Credit: United Nations

By Shihana Mohamed
NEW YORK, Sep 29 2026 (IPS)

“Artificial intelligence (AI) must be shaped by humanity, with humanity, and for all humanity… Life-and-death decisions must never be surrendered to machines. Killer robots must have no place in our future.”

With those words, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres opened the high-level debate of the 81st session of the General Assembly (UNGA 81). He also warned: “Women and girls continue to face discrimination, violence, exclusion and abuse… Their rights are being rolled back. Their voices silenced. Their bodies turned into battlegrounds.”

Both technological transformation and the erosion of women’s rights were placed before the world, yet the political response to each was markedly different.

Opening speeches focused heavily on technology. French President Emmanuel Macron warned that a few powers could decide the planet’s future through AI and urged states to build independent, open-source models; UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham called for global cooperation on transparency and ethics; China’s Vice President Han Zheng stressed a people-centered approach to narrowing the digital divide; and Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov called for the UN to lead AI rule-setting through equal participation.

U.S. President Donald Trump focused on U.S. technological leadership. He declared that the United States was outcompeting the world and called for a change in terminology: “From this point forward, all U.S. documents—and hopefully the world—will use the more accurate term super rather than artificial. So, it’s super intelligence.”

Shihana Mohamed

The question is unavoidable: why has the international system shown such urgency in governing emerging technologies while allowing the erosion of women’s rights to remain a secondary concern?

Twin Transformations
The 81st session convened under the theme, “Restoring trust, managing transformation: a United Nations that delivers for all.” That theme highlights two defining transformations: the rapid expansion of generative AI and the growing political backlash against the rights of women and girls.

The United Nations treats both as critical to achieving the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, yet world leaders are not giving them equal political weight. AI is being elevated as an urgent global governance challenge, while gender equality is increasingly treated as a goal that can wait.

That is a dangerous disconnect.

AI is already reshaping economies, labour markets and public life. It will influence who gets opportunities, whose work is automated, and whose voices are represented in the systems that increasingly influence daily life.

Declining Gender Momentum
AI has ascended to the top tier of global political concerns. Leaders are focused on governance, innovation, digital sovereignty, security, and technological competition.

Meanwhile, the momentum on gender equality is moving in the opposite direction. UN Women and UN DESA report that one in three institutional mechanisms for gender equality has lost institutional power over the past two years. Around one in four have seen their operating budgets cut, while nearly one in ten have lost control of their budgets altogether.

Globally, progress on women’s political and executive participation is reversing. At the current rate of progress, the report projects that global gender equality could be achieved only by 2197, far beyond the UN’s 2030 target.

There is a basic leadership question that Member States have yet to answer: Why has no woman ever been selected as Secretary-General of the United Nations?

The problem is not a shortage of promises but the widening gap between rhetoric and political action.

The Funding Disparity
The resource gap makes that contrast tangible.

Global venture-capital investment in AI firms reached $258.7 billion in 2025, accounting for 61% of total global VC investment, according to the OECD. Philanthropic investment is also growing, including the Gates Foundation’s September 2026 commitment to spend at least $1 billion over two years on equitable access to AI and AI-enabled solutions.

Funding for women’s rights is contracting.

Funding for gender equality fell 13% between 2023 and 2024, while funding for women’s rights organizations declined by 28% over the same period.

This is not merely a funding problem; it reflects what the international community considers urgent.

The world is mobilizing enormous capital to build the technologies that will define the future while reducing resources for the organizations working to ensure that women have an equal place in it.

Women Left Behind in the AI Economy
The gender gap is already visible inside the AI economy.

UN Women’s 2026 Gender Snapshot reports that women account for around 22% of AI professionals globally and fewer than 14% of senior leadership positions, based on an analysis of nearly 1.6 million AI professionals.

Women are around 20% less likely than men to use generative AI tools. The result is a persistent gap in both the development and adoption of AI—and a fundamental question about whose perspectives are shaping the future of work.

The International Labour Organization finds that female-dominated occupations are almost twice as likely to be exposed to generative AI as male-dominated occupations—29% compared with 16%. Women’s concentration in clerical, administrative, and business-support roles, where many tasks are routine and codifiable, contributes significantly to this disparity.

AI is intensifying digital violence against women in public life. UN Women reports increasing use of AI-generated deepfakes, manipulated images and coordinated online harassment against women in public-facing roles. Such abuse can intimidate women and undermine their participation in public life.

UN Women estimates that 90–95% of online deepfakes are non-consensual pornographic images, with around 90% depicting women.

This is where the two crises converge. The same technology being celebrated as transformative is also being used to threaten women’s economic security, public participation, and personal safety.

Immediate Mandates for AI and Gender Equality
More than three decades after the 1995 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action set a global framework for gender equality, the world remains far from its commitments.

The General Assembly must move beyond another cycle of declarations and voluntary targets and act where technology, funding and gender rights now intersect.

• Enforce Financial Reciprocity via a Global Tech Solidarity Fund: The General Assembly should establish a mechanism requiring a fixed share of global digital-transformation investment to support grassroots women’s organizations, and strengthen their technical capacity, infrastructure and advocacy.

• Establish an International Enforcement Mechanism with the Urgency Applied to AI: The UN should address the erosion of women’s rights with the same urgency applied to emerging technological threats. The General Assembly should establish a global monitoring mechanism empowered to impose diplomatic and financial consequences on states that roll back women’s legal protections.

• Criminalize Technology-Facilitated Abuse and Mandate Safety-by-Design: The General Assembly should advance a binding international treaty classifying AI-generated deepfakes weaponized against women in public life as violations of international human rights law. Technology companies should be required to address algorithmic bias and security failures that endanger women’s participation in public life.

If world leaders truly intend to “manage transformation” and “restore trust,” they cannot continue treating women’s empowerment as a secondary issue.

The willingness to govern the digital frontier must extend to protecting the women who live and work within it.

Otherwise, the “super intelligence” that leaders celebrate will not simply become an engine of economic growth. It could also become a powerful tool for reinforcing the structural exclusion of half the human race.

Shihana Mohamed is the President of Asia Global Forum (www.AsiaGlobalForum.org) and a US Public Voices Fellow on advancing the rights of women and girls. She is the founder of the UN Asia Network for Diversity & Inclusion (www.UN-ANDI.org) and a dedicated human rights activist and a strong advocate for gender equality and the advancement of women.

IPS UN Bureau

Rob Jetten, Prime Minister of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, addresses the High-level Meeting on Climate Action and the Just Transition on September 23. Credit: UN Photo/Laura Jarriel

By Oritro Karim
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 29 2026 (IPS)

The United Nations 2026 Climate Summit addressed critical strategies to mitigate the compounding impacts of the climate crisis and accelerate progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The summit brought together civil society actors, climate scientists, major energy producers and consumers, development experts, and world leaders on September 23 as part of the High-Level Week of the 81st session of the General Assembly (UNGA 81).

“The world is crying out for climate justice in mitigation, adaptation, and finance. We must answer that call with action, and we don’t have a moment to lose,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres in his opening remarks. “But emissions are still rising when they must plummet, and fossil fuel expansion continues, defying science, economics, and common sense.”

“We have seen our fossil fuel dependence wreak havoc, driving up costs, draining budgets, squeezing households, and leaving countries at the mercy of conflicts and decisions far beyond their borders. Meanwhile, fossil fuel companies are banking windfall profits while everyday people foot the bill. Doubling down on oil and gas will only lock in vulnerability for decades,” Guterres added.

Nearly a decade after the adoption of the Paris Agreement, the summit comes as climate experts warn of a dangerous new phase in the global climate crisis. New findings project it is virtually “inevitable” that global temperatures will exceed 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels within the next ten years.

This overshoot presents widespread, multifaceted risks—from extreme weather patterns to escalating public health emergencies. Intensifying heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, storms, and floods continue to cause millions of deaths annually, drive mass displacement, and destroy critical infrastructure, particularly in low-lying coastal regions.

Prime Minister Tarique Rahman of Bangladesh—one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable regions—warned the General Assembly that up to 18 percent of the country’s coastal land could be entirely submerged by rising seas, endangering the security and livelihoods of tens of millions. President Naiqama Lalabalavu of Fiji also emphasized that over half of his country’s population lives within a kilometer of the shore, leaving communities at a significant risk of being exposed to natural disasters. He further noted that the stock of fish available to each Fijian is estimated to decline by nearly 25 percent by 2050, threatening widespread food insecurity across the region.

The compounding impact of these disasters is also linked to depressed crop yields—which significantly impact food insecurity, accelerate biodiversity loss, and cause widespread disease outbreaks. Higher temperatures directly drive the spread of vector-borne illnesses, while rising sea levels and flooding exacerbate waterborne diseases. As a result, countries worldwide continue to sustain massive economic and human costs while aid organizations and health sectors struggle to keep up with the influx of needs.

Tarique Rahman, Prime Minister of Bangladesh, addresses the High-level Meeting on Climate Action and the Just Transition. Credit: UN Photo/Laura Jarriel

“We just lived through the hottest July and August on record. Global sea surface temperatures are at a record high, and the worst is yet to come,” said Celeste Saulo, Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). “We enter a dangerous terrain where we’re likely to cross a number of tipping point systems that not only regulate the stability of the climate system, but also fundamentally determine life support for human development.”

Numerous speakers also underscored the severity of an immensely powerful “Super El Niño” rapidly forming in the Pacific Ocean, which WMO has described as potentially the strongest in at least a millennium. Data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Climate Prediction Center indicate a 90 percent chance that this El Niño will mark one of the most extreme weather events of the 2026-2027 winter.

Saulo warned that the global impacts of the impending El Niño will be massive and long-lasting and will cause 2026 to become the hottest year on record. Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, Mayor of Freetown, Sierra Leone, told the General Assembly that damages in Africa alone could exceed USD 20 billion, with comparable losses projected across other highly climate-vulnerable regions.

The summit sets new goals for the international community: to return global temperatures to below 1.5°C as quickly as possible, limit the severity and duration of ongoing impacts from the overshoot, and facilitate the global transition to renewable energy. Guterres warned that the current generation sits at a critical turning point—it is the first to possess the tools to end the climate crisis and the last with the opportunity to avert a “climate catastrophe.”

The main pathways for climate action highlighted during the summit included increased intergovernmental cooperation, sustained investment in climate adaptation and resilience monitoring systems, and wider-scale deployment of renewable energy. In recent years, renewables have become significantly cheaper than traditional fossil fuels—such as coal, oil, and natural gas—while generating far lower emissions, facilitating sustainable development, and potentially averting hundreds of billions of dollars in climate-related losses worldwide.

While countries representing roughly 90 percent of all global emissions have submitted updated Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs)—signaling widespread political commitment to the Paris Agreement in the midst of heightened geopolitical tensions—current NDCs are projected to continue to fall short of the emission reductions required to prevent an overshoot of the 1.5°C target.

Michael R. Bloomberg, the UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy on Climate Ambition and Solutions and also founder of Bloomberg and Bloomberg Philanthropies, told the General Assembly that current financial contributions from the international community are insufficient, warning that these gaps in funding “can mean the difference between life and death.”

“More countries recognize that clean energy is essential to their security and economic stability. At the same time, while there’s still not enough climate funding going to developing countries, the amount has more than doubled since the Paris Agreement took effect,” said Bloomberg. “Now, we all know that’s not enough. Every day brings new evidence of the worsening harms of climate change.”

“No place on Earth is safe from climate change. Countries need more investment in resilient measures that protect people and in modern connected grids that will support the waves of clean energy installation. Both will require more of the kind of collaboration that has enabled progress over the past decade across government and business, philanthropy, nonprofits, and community leaders.”

IPS UN Bureau Report

Helen Clark, Chair of the Board of Partners for the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health (PMNCH), moderates the event "Financing for Women's, Children's and Adolescents' Health in a Time of Austerity", hosted by the Global Leaders Network. Credit: UN Photo/Manuel Elías

By Shuli Wong
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 28 2026 (IPS)

In the wake of the largest decline in global health financing on record, the Global Leaders Network (GLN) for Women’s, Children’s and Adolescent Health convened a high-level meeting on September 22 to sustain political momentum for women and children’s health financing. The event, Financing for Women’s, Children’s and Adolescent’s Health in a Time of Austerity, was co-hosted by the Governments of South Africa, Spain, and Tanzania, in addition to the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn, and Child Health (PMMCH).

Throughout the meeting, GLN members repeatedly called for a financing reset for women’s, children’s, and adolescent health (WCAH), warning that reduced global assistance and rising debt could reverse decades of progress. In 2025, official development assistance (ODA) fell to USD 174.3 billion, a 23.1 percent drop from 2024 and the largest annual decline on record. Simultaneously, the external debt in low- and middle-income countries reached a record USD 8.9 trillion, with debt-servicing costs remaining at a historic high. The reduction in assistance, with the increase in debt, has limited governments’ abilities to invest in essential services, leading to consequences for WCAH.

In low- and middle-income countries, an estimated 260,000 women died in 2023 from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. In 2024, an estimated 4.9 million children died before their 5th birthday from deaths that are preventable with low-cost interventions and access to quality health care. Members of the GLN framed this challenge less as finding replacement funds for the declining aid, but instead, governments need to ensure that existing resources are allocated, protected, and used effectively to deliver improvements in WCAH.

“We know that issues of women, children, adolescent health and well-being can’t be solved by ministers of health alone. They need head of state support, they need minister of finance support, and there are always political choices to be made about what we protect when the resources are scarce,” said Helen Clark, chair of the board of the PMNCH and moderator of the meeting.

Dr. Tedros Adhanom Chebreyesus, WHO Director-General, also called for the protection of health budget lines for WCAH, in particular the protection of sexual and reproductive health in humanitarian settings, and stronger accountability and reporting of results. “A policy without a budget is a press release. A commitment without financing is a promise already broken,” he said.

During Tuesday’s meeting, representatives continued to stress the point of investing in primary health care. In particular, the importance of midwives, community health workers, vaccines, medications, nutrition services, clinics, and referral systems that women, children, and adolescents depend upon. Helga Fogstad, Director of the UNICEF Health Programme, urged governments to protect these foundations when preparing the 2027 budgets. Fogstad urged the prioritization of “domestic resources for what has the greatest impact, ensuring essential medicines, vaccines, and nutrition supplies are available where they are needed and investing in enough trained, equipped, and paid healthcare workers to reach every community”.

Diene Keita, Executive Director of UNFPA, stressed the importance of investing in maternal care and family planning: “World leaders and financial experts agree, investing in women and girls delivers unbeatable returns.”

An audience member at the event “Financing for Women’s, Children’s and Adolescents’ Health in a Time of Austerity”, hosted by the Global Leaders Network. Credit: UN Photo/Manuel Elías

Country examples presented during the session illustrated how investing in WCAH has been translated into policy. For example, under Nigeria’s Health Sector Renewal Investment Initiative, Nigeria has moved away from fragmented donor-led programs towards greater country ownership, stronger alignment of resources and accountability for results. Nigeria has already committed nearly $3 billion in domestic health financing over five years in addition to USD 2 billion of US support. The result of this has been revitalizing more than 4,000 primary health centers, retraining 80,000 frontline health workers, a 34 percent increase in deliveries by skilled birth attendants, and a 22 percent reduction in maternal mortality among women delivered in the facilities.

A tension emerged during the session between greater national ownership for countries and the continuing need for international solidarity. Speakers across the board discussed the need for blended finance, pooled funding, and debt-for-health swaps, while institutions like the World Bank and Islamic Development Bank advocated for moving isolated projects into integrated national systems. Issa Faye, Director General for Global Practices and Partnerships at the Islamic Development Bank, stressed how the “challenge now is to help the countries move beyond the short-term responses”.

“We should go away from project by project to really act in a more massive way through the system. We need to talk about the system, not the project,” said Faye.

In closing, the GLN committed to stronger country-led financing, domestic resource mobilization, and appropriately designed financing mechanisms. In addition, donors were called upon to align assistance with countries’ national plans. The focus was that austerity cannot become health austerity; instead, political declarations and financing plans must protect frontline services and lead to a measurable reduction in preventable deaths.

IPS UN Bureau Report

The 1944 Bretton Woods (BW) conference accepted the US demand to use the dollar to settle international financial transactions. This arrangement would require a US balance-of-payments deficit to issue enough dollars.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Bretton Woods
At BW in July 1944, 44 allied nations met to design the post-war world monetary system. John Maynard Keynes represented the UK, no longer financially dominant due to its heavy public debt fighting two world wars.

Harry Dexter White represented the US, which then held two-thirds of the world’s monetary gold, while other countries needed dollar loans for trade and reconstruction. The US promised foreign governments and central banks to convert dollars to gold.

With the US BW promise to redeem an ounce of gold for $35, the dollar became the world’s reserve asset. Every other currency’s exchange rate was fixed against the dollar, in principle, adjustable with IMF approval.

Instead, Keynes proposed a reserve currency, Bancor, managed by an international clearing union to avoid any national currency becoming dominant; a payments system using a national currency could eventually force others to accept its national policies and priorities.

Unsustainable by design
The BW agreement also created the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Each member nation was assigned a quota, partly paid in gold and its own currency.

A member nation’s quota determined both its voting weight and how much it could borrow if it needed to borrow when its own currency came under pressure.

The dollar-gold peg was vulnerable by design. For the arrangement to function, the world needed a growing supply of dollars for reserves and international transactions.

In principle, the US had to have enough gold to honour all claims against it. This requirement was met in 1944, when its gold reserves were vast, while other economies were ruined. However, these conditions were not met for long.

As currency devaluations were stigmatised, currency pegs were rarely adjusted. Governments defended unrealistic exchange rates, unjustified by their reserves.

Instead of adjusting gradually, fixed exchange rates would adjust abruptly, typically after crises, as with sterling in 1967 and the dollar in 1971.

Keynes had insisted on allowing governments to manage cross-border capital movements, expecting free-flowing speculative capital to undermine fixed exchange rates.

For a decade and a half, most European governments used the IMF’s sixth Article of Agreement to restrict how freely money could leave their countries and thus defend their currency pegs.

As strong post-war recoveries turned Europe’s dollar shortages into surpluses, capital controls were gradually loosened from the 1960s.

London Gold Pool
The US Congress ignored Triffin’s warning. Instead, in late 1961, the US organised seven European central banks into the London Gold Pool, coordinated by the Bank of England rather than by treaty.

It worked for a while. Whenever private demand pushed the gold price over $35/ounce, participating banks sold their bullion to bring the price down, to buy gold!

From 1962, currency swap lines involving the same central banks withdrew dollars from circulation abroad to reduce demand for gold. Both efforts used a formula based on each country’s original contributions.

Rising US government spending made things worse. The Johnson administration financed both the Vietnam War and Great Society programmes without raising taxes. More dollars flowed out of the US, expanding the supply of Eurodollars.

In March 1967, without any parliamentary mandate or transparent treaty, West Germany’s Bundesbank President privately promised the Fed it would not convert its large dollar reserves from its fast-growing trade surplus into gold.

But France’s president had never accepted Washington’s abuse of the post-war arrangement. In February 1965, De Gaulle complained of the dollar’s exorbitant privilege.

This referred to the US ability to settle its liabilities abroad by issuing more dollars, instead of earning foreign exchange like others. In June 1967, France refused to continue subsidising the dollar peg by withdrawing from the Gold Pool.

Britain devalued the pound in November 1967. As speculative pressure on gold rose, other Pool central banks had to sell even more gold until they gave up on 17 March.

Two tiers
In the subsequent two-tier system, the $35 gold price was only used for transactions between central banks and governments. Another floating free-market price traded well above it.

US gold reserves, almost $20 billion shortly after WW2, were halved by 1971 as foreign governments’ and central banks’ dollar claims rose over $50 billion!

When member governments safely created official liquidity by introducing a new reserve asset, the Special Drawing Right (SDR), in 1969, the problem was highlighted again.

SDRs were allocated directly to member countries rather than tied to either gold or the US trade or current account deficit. The SDR was supposed to supplement, not replace, gold and the dollar as reserve assets.

By mid-1971, when President Nixon unilaterally ended the dollar’s gold convertibility obligation, the debate was no longer about whether the gold window could hold, but over how to close it without triggering a currency-market panic after years of speculation.

IPS UN Bureau

Participants at the fourth UN High-Level Meeting on the Prevention of Noncommunicable Diseases and Mental Health (NCDs), held in September 2025. Credit: UN Photo/Eric Kanalstein

By Shreya Komar
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 25 2026 (IPS)

On September 21, just prior to the opening of the United Nations General Assembly Debate (UNGA81), the NCD Alliance held its fifth Multi-stakeholder Gathering, “Strategies for a Sustainable NCD and Mental Health Response,” during the UN High-level Week.

“This meeting may be on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, but the issues discussed here are central to the global health agenda,” emphasized Mary-Ann Etiebet, President and CEO of Vital Strategies and moderator of the event. She opened by highlighting the continuing global burden of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) and the gap in funding and resources dedicated to addressing it.

The discussion centered on how countries can sovereignly lead, scale, sustain and strengthen their responses, with a particular emphasis on country ownership and “putting the country in the driver’s seat”.

The gathering focused on how countries can move from policy commitments to implementation and build sustainable responses to NCDs and mental health through governance, financing, and cross-sector partnerships.

Fleming Kondradsen, a panelist and Chief Scientific Officer at Novo Nordisk Foundation, emphasized the importance of supporting more horizontal approaches to health. Rather than creating parallel systems and new structures, he argued for strengthening and integrating NCD prevention and care into existing health systems wherever possible.

For Paula Johns, another panelist from Brazil and Executive Director of ACT Health Promotion Brazil, meaningful participation begins with a fundamental question: How do we include the public in public health? Maintaining strong relationships with communities, she argued, is essential to ensuring that health policies and interventions reflect the realities of the people they are intended to serve.

Johns also raised concerns about the growing pressures affecting young people in Brazil, describing a “mental health global pandemic”. Among the issues she highlighted were social media and sports betting, calling for greater attention and regulation of environments that can affect young people’s health and wellbeing.

The discussion reinforced the importance of looking beyond the health sector itself. Addressing NCDs and mental health requires collaboration across government, civil society, communities and other sectors that shape the environments in which people live.

For Prisca Githuka, founder of the Pink Hearts Cancer Support Foundation from Nairobi, Kenya, one of the most important questions when it comes to addressing NCDs and mental health is meaningfully engaging people with lived experience. Consulting people who have experienced a disease, she said, is only the beginning. Meaningful engagement means involving people with lived experience in co-creating solutions and participating directly in decision-making structures. This distinction, she noted, separates genuine participation from tokenism.

People with lived experience should not simply be invited to share their stories. They should have a meaningful role in shaping decisions that impact their health, and their contributions should be fairly compensated. Githuka also stressed the importance of measuring whether people’s input actually influences outcomes. Engagement should not end when feedback is collected. Instead, stakeholders should ask: What changed as a result of that feedback? And did the final implementation actually benefit the people with lived experience?

Her own advocacy work has included petitions and efforts to secure funding and support for cancer patients, including advocacy around oncology packages and the National Health Insurance Fund.

The emphasis on advocating for lived experience at the forefront of decision-making also highlighted the impact of smaller organizations and community-based groups. For many of these organizations, their most important contribution is their proximity to the communities affected by NCDs and mental health conditions. Their stories can provide insight into gaps that may not be visible in national strategies or global commitments.

For people with lived experience with NCDs and mental health conditions, being in the room is only the first step. The measure of meaningful engagement is whether they have a voice in decisions, whether that voice influences what happens next, and whether the resulting policies and services improve their lives.

IPS UN Bureau Report

Moderator Arif Ullah of Anthropocene Alliance joins LaTricea Adams of Young, Gifted, and Green; Dionne Delli-Gatti of Continuum Strategies; and Dr. Katlyn Turner of CU Boulder Information Science and KTLN Consulting to discuss AI’s environmental justice impacts and how frontline communities can maintain agency as data center development expands. Credit: Pillar Projects / Grayson Wise

By Oritro Karim
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 25 2026 (IPS)

On September 21, Frontline Resource Institute (FRI) hosted its Climate Justice Hub at Fordham University at Lincoln Center in New York City under the theme “Building a Stronger Climate Coalition.”

As part of Climate Week, and coinciding with the 81st session of the UN General Assembly, the event united advocates, researchers, policymakers, and frontline leaders to address the intensifying threat of climate change to global public health, while highlighting the need for stricter guardrails on artificial intelligence (AI) data centers, particularly in their impacts on frontline communities.

Arif Ullah, Executive Director of Anthropocene Alliance (A2) and a moderator at the event, referenced Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI by journalist Karen Hao, noting her warning that AI functions as a “new form of colonialism.” Ullah emphasized that AI’s impacts on frontline communities and their environments is multifaceted and far-reaching, requiring far more robust physical infrastructure to be sustainable.

“In July, nearly 1,400 tech company employees signed an open letter urging the [U.S.] government to regulate AI. Recently, an Anthropic researcher quit his job warning that the people building AI believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” said Ullah. “When you consider the many ways in which [resources are] extracted, it’s hard to disagree. Hyperscale data centers are among the ways it’s most extracted, not to mention destructive. We are seeing them proliferate, unchecked and unregulated across the country.”

Numerous speakers at the event underscored that natural resources are routinely extracted from frontline communities with little regard for public health or the stability of local ecosystems. To meet the rapidly growing demands for continuous power, data centers around the world have increasingly implemented methane gas turbines. These measures have led to a surge in toxic chemical emissions—such as formaldehyde and benzene—driving widespread air and water pollution while consuming vast amounts of water.

Sarah Vogel, Senior Vice President of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and another moderator of the event, warned that extreme weather patterns—including intense heatwaves, prolonged flooding, destructive wildfires, degraded air and water quality, and the spread of infectious diseases—are among the most alarming and common consequences of AI-exacerbated climate change.

She emphasized that these impacts present heightened risks of lung cancer, heart disease, and strokes, particularly for frontline communities. Young people are uniquely vulnerable, as their developing bodies face continuous strain from pollutants without the opportunity to grow up in healthy environments. Those with pre-existing conditions also face a heightened risk of exacerbated health outcomes.

“For communities in this country and around the world who have experienced the legacy and ongoing impacts of environmental injustices, climate change and the related pollution is a threat magnifier,” said Vogel. “We know that when our health is impaired, it’s like a domino effect. Everything is impacted. Our ability to work, our ability to take care of children, the costs associated with it. The ability to just enjoy our lives. That is what we mean when we say that the climate crisis is a health crisis”

It is these frontline communities, oftentimes primarily composed of people of color, that are entrenched in severe environmental degradation and pushed further into poverty while others reap the financial benefits. Bearing the brunt of extreme pollution, these communities often lack the healthcare infrastructure required to withstand such environmental shocks.

LaTricea Adams, Founder, CEO, and President of Young, Gifted, and Green, noted that frontline communities are often left ill-equipped to adapt to AI-driven climate shocks, describing it as a “point of reckoning.” She emphasized that many residents are often unaware that they are on the frontlines of environmental degradation, going a “significant amount of time” without understanding the full extent of how these developments directly impact their lives.

“We as a collective are still not taking public health seriously. That also has an economic implication,” said Adams. “While you may bring in millions of dollars, if people are consistently sick, does that not have an impact on healthcare, which we know is lacking in our country and in our society?”

“What you’re not gonna do is come into our community and give us nothing but pollution while we remain in poverty. But at the same time, we do have to make sure that we protect the people that have been neglected for centuries in disinvestment.”

Several panelists underscored the importance of centering frontline communities in AI reform, with cooperation between governments, community leaders, corporations, and the health sector imperative in preventing harm and establishing sustainable practices that can uplift these communities. Vogel noted that in order to build healthy and resilient communities, approaches in AI regulation must prioritize health and equity to effectively minimize risks.

Panelist Ali Abazeed, Chief Public Health Officer and Director for the city of Detroit warned that the international community must not become “sophisticated witnesses” to preventable harm, noting that progress hinges on empowering communities and providing them with the data that affects their lives.

“Public health doesn’t happen inside an office. Comfort is comfortable. The ivory tower—the research generated there is hugely important but it has to roll out to the communities,” said Abazeed, emphasizing that action is critically important amidst widespread cuts to funding for research and potential hostile takeovers of national institutes for health.

“Speaking as a government official, we need to recognize that the work that we do and the powers that we have can help uplift and elevate communities. The charge is to be outside, to be in the clinic lobby for public health, in the church basement, for us to be meeting the fence-line communities.”

IPS UN Bureau Report

Credit: Amanda Cotton / Ocean Image Bank

By Gareth Johnstone and Jan Thomas Odegard
OSLO, Norway, Sep 24 2026 (IPS)

As Norway undertakes Vendepunkt, or “Turning Point,” its reflection on the future of Norwegian development policy, it is critical that oceans remain a priority. Donors around the world are running similar audits, deciding which long-term partnerships to keep, and why. Norway has decades of expertise to offer, but also something significant at stake: healthy and well-governed oceans underpin food, livelihoods and economic activity in partner countries while supporting global seafood supply chains in which Norway itself participates.

West Africa demonstrates what sustained investment in oceans can achieve. More than a decade of cooperation on illegal fishing has helped countries strengthen their own capacity to monitor and protect their waters. But the ocean cannot be managed country by country. Fish stocks are shared, vessels move across borders, and climate change is shifting marine resources into new waters. Strong national capacity must therefore be matched by the ability of countries to cooperate.

That cooperation depends on the relationships between countries that allow information to be shared, trust to develop and authorities to act together. These relationships are not simply a by-product of capacity building. They are essential development infrastructures particularly when the resources being protected cross borders.

Gareth Johnstone

The connection between West Africa and Norway makes this tangible. Fish caught off West Africa enters international supply chains as fishmeal and fish oil, including feed used in aquaculture thousands of kilometres away. A fish caught off Guinea-Bissau can ultimately help feed a salmon in a Norwegian fjord. In one investigation supported by TMT, authorities took action against the factory vessel TIAN YI HE 6 after it received fish from a Turkish-flagged vessel, with the resulting fishmeal transported onwards to international markets. The case resulted in fines for unauthorized fishing operations, illegal transshipment and obstruction of inspectors.

Jan Thomas Odegard

Technology has transformed what fisheries authorities can do. An inspector can now examine a vessel’s movements and history before deciding whether it should enter port. Recorded use of the Vessel Tracking Tool, developed by fisheries intelligence organisaiton, TMT, more than doubled between 2024 and 2025.

Despite this, turning information into action requires trained officials, functioning institutions and trust between agencies and countries. In the West African region where TMT, and its partners have focused support, the relationships resulted in the deterrence of illegal fishing took more than a decade to build. An independent assessment by Poseidon Aquatic Resource Management of this work, supported by Norway, found that some of the strongest results came when governments shared information regionally.

One case began with a concern raised by a fisheries inspector in Ghana about the vessel NOVA ZEELANDIA. Officials in Côte d’Ivoire, Angola and South Africa checked their records and shared information. Angola subsequently fined associated trawlers for unauthorized transshipment and barred NOVA ZEELANDIA from its waters, while Cameroon separately fined the vessel owners US$2.1 million for breaches of inspection rules.

The vessel later changed its name and flag and remains in operation. It is a reminder that effective ocean governance requires sustained cooperation across jurisdictions.

Relationships are development infrastructure

Development programmes routinely count the numbers of people trained, systems established and institutions strengthened. The value of the relationships built alongside them is harder to measure. Yet a fisheries officer knowing who to contact in a neighbouring country can be as important as the technology on their desk.

These relationships take years to build and can be fragile. One or two funding cycles may establish a system or deliver training, yet they are less likely to embed the institutional memory, expertise and relationships that allow it to survive and adapt.

Long-running development partnerships and support should therefore not automatically be viewed as evidence that localisation has failed to materialise. A better test is whether they are evolving toward stronger national institutions, greater regional leadership and with less dependence on external technical expertise, while preserving cooperation where challenges remain shared.

Oceans belong in Norway’s Turning Point

Norway brings decades of experience in fisheries management, marine research and ocean governance. Norway is itself a fishing and aquaculture nation, connected through the same ocean systems and global seafood supply chains.

Norway’s investment in oceans can therefore combine locally led capacity with international cooperation because illegal vessels do not respect borders.

The evidence from West Africa shows why sustained investment matters. National enforcement capability and regional networks have been built over more than a decade. Withdrawing support before those systems are sufficiently resilient risks losing hard-won gains, continuing to invest allows national leadership to deepen and relationships to mature.

Norway’s challenge is not unique. Development partners are increasingly being asked to make harder choices and reduce dependency without dismantling the relationships and cooperation needed to address problems that are inherently international. As Turning Point asks where Norway has particular strengths and where its development cooperation can have greatest impact, oceans deserve a prominent place in the answer.

The question should not simply be which partnerships Norway can eventually leave. It should also be which are worth sustaining and deepening because the same fish stocks, vessels and networks are what is at stake. Strong national capacity and international relationships are not competing goals. One makes the other possible. And in an ocean that connects Guinea-Bissau’s fishing communities with Norway’s fjords, Norway has both the expertise and the interest to keep investing in both.

Gareth Johnstone is the Executive Director of Norwegian based fisheries intelligence organization, Trygg Mat Tracking (TMT). He has over 30 years’ experience as an environmental scientist, researcher and policy expert. He is also the former Director General of WorldFish.

Jan Thomas Odegard is a Norwegian environmental and development expert with 30 years’ experience spanning the UN, NGOs, private sector and research. He is co-founder and Chair of the Trygg Mat Tracking Board and former Secretary General of Friends of the Earth Norway.

IPS UN Bureau

Excerpt:

Credit: IAEA
 
IAEA’s 70th General Conference highlights growing strains on safeguards and nuclear security as attention shifts to the first review of the Nuclear Weapons Ban Treaty.

By Katsuhiro Asagiri
VIENNA, Sep 24 2026 (IPS)

The international nuclear order is facing another test as governments move from an inconclusive review of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in New York to renewed disputes over safeguards and nuclear security in Vienna—and toward the first Review Conference of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) later this year.

The 70th General Conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), held in Vienna from September 14 to 18, came less than four months after the 11th NPT Review Conference ended without consensus on a substantive outcome.

It was the third consecutive NPT Review Conference, following those in 2015 and 2022, to conclude without agreement on substantive conclusions and recommendations—underscoring the growing difficulty of reaching consensus amid heightened nuclear risks and geopolitical tensions.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres expressed disappointment at the outcome while reaffirming the NPT as a cornerstone of the global nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation regime.

The IAEA does not negotiate nuclear disarmament. Its responsibilities include promoting the peaceful uses of nuclear energy and applying safeguards to verify that nuclear material is not diverted to nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.

Yet the issues confronting the Agency—from Iran and North Korea to Ukraine and naval nuclear propulsion—show how safeguards, nuclear security and armed conflict are increasingly intertwined with wider questions about the future of the international nuclear order.

Map of Iran

Iran remains one of the most difficult issues facing the Agency.

For the IAEA, the central question is not simply the political dispute surrounding Iran’s nuclear programme, but whether it can maintain the continuity and credibility of independent verification.

Restrictions on access and uncertainty surrounding nuclear material, including highly enriched uranium, have intensified concerns about the effectiveness of safeguards.

The issue has taken on an additional dimension following attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities. Beyond competing political and military claims lies a wider question for the international community: how can nuclear facilities—and the verification system surrounding them—be protected during armed conflict?

Ukraine Tests Nuclear Safety in Wartime

Ukraine presents another challenge.

The war has placed major nuclear facilities in or near areas of military operations, with the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant remaining at the centre of international concern.

The IAEA has maintained experts at the site as part of efforts to reduce risks to nuclear safety and security.

Russia and Ukraine have repeatedly accused each other of actions threatening nuclear installations. While those claims remain contested, the underlying issue extends beyond this war: international nuclear governance mechanisms must now operate in circumstances where a major nuclear facility can be exposed to prolonged armed conflict.

Water is used to cool processes at the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine. Credit: IAEA/Fredrik Dahl

North Korea and the Limits of Verification

Credit: journal-neo.org

The IAEA continues to monitor developments in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea from outside the country and maintains its readiness to resume verification activities should political circumstances permit.

The case illustrates a fundamental limitation of international verification: even sophisticated monitoring institutions ultimately depend on access and cooperation.

More broadly, the Vienna conference reflected the growing difficulty of achieving consensus. Political divisions are increasingly affecting debates even within an institution whose work is largely technical, encompassing safeguards, nuclear safety and security, and peaceful nuclear applications.

At the same time, progress in other safeguards cases shows that multilateral verification can produce results when governments provide access, transparency and sustained cooperation.

Civil Society Bridges the NPT and TPNW

Hideto Matsuura, head of Nihon Hidankyo, addresses an event hosted at the sidelines of the 2026 NPT Review Conference. Credit Naureen Hossain/IPS

At the 2026 NPT Review Conference, Soka Gakkai International (SGI) was among civil society organizations advocating nuclear disarmament education, nuclear risk reduction and greater attention to the humanitarian and environmental consequences of nuclear weapons.

On April 30, SGI and the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation co-organized a side event examining extended nuclear deterrence through the lens of the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons.

Hideto Matsuura, an atomic bomb survivor representing Nihon Hidankyo, described how radiation-related illnesses continue to affect Hibakusha more than eight decades after the atomic bombings.

The discussion raised a question that lies at the heart of the continuing debate over nuclear deterrence: whether security should be viewed primarily from the standpoint of states or also through the lens of human security.

Such civil society engagement provides a link between the NPT process and the humanitarian approach that contributed to the emergence of the TPNW.

From Vienna to New York

The next major stage of the 2026 nuclear diplomacy cycle now moves back to New York.

From November 30 to December 4, states parties to the TPNW will hold the treaty’s first Review Conference at United Nations Headquarters.

United Nations Headquarters. Credit: Katsuhiro Asagiri

The TPNW does not replace either the NPT or the IAEA.

The NPT combines three pillars—nuclear non-proliferation, nuclear disarmament and the peaceful uses of nuclear energy—while the IAEA provides much of the safeguards and verification machinery supporting the non-proliferation regime.

Credit: IAEA

The three frameworks therefore address distinct but interconnected dimensions of the nuclear order.

The 2026 NPT Review Conference demonstrated the difficulty of reaching political agreement on disarmament and non-proliferation. Vienna, meanwhile, highlighted the practical challenges confronting verification and nuclear security amid armed conflict, regional proliferation disputes and geopolitical divisions.

The first TPNW Review Conference will now examine what the prohibition treaty can contribute under these conditions.

Nuclear-armed states remain outside the TPNW, placing clear limits on what the treaty can achieve on its own. At the same time, its states parties and supporting civil society organizations have placed the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons and their elimination at the centre of international debate.

When delegates gather in New York on November 30, the discussion will therefore extend beyond the implementation of a single treaty.

After another NPT Review Conference ended without substantive consensus, a broader question remains: how can established and newer multilateral frameworks work alongside one another to reduce nuclear risks, strengthen verification and advance nuclear disarmament?

From Vienna to New York, that question is set to remain at the centre of nuclear diplomacy in 2026.

This article is brought to you by INPS Japan in collaboration with Soka Gakkai International in consultative status with UN ECOSOC.

IPS UN Bureau

By James Alix Michel
VICTORIA, Seychelles, Sep 24 2026 (IPS)

After decades in which the high seas were too often treated as a distant frontier—vast, ownerless and beyond meaningful protection—the High Seas Treaty entered into force on 17 January 2026.

It was a landmark achievement for international cooperation and a reminder that, even in an increasingly divided world, nations can still come together in defence of the common good. But celebration must not be confused with protection. A treaty on paper will not restore depleted marine life. It will not prevent harmful activity and it will not ensure that the benefits of ocean science are shared fairly. Nor will it secure a healthy ocean for future generations unless the international community gives it the resources, institutions, scientific capacity and political courage necessary to succeed. That is the real test now before us.

The Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) Agreement, also known as the High Seas Treaty, creates a framework for the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction. It addresses four essential areas: the fair and equitable sharing of benefits from marine genetic resources; marine protected areas and other area-based management tools; environmental impact assessments; and the capacity-building and transfer of marine technology. These areas will secure the future of the global ocean—and, by extension, the future of every nation whose climate, food security, economy and heritage depend upon it.

For small island developing states, it is our climate regulator, our food source, our economic space, our history and our future. We do not look at the sea as a faraway expanse beyond our borders. We live with it every day. We prosper or suffer according to its health.

During my years as President of Seychelles, this understanding shaped my conviction that the ocean had to be placed at the centre of national development. Seychelles chose to pursue a blue-economy vision at a time when the phrase was less familiar than it is today. We worked to protect large areas of our maritime space, advanced marine spatial planning, and explored innovative approaches to ocean finance, including debt-for-nature arrangements and the blue bond.

Our actions were not driven by the illusion that a small island nation could fix a global crisis single-handedly. Instead, we acted out of a core conviction: true leadership belongs to more than just the largest landmasses, the richest economies, or the most dominant militaries. While we are a small island state in land, we are a vast ocean nation. We possess a wealth of experience, strategic maritime vision, and deep resolve. It is this exact spirit—proving that stewardship is measured by commitment rather than geographic size—that must anchor and define the High Seas Treaty.

The treaty rightly recognises the special circumstances of developing states, including small island developing states and coastal African states. It acknowledges that access to data, research, equipment, technical knowledge, monitoring systems and trained people is essential if all countries are to participate meaningfully in ocean governance. However, this principle must now be honored in practice. Too often, developing countries are invited to global negotiations only to discover that the real advantages remain concentrated elsewhere: locked away in distant laboratories, research vessels, satellites, and data systems. If the benefits arising from marine genetic resources are to be genuinely shared, then access to the knowledge and tools required to understand and use those resources must also be shared. The ocean cannot become another arena in which wealthier nations draw the greatest benefit while poorer and more vulnerable countries are asked merely to endorse the rules.

The first Conference of the Parties for the High Seas Treaty, scheduled to take place in early January 2027, will be a critical moment. It must not become a narrow exercise in procedure or a meeting dominated by those already best equipped to influence outcomes. It should establish an implementation culture based on ambition, inclusion and urgency. It must ensure that the financial mechanism is strong enough to support developing countries, that scientific cooperation is meaningful, and that capacity-building is not reduced to occasional workshops or vague promises. The treaty’s decision-making body is expected to convene within its first year in force, making the coming months decisive for how this new era of ocean governance is shaped.

There is another important lesson here. The world has too often separated environmental protection from development, as though nations must choose between conserving nature and improving the lives of their people. For island states, this is a false choice. A healthy ocean is development. It supports fisheries and livelihoods. It protects coastlines. It regulates climate. It sustains tourism, culture and community. It offers scientific discoveries that may help humanity confront disease, food insecurity and environmental change. To protect the ocean is not to turn away from progress. It is to redefine progress so that it can endure.

This is why the High Seas Treaty matters so deeply. It offers a chance to move beyond a culture of reaction—responding only after a fishery declines, a species disappears, a reef bleaches or an ecosystem is damaged beyond repair. It gives the international community an opportunity to act with greater foresight: to assess environmental risks before they are allowed to grow, to establish protected areas before the last refuge is lost, and to place stewardship alongside opportunity. But no agreement, however historic, can substitute for political will.

The treaty will need champions: governments willing to invest in its success; scientists willing to share knowledge; institutions prepared to support fair access; civil society determined to hold leaders accountable; and young people who refuse to accept that the ocean’s future should be decided without them. Seychelles has long believed that the world must see the ocean not as a boundary between nations, but as the great connector of humanity. That belief is even more urgent today.

The high seas belong to no single country and its condition affects us all. The High Seas Treaty is therefore more than a legal instrument. It is a test of whether multilateralism can still respond to the challenges that no nation can solve alone.

The ocean has a law and now the world must give it life.

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

IPS UN Bureau

Credit: Matt Palmer / Unsplash
 
This guest post is authored by V. Ram Ramanathan, Durwood Zaelke, and Marcelo Suárez-Orozco and is informed by a presentation that Ramanathan is set to give at the Vatican on September 26.

By V. Ram Ramanathan, Durwood Zaelke and Marcelo Suárez-Orozco
NEW YORK, Sep 24 2026 (IPS)

Among the three of us, we have 15 decades of high-level experience in climate science, policies and actions, and we have never been more alarmed than we are at this moment. The United Nations has just officially declared that the world has failed in limiting global warming to a safe level. During the last decade, heat-trapping pollutants nearly doubled the rate that heat is being added to the planet—a rate that will push temperatures across the 1.5°Celsius threshold in five years or less and breach the first barrier of the Paris Agreement. This will further destabilize natural climate systems and amplify weather extremes, which are already costing the world economy more than $ 2 trillion annually. At the current rate of warming, the global temperature is likely to cross 2° Celsius in about 15 years, the outer limit of the Paris Agreement, taking us into a climate not witnessed by homo sapiens, ever.

High altitudes in the Tibetan-Himalayan region and the Alps are already warming at two to three times the global average (which may be implicated in the recent Nepal / Tibet floods that left 1400 confirmed dead and 5,000 missing). Other disastrous impacts of reaching 2°Celsius include the the transition of the Amazon from a forest into a savanna. The health impacts could be the worst of all. At 2°Celsius, heat deaths in 2050 could reach a staggering two billion in a worst-case analysis by actuarial experts at Exeter University.

If that weren’t bad enough, a new scientific study raises the possibility that the current rate of warming, if continued, could eventually shut down the ocean current called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation—AMOC. The Gulf Stream is a major part of this vital ocean current, which plays a dominant role in winter weather over north America and Europe. Worryingly, AMOC is already slowing down.

At today’s rate of warming AMOC could begin to collapse at warming as low as 2° Celsius, which could be crossed by the time today’s infants are in college. Impacts would be punishing, stranding heat in the already too hot tropics, while robbing northern countries of heat now transported north to keep temperatures temperate, leading to bitter winters. If AMOC collapses, currently a low-probability event, it could trigger massive forced internal and international displacements, ushering in the world’s largest crisis of forced migration ever.

Crossing 2°Celsius will trigger other irreversible impacts too, further amplifying warming through the loss of sea ice and glaciers. The depletion of ice and snow will make the planet darker, resulting in more absorption of incoming solar radiation, amplifying warming by 25% or more.

The good news is that we can avoid this fate if we cut the rate of warming quickly—by 50% within 15 years, which is feasible in two parts.

First, we need to cut the super-pollutants of climate. These include hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), methane, lower-atmosphere ozone, and black carbon soot from diesel and cooking smoke. These short-lived climate pollutants are called super pollutants because they are tens to thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide in heating the planet and are currently contributing more than half of the warming the planet has witnessed. However, and this is crucial–they dissipate from the atmosphere within two decades, whereas carbon dioxide, the best-known climate pollutant, takes multiple decades to a century to significantly decline.

Technologies exist to quickly and affordably reduce the super pollutants. In many cases we have the policies and laws as well. HFCs are being cut through the 2016 Kigali amendment to the successful Montreal Protocol—the treaty that has slowed warming by several decades while restoring the protective stratospheric ozone layer.

Methane pollution is getting more attention recently, including from Prime Minister Mia Mottley of Barbados, who is recommending a binding international agreement —inspired by the Montreal Protocol—to prevent the oil and gas industry from wasting natural gas, which is 90% methane. Other local solutions can reduce or even eliminate methane from landfills, starting by reducing food waste. There are many other such practical, off-the-shelf solutions.

The immediate task at hand is to thin the invisible heat trapping blanket. If we implement super pollutant solutions before 2030 and scale to full potential in less than10 years, the rate of warming can be reduced by 30% by 2040s. But we need to cut the rate of warming by half, i.e. 50%. The super pollutants should be our first target, because the technologies and policies are there and once we put them into action, the blanket-thinning will start immediately.

Second, as the recent IPCC report affirms, we need to focus on removing CO2. The human-made CO2 blanket up there weighs about 1,200 billion tons and we have to thin it by 5%, or 60 billion tons. Nature-based solutions are currently removing about 2 billion tons per year. Chemical/biological/technological solutions are actively pursued. Scaling to 4 billion tons per year would remove the needed tons in 15 years.

Together, these two measures would halve the rate of warming from today’s nearly 0.4° Celsius per decade to less than 0.2° Celsius per decade. We know of no other measures of thinning the heat-trapping blanket to provide the rapid cooling needed to allow us to survive and thrive. Even with rapid actions, climate disruption will continue for decades. We must make people and ecosystems resilient. Since we are all interconnected, we require global cooperation to make people and ecosystem climate resilient. Towards this global cooperation, we propose creating: One Million Climate Advocates to empower the public to support local and national actions; and One Million Climate Champions to connect civil society, governments, and industries to turn climate mitigation policies into actions at the local to the global level.

It’s time to move forward, always forward. Adelante, Siempre Adelante. Those were among the last words Pope Francis offered one of us (Suárez-Orozco). Not forward when the politics are perfect or opposition relents. Forward now, with the urgency of a species that has finally seen the iceberg but still has time to turn the tiller toward safety.

V. Ram Ramanathan is a distinguished research professor at the University of California at San Diego and the winner of the 2026 Crafoord Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy.

Marcelo Suárez-Orozco is chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Boston & the UCLA Wasserman Dean Emeritus.

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

IPS UN Bureau

Excerpt:

Credit: United Nations

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 24 2026 (IPS)

The world’s ongoing arms race is threatening to extend beyond planet earth—and spillover into outer space.

The US has deployed weapons in space and will use them to defend American forces, Air Force Secretary Troy Meink said last week, according to Cable News Network (CNN). His comments marked the first public acknowledgment of such capabilities, though he offered no details about the weapons or when they were put into orbit.

“Today we continue to ensure we remain ready to meet the challenges of evolving threats wherever they exist,” Meink told the Air, Space and Cyber Conference, an annual gathering hosted by the Air & Space Forces Association in National Harbor, Maryland.

The disclosure comes as the US faces an advancing space arms race with China and Russia, which are testing sophisticated offensive capabilities.

Specifically, American officials have said they are monitoring China’s development of a nuclear-capable partial-orbit hypersonic missile. US intelligence has also suggested Russia is developing a space-based nuclear weapon that could knock out satellites critical to weather forecasting, navigation, banking, shipping and emergency services — a claim Moscow denies, according to CNN.

The New York Times quoted Guo Jiakun, a spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry as saying: ‘We urge the US side to stop expanding its military force and preparing for war in outer space”.

There have also been reports that “Russia could be planning to put a nuclear weapon in space, a threat that could disrupt satellite networks that are vital to everything – from communications to military operations.”

The multiple UN Conferences on the Exploration and Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (UNISPACE), have served as landmark global summits to shape international cooperation and policy for space exploration.

Convened at the Hofburg Palace in Vienna from 14 to 27 August 1968, UNISPACE 1 focused on the practical benefits of space technology and scientific exchange

Tariq Rauf, former Head of Verification and Security Policy, at the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), told Inter Press Service (IPS) , while appreciating the transparency shown by the US, this disclosure is the most consequential open acknowledgement by any spacefaring State of weaponised on-orbit capability since the erosion of the informal post-Cold War taboo on space weapons.

The testing began with the 2007 Chinese ASAT test and the 2008 and 2021 Russian ASAT tests., the 2008 US and 2021 Russian ASAT tests, and India’s 2019 Mission Shakti ASAT test — building on earlier direct-ascent ASAT programs pursued by the United States and the Soviet Union from the 1960s through the 1980s.

The US deployment converts a long-suspected capability gap into a declared fact, and it will be read by other delegations as confirmation that at least one major power has moved decisively from space “control” doctrine to operational deployment, he said.

For the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) and the Ad Hoc Committee of the Conference on Disarmament on Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space (PAROS), the announcement raises four immediate questions:

(1) whether the deployment is compatible with the existing Outer Space Treaty regime; (2) what it means for the stalled draft Treaty on the Prevention of the Placement of Weapons in Outer Space, the Threat or Use of Force against Outer Space Objects (PPWT) and the EU Code of Conduct (EU International Code of Conduct for Outer Space Activities); (3) how the expert and policy community is interpreting the move; and (4) what practical steps the Committees can recommend to prevent a cascading arms race in space.

Rauf proposed five recommendations:

1. Convene an urgent joint briefing between COPUOS’s Scientific and Technical and Legal Subcommittees and the CD’s PAROS Ad Hoc Committee to develop a shared factual record of the announcement and its technical implications, avoiding duplicated or contradictory assessments across the two bodies.

2. Both PAROS Ad Hoc Committee and COPUOS should issue an urgent call for a moratorium on placing weapons in Space, urge the US to take down space weapons it has deployed and urge all spacefaring States to preserve Space as the common heritage of humankind and weapons-free.

3. Request, through the Conference on Disarmament Secretariat, that all spacefaring States with counterspace capability — not only the United States — provide voluntary technical briefings on the general character (though not classified specifics) of any on-orbit weapons systems, to reduce the information asymmetry currently driving worst-case assumptions.

4. Task the Legal Subcommittee with producing a technical working paper clarifying the scope of Article IV of the Outer Space Treaty as applied to conventional (non-WMD) on-orbit weapons, and the interaction of Articles III and IX with counterspace operations, to give delegations a common legal baseline rather than competing unilateral interpretations.

5. Encourage major space powers to reaffirm, at head-of-delegation level, existing voluntary moratoria on destructive kinetic ASAT testing, and invite additional States to associate themselves with such moratoria pending progress on a binding instrument.”

Jonathan Granoff, President Global Security Institute, told IPS placing offensive weapons in space is a very risky proposition.

The Outer Space Treaty has been instrumental in ensuring numerous benefits of outer space, including satellites and exploration. All major nations are parties including United States, Russia, China, India, Japan, and all member states of the European Space Agency. The Treaty in its first article establishes that space exploration and use shall only be for the benefit and in the interests of all countries and shall be the province of all mankind, ensuring free and non-discriminatory access for all states.

The deployment of weapons in space by the United States could easily be interpreted as violating that peaceful uses principle, he pointed out.

“However, there is an argument that putting weapons in space for defensive purposes only helps protect against abuses of the peace which is in the interest of all nations. This is not frivolous. The problem with that argument is that weapons used for defensive purposes can also be used offensively and the deployment of such weapons would indeed violate the the Treaty. Moreover, such a deployment by one nation will surely stimulate an arms race.”

There are several important questions, he said.

Should the entire world trust that the weapons the US places in space would only be used defensively to preserve the peace? If the US places weapons in space would this new interpretation of the Treaty stimulate other nations to do the same? Would it be wise to trust they would only use their weapons defensively?

Recall that President Reagan, addressing such questions, offered to share his Star Wars deployments of space based missile defenses with the Soviet Union. Would it be a good idea for the US to share space weapons technologies with other nations?

“The entire world benefits very much from the current military uses of outer space which allows the observation of the military activities of all nations thus helping stability. Such uses should affirmatively be protected and encouraged. Other uses that will lead to a new arms race should be prohibited. A protocol to the OST to prohibit offensive weapons in space as well as any anti-satellite weapons should be obtained”, declared Granoff..

IPS UN Bureau Report

Indigenous Peoples, local communities, and Afro-descendant Peoples protest exclusion and lack of recognition at the UNCCD COP17 in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Credit: Lucas Wasson for Rights and Resources Initiative

By Bayarsaikhan Namsrai, Gregoria Jimenez Amaya, Isabel Davila Pereira and Stephen Basele
ULAANBAATAR, Mongolia, Sep 23 2026 (IPS)

Rightsholders came to Ulaanbaatar from across the world, carrying declarations, demands and years of experience defending the lands on which their communities depend. Indigenous Peoples, local communities, Afro-descendant Peoples, women and youth were equally clear about what they needed from COP17. But being in the room is not the same as having power in the room.

In a year when the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists and the three Rio Conventions were supposed to create momentum for rights, recognition and implementation, the negotiations showed how quickly those gains can be diluted when the people concerned are not able to shape the language that governs their lands.

What happened in Ulaanbaatar should concern anyone advancing land restoration, climate resilience and biodiversity conservation. These cannot succeed while the rights of the people who govern these landscapes remain negotiable.

Ahead of COP17, the demands were clear: 2026 could not be a symbolic year. It had to be a year when secure and customary tenure for Indigenous Peoples, local communities, pastoralists, Afro-descendant Peoples, women and youth was translated into real protections and implementation across the Rio Conventions.

Pastoralists, Mobile Peoples, Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendant Peoples and local communities are proven leaders in land stewardship, biodiversity conservation and climate resilience. Achieving global restoration goals requires recognizing their rights, knowledge and leadership.

Secure and flexible tenure and mobility rights were an urgent ask in the context of the IYRP. RRI’s legal analysis of seven countries found that only Nepal and Niger recognize pastoralists as distinct rightsholders and only Niger considers mobility as a fundamental right. Even where rights exist on paper, they routinely fail against agricultural encroachment, mining, conservation expansion and green energy projects. Tenure should not be secondary to these initiatives, but a pre-condition before any projects are attempted in community lands.

Communities requested land and customary governance rights as a formal and permanent agenda item following past land tenure decisions, with customary institutions recognized as implementing bodies rather than consulted stakeholders and Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) as a precondition for any Land Degradation Neutrality action.

Finance is not a technical question. It is a question of power. At a COP supposedly focused on implementation, it should have been a central matter that communities cannot implement priorities they did not define, using resources they do not control. Yet too much climate, biodiversity and land finance still travels through institutions far removed from the communities whose territories generate environmental benefits.

For communities, direct and flexible finance is about more than getting money to the last mile. It is about trusting organizations and customary institutions to decide what resilience, restoration and development mean in their own territories.

Rightsholders were ready to advance their distinct rights during COP17. The presence of pastoralists at COP17 was significant, but presence alone does not translate into influence. Pastoralists arrived organized, with a global declaration and clear demands, yet the experience of the negotiations showed that meaningful participation requires more than being present in the conference halls. It requires the knowledge, resources, relationships and sustained capacity to follow negotiating texts, understand procedures, build alliances and influence language as decisions are being shaped.

On Land and People Day, the Indigenous Peoples Caucus delivered the Sacred Lands Declaration directly to the UNCCD Executive Secretary, demanding recognition grounded in self-determination, a permanent seat on the Committee on Science and Technology, and a dedicated fund for Indigenous-led restoration.

The local communities caucus asked for institutional status equal to the Indigenous Peoples’, Gender and Youth Caucuses rather than as a facilitative mechanism sidelined when convenient, plus a self-determined representation model and sustained funding for its operation.

Afro-descendant Peoples asked for what the other two Rio Conventions have already conceded: to be named. Afro-descendant Peoples across Latin America and the Caribbean steward territories degraded or acutely at risk — drylands, deforested frontiers, dry forests, riverine and coastal lands. They asked the UNCCD to open an Afro-descendant desertification agenda for the first time.

Women’s demands cut across all of this. Parties have built agreed gender language across three COPs. The ask was that it hold and be implemented.

For youth, being called “the future” has become another way of postponing their participation in the present. Young rightsholders are already living the consequences of drought, shrinking mobility, changing economies and pressures on their territories. They are not waiting to inherit these challenges. What they need is more than a voice now, it is representation, resources and authority in the institutions making decisions about their future. Their minimum requests included recognition as drivers of present-day adaptation, a permanent space within UNCCD processes, culturally appropriate education, and direct financing for youth-led organizations.

How the Negotiations Went

Based on prior COP decisions, COP17 should have been the continuation of a road towards implementation. Instead, the days in Ulaanbaatar became much more focused on protecting past progress rather than operationalizing it.

The institutional failures began on day one. At the opening plenary on 17 August, only two State Parties objected to agenda items, yet no vote was held and instead the presidency provisionally adopted the agenda. Future Strategic Framework, synergies with other conventions, gender, and participation of civil society were all deferred pending consultation. The COP closed with no decision at all on civil society participation, the Riyadh mandate to bring the Indigenous Peoples’ Caucus and the Local Communities’ Caucus to full Terms of Reference under Decision 5/COP.16 was pushed to COP18, and Rio synergies were removed from all decisions. Gender never reached the negotiation floor; instead, a quiet Gender Caucus convened in Plenary as the agenda block was sustained.

Still, IYRP advocacy proved successful to some extent. Parties agreed to recognize the critical role of pastoralists as stewards of rangeland ecosystems, including the importance of transboundary mobility. However, compromise language was adopted, replacing “traditional knowledge” with “knowledge accumulated by pastoralists” in order to remove wording related to Indigenous Peoples and local communities.

This distinction matters. Pastoralist knowledge is not simply a body of information accumulated over time; it is embedded in living institutions, relationships, territories and systems of customary governance. When knowledge is separated from the peoples and institutions that hold and transmit it, it becomes a technical resource while the rights and authority of its holders remain unrecognized. Draft decisions on land tenure and sand and dust storms also advanced, but only by leaving the naming of rightsholders behind. The lack of language on Indigenous Peoples and local communities was one of the biggest gaps. Many negotiators backed Indigenous Peoples’ and local communities’ rights in plenary, but behind closed doors, agreed to language so general it protects no one in particular. Language proposed replacing references to Indigenous Peoples with “common places” or “common people.” In the land tenure text, “affected areas” was pushed toward “common areas,” a phrase with no grounding in any multilateral mechanism and no obligations attached.

This dilution of language is particularly consequential as pressure on rangelands grows from competing global agendas. Rangelands are increasingly being presented as spaces for carbon sequestration, renewable energy, conservation and large-scale restoration, often without adequately recognizing the pastoralists who already govern and steward these landscapes.

And this is where the politics of rangelands becomes unavoidable.

Rangelands are increasingly being seen as spaces for carbon, renewable energy, conservation and large-scale restoration. The danger is that landscapes already governed and stewarded by pastoralists begin to be treated as empty spaces available for solving someone else’s global environmental problem.

A green transition cannot become a new form of land dispossession.

If pastoralists are displaced in the name of renewable energy, excluded in the name of conservation, or turned into carbon credits in the name of climate action, then changing the colour of development does not change its underlying politics.

Climate, biodiversity and land restoration objectives must not be pursued by treating pastoralist territories as empty spaces or global environmental infrastructure while sidelining the people whose livelihoods, cultures and institutions are rooted in them.

The same principle applies to emerging carbon and other environmental markets. Pastoralist rangelands cannot be reduced to carbon sinks whose value is defined externally while the cumulative ecological, economic and cultural value of pastoralism remains invisible. Any financing or market mechanism operating in these territories must begin with secure tenure, meaningful participation, Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC), and fair recognition of the rights and contributions of pastoralist communities.

Right through the final day, negotiators discussed whether to reference synergies among the Rio Conventions, and whether to include gender at all. These questions were either resolved by adopting ambiguous and broad language that betrays the protection from past COP decisions or by simply delaying any decisions to COP18.

Across every draft negotiating text currently available, rangelands, drought, sand and dust storms, land tenure, Afro-descendant Peoples do not appear at all. Not contested and diluted; simply absent. On the year of the three Rio Conventions, this demonstrates how UNCCD is lagging. CBD Decision 16/6 made the Convention on Biological Diversity the first Rio Convention to name them explicitly and at UNFCCC COP30 they appeared in core negotiating text. The bridge that could have carried that recognition into the UNCCD was the synergies item blocked on day one. These synergies are urgent to deal with the intersections across climate, land degradation and biodiversity conservation.

When it came to drought, the COP also fell short. Decision ICCD/COP(17)/L.15 runs to four operative paragraphs: continue discussions at COP18 with a view to adopting a decision on proactive drought management; make drought a stand-alone agenda item; ask the secretariat and Global Mechanism to keep supporting Parties; and report back. After deferring at COP16 and again here, the working group toward a binding instrument did not materialize; the next window is 2028. In the current text, Indigenous Peoples and local communities appear as people affected by drought and consulted, rather than as rightsholders.

COP17 presented an unprecedented situation in which a small number of Parties blocked key issues from meaningful consideration. There is no Land Degradation Neutrality without human rights, no resilience without gender equality, no sustainable land governance without Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendant Peoples and local communities.

COP17 also taught us something uncomfortable about participation. It is possible to be visible everywhere at a COP and still have very little influence over what finally enters the negotiating text.

Influence requires preparation. It requires people who understand the Convention, know the procedures, follow the text, build relationships with negotiators, organize across constituencies and remain engaged long after the cameras leave. Pastoralist movements have strong knowledge of their lands and livelihoods. What they need now is equal investment in the political and technical capacity required to defend that knowledge and those rights in global decision-making spaces.

If pastoralists want to shape the next COP, they cannot only prepare declarations. They must prepare negotiators.

What Happens Next

The answer cannot be another declaration.

The remaining COPs of 2026 must turn recognition into implementation. That means three things: name the peoples whose rights are at stake; put resources directly into the hands of their organizations and institutions; and give them meaningful authority over the decisions affecting their territories.

At CBD COP17 and UNFCCC COP31, Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendant Peoples and local communities must be recognized as rights-holders and implementing partners, not folded into generic “vulnerable groups” language. At UNCCD COP18, the gains made on pastoralists, tenure and customary governance must not be allowed to disappear into vague language.

But the responsibility does not rest with the conventions alone. Pastoralist movements must also build the capacity to influence these processes. The period between COPs must be used to coordinate positions, prepare negotiators, track decisions and negotiating texts, build alliances across the Rio Conventions and engage governments between sessions. Pastoralist organizations need investment not only to attend COPs, but to understand and shape what happens inside them.

COP18 must deliver the adoption of Terms of Reference for the Indigenous Peoples’ and Local Communities’ Caucuses, restore gender and synergies to the agenda, open an Afro-descendant desertification agenda, advance a drought decision with the communities who live its consequences first, and restore the full recognition of traditional knowledge.

Vague language does not merely fail to establish obligations. It blurs the content of rights and leaves earned recognition in a regression limbo.

Naming peoples is the beginning of recognition, not the end of it. Recognition must lead to rights, rights must be backed by institutions and finance, and those institutions must have the authority to shape the decisions that affect their territories.

The peoples who shepherd the vast majority of the world’s lands do not need another symbolic year. They need their names written into the decisions, and their voices, institutions and authority protected long after the COP is over.

Bayarsaikhan Namsrai (Steps Without Borders), Gregoria Jimenez Amaya (CITAFRO/ODECO), Isabel Davila Pereira (Rights and Resources Initiative), Stephen Basele (Pastoralist Goals Foundation)

IPS UN Bureau

Helen Clarkson, CEO, Climate Group at Climate Week NYC. Credit: Climate Group

By Naureen Hossain
NEW YORK, Sep 22 2026 (IPS)

The Climate Group’s annual conference in New York City has attracted thousands of attendees this year, among them world leaders, corporate heads, philanthropists, and climate advocates. Those leaders present at the opening ceremony of Climate Week have made clear calls to collectively tackle climate issues.

Climate Week NYC’s opening ceremony and conference began on Monday in conjunction with the United Nations General Assembly Debate and High-Level Week (21-29 September). In addition to the main conference, held in the Glass House on 12th Avenue, there are multiple events hosted across New York City—more than 1,500. This is slated to be the biggest Climate Week yet, according to the Climate Group, the organizers of this week-long event.

Each year, Climate Week focuses on the most urgent issues when it comes to tackling climate change, from the transition to renewable energy, corporate and government responsibility, and scaling climate and economic progress.

The consequences of climate change, including extreme weather events, rising temperatures, and sea levels, are being felt worldwide. Global conflicts like the war between Russia and Ukraine and the situation in the Middle East have disrupted the world’s energy supply of oil and gas, which has put developed and developing countries alike in prolonged stress over energy needs.

Australian PM M Anthony Albanese. Credit: Climate Group

It is the latter point that the day’s first speakers urged on, as even in the face of mounting evidence that clean energy is more affordable, countries still rely on fossil fuels. But blaming the situation solely on fossil fuel companies would not be accurate. Helen Clarkson, the founder of Climate Group, pointed out in her opening remarks that incumbents still use and rely on fossil fuels for their energy needs. She also pointed her finger at right-wing pundits in traditional and social media that spread misinformation about renewable energy and politicians who “weaponize people’s fear.” Meanwhile, some leaders and even media outlets choose not to use the word ‘climate’ in relation to these issues in a form of erasure or denial. Silence is a form of inaction, Clarkson noted soberly, and that inaction leads to more climate change.

“It’s time to face the truth, and that’s hard in a world where truth has lost so much of its currency. But the truth is, we’ve been making ourselves smaller and quiet at the exact moment we should be bigger and louder,” said Clarkson.

Climate and nature loss should also be treated as a matter of national security, said Ed Miliband, the United Kingdom’s Foreign Minister. Miliband, who served as the energy secretary under Prime Ministers Gordon Brown and Keir Starmer, remarked that climate destruction was once treated as a peripheral matter that was separate from economic growth or energy security. The job growth in the clean energy sector proves their potential for a sustainable transition. The latest conflicts in Ukraine and Iran underline the dependence of countries on fossil fuels while also highlighting the “energy independent imperative” of clean energy.

Ed Miliband, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs of the United Kingdom at Climate Week. Credit: Climate Group

Countries struggle with the overlapping consequences driven by climate change, for they are no longer confined to borders. In 2026 alone, over 150 million hectares burned in the first four months. This year has also confirmed a “super” El Niño that will likely drive global recorded temperatures and extreme weather events to new levels.

“This is why these facts, what is happening in our world, and why climate breakdown, in my view, must be an issue for foreign ministers and prime ministers, as well as energy and climate ministers,” said Miliband.

Miliband recommended governments pool information on climate issues so that it can be used to inform forecasts and early warning systems to “[act] before the crisis hits, rather than picking up the pieces afterwards.”

This sense of collective responsibility between countries was the core of the keynote speech, delivered by Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

“The global community cannot afford to be frozen in time while the world falls around us,” said Albanese. “Australia understands the dangers of global warming and the emergency of climate action as well as any nation. We’ve seen it up close from increasingly intense bushfires and floods.”

Albanese also spoke to the specific context of the Pacific region, where states are uniquely vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and have been among the most vocal advocates for climate action. He cited Australia’s efforts to fund and support Pacific Island states in their climate resilience plans. There is also the Pacific Resilience Facility, established last year, which he claimed was the first Pacific-led climate financing mechanism.

Adopting climate-friendly and sustainable initiatives is possible and better in the longterm to build necessary resilience. Iceland provides one such example, as a country that holds geothermal reserves but had been running on imported oil until the early 1970s during the oil crisis that disrupted their supplies. Through financing, political will, and cutting-edge technology, Iceland began developing large-scale geothermal heating districts across the country. Today, over 90 percent of households in Iceland are heated by geothermal energy. For Prime Minister Kristrún Frostadóttir, the lesson that countries should take from their example is to invest in climate-friendly infrastructure and initiatives before the next shock.

“The transition each of you is managing—in energy, in supply chains, in infrastructure, in economic competitiveness—won’t be won by the country or the company that reacts fastest to the next disruption. It’ll be won by the one that has already built the capacity to absorb it, years before it arrives. Resilience, in other words, isn’t a response. It’s a foundation you pour long before anyone tells you the storm is coming,” Frostadóttir said.

As Frostadóttir and the other world leaders remarked in their addresses, the solutions to climate change already exist. But it will require an equal measure of financing and political will to push through with the necessary steps. It cannot be a matter of waiting for the next climate or geopolitical shock to adopt those changes.

IPS UN Bureau Report

Treating the polycrisis as one undifferentiated agenda has never worked; treating them as three coherent families might. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

By External Source
APEX, North Carolina / SAN FRANCISCO, California / VIENNA, Austria / SHEFFIELD, United Kingdom / GENEVA, Switzerland, Sep 22 2026 (IPS)

In March 2025, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres launched “UN80”. Recognizing that the world is in a state of dramatic and rapid change at a time when funding for the UN is under threat from budget cuts, Guterres declared that, on the anniversary of the UN’s 80th birthday, a review of its work was long overdue. Now, UN80 is coming to a head with a set of recommendations that cover almost every aspect of the UN’s work.

Some of the recommendations are focused on reducing budgets. With some major governments cutting their funding and heavily in arrears, the UN needs to cut its spending.

The current target is a reduction of roughly 20%. This has already resulted in a decision to shift staff from high-cost duty stations like New York or Geneva, to lower-cost locations such as Bonn and Nairobi.

There has also been more “structural and programmatic alignment”—in other words, finding ways to make different parts of the UN work together more efficiently, or even merge different groups. So far, this has included the UN General Assembly agreeing to merge the UN System Staff College (UNSSC) and the UN Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) into the UN Institute for Capability and Learning Innovation.

On the research side, the UN Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) has been integrated into the UN University. Meanwhile, the UN Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI) has been absorbed into the UN Office on Drugs and Crime.

Finally, in the development agenda, there have been proposals to merge the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and UN Office for Project Services (UNOPS), and to join together the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) and UN Women, while also integrating the Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) into existing programs.

Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation: Improving Multilateral Environment Agreements

But what about all-important environmental issues? Does UN80 address the triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution?

The short answer is, yes. UN80 includes “Work Package 27” dealing with the environment. We are delighted to see the inclusion of several issues we believe would improve how multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) are organized, including the idea of “clustering.”

The UN80 process of the past 18 months has generated some excellent ideas. The window for acting on them is narrower than it looks: a new Secretary-General takes office in January 2027, and proposals that have not been anchored in a mandate by then will be inherited by someone who did not make them. Now is the time to bring them to fruition

Over the past year, we have advocated taking up an idea first mooted by UNEP’s Executive Director Klaus Töpfer back in the 2000s. He proposed grouping—or clustering—MEAs and making them work more closely and effectively together. These could be grouped along the lines of the triple planetary crisis (or “polycrisis”): (i) chemicals, waste and pollution; (ii) biodiversity loss and (iii) climate change.

The logic of the groupings matters. Chemicals and waste are fundamentally about pollution and health; biodiversity is about conservation and sustainable use, while climate change sits at the nexus of these challenges. This means effectively exploiting all synergies. Treating the polycrisis as one undifferentiated agenda has never worked; treating them as three coherent families might.

Achim Steiner, who took over from Töpfer as Executive Director of UNEP in 2006, made the first attempt at clustering. The chemicals and waste conventions—Basel, Rotterdam and Stockholm—agreed a synergies process that produced joint decisions and, from 2010, back-to-back conferences of the parties, a shared secretariat structure and common administrative services.

It has been largely a success on the terms it set itself: it improved collaboration and cut costs, even if programmatic integration has gone less far than administrative integration.

Steiner also started efforts to cluster MEAs focused on biodiversity. However, this process was never completed. We believe UN80 provides an ideal opportunity for this to be revisited and moved forward.

We are pleased to see that UN80 recommends establishing “a time-limited, independent and regionally representative Consultative Group of Ministers or High-level representatives of UN Member States to evaluate benefits, feasibility and possible options for MEA consolidation.” (Action 5.1)

This group should focus on two areas: clustering the three biodiversity conventions administered by UNEP—the Convention on Biological Diversity, CITES and the Convention on Migratory Species—with the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework as a unifying umbrella; and bringing the Minamata Convention on Mercury closer to the other chemicals and waste MEAs (Basel, Rotterdam, Stockholm).

If achieved, such clustering would strengthen both the treaties seeking to address biodiversity loss and those dealing with chemicals and waste.

Clustering the three UNEP-administered biodiversity conventions is only the start: working relationships will also be needed with the biodiversity-related conventions outside UNEP—Ramsar (wetlands), World Heritage, the Plant Treaty, and Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) —and with the other Rio conventions.

We already have more than a decade of experience of what the chemicals and waste cluster has achieved and believe there is much to learn from it, and to replicate.

Better Science

Another recommendation that should be implemented is the better coordination of environmental science, and closer links between science and policy.

This matters because so many environmental issues, such as biodiversity loss and climate change, are interlinked. Connecting the scientific work in these areas helps us “join the dots” and also develop and implement better policy.

The UN80’s recommendations include several very good ones on science coordination and science policy. For instance, it proposes that we:

• “Institutionalize a periodic science–policy dialogue anchored in UNEP’s science function that informs UNEA, as well as MEAs and other UN entities governing-bodies, as appropriate.” (Action 2.1)
• “Promote structured coordination and collaboration among chairs of MEA scientific and technical bodies and other science-policy interfaces, using existing mechanisms while respecting mandates.” (Action 3.1)
• “Build a user-driven, modern knowledge ecosystem and repository of environmental science and knowledge as a shared UN asset, linking country-to-global data and existing science platforms through shared standards and interoperable search.” (Action 3.2)

These are also the cheapest recommendations on the list, and the ones with the widest benefit. It is worth making this very clear at a moment when everything is being weighed against a 20% savings target: coordination costs very little and duplication costs a great deal.

With the global community appearing to be so divided and splintered across so many issues, we understand that not all ideas will command universal support.

This is why we applaud the idea of developing “coalitions of the willing” or communities of practice around various MEAs. We believe UNEP can and should play a convening role in this, as well as related discussions about how the Rio treaties dealing with climate change, desertification and biodiversity loss can work more closely and effectively together.

Environmental Interlinkages

When UNEP was set up in 1972, one of its key missions was to help coordinate environmental work by different UN bodies. Much of this has fractured over the years as new MEAs and organizations have emerged to address major environmental issues like climate change. However, we believe it is time to reinvigorate UNEP’s mission.

UN80 addresses this by proposing that the UN’s Environment Management Group (which is chaired by the head of UNEP) should:

• “Develop and roll-out a new EMG strategy and operating model. (Action 4.1)
• “Adopt a common UN system-wide results framework for environmental mainstreaming.” (Action 4.2)
• “Establish effective linkages with the UN Secretary-General and key governing bodies (e.g., UNEA, World Health Assembly, Human Rights Council, World Meteorological Congress, etc.).” (Action 4.3)

It is worth being clear about which of these the UN can simply decide to do, and which it cannot. The science function, the knowledge ecosystem and a reinvigorated Environment Management Group are Secretariat matters: they can be delivered by the UN system itself. Clustering conventions is not.

MEAs are autonomous treaties, and only their Parties can agree to consolidate them. That is precisely why Action 5.1 proposes a group of ministers rather than an administrative decision—and why governments, not officials, will determine whether this part of UN80 goes anywhere.

Strengthening Political Leadership

What else should be done? In 2025, we proposed reintroducing the Global Ministerial Environment Forum—a body that met annually through the 2000s in conjunction with UNEP’s Governing Council, until it was superseded by the creation of the UN Environment Assembly. The Forum’s goal was to elevate discussions on environmental issues to a high political level.

Work Package 27 suggests a slightly different approach, but with similar aims. It suggests a Global Environment Leaders’ Summit, to be held every four years and attended by heads of state and government. We support this (or similar) initiatives intended to bring presidents and prime ministers to the table. In short, we need decision makers at the highest level coming together to address global environmental matters.

But four years is almost too long given the speed and acceleration of global environmental change. A simpler answer is available: a ministerial segment attached to each session of the Environment Assembly, which already meets every two years and already has universal membership, with a leaders’ summit every four. That adds almost no additional costs, and it builds political attention into a cycle that already exists rather than competing with it.

A New Secretary-General — and the Question of Who Carries This Forward

There is one complication none of this can avoid. UN80 is António Guterres’ initiative, and his term ends in December 2026. The recommendations in Work Package 27 have been prepared for a Secretary-General who will not be in office to implement them.

Whoever succeeds him will inherit these proposals rather than own them—and on the evidence of the selection process so far, will arrive with no particular commitment to them. Eight candidates have published vision statements and taken part in interactive dialogues with the General Assembly since April.

So, what can we expect? Continuity on the efficiency agenda, almost certainly. Every candidate has endorsed UN80 in some form, and the Organization’s financial position leaves little choice.

Several have committed to sustained mandate discipline, which the General Assembly’s March 2026 resolution on the creation, implementation and review of mandates now underpins. That is genuinely useful, and over time it should reduce reporting burdens across the system.

But it carries a risk worth naming. Mandate discipline affects Secretariat mandates. It does not reach the treaty bodies, whose mandates are made by their own Parties.

If an incoming Secretary-General treats Work Package 27 primarily as a savings exercise, clustering becomes consolidation by austerity. This means the functions most likely to be cut are precisely those with no treaty constituency to defend them: science coordination, the knowledge ecosystem, the Environment Management Group.

Two practical conclusions follow. The first is that the Consultative Group proposed under Action 5.1 should be established now, with a mandate and a reporting line designed to survive the transition, rather than left to a successor to constitute. The second is that in whatever dialogue remains before the appointment, candidates should be asked a question none has yet been put to them: what do you intend to do with Work Package 27?

Optimism and Action

The suggestions in UN80 and Work Package 27 offer a new approach to environmental issues and show great potential. A more empowered UNEP could provide stronger systemwide coordination across the UN and significantly enhance the integration and coherence of science, policy, and environmental protection.

To succeed, decision makers will need to be bold and to move forward quickly and decisively. The UN80 process of the past 18 months has generated some excellent ideas. The window for acting on them is narrower than it looks: a new Secretary-General takes office in January 2027, and proposals that have not been anchored in a mandate by then will be inherited by someone who did not make them. Now is the time to bring them to fruition.

Prof. Felix Dodds and Chris Spence have participated in United Nations talks on climate change and other environmental negotiations since the 1990s. They co-edited Heroes of Environmental Diplomacy: Profiles in Courage (Routledge, 2022) and wrote Environmental Lobbying at the United Nations: A Guide to Protecting Our Planet (Routledge, 2025). Their next book, Political Heroes of the Environment: Profiles in Courage, is due for release in 2027.

Hugo-Maria Schally is former Head of the Multilateral Environmental Cooperation Unit at the Directorate-General for Environment, European Commission.

Peter Bridgewater is an Associate Researcher at the Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre, Sheffield Hallam University, UK.; Adjunct Professor at the University of Canberra, Australia; a former Director of the Division of Ecological Sciences in UNESCO; and former Secretary General of the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands.

Craig Boljkovac is Executive Director of Green Cross International, a Geneva-based Senior Advisor with a Regional Centre for the Basel and Stockholm Conventions, and an independent international environmental consultant with over 35 years of experience in relevant fields. He has participated in several INCs and related meetings for the global plastics agreement.

The opinions expressed in this article are the personal views of the individuals listed and do not necessarily reflect those of the organizations with which they are affiliated.

For many couples cohabitation has become an alternative to marriage rather than simply a step toward it. Credit: Shutterstock

By Joseph Chamie
PORTLAND, USA, Sep 22 2026 (IPS)

Marriage is declining in many countries, with fewer people marrying and many postponing marriage until later in life. At the same time, increasing numbers of men and women are choosing cohabitation instead of marriage.

Various social, economic, and legal factors have contributed to this shift from marriage to cohabitation. Moreover, cohabitation is increasingly not simply a prelude to marriage but, in many cases, an alternative to it. Although its prevalence varies considerably across regions and countries, cohabitation among unmarried couples has continued to rise in many parts of the world.

Historical demographic trends indicate that marriage has become less common over the past several decades, with particularly pronounced declines among younger adults. Nearly 90% of the world’s population lives in a country where marriage rates are declining. This change in union formation is part of the broader transformation in family and household patterns around the world.

In the mid-20th century, about 65% to 70% of adults worldwide were married. By 2021, however, the global share had declined to approximately 50% to 55%.

The proportion of married adults has declined across major age groups. In the United States, for example, the share of adults who were married decreased across all major age groups between 1960 and 2010 (Figure 1).

Source: U.S Census Bureau.

In addition, declines in marriage rates have been accompanied by substantial delays in marriage. Several decades ago, women in many countries typically married in their early or mid-twenties. Today, the median age at first marriage for women has risen to the late twenties or early thirties in many developed countries.

Historical demographic trends indicate that marriage has become less common over the past several decades, with particularly pronounced declines among younger adults. Nearly 90% of the world’s population lives in a country where marriage rates are declining. This change in union formation is part of the broader transformation in family and household patterns around the world

Marriage is therefore becoming less common in an increasing number of countries. At the same time, cohabitation has become increasingly widespread.

Once more common among people with lower levels of education and socio-economic status, cohabitation has in recent decades spread across educational and socioeconomic groups, making it a more broadly established form of partnership.

Cohabitation is particularly common in Central and South America, where levels are among the highest in the world. Rates of 40% or more of all unions are found in Panama, Nicaragua, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti.

Brazil provides another striking example. In 2022, nearly 40% of couples were in consensual or cohabiting unions, compared with about 38% in civil and religious marriages. For the first time, consensual unions surpassed civil and religious marriages as the most common form of union.

The rise of cohabitation in Latin American countries has also been accompanied by increasing proportions of children being born outside of marriage. From roughly 2016 to 2020, approximately 75% of children in Latin America were born outside marriage. The proportions ranged from about 60% in Guatemala and Ecuador to more than 80% in Colombia and Panama.

By contrast, cohabitation remains less common in Asia and the Middle East. These lower rates are generally attributed to the continuing influence of traditional family structures, marriage practices, and cultural and religious norms.

In addition, some countries have cultural restrictions and laws prohibiting sex outside of marriage, effectively making cohabitation illegal. These include Afghanistan, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Kuwait, Malaysia, Mauritania, Morocco, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. In most of these countries, a large majority of adults aged 18 to 49 are married.

Various factors have contributed to the shift from marriage toward cohabitation in many countries. Unlike marriage, cohabitation generally involves fewer legal procedures, costs, and formalities and may avoid some of the financial and legal complications that may arise from divorce (Table 1).

Source: Author’s compilation.

Cohabitation also gives men and women opportunities to get to know each other, assess their compatibility, financial circumstances, and make decisions about their future without immediately assuming the legal obligations of marriage. For many couples, therefore, cohabitation has become an alternative to marriage rather than simply a step toward it.

The widespread availability of modern contraceptives has given men and women greater flexibility in forming personal relationships and greater control over the timing and number of their children. Other important factors include urbanization, rising educational attainment, increasing female labor-force participation, financial pressures and unemployment, changing priorities regarding careers, personal growth, and independence, and evolving social and economic roles of men and women.

Additional factors include the rising costs associated with marriage, the potential financial consequences of divorce, changes in laws governing unmarried couples, and growing social acceptance of cohabitation.

Among OECD countries, about 12% of adults aged 20 and older lived in a cohabiting union around 2023. The proportions were considerably higher in some OECD countries, including Iceland (22%), Sweden (20%), and France (19%).

As in many Latin American countries, a large proportion of the births in OECD countries now occur outside marriage. A half century ago, fewer than 10% of children were born outside of marriage in most OECD countries. By 2020, that share had risen to more than 30% in most countries and to more than half in several, including Denmark, Estonia, France, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden.

In sum, although substantial regional variations persist, particularly in more traditional and religious societies, marriage has declined significantly in most countries over the past several decades. Many men and women are also postponing marriage until later in life. At the same time, cohabitation among unmarried couples has become increasingly common, reflecting a broader transformation in partnership patterns.

Joseph Chamie is a consulting demographer and a former director of the United Nations Population Division.

Julia Braunmiller, Senior Private Sector Development Specialist with the World Bank Group’s Women, Business and the Law, and Antonia Kirkland, Director of Legal Equality and UN Liaison at Equality Now, discuss the importance of family law reform during the UNGA side event, The Gender Equality Dividend: Investing in Women’s Economic Prosperity Through Family Law Reform. Credit: IPS/Oritro Karim

By Oritro Karim
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 22 2026 (IPS)

On September 16, at the lead-up to the 81st UN General Assembly, Equality in Family Law (GCEFL), Equality Now, TrustLaw, and the World Bank Group convened in New York City for the event titled The Gender Equality Dividend: Investing in Women’s Economic Prosperity Through Family Law Reform. Hosted by APCO, the event introduced new data on barriers to family law reform and highlighted strategies to help the international community maximize women’s economic participation.

Bringing together experts in legal reform and economic development, the event marked the launch of a landmark joint brief by the World Bank Group and Equality Now, titled Unlocking Women’s Economic Rights through Family Law Reform: Lessons from Case Studies across Five Regions. Drawing upon data collected from Chile, Kenya, Malaysia, Morocco, and Nepal, the brief examines the legal, social, and economic barriers that hinder gender equality, economic growth, and sustainable development.

Targeting the reform of 20 discriminatory laws by 2030, the report highlights the persistent and widespread disparities that women around the world continue to face in marriage, divorce, inheritance, and household decision-making. At the event, Antonia Kirkland, Director of Legal Equality and UN Liaison at Equality Now, stressed that no country has achieved full legal equality for women in terms of economic autonomy and social freedoms.

Additional data from the World Bank Group’s Women, Business, and the Law 2026 project reveals that 22 economies still lack laws granting women equal rights to immovable property, while 43 economies continue to deny women equal inheritance rights. Furthermore, women are estimated to be 33 percent less likely than men to participate in the formal labor market.

Over the past 50 years, family law reform has enabled more than 600 million women to access better economic opportunities, while approximately 118 countries have enacted laws that allow women improved access to employment. However, progress has stalled in recent decades, largely because family law reform is rarely treated as an interconnected policy, cultural, and economic issue.

Removing systemic discriminatory barriers against women yields immense social, financial, and developmental benefits. Granting women control over economic and financial resources can significantly strengthen their household bargaining power, foster greater individual autonomy, and considerably expand their access to formal employment.

Julia Braunmiller, Senior Private Sector Development Specialist with Women, Business and the Law, informed reporters at the briefing that if women had equal access to employment, global GDP could increase by up to 20 percent. Figures from UN Women’s Gender Snapshot 2026 report show that not a single indicator on the Sustainable Development Goal for gender equality (SDG 5) is on track to be met by 2030.

“Family law is economic policy. It is not something private,” Braunmiller said. “Marriage, divorce, and inheritance; these are the rules that can change who can work, who can own property, who can make financial decisions, who can earn and spend money. When rights are restricted, we are limiting the productive potential of half our societies. Family law is an overlooked driver of growth, productivity, and economic resilience.”

When women have equal access to formal employment, they are able to achieve significantly greater influence in decision-making, household affairs, and the ability to support themselves, separate from their husbands. In Nepal, landmark legal reforms have enabled widows to access marital assets and property, allowing families to stay afloat during periods of economic hardship.

“Many women, particularly in rural areas, who have lost their husbands or are divorced are in financially precarious situations. Obtaining a share of marital property enables them to invest in income-generating opportunities, educate their children, and even obtain further education themselves to better their lives,” said Gyanu BC, a Nepali women’s rights advocate.

Furthermore, improved family laws could significantly accelerate national productivity, strengthen social security systems, and benefit all household members. Control over family resources, such as access to credit, inheritance, and immovable property, is directly linked with household wellbeing.

Amy Hutchinson, Chief Development Officer of Equality Now, noted that working women invest roughly 90 percent of their incomes in their families, which has “profound” impacts on child nutrition, development, and education. National economies could also save significant aid dollars in social services and programs addressing and preventing gender-based violence by investing in family law reform. According to Hutchinson, women who lack access to formal employment are “infinitely” more vulnerable to violence and exploitation.

“This is not charity, this is an investment that is not just in women and girls, but in sustainable development and economic prosperity for all,” said Hutchinson. “It’s an investment in families, communities, and our global economies…this is an opportunity to invest in ground-floor systemic solutions that scale, not just mitigating the symptoms in perpetuity. Unfortunately, gender equality has become very polarizing and political.”

All of the speakers at the event emphasized that continued support from the international community in establishing legal equality is a crucial first step in closing persistent gender gaps, underscoring the global benefits in driving sustainable growth, preventing gender-based violence, and strengthening community resilience to economic shocks. GCEFL, Equality Now, TrustLaw, and the World Bank Group continue to work alongside national governments to close these gaps and secure a safe and equitable future for all.

IPS UN Bureau Report

The UN General Assembly will soon vote – most likely favourably – on Bangladesh’s request to postpone the country’s graduation from the UN’s Least Developed Country (LDC) category, currently scheduled for November this year. The request for a 3-year extension was endorsed by the ECOSOC following the recommendation of the UN’s Committee for Development Policy (CDP). It is highly likely that the extension will also be justifiably granted to Nepal and Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao, PDR) – the two other countries scheduled to graduate with Bangladesh, given the fast deteriorating global economic situation and recent natural disaster in Nepal. In fact, the same argument for an extension may be admissible to all prospective graduating countries, such as Solomon Islands (2027), Cambodia (2029) and Senegal (2029).

Anis Chowdhury

The background

The United Nations established the LDC category in 1971 for low-income countries facing severe structural barriers to sustainable development and to direct special international support toward them such as preferential market access, financial aid, and technical cooperation. The idea of a special category for low-income, structurally weak countries originated in the first session of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in 1964.

Since the creation of the LDC category, the UN organised five international conferences, the first being in 1981, to draw up comprehensive ten-year frameworks for supports with specific goals. The current programme is the Doha Programme of Action (DPOA) for the Decade 2022–2031, preceded by the Istanbul Programme of Action (IPOA) for the Decade 2011–2020.

The decision to establish a separate LDC category was undoubtedly commendable. The global consensus around the comprehensive action programmes also reflected the goodwill of the international community.

However, none of the programmes could reduce the vulnerability of LDCs. The number of LDCs steadily increased from the 1971 list of 25 countries, reaching a peak of 51 countries in 2003. The number now stands at 46, still nearly double that of the original list. Only 9 countries exited the list – one, Sikkim, through India’s annexation in 1975.

Although the inclusion of newly independent countries partly explains the lengthening of the LDC list, one cannot avoid the judgement of an overall failure of the international community’s good-intentioned programmes. This is especially so in light of the development successes of countries which did not join the group despite their eligibility.

The Reckoning

The failure became staggering by the time the international community met in Istanbul in 2011. After four decades since the special LDC category was created, only three countries – Botswana, Cabo Verde and Maldives – exited the group. Furthermore, the post-graduation experience has been disappointing.

For example, life-expectancy in Botswana, the first country to exit the LDC group, declined from 61.6 years in 1988 to 50.08 years in 2003, while it remains one of the most unequal countries in the world, holding the 9th highest income Gini coefficient globally. Botswana, although hailed for macroeconomic stability, failed to transform structurally with the share of manufacturing hovering below 6% of GDP, and it remains extremely vulnerable to fluctuations in international commodity markets, especially diamond. Thus, growth has declined significantly since the mid-2000s and the unemployment rate has increased to very high levels, around 26%.

Therefore, the core goals and targets of the IPOA included:

• Enable half of all LDCs to achieve graduation status by 2020.
• Attain sustained, equitable, and inclusive economic growth of at least 7% annually.
• Strengthen education, health, and nutrition.
• Build productive bases and diversify economies to generate decent jobs, especially for youth

Unfortunately, only 6 countries – Maldives, Samoa, Equatorial Guinea, Vanuatu, Bhutan and São Tomé and Príncipe graduated – during 2011-2024, and 3 countries – Bangladesh, Nepal and Lao PDR – became eligible to graduate this year. Again, the experience is not very encouraging for the graduated countries, while the fear of graduation has gripped the countries soon to graduate.

In 2021, UNCTAD concluded that 50 years of LDC experience is “sobering”. It found that half of the LDCs fell behind the rest of the world in terms of per capita income and other dimensions of development. Hence, the economic gap between these countries and the rest of the world has widened over the last 50 years.

Rejecting “LDC insult”

Zimbabwe, a land-locked country, rejected the UN’s recommendation to be classified as a LDC in 2006 despite facing severe economic hardships. Zimbabwe viewed the UN recommendation “to be downgraded to LDC status” as an insult, while the neighbouring land-locked Zambia was among the first group of countries classified as an LDC in 1971.

When Zimbabwe’s per capita GDP plunged to USD341 in 2008, resource-rich Zambia’s per capita GDP was around USD1,376. Today, after more than half a century as an LDC, the per capita GDP of Zambia, one of the world’s leading producers of copper, cobalt, and semi-precious gemstones like emeralds, is around USD1,318, while Zimbabwe’s per capita GDP recovered within a decade to around USD3,445 in 2017.

Vietnam, coming out of a quarter century long devasting war in 1975, facing the challenge of unifying the country during the worst global economic situation with a paltry per capita income of around USD85, chose not to join the LDC group. Instead of aid dependence, it opted for the trade and investment route to development. Today, its per capita GDP is approximately USD5,066, while Bangladesh which joined the LDC group in 1975 with a per capita income of around USD230 could manage to raise its per capita GDP to approximately USD2,960.

The Republic of Korea (ROK), one of the poorest countries of the world in the 1960s, could also join the LDC group in 1971 when it was created; but it did not. Maintaining its policy independence and choosing the trade and investment route, ROK has become a full-fledged developed country in 1996 (member of OECD) within three decades. It managed to increase its per capita GDP from USD158 in 1960 to USD36,227 in 2025.

What may have gone wrong?

UNCTAD attributed the “sobering” experience to the LDCs’ inability to exploit international support measures (ISMs) strategically to develop their productive capacity. Others offered different reasons such as failure to understand the complex development process and appreciate the dangers associated with increased integration of structurally weak economies to the rapidly changing global economic system.

Add to these, complicity. Countries joining the group took ISMs as guaranteed; they did not take serious steps to mobilise domestic resources, diversify their economies and expand markets. Take the case of Bangladesh, a country regarded as the best utiliser of ISMs.

Bangladesh’s tax-GDP ratio is dismally low, experiencing a decline from a peak of around 10% to around 7%. Its ready-made garment (RMG) sector’s dominance increased from around 67% of export earnings in 2018 when the country first met the graduation criteria to around 85% by 2025 while it should have been declining as the graduation deadline was approaching.

Bangladesh has also failed to diversify its export markets away from the EU and the USA, accounting for close to 80% of RMG exports. It does not have any meaningful trade agreement with any country or trading bloc, while Vietnam has 17 bilateral FTA and is a member of Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership as well as Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, the world’s largest free trade agreement, covering roughly 30% of global GDP.

Ironically, the sector that propelled Bangladesh’s industrialisation, made the country more vulnerable. Worst, too big to ignore, the RMG sector has captured Bangladesh’s political and policy space. The CDP’s recommendation in favour of Bangladesh’s extension request has been made subject to the country’s commitment to reforms. However, political will for reforms may waver when the state is captured by a dominant sector.

Curse or Boon?

Thus, what was supposed to be a boon, for many LDCs, the category has become a curse, trapping them in a perpetual state of underdevelopment and vulnerability. It fits the narrative of William Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden; unfortunately, the international community may feel burdened and grant an extension to the “fearful” LDCs even when its “good-intentioned” efforts have produced so little good.

Anis Chowdhury, Emeritus Professor, Western Sydney University (Australia). He held senior UN positions in Bangkok and New York and served as Special Assistant to the Chief Advisor for Finance (with the status and rank of State Minister) in the Professor Yunus-led Interim Government. E-mail: anis.z.chowdhury@gmail.com; a.chowdhury@westernsydney.edu

IPS UN Bureau

President Mahmoud Abbas of Palestine. Credit: UN Photo

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 21 2026 (IPS)

When Yasser Arafat was denied a US visa for his second visit to New York to address the United Nations back in 1988, the General Assembly defied the United States by temporarily moving the UN’s highest policymaking body to Geneva—perhaps for the first time in UN history—providing a less hostile political environment and a platform for the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

Arafat, who first addressed the UN in 1974, took a swipe at Washington when he prefaced his statement in Geneva by remarking, “It never occurred to me that my second meeting with this honorable Assembly, since 1974, would take place in the hospitable city of Geneva.”

The US last week denied visas to the Palestinian delegation, led by President Mahmoud Abbas, who was due to address the General Assembly on September 24. The delegates were also denied visas last year.

In the official list of speakers released last week, Abbas has been designated “Head of State” (HS) of the “State of Palestine.”

The U.S. State Department criticized Abbas and the Palestinian Authority (PA) for pursuing the “unilateral recognition of a conjectural Palestinian state” through international bodies rather than negotiated bilateral talks.

As a rebuff to the US, the General Assembly voted overwhelmingly last week to allow President Abbas and other high-level Palestinian officials to participate and address the annual gathering of world leaders via video, outsmarting the US—electronically.

The resolution was adopted with a 152-3 vote (with four countries abstaining). This decision directly addresses the decision by the United States to deny entry visas to the high-level Palestinian delegation—including Abbas—marking the second consecutive year the delegation has been barred from attending the UN high-level meeting of world political leaders.

The resolution was opposed only by the United States, Israel, and Paraguay, with Colombia, Honduras, Panama, and Peru abstaining.

So far, the UN expects about 73 Heads of State, 45 Heads of Government, 49 Ministers, 11 Vice-Presidents, and one Crown Prince to address the General Assembly through September 28.

Alongside the mandated meetings, there are about 168 events that are scheduled during the high-level week, and last week, Member States have submitted about 1,000 requests for bilateral meetings amongst themselves.

The bilateral meetings with the Secretary-General are also in the process of being scheduled.

The UN has also issued 1,935 press passes for visiting journalists and an additional 1,290 press passes for official media.

Dr. Stephen Zunes, a professor of Politics and International Studies at the University of San Francisco, where he serves as coordinator of the program in Middle Eastern Studies, told Inter Press Service (IPS) under the 1947 US-UN Headquarters agreement that the United States is obliged to allow foreign leaders to address the General Assembly.

“That’s why previous administrations allowed even the likes of Muammar Qaddafi, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Idi Amin, Suharto, and other nasty characters to visit.”

(According to one definition, “ruthless autocrats” are political leaders who hold absolute power and use severe oppression, violence, and censorship to maintain control. Throughout history, these dictators have suppressed political opposition, eliminated civil liberties, and caused massive human suffering.)

Now, however, the Trump administration is banning representatives of the government of Palestine—a permanent non-member state of the United Nations—from coming to New York despite their recognizing Israel, renouncing terrorism, and calling for peace, said Dr. Zunes.

And there have been no objections, he said, from Democratic leaders in the US Congress. The problem, therefore, is not that the State of Palestine is a brutal dictatorship or violating international legal norms—the United States has no problems with that.

“The problem is that they are Palestinians. This is bigotry, pure and simple,“ he said.

The General Assembly could have relocated to Geneva, as they did in 1988. However, concerns about the costs and the carbon footprint, combined with access to modern communications technologies, have led them to allow the Palestinian leadership to Zoom in, said Dr. Zunes.

While going to Geneva would have been a more powerful statement, the support by such an overwhelming majority of the world’s nations can still be seen as a rebuke of Washington’s continued opposition to Palestine’s right to exist, declared Dr Zunes.

Mouin Rabbani, Managing Editor, Jadaliyya, an independent ezine produced by the Arab Studies Institute, told IPS the United States has once again demonstrated itself to be unfit to play the role of host nation of the United Nations. It considers the Host Country Agreement as something to be honored on a voluntary basis rather than a series of binding obligations.

The US government considers it perfectly normal to behave like a gangster state and openly violate its obligations by refusing entry to foreign delegates on the most specious of pretexts, he pointed out.

This is not a matter of the Trump administration. Nearly four decades ago, its predecessor, the Reagan administration, also refused entry to a Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat.

What is particularly noteworthy on this occasion, he said, is that the US government is explicitly identifying the Palestinian recourse to the ICJ and ICC as legitimate grounds to refuse the participation of the Palestinian leader in the GA.

“This is the conduct of one gangster state acting on behalf of another (Israel) and demonstrates in the clearest manner possible that the US cannot and should not be entrusted with hosting the UN HQ.”

The Palestinians should of course be demanding that the GA conduct its session outside the US. The problem is that they are led by the exceptionally weak-kneed Mahmoud Abbas, who seems to continue to believe that absorbing these outrageous violations without confronting them forcefully will earn him brownie points with Trump and Netanyahu, which of course they won’t, declared Rabbani.

Meanwhile, responding to questions from journalists, UN Spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric said last week the Secretary-General deeply regrets the announcement by the United States extending sanctions that would deny visas to members of the Palestine Liberation Organization and officials of the Palestinian Authority to participate in meetings of the United Nations.

“The Secretary-General is concerned about the impact of this decision on the ability of the State of Palestine to participate fully in the work of the United Nations. The full participation of all delegations in the work of the organization is essential to its proper functioning”.

The Secretary-General takes note of the arrangements adopted yesterday by the General Assembly for the participation of the State of Palestine in the eighty-first session.

The Secretary-General urges the host country to ensure that visas are issued to all delegations in accordance with its obligations under the Headquarters Agreement and will continue to engage with the United States authorities to this end.

Meanwhile, key details of the General Assembly decision include the following:

• Scope of Virtual Access:

• The approved measure not only permits President Abbas to deliver his address virtually but also extends video-participation rights to any senior Palestinian officials for any UN meetings or conferences over the next year if they remain blocked from traveling to the U.S.

• The U.S. Stance:

• The Trump administration extended existing visa sanctions, citing security concerns and accusing the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) of failing to comply with legal commitments and attempting to “internationalize” the conflict through global tribunals.

• On-the-Ground Representation:

While the high-level traveling delegation was barred, Palestinian diplomats who are already permanently accredited to the UN in New York will continue to represent them.

IPS UN Bureau Report

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IPS UN Bureau Report

Closing plenary of the recent Kunming Dialogue. Credit: ENB-IISD/Anastasia Rodopoulou

By Stella Paul
KUNMING, China, Sep 17 2026 (IPS)

The world may have enough money to protect nature. The bigger problem, according to the head of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), is that too much of it is still being spent on activities that destroy it.

With just four years left to meet the world’s 2030 biodiversity goals, Astrid Schomaker, Executive Secretary of the CBD, said governments must urgently change where money flows if they are to slow the loss of nature.

Her warning comes just weeks before governments meet in Yerevan, Armenia, for COP17, the UN biodiversity conference scheduled for October 19-30.

Speaking at a press conference organised by the CBD Secretariat on September 11 – after the three-day Kunming Dialogue, Schomaker said governments need to redirect financial flows and reform incentives that encourage activities harmful to nature. Without such changes, she warned, progress under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF) will remain too slow.

What’s Slowing Biodiversity Action?

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, adopted in Montreal in 2022, sets 23 targets for protecting and restoring biodiversity by 2030. Since its adoption, governments have been carrying out the first-ever global stocktake of how the framework is being implemented, examining progress across countries and individual targets.

The stocktake began after COP16 and is looking at the full picture of implementation, from the targets countries have set for themselves to the policies, plans, finance and other measures they are putting in place to achieve them. Its findings are being compiled in the forthcoming State of Biodiversity Action report, which will present the final global assessment at COP17.

The three-day Kunming Dialogue, held from Sept. 7 to 9, offered governments, scientists, Indigenous Peoples, youth representatives and civil society organisations an early look at the trends emerging from this stocktake. While more than 70 percent of countries have submitted national reports and over 90 percent have established biodiversity targets aligned with the global framework, the emerging picture is far less encouraging. Progress remains uneven, with implementation lagging behind the scale and pace needed to achieve the 23 targets by 2030. The emerging findings suggest that global efforts are not yet moving fast enough or at the scale needed to achieve the 23 targets by 2030. In other words, while countries have made progress in setting commitments, implementation remains well behind what is required.

“Progress is being made clearly, but it is uneven, and it is clearly also not at the pace and scale required,” Schomaker told IPS.

Gap Between Global Goals and National Action

One of the biggest problems is that biodiversity commitments have not yet been fully carried into national policies, budgets and economic decisions.

According to Schomaker, some of the largest gaps are in finance, resource mobilisation and efforts to bring biodiversity into the work of government ministries and economic sectors beyond the environment.

Jillian Campbell, Head of Planning, Monitoring and Knowledge at the CBD Secretariat, said the problem is not that countries have failed to set targets. Rather, there is often a gap between what was agreed globally and what countries have committed to doing at home.

“Most parties have set national targets covering almost every global target. However, the national targets often don’t cover the full extent of the global targets,” she told IPS.

As countries turned the global framework into their own national plans, some of its ambition was lost along the way. This is particularly visible in areas where action depends on ministries beyond the environment, including finance, agriculture, infrastructure and development.

That raises a bigger question — and one that is likely to be central at COP17: is the problem really a lack of money for biodiversity, or is it where existing money is going?

For Schomaker, the answer is clear.

“The biggest elephant in the room of all of that is the misalignment of financial systems,” she told IPS. “There is enough money around in the world economy. The question is, where does that money go?”

Money Flowing in the Wrong Direction

Governments, businesses and financial institutions continue to channel large amounts of money into activities that damage ecosystems, even as they commit themselves to protecting nature.

Changing that pattern, Schomaker said, should be one of the central priorities for COP17.

The discussions in Kunming highlighted a growing understanding that biodiversity loss is not caused only by what happens in forests, rivers and oceans. It is also shaped by decisions made in boardrooms, government ministries and financial institutions.

Participants pointed to subsidies, investments and other financial incentives that continue to make activities harmful to nature more attractive or profitable.

Asad Naqvi, Secretary of the Subsidiary Body on Implementation, said the answer to the biodiversity funding problem may therefore lie partly in changing how existing money is used rather than simply searching for new sources of funding.

He noted that governments are still spending large sums on incentives that undermine biodiversity, particularly through harmful subsidies in agriculture and fossil fuels. Redirecting those resources, he suggested, could help close financing gaps while addressing some of the root causes of nature loss.

Biodiversity Beyond Environment Policy

Finance, however, is only part of the challenge.

The Kunming Dialogue also highlighted the need for governments to treat biodiversity as an issue that cuts across the entire economy, rather than something that belongs mainly to environment ministries.

Agriculture, finance, infrastructure and development ministries all make decisions that can either protect or damage ecosystems. Unless biodiversity is considered in those decisions, governments may find themselves trying to repair environmental damage with one hand while creating more of it with the other.

That broader approach is expected to be an important part of the discussions at COP17.

For many observers, the significance of COP17 will depend on how governments respond to the findings of the State of Biodiversity Action report — and whether they can turn commitments into action faster.

The conference is expected to focus on speeding up implementation, closing finance gaps and tackling the targets where progress remains furthest behind.

As delegates prepare to meet in Yerevan, the debate is moving beyond whether governments support the global biodiversity framework.

With only four years left before the 2030 deadline, bringing finance into line with the needs of nature may become one of the defining tests of the global biodiversity agenda.

IPS UN Bureau Report

Indigenous Kakataibo patrol in the Yamino community forest. A new report titled Collective Power documents the deaths of people who stood against environmental destruction, land grabs, illegal logging, mining projects and other threats to their communities. Credit: Global Witness

By Umar Manzoor Shah
LONDON & SRINAGAR, India, Sep 16 2026 (IPS)

At least 124 land and environmental defenders were killed around the world in 2025 while protecting forests, rivers, farmland and Indigenous territories, according to a new report by Global Witness that warns violence against activists remains widespread even as recorded killings have declined from previous years.

The report, titled Collective Power, documents the deaths of people who stood against environmental destruction, land grabs, illegal logging, mining projects and other threats to their communities. It says the 124 killings recorded in 2025 bring the total number of land and environmental defenders killed or disappeared since Global Witness began tracking such cases in 2012 to 2,375.

While the number of killings fell from 142 deaths and four disappearances documented in 2024, Global Witness cautioned that the decline should not be viewed as evidence that defenders are becoming safer, and onimously, the killing and intimidation have serious consequences for the environment.

“Defenders are the world’s eyes and ears on the ground. It’s thanks to them that we know when ecosystems are being destroyed, where forests are being cleared or rivers polluted,” Toby Hill, land and environmental defenders investigator and lead author, said. “The violence that defenders face, including killings in the most extreme cases, reflects a much broader struggle over the world’s land and resources. But beyond these tragic stories, we can’t forget the thousands of defenders around the world who are working every day to protect their territories and cultures under increasing pressure.”

The report said, “Every one of these deaths represents an attempt, in the most brutal fashion, to impose a chilling effect on movements that resist environmental and human rights abuses. We remember the families, friends and communities who have been left devastated by each attack.”

Researchers argue that the real number of killings is likely much higher because many attacks occur in remote areas, conflict zones and countries where civil society groups face intimidation for reporting abuses. According to the report, difficulties in documenting cases are particularly severe in parts of Africa and Asia, as well as increasingly in Latin America.

The findings reveal a global struggle over land, natural resources and environmental protection, with Indigenous peoples and small-scale farmers bearing the heaviest burden.

Indigenous women walk along a river in the Amazon rainforest. According to Global Witness, Indigenous peoples and small-scale farmers accounted for nearly three-quarters of the land, and environmental defenders killed globally in 2025. The report highlights the growing risks faced by communities defending their lands, livelihoods and ecosystems from environmental destruction and resource exploitation. Credit: Global Witness

Nearly three-quarters of those killed in 2025 were Indigenous people or small-scale farmers defending their land rights and livelihoods. The report found that 47 victims were small-scale farmers and 44 were Indigenous people. Three victims were Afro-descendant defenders.

Among the dead were seven members of Indigenous guard systems, community-based groups that patrol and protect ancestral territories from illegal activities and outside encroachment. In five of those cases, researchers identified links to organised crime, highlighting what the report describes as a growing overlap between environmental conflicts and criminal networks.

Despite this, Indigenous people continue to defend their environments.

“Defending our territory is important to us as a community and as a people, and we’re proud to support the climate that we all depend on. In our culture, the work of defending our resources and territory is taught from an early age. But for this next generation coming up, the work is more dangerous than ever,” Segundo Ispón, commander of Peru’s Kakataibo Indigenous Guard, said.

Global Witness said the killings represent only the most visible form of repression. Beneath them lies what human rights groups call a “hidden iceberg” of threats that include criminal charges, surveillance, harassment, smear campaigns and online abuse.

“Increasingly, social media is weaponised to discredit and harass defenders, eroding public trust and isolating them from their communities,” the report noted.

The organisation suggested that some governments and powerful interests may be relying more on non-lethal forms of repression, which can silence opposition without attracting the international attention that often follows a murder.

The report also highlights a broader deterioration in civic freedoms. Of the 15 countries where killings were documented, 10 were categorised as “repressed” by the CIVICUS Monitor, a global tracker of civic freedoms. Nicaragua was listed in the most restrictive category, described as “closed”.

Asia emerged as one of the regions where environmental defenders face increasing pressure through legal and political means.

A major section of the report focuses on Indonesia, where Dayak Indigenous communities in West Kalimantan have resisted industrial expansion, land grabs and deforestation. According to Global Witness, community leaders and Indigenous defenders have faced criminalisation while attempting to protect forests and customary lands.

The report argues that such cases reflect a wider regional trend in which defenders are increasingly targeted through courts, police investigations and administrative actions rather than direct violence alone. It cites concerns raised by human rights organisations regarding the criminalisation of environmental activism across parts of Asia.

In the Philippines, environmental defenders Jhed Tamano and Jonila Castro are highlighted as examples of activists who continued their advocacy despite legal and political pressure. Their experiences are presented as part of a larger pattern in which defenders face reputational attacks and criminal allegations linked to their activism.

The report also examines Peru, where members of the Kakataibo Indigenous people have developed Indigenous guard systems to protect their territory from growing threats associated with organised crime and environmental exploitation. The movement is presented as an example of collective protection developed by communities that feel abandoned by state institutions.

Across Latin America, which has historically recorded some of the highest numbers of killings of environmental defenders, the report documents continuing violence, disappearances and intimidation.

It revisits the disappearance of Mexican defenders Ricardo Lagunes and Antonio Díaz, whose case has become emblematic of the dangers faced by people challenging powerful economic interests. Three years after their disappearance, United Nations experts were still calling for truth and justice.

The report also highlights the unresolved disappearance of Chilean Indigenous defender Julia Chuñil. According to Global Witness, her family and legal representatives have faced mounting pressure while continuing to seek answers.

“Despite this pressure, Julia’s family continues to fight for truth and justice,” the report said. “They are still searching for their mother, organising protests, pursuing legal challenges and bringing international attention to the case.”

In Nigeria, defenders protecting the Ekuri Forest in Cross River State continued to face intimidation, arrest and detention after speaking out against illegal logging. The report said community leaders were targeted following complaints linked to logging interests but were later released after intervention from environmental organisations and lawyers.

“The arrests were widely viewed as an attempt to silence efforts to defend tropical forests and community forest rights,” the report stated.

The gender dimension of environmental activism also features prominently in the findings. Of the 124 defenders whose deaths were verified in 2025, 109 were men, 14 were women and one was identified as non-binary. However, researchers stressed that women defenders often experience different forms of violence that are less visible but equally damaging.

The report cites data from the Mesoamerican Initiative of Women Human Rights Defenders showing more than 30,000 non-lethal attacks against women defenders in Mexico and Central America between 2012 and 2023. These included harassment, threats, surveillance, psychological abuse and smear campaigns.

The report also expresses concern about the unprecedented fall in foreign aid seen in 2025 – driven by budget cuts by the governments of the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom and other traditional donors – impacting thousands of human rights organisations, drastically reducing the global pool of support to communities acting in the depths of rainforests and other secluded ecosystems.

“The effects of these budget cuts are not abstract. In Colombia, projects working to promote and protect human rights and support defenders have been hit by the sudden drop in foreign aid, particularly from the U.S. When foreign aid retreats, Indigenous Peoples and small-scale farmers can be left with fewer resources and less support as they defend the forests, rivers and other ecosystems that sustain their communities and help keep the global climate stable,” Juliana Vélez Echeverri, a senior campaigner at Global Witness, said.

Global Witness says the solution requires more than investigations into individual killings. The organisation is calling for stronger legal protections for Indigenous peoples, recognition of land rights, accountability for corporations and criminal networks, and greater support for community-led protection systems.

The report argues that environmental defenders are not only protecting local communities but also safeguarding forests, biodiversity and ecosystems that are critical in the fight against climate change. Their work, researchers say, often benefits society far beyond the places where they live.

The publication opens with a dedication to those who continue that work despite the risks.

“This report is dedicated to all those individuals, communities and organisations bravely speaking out or taking action to defend their rights to land and a clean, healthy and sustainable environment,” it says. “Last year, 124 people were murdered for doing this work.”

IPS UN Bureau Report

When host governments negotiate with investors, they typically suffer from the fact that investors know more about the value of the minerals than governments do. Credit: Shutterstock

By Karl P. Sauvant and Louis T. Wells
Sep 15 2026 (IPS)

“Critical minerals” are critical in the eyes of firms and governments in industrialized countries because they are indispensable for products such as modern automobiles, AI, computers, drones, and many other consumer and defense products.

Mining, and especially processing, of many critical minerals are today concentrated in China; withholding access to them provides China with a powerful bargaining tool when tensions arise with the West. Consequently, governments and firms of industrialized countries are scrambling to develop new mines and processing facilities outside China to secure their supplies.

Many deposits are in developing countries, but most of the countries must turn to foreign firms for the capital and know how needed to extract rare earths and other critical minerals. Exploration and development contracts determine the rights and responsibilities of both investors and host governments for, often, decades. Because most investors are protected by investment treaties, host countries need to get the contracts “right” at the outset.

Technologies are changing rapidly: what is in demand today for, say, batteries, might be different in a few years. Hence, “use-it-or-lose-it” clauses in contracts are essential: if investors fail to develop mines by an agreed date or meet output requirements, contracts must provide that the investors’ rights end so that government are then free to seek other investors

The bargaining power of developing countries is often greater for critical minerals than for other minerals. This is due to the eagerness of private firms from industrialized countries as well as their home governments for access to critical minerals and their desire to keep them out of the hands of competitors.

When investors are eager, host countries can insist on gaining beneficial financial terms (taxes, royalties), avoiding broad stabilization provisions, including programs to develop local suppliers, ensuring proper mine-closure arrangements, etc. Sometimes, host countries can insist on investors processing ores locally.

Another opportunity is the chance to exploit the strong interest of investors’ home governments to ensure that their investors control critical minerals. Host countries can insist that these governments provide benefits such as finance for projects or increased aid for infrastructure projects even beyond those needed for the mine.

Obtaining real benefits from home governments is more likely if host governments have in-depth knowledge about the investors and their home countries’ policies, as well as information about mining agreements concluded elsewhere. Special to critical minerals are multilateral and bilateral arrangements that are being built to develop and stabilize critical mineral supplies. They include FORGE and stockpiling attempts such as Project Vault.

Exploiting these emerging opportunities to obtain benefits from investors’ home governments may require that host governments involve their foreign affairs ministries as well as the usual ministries concerned with mining. This adds to the common problem of coordination within governments.

Host countries also face certain risks. Particularly important is the risk that investors conclude agreements, but never actually invest. Or they stop short of producing expected levels of output. Or companies may sign agreements only to keep deposits out of the hands of other firms or as backup, “just in case.

Also, technologies are changing rapidly: what is in demand today for, say, batteries, might be different in a few years. Hence, “use-it-or-lose-it” clauses in contracts are essential: if investors fail to develop mines by an agreed date or meet output requirements, contracts must provide that the investors’ rights end so that government are then free to seek other investors.

When host governments negotiate with investors, they typically suffer from the fact that investors know more about the value of the minerals than governments do. And governments often lack the legal, financial and technical expertise required to negotiate successfully with well-resourced international investors.

Even when they have negotiated mining contracts in the past, the expertise acquired can be lodged in the heads of officials who have moved on to other positions, in government or in the private sector. The imbalance may be even greater when it comes to the complexities and special opportunities posed for negotiating agreements covering critical minerals.

Thus, exploiting the opportunities developing countries have is not an easy task. Outside expertise can help governments to optimize mining agreements. But the poorest developing countries typically lack the financial resources to hire international expertise such as lawyers, geologists, engineers, financial analysts, market specialists, and environmental experts.

Multilateral institutions such as the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation can help in developing policies and laws for foreign investment and mining, but they drop out when it comes to actual negotiations with individual firms.

However, there are sources of pro bono advisors that provide help in the negotiation stage. The International Senior Lawyers Project and the African Legal Support Facility offer legal support. The CONNEX Support Unit provides not only legal support, but also other expertise required for specific projects.

Governments should consider calling on such external support when they are negotiating contracts for critical minerals. But they should work closely with the providing organization to select advisors who meet their specific needs and with whom they are comfortable.

The chosen advisors should have the necessary technical knowledge, but also the consulting skills that are required to bring together the ministries and agencies that have an interest in proposed mines—often a challenging task. In the end, advisors, or teams of advisors with different skills, can only advise. The governments of countries with minerals make the decisions.

One word of caution, though. Governments need to be careful not to overplay their hand. They need to aim for contracts that reflect, in a balanced manner, the long-term interests of all parties involved. Only then will they stand the test of time.

Karl P. Sauvant is Senior Fellow, CCSI, Columbia University, and former Director of UNCTAD’s Investment Division; Louis Wells is the Herbert F. Johnson Professor of International Management, Emeritus, Harvard Business School. The authors are members of the CONNEX Advisory Committee.

Members of the Uyghur delegation pose with the director of their host organisation, CADAL, during their visit to Buenos Aires, Argentina, 23 August 2026. The sky flag is strictly banned by the Chinese government under anti-separatism laws. Credit: CADAL.

By Inés M. Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Sep 15 2026 (IPS)

On 24 August, I took part in a human rights conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Days before it opened, the city legislature cancelled the intended venue after the Chinese ambassador complained to the Argentine government about the participation of prominent Uyghur human rights defenders, including Dolkun Isa, an activist exiled in Germany. Beijing has waged a campaign of mass detention and forced assimilation against the mostly Muslim Uyghur population for years.

The organisers found another venue at the last minute, and the conference went ahead, but the episode was revealing. This was a small gathering, of no great consequence to anyone beyond those in the room, in a global south city over 19,000 kilometres from Beijing, yet China still went out of its way to stop it. The episode showed how China aims to deny its critics any platform, however modest, anywhere. A phone call to a compliant government is the least of what it does in pursuit of this objective.

China’s global campaign

China is the world’s leading perpetrator of transnational repression, the practice of reaching beyond borders to intimidate, punish and silence critics in exile. Its new ‘Ethnic Unity Law‘, in force since July, lets the government target dissidents abroad when they are deemed to be ‘undermining ethnic unity’ or ‘creating ethnic division’. Freedom House has documented at least 319 instances of China’s physical transnational repression targeting Hong Kong democracy activists, Tibetans and Uyghurs, in addition to Taiwanese civil society and political figures, whom it treats as if they were Chinese nationals.

China’s transnational repression spans the spectrum of severity. At the far end, dissidents disappear. Chinese dissident Yi Haihua reportedly vanished in Dubai in April, having fled China via Hong Kong the previous November. China also uses prosecution and imprisonment to punish dissent abroad. Those targeted include a student who was handed a six-year sentence when he returned to China after participating in a pro-democracy protest in Australia.

Less extreme but far more widespread are surveillance, intimidation and repression by proxy, through which China monitors and threatens dissidents abroad and pressures family members back home. China also applies economic leverage against states, as seen in April when the government of Zambia, a state heavily indebted to China, called off the RightsCon digital rights conference, over the participation of Taiwanese activists, days before it was due to open in Lusaka.

Beyond China

China is not alone. Vietnam and Russia are the second and third worst offenders, and at least 54 states have engaged in transnational repression, with six — Afghanistan, Benin, Georgia, Kenya, Tanzania and Zimbabwe — identified as using these tactics for the first time in 2025.

Latin America, once largely spared, is now home to transnational repression. In June 2025, former Nicaraguan army major Roberto Samcam, an outspoken critic of dictator Daniel Ortega, was shot dead at his home near San José, Costa Rica, the third such killing of a Nicaraguan exile there in recent years. Nicaragua has also taken the lead in stripping dissenters of nationality. Since 2023, the government has removed citizenship from over 300 former journalists, opponents and political prisoners and confiscated their assets, leaving them stateless and unprotected.

Venezuela under Nicolás Maduro pursued its opponents with similar determination. In February 2024, men in fake police uniforms abducted exiled former army lieutenant Ronald Ojeda from his apartment in Santiago de Chile. His dismembered body was found buried under concrete nine days later. Chilean prosecutors concluded the killing was ordered by the Venezuelan government and carried out through a Venezuelan gang, part of a growing practice of outsourcing violence that offers plausible deniability. In October 2025, gunmen in Bogotá opened fire on exiled activists Yendri Velásquez and Luis Peche. Fortunately, they survived their multiple gunshot wounds.

Weak response

In March 2025, a New York jury convicted two members of an Eastern European crime ring hired by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard over a 2022 plot to kill exiled journalist Masih Alinejad at her Brooklyn home. This June, a UK court convicted two men of spying on UK-based Hong Kong democracy activists, and in July, it convicted those responsible for a knife attack on exiled Iranian television presenter Pouria Zeraati. The USA has imposed visa bans on Thai officials responsible for forcibly returning Uyghurs to China.

Yet these are exceptions in a pattern of host states quietly enabling the repression they claim to oppose. On top of failing to do enough to prevent transnational repression on their soil, many are facilitating it through their border and immigration systems, with geopolitical calculations and political pressure to curb immigration numbers trumping human rights protections.

In June, Germany deported Tajik opposition activist Asadullo Boboev and his son despite a documented risk of arrest. Tajik authorities detained Boboev on arrival. The USA has repeatedly returned Russians to the authoritarian government they fled, and has let officials from Iran’s consulate into US detention facilities to help process Iranian asylum seekers for deportation, including Christian converts and women’s rights protesters. In 2025, the UK reopened the door to extraditions to Hong Kong, five years after suspending cooperation over the territory’s draconian national security law. The Trump administration’s 2025 dismantling of USAID and freeze on democracy funding have cut off support that once helped threatened activists relocate and rebuild their lives.

The European Parliament, the G7 and the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights have all formally acknowledged transnational repression as an assault on human rights and state sovereignty, but recognition hasn’t brought stronger responses. Democratic states must resist pressure, impose consequences on foreign officials who order transnational repression and refrain from returning exiles to face danger. Democracies must not prioritise calculations of trade and diplomacy over the protection of the people seeking safety.

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 a Professor of Comparative Politics at Universidad ORT Uruguay.

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

On 11 September 2001 I was in New York, on one of my frequent visits to the United Nations, to which I was tied by a consultancy contract. That morning I woke up late, around eleven, sleeping off the jet lag of the flight from Italy. I was staying at the Hyatt Park, today the Millennium. A hotel a few metres from the Glass Palace, built to serve the world of the United Nations.

Roberto Savio

When I came down to the lobby, I was taken aback by an extreme state of agitation, from the staff to the guests. I tried to speak to a bellboy I knew, but he ran off without answering. So I went to reception, where everyone was on the telephone and no one paid me any attention. Finally, someone I knew told me: “They’ve attacked the Twin Towers!” And then she too rushed away.

At that point, with the professional deformation of the journalist, I went out into the street to take a taxi and get to the scene. But the street was deserted. Not a car in sight, and the few passers-by were running as well, certainly to get home.

So I did the only intelligent thing left to me, which was to watch television. The images were clear and terrible. But the anchors were groping in total darkness, in a bewilderment I had never seen. It was clear that this was an attack and not an accident. But by whom? And why? The CBS presenter was asking: “But who could wish America harm, when we have always helped the whole world?” And the one on NBC: “The Evil Empire is over, it set with the fall of the Berlin Wall twelve years ago. Where does this hatred come from?”

New York comes to a halt

On the day of the attack, as on the day after, New York ceased to exist. The streets were deserted. Shops, restaurants, supermarkets, closed. There was no public transport. In my hotel, where the staff had not turned up, the managers improvised pathetic sandwiches, which was all that could be offered to the guests to keep them fed. Everyone was at home digesting the shock, avoiding unpredictable dangers, and watching television. Only on the second day, beyond the appalling images of people falling from the sky, of office workers and firemen covered in a mantle of ash, did figures and data begin to appear. And in those days, the American dream vanished.

The American myth and its crisis

The United States had been the clear winner of the Second World War. And from then on, the undisputed leader of the world, opposed only by the Evil Empire, the Soviet Union. But American citizens saw the socialist world as politically absurd and economically backward, a place people were constantly fleeing in order to take refuge in the world of freedom, democracy and prosperity, the United States. It was they who had set in motion the reconstruction of Europe, which, though historically the centre of the West, was by then an arm of American hegemony. And their aid to the development of the Third World had saved millions of people from hunger and famine. In the collective imagination, this took on enormous proportions, which had nothing to do with reality. Shortly before 11 September, the New York Times had published a survey according to which the American “in the street” believed that development aid amounted to anywhere from a minimum of 5 per cent of Gross Product up to 10 per cent. In fact it was 0.10.

The common feeling in those days was disbelief. In the history of the United States, Americans had first read about and then watched wars, massacres and every kind of violence as distant events, even when their own sons were involved, as in the Second World War. But they had never suffered an attack at home. And the fact that this had been possible was the first, subconscious feeling of distrust towards the institutions — which, with other events and with time, would become an important part of today’s political reality. Until then, polls had always recorded a serene confidence in a State that guaranteed security.

From the American dream to Trump and Musk

To make an effective analysis of how the American dream progressively faded would require far more space than we have. But let me try to summarise the threads of the carpet that slowly covered the United States we knew, replacing them with those of Trump and Musk.

First of all, it should be remembered that in the decade of the Eighties a number of things happened that carried great significance not only globally, but with great weight inside the United States.

The first was the Conference of Heads of State in Cancún, in 1981, convened by the United Nations to continue the dialogue for a New World Order based on cooperation and international solidarity, adopted by acclamation by the General Assembly in 1973. I was head of communications for the Summit, and I lived it from the inside. The 25 most representative heads of state of the moment were there, and from Indira Gandhi to Mitterrand, from Nyerere to Trudeau, all spoke of the need to strengthen international cooperation. When Reagan’s turn came, elected shortly before, his speech was categorical, and was later taken up by Thatcher: “American citizens elected me to serve their interests and not those of others. And therefore I do not accept the straitjacket of United Nations resolutions. From now on, America will choose its own road.”

In those same years, at American urging, the international community adopted the Washington Consensus, drawn up by the American Treasury, the Inter-American Development Bank and the World Bank. The consensus broke with the economic doctrines that had prevailed since the end of the war. It eliminated every social component, making the market and its laws of absolute competition the centre of society. The State was to withdraw from its central role and let the market take its place. Expenditure that was not immediately productive, such as health and education, was to be taken over by the private sector. And competition, at every level, from the individual to the global, was to be the yardstick by which success is judged.

The result was that many factories and companies moved to countries with lower labour costs and fewer controls. America lost millions of jobs, of people who until then had been a middle class — white, rural, with a social conscience. But the same happened in the rural world, of white, conservative Americans with little education and an unconscious racism towards workers of colour.

The wars and the financial collapse

Nor should it be forgotten that after the attack on the Twin Towers, the United States began the war in Afghanistan, from which it would withdraw ignominiously twenty years later. And shortly afterwards, in 2003, it began the invasion of Iraq, from which it withdrew in 2011, giving life to the Islamic Caliphate (ISIS), which would become a great element of destabilisation throughout the Middle East. During these years, Americans discover that their country is not invincible. It was supposed to overcome the trauma of Vietnam. Instead, the failure of the most powerful military machine in the world continues. In the end, all that will remain is a tragic balance sheet of ruins and dead, and a total expenditure of around eight trillion dollars. To put it in perspective, the American budget today is thirty trillion dollars.

But in my view, the final blow to the American dream came a few years later, with the collapse of Wall Street, an event which once again found me present while it was happening. Finance without controls had gone so far as to turn the stock exchange into a genuine casino, a place of ever riskier bets. Under Clinton, in 1999, a law was repealed which since 1923 had established a clear separation between deposit banks (those serving citizens and businesses, loans and mortgages) and investment banks, that is, banks of speculation. The capital of the deposit banks, which were not very profitable, flowed into the investment banks. Americans do not say, as we Europeans do, that they “gamble” on the stock exchange, but that they “invest” in it. And a great many citizens do so, as do their pension funds.

In 2008 the speculative bubble bursts, sweeps away Lehman Brothers, an icon of Wall Street, and gives rise to a crisis which obviously affects the whole world. It is calculated that all the countries of the world together had to commit some 20,000 dollars in rescue money for every citizen of the planet in order to avoid a total collapse of finance. In the crisis, millions upon millions of Americans lose their savings. Their pensions too are in danger. Since the decade of the Eighties, the bargaining power of the unions has been in continuous decline. Wages in real, purchasing terms have been steadily falling. Many citizens are struggling with precarious and part-time jobs with which they can barely reach the end of the month. Many have to hold down two jobs in order to survive. The poverty rate rises to 15 per cent, and child poverty to African levels. UNICEF’s figures are dramatic. And so begins the conviction that the elites are the enemies of the people, that politics no longer has anything to do with citizens’ real concerns. Electoral abstention increases. And so the immigrant, the labour force on which America was built, becomes the enemy who takes my job, pollutes my child’s classroom, takes my place in the hospital, and commits crimes and outrages.

Religion, sovereignism and the new right

It is not only politics that digs out this feeling of frustration and anger, which explains Trump’s great success. It is also religion. Fundamentalist evangelicals now number 60 million in the United States, and their message takes up exactly the economic and social vision of the Washington Consensus. We must compete, because God judges us by our success; whoever is poor is poor because he has not fought. They support an Israel that recovers its ancient kingdom of Samaria and Judea (and therefore a vast ethnic cleansing), because they preach that Jesus will make a “second coming”, a return to earth, only when Israel has returned to the time of Jesus. And in this world flourishes the sovereignism of Bannon, who wants to turn the right into a great international (later overshadowed by Musk, who wants an anti-system sovereignism of the far right). Catholic integralism flourishes, embraced by J. Vance, the vice-president placed there by Silicon Valley and a possible next President. The integralism that leads the Secretary of Defense (or rather of War, as he prefers it) to bring religion into the armed forces, to present the war against Iran in terms of religion. And a population in which the level of economic and social distress reaches 20 per cent sees the flourishing of the first trillionaire in history (let us look at a trillion: 1,000,000,000,000), who boasts of paying no taxes, eliminates American development aid, and dismisses tens of thousands of public servants without criterion.

The internet and the end of shared truth

Shortly afterwards comes the development of communications technology. In 2004 Facebook is born, Reddit in 2005, Twitter in 2006. All at once, millions of Americans find themselves connected to one another, bypassing the enormous media system of the United States, which was in any case in few hands. I was one of the great champions of the internet, until (I believe it was Bill Gates) someone launched a slogan: “Now it is not important to know; it is important to know where to look” — which brought me to a state of great concern. If I find, but do not possess, what I have looked for, it will slide off me, like water off a goose’s back.

But the problem is that the internet was not born as a common good, as a service for humanity. It was born as a source of profit, and with the orgy of available information, being consulted became fundamental. Hence the abandonment of any meaningful mechanism of ethical or professional control over the information in circulation. So, in order to keep the connection and not lose the user, priority went to the most sensational, extraordinary, striking information. Before long this would be exploited by creators of false or tendentious news, with a great flowering of conspiracy theories which, for example, see in the President of the Republic and the Pope a network of paedophiles covered by the secret services. I read, again I think in the NYT, that the FBI estimated at 45 million the number of people adhering to these conspiracies, which stripped the institutions of all legitimacy. And so the internet gave them a megaphone, which carried the most incredible ideas from the bar to the whole of society. And above all to the extremists, infinitely more fanatical than ordinary citizens.

Numerous studies and statistics tell us of the impact of the isolation that leads young people, instead of socialising, to shut themselves up in the internet, in a virtual world in which AI becomes the real friend and adviser. This falls upon a society that has always idealised the individual against the social, and where a winning political line sees in the reduction of the State the freedom of citizens, in taxes an unjust expropriation of the fruit of their labour, and in social spending, such as medical care, a clear socialist imprint.

Obviously, a reaction of suffering is under way in the United States. The Mayor of New York, who declares himself a socialist, has been elected, and other openly progressive figures are entering the field. But this is happening with a strong polarisation, with an intolerant and profound confrontation, which offers no glimpse, in the immediate future, of a path towards national consensus, but quite the contrary. Trump calls the Democrats “communists”, and politics has by now become the great instrument of division. The future does not look at all like a return to the America of dreams.

Bin Laden’s legacy and Europe

Bin Laden could never have imagined, in destroying the Twin Towers, that he would set in motion such a mechanism of destruction.

But his legacy is not measured only in treaties. It is measured also in everyday gestures, which we have stopped recognising as such. Today no one is surprised at having to arrive at the airport two hours before departure: shoes and belts in the tray, liquids in hundred-millilitre bottles, queues, scanners, searches. The new generations experience it as a law of nature, because they never knew the before. It was enough to turn up half an hour ahead, check in, and go straight to the gate. No controls. That world disappeared on a September morning, and it has never come back. This is terrorism’s most silent victory: not to have changed our ideas, but our habits, to the point that we no longer remember having had different ones.

We should also analyse how this mechanism did not remain in the United States. With different characteristics, and in a different reality, it spread to Europe as well. One need only look at the Maastricht Treaty, on which our European Union is based. Concluded in the Dutch town in 1992, at the height of the intoxication with the extreme capitalism of the Washington Consensus, it provides for obligations and competences in the economic field alone. The social field is part of an added document, which has no binding value. And now, out of 27 member states of the Union, a majority are sovereignist, and therefore opposed to any real power for Brussels. Next year we will have elections in Spain, France, Italy and Poland. Countries of great weight. If sovereignism prevails in these too, Europeans — who look upon Trump as an aberration — will have fulfilled his dream: to destroy the European Union.

Publisher of OtherNews, Italian-Argentine Roberto Savio is an economist, journalist, communication expert, political commentator, activist for social and climate justice and advocate of an anti-neoliberal global governance. He is co-founder of Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency and its President Emeritus.

IPS UN Bureau

Credit: Cia Pak / UN

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 15 2026 (IPS)

As the race for the election of a new Secretary-General (UNSG) gathers momentum, the spotlight is on the 193-member General Assembly, the highest policy making body at the United Nations, which has refused to assert itself and continues to play a subservient role in the elections of UNSGs.

Perhaps this year will be no exception either.

According to Article 97 of the United Nations Charter, the Secretary-General is appointed by the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council (SC), which puts forward a single recommended candidate.

Traditionally, the General Assembly (GA) has always approved that recommendation, usually by acclamation or a resolution

But the GA has never rejected a SC nominee. Despite a growing demand for a female SG in the 81- year history of the UN, what if the SC nominee this year is a male candidate.?

Isn’t it time for the GA to assert its authority and reject any candidates– male or female—who lacks the right credentials for the post of Chief Administrative Officer of the United Nations? Isn’t it also time for the GA to cease being a mere rubber stamp — approving without questioning the Security Council decision?

Richard Gowan, Director for Global Issues and Institutions and a longtime UN watcher at the Brussels-based Crisis Group, told Inter Press Service (IPS): “I really, really doubt that the General Assembly would reject a candidate approved by the Security Council– unless he or she was a certified axe murderer. And even then, it might be a close call.”

There has been a lot of talk about the General Assembly asserting itself more in the selection process. But member states are also worried that the veto powers in the Council will not be able to agree on anyone at all. There is more and more talk of the Council reaching the end of the year without making a recommendation, he said.

“ I think that there will be a deal in the end, but to be frank if the veto powers do agree on a candidate, a lot of countries will conclude that they have to accept him or her. Even if diplomats in New York think the person on offer is sub-standard, their political bosses in capitals will not want to offend Washington, Beijing and Moscow by challenging the choice”.

* I can imagine a situation in which the veto powers force through a candidate from outside Latin America and the Caribbean, leading the Latin Americans to abstain or vote against them in protest over the breach of the regional rotation principle. Although a lot of members do really want a female Secretary-General, I find it less likely that a lot of states would vote against a man on principle.”

* I think that a lot of diplomats would worry about damaging their relations with the next Secretary-General before they even take office. And in the final analysis, there will be a tendency to say that it is better to give the next UN chief a broad endorsement for the sake of the organization. Turning the next Secretary-General into a lame duck in advance would look bad, declared Gowan.

Jesselina Rana, UN Advisor, CIVICUS, a global alliance of civil society organisations and activists, told IPS in theory the GA can push back if a woman is not recommended, once voting starts. It only takes a simple majority present and voting to appoint the SG. In practice, it never has happened.

Real pressure has to come earlier. This means the GA asking for multiple candidates before the Security Council makes its recommendation or even holding GA straw polls to gauge preferences., she said.

Dr Palitha Kohona, former Chief of the UN Treaty Section, told IPS to seek clarity from the Charter, which substantially reflects the reality of the world after the Second World War, would not be particularly helpful in the appointment of a new SG.

“We continue to be dominated by that reality which in the view of some commentators, including the present writer, is outdated. Practices have been developed which essentially perpetuate that reality. Whatever the P5 decides is likely to prevail.”

The Charter itself says little on the appointment process of the SG. Article 97 stipulates that the General Assembly will appoint a Secretary-General on the recommendation of the Security Council. Resolutions 11/1 of 1946 and 54/246 of 1997 are important in this regard, said Dr Kohona, a former Permanent Representative of Sri Lanka to the United Nations.

The Security Council (SC) has continued to play the preeminent role in the selection of a candidate for the position of SG. In fact, the role played by the veto wielding Permanent 5 (P5) is critical.

In the first instance, he pointed out, the SC will seek consensus prior to recommending a candidate to the GA, although 9 votes in favour of a candidate in the Council would suffice to progress the matter. If consensus is not feasible, the Council will vote on the candidates available.

The practice of conducting straw polls among the members of the SC has become popular in recent times. To the disconcert of many members of the world body, the recommendation is adopted at a private meeting in accordance with Rule 48 of the Provisional Rules of Procedure. The P5 has fiercely hung on to this privilege.

“It is now almost mandatory for aspirants to the post of SG to undertake visits to the capitals of the P5 to seek their blessings and not say or do anything that would cause them unease”.

In South Asia, people are familiar with the somewhat similar practice of making offerings to deities in order to obtain divine blessings prior to undertaking any important task.

This was not always the case. When, in 1951, Trygve Lie was vetoed by the Soviet Union, as he sought his second term, the US had him appointed through a clear majority of votes in the GA.

Given the difficulties that Trygve Lie faced subsequently, especially in dealing with a hostile Soviet Union, it would be unlikely that such a break from accepted practice would be adopted today. The life of a SG appointed in this manner would simply be too difficult, he argued.

While many would consider that at least now a woman should occupy the position of SG, the present writer subscribes to the view, that the best candidate should be picked to head this supremely important global position, irrespective of gender.

“The ideal candidate should be able to work effectively with the P5, maintain the confidence of the members of the Organization, manage a complex universal bureaucracy and advance the goals and ideals of the Character without fear or favour, declared Dr Kohona.

Meanwhile, in an article published in PassBlue last month, Graca Machel, a co-founder and the Deputy Chair of The Elders, an independent group of global leaders, said historically, the selection of a new secretary-general has been treated as the domain of the UN Security Council, especially its five permanent members, known as “the P5.”

But the wording of the UN Charter is clear that while the Council should recommend a candidate, the appointment is made by the General Assembly. If the P5 propose an unsuitable candidate for reasons of realpolitik, the states of the General Assembly can and should reject them and insist that more suitable individuals be put forward said Machel, the only woman in modern history to have served as First Lady of two countries: South Africa and Mozambique.

“The concentration of such power in the hands of only five member states — Britain, China, France, Russia and the US — has never been consistent with the democratic spirit of multilateralism. It is particularly indefensible today, when two permanent members, Russia and the US, have recently breached the Charter through launching unilateral wars of aggression,” she pointed out.

The concentration of such power in the hands of only five member states — Britain, China, France, Russia and the US — has never been consistent with the democratic spirit of multilateralism. It is particularly indefensible today, when two permanent members, Russia and the US, have recently breached the Charter through launching unilateral wars of aggression.

“As an African woman who fought in my country’s liberation struggle and has spent decades working for peace, justice and human dignity, I find it profoundly troubling that the UN still reflects, at its uppermost levels of the Security Council, the power hierarchies of 1945 and the colonial era”, she declared.

All 193 members of the General Assembly bear responsibility for ensuring a credible process and must affirm their commitment to multilateralism, universal human rights and the rules-based international order. They have an obligation to ensure that those principles are reflected in the candidate they support.

“If the Security Council presents a candidate who lacks the independence, experience, integrity and broad confidence required for the office, the General Assembly is not bound to rubber-stamp that choice. Member states have the right and responsibility to demand a candidate worthy of the Charter and of the peoples in whose name the UN acts”.

The next secretary-general cannot be merely an administrator of international consensus, especially when consensus itself is often paralyzed. The office requires a leader with moral courage, political judgment and strategic independence — someone to speak truth to power, to work quietly and effectively behind the scenes and to retain the trust of governments without becoming beholden to any of them, declared Machel.

IPS UN Bureau Report

A report Rebuild Trust: Rigged Economies, Fractured Societies and the Case for Change found that people everywhere believed the system was rigged. Credit: Earth4All

By Umar Manzoor Shah
SRINAGAR, India, Sep 14 2026 (IPS)

An international survey released by Earth4All has found a growing crisis of trust in governments, widespread anger over inequality, and strong public support for major economic reforms, suggesting that many people across the world believe current political and economic systems are failing to serve ordinary citizens.

The report, Rebuild Trust: Rigged Economies, Fractured Societies and the Case for Change, surveyed people in 17 countries representing 58 percent of global GDP, 38 percent of the world’s population, and 37 percent of global carbon emissions. Its findings paint a picture of societies that feel increasingly divided, economically insecure, and disconnected from political institutions.

As per the report, nearly two-thirds of respondents said they believe their country’s economic system is “rigged” to benefit the rich and powerful. Seven in ten said there is too much economic inequality in their country, while 69 percent called for major changes to economic systems to improve life for most people.

“The survey results show a mismatch between public support for economic change and what mainstream political parties are willing to offer,” the report’s authors, Owen Gaffney and Kate Pickett, write. They argue that the findings reveal an opportunity for governments to build new social contracts based on fairness, economic security, and long-term wellbeing.

The survey comes at a time when many countries are grappling with rising living costs, political polarisation, climate pressures, and growing public frustration with institutions.

One of the report’s most striking conclusions is that many people feel their societies are becoming more fractured.

Across the 17 countries surveyed, 67 percent said their country is more divided today than it was a decade ago. More than seven in ten respondents reported serious tensions between supporters of different political parties. Nearly two-thirds saw conflict between rich and poor, while similar numbers perceived tensions between immigrant and native-born populations.

The authors argue that these divisions are linked not only to economic conditions but also to a broader erosion of trust.

“Societies feel themselves coming apart. There is a trust deficit at the heart of societies,” reads the report.

Only 31 percent of respondents said they trust their governments to make decisions that will benefit the majority of people 20 or 30 years into the future. This was one of the lowest-rated measures in the survey.

The report also highlights a less visible issue. Many people feel they are not treated with respect and dignity.

Across all surveyed countries, only 41 percent agreed that people like them are treated with respect and dignity. The authors note that feelings of disrespect and humiliation can fuel political alienation and social resentment.

“A society in which one in four people feel they do not receive respect contains significant combustible material,” the report states. “Many people feel unseen, believe the system is rigged and do not experience their society as a collective enterprise.”

Asian countries included in the survey showed significant differences in public attitudes.

Indonesia emerged as one of the strongest supporters of economic reform. Nearly three-quarters of Indonesians said there is too much inequality in their country, while 74 percent believed the system benefits the wealthy. A remarkable 78 percent supported major economic changes, the highest level among all countries surveyed.

Indonesians also showed strong backing for climate action. Sixty-eight per cent said governments should take strong action against climate change even if it results in higher prices.

Yet Indonesia appeared less polarised than many Western countries. Only 53 percent believed the country is more divided than it was ten years ago, significantly below the global average.

Japan presented a different picture.

Trust in government was among the lowest recorded in the survey. Only 19 percent of Japanese respondents said they trusted their government to make long-term decisions benefiting the majority of citizens. Just one fifth felt they were treated with respect and dignity.

The findings also revealed unexpectedly strong support for authoritarian leadership in Japan. Nearly half of respondents agreed that the country would be better off with a strong leader unconstrained by parliament and elections. Meanwhile, only half said democracy was the best system of government.

India also featured prominently in the survey. According to comparative data in the report, 66 percent of Indian respondents agreed that there is too much economic inequality in the country, close to the international average. India ranked among countries where a majority still felt they were treated with respect and dignity, recording one of the highest scores in the survey on that measure.

Despite widespread frustration with governments and economic systems, the survey found continued support for democracy.

Overall, 68 percent of respondents said democracy remains the best way to govern their country. However, support was not universal. Forty percent also agreed that their country would be better off with a strong leader who does not have to worry about parliament or elections.

The authors describe this as a warning sign rather than a rejection of democracy itself.

In countries such as Brazil and Japan, support for strong leaders reached especially high levels. In Brazil, 51 percent backed the idea of a leader unconstrained by elections, while 63 percent still supported democracy. In Japan, support for strong leadership stood at 46 percent.

The United States presented a contrasting picture. Only 26 percent favoured a strong leader outside democratic constraints, while 68 percent supported democracy as the preferred form of government.

The report warns that declining trust in institutions can create openings for anti-democratic movements if governments fail to address public concerns about fairness and economic opportunity.

Climate Action Retains Public Backing

Despite growing economic anxieties, the survey found continued support for climate action.

More than half of respondents said governments should take strong action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions even if it leads to higher prices. Support was strongest in middle-income countries and weaker among lower-income households and politically conservative respondents.

The authors argue that climate policies are more likely to succeed when paired with measures that address economic inequality and social insecurity.

Public resistance to climate action often grows when people believe they are being asked to bear unfair costs while wealthier groups benefit from the existing system, the report suggests.

Kate Pickett, one of the report’s authors and a well-known researcher on inequality and social wellbeing, has long argued that unequal societies tend to experience weaker social cohesion and lower levels of trust. The findings of the new survey appear to reinforce that argument.

Economic Anxiety Remains Widespread

Beyond questions of trust and politics, the survey highlights persistent worries about basic economic security.

Across the countries surveyed, 41 percent of respondents said they were concerned about having enough money to cover their basic needs during the coming year. Economic anxiety was particularly high in countries facing inflation and financial instability.

Argentina recorded the highest levels of economic insecurity. More than two-thirds of respondents worried about covering basic needs, and 78 percent supported major economic reforms.

Even in wealthier countries, concerns about inequality remained widespread.

In the United States, 62 percent said there was too much inequality. In Sweden, often regarded as one of the world’s more equal societies, 71 percent shared the same view. Australia recorded 64 percent.

The authors argue that economic growth alone is no longer enough to reassure citizens.

Instead, people increasingly judge systems based on fairness, opportunity, and whether prosperity is shared.

The Earth4All initiative was launched by organisations including the Club of Rome, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, the Stockholm Resilience Centre, and the Norwegian Business School. It seeks to identify pathways toward sustainable prosperity and social wellbeing.

The report’s authors say the findings should serve as a wake-up call for political leaders.

Rather than viewing public frustration as a temporary reaction to economic shocks, they argue that governments should recognize it as evidence of deeper structural problems.

The survey reveals what the authors call a “near-universal diagnosis”. Across different political systems, cultures, and income levels, large majorities share the belief that current economic arrangements favour elites while leaving ordinary citizens behind.

IPS UN Bureau Report

An AfD election poster with the message: “Youth come to us”, reminiscent of both Nazi and Communist propaganda.

By Jan Lundius
STOCKHOLM, Sweden, Sep 14 2026 (IPS)

During summer months there is a certain news drought. Nevertheless, this year social media has been crowded with news from wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, while customary tales about grisly murders have not been neglected. In Sweden it is election year and summer reporting has been supplemented by a debate about “hate speech against ethnic groups”. If individual tragedies connected with murders upset people, many seem to be indifferent to the fact that entire population groups are targeted by politicians. Swedish social media is overloaded with outcries about “Muslim” immigration and concerns about Sweden becoming “Islamized” and in danger of being transformed into a new Afghanistan.

Prominent in this hyped propaganda are the Sweden Democrats. A nationalist, social conservative, and populist political party finding its roots in neo-Nazism. In the 2010 elections, this party entered the Swedish parliament with 5.7 percent of the national votes and it now reigns the nation in coalition with other right-wing parties. According to the Statistical Central Bureau, a state agency, was the Sweden Democrats with 18 percent of current approval Sweden’s second largest political party, after the Social Democrats, with 34 percent.

The Sweden Democrat’s chief ideologist is a former high school teacher, Richard Jomshof, who together with three comrades by the turn of the last century managed to steer away Sweden Democrats from the White Power Movement and neo-Nazism, while maintaining the party’s nationalist and anti-immigrant tenor. After the 2022 parliamentary elections the Sweden Democrats became part of the Government. Jomshof left his post as party secretary and became chairman of the Parliamentary Justice Committee, which prepares cases connected with the Swedish judicial system – courts, the prosecution service, the police and correctional services, as well as cases and laws related to the Criminal Code.

Jomshof used his position to propagate for a tougher stance against criminals with a “non-Swedish background” and to promote restrictions on immigration. One of Jomshof’s goals has been to warn Swedes about the “Islamization of our Homeland”. After publishing anti-Islamic cartoons on X Jomshof was close to be removed from his position as chairman of the Justice Committee. However, committee members sided with him while one of them characterized the accusations of “discrediting an entire population group” as nothing more than a common “political yap”. Nevertheless, a year ago, Jomshof stepped down as chair of the Committee, in protest after the Government had banned certain semi-automatic weapons.

After that Jomshof dedicated much of his time to write an “analysis” of Islam and recently published a book called Kafir, an Arab word for “infidel”, which has become a bestseller. Jomshof’s political stance and career as an “expert” on Islam is one example of the polarization that currently characterizes much of European politics – a tendency to turn any individual into a representative of an entire ethnic and/or religious group and throw her/him into one big pot where s/he becomes part of a one single problem – immigration.

Jomshof is an extreme nationalist representing an anti-immigrant political party, but that does not mean that every supporter of Sweden Democrats is a reformed Nazi and stout believer in Jomshof’s generalisations, likewise not every Muslim is a supporter of the extremist Islam Jomshof depicts. It is dangerous to bundle together individuals and label them all as extremists. Recently a young man equipped with sword and helmet entered a Swedish school and killed one pupil while gravely wounding two, a third escaped with minor injuries. He had apparently been inspired by the Norwegian Behring Breivik, who in 2011 massacred 77 people as a gesture to “combat multiculturalism and Muslim immigration”. In 2015, the Swede Anton Lundin-Pettersson murdered three persons for the same reason.

Gaining political advantages through xenophobia is just one ingredient in a larger European political landscape. That a small, marginal political party with Neo-Nazi roots after less than fifteen years ended up in the Swedish government re-confirms a phenomenon present all over Europe. On 15 September, there are general elections in Sweden and next year in France, Spain, Greece, Poland and Italy. All these countries have powerful parties with a nationalistic/xenophobic agenda. In France, the predecessor of National Rally was in 1972 founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen and then included some former members of the Nazi Waffen-SS. The Spanish Vox was established in 2013, benefitting from donations by ultra-conservative lobbies, such as HazteOír and CitizenGo. The Greek Golden Dawn was dissolved in 2020, after members of its top echelons had been convicted for serious crimes. In 2023, the Greek Supreme Court blocked its successor party, Hellenes, from participating in the general elections, a ruling that still stands for the elections in 2027. However, a plethora of smaller parties have taken up its agenda. The Polish Law and Justice Party is a conservative outbreak from the labor movement Solidarność, with a huge following and an agenda based on political Catholicism, strong conservatism, anti-liberalism, nationalism, and Euroscepticism. Brothers of Italy finds its roots in MSI, Movimento Sociale Italiano, a fascist party founded after the death of Mussolini. Through the general elections in 2013, Brothers of Italy gained nine seats in the Parliament, after obtaining two percent of the votes. According to the Italian polling and research firm Only Numbers, Brothers of Italy is currently Italy’s largest party and after the 2022 elections its leader, Giorgia Meloni, is Prime Minister of Italy. How could those originally small parties, some with a quite sordid background, in such a short time become so powerful?

One reason might be that by exposing outrageous and extreme opinions, which a political establishment would be ashamed of uttering, fringe parties might obtain attention from a generally liberal press. While warning the general public about such “fanatics”, liberal media spread their ideas and create an increasing interest. In a well calculated moment before the Swedish elections, Richard Jomshof published his untrustworthy and generalizing book about Islam. Although it was issued by a small and rather unknown publisher it received extreme attention by Swedish media – TV, newspapers and the web – and thus became an immediate bestseller. As Oscar Wilde once stated: “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about”.

A similar phenomenon is currently under way in Italy. In 2023, the general Roberto Vannacci self-published a book on Amazon, Il mondo al contrario , The Upside-Down World, sparking a furious backlash and drawing heavy criticism for its contents. The Italian Armed Forces quickly distanced themselves from General Vannacci’s ideas. The defence minister stated that he had “discredited the Army, the Defence and the Constitution.” Vannacci, grateful for all attention, continues to spread his homophobia and misogyny, attacking immigration policies and environmentalism, while defending Russia’s war on Ukraine. He is now a welcome guest on TV, participates in debates with reputed politicians and academicians, while he recently has founded a political party.

The recent landslide election victory of the AfD, Alternative for Germany, in the federal state of Saxony-Anhalt has sent shock waves through liberal Europe. While being part of the larger Federal Republic of Germany, Saxony-Anhalt hosts just three percent of the nation’s entire population and has its second lowest GDP per capita. Nevertheless, the victory of its Saxony branch now fuels AfD’s hope to take the reins of the entire German Republic. AfD’s ultra-nationalistic agenda claims that Germany has had enough of guilt feelings about the repression and mass killings of the Nazi Regime. The past has to be reinterpreted and the party now asserts that Germany is in need of “less Hitler and more Bismarck”, i.e. the Chancellor who in the 19th century united Germany under the slogan “Blood and Iron”.

AfD has accordingly re-introduced the concept of Völkisch, folksy, used by the Nazis to denote a battle against “radicalism” in the form of modern art and foreign influences, while fomenting pride in everything the Party deemed as “German”. However, the concept was older and originally developed in opposition to the socio-cultural changes of modernity. AfD’s Saxony-Anhalt party programme intends to purge ”slander” of Germany from school education. No funding will be granted to organisations maintaining sites of Nazi terror – AfD’s leadership has condemned Berlin’s Holocaust Monument as a “national disgrace” – and the the party has also demanded that the world-famous Bauhaus complex in Dessau ought to be closed. In the 1920s this learning centre was a highly influential focus of innovative approaches to art and architecture, until the Nazis closed it down in 1933. It did later re-emerge as a museum, research centre, and cultural landmark, being part of the UNESCO Heritage Sites. The Saxony-Anhalt branch of AfD is furthermore a representative of what has been called eastalgia, i.e. nostalgia for the times when Saxony-Anhalt was part of the Communist, Soviet dominated East Germany. Consistent with this perception and displeasure with the central government’s spending on Ukraine’s defence, AfD is a stout supporter of Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Before the 1990 reunification of West and East Germany, Saxony-Anhalt was an important centre for a polluting heavy industry. One of East Germany’s most famous authors, Monika Maron, wrote a novel called Flugasche, Flying Ashes, in which she described the bleak, contaminated land of Saxony. Since then, the German Federal Republic has successfully cleaned up the traces of a ruthless industrialization and gradually transformed Saxony-Anhalt into an increasingly green state. However, this initiative came at the cost of the shutting down of several large industries, resulting in increased unemployment. Since 1990, Saxony-Anhalt has lost 750 000 inhabitants, mainly skilled young people, who have moved to the “West”, a fourth of the state’s population. Those left behind are an aging population and unskilled, unemployed young people, while the state has been partly repopulated by immigrants coming from foreign countries. They now constitute a tenth of the population. This has left a fertile ground for a populist party attracting disappointed old people and depressed youngsters, presented with the chimera of a happy pre-war Germany and/or Communist East Germany, which in reality are now forgotten and probably never existed.

A general sense of insecurity, reduced GDP and increasing unemployment harass several Europeans, not least young people. An embellished nostalgia for an actually forgotten past, assumed to have been annihilated by hordes of immigrants and corrupt liberals, has made Europeans affected by ultra-conservative parties, promulgating hazardous and divisive ideas. Representatives of murky ideologies are by media provided an attention they do not deserve. Excessive media interest, especially when marginal fanatics begin to spread their poisonous seed, might strengthen their outreach. Critical analysis, research and education are despised by dark forces who deliberately divulge their message through easy-to-understand, diluted and digestible propaganda and fake news. An ominous development that demands urgent action.

IPS UN Bureau

Most free trade advocates falsely claim that comparative advantage ensures developmental gains from trade liberalisation. Mainstream trade theory does not promise that partial trade liberalisation guarantees optimal international specialisation.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Why should developing countries specialise in producing and exporting mineral or agricultural primary commodities? After all, most economists recognise the greater gains in growth, employment, and income from dynamic modern activities, especially manufacturing.

Comparative advantage supposedly gained by trade liberalisation supposedly ensures gains from international specialisation. However, tropical agriculture has instead experienced falling relative prices rather than higher-value-added secondary and tertiary activities in the North.

As Hans Singer and Raul Prebisch showed in 1950, export prices for primary commodities have fallen much more over the long term relative to the prices of manufactures. Bilge Erten has shown these trends continuing into the early 21st century.

Evidence since the late 20th century suggests that the prices of manufactured goods produced by developing countries have fallen relative to those of more sophisticated, high-tech goods from more developed economies.

Intellectual property rents
Due to intense competition among developing countries producing ‘generic’ manufactures, developed-country firms secure higher rents from intellectual property rights (IPRs) – namely, ‘surplus’ from monopoly power so conferred – on their manufactured exports.

The latter are priced higher due to the ‘exclusive’ monopoly power protected by IPRs and ‘branding’ strengthened by transnational law with the establishment of the multilateral World Trade Organization and related law on trade-related intellectual property rights (TRIPS).

In fact, the prices of generic primary commodities and ‘unbranded’ manufactures have fallen due to more intense competition. In contrast, the prices of ‘exclusive’ products, due to monopoly IPRs and transnational corporate branding, remain higher.

However, such rents do not accrue to mass-produced generic products, whether primary commodities or manufactures made with easily accessible materials and production techniques, subject to intense market competition.

The last decade-long commodity ‘super-cycle’ price boom, which ended around 2004, generated windfall earnings and investible capital. While it undoubtedly lifted many boats for growth, if not development, it did not contradict longer-term trends.

Biased theory
The economic literature on development, trade, and monopolistic competition recognises the possibility of increasing – not just diminishing – returns to scale in manufacturing, enabling average costs to fall.

Such gains from trade are not from one-time ‘static’ improvements in resource allocation. Instead, these benefits stem from dynamic changes driven by production expansion, specialisation, and differentiation for larger markets.

Potential gains from greater external market access can be significant, but only if building on an existing industrial base, capacity and capabilities. Proactive support through appropriate industrial, investment, and technology policies can be crucial.

This pragmatic developmental approach to trade policy contradicts the neoclassical Heckscher-Ohlin ‘pure’ trade theory, the received conventional wisdom invoked by contemporary advocates of trade liberalisation.

Some Keynesian economists promoted balance-of-payments-constrained growth. Cross-border flows of goods and services are determined by the level and growth rate of economic activity, with the exchange rate determining relative prices.

This approach, implying fewer gains from trade, is rejected by trade liberalisation advocates. Developing countries’ gains from specialisation are reduced by falling relative prices, with consumers benefiting from productivity gains at the expense of producers.

If developing-country firms do not manufacture products at productivity levels comparable to those in developed countries, claims of trade gains from consumers’ ‘love of variety’ become quite irrelevant.

Agricultural trade liberalisation
The Western push for agricultural trade liberalisation sought to eliminate tariffs to ensure food security while ignoring subsidies that developed countries could afford.

Although agricultural export subsidies have been largely eliminated, OECD food producers continue to benefit from production subsidies, thereby enabling productivity and trade gains.

As many developing countries became net importers of subsidised agribusiness exports from OECD exporters, price increases due to subsidy withdrawal hurt consumers, especially in developing countries.

Comparable gains in developing-country agriculture have often been modest due to the decline in infrastructure and support services, especially after the imposition of the ‘neoliberal’ Washington Consensus by the West in the 1980s.

The increasing private foreign corporate domination of agricultural research, development, and extension has also significantly reduced net gains to developing-country smallholder farmers.

Neoliberal reforms, including structural adjustment programmes, have reduced, contracted out or privatised government and public-sector alternatives. This raised the costs of credit, marketing, and inputs, including seeds, fertilisers, herbicides, pesticides, machinery and fuel.

While trade liberalisation of manufactured imports eroded the policy space needed for investment and technology policies for development, agricultural trade liberalisation has undermined ‘food security’ in most developing countries.

Thus, many African net food-exporting nations became net food importers in the 1980s, following the neoliberal reforms imposed by structural adjustment programmes on indebted nations.

IPS UN Bureau

Credit: Conny Odengrund / Wiki Commons

By Jordan Ryan
Sep 11 2026 (IPS)

 
Late in August I stood at Dag Hammarskjöld’s grave in Uppsala. It is a quiet place, a long way from New York and from the wars the United Nations exists to prevent.

He died sixty-five years ago this month, on 18 September 1961, in an aircraft crash near Ndola, in what is now Zambia. He was fifty-six, on his way to seek a ceasefire in the Congo, where the secession of the mineral-rich province of Katanga had drawn a newly independent country into conflict and great-power rivalry.

Leaving the cemetery, I found myself thinking about the office he held and about a practice he helped build that the organisation has praised ever since but never fully sustained.

Hammarskjöld treated preventive diplomacy as a working method. He travelled repeatedly into crises, used the Secretary-General’s office when local conflicts threatened to become arenas of great-power rivalry, and kept an independent United Nations presence where member states could not or would not go. He negotiated before positions hardened and violence became harder to stop.

Suez, Lebanon and the Congo were very different crises, but he approached them as exercises of the same craft. He did not always succeed. The point was not that prevention always worked. It was that he regarded it as part of the job.

Preventive diplomacy has been restated as a priority many times since. Boutros Boutros-Ghali gave it a doctrine in An Agenda for Peace. Kofi Annan strengthened early-warning and mediation capacity. Ban Ki-moon issued the first Secretary-General’s report devoted to preventive diplomacy in 2011. António Guterres made the case again in A New Agenda for Peace. Member states restated it in the Pact for the Future, and the UN80 Initiative is reviewing how mandates are designed, implemented and assessed.

Doctrine is not what is missing.

Prevention remains politically difficult because success is hard to prove. A crisis that does not happen leaves no ruins, no displaced population and no peacekeeping budget against which the cost of prevention can be measured. Governments that will pay heavily once violence has escalated are often reluctant to fund the diplomacy that might have kept it from escalating.

The problem is also institutional. The United Nations is often better at identifying risk than at acting on it early. Sudan, eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Sahel, Myanmar and Gaza all illustrate, in different ways, how warning signs can accumulate while political space for preventive action narrows. Information moves through the system, but knowledge does not create an obligation to respond.

That is the problem the next Secretary-General will inherit.

Member states choosing António Guterres’s successor have asked useful questions about gender, regional representation, management and reform. They have also asked about prevention. Candidates have described it as a central responsibility of the office, proposed stronger mediation capacity and invoked Article 99 of the Charter, which allows the Secretary-General to bring to the Security Council’s attention any matter that may threaten international peace and security.

The harder question is what the office will do when warning signs are mounting, information is moving through the United Nations system, and the Security Council is unable or unwilling to act.

Hammarskjöld confronted that problem in a different era. In 1960, during the Congo crisis, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev demanded his resignation and proposed replacing the Secretary-General with a three-person ‘troika’ representing competing political blocs.

Hammarskjöld refused.

“It is very easy to resign; it is not so easy to stay on,” he told the General Assembly on 3 October 1960. “It is very easy to bow to the wish of a big Power. It is another matter to resist.”

Earlier in the same statement he had explained whom the United Nations was for.

“It is not the Soviet Union or indeed any other big Powers who need the United Nations for their protection,” he said. “It is all the others.”

That remains the strongest argument for an independent Secretary-General.

The major powers possess other instruments. Smaller and middle powers have fewer. When the Security Council works, the Secretary-General is one actor among several. When it does not, the office may still provide a channel for mediation, bring neglected crises into international view and give political weight to countries that cannot command attention through military or economic power.

That is why Hammarskjöld’s example matters now. He answered Khrushchev in public, and he could do so because of what he had already done in Suez, in Lebanon and in the Congo. His authority came from judgement, discretion and a willingness to keep working when powerful governments wanted him to stop.

Nor should prevention depend on finding another exceptional individual.

Sixty-five years after Ndola, the better tribute is to finish some of the work Hammarskjöld left behind: choose a Secretary-General prepared to exercise the office’s independence while prevention still has a chance to work, and give that office the political and institutional support to do so.

The great powers can still look after themselves.

The United Nations still matters most to “all the others.”

The author at Dag Hammarskjöld’s grave in Uppsala.

Related articles:

A Hundred Dollars for War, One for Peace
Governing the Ungovernable
When Destruction Becomes Policy: What the Munich Security Report Reveals About the Future of Global Governance

Jordan Ryan is a Senior Consultant to the Folke Bernadotte Academy and Senior Counsel (Social Impact) for Hamilton Advisors. He is also a former Vice President for Peace Programs at The Carter Center, where he led strategic planning and implementation of peacebuilding initiatives worldwide from 2015-2018.

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

IPS UN Bureau

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 11 2026 (IPS)

When over 130 world leaders arrive in New York for the high-level segment of the General Assembly next week– it will be rare to hear hard-hitting, headline-grabbing political statements from the podium.

The speeches before the 193-member General Assembly, and UN press briefings that occasionally follow, are mostly long-winded and monotonously boring. The exceptions, however, are rare.

When Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi visited the UN in September 2009, a report in the London Guardian said he “grabbed his 15 minutes of fame at the UN building in New York and ran with it. He ran with it so hard he stretched it to an hour and 40 minutes, six times longer than his allotted slot, to the dismay of UN organizers”.

Gaddafi fully lived up to his reputation for eccentricity, bloody-mindedness and extreme verbiage, as he tore up a copy of the UN charter in front of startled delegates, accused the Security Council of being an al-Qaida like terrorist body, called for George Bush and Tony Blair to be put on trial for the Iraq war, demanded $7.7 trillion in compensation for the ravages of colonialism on Africa, and wondered whether swine flu was a biological weapon created in a military laboratory.

Incidentally, according to one news report, there were 112 different spellings of the Libyan leader’s name, both in English and Arabic, including Muammar el-Qaddafi, Muammar Gaddafi, Muammar al-Gathafi, Muammar El Kadhafi, Moammar el Kazzafi, Moamer, El Qathafi, Mu’Ammar, Gadafi, and Moamar Gaddafi, amongst others.

The Wall Street Journal ran a cartoon making fun of the multiple spellings, with a visiting reporter, on a one-on-one interview in Tripoli, told the Libyan leader: ”My editor sent me to find out whether you are Qaddafi, Khaddafi, Gadafi, Qathafi or Kadhafi?”

A memorable Soviet-US confrontation took place at the General Assembly hall in October 1960 during the height of the Cold War, but this time it was between the USSR and the Philippines, considered a close US ally at that time.

The Filipino delegate Lorenzo Sumulong, lashed out at the USSR, pointing out that “the peoples of Eastern Europe and elsewhere (under Soviet domination) have been deprived of the free exercise of their civil and political rights and which have been swallowed up, so to speak, by the Soviet Union”.

Incensed by the remark, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who was leading the Soviet delegation, hit back with a vengeance, describing the Filipino as “a jerk, a stooge, and a lackey”, and a “toady of American imperialism” –words that are rarely heard in the General Assembly or the Security Council these days. Forget the North Korean refrain: “Running Dogs of Imperialism”.

But an equally legendary story was the longstanding rumor that Khrushchev removed his shoe and kept banging on his desk, to be recognized, on a point of order.

The only evidence was a single photo in circulation, which was dismissed by some as a fake concocted by US intelligence – and that was long before the age of digital technology and photo-shopping.

The British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, who was at the podium, jokingly responded to the Soviet leader’s angry outbursts by famously asking the Speaker: “I should like that to be translated, if I may,’ amid loud laughter.

UN speeches are translated simultaneously into six of the UN’s official languages— Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish– but never the banging of shoes.

In another bygone era, Ugandan leader Idi Amin caused a stir when he tried to praise British Prime Minister Edward Heath. He told the assembly that Heath was just like Adolf Hitler—before quickly insisting he meant Winston Churchill.

And back in October 2006, the civilian government in Thailand was ousted when Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra was in New York to address the General Assembly. Instead of returning home, where he was likely to face charges of corruption, Thaksin opted to fly to London, where he was in virtual political exile.

The bloodless military coup against a democratically elected government in Thailand forced the United States to review its military relations and suspend aid to one of Washington’s long-standing political allies in Southeast Asia.

The administration of U.S. President George W. Bush, which was seeking UN sanctions against the military government in neighboring Myanmar, said the Thai military coup was a “U-turn” for democracy in that politically stable region.

Still, the best guarantee for survival — for visiting world leaders during the General Assembly sessions– was to include all their military leaders, including the chiefs of the armed forces, the navy and the air force, in the country’s UN delegation so that they will be within sight at the General Assembly Hall – and not back home taking over the leadership of the country in military coups.

During the General Assembly sessions, the IPS office on the UN’s fourth floor was an occasional meeting place for representatives of liberation movements accredited to the UN, including the PLO and FRETILIN.

One regular visitor was Jose Ramos-Horta, designated as foreign minister in the government-in-exile set up by the liberation movement FRETILIN (Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor). Winner of the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize and later president of East Timor (2007-2012). Ramos-Horta, according to a widely circulated anecdote, was at a dinner in a restaurant frequented by delegates, in the UN neighborhood, where waiters politely asked guests from what country they were from.

When asked, he proudly claimed he was from East Timor, (a former Portuguese possession that was under Indonesian control from 1975 to 1999). “So, you are an Eskimo?”, said the waiter displaying his geographical ignorance. “’No, no, no,” replied Ramos-Horta: “I am not an Eskimo, I am from a country called East Timor.”

After he completed his first presidency in 2012, he was appointed as the United Nations‘ Special Representative and Head of the United Nations Integrated Peacebuilding Office in Guinea-Bissau (UNIOGBIS) in January 2013. When I met him outside the UN on First Avenue, I double checked the anecdote— and he confirmed it did happen. And we laughed.

Meanwhile, a security officer once recalled an incident where the prime minister from an African country, addressing the General Assembly, was heckled by a group of African students. As is usual with hecklers, the boisterous group was taken off the visitor’s gallery, grilled, photographer and banned from entering the UN premises. But about five years later, one of the hecklers returned to the UN —this time, as foreign minister of his country, and addressed the world body.

Besides Qaddafi, some of the military leaders who addressed the UN included Fidel Castro of Cuba, Amadou Toure of Mali (who assumed power following a coup in 1991 but later served as a democratically elected President), and Jerry Rawlings of Ghana (who seized power in 1979, executed former heads of state but later served as a civilian president voted into power in democratic elections).

Although PLO leader Yasser Arafat made it to the UN, some of the world’s most controversial leaders, including Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Syria’s Hafez al-Assad and his son Bashar al-Assad, and North Korea’s Kim il Sung and his grandson Kim Jong-un never made it to the UN.

When the politically-charismatic Ernesto Che Guevara, once second-in-command to Cuban leader Fidel Castro, was at the United Nations to address the General Assembly sessions back in 1964, the U.N. headquarters came under attack – literally. The speech by the Argentine-born Marxist revolutionary was momentarily drowned by the sound of an explosion.

The anti-Castro forces in the United States, backed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), had mounted an insidious campaign to stop Che Guevara from speaking. A 3.5-inch bazooka was fired at the 39-storeyed Secretariat building by the East River while a vociferous CIA-inspired anti-Castro, anti-Che Guevara demonstration was taking place outside the U.N. building on New York’s First Avenue and 42nd street.

But the rocket launcher – which was apparently not as sophisticated as today’s shoulder-fired missiles and rocket-propelled grenades – missed its target, rattled windows, and fell into the river about 200 yards from the building. One newspaper report described it as “one of the wildest episodes since the United Nations moved into its East River headquarters in 1952.”

As longtime U.N. staffers would recall, the failed 1964 bombing of the U.N. building took place when Che Guevara launched a blistering attack on U.S. foreign policy and denounced a proposed de-nuclearization pact for the Western hemisphere.

It was one of the first known politically motivated terrorist attacks on the United Nations. After his Assembly speech, Che Guevara was asked about the attack aimed at him. “The explosion has given the whole thing more flavor,” he joked, as he chomped on his Cuban cigar.

When he was told by a reporter that the New York City police had nabbed a woman, described as an anti-Castro Cuban exile, who had pulled out a hunting knife and jumped over the UN wall, intending to kill him, Che Guevara said: “It is better to be killed by a woman with a knife than by a man with a gun.”

This article contains excerpts from a book on the United Nations titled “No Comment—and Don’t Quote Me on That,” authored by Thalif Deen, Senior Editor at Inter Press Service news agency. A former member of the Sri Lanka delegation to the General Assembly sessions, he is a Fulbright scholar with a Master’s Degree in Journalism from Columbia University, New York, and twice (2012-2013) shared the gold medal for excellence in UN reporting awarded annually by the UN Correspondents Association (UNCA). The book is available on Amazon. The link to Amazon via the author’s website follows: https://www.amazon.com/No-Comment-dont-quote-that/dp/064811838X

IPS UN Bureau Report

Credit: UNESCO

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 10 2026 (IPS)

First, it was the mass deportations of undocumented aliens, then a crackdown on liberal-minded academics from prestigious US Universities, and now, restrictions on foreign journalists based in the US.

The proposed restrictions may also affect scores of journalists covering the UN, including those who are part of national delegations scheduled to arrive in New York next week for the high-level segment of the 81st session of the General Assembly, with over 130 world political leaders in attendance.

According to the UN’s Media Accreditation and Liaison Unit (MALU), close to 5,000 media representatives are accredited by the UN,, including long term and temporary IDs, (the latter mostly for the annual General Assembly sessions).

The Foreign Press Association (FPA), the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), and the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) have jointly expressed strong opposition to the July 2026 U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) proposed regulation that heavily restricts foreign media “I” visas.

“Together with the SPJ and the CPJ, we have drafted a letter to congress setting out our case against the impending changes and asking them to intervene promptly. We thank our sister organization, the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association AMEJA, for its prompt and effective support in getting attention on the Hill”.

These restrictions are an arbitrary and unilateral tariff wall against the exchange of ideas and information, says Ian Williams, FPA President.

“We ask all our members to enlist other signatories to the letter and to approach legislators who can help stop these pernicious proposals. We have been here before. Last time such proposals were raised, FPA and SPJ led the battle to thwart the proposals – but they are back, and we are pleased this time to be backed by so many other organizations.”

At a press briefing August 31, UN Spokesperson Stephane Dujarric was asked whether the Secretary-General is aware of the proposed visa restrictions due to go into effect on 15 September that will impact international journalists.

“Is he concerned that this could impact coverage – not only of the United States, but of the United Nations, given it limits journalists to 240 days and many journalist’ organizations are very concerned about the impact that this will have on journalists?”

In his response, Dujarric said: “Look, of course, countries have the right to decide on visa policies. But we would hope that we see here in our (UN) host country a policy that allows for the maximum number of international journalists to cover, including to cover the UN. “

Despite the 1947 Headquarters Agreement between the US and the UN, which calls on Washington to facilitate the functioning of the UN, the US has denied visas to several heads of governments planning to visit the UN, or those accredited as diplomats.

The US State Department says: “Our mission is to enhance the United States’ global influence by helping foreign journalists develop a deeper understanding of U.S. policy, society, and values through programs and services that connect them with authoritative American information sources. Our mission reflects a commitment to fostering informed global dialogue, ensuring that international coverage of U.S. affairs goes beyond the surface and captures the complexity of American life.”

With over 1,500 accredited foreign journalists in the U.S., “our offices connect U.S. policy and cultural experts with audiences worldwide. Journalists credentialed with us are leading voices in their home countries, thus amplifying with their own credibility the access we curate and facilitate.”

• Every year, US Foreign Press Centers host dozens of experts from the private, public, and academic sector for on-the-record briefings on a variety of relevant topics.

According to the FPA, the US proposals also have broader implications for free speech and movement beyond just journalists; they also affect academics, students and other skilled professionals, so it is heartening to see a growing list of organizations from other sectors joining in opposition.

These proposed regulations will restrict both the numbers and the freedoms of international reporters in the US. We urge you persuade colleagues to join the FPA to help us to combat the proposals and assist colleagues who might be affected, said Williams.

Last week U.S. District Judge F. Dennis Saylor called out the Trump administration for imposing new restrictions on the duration of visas impacting international journalists and students. The changes impact F, J, and I visas and change how long students or journalists can stay, adding massive barriers if they need to extend their time in the United States.

“I think that the uncertainty point in terms of the impact of the potential irreparable harm is enormous,” Judge Saylor said.

Williams told Inter Press Service (IPS): “It is good that our issue is tied with other educational and work visas, so there are some influential litigants fighting this in the courts. The administration seems prejudicially impervious to reality”.

All our sources suggest that they did not consult with relevant officials in the State Department, which issues the visas, he said. “It’s apparent that the framers of the visa restrictions ignored the overwhelming majority to the request for feedback which opposed the proposals.”

As a result, the foreign press are caught in a “very Imperfect Storm.” The MAGA operatives making the moves combine ignorance and arrogance. They are profoundly suspicious of ALL media and of foreigners making the foreign press a dual target, and these people have no idea how the media work beyond recycling corporate and White House press releases.

In effect they are telling journalists whose beat is STEM, Wall Street, Media, Art, American politics and industry, that they can amass all the expertise all they need to know in less than 240 days – and that they face the chance of being excluded if their work does not reflect the administration’s view, declared Williams..

The joint letter said It is good that our issue is tied with other educational and work visas, so there are some influential litigants fighting this in the courts. The administration seems prejudicially impervious to reality.

All our sources suggest that they did not consult with relevant officials in the State Department, which issues the visas.

It’s apparent that the framers of the visa restrictions ignored the overwhelming majority to the request for feedback which opposed the proposals.

As a result, the foreign press are caught in a “very Imperfect Storm.” The MAGA operatives making the moves combine ignorance and arrogance. They are profoundly suspicious of ALL media and of foreigners making the foreign press a dual target, and these people have no idea how the media work beyond recycling corporate and White House press releases.

In effect they are telling journalists whose beat is STEM, Wall Street, Media, Art, American politics and industry, that they can amass all the expertise all they need to know in less than 240 days – and that they face the chance of being excluded if their work does not reflect the administration’s view.

IPS UN Bureau Report

UN staff members at the SDG Action Zone outside UN Headquarters in New York, 2019. Credit: UN Photo/Laura Jarriel

By Samuel King and Inés M. Pousadela
BRUSSELS, Belgium / MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Sep 9 2026 (IPS)

When the UN High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF) ended in New York in July, it took two recorded votes for states to pass a ministerial declaration that, until recently, would have been adopted without controversy. Uruguay, speaking for the Group of 77 developing countries plus China, pushed through the deletion of a reference to the agreement reached at the COP28 climate summit. Israel forced a vote on a paragraph about self-determination for people under occupation. Russia dissociated itself from the passage on peace and security. The wrangling revealed the extent to which the consensus that in 2015 saw all 193 UN states agree the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – a common blueprint to end poverty, tackle climate change and build accountable institutions by 2030 – has been eroded.

The problem goes beyond this latest session. Progress is tracked through Voluntary National Reviews, the self-assessments states present at the Forum. Thirty-six countries did so this year. But the process asks nothing of states beyond showing up. There’s no independent verification of data, and governments aren’t required to consult civil society. States that restrict civic space at home face no consequences. Seventeen of the 36 states that presented reviews this year are rated by the CIVICUS Monitor as having repressed or closed civic space.

A forum built to hold states accountable has become a stage on which the least accountable governments may perform compliance, while the civil society groups meant to keep them honest are locked out of the room.

In the room but not at the table

Where civil society can act, it supports delivery of the SDGs. Sustained advocacy delivered Colombia’s ban on child marriage in 2025 and continues to drive the campaign against female genital mutilation in The Gambia. In Nepal, local organisations have made monitoring the goals more inclusive by supplying data on excluded communities that official statistics miss.

Yet the HLPF gives civil society little formal standing. Civil society was in the building all week — CIVICUS co-organised sessions on civic space and the SDGs, supported a global forum on the future of multilateralism and ran a workshop on the post-2030 agenda — but it didn’t get a seat at the table where decisions are made.

Showing up can also be dangerous. In 2025, most civil society representatives from El Salvador withdrew over fears of reprisals. Activists elsewhere describe reprisals for exposing gaps between official reporting and reality on the ground, often with little practical support from the UN despite guidelines that are supposed to protect them.

SDG 16 on peace, justice and strong institutions is meant to be the foundation for the other 16 goals, and its Target 16.10 commits states to protecting fundamental freedoms. But it’s routinely ignored. The CIVICUS Monitor has tracked year-on-year regression in civic space conditions since the SDGs came into effect. Where civil society can’t operate freely, it’s no surprise if the goals it should help implement and monitor aren’t being met.

Falling short

The UN Secretary-General’s 2026 report on the SDGs made clear how delivery is falling short. It found that out of 139 targets with reliable trend data, only 15 per cent are on track, while a further 15 per cent have regressed below their 2015 baselines.

But rather than take responsibility for their failures, powerful states are using the lack of progress as a pretext to demand less ambition. The USA has dismissed the SDGs as an infringement on national sovereignty. Speaking at an event during the Forum, Russia’s representative said that the goals’ ambitions had proven ‘quite far away from reality’, blaming the design of the goals rather than states’ failure to deliver. For many states, an ambitious rights-based agenda is no longer a promise to keep, but a commitment to be backed away from.

Yet evidence suggests that when political will exists, change can come. The UN’s Asia-Pacific review presented at the HLPF showed that the number of children in child labour fell from 49 to 28 million between 2020 and 2025. What holds back achievement of the SDGs is not flawed design, but political choices.

As negotiations begin on what comes after the goals’ 2030 deadline, some states and UN officials favour extending the current goals, on the reasonable logic that reopening them in today’s political climate risks producing something weaker. But the framework agreed in 2015 wasn’t built for a world of growing authoritarianism, accelerating climate breakdown, coordinated backlash against gender equality, increasing militarisation, collapsing multilateral cooperation and rapid technological development. A post-2030 agenda will have to take account of all this, along with the financial strain on the multilateral system.

Forus, a network of national civil society platforms, has mapped three scenarios for the post-2030 process – continuity, reset or fragmentation – and insists that whichever prevails, accountability, civic space and financing reform must sit at the centre. Several upcoming moments will reveal the direction of travel. Next year’s Commission on the Status of Women and Economic and Social Council’s Youth Forum, along with the SDG Summit and the 2028 Pact for the Future review, all offer opportunities that must be seized to bring civil society into the process, identify where implementation is failing and match ambition with achievement.

Samuel King is a researcher with the Horizon Europe-funded research project ENSURED: Shaping Cooperation for a World in Transition at CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation.

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

Rodney Bay Marina, Saint Lucia. Rising seas are among the mounting risks for small island states as the world heads towards an expected overshoot of 1.5°C. Credit: Alison Kentish/IPS

By Alison Kentish
CASTRIES, Saint Lucia, Sep 8 2026 (IPS)

The world is now expected to breach the 1.5 degrees Celsius warming limit that small island states have spent years defending as a threshold for survival.

For people in the Caribbean, Pacific and Indian Ocean, the consequences will not begin only when islands disappear beneath the sea. They include saltwater intrusion into freshwater supplies and agricultural land, coral reef loss, more damaging coastal flooding and mounting pressure on already limited resources for recovery and adaptation.

That is the stark warning emerging from the United Nations Environment Programme’s Limiting Overshoot report, launched on September 2. The report examines a future in which average global temperatures rise beyond 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels before, potentially, being brought back down.

The report concludes that the world is now expected to cross the 1.5°C threshold. What is still uncertain is how far above it temperatures will rise, how long they will remain there and how quickly they can eventually be brought back down.

Dr Shobha Maharaj, a Caribbean scientist and one of the lead authors of the report’s Chapter Four, says the expected breach raises a new set of questions for small island states.

“For years, the goal was to avoid crossing 1.5°C. But this report now says very clearly that we are going to cross it,” she said. “The question now is how deep is this overshoot going to go? How long is it going to last? And how do we live through it while we work to bring temperatures back down to 1.5°C?”

No buffer

The Paris Agreement committed countries to pursue efforts to limit warming to 1.5°C. Small island states were among the strongest advocates for the 1.5°C target, arguing that higher levels of warming would pose an existential threat.

“For small islands, it is because we live closest to the thresholds,” Maharaj said. “In a wealthy, temperate country, an additional half-degree of warming would still carry serious costs. But on a small island, it could determine whether a reef recovers or not, or whether an aquifer stays fresh or turns salty for good.”

“There is no higher ground to move to, no deep treasury to draw on and no second reef when one of them dies,” she added. There is no higher ground to move to, no deep treasury to draw on and no second reef when one of them dies.

The danger is not limited to dramatic disasters, she said. Habitability can erode quietly.

“Saltwater can contaminate groundwater and soil. A kitchen garden that has fed a family for generations may stop producing. High tides can reach roads, homes and public infrastructure even on clear days. When reefs die, communities lose not only fish and tourism income but also natural barriers that weaken waves before they reach the shore.”

“None of this requires an island to vanish,” Maharaj said. “Habitability begins to collapse first, quietly, through water, food and the loss of the everyday things that make a place home. By the time submergence becomes the headline, people have often already been forced to leave.”

The report warns that sea-level rise will continue for centuries and that falling global temperatures would not reverse all the damage accumulated during overshoot. Some ecosystem, biodiversity and glacier losses would persist, meaning a return to 1.5°C would not restore the world that existed before the threshold was crossed.

Small Islands, Different Realities

SIDS are often discussed as a single group, but Maharaj cautioned that their circumstances and options differ.

Pacific atoll states face acute threats because of their extremely low elevation and vulnerable freshwater lenses. Some Pacific islands are also experiencing land subsidence, compounding the effects of rising seas.

Several Caribbean states have higher terrain, but much of their population, infrastructure and economic activity is concentrated along narrow coastal areas. Indian Ocean states face their own combination of risks.

“What we share is a structural predicament, narrow room for retreat, limited finances and economies that are exposed to single shocks,” Maharaj said.

But she warned against transferring solutions indiscriminately between regions.

“The right response in Tuvalu, for example, is not automatically the right response in Barbados or the Maldives.”

Adaptation Buys Time, Not Immunity

For decades, adaptation has been presented as the principal defence for countries already living with climate impacts. But the UNEP report says many existing approaches were designed for gradual, one-directional warming, not temperatures that rise, plateau and may eventually decline.

Strategies fixed to one set of conditions could become ineffective or even increase vulnerability as conditions change. The report calls instead for adaptation that is flexible, forward-looking and capable of evolving throughout the different stages of overshoot.

“Adaptation buys time, not immunity,” Maharaj said.

She said the large gap between adaptation planning and implementation may provide a narrow opportunity to revise projects before they are built for conditions they can no longer withstand.

“We have a lot of plans, but many of them have not yet been implemented,” she said. “That gives us a window, although not a large one, to recalibrate those plans for a post-1.5°C world.”

That shift will require money before disasters strike.

Many developing countries are already trying to adapt, recover from extreme events, transform their economies and reduce emissions while servicing heavy debt. Climate finance, Maharaj said, arrives too slowly and is often supplied through loans that add to that burden.

“A disaster drains public funds into emergency response and reconstruction. That leaves less money to reduce the risks posed by the next event, which then hits a weakened country even harder. Each turn of that wheel reduces the very capacity we need to climb out of it.”

Breaking the cycle will require grants, upfront financing and investment in prevention, rather than repeatedly paying to rebuild after losses.

A Deeper Injustice

Overshoot also raises questions of climate justice, particularly for countries with little historical responsibility for the emissions driving warming.

“The harms concentrated during this period, especially those that turn out to be irreversible, fall hardest on the countries least responsible for the emissions that caused them,” Maharaj said.

Maharaj said contributing to the report carried a particular weight for her as a Caribbean scientist.

“For those of us from these islands, 1.5°C was never simply a number on a chart. It was the line we were told represented survival. It was the line at which we were told survival was still possible,” she said. “Now, helping to write the science of what lies beyond that line is a heavy thing, both personally and professionally.”

Crossing 1.5°C, she said, represents “a profound failure of collective will” but not permission to give up.

“How high the peak rises, how long we remain there and how quickly temperatures are brought back down are all still ours to decide,” Maharaj said. “Every one of those choices will be measured in lives and livelihoods here in our region and across small islands.”

For small islands, limiting the overshoot could mean the difference between mounting losses and holding on to the places people call home.

IPS UN Bureau Report

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