They were arrested in 2020, accused of conspiring to incite riots in Delhi during the protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act. In January, the Supreme Court denied them bail, ruling that delay is no ground for bail under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967, and in July a Delhi court rejected fresh pleas. Sonam Wangchuk was held under the National Security Act, 1980, for around six months before the central government revoked the order.

Protests are crushed across the country, in mining areas and on the streets of Delhi and Mumbai. In July, police detained over 150 people who protested against the Ken–Betwa river-linking project in central India, including their leader, Amit Bhatnagar. Authorities routinely ban gatherings under section 163 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, India’s criminal procedure code, and internet shutdowns and surveillance add to the pressure. A compromised judiciary and a largely pliant media make all this possible.

Human rights organisations have adapted to these restrictions in different ways. Some have taken to the streets alongside student groups and political organisations. Others have turned to building international support, mobilising global opinion and working with diaspora groups. They also support communities fighting on specific issues in different parts of India, challenge government decisions in the courts and build wider alliances.

How can civil society in other countries, international bodies and states support Indian protesters and civil society?

Governments, institutions and civil society abroad must name and shame the regime in all international forums and challenge its attempts to paint a glorious picture of itself. They should use the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council and its Universal Periodic Review process, treaty-body reviews and the UN Special Procedures, whose experts have formally raised the demolition of Muslim homes with the Indian government. They should also draw on reports from Amnesty International, CIVICUS and Human Rights Watch, and press freedom rankings such as those of Reporters Without Borders.

In November, the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions will review the accreditation of India’s National Human Rights Commission. This is another opportunity, and it should be backed by international political pressure through bilateral dialogues and parliamentary resolutions.

Funders and partners should protect human rights defenders through legal support, trial observation and visible solidarity with those in jail. Beyond that, human rights groups and social movements need to reconfigure their alliances with progressive student groups, and the international community can help create spaces for these conversations. Relying on diaspora groups is not enough.

What has the movement achieved so far, and what are your hopes?

Despite its aggressive stance, the government is already on the back foot, even if it government won’t admit it, and has announced measures to reinstate people removed from the voter rolls. But the revelations keep coming, people remain on the streets, and the movement refuses to die down.

People now openly distrust how elections are run, and many will not accept more elections under this government. But the Indian state is mighty and may try to wait until people’s energy runs out. The home minister boasts that his party will rule for another 30 or 50 years, but it is now clear that ideological hegemony alone won’t achieve that. Whatever happens next, the government’s legitimacy is now in doubt.

My hope rests on the student movement. It builds on the legacy of earlier movements and those still under way across India, and it’s part of a global wave of student protests. If it holds, as it seems to be doing, it could follow the path of neighbouring countries. The challenge is to rebuild a truly democratic state and the institutions that have been compromised and decimated. We must also restore a democratic culture and the values of the Indian Constitution, which are those of a secular, diverse and federal country.

CIVICUS interviews a wide range of civil society activists, experts and leaders to gather diverse perspectives on civil society action and current issues for publication on its CIVICUS Lens platform. The views expressed in interviews are the interviewees’ and do not necessarily reflect those of CIVICUS. Publication does not imply endorsement of interviewees or the organisations they represent.

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Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

By James Alix Michel
VICTORIA, Seychelles, Nov 4 2026 (IPS)

I have stood on the corniche of Abu Dhabi at many moments over more than thirty years. Each time, I reflect on the distance this city has travelled: from a shoreline shaped by modest commercial buildings and dwellings to a capital whose architecture, institutions and ambitions look far beyond the horizon. Glass towers catch the Gulf light. The dome of the Louvre Abu Dhabi scatters sunlight across the water. Yet the transformation that interests me most is not the skyline itself. It is the thinking behind it.

What does it take to build a city of the future? Wealth, certainly. Technology, increasingly. But neither is sufficient without a vision of the society that city should serve. As a frequent visitor, a resident and a longstanding friend of the United Arab Emirates, I have watched that vision take shape. What I see is not a finished model, but a remarkable, evolving example of a country turning resources into possibilities.

That vision did not begin with glass and steel. Some leaders build institutions. Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan built a nation, and gave it a soul. With wisdom, patience and an open heart, he brought the emirates together in 1971 and planted the seeds of unity, tolerance and generosity that still shape the UAE today. He believed in his people, cared for the land and the sea, and reached out to the world with kindness. The newly declared Zayed the Founder Day, to be observed each year on 7 January, is a beautiful way to honour a man whose vision lives on in every corner of this country. May Allah bless his soul.

No honest account of the UAE’s rise can overlook hydrocarbons. Oil provided the means for an extraordinary transformation. But natural wealth does not automatically produce lasting prosperity. Resources alone cannot build the institutions, skills and economic diversity needed to sustain development. What distinguishes the UAE, in my view, is its determination to treat oil revenue not simply as income to be spent, but as capital with which to prepare for a different future.

Trade, tourism, finance, manufacturing and technology have broadened its economy. Investment in education, healthcare and research reflects an understanding that the most enduring national resource is human capability. For small island states such as Seychelles, the lesson resonates. Our circumstances differ greatly, but the question is familiar: how do we use today’s opportunities to strengthen tomorrow’s resilience? The answer cannot be to wait until vulnerability becomes crisis.

One of the most revealing aspects of Abu Dhabi’s transformation is its investment in culture. The Louvre Abu Dhabi and the wider Saadiyat Cultural District express an ambition extending beyond tourism. They place art, history and encounters between civilisations within the country’s vision of development. The preservation of Qasr Al Hosn and other heritage sites provides an important counterpoint. A city moving rapidly towards the future must also maintain a conversation with its past. Modernity is too often measured in height, speed and scale. Museums, libraries and places of learning offer something less easily measured: space for reflection, creativity and understanding.

The same principle applies to education and healthcare. Institutions such as NYU Abu Dhabi, Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi and Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi illustrate the effort to make knowledge and specialised care part of the country’s foundations. Here, the city of the future acquires its deeper meaning: not only in what it displays, but in what it enables people to become.

Artificial intelligence has become central to the UAE’s ambitions. Its digital investments and the establishment of the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence signal a determination to help shape technological change. The value of that ambition lies in its human purpose: improving services, healthcare and education, and helping communities manage resources more intelligently. That responsiveness is also felt in ordinary moments.

I have often been struck by Abu Dhabi’s maintained public spaces, walkways and the sense of ease I experience walking its streets. The UAE ranks among the world’s safest places by residents’ perceptions of nighttime safety. Gallup’s 2025 Global Safety Report found that 90 percent of people surveyed in the country felt safe walking alone at night. For me, this is more than a statistic. That quiet freedom from fear is a precious part of daily well-being.

So, too, is the greening of a desert city. Trees, gardens and flowering verges soften the urban landscape. Abu Dhabi’s continuing tree-planting programmes, including native ghaf trees, seek to expand shade and improve the environment along walking and cycling routes. These are not merely decorative touches. They express care for how people experience the places they inhabit. As an islander and an advocate for ocean conservation, I am particularly interested in how urban ambition connects with environmental responsibility.

The UAE’s investment in solar power and other low-carbon energy sources, together with its net-zero commitment, reflects an effort to prepare for a changing energy future. Its continuing dependence on hydrocarbons also makes clear the complexity of that transition. The journey requires sustained implementation: cleaner energy, responsible water use, reduced emissions and habitat protection. The UAE’s mangrove restoration and marine conservation efforts are especially meaningful to me. Mangroves protect coastlines, shelter marine life and store carbon. Coral reefs sustain biodiversity and coastal livelihoods, even as warming seas place them under pressure. For Seychelles and other island nations, these are not abstract concerns. They are questions of security, identity and survival. A city’s relationship with the natural world does not end at its waterfront.

Another defining feature of the UAE is the diversity of those who live and work there. People from across the world contribute to its economy and daily life. Such diversity calls for more than mutual respect. It calls for belonging—and the assurance that every person’s safety matters, whatever their nationality. During the regional conflict, His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan gave powerful expression to that responsibility, placing the protection of citizens, residents and visitors at the top of the UAE’s priorities. “In the UAE,” he said, “everyone is Emirati through their love for this land and their contributions to it.” I find those words deeply meaningful. They speak of belonging not simply as something felt, but as a responsibility embraced by leadership. The Abrahamic Family House, bringing a mosque, a church and a synagogue together within one complex, offers another expression of coexistence. That spirit must also be lived beyond symbolic spaces. Workers’ dignity, fair treatment and opportunities across different backgrounds remain essential measures of progress. Recognising achievements need not mean overlooking the work that remains.

My perspective is also deeply personal. Over decades, I have witnessed the friendship between the UAE and Seychelles develop into practical cooperation. During my years in public office, I saw that partnership support water and electricity infrastructure, renewable energy, healthcare, housing and education. For a small island country, such cooperation is felt in families’ lives: access to treatment, reliable water, a home, or better opportunities for children. I remember with gratitude the late Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan. I also deeply value my longstanding friendship with President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, whose visionary leadership and commitment to his country’s development I have had the privilege of observing at close quarters. That friendship informs my account. It reinforces my belief that national achievement acquires greater meaning when it helps others strengthen their resilience.

The UAE’s experience cannot simply be replicated. Its resources, scale and circumstances are distinctive. The lesson here is not to imitate its skyline, but to draw inspiration from its willingness to imagine beyond present constraints—and to translate that imagination into action. Perhaps that is the deepest meaning of the UAE’s great leap. What I see taking shape is more than a skyline: it is a vision of prosperity that brings knowledge, culture, human well-being and care for the natural world into the same frame. Still evolving, still confronting the challenges that accompany rapid change, the UAE offers a beautiful example of what becomes possible when imagination is matched by the resolve to act.

Along Abu Dhabi’s corniche, the towers catch the light, but it is the horizon that holds my gaze. As someone who has returned to these shores over many years, and whose friendship with this country has deepened along the way, I find both beauty and inspiration in its unfolding story. I leave each walk with a feeling that reaches far beyond this waterfront: that the future need not simply be something we await. It can be something we have the courage to imagine—and the determination to build.

James Alix Michel is Former President of the Republic of Seychelles.

IPS UN Bureau

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These differences matter when comparing observations across the Pacific.

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

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

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

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

Connecting the Science Across the Pacific

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Measuring Seawater to Understanding Marine Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taking Pacific Research to the International Stage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IPS UN Bureau Report

Excerpt:

People protest against proposed federal voter ID and proof-of-citizenship mandates outside the US Capitol in Washington, DC, on 18 March 2026. Credit: Bryan Dozier/NurPhoto via AFP

By Inés M. Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Nov 3 2026 (IPS)

In the run-up to the US midterms, armed federal agents have been knocking on the doors of voters suspected of being non-citizens. Republican-led states have redrawn electoral districts in their party’s favour, removing power from Black voters. Federal agencies have invaded people’s privacy, combing voter rolls for non-citizens while finding hardly any.

The USA increasingly resembles a competitive authoritarian regime, where elections take place and the opposition can win, but the incumbent abuses state power to stack the odds against rivals. The CIVICUS Monitor, which tracks civic freedoms worldwide, downgraded the USA’s civic space to obstructed last December, after placing it on its Watchlist of countries experiencing rapid decline.

For the first time since 2002, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) will not observe a US federal election. On 23 September, the body announced it had not received an invitation, putting the USA on a par with Belarus and Russia, which failed to allow OSCE observers for their latest national elections. Meanwhile, the Carter Center, which has observed over 100 elections worldwide, mostly in fragile and fledgling democracies, is training and deploying volunteer observers in the USA, having first observed a US election in 2020, when it monitored the presidential recount in the US state of Georgia in the face of Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn his defeat.

Manufactured majorities

Gerrymandering has a long history in US politics, but 2025 brought the first coordinated national gerrymandering campaign. Trump pressured Republican-led states to redraw their maps mid-decade, and several complied. Democrats hit back where they could, and now nine states are voting under new maps that could hand Republicans up to 15 extra seats compared with six for Democrats. This means Republicans could lose a significant share of the vote without it costing them a corresponding number of seats.

In practice, partisan and racial gerrymandering are hard to separate. In the South, where Black voters overwhelmingly back Democrats, maps drawn to eliminate Democratic seats often do so by breaking up districts with substantial numbers of Black voters. It is illegal to dilute minority votes, but the Supreme Court has made it easier to get away with it. On 29 April, it struck down a Louisiana map drawn to comply with the Voting Rights Act, ruling that voters must now prove lawmakers intended to discriminate. Louisiana promptly eliminated a majority-Black district. The Justice Department has pledged to review similar districts nationwide.

Voters under suspicion

The administration has built its election agenda on the false claim that large numbers of non-citizens vote. The Justice Department demanded complete voter registration lists from 49 states and the District of Columbia and sued the 31 jurisdictions that refused. All 26 judges who had ruled by mid-October threw out the lawsuits. On 9 October, in a case brought by Common Cause, a federal judge struck down the department’s voter roll collection programme.

The hunt has turned up almost nothing. Trump claimed in July that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had found nearly 16,000 non-citizens registered in Nevada. DHS later confirmed only 185, and Nevada officials found they were all citizens. A database DHS overhauled so states could run bulk checks on voter rolls has made numerous mistakes, leaving some Texan citizens unable to vote in the March primary. Across seven states with 35 million voters, it flagged roughly 4,200 people, around 0.01 per cent of the electorate. A federal judge ruled the overhaul unlawful, but the Supreme Court paused the ruling, and over half the states kept using the database.

The administration has also tried to restrict postal voting, ordering the Postal Service to deliver ballots only to voters on lists compiled by DHS, and has sued to stop California counting over 20,000 postal ballots. Courts have blocked both for this election.

Intimidation has extended to voters’ homes. Armed DHS agents have gone door to door to question people suspected of voting while ineligible, including naturalised citizens. The DHS stepped up the operation as early voting began, but on 21 October a federal judge ruled that it likely amounted to voter intimidation and barred agents from questioning people until the polls close, a ban an appeals court has kept in force. However, fear has had an impact. In Minnesota, an organisation serving African immigrant communities reported a single new registration this year, compared with hundreds ahead of previous elections.

The decentralised system that withstood Trump’s attempt to overturn his 2020 defeat is under strain. Earlier this year, Trump urged Republicans to ‘nationalize’ voting, arguing that states run elections as agents of the federal government. But the US Constitution says otherwise. The administration has cut close to 1,000 staff from the federal agency that helps election officials fend off cyberattacks, despite warnings of potential foreign interference. Meanwhile, threats and harassment have helped push turnover among local election officials to its highest level in at least 25 years.

Civil society on guard

Civil society is resisting and has won most of its court battles, including those that halted the voter data programme, kept postal voting restrictions on hold and stopped door-to-door visits. The Vote Safe initiative is placing trusted community figures at polling places in four states to reassure voters, and Common Cause has trained over 400 volunteer observers in Texas alone.

This work is, however, under attack. Federal agents have raided a voter registration group’s office without explanation, and the Justice Department has indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center. Funders and financial institutions have distanced themselves from targeted groups, in some cases cutting off donations or banking services. Major law firms have largely stepped back from challenging the administration, leaving most litigation to civil society and small firms.

Civil society is keeping up its work despite the pressure, and that work won’t stop when the polls close. Whether Trump will accept results he doesn’t like is an open question. If results are challenged, the records kept by thousands of volunteer observers may prove vital to ensuring voters’ choices are respected.

Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Head of Research and Analysis, co-director of and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report. She is also a professor of Comparative Politics at Universidad ORT Uruguay.

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

This autumn I have found myself watching the evening news from Europe with a growing sense of recognition. Not of the tear gas or the burning barricades, which I deplore, but of the faces. Teenagers holding hand-painted signs. University students sleeping in tents in city squares. Young people who look, more than anything, tired of waiting.

James Alix Michel

And it has not stayed in France. Italian students have occupied schools and marched under the banner “Let’s reclaim our future.” In Spain and Portugal, young people have pitched tents to protest rents they cannot pay. Belgian students are resisting education cuts and higher tuition fees, and Greek students have chanted for free public education “from Greece to France.” In Serbia, nearly two years of student-led protest has helped bring a change of leadership at the ballot box.

This weekend the wave reached Germany, where a movement calling itself “Gen Z regelt” – roughly, “Gen Z’s got this” – called rallies in more than thirty cities for better schools, affordable lives, climate protection and against a return of compulsory military service.

I can see it spreading. And I think we should all pay attention.

It would be easy to dismiss this as youthful anger, or to reduce it to the images of looting that have accompanied some marches. That would be a mistake. Listen to what the young people are actually saying. A 21-year-old in Rome speaks of single rooms in student housing costing 1,200 euros a month. In Lisbon, students are marching against plans to unfreeze tuition fees that have been capped since 2020. Across the continent, the demands overlap: crumbling schools, unaffordable housing, insecure jobs, the rising cost of fuel and food, a climate crisis they did not cause, and a deep feeling that nobody in power is listening.

Add to this a new anxiety that my generation never faced: artificial intelligence quietly eating away at the entry-level jobs that once gave young graduates their first step on the ladder. It is no wonder that many feel the future has been mortgaged before they have had a chance to live it.

This is a generation that was told to study hard, and it did. It was told education was the path to security. Now it finds the classrooms falling apart, the degrees expensive, the rents impossible, and the promised security nowhere in sight.

What strikes me most is that Europe is not alone. Over the past two years we have seen young people rise in Kenya, in Nepal, in Madagascar – our close neighbour in the Indian Ocean – and elsewhere. The tools are the same – TikTok, encrypted chats, leaderless networks that mobilise in hours – and so is the question: what kind of future are we being offered, and who decided it on our behalf?

In public life I learned that protest is rarely the first choice. It is usually the last, after letters go unanswered and promises are forgotten. When young people take to the streets in such numbers, the ordinary channels of listening have broken down.

In France, President Macron has announced education reforms – a first step, though the young will judge it by results. But reacting to each wave with concessions is not enough. Three things seem to me essential.

First, invest in education as infrastructure, not as an expense to be trimmed in hard times. Cutting school and university budgets simply transfers the debt to the next generation in another form.

Second, treat housing and the cost of living as questions of fairness between generations. When young adults cannot afford a home or a family, a society is eroding its own foundations.

Third, bring young people into the room as genuine partners, not as a photo opportunity. Serious consultation would do more to prevent the next wave of unrest than any number of riot police.

And to the young protesters themselves, I would say this, with respect and admiration: your cause is strongest when it is peaceful. The broken shop windows give your opponents the excuse they need to ignore you. The quiet determination of a tent camp, or a school occupation, or a peaceful march of thousands, is far harder to dismiss.

Watching from the Indian Ocean, I am grateful that Seychelles has so far been spared such unrest. That is no accident. Since the late 1970s we have steadily implemented progressive programmes of social justice: free health care for all, free education up to university (in 2009 I had the privilege of establishing the University of Seychelles), affordable housing, social security and pensions, sustained by progressive economic reforms. We feel the world’s shocks too, from fuel prices to the cost of living. But these choices have given our young people a real stake in their country, and so far no reason to take to the streets. That is not a cause for complacency, but for vigilance.

Every generation inherits a world shaped by the one before. What is different now is the speed at which this generation can organise, and the clarity with which it can see that the deal it has been offered is not a fair one.

Europe’s Gen Z is not asking for the impossible. It is asking for decent schools, affordable homes, a liveable planet and a voice. These are not radical demands. They are the basic promises any society makes to its children.

The question is whether those in power will treat this autumn as a security problem to be managed, or as a message to be answered. I hope, for Europe’s sake and for ours, they choose the second.

James Alix Michel is Former President of the Republic of Seychelles.

IPS UN Bureau

Credit: United Nations

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 3 2026 (IPS)

In a bygone era, gender parity was never heard of at the United Nations—UN female staffers were mostly hired as secretaries and stenographers in a male-dominated Secretariat.

Perhaps it was best illustrated in a wildly-circulated story, doing the rounds in the 1970s and 80s, about a female applicant, with strong academic credentials from a prestigious Ivy League university, being interviewed for a job in the UN Secretariat,

The high-ranking male staffer who was interviewing the candidate looked at her credentials and asked her: “But can you type?”

Perhaps one of the longstanding complaints has been the widespread gender bias and gender disparity, particularly in appointments of female staffers to some of the high-ranking jobs in the UN hierarchy– including Directors (D1-D-2), Assistant Secretaries General (ASGs) and Under-Secretaries General (USGs), ranked as the third high-level job, just behind the Secretary-General and the Deputy Secretary General (DSG).

But according to a recent UN Gender Parity Dashboard (below) there is now gender parity, with over 45 t0 56 percent of the jobs held by women, including P1-P5s, Director 1-2s, ASGs and USGs, UN system-wide and in UN entities

Link to the Internal dashboard

https://www.un.org/gender/en/content/un-secretariat-gender-parity-dashboard

In 2025, the proportion of women in the Professional and higher ranks reached 50.4 per cent— described as “an historic milestone”.

The representation of women in the Professional and higher categories in the United Nations system increased from 47 per cent to 48.8 per cent from 2021-2023.

Regarding gender, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres asserted last week that the United Nations “has achieved parity across all senior leadership, and all headquarters and professional staff. We did this not by lowering standards, but increasing opportunities”, he said.

Going forward, the Secretary-General said that gender gains and expertise must be protected, and anti-racism must remain a priority and decisions on recruitment, promotion, assignments and retention, those decisions must be transparent, consistent and bias-free

As part of the commitment to transparency and accountability, the interactive Gender Parity Dashboard shows the latest gender balance data for Phase I of the Strategy. The dashboard focuses on the target population of international staff in the UN Secretariat (only), as defined in the Strategy.

Dr. Purnima Mane, a former Deputy Executive Director (Programme) and UN Assistant-Secretary-General (ASG) at the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), told Inter Press Service (IPS), recognizing that gender bias, disparity and discrimination are a reality in most countries– despite years of advocacy and programs– it is not surprising that the UN and its specialized agencies have initiated several key agreements and commitments to work towards gender equality and fight against gender bias and discrimination.

“Data from the UN Gender Parity Dashboard for UN International staff show an interesting picture. The numbers suggest that overall, women represent almost 46% of the staff and are well represented at the senior levels”.

“The data at the field level however, show that more needs to be done towards parity at least in numbers and ranks and it is perhaps here that the UN needs to focus for improvement.”

Numbers of course only tell part of the story, she said. “Working conditions, work opportunities and work-related benefits for women need to be assessed to dig deeper into gender parity at the next level of analysis.”

“Yes, there is evidence to show that there are many competent women who are assigned to take on leadership roles at all levels of the UN; and yet, a woman has never been elected to the role of SG by the members of the UN and frankly not even considered seriously till recently.”

The dashboard might serve as a tool to help Member states acknowledge that the UN practises what it preaches and serve as a reminder of the reality of women’s competency especially when there is soon going to be a vote at the UN for the leadership of the UN, said Dr Mane, who has held senior positions in the World Health Organization, UNAIDS, Global Fund to fight AIDS, TB and Malaria and the Population Council, and most recently, President and CEO of Pathfinder International.

Shihana Mohamed, President of Asia Global Forum (www.AsiaGlobalForum.org) and a US Public Voices Fellow with The OpEd Project and Equality Now, told IPS the Secretary-General has done an exemplary job in achieving gender parity in senior-level positions.

This is particularly evident in the appointment of Under-Secretaries-General (USGs) and Assistant Secretaries-General (ASGs), which falls under his sole authority. He also plays a significant role in selecting Resident Coordinators.

“However, I remain skeptical about how gender parity was achieved at the professional levels in 2026”.

Compared with the UN’s official 2025 statistics on the Composition of the Secretariat, the reported achievement reflects an annual increase of 2% or more in women’s representation at the P-5 and D-1 levels, she pointed out.

“Honestly, after more than 20 years of working on gender analysis in the UN Secretariat and ICSC, I know as a fact that such a significant increase is almost impossible to achieve organically within one year”.

“The increased representation of professional women in the UN Secretariat is mainly attributable to recent budget cuts. Massive layoffs disproportionately affected men, artificially increasing women’s share of the workforce. Recruitment, meanwhile, remained minimal. Staff reductions were even more severe in peace operations, where men have been significantly overrepresented”, she argued.

“Historically, women have been more represented at the P-2 and P-3 levels but tend to remain at these levels for longer, particularly, if they come from the Global South. The same pattern affects most men from the Global South. Thus, recent achievements in gender parity at the P-4 and P-5 levels have not necessarily benefited women in the UN who remain concentrated at the lower professional levels, said Mohamed.

Furthermore, approximately 20 countries are unrepresented and 30 are underrepresented, including countries in the Asia-Pacific region in the UN. This raises the question: Which regions do these women represent?

“One important point is that many of these hiring managers are themselves from the Global South. Yet some appear willing to do whatever it takes to please the Global North and its influential networks. Their aim seems to be to survive and advance within the UN”.

Genuine efforts to achieve gender parity must begin from the stage of recruitment and selection, she noted.

“This is where hiring managers exercise their delegated authority impartially and uphold the values and provisions of the UN Charter to recruit, select and promote women, including women from the Global South. This is the step where anti-racism efforts must also begin. However, that’s not the case within the UN.”

“The Secretary-General alone cannot achieve gender parity or address racism and racial discrimination within the UN. Real action requires a collective effort. All managers with delegated authority in human resources management must set the same tone as the Secretary-General. This is the only way to build a truly inclusive and fair UN.”

Unfortunately, that is not the reality within the UN. I hope the Secretary-General recognizes this truth as he prepares to conclude his term, said Mohamed who is also a founding member and Coordinator of the United Nations Asia Network for Diversity and Inclusion (www.UN-ANDI.org), and is a dedicated human rights activist, and a strong advocate for gender equality and the advancement of women.

Meanwhile, in an address to the UN Staff, Narda Cupidore, President of the UN Staff Union (UNSU), said addressing historically complex and deeply rooted inequality, particularly where ethnic group and gender intersects requires both institutional courage and sustained commitment.

“As we reflect on the trajectory of the Secretariat, it is important to recognize the foundations that have been established.”

In recent years, the Organization has elevated attention to systemic racial inequities, expanded spaces for workplace dialogue, made concerted efforts to advance women’s representation in senior leadership, and introduced new accountability frameworks through the Strategic Action Plan on Addressing Racism and the System-Wide Strategy on Gender Parity.

“Speaking on behalf of staff, we welcome these foundational steps”, she said.

Staff across every duty station want institutional leadership to succeed, because management’s success in eradicating discrimination strengthens the integrity and effectiveness of the entire United Nations.

At the same time, we must be candid about the road ahead: much work remains to be done. Discrimination based on color of one’s skin and gender inequality are not isolated incidents, they are systemic challenges embedded in our organizational structure that cannot be fully addressed through short-term measures, awareness campaigns, or standalone events.

Establishing policy frameworks, hosting listening sessions, and mandating e-learning modules create necessary awareness, but awareness is only the starting line. Across the Secretariat, a noticeable gap persists between administrative assessments of progress and the day-to-day lived reality of personnel on the ground.

When elected staff representatives and grassroots justice networks are engaged primarily at the conclusion of policy discussions rather than included as co-architects from the outset, our institutional response remains incomplete.

Building on the foundations already established requires moving from short-term initiatives to durable policy reforms across four operational areas.

First, efforts to advance women’s leadership and representation must extend across the entire grade pyramid. While achieving gender parity at the senior-most levels is a vital milestone, true intersectional equity requires looking beneath the executive ranks. Across the Secretariat, General Service staff and National Officers, who are predominantly women and colleagues from the Global South, perform indispensable operational and substantive work yet remain constrained by the restrictive G-to-P examination barrier.

Lasting institutional change means dismantling artificial career ceilings, introducing anonymized competency assessments, and establishing merit-based pathways into the Professional category.

Second, strengthening accountability measures must translate into verifiable outcomes.

Embedding workplace dignity clauses into Senior Manager Compacts is an important foundation, but compacts are only as strong as their enforcement. Sustainable reform requires integrating mandatory, anonymous 360-degree upward feedback into leadership evaluations and attaching clear administrative consequences when managers foster or tolerate discriminatory environments.

Third, expanded opportunities for dialogue must be backed by safe, accessible justice mechanisms. Colleagues on fixed-term and temporary appointments still hesitate to report subtle racial or gender bias due to high evidentiary thresholds in formal oversight investigations and the fear of quiet contract non-renewal.

Establishing specialized intake capacity for systemic discrimination, rebalancing the burden of proof in retaliation reviews, and guaranteeing interim contractual stability during active grievances will give personnel the security required to speak up.

Fourth, effective policy reform requires precise, transparent data. Relying on broad regional and nationality groupings as proxies for race obscures where women of color and marginalized staff encounter career bottlenecks. Introducing voluntary, disaggregated demographic tracking across grades and contract modalities will allow the Organization to measure real impact rather than procedural inputs.

The foundations have been laid, and the language of equity and inclusion is now firmly part of our institutional discourse. The test of our courage and commitment is whether we now translate those foundations into permanent, enforceable guarantees.

Lasting institutional change cannot be achieved through top-down programming alone; it is forged through effective engagement and collective partnership at the Staff-Management Committee, where human resources policies, administrative issuances, and conditions of service are negotiated together.

A legacy cannot be measured by short-term programmes or the eloquence of our commitments, but by whether every staff member, across every grade, contract type, race, and gender, experiences equitable opportunity, protection, and dignity at work.

Today, I can confidently confirm that the Staff representatives, Unions and Staff Federations stand ready to work together with leadership as equal partners to turn the vision of discrimination free United Nations into reality.

IPS UN Bureau Report

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Boost for an Ongoing Restoration Effort

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Communities Become Partners in Restoration

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

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

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

Creating Alternatives to Illegal Fishing

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

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

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

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

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

IPS UN Bureau Report

Excerpt:

Shirley Botchwey

By Shirley Botchwey
LONDON, Nov 2 2026 (IPS)

Ours is not a new realisation. The Commonwealth is responding to what world leaders have acknowledged for many years: ‘business as usual’ cannot reverse the unsustainable course the world finds itself, from economic to climate crises and the growing lack of trust in governance institutions, both national and multilateral.

Economic uncertainty, job insecurity and rising prices are leaving a generation of young people across the world unable to plan with confidence for their futures, while social protection systems are weakening under the burden of slow growth. AI is outpacing our ability to fully grasp its impacts or regulate it, creating as many threats as opportunities. For many, the promise of new technology brings a more immediate concern: whether they will have the skills, opportunities and security they need to build a decent future.

At the same time, increasingly severe weather is disrupting lives, livelihoods and food security, intensifying competition over scarce resources, fuelling conflict and contributing to growing patterns of migration. These pressures are interconnected. A climate shock can undermine a family’s livelihood; a lack of economic opportunity can drive migration; and weak infrastructure can make communities more vulnerable to both.

While many multilateral institutions are perceived to be paralysed in the face of the growing global fracture, the Commonwealth, because of its history of reaching consensus on the most intractable issues and its common values, has recognised this as its moment of opportunity. Its leaders have signalled support for changing track: asking the difficult questions and rallying around solutions that are bold, innovative and ambitious enough to respond to the expectations of the 2.7 billion people of the Commonwealth.

The Commonwealth is well-positioned for breakthrough. Our 56 countries span every region of the world and include some of its largest economies and populations and some of its smallest and most vulnerable states. We bring together different histories, experiences and perspectives, but also a shared commitment to cooperation. That diversity can be a strength: it allows us to connect countries and partners that might not otherwise sit around the same table.

That is why, at our leaders’ meeting this week on the Caribbean island of Antigua and Barbuda, Commonwealth countries, with their diverse histories, economies, and perspectives, will reinforce our new approach, our new direction.

Together, with Commonwealth businesses, development banks, international financial, trade and climate institutions, private investors and civil society as well as youth and women’s groups, we will create new partnerships and unlock investment. We want to turn the priorities identified by our countries into practical projects and action, focusing on climate, infrastructure, trade and the digital economy. The ambition is not simply to mobilise more money, but to make sure that finance reaches the projects and communities where it can have the greatest impact.

For the first time at a Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM), investors and development partners will be included in our substantive deliberations. No country can act alone in the face of today’s global challenges. Neither should any sector act alone. We need governments, development institutions and the private sector working together if we are to mobilise the scale of finance, expertise and innovation required.

Our new investment platform, launched last week ahead of CHOGM, is an important first step. It brings together 69 projects worth $34 billion across 20 countries and 10 sectors, with a particular focus on clean energy, transportation and logistics. It marks the start of a dedicated effort to connect Commonwealth countries with the investment and expertise they need to turn ambition into action.

But investment is only one part of the picture. Countries also need the right conditions to grow: access to markets, affordable finance, reliable infrastructure, digital connectivity and a workforce equipped with the skills needed for the jobs of tomorrow. That is why the wider agenda at CHOGM matters too.

CHOGM 2026 will see commitments from leading investors to support Commonwealth countries in areas including youth skills and entrepreneurship, science and innovation, and the transition to net zero.

This year’s meeting will also focus on making it easier for Commonwealth countries to trade with one another, developing a shared approach to sustainable debt and affordable finance for countries most vulnerable to economic and climate shocks, and setting out how we will build on this investment agenda in 2027.

Taken together, these efforts are about putting people at the centre of multilateral cooperation and shaping responses to the realities they face, rather than what the development cooperation agenda offers. It is about moving beyond declarations and towards partnerships that can deliver and ensuring that cooperation between countries results in opportunities for people and businesses.

The task now is to turn these commitments into something people can see and feel: a job created, a business grown, a community made more resilient, a young person given the skills and opportunity to build a future, a future driven by strong demand from a consumer market of 2.7 billion people.

That is what meaningful multilateralism should deliver. And with 2.7 billion people counting on us, there is no shortage of reasons to make it work.

Shirley Botchwey is Secretary-General of the Commonwealth.

IPS UN Bureau

Excerpt:

A delegate casts his ballot at the Human Rights Council elections held during the 20th plenary meeting of the UN General Assembly. Credit: UN Photo/Mark Garten

By Inés M. Pousadela and Victoria Ubierna
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay / BUENOS AIRES, Argentina, Nov 2 2026 (IPS)

On 13 October, Burundi won a second consecutive term on the UN Human Rights Council, the UN’s main human rights body. The CIVICUS Monitor rates civic space in Burundi as closed, the worst category. Its government has spent years silencing civil society, critics and opposition parties, including through extrajudicial killings, forced disappearances and torture.

The Council was created 20 years ago to replace the Commission on Human Rights, which had lost credibility because states with poor rights records used their seats to shield themselves from scrutiny. Clearly, problems persist.

An election without choice

Burundi secured its seat because the vote was an election in name only. Each year, the UN General Assembly elects roughly a third of the Council’s 47 members, with seats allocated among five regional groups. The resolution that created the Council asks states to consider each candidate’s contribution to human rights and expects members to uphold the highest standards. But for the second year running, every regional group put forward exactly as many candidates as seats. All 15 candidates were elected, six for a second term. Burundi received 160 votes, the fewest of any candidate, a sign that some states withheld their support. With no other candidate standing, it made no difference.

This is a longstanding problem. The Council’s first election, in 2006, was the only one in which every regional group offered a choice. Of the 20 held since since, five, including the last two, featured uncompetitive slates in every group, and in most of the rest only one or two groups held a competitive vote. When there are no alternatives, even states with the worst records are guaranteed a seat.

Alongside Burundi, nine of this year’s 15 elected states have civic space rated as obstructed or repressed. In Jordan, Kuwait and Nigeria, people face serious risks when they speak out, organise or protest. Only six of the chosen states met most of the 17 criteria set out in the International Service for Human Rights’ scorecards, which include cooperating with UN experts and paying UN dues on time.

Selective scrutiny

The Council’s 63rd session, which ended on 7 October, showed what it can still do. Despite severe budget cuts, it renewed the mandates of the Special Rapporteurs on Afghanistan, Burundi and Russia, as well as the fact-finding missions on Sudan and Venezuela.

Many states, however, chose not to take sides, putting geopolitical calculations ahead of human rights principles. Three of the four country resolutions put to a vote saw high numbers of abstentions. On Sudan, the resolution stopped short of naming the foreign governments, notably the United Arab Emirates, that the UN’s fact-finding mission has identified as fuelling the war.

Other crises barely registered. In Bahrain, close to 300 people have been arrested for protests or social media posts since the start of the US–Israeli war on Iran, but the country received only a passing mention. Ecuador and India, which jail activists and attack journalists, received no attention, perhaps because both sit on the Council after being elected unopposed in 2025. Once again, the Council took no action on China, one of its members, four years after a UN report found that abuses against Uyghur people in Xinjiang may amount to crimes against humanity. Such silences reflect political choices by the Council’s members, many of which have little interest in strengthening scrutiny that could one day turn on them.

Reform deferred

The Council’s 20th anniversary offered a chance to fix some of these flaws, but states let it pass. In July, a long-awaited review kept the Council as a subsidiary body of the General Assembly, rather than one with the same standing as the Security Council, and the next review is not due before 2035. Meanwhile, Israel, Nicaragua and the USA have said they will not cooperate with the Council, part of the wider crisis of multilateralism documented in CIVICUS’s 2026 State of Civil Society Report.

States’ failure to pay their dues has also pushed the UN into a liquidity crisis, and its response, the UN80 efficiency drive, has brought deep cuts, disproportionately affecting human rights functions. The UN Human Rights Office’s regular budget is 10 per cent smaller than last year’s, and it has shed over 110 posts. Support has been cut for around a quarter of thematic Special Procedures.

Civil society is paying the price too. Restrictions introduced as temporary, including a cut in the number of written statements accredited organisations can submit, remain in place. Meanwhile, people who share information with the UN or speak at the Council risk detention, smear campaigns, surveillance and travel bans, yet only 10 states raised concerns about reprisals. If engaging with the UN becomes too dangerous, the Council will lose the first-hand evidence it needs to respond to abuses.

A world where 73 per cent of people live in countries with repressed or closed civic space needs a Human Rights Council able to respond to grave violations and protect those who speak out. Competitive elections, adequate funding and stronger civil society participation are required to make the Council the body it needs to be.

Victoria Ubierna is Research Programme Officer at CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation. Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Head of Research and Analysis, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report. She is also Professor of Comparative Politics at Universidad ORT Uruguay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New and Emerging Donors, Including Cities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Coalition Targets Harmful Subsidies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GEF Keeps Pledging Window Open

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

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

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

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

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

IPS UN Bureau Report

Excerpt:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leading the Good Fight for Nature

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

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

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

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

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

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

Farming, Forests and Cultural Knowledge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Protecting Ancestral Forests

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

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

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

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

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

Indigenous Voices Across Continents

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recognition Amid Continuing Frustrations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IPS UN Bureau Report

 
CIVICUS discusses voter suppression ahead of the USA’s 2026 midterm elections with Aklima Khondoker, an Atlanta-based civil and voting rights attorney, civil society organisation executive and founder and principal of Atabey Strategies, a consultancy firm that advises civil society organisations on democracy and electoral participation.

Aklima Khondoker

How is the Trump administration changing the way elections are run?

President Trump has called for ‘nationalising’ elections, which means centralising election control within the federal government, giving his administration more control over who can vote, who receives a mail ballot and how election officials do their jobs. Trump is using the federal government to upend how elections are run. His March 2026 executive order required federal agencies to compile citizenship lists for states and instructed the Justice Department to prioritise investigations of election officials who issue ballots to people deemed ineligible. The order also directed the Postal Service to develop new mail ballot rules, including a federal enrolment system that could determine whether a voter’s postal ballot is delivered. Meanwhile, the Justice Department has demanded state voter data. The administration says these measures protect election integrity. Yet integrity requires accurate records and fair administration free of political pressure. Using disputed data to question eligible voters and threatening officials with investigation can undermine both and risk wrongful exclusion.

This creates serious constitutional tensions. The Constitution assigns states responsibility for running elections and gives Congress, not the president, the power to change the rules by law. The Supreme Court has allowed parts of the executive order to take effect on procedural grounds, without ruling on their legality. However, it has blocked the new postal ballot rules from applying in the midterms.

Democracy depends on people being able to register, get clear information and cast a ballot that will count. Rights can be hollowed out one procedure at a time, each change defended as technical or necessary, until they survive in name only. Erosion of this kind works like a slow boil, making each new restriction feel ordinary. A safeguard is weakened here, a group pushed to the margins there. The danger is that the rest of us grow accustomed to the heat and call it normal, while power moves further from the public it’s meant to serve.

What does the Supreme Court’s ruling on postal ballot deadlines mean for the midterms?

It means states can keep counting mail ballots that arrive after election day as long as they were posted on time. The case concerned Mississippi, one of several states that allow this, which gives ballots up to five business days to arrive. The Republican National Committee and the Libertarian Party of Mississippi argued that federal law requires ballots to be received by election day. Had the Supreme Court agreed, all these grace periods could have fallen, and the practical effect would have been to discard eligible voters’ ballots because of postal delays beyond their control. That’s voter suppression in practice.

But the ruling leaves states free to set their own rules and doesn’t require any state to offer a grace period, so voters face different deadlines depending on where they live. Someone can post a ballot on time and still be caught out by postal delays or other barriers. And voting by mail matters. The pandemic showed its value by letting people vote without in-person exposure, and many voters with disabilities still depend on it.

To be clear, postal voting is safe. For over two decades, Oregon has mailed ballots to active registered voters, who can return them by mail or drop box. From 2000 to 2019, around 61 million ballots were cast there and there were only 38 criminal convictions for voter fraud. In Georgia, amid the Trump campaign’s fraud claims after the 2020 election, a Republican-led audit of a random sample of 15,118 absentee ballot envelopes found no fraudulent ballots. Years of investigations have not substantiated claims of widespread or outcome-changing mail ballot fraud.

What pressure do election officials face from federal authorities?

They face federal demands, on tight deadlines and under threat of legal action, to withhold the ballots of voters whose citizenship is questioned. In California, the Justice Department gave officials 48 hours to review a list of voters on a password-protected drive, without disclosing how many people were on it. It demanded that ballots not yet sent to these voters be withheld until their citizenship was confirmed and that returned ballots be set aside if officials couldn’t verify it. It threatened emergency legal action if they didn’t comply.

The task involves far more than a database search. Officials must check whether records are accurate, coordinate across state and county offices and protect eligible voters’ ballots, all as the election approaches. California has 23.16 million registered voters. Los Angeles County alone had about 5.89 million in its June primary, in which over 80 per cent of ballots were cast by mail. Days after the vote, the county still had around 355,000 mail ballots to process. That’s the ordinary work. The 48-hour deadline lands on top of it.

Election workers also pay a personal price. After the 2020 election, some were falsely accused of fraud, treated as political enemies and subjected to racist threats.

Which voters are most likely to be shut out?

Those asked to spend the most time, money or effort proving they belong at the ballot box are the most likely to be excluded, including Black voters and those from other communities of colour, Native voters, people with disabilities, naturalised citizens caught in record mismatches and people with felony convictions. Exclusion doesn’t always arrive with a sign saying ‘you can’t vote’. It can come as an inaccessible polling place, an address that doesn’t match the one on an ID, a database error or a confusing deadline.

This kind of exclusion has a long history. The 15th Amendment to the Constitution promised Black men the vote. But after Reconstruction, the period following the Civil War, southern states used discriminatory laws, grandfather clauses, literacy tests, poll taxes, intimidation and violence to push newly enfranchised Black voters out of political life. While today’s barriers are not a replay of the Jim Crow era, that history shows how administrative rules can produce profoundly unequal consequences.

Eligible citizens whose records are incomplete or outdated, including naturalised citizens, risk being wrongly flagged as ineligible. If their citizenship can’t be confirmed quickly, their ballot may be withheld while they face a rushed demand to prove they belong. That can cost them their vote, and it can deter other eligible voters from taking part. The danger is real enough that on 9 October, a federal judge struck down as unlawful a Justice Department policy of cross-checking voter rolls against federal records, citing the risk that outdated federal records could mark eligible citizens as ineligible.

In 2024, an estimated four million Americans were barred from voting because of a felony conviction. Around 40 per cent had served their full sentences but still could not vote. This is ‘civil death’. People who live in a community, raise families and work alongside their neighbours have no say in the decisions that govern their lives.

Accessibility also determines whether voters with disabilities can participate independently and safely. In a national study of the 2020 election, 18 per cent of voters with disabilities who voted in person reported difficulty, compared with five per cent of those who voted by mail.

The representatives voters choose make decisions on the cost of living, education, healthcare and the future of democracy itself. When the people most affected by those decisions face the hardest path to the ballot, their interests become easier to ignore.

How is civil society protecting voting rights ahead of the midterms?

Civil society groups make a constitutional right reachable. They translate changing rules into clear guidance, connect voters with legal help, monitor the process, document problems and challenge unlawful barriers. Most voters will never read a court filing or an election observation report, but they may call a hotline because their name is not on the rolls, ask a volunteer what to do when a ballot is challenged or rely on a trained observer to document what happened at a polling place.

The Election Protection coalition brings together over 300 local, state-level and national organisations, and its trained volunteers help voters by phone or text. Observers witness and document the process so public confidence rests on evidence, not rumour.

Around the world, civil society groups are often among the first to document exclusion and defend civic space when governments restrict it. Contexts differ, but the lesson travels: participation does not protect itself. It takes organised people, acting together, to make sure that voters are heard.

What safeguards are needed to protect votes?

Safeguards begin with adequately funded election offices, clear rules announced well in advance, accessible ways to vote, and fair notice and time to fix registration problems. The right to vote means little if a voter can’t reach the polling place, understand the instructions, correct a registration error or get help without fear. Voter roll maintenance, which federal law requires to be uniform and non-discriminatory, should protect eligible voters from wrongful removal instead of leaving them scrambling to prove they belong.

Vote counting must also be transparent, with documented ballot handling, open audits and clear public explanations of the process. Voters, election workers and those who help people vote must be protected from intimidation and threats. The Voting Rights Act, the landmark law against racial discrimination in voting, must be strengthened and fully enforced. Its protections must cover every stage at which someone can be denied the vote or an equal voice, including registering, casting a ballot and having it counted. They must also guarantee language access and assistance for voters who need them. These safeguards are how we stop a slow erosion of rights from becoming a democratic rupture.

CIVICUS interviews a wide range of civil society activists, experts and leaders to gather diverse perspectives on civil society action and current issues for publication on its CIVICUS Lens platform. The views expressed in interviews are the interviewees’ and do not necessarily reflect those of CIVICUS. Publication does not imply endorsement of interviewees or the organisations they represent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Farhan saw how women responded when disaster struck last year.

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

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

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

Orangutan and infant. Credit: Anton Leddin/Wikimedia

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

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

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

Working with communities has humbled Farhan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IPS UN Bureau Report

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IPS UN Bureau Report

A young protester holds a sign that reads ‘Listen to us’ in Paris, France, on 22 October 2026. Credit: Eric Broncard/Hans Lucas via AFP

By Andrew Firmin
LONDON, Oct 26 2026 (IPS)

Classrooms with mouldy walls, riddled with cockroaches and rats, stifling in summer and freezing in winter: this is how French high school students describe the places where they’re meant to learn. These impossible-to-ignore symbols of underfunding and neglect sparked a protest movement that has shaken the country.

Students’ complaints centre on underfunding, teacher shortages, crumbling infrastructure, crowded classrooms and an opaque university admissions system. These matter in their own right and raise broader questions about whose interests economies and governments serve, and what futures people can look forward to.

When high school students blockaded their schools, it struck a chord. University students quickly joined in. Within weeks, at least 250,000 people were on the streets, with teachers, trade union members and supporters of the left-wing France Unbowed (LFI) party among those joining in. The government opened a consultation platform for students, announced the release of fuel reserves and promised school improvement policies, but these limited concessions didn’t stop the protests. Meanwhile the message spread across Europe.

A continental wave

Students organised school blockades in several cities in Belgium, while in Italy, thousands took to the streets to demand increased education spending, better school buildings and action on the cost of living.

In Spain, the crisis of unaffordable housing has brought nationwide protests, with many young people to the fore. The trigger was the eviction of 87-year-old María del Carmen Abascal, known as Maricarmen, from the Madrid apartment that was her home for over seven decades, after the investment firm that bought her building pushed the rent up by over 230 per cent. Weeks of protests followed across Spain and Madrid’s Puerta del Sol filled with over 1,200 protesters’ tents. When right-wing parties blocked emergency housing legislation, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called a snap election.

In Portugal, thousands camped in public squares to protest at unaffordable housing, calling on the government to withdraw a draft law that will make it easier for landlords to evict tenants and end rent caps on new leases. In Greece, students protested against high student rents.

Protests have resurged in Albania. They were initially triggered by a luxury tourism development linked to the Trump family, which unleashed discontent over unaccountable politicians, oligarchical power and corruption. France’s protests gave the movement fresh impetus, with students mobilising against high education costs, poor university conditions and limited job prospects.

The triggers and demands of protest movements vary, but movements speak to a shared understanding among many young people that they aren’t being heard and growing economic difficulties aren’t being addressed.

Roots of a generational revolt

What has happened in France and other European countries is part of a broader global pattern. Young people expect few opportunities in economies that fail almost everyone but the super wealthy. They see bad public services get worse, including their schools and universities, while the cost of essentials soars, driven by the climate crisis and needless conflicts.

When young people leave education they enter impossible job markets and face handing over most of what they earn in rent. A housing crisis that has been bubbling up for years has become a mainstream issue. Private sector interests have turned a necessity into an object of financial speculation. Corporate landlords seek to extract as much rent as the market can bear and use their lobbying power to water down policies to control rents.

Many people view governments as not having the answers. In France, as elsewhere, the current plan is more economic austerity. Established centre-right and centre-left parties are widely seen as differing little.

At the same time, young people have seen the power of self-organising. Gen Z-led protest movements have arisen in many countries, motivated by anger at economic failures, corruption and unaccountable political power. In 2024, young people rose up in Kenya against a planned tax on essentials. In Bangladesh, young people protested against a quota that restricted entry to public sector jobs, toppling an authoritarian government.

In 2025, a ban on 26 social media platforms showed Nepal’s young people how out of touch their government was. Their protests ousted the prime minister, leading to an election that brought democratic change. This year, India’s Gen Z-led cockroach movement secured the resignation of the education minister over exam leaks and is now protesting against unfair changes to the electoral roll.

In 2025, Gen-Z led movements arose in countries as diverse as Madagascar, Morocco, Peru, Philippines, Serbia and Togo, among many others. Movements share remarkably similar characteristics, practising internal democracy and sharing inspiration, tactics and symbols across borders. When movements broaden their support beyond their origins, connecting with established groups and organisations, Gen Z remains at their heart, driving them forward.

Repression and political opportunism

Because they question the distribution of economic and political power, Gen Z-led protests have invariably been met with state violence. In France, Amnesty International has tracked the use of batons, teargas and mass arrests, including against children. On 7 October, amid public outrage, the government was forced to suspend the police’s use of stun grenades after a 15-year-old boy lost a hand. Police have detained thousands of under-18s.

Protesters have mobilised overwhelmingly peacefully, apart from isolated acts of vandalism. But cost-of-living protests joined by hundreds of thousands over the weekend of 17 and 18 October ended in much more significant violence, with rioting and looting in several cities.

With a presidential election due in April, politicians have been quick to capitalise on the violence. Government spokespeople sought to blame LFI, while far-right leader Marine Le Pen, who currently tops the polls, has blamed the violence on what she calls ‘anarchic immigration’. Donald Trump and the Russian government have done the same, while far-right politicians across Europe have followed her lead.

Protesters don’t want a far-right victory, and if France or other countries shift further rightwards, the blame won’t lie with them. Public anger that demands disruption and seeks to punish elites can be channelled towards far-right populist and nationalist ends when no better alternatives are on offer. Economic and political failures, in countries with large Gen Z populations, all but guarantee further protests. The political establishment must start listening and offer a more positive response.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yet today, biodiversity is only part of the story.

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

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

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

Competing Environmental Claims

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Livelihood Along a Militarised Border

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

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

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

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

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

A Wildlife Corridor Under Pressure

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

Today, such sightings appear less frequent.

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

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

Evidence From Another Frontline

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Restoring Nature After Conflict

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

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

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

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

COP17: The Missing Finance Conversation

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

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

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

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

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

An Overlooked Threat to Biodiversity

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

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

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

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

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

IPS UN Bureau Report

Excerpt:

Credit: United Nations

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 23 2026 (IPS)

The international day for the eradication of poverty, commemorated last week, was a grim reminder that the UN will not achieve its highly-ambitious target of helping eradicate extreme poverty—”in all its forms”– by 2030.

According to Secretary-General Antonio Guterres eradicating poverty by 2030 requires urgent political will, massive investments, and a commitment to justice rather than charity.

But that is unlikely to happen by the targeted date?

UN Deputy Spokesperson Farhan Haq told reporters last week the message to donors is that there is a crucial importance towards focusing aid on eliminating poverty as much as possible.

“It’s a disgrace that so many people – really, hundreds of millions of people around the world – still face acute poverty. Because of that, and because there’s still such a large gap in the needs that are to be addressed, it’s unlikely that we’re going to meet the targets by 2030. But the Secretary-General, as you know, continues to push for determination. The idea being, as he puts it, that he is neither hopeful nor pessimistic, but determined. And that’s what we have to do in the fight against poverty.”

Guterres has described poverty as an “insult” to human dignity, a denial of fundamental human rights, and an issue of social justice.

In 2026, an estimated 826 million people (or 1 in 10 people worldwide) were living in extreme poverty. If current trends continue, 9% of the world’s population will still live in extreme poverty by 2030.

Richard Ponzio, Director of the Global Governance, Justice & Security Program and a Senior Fellow at the Washington-based Stimson Center, told Inter Press Service (IPS) ending poverty in all its forms everywhere by 2030 is Goal #1 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

“While we saw tremendous progress on a similar Millennium Development Goal poverty alleviation effort from 2000-2015 — thanks in large part to advances in two large developing countries at the time (China and India) — we have seen less progress overall during the present period (2015-2030) for multiple reasons, including growing debt burdens, the COVID-19 pandemic, continued environmental degradation, and the drag on global economic growth stemming from tariffs and new major wars.”

Despite these obstacles, he pointed out, the Secretary-General and his UN system’s continued determination to fight acute global poverty merits the support and commensurate levels of commitment and determination by the world body’s 193 member states.

In the run-up to next September’s SDG Summit in New York, international efforts, including innovative developments strategies and new financing approaches, should be redoubled in support of the “No Poverty” SDG — while ensuring that steps to eradicate extreme poverty remain a central plank of an emerging Post-2030 Development Agenda, he declared.

Max Lawson, Oxfam International’s Head of Inequality Policy, told IPS extreme poverty can be ended by 2030—“but only if we radically reduce inequality.”

“Right now, for every new dollar of wealth created in the world, the richest one percent pocket 41 cents ―and the entire bottom half of humanity gets just a single cent. While everyday people are hit hard by rising prices, wars, and pandemics, billionaires have more than doubled their fortunes,” said Lawson.

According to one report, poverty has many dimensions. Its primary causes include unemployment, social exclusion, and the high vulnerability of certain populations to disasters, disease, and other crises that prevent them from earning a productive living.

The UN’s SDGs are a collection of 17 global goals and 169 specific targets adopted by UN Member States in September 2015 under the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development

These goals also include an end to worldwide hunger, the need for quality education, good health and well-being, among others.

Anuradha Mittal, Executive Director, The Oakland Institute, told IPS: “As we look for solutions to end poverty, we need to focus on the causes of poverty.”

The international day for the eradication of poverty should be the day to eradicate wars around the world, she argued.

Global military spending continues to rise. Trump’s proposed defense budget for 2027 – a record high of US$1.5 trillion, nearly doubling the 2023 budget – is in line with projections estimating global military spending could reach $6.6 trillion by 2035.

The buildup of the military industrial complex comes at the expense of common good. A small fraction of annual military budgets – less than $300 billion could help eliminate extreme poverty. $93 billion per year – less than 4% of yearly global military spending – could help address global hunger, she said.

Today, over half the world’s 1.1 billion poor live in conflict situations. War diverts necessary funds for public health, education, and social safety nets. Destruction and pillage of war manufactures poverty and then maintains it,” said Mittal.

Danielle Nierenberg, President and Founder, Food Tank, told IPS “determination is good but in order to be effective, we need to have courage.”

With the cutbacks to international aid including the systemic dismantlement of USAID, we need to stand up to those who the aid is a waste of money, she said.

Millions of people are dying unnecessarily when only a very small percentage of rich countries budgets could help save them. Aid benefits us all—it’s not only the moral thing to do, but it helps strengthen national security, declared Nierenberg.

Frederic Mousseau, Policy Director at the Oakland Institute, told IPS focusing on “donors” to address the poverty and climate crises that the world faces today is misdirected.

Poverty goes hand in hand with growing inequities and cannot be addressed separately. There is plenty of money to go around to solve both these crises.

According to Oxfam, US$9 trillion could be raised just from increasing taxes on the wealth and income of the top one percent richest people and the profits of 722 of the world’s biggest corporations.

As the wealth of the billionaires and the largest corporations keeps increasing to insane levels, there is no other way to address poverty than to tax it. The UN should lead the way on an international tax reform that will allow a redistribution of the wealth towards the poor and the adaptation to the climate crisis, declared Mousseau.

According to the SDG 2026 report, poverty has many dimensions. Its primary causes include unemployment, social exclusion, and the high vulnerability of certain populations to disasters, disease, and other crises that prevent them from earning a productive living.

Why should I care about other people’s economic situation?

There are many reasons, but the simplest is that as human beings, our well-being is deeply interconnected. Growing inequality hurts economic growth and undermines social cohesion. This raises political and social tensions and, in some circumstances, drives instability and conflict.

Why is social protection so important?

Strong social protection systems are essential to cushion the blow of economic shocks and prevent vulnerable families from falling into poverty.

While social protection measures did expand during the COVID-19 crisis, approximately 46% of the world’s population—about 3.8 billion people, including 1.4 billion children—remained entirely unprotected in 2023.

In response to the subsequent cost-of-living crisis, 105 countries and territories announced nearly 350 social protection measures between February 2022 and February 2023. However, 80% of these programs were only short-term. To truly achieve the SDGs, nations must build permanent, universal, and sustainable social protection systems for all.

The contribution of science to end poverty has been significant. For example, it has enabled access to safe drinking water, reduced deaths caused by water-borne diseases, and improved hygiene to reduce health risks related to unsafe drinking water and lack of sanitation.

• If current trends continue, 9% of the world’s population may still live in extreme poverty by 2030, and only one in five countries will succeed in halving their national poverty levels.
• In 2025, 7.9% of the global workforce (284 million workers) lived in extreme poverty, down from 11% in 2015.
• For the first time on record, over half of the world’s population receives at least one social protection benefit. Despite this milestone, 3.8 billion people remain completely uncovered.
• Development aid focused on poverty reduction has fallen sharply, erasing a decade of progress and returning to 2015 levels.
• Advanced economies spend a significantly higher share of government budgets on essential services (like education, health, and social protection) compared to emerging and developing nations.
• Guaranteeing basic social security floors in low- and middle-income countries requires an additional $1.4 trillion annually, equal to 3.3% of their combined GDP in 2024.

Source: The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2026

IPS UN Bureau Report

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IPS UN Bureau Report

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cities at Risk

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Drains Become Sewers

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

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

Lessons From 1997

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

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

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

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

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

Opiyo says weak development control is worsening the risk.

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

Tanzania Prepares

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

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

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

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

Beyond El Niño

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They can see the rain coming.

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

IPS UN Bureau Report

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Barriers to Receiving Aid

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Religious Racism in a Changing Climate

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

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

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

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

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

Super El Niño

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

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

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

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

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

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

IPS UN Bureau Report

 
CIVICUS discusses the persecution of Uyghurs and activism in exile with Rushan Abbas, an Uyghur American activist, founder and executive director of Campaign for Uyghurs and chair of the Executive Committee of the World Uyghur Congress.

Rushan Abbas

Why did you leave Xinjiang?

I was born in Ürümchi, Xinjiang’s regional capital, during the Cultural Revolution. I started my activism as a student at Xinjiang University, where I co-organised pro-democracy protests in 1985 and 1988. In 1985, we mobilised over 20,000 students from seven universities, institutes and technical schools across the city. We demanded equality and an end to the forced sterilisation of Uyghur women and to nuclear testing in the region.

Those years brought a brief period of openness, but retaliation against the organisers came quickly. I was interrogated and, although I graduated with the highest academic honours, my job offer was withdrawn. All my prospects were denied. So in 1989, I left for the USA to pursue higher education and look for freedom and democracy.

Has danger followed you into exile?

It has, and it hit my family directly. In the early 1990s, as soon as I started working with US politicians, my father, a high-level academic in Ürümchi, lost his job at 59 in retaliation for my advocacy. In 2018, just days after I spoke publicly at the Hudson Institute, a Washington DC think tank, about the mass detentions, Chinese authorities abducted my sister Gulshan Abbas. She’s a retired physician, a mother of two and a grandmother of four, and she had never been political.

In December 2019, Chinese state media outlet CGTN denied my sister existed and accused me of making up cases and spreading rumours overseas. In December 2020, the authorities finally acknowledged Gulshan had been secretly sentenced to 20 years in prison, obviously on fabricated charges. Her case is one of the clearest examples of how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) uses kin punishment and transnational repression to silence Uyghurs. My sister turned 64 this June. She’s still in a Chinese prison because I exercised my freedom of speech. We have no picture or video of her. No one has been able to visit her and we have received no independent report on her health or wellbeing.

I quit my job after Gulshan’s detention to campaign full time for her freedom and for the Uyghurs suffering what’s effectively an ongoing genocide. Transnational repression has followed me ever since, in the form of cyberattacks, defamation, fabricated court documents, harassment and intimidation. A video appeared on YouTube calling for my execution and that of my husband, Abdulhakim Idris. I have received emails asking what colour rifle I would prefer to be shot with. After I published my memoir, fake books claiming to tell my life story appeared on Amazon. My organisation, Campaign for Uyghurs, has experienced persistent cyberattacks. My case is not unique. Uyghurs in the diaspora and those who speak out continue to suffer transnational repression.

Why does the Chinese government target Uyghurs?

The Chinese government targets us because of our distinct ethnic identity and heritage and because we are the owners of the land we inherited from our ancestors. Our Muslim faith and our culture and language stand in the way of Beijing’s absolute control. Our faith in God, rather than the CCP, as the ultimate authority threatens the regime. This fear drives the regime to try to erase our culture and beliefs.

Economic interests are also at stake. The Uyghur region is rich in natural resources, including coal, natural gas, petroleum, rare earths and critical minerals such as uranium. It accounts for 20 per cent of the world’s cotton, 35 per cent of its solar-grade polysilicon, used in solar panels, 10 per cent of its aluminium and PVC production and 70 per cent of China’s tomato production.

Geography matters too. The region connects China with Central Asia and the Middle East and is a gateway to Africa and Europe, including the Balkans. Once the heart of the ancient Silk Road, it now hosts four of the six major Belt and Road Initiative land routes, part of China’s global infrastructure programme. This makes it key to China’s economic and geopolitical ambitions. The result has been ever-tighter control and securitisation, which has escalated into full-fledged genocide.

What does this persecution look like?

The CCP imposes forced labour, mass arbitrary detention and imprisonment, mass surveillance and restrictions on cultural and religious life. In 2025, there were 3.36 million forced labour transfers and over a million children were placed in state-run boarding schools, where they are raised cut off from their cultural heritage. The Uyghur language is banned in schools. Uyghur books and religious texts have been burned. Uyghur women are subjected to forced abortion, sterilisation and marriage to men from the dominant Han ethnic group.

China’s government claims these policies bring stability, but stability for who? This is a system where the government exercises unchecked power to detain, punish, silence and watch people for their beliefs, their identity and their demands for human dignity.

How is Campaign for Uyghurs pushing for accountability?

We document abuses, bring evidence to policymakers and international institutions and support Uyghur-led advocacy. Central to our work is equipping Uyghur women and young people in the diaspora with the knowledge and practical skills to lead advocacy efforts. We have run around 20 advocacy workshops worldwide, and we are proud to see a new generation of young Uyghur activists taking the lead.

We also work with civil society groups, interfaith organisations, think tanks and universities to turn evidence into tangible policy action. Our campaigns have contributed to US laws, including the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act and the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2020, and our coalition-building has helped put the Uyghur crisis on the political agenda.

With investigative partners, we exposed Volkswagen’s sham audit and its attempts to conceal links to state-imposed forced labour. We worked with The New York Times to reveal that cotton from the Uyghur region was used to make the viral Labubu dolls manufactured by Pop Mart. This work connects evidence from the ground with public scrutiny and action.

Why has there been so little international action since the UN’s landmark 2022 report?

China has enormous economic and political leverage. Many governments and companies are reluctant to jeopardise diplomatic, trade and investment ties, or have simply been pressured into silence. Such is China’s influence that the UN refused to debate human rights abuses in the Uyghur region.

There is also an often underestimated propaganda problem. China has spent years building a global media apparatus. It uses state broadcasters, partnerships with foreign media outlets, sponsored trips for journalists and influencers and coordinated messaging to drown out credible research and human rights reporting. China does not necessarily need the world to believe its propaganda. Creating doubt and making people hesitate to act can be enough.

Time is another obstacle. Every day without meaningful consequences normalises abuses, and a human rights crisis becomes the accepted status quo.

What should governments and the UN do?

Lawmakers should pass legislation to address transnational repression, ban products made with state-imposed forced labour and provide stronger protection for Uyghurs seeking refuge.

Governments should use existing sanctions tools, including the Global Magnitsky Act, which allows sanctions on individual human rights abusers, to hold officials responsible for the genocide accountable.

Governments should also refuse to extradite Uyghurs to China. No one should be sent back to a country where they may face genocide.

Governments and international institutions must keep individual cases and the broader human rights crisis on the agenda. They should keep existing official genocide determinations in place and secure the release of political prisoners such as my sister. Human rights should never be treated as secondary to broader relations with Beijing.

CIVICUS interviews a wide range of civil society activists, experts and leaders to gather diverse perspectives on civil society action and current issues for publication on its CIVICUS Lens platform. The views expressed in interviews are the interviewees’ and do not necessarily reflect those of CIVICUS. Publication does not imply endorsement of interviewees or the organisations they represent.

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SEE ALSO
Transnational repression: a world without refuge CIVICUS Lens 03.Sep.2026
China: ‘The Ethnic Unity Law means there is one acceptable way to be Chinese’ CIVICUS Lens | Interview with Gulchehra Hoja 30.Jul.2026
Transnational repression: ‘China feels emboldened to globalise its political red lines’ CIVICUS Lens | Interview with Barbora Bukovská 19.May.2026

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

By Ignatius Banda
BULAWAYO, Oct 16 2026 (IPS)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Health financing strategies sit on shelves. Insurance schemes are legislated but struggling to be capitalised. Benefit packages are defined but not costed into medium-term expenditure frameworks. A reform without a budget line does not constitute a policy,” Diaw said.

Yet it is a commitment African governments made in 2001 at the Abuja Declaration to allocate 15 percent of national budgets to health, but countries have fallen short, with some allocations ranging between as little as 2 percent and 12 percent, according to the World Health Organisation.

To address the public health funding crisis, UNECA says what remains crucial is “a fundamental reset in how African governments and their finance ministries fund health systems” in a continent where millions lack access to and cannot afford basic medical care.

“External aid covered more than 30 per cent of health expenditure, and in some 13 countries the ECA has looked at, households pay more for health than their own governments do,” Diaw said, adding that “many countries on the continent now spend more on servicing debt than on public health.”

Amid these challenges and competing public spending priorities, it is not yet clear how governments will navigate these new public health funding realities, as pressure from international lending institutions for African countries to repay billions of loans still remains.

Analysts however see the funding crisis as part of Africa’s broader political architecture where short-term planning by sitting governments prioritises projects closely linked to the election cycle.

“Governments have to balance health against infrastructure, security, education, social protection and other priorities,” said Pakhani Mhazo, a public health researcher based in  South Africa.

“However, health preparedness often produces benefits that are not immediately visible to voters. For example, if you invest in disease surveillance, laboratories and emergency systems and successfully prevent an outbreak from becoming a crisis, there is no obvious event that voters can see as the result of that investment,” Mhazo told IPS.

Meanwhile, without any clear or immediate sources to fill the funding gaps left by international aid, African governments have their work cut out, and as Claver Gatete, UNECA Executive Secretary, reminded African ministers during the High-Level Forum on Sustainable Health Financing in April this year, “Health is not expenditure; it is investment – in people, in productivity and in prosperity.”

IPS UN Bureau Report

Singer-songwriter Yusuf ‘Cat Stevens’ Islam speaks during the closing session of the Global Tipping Points Conference in Kuala Lumpur. Credit: Zofeen T. Ebrahim

By Zofeen Ebrahim
KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 16 2026 (IPS)

With the city enveloped in a cloak of haze, the urgency of tackling the climate crisis could hardly have been clearer as the four-day Global Tipping Points Conference 2026 drew to a close at Malaysia’s Sunway University on Thursday.

At the conference, speakers stressed the need for humanity to remain within planetary boundaries, or the “safe operating space”.

Crossing these boundaries could have catastrophic consequences, warned Professor Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and one of the conference organisers.

He highlighted the dangers of triggering irreversible changes in major Earth systems. Some of the bulwarks have already been breached, manifesting themselves in the form of collapsed ice sheets, bleached corals, shrinking wildlife habitats and the slow death of rainforests.

Dong Wang’s park in Bangkok. Credit: Zofeen T. Ebrahim

‘Tipping points’ conference brings together climate scientists, activists, and finance gurus; highlights success stories from around the world

All of this threatens food security, causes displacement, damages human health and destabilises economies.

With plenty of reasons to be pessimistic – social and political polarisation, rising inequality and poverty, and wars among them – the message was nevertheless one of urgency rather than despair. “The science has matured, evidence is there… it is time for action… that’s the natural step,” said Sultan Nazrin Shah of Perak.

But there is another side to the tipping-point story.

Professor Timothy Lenton, chair of Climate Change and Earth System Science at the University of Exeter and one of the organisers, spoke about “positive tipping points.” Lenton, who has studied tipping points since the 1990s, argued these could help societies move towards more sustainable futures. Citing Pakistan’s solar boom and Norway’s rapid adoption of electric vehicles, he pointed to transformative shifts that can happen within a relatively short period.

But protecting ecosystems is as important as technologies, said Acehnese forest conservator Farwiza Farhan, while making a compelling case for the protection of the Leuser Ecosystem – a tropical rainforest reserve in Sumatra and one of the last places on Earth where tigers, elephants, rhinos and orangutans coexist in the wild.

Others turned to imagining the future. Anab Jain, co-founder of London-based Superflux, described Mitigation of Shock, an immersive installation set in a fictional 2050. Visitors enter an imagined apartment shaped by a future in which some of the most severe impacts of climate change have already occurred. More than 100,000 people have visited it since 2017, she said.

Professor Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, broadened the discussion to social, economic and political tipping points. If these systems tipped in the wrong direction, he warned, they could trigger a “cascade of devastating consequences.”

Planetary changes and social, economic and political conditions are deeply interconnected, said Sachs, making cooperation essential to averting disaster. He repeatedly pointed to poverty and inequality as forces that could deepen instability but argued that all was not lost. The tools for change – economic wellbeing, social inclusion, environmental sustainability, and peace and cooperation among nations – already exist, he said.

Discussions also covered deforestation, land-use change, governance failures and the rise of artificial intelligence. Turning tools into action, however, requires money, policy and political will.

“But where’s the money?” many asked, urging encouragement for supportive policies and a pipeline of “bankable projects” that protect nature, so that economic incentives favour regeneration over extraction. One such approach came from Dr Ralph Chami, founder of Blue Green Future, who outlined his concept of “regenerative GDP”, i.e. recognising the value of “living nature” and accounting for it on the balance sheet.

Timothy Lenton explaining the positive tipping points. Credit: Zofeen T. Ebrahim

“Why kill the goose that lays the [golden] egg?” he asked, contrasting a living coral reef in the Maldives – which provides a habitat for fish and plays a role in the marine carbon cycle – with a bleached one that can threaten both tourism and fisheries.

But money and markets are only part of the equation. Dr Jemilah Mahmood, executive director of the Centre for Planetary Health at Sunway University, insisted on channelling youth energy. “Give them space at policy [discussions], send them to COPs not as tokenism, but let them negotiate. It’s their future,” she said.

As an example of what young people can achieve, Mahmood pointed to Pacific Island law students whose campaign helped bring climate change and human rights before the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Their efforts contributed to a landmark advisory opinion in July 2025, clarifying states’ legal obligations on climate change. Climate litigation and the role of legal action in holding governments accountable also featured in the wider conversation.

The highlight of the conference was definitely the success stories from around the world that offered the most tangible hope.

For example, Chinese urban planner Dong Wang, who specialises in sponge cities and ecological planning, shared a low-cost, low-maintenance and replicable project in the heart of Bangkok – the transformation of a former tobacco factory into the 102-acre Benjakitti Forest Park, to which more than 200 bird species have since returned.

Eva Gladek of Metabolic, who spoke about NetZeroCities, showed how 17 old houseboats in Amsterdam were retrofitted with clean technologies and transformed into energy-efficient offices and workspaces.

Mumbai-based Sheela Patel, director of the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres, drew on five decades of work with people living in informal settlements to highlight another kind of urban resilience. Through the ‘Roof Over Our Heads’ campaign, women supported by young professionals are helping make homes more resilient to rain, strong winds and extreme heat.

And these efforts are not simply one-off experiments. Patel said the work has been documented and shared, with more than 100 labs established across 20 countries to help communities test and replicate solutions. Gladek, meanwhile, is helping 100 European cities work towards climate neutrality.

The thought-provoking conference had opened on a note of faith, with Sultan Nazrin Shah speaking of humanity’s responsibility to care for the planet, which he said “comes with privilege and obligation” but is “not a burden to be feared”.

It ended on a rather philosophical and spiritual note, with British singer-writer Yusuf ‘Cat Stevens’ Islam urging people to become the change rather than expecting the world to change. “Never stop being a child, as there is light in their eyes and they see hope,” he said, also stressing the need to bring spirituality into education. “Look how the curriculum has been colonised.”

For positive tipping points to hold, science alone will not be enough, concluded Mahmood. It will also need the voices of those whose futures are at stake.

Note: Published with the permission of Dawn.

IPS UN Bureau Report

UN DESA Assistant Secretary-General Bjørg Sandkjær (right) and Rashmi Banga, Chief of the Development Research Branch, brief journalists at UN Headquarters on the launch of the 2026 World Social Report, emphasizing the need for social inclusion as economic, digital, and climate transformations widen existing divides. Credit: UN DESA / P. Vasic

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

The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA) new report, which addresses the rapid global transformations driven by artificial intelligence (AI), demographic shifts, climate change, and conflict, highlights the widening disparities in employment, social inclusion, and access to services.

The report titled The New Economics of Social Inclusion: Making Transformations Work for All was released on October 5.

Despite decades of progress in income, health, and education that drove development worldwide, the report warns that millions of people risk falling behind. Drawing on data collected over 25 years and across 168 countries, this year’s edition introduces a new Socially Inclusive Transformation (SIT) dashboard, which examines how a nation’s economic, digital, and energy transformations align with social and economic inclusion.

“On one hand, rapid transformations are reshaping our world: digital technologies, artificial intelligence, renewable energy, and the demographic and economic transition,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres during a press briefing at the UN Headquarters coinciding with the report’s release. “On the other hand, these transformations are not working for all. Poverty and deprivation are widespread. Billions are locked out of opportunities because of income, gender, age, disability, ethnicity, or many other fault lines that undermine equality.”

In 2025, UN DESA found that roughly 58 percent of workers were informally employed, while approximately 27 percent of young women aged 15 to 24 were neither employed nor in education or training programs. The same year, UN DESA estimated that around 26 percent of the world’s population, or 2.2 billion, still lacked internet access. Roughly 730 million people lacked access to electricity. The report underscores that even among digitally connected communities, affordability and service quality continue to hinder meaningful participation.

Between 2000 and 2024, the agency reported that more than 50 countries experienced rising income inequality, including in 23 high-income countries. These gaps continue to stifle productivity and weaken community resilience to economic shocks from technological shifts, climate disasters, and geopolitical tensions.

Marginalized groups—including women and girls, youths, disabled persons, migrants, and Indigenous peoples—disproportionately experience limited access to essential resources, economic opportunities, and decision-making processes.

Rashmi Banga, Chief, Development Research Branch, Economic Analysis and Policy Division at UN DESA, stressed that transformations do not automatically translate into inclusion. She noted that none of the top five best-performing countries in transformation, specifically Malta, Ireland, the U.S., Singapore, and China, rank among the top five in inclusiveness, which mainly consist of European countries. The report reveals that numerous African countries continue to fall behind, especially with the proliferation of new digital technologies and the energy transition.

The report highlights the compounding climate crisis as a major driver of social exclusion, noting that approximately 887 million of the 1.1 billion people living in multidimensional poverty are also exposed to at least one major climate hazard. These impacts are most pronounced in regions entrenched in humanitarian crises, where communities have the fewest resources to adapt, significantly threatening long-term economic resilience.

Guterres warned that cascading global shocks, such as the Middle East crisis, are compounding existing threats through rising food, fertilizer, and fuel prices, resulting in more than 100 countries lowering their gross-domestic product forecasts this year alone.

UN DESA also identifies the growing digital divide driven by artificial intelligence as a major threat to social inclusion. While the report shows AI’s potential in enhancing agricultural productivity and generating meaningful gains for rural communities, it warns that significant threats remain. Entire communities with limited affordable, digital connectivity, coupled with insufficient digital skills, risk falling further behind.

Bjørg Sandkjær, UN DESA’s Assistant Secretary-General for Policy Coordination, told reporters that AI often reproduces “biases that exist in the world today” during hiring processes. She warned that this has severe implications for employment, particularly for women.

Banga added that equitable and effective AI governance is critical in preventing these biases and fostering economic and social inclusion. She highlighted India and China as examples of countries implementing AI education into school curriculum, while France has established access to digital infrastructure as a legal right.

Additional data from the report reveals that delaying social inclusion carries a “measurable economic cost.” UN DESA estimates show that if investments in social protection mechanisms are delayed by another decade, countries could face a potential decline in economic output by roughly 12 percent compared to countries that invested early. Conversely, efforts to include young people in employment could raise national GDP by 9.6 percent over the next decade.

“Inclusive societies are more productive, resilient, and prosperous,” said Guterres. “The report urges investments in education, job creation, and skill training, so all people can benefit from technological advancements and the growth of new industries. It calls for inclusive institutions and policymaking to ensure all voices are represented, and it advocates equity-focused approaches to labor markets and taxation to open opportunities for all people, no matter who they are or where they live.”

Banga emphasized that national investments alone cannot achieve adequate social inclusion without strong international cooperation. Multilateral support is pivotal in expanding fiscal space, providing long-term development financing, and widening access to digital infrastructure. Sandkjær called on governments to reframe social inclusion not only as an economic imperative, but as a strategic investment in long-term stability, resilience, and productivity. She also urged for greater integration of social commitments into macroeconomic planning.

“As transformations gather pace, there is no time to be lost by bringing social commitments into the heart of economic policymaking; we can unleash a virtuous cycle of greater inclusion and stronger growth,” said Sandkjær.

IPS UN Bureau Report

Woodlands in nearly every forested country face threats from climate-change-driven fires and deforestation pressures fueled by economic interests exploiting natural resources. Credit: Imran Schah/IPS

By Stephanie Dowlen
MALMO, Sweden, Oct 16 2026 (IPS)

On Monday, governments from across the world will gather in Armenia for COP17, the UN biodiversity summit, to assess progress on the global agreement to halt and reverse biodiversity loss. For anyone who cares about the livability of our planet for future generations, and the richness of life on earth, the stakes could hardly be higher. Policy makers will debate targets, implementation, and the lack of money to protect nature, in particular the failure of developed countries to fulfil their obligations. But there is a more basic question that should put at the center of those discussions: what happens when the financial system governments are counting on to fund nature protection is also financing its destruction?

A new analysis by the Forests & Finance coalition provides an alarming answer. Since 2020, banks have provided $595 billion to companies operating in high-risk agribusiness and metal and mineral mining sectors across tropical forest regions. Of that, $351 billion went to agro-commodities and $244 billion to mining. These are among the primary industries driving deforestation, land degradation, pollution and conflicts with communities across the tropical forest regions of South America, Southeast Asia and Central and West Africa.

The significance of that figure goes beyond the amount of money involved. It exposes a fundamental weakness in the way the biodiversity crisis is being addressed. Governments have committed under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework to aligning financial flows with biodiversity goals, yet financial institutions remain largely free to finance nature destruction as a risk to themselves rather than as harm they may in fact be helping to cause.

Nature-related risks are not like ordinary financial risks. A bank might assess how drought could affect a company’s revenues without adequately considering whether the company itself helped create that vulnerability by clearing forests, draining wetlands or degrading watersheds. By the time those consequences appear on a balance sheet, an ecosystem may already have crossed a threshold from which recovery is extremely difficult. The report finds that current financial risk frameworks and sustainability policies remain woefully ill-equipped to assess these real-world impacts.

The consequences are already visible in some of the world’s most important forest landscapes. In Brazil, banks have provided $83 billion to the soy sector since 2020, including $6.8 billion this year alone, despite the collapse in January of the Amazon Soy Moratorium, which had been credited with reducing soy-driven deforestation by 69 percent in monitored areas. The withdrawal of major exporters from the agreement removed a critical safeguard and traceability system keeping forests standing, yet banks have not publicly taken a position on its collapse.

Indonesia presents a similarly disturbing pattern. Banks have provided $67.1 billion to the country’s notoriously destructive pulp and palm oil sectors since 2020, including financing for companies associated with repeated breaches of their own commitments to avoid deforestation, peatland development and exploitation. Peat drainage and deforestation leave landscapes less able to retain water and resist fire, increasing the vulnerability of communities to climate extremes.

At the same time, the financial flows behind mining are growing rapidly. Governments and companies are scrambling to secure copper, lithium, nickel, cobalt and other minerals needed for energy technologies, while demand is also being driven by geopolitical competition and the expansion of artificial intelligence infrastructure. Financing for mining in tropical forest-rich countries increased 55 percent between 2016 and 2025, with lithium financing increasing more than elevenfold and nickel financing by 183 percent.

There is a danger in treating every new mine as part of a clean transition simply because its minerals may eventually be used in low-carbon technologies. Mining in tropical forest regions is associated with ecosystem destruction, pollution, land conflicts, violence and violations of Indigenous Peoples’ rights. A transition that sacrifices some of the world’s most biodiverse landscapes and the people who depend on them is not sustainable, whatever the end product.

What makes this particularly troubling is how little protection many banks actually require before providing this financing. The average score in the report’s assessment of bank policies covering forest-risk agro-commodities is only 25 percent, while 39 percent of banks assessed scored below 20 percent. JPMorgan Chase, one of the world’s largest and most influential banks, scored just 18 percent.

Voluntary commitments have done little to close this gap. Governments now need to establish binding rules requiring financial institutions to conduct meaningful environmental and human rights due diligence across corporate groups and supply chains, disclose where their money is going and what impacts that financing is associated with, and face consequences when they finance severe and unresolved harms.

Financial regulators also need to recognize biodiversity loss as more than a distant environmental concern. Tropical forests underpin food systems, water supplies and economic activity, while their degradation can create cascading risks across economies. Yet there is still no equivalent to the regulatory framework used for financial institutions considered systemically important, even as the degradation of these natural systems threatens consequences that extend far beyond individual companies or projects.

But banks should not wait for governments to act. They can establish clear red lines against deforestation, ecosystem conversion and serious human rights abuses, make those requirements enforceable in financing agreements, independently verify compliance and suspend or terminate financing when clients fail to address serious violations. Those safeguards must respect Indigenous Peoples’ rights, including Free, Prior and Informed Consent, and provide affected communities with meaningful access to remedy.

The choice facing governments at COP17 is therefore not simply how much money to mobilize for biodiversity. It is whether they are prepared to stop the financial system from undermining those investments in the first place.

The evidence is increasingly difficult to dismiss. Hundreds of billions of dollars are flowing into industries that are rapidly degrading the natural systems on which economies, and the web of life, depend. Governments have already promised to align financial flows with biodiversity goals. Now they need to make that commitment real.

At COP17, following the money would be a good place to start.

IPS UN Bureau

Kenia Inés Hernández Montalván. Credit: @CDHVitoria

By Clare Quirk
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa, Oct 15 2026 (IPS)

Kenia Hernández is an Indigenous Mexican lawyer and human rights defender dedicated to advancing women’s rights and social justice.

Arrested in October 2020, she has faced multiple criminal proceedings that human rights organisations, including CIVICUS, have denounced as politically motivated and linked to the criminalisation of her activism. This piece is the second in our series on the campaign that advocates for the immediate release of unjustly imprisoned or persecuted human rights defenders globally.

Additional reference: Five years of resistance: The case of Kenia Hernández and the battle against the fabrication of crimes 

Additional research and reporting: Cecilia Russell
Note: This feature is published with the support of CIVICUS: Stand As My Witness Campaign.
IPS is solely responsible for the editorial content, and it does not necessarily reflect the views of CIVICUS.

IPS UN Bureau Report

UN Secretary-General António Guterres opens the general debate of the General Assembly’s 81st session on 22 September 2026. Credit: UN Photo/Loey Felipe

By Andrew Firmin
LONDON, Oct 14 2026 (IPS)

At this year’s highest-profile UN event, Donald Trump publicly mused over his ‘big decision’ about whether to ‘annihilate’ Iran. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as dozens of delegates walked out, branded those who condemn genocide in Gaza ‘moral cowards’.

The UN was established in the devastating aftermath of the Second World War with the explicit aim to ‘save succeeding generations from the scourge of war’. Its charter commits all UN members to settling disputes peacefully. Yet at the UN General Assembly’s annual high-level session, held in September, several national leaders used a podium meant for peace and international cooperation to justify and threaten violence.

The bellicose tone of many speeches signalled a broader crisis of multilateralism. Autocrats are throwing their weight around, determined to prove that might makes right, or, as Trump put it when boasting of US control of Venezuelan oil, ‘to the victor belong the spoils’. Such leaders care little for international laws, norms, institutions and processes.

Powerful states are withdrawing from institutions, defunding them, refusing to cooperate and forming rival, more selective and less formal groupings. Nakedly transactional deal-making is replacing collective action, fragmenting the multilateral system. As a rules-based order gives way to something more chaotic, civil society’s opportunities to engage are withering. All this is happening as huge transnational problems mount up, including the climate crisis, economic inequality, impunity for conflict atrocities and the repression of civic space.

The race to succeed Guterres

Against this backdrop, someone new will take the helm. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’s second term expires at the end of the year, and states are now choosing his successor.

Civil society is calling for a feminist woman leader who puts human rights first. Yet human rights feature little in the debate. A former UN human rights chief, Michelle Bachelet, has pulled out because straw polls among the 15 Security Council members, a key stage of the process, showed she lacked support.

In each poll, states can ‘encourage’ or ‘discourage’ a candidacy, or express ‘no opinion’. So far, five rounds have proved inconclusive. Former Costa Rican Vice President Rebeca Grynspan has emerged as frontrunner, but the latest poll saw her receive six ‘discourage’ votes compared to three in the round before. No candidate commands overwhelming backing and it’s possible other candidates will come forward.

Civil society is trying to engage, but ultimately states don’t have to publicly justify their decisions. Because the Security Council is central to the process, the final say rests with its five permanent members, China, France, Russia, the UK and the USA, any of which can veto a candidate they dislike. Opaque negotiations are therefore likely to produce a compromise candidate that China, Russia and the USA find sufficiently inoffensive.

As the race heats up, there are signs candidates are avoiding speaking about issues that may be seen as contentious for fear of losing support. States that back particular candidates may decide not to ask difficult questions that could cost them votes. As a result, important matters such as Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the rights of excluded groups are being sidelined. Anyone who sees themselves as a world leader should be taking these issues on, but candidates’ refusal to do so shows how firmly powerful states are calling the shots.

One candidate, Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett, has been the target of a Wall Street Journal hit piece over comments condemning Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide, made in her role as Guyana’s ambassador to the UN. The intent is clearly to encourage the USA to block her.

Civil society expects a global voice of conscience, someone prepared to go further than serving states and willing to speak up on the issues candidates are now avoiding. History shows that, even in difficult times, the personality and leadership style of the secretary-general can make a difference. Whoever prevails will have to steer the UN through crisis and rebuild respect for the institution and the broader promise of multilateralism, and that means putting human rights first.

Access needed

When they next meet, national leaders will have the opportunity to shape the future of development. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the set of 17 interconnected goals agreed by every UN member state in 2015, expire in 2030. Next year’s SDG Summit will consider what should come next.

In these difficult times, civil society faces the challenge of asserting a progressive vision and pushing for goals that make a real difference. But civil society remains excluded. It was once again forced to the sidelines for this high-level session. The passes of organisations that have cleared accreditation hurdles and normally have access to UN headquarters are suspended at these annual meetings. This speaks of a broader exclusion. The UN has failed to advance even modest proposals to recognise civil society’s role, such as instituting a UN civil society day or appointing an envoy to coordinate civil society engagement.

Meanwhile, the UN’s funding crisis is further impacting on civil society’s participation. The USA is the chief culprit, owing around US$4.2 billion in contributions. The USA and other powerful states are defunding and sidelining the UN’s human rights functions, which civil society most engages with. The result is job cuts, curtailed mandates and fewer opportunities for civil society participation.

The arrival of a new secretary-general and the debate on new development goals bring not just challenges but also opportunities. To seize them, civil society will need to build stronger coalitions and collaborate more closely than ever. It must engage constructively with the next secretary-general while raising expectations, putting stronger access and partnerships on the table.

A state-centric UN will fail. A UN that hopes to make a difference on big problems, rebuild respect for human rights and win an increasingly contested argument for the value of multilateralism can’t keep excluding civil society. The next secretary-general must champion an open and accountable UN that recognises civil society as an essential partner.

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

A new report on deforestation reflects the persistent gap between global ambitions to conserve and restore forests and enduring practices that continue to destroy them. Credit: UN Climate Change/Diego Herculano

By Umar Manzoor Shah
BERLIN, Germany/WASHINGTON, D.C., USA , Oct 14 2026 (IPS)

The world lost more than 7 million hectares of forest to deforestation in 2025, a modest improvement on recent years but still far from what is needed to meet global forest protection targets by 2030, according to a new assessment of international conservation efforts.

The Forest Declaration Assessment 2026, prepared by a coalition of civil society organisations and researchers and released worldwide on October 14, says deforestation remains stubbornly high despite international commitments to halt and reverse forest loss. The average annual area cleared since 2021 has exceeded 8 million hectares, highlighting the gap between government promises and progress on the ground.

Ivan Palmegiani, senior consultant at Climate Focus and one of the key report authors, told Inter Press Service in an exclusive interview that a key reason deforestation remains so high is that commitments have not been matched by the scale of action needed, and where action has been taken, it has not always been sufficient to deliver lasting impact.

“We have seen what is possible under dedicated political leadership, such as the Lula administration in Brazil, where targeted policies, enforcement, and political will reduced deforestation within a single term. However, these successes remain the exception rather than the norm, and they can be quickly reversed when priorities change.”

He added that at a deeper level, forest commitments have not been translated into the structural transformation in how natural resources are governed and used. Forests, Palmegiani said, continue to face strong economic pressures from agriculture, infrastructure, extraction, and other land uses, while decision-making systems and incentives still frequently favour the powerful few, who are physically and emotionally disconnected from forests, rather than the many who depend on them for their livelihoods, well-being, and cultural identity. “Until our societies, political and economic systems change how decisions about forests and other ecosystems are made, forest loss is likely to remain high despite global pledges.”

Ivan Palmegiani, senior consultant at Climate Focus and one of the authors of the Forest Declaration Assessment 2026. Credit: Supplied

The report also found that at least 65.4 million hectares of forest worldwide lost ecological integrity in 2024 because of human activities. The figure highlights a problem that extends beyond the complete removal of trees. Forests can remain standing while losing biodiversity, carbon storage capacity and their ability to sustain wildlife and local communities.

“Both figures reflect a persistent gap between global ambitions to conserve and restore forests and enduring practices that keep destroying them,” the report says.

The assessment examines progress on forest protection, sustainable production, finance and governance. It finds that some initiatives are moving forward, including efforts to improve forest monitoring and recognise Indigenous land rights. But these developments have not yet produced the scale of change required to reverse forest destruction.

More than 140 countries pledged under the Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration on Forests and Land Use, announced at the 2021 United Nations climate conference, to halt and reverse forest loss and land degradation by 2030.

Five years later, the latest assessment suggests that the world remains far from achieving that objective.

Tropical forests face particular pressure from agricultural expansion, infrastructure development and commercial activities. The report says these pressures are reinforced by weak enforcement of environmental laws and economic incentives that continue to favour activities associated with forest destruction.

‘We No Longer Look at Country-Level Figures’

Tropical Latin America recorded the largest absolute area of deforestation among the regions assessed but also made the most significant progress compared with the 2018-20 baseline. Deforestation there fell by 33 percent in 2025.

Tropical Africa, however, experienced a continued rise in forest loss. Annual deforestation in the region reached about 2.4 million hectares in 2025, comparable to the 2.5 million hectares recorded in tropical Latin America.

Tropical Asia lost approximately 1.6 million hectares of forest in 2025. That represented a 12 percent reduction compared with the 2018-20 baseline, although the report cautions that the underlying causes of deforestation remain largely unchanged.

The assessment describes tropical Asia’s progress as ambiguous. Two consecutive years of modest declines may indicate that the worst recent peaks have passed, but they do not establish that the region is on a sustained path towards forest recovery.

Tropical Oceania was the only tropical region assessed as being on track to meet its 2030 forest goals. Its relatively small share of global tropical forest area and lower current pressure on forests partly explain this difference.

The findings underline how national policies, commodity production and enforcement capacity can produce sharply different outcomes across regions.

When asked which countries have contributed most to this progress and what challenges continue to prevent deeper reductions in terms of deforestation, Palmegiani said, “We no longer look at country-level figures because the global datasets used for our calculations can sometimes misrepresent national trends. In fact, to avoid overstating the precision of the data, we only publish regional and global aggregates for our indicators.”

He added, ”That said, independent analyses and regional initiatives suggest that Indonesia and Malaysia have been important contributors to the decline in deforestation observed across tropical Asia. Despite this progress, the region continues to face significant economic pressures. These include growing demand for critical minerals, particularly nickel, of which Indonesia is the world’s leading exporter, as well as broader economic uncertainty linked to geopolitical conflicts and disruptions in global markets. When these pressures intensify, short-term economic priorities can outweigh environmental considerations, and forests often bear the cost.”

Agricultural Expansion and Commercial Interests

Agriculture remains a major driver of forest loss, with commercial production and growing demand for food, animal feed and bioenergy putting pressure on natural ecosystems.

The report says between 61 and 94% of tropical deforestation linked to commercial agriculture may be illegal. It estimates that environmental crime, including illegal deforestation and timber and wildlife trafficking, generates as much as US$281 billion annually.

Such activities often overlap with other criminal enterprises.

A 2025 study by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, cited in the assessment, found links between environmental offences and crimes including drug trafficking, illegal mining and human trafficking.

The scale of these activities presents a major challenge for governments seeking to protect forests while regulating international commodity supply chains.

The assessment also points to gaps in corporate accountability. Companies in sectors linked to forest loss have increasingly adopted sustainability commitments and reporting systems, but disclosure and implementation remain uneven.

Financial institutions have begun to recognise deforestation as an environmental and financial risk. Yet the report says many regulatory frameworks lack detailed guidance on how banks should assess and manage those risks.

More than 60 percent of the countries assessed had yet to establish disclosure requirements covering deforestation-related risks for banks or insurance companies.

The report’s findings suggest that voluntary commitments and corporate reporting need to be accompanied by stronger enforcement and clearer requirements if they are to produce measurable changes in production and investment.

Forest Finance Remains a Major Challenge

The assessment identifies the scale and distribution of finance as another obstacle to forest protection.

Although international funding commitments have increased, financial support for conservation remains difficult to reconcile with the economic incentives that encourage activities harmful to forests.

The report estimates that subsidies linked to the production and use of fossil fuels reached $921 billion in 2024. Emergency measures introduced in 2026 to ease high energy prices could push the global total above $1 trillion this year.

The assessment warns that such subsidies can undermine efforts to shift to less harmful energy sources.

It also highlights the potential benefits of redirecting public support to activities that restore nature.

“Every dollar of agricultural support that is repurposed to support farming practices that restore nature, such as agroforestry, silvopasture, and low-carbon agriculture, can generate up to USD 30 in economic benefits, especially for rural communities,” the report says.

The findings point to an opportunity for governments to reform existing spending rather than rely entirely on new funding.

However, the report notes that international forest finance does not consistently reach the Indigenous peoples and local communities who manage and protect forest territories.

Community-led funding mechanisms can help direct resources towards local priorities, but they remain secondary recipients of direct funding from governments and multilateral institutions.

Indigenous Rights and Participation

The assessment identifies recognition of Indigenous land rights as an important part of effective forest governance.

At the 2025 United Nations climate conference, known as COP30, an intergovernmental commitment involving 16 countries and one subnational jurisdiction pledged to recognise or strengthen rights over an additional 160 million hectares of Indigenous lands and territories.

The launch of the Tropical Forests Forever Facility also created a provision reserving 20 percent of country-level payouts for direct transfers to Indigenous and local community organisations.

These developments represent progress, but the report says participation in international policymaking does not necessarily translate into decision-making power.

Indigenous coalitions have stressed that their increased presence at COP30 remained largely consultative. Indigenous peoples still lack formal standing in the United Nations climate negotiations, such as COP 31, which will take place in Antalya, Türkiye, from November 9 to 20.

National climate plans also frequently mention Indigenous peoples and local communities without specifying how they will participate in designing or implementing policies.

A 2026 review of 84 national climate plans found that 61 referred to under-represented groups, including Indigenous peoples and local communities. However, the assessment says most references were descriptive rather than linked to concrete measures.

The report argues that meaningful participation requires more than recognition in policy documents. It requires secure land rights, opportunities to influence decisions and access to the financial resources needed to manage territories.

Environmental Defenders Face Continuing Threats

Forest protection also carries serious risks for people who challenge illegal activities and defend community land.

The assessment cites Global Witness data showing that at least 124 land and environmental defenders were killed in 2025. More than half of the documented killings were linked to land disputes, and nearly three-quarters of the victims were Indigenous people, small-scale farmers or people of African descent.

Front Line Defenders separately reported that at least 358 human rights defenders were killed in 28 countries in 2025. Those working on land, environmental and peasant rights, as well as Indigenous rights, were among the groups that were frequently targeted.

Erin Matson, a lead consultant of Climate Focus and report author, told IPS in an interview that the statistics from Global Witness that we cite each year are always humbling. It’s important to remember that that figure is likely a significant underestimate, as many killings and disappearances go unreported.

Erin Matson, a lead consultant of Climate Focus and one of the authors of the Forest Declaration Assessment 2026. Credit: Supplied

“There are many factors at play, most of which are rooted in governance. The vast majority of environmental defenders are killed over land disputes, for example, when a mining operation encroaches on Indigenous territories. If those Indigenous communities do not have secure, recognised tenure rights to their territories, it makes it that much harder for them to resist operators who are acting illegally.”

She added that, therefore, securing tenure rights is a major step that governments need to enable. Next, Matson added that an environment of corruption and impunity allows actors to literally get away with murder. “In locations where government actors and law enforcement are under the sway and on the payroll of special interests, they will look the other way when people are harmed. Rooting out corruption, therefore, and instituting reforms to corrupted systems is essential. It must be ensured that public officials are paid well for their services so that they won’t be susceptible to corruption in the first place.”

The report identifies weak enforcement, limited government capacity and impunity for powerful actors as major obstacles to effective forest governance.

It also warns that environmental defenders face forms of intimidation beyond lethal violence, including criminalisation, threats and harassment.

Improved technology is helping authorities detect illegal forest clearance. Satellite monitoring, traceability systems and new investigative tools can help identify offences and strengthen cooperation across borders.

In Guatemala’s Maya Biosphere Reserve, for example, researchers are testing artificial intelligence-powered acoustic sensors designed to recognise chainsaws, gunshots and engines. The technology can alert rangers to potential illegal logging in remote areas that are difficult to patrol regularly.

But the report stresses that improved detection must be matched by fair and effective enforcement. Otherwise, small-scale producers and local communities may carry a disproportionate share of the burden while more powerful actors escape accountability.

The report reveals further that deforestation in 2025 was lower than in much of the preceding decade, and forest finance has increased. Monitoring systems have also improved, while several countries have taken steps towards recognising Indigenous land rights.

But the report cautions against interpreting these gains as evidence of a lasting turnaround.

It says the reduction in deforestation may partly reflect temporary factors, including stronger enforcement in some jurisdictions, changing commodity prices and economic conditions that slowed land conversion.

“These wins should not be mistaken for the transformation still needed,” reads the report.

IPS UN Bureau Report

A group of UN Staffers outside the Secretariat. Credit: United Nations

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 13 2026 (IPS)

The United Nations has once again revived a longstanding problem that has been left lingering behind closed doors for decades – racism and racial discrimination at the UN Secretariat.

A message sent to UN staffers last week reads: “The United Nations is founded on the bedrock principle that all people are equal in rights and dignity. Racism has no place in our Organization, and we are committed to fighting it on every front”.

“But racism often hides within systems, becoming entrenched through policies and practices that may appear neutral, but in fact reinforce biases and deepen inequities. Bringing these patterns to light is crucial, and for that we need data.”

“That is why, on 17 October, we will be launching a voluntary race data collection initiative. This exercise invites all Secretariat staff to provide information about their race, to help the Organization better identify and address discrimination. It is optional. It is anonymous. And it is one of the best tools we have to discover where action is needed.”

Approximately 3,600 to 4,800 Secretariat staff members, including UN agencies, are based in New York.

Meanwhile, the UN Secretariat in New York, faltered ingloriously last year, as it withdrew its own online survey on racism, in which it asked staffers to identify themselves either as “black, brown, white, mixed/multi-racial, and any other”.

But the most offensive of the categories listed in the survey was “yellow” – a longstanding Western racist description of Asians, including Japanese, Chinese and Koreans.

Subsequently, a non-apologetic message emailed to staffers read: “The United Nations Survey on Racism has been taken offline and will be revised and reissued, taking into account the legitimate concerns expressed by staff.”

Dr Palitha Kohona, a former Chief of the UN Treaty Section in the Office of Legal Affairs (OLA) told Inter Press Service (IPS) racism today is not overly evident at the United Nations which was founded on ideals that were very much ahead of their times, but an undercurrent of racial superiority and racial bias exists among certain elements of the Organization. This is evident in certain appointments and deep-seated attitudes, even among some delegates.

“Racism in international bodies could be traced even to the founding of the League of Nations where President Woodrow Wilson strenuously opposed the Japanese proposal to incorporate the principle of racial equality in the constitution of the Organization. His vision of international order was hierarchical and implicitly based on a racial hierarchy that placed white, Western nations at the top”.

While the United Nations is staffed by many enlightened individuals, some bias based on race still prevails at the highest levels, he pointed out, despite the organization itself having been headed by two Asians and an African in recent times.

“Curiously certain positions have been held only by Europeans. For example, the position of the UN Legal Counsel has been held only by white Europeans. There are other positions apparently reserved for European countries”.

Some delegates are also still affected by racial prejudices of an unenlightened past.

In a well reported incident, the not-so-white chairman of the WEOGs ( a Western European group) from a Southern European country once told the recently-arrived Australian delegate (an Australian citizen of Asian ancestry) that the developing countries of the Group of 77 were meeting in an adjoining room—(implying he was an Asian at the wrong meeting).

In an Organization created on the high ideals of equality and merit there is no logical reason for reserving certain positions on the basis of race, even sub consciously.

“Having gone a long way in minimizing gender bias, it is time to ensure that all vestiges of racial bias are also eliminated. One way to ensure equality and equity in appointments might be to subject all appointments to an open application process with selections being made by racially and gender mixed panels,” declared Dr Kohona, a one-time Permanent Representative of Sri Lanka to the UN, and until recently, Ambassador to China.

Ian Richards, President of the UN Geneva Staff Union told IPS: “We are concerned this is being tackled very much from a North American perspective.”

“Race is only a useful indicator if it is combined with where you grew up, which indicates opportunities or disadvantages in formative years, and where you work now. Each region has its own history and attitudes. We don’t feel this has been taken on board,” he said.

Meanwhile, the circular to staffers also points out that by understanding how colleagues identify their race, we can:

•     Pinpoint areas where racial bias or disparities may exist;

•     Examine institutional factors that may contribute to racist misconduct, underreporting of incidents, or barriers to racial justice; and

•     Develop remedial measures to build a workplace free from racial discrimination.

Staff will be invited to participate by selecting a race category on Inspira. To ensure data protection and maintain privacy, your data will be anonymized and aggregated. It will not be used in connection with any individual human resources management processes, such as recruitment or promotions. It will not be visible to recruiters or hiring managers.

The collection of race data will be managed strictly in line with the parameters outlined in General Assembly resolutions A/RES/80/238 and A/RES/80/243 B, as well as the provisions set out in ST/SGB/2024/3.

The racial categories listed echo the language used in past United Nations staff engagement surveys. An additional question will ask staff if they consider themselves to be a member of a racialized community.

Speaking on condition of anonymity. a former UN staff member expressed concerns about the UN Secretariat Administration’s proposed race data collection initiative, particularly regarding its methodology, suitability for the UN’s diverse global workforce, and safeguards for sensitive personal information.

It was pointed out that a fundamental question remains unanswered: Is the lack of race-disaggregated data genuinely preventing the Organization from addressing racism, or does the real problem lie in the implementation of existing policies, the enforcement of accountability, and the failure to translate commitments into effective action?

This distinction must be established before sensitive personal data are collected on such a scale.

“Any approach to addressing racism and racial discrimination within the UN should also recognize the experiences of affinity groups and other minority and underrepresented communities, whose experiences of exclusion may not be adequately captured by standardized racial classifications”.

The absence of meaningful consultation with staff representatives, together with insufficient clarity regarding the conceptual or empirical basis for the selected racial categories, data protection measures, future use of the data, and independent oversight, further undermines confidence in the initiative.

The United Nations must demonstrate its commitment to equality through action, transparency, and accountability. Collecting sensitive racial data must not become a substitute for enforcing existing protections, addressing substantiated concerns, and correcting discriminatory institutional practices, the former staff member said.

“The ultimate measure of success is not how much data the Organization collects, but whether it can demonstrate that racism has been reduced, accountability strengthened, and the working environment made fairer for all staff”.

IPS UN Bureau Report

Photos of the Rasuwa flood missing line the walls of the Teaching Hospital, Tribhuvan University. Credit: Brandon Kohrt

By Diwash Gahatraj
KATHMANDU, Oct 12 2026 (IPS)

Nearly three decades ago, in the final stretch of Nepal’s civil war, Dr Brandon Kohrt sat with parents whose sons had been conscripted as child soldiers and never returned.

Nobody could tell them what had happened, whether their sons were alive somewhere, whether they were dead, or even where to begin looking. That absence of an answer, Kohrt says, never really left those families. It is the same absence now facing thousands of households across Nepal, after catastrophic floods swept away entire communities.

On August 26, floods and landslides tore down the Bhotekoshi and Trishuli river valleys in Nepal’s Rasuwa district, killing well over a thousand people and leaving thousands more missing, one of the deadliest natural disasters in the country’s recent history.

Kohrt has spent nearly 25 years in Nepal, long enough to watch the country move through this same unresolved grief again and again, first during that war, then after a devastating earthquake, and now, once more, before a wall of missing-persons photographs at Kathmandu’s Teaching Hospital.

Only a small fraction of the recovered bodies have been identified so far. These missing men and women are not just numbers — they add up to a history that stretches back decades in Nepal to that same conflict and the earthquakes that followed it, when entire families waited years for people who never returned. Tracking these disappearances and the psychological toll they leave on families and Nepali society at large has occupied Kohrt ever since.

Kohrt is a professor of psychiatry, global health, and anthropology at George Washington University and has served since 2006 as a technical advisor to the Transcultural Psychosocial Organization Nepal.

Much of his work centres on ambiguous loss, the specific, suspended grief that comes when someone is gone but there’s no body, no confirmation, and nothing to mourn against. The term was coined in the 1970s by Pauline Boss, an American family therapist who began studying it through the wives of US soldiers missing in action in Vietnam, women who couldn’t say for certain whether they were married or widowed.

Boss found the condition wasn’t confined to one culture or one kind of disaster. Researchers have since studied it among families of the disappeared during Argentina’s military dictatorship, families of migrants lost crossing borders in Europe and Africa, and among the families with whom Kohrt sat decades ago. He has worked directly with Boss for over a decade and has applied her framework in Nepal for years before this disaster ever struck.

In the weeks since the floods struck, that gap between the dead and the missing has filled with people. Nepali families search alongside Indian, American, Ukrainian, and Malaysian families thousands of miles away, all waiting on the same uncertain word.

IPS spoke with him about what that grief looks like this time, what’s changed for him after his years of returning to the same wound, and what he’s learned, watching people find ways to keep living without an answer.

Dr Brandon Kohrt, professor of psychiatry, global health, and anthropology at George Washington University and technical advisor to the Transcultural Psychosocial Organisation, Nepal.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

IPS: For readers encountering the term for the first time, what is ambiguous loss?

Kohrt: It’s an important psychological concept, and I want to say at the outset, it is not a mental illness. It’s something anyone can go through. It’s when you still have the psychological sense of someone’s presence in your life, typically a loved one, but there is no physical evidence of either their life or their death. There’s no phone call, no video, nothing to prove they’re still living. But there’s also no body, no proof that they’re deceased.

Nearly every culture has rituals around a body that help us mourn and accept a loss. When there’s no body, we’re stuck in emotional limbo, caught between hope and despair. Some people jump right away to accept their loved one is gone, even without confirmation. Others maintain hope beyond even expectations of reality. We’re all on a different spectrum, and it’s very personal, very individualised. Ambiguous loss is also a real risk factor for what we call complicated grief, a longer, more psychologically difficult kind of mourning, with a higher risk of depression and anxiety.

With 6,145 people still missing in Nepal and only a fraction of recovered remains identified, that state of unresolved uncertainty isn’t abstract. It’s the present condition of thousands of families right now. IPS asked Kohrt how Nepal has faced this same experience before.

IPS: You’ve now worked in Nepal through the Maoist conflict, the 2015 earthquake, and this flood. What connects them?

Kohrt: I first came to Nepal in 1996, right at the start of the civil war. Toward the end of it, I worked with an organisation here, TPO Nepal, on the mental health needs of former child soldiers. Some of those parents never found out what happened to their children. Ambiguous loss was part of the psychosocial reality here even then, decades before this flood, and those families often carried an added burden – communities sometimes treated them with suspicion or blame simply for having a missing relative linked to the conflict, something families searching after this flood aren’t facing in the same way, since so many communities have been affected together.

After the 2015 earthquake, most bodies were recovered, and families were able to do funeral rites, but there are still villages, not far from where this disaster has struck now, where landslides buried people who were never found. This isn’t Nepal’s first experience with this exact kind of unresolved loss in some of these same communities.

A house damaged by the Rasuwa flood. Credit: Brandon Kohrt

IPS: In Nepal specifically, are there rituals that help families cope when there’s no body?

Kohrt: There’s a ritual called Kush Kriya, using grass to essentially perform a substitute funeral when there’s no body. It’s very helpful, but people need to be ready for it. Some may feel like they haven’t exhausted every possible avenue to find their loved one, and they’ll refuse to do it. There’s also a different ritual, Bakal Garne, more like a promise or a wish, maybe to a temple, maybe releasing fish into a river. That one doesn’t require accepting death. You can do a Bakal Garne hoping for your loved one’s safe return or simply hoping to find their body so you can do the cremation you need to do.

Even without an old ritual to lean on, Kohrt says, people still need something to actively do.

IPS: You mentioned people in Nepal are giving DNA samples right now, sometimes more than one, in different countries. What does that process do for a family psychologically?

Brandon Kohrt: Providing a DNA sample has a symbolic meaning that goes beyond its forensic purpose. You’re taking a piece of yourself and giving it in hopes of finding your loved one. Even if the result never confirms anything, the act itself becomes almost another form of ritual. People need to feel active and engaged, rather than passive and helpless.

That instinct, to act rather than wait, is something Kohrt has watched play out across every disaster he’s worked through in Nepal.

IPS: Does arriving at a disaster site feel different to you now than it did 25 years ago, or does something in you brace the same way each time?

Brandon Kohrt: With the earthquake, you could walk through neighbourhoods and see and touch the destruction right in front of you. But with the flood, when I arrived in Nuwakot, I could see some destroyed buildings and others submerged in mud. What you can’t see are all the buildings, bridges, vehicles, and people that were taken by the flood and washed away. This is much more a disaster of absence than a typical disaster of ruins. This will be something much more common with climate change-related disasters, where places gradually and abruptly disappear.

Professionally, the biggest difference is going from being hands-on in the response to being more of a supportive observer. Foreign expertise really isn’t needed anymore; there’s such a strong local Nepali mental health emergency response community now, from psychiatrists to community psychosocial workers.

One colleague, who I first hired at TPO Nepal twenty years ago, is now leading donor coordination and setting out a vision for what’s needed over the next three years. If foreign aid and development is successful, you should get to a point where disaster response is led locally, like we’re seeing in Nepal now.

IPS: You described the photo wall at Teaching Hospital. What does it do to you personally, standing there again?

Kohrt: It was really difficult standing in front of the wall of photos. What is so hard is thinking that behind each photo there are so many family members and friends wondering what happened to this person. Some are holding out hope; some are trying to accept the loss and move toward grief. Each face represents someone who was a sister, a mother, a daughter, a friend, a neighbour, or a coworker to all these other people. For every face we see, there are scores of people suffering.

A house damaged by the Rasuwa flood. Credit: Brandon Kohrt

IPS: Do you find yourself getting better at holding this kind of grief over the years, or does it stay just as hard each time?

Brandon Kohrt: I would say I am better at connecting with grief, acknowledging and sharing in others’ grief. A year after the earthquakes, I was in Nepal when one of my brothers died in the United States. I didn’t make it home in time to see his body before he went to the hospital morgue and was cremated.

I remember how hard it was grieving without having seen his body. That pales in comparison to the ambiguous loss thousands of families in Nepal are experiencing as the search for bodies continues. But it’s something that comes up for me when I talk to grieving families and hear their stories. It cracks open a window to allow the flow of empathy.

IPS: After all these years, what have you learned about how people manage to keep living when there is no answer forthcoming?

Brandon Kohrt: It’s how people move on. People have an incredible ability to carry a lot inside of them – pain, loss, unfulfilled hope, and grief – and keep moving forward in life. A lot of what people went through with the flood will be something they carry with them psychologically, but day-to-day survival requires focusing on taking care of children, caring for elderly relatives, and finding a new place to live. This shouldn’t be confused with recovery or resilience. It’s just getting by, which so many people do after a disaster. What good psychosocial and mental health support does is be available for those moments when some of that pain and grief can surface so that when people are ready, they have that support waiting for them.

IPS UN Bureau Report

Religious leaders, representatives of international organizations and Kazakh officials gather for the 24th Secretariat meeting of the Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions at the Palace of Peace and Reconciliation in Astana on October 7, 2026. The gathering reflected Kazakhstan’s longstanding efforts to turn interfaith dialogue into practical international cooperation. Credit: The press service of the congress.

By Katsuhiro Asagiri
ASTANA, Kazakhstan, Oct 12 2026 (IPS)

In a world increasingly divided by war, political distrust and competing ideologies, Kazakhstan has spent more than two decades pursuing an unusual diplomatic undertaking: keeping representatives of different religions in conversation.

Erlan Karin, Vice President of Kazakhstan and Head of the Secretariat of the Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions, addresses the 24th Secretariat meeting at the Palace of Peace and Reconciliation in Astana on October 7, 2026. He emphasized the role of spiritual diplomacy in building trust and complementing conventional diplomatic efforts. Credit: Congress Press Service

“Spiritual diplomacy can play a special role,” he told participants. “It doesn’t replace political talks. But it complements them and keeps channels of communication open where diplomatic dialogue is difficult.”

The remarks came at the 24th meeting of the Secretariat of the Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions, held on Oct. 7 at the Palace of Peace and Reconciliation.

The official participant list named 38 representatives of religious communities, international organizations and Kazakh government institutions, reflecting the forum’s religious and geographical diversity.

Founded in 2003 at the initiative of Kazakhstan’s first president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, the Congress initially brought 17 delegations from 13 countries to Astana.

It has since developed into an international forum that convenes major gatherings every three years while maintaining contact through its Secretariat.

Pope Francis participated in the seventh Congress in 2022, alongside the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Ahmed Al-Tayeb. The eighth Congress, held in September 2025, brought together religious and international representatives around the Astana Peace Declaration.

For Kazakhstan, situated between Russia and China and pursuing relations across competing centers of power, the Congress has become one expression of its wider diplomatic approach: providing a meeting place for governments, religions and civilizations that do not always share political interests.

Kazakhstan’s Legacy of Interfaith Dialogue. This illustration traces the Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions from its founding in 2003 under President Nursultan Nazarbayev to the historic 2022 gathering attended by Pope Francis and Al-Azhar’s Grand Imam Ahmed Al-Tayeb, and the adoption of the Astana Peace Declaration in 2025 under President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev. Together, these milestones reflect Kazakhstan’s enduring efforts to promote interfaith dialogue, mutual understanding and global peace. Credit: AI-generated illustration/INPS Japan

But its participants are increasingly asking how such encounters can influence events outside the conference hall.

Father Laurent Basanese of the Holy See’s Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue. He emphasized the Vatican’s longstanding commitment to the initiative and the importance of translating interfaith declarations into sustained cooperation.

Father Laurent Basanese, representing the Holy See’s Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue, reminded delegates that the Vatican had supported the initiative since its founding.

He recalled Pope Francis’ participation in 2022 and emphasized the continuing work required after declarations are adopted.

The credibility of such statements, he said, ultimately depends on the willingness of their signatories to keep working together.

That concern was echoed by Mohamed Abdelsalam, secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Elders, who warned that principles left unimplemented risk becoming little more than words on paper.

“A declaration that is not implemented loses its functionality,” he said, according to the meeting transcript.

The appeal for continuity also came from the United Nations.

Nihal Saad, director of the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations, thanked Kazakhstan for its sustained efforts to promote cooperation across cultural and religious boundaries.

Mohamed Abdelsalam, Secretary-General of the Muslim Council of Elders. He emphasized the need to translate interfaith declarations into concrete action for peace and human fraternity. Credit: Katsuhiro Asagiri/INPS Japan

The challenge with AI, she said, was ensuring that ethics were “built into the design of AI systems rather than as an afterthought.”

Her remarks placed the Congress within a wider international debate over how technological progress can remain accountable to human values.

Turning Principles Into Projects

Kazakhstan’s latest effort to give the forum a practical role produced two documents adopted at the meeting.

One addresses the contribution of religions to combating climate change. The other establishes 11 ethical principles for using artificial intelligence in religious contexts.

Both emerged from proposals advanced by President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev at the 2025 Congress.

Gulsana Kozhabay, who heads the International Center for Interfaith and Interreligious Dialogue, explained that the climate document had been developed with contributions from 26 religious representatives, diplomats and experts.

Nihal Saad, director of the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations. Credit: The Astana Times

The AI code, refined through an interreligious commission of 24 participants, addresses human dignity, freedom of conscience, religious information and the dangers of algorithmic manipulation.

Contributors included representatives of religious traditions extending far beyond Central Asia, among them Japanese Shinto representatives and Chinese Taoist leaders.

The meeting also considered a different kind of cooperation.

Yerzhan Ashikbayev, Kazakhstan’s first deputy foreign minister, presented a joint initiative with the Holy See: a charter protecting the rights and dignity of children with incurable diseases.

Kazakhstan and the Holy See had agreed on the charter’s text during a separate colloquium in Astana on Oct. 2–3. The Secretariat subsequently supported efforts to advance it internationally.

“When medical science reaches its limits, our human responsibility does not end,” Ashikbayev said in his prepared remarks.

The charter emphasizes palliative care, relief of suffering, parental participation and support for children and their families.

Yerzhan Ashikbayev, Kazakhstan’s First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs. He presented a joint Kazakhstan–Holy See initiative to protect the rights and dignity of children with incurable diseases. Credit: Katsuhiro Asagiri/INPS Japan

The Next Test for Spiritual Diplomacy

None of these initiatives removes the political difficulties surrounding international cooperation.

The two ethical documents are advisory and create no legal obligations. Their influence will depend on whether religious institutions, governments and technology companies act on their recommendations.

These efforts also reflect the security challenges facing Central Asia.

As developments in Afghanistan continue to affect regional stability, Kazakhstan has worked with the United Nations to combat terrorism and prevent violent extremism.

Against this backdrop, Kazakhstan’s ability to sustain an international platform for dialogue among religious leaders of different traditions for more than two decades has become a distinctive feature of its diplomacy, linking regional security concerns with a commitment to religious diversity and mutual understanding.

At the conclusion of the meeting, Karin called for work on a proposed Global Movement for Peace, intended to strengthen cooperation among religious leaders and give spiritual diplomacy a more practical international role.

The pyramid-shaped Palace of Peace and Reconciliation in Astana, Kazakhstan, hosted the 24th Secretariat meeting of the Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions on October 7, 2026. The landmark symbolizes Kazakhstan’s longstanding commitment to promoting interfaith dialogue, mutual understanding and global peace. Credit: Katsuhiro Asagiri/INPS Japan

A draft concept and phased plan are to be prepared for consideration in 2027, ahead of the ninth Congress in 2028.

It remains a proposal, not an established peacebuilding mechanism.

But the assignment reflects an important shift in Kazakhstan’s approach: from demonstrating that religious leaders can meet despite their differences to asking what they are prepared to accomplish together.

After 23 years, the country has demonstrated an ability to keep the conversation going.

The next test is whether that conversation can help change the world beyond Astana.

This article is brought to you by INPS Japan in collaboration with Soka Gakkai International in consultative status with UN ECOSOC.

IPS UN Bureau

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