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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mercury’s Slow Poison

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bringing Artisanal Miners Out of the Shadows

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

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

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

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

A Capful of Mercury Replaced by Mechanical Processing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Healing the Land, Working Together

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

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

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

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

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

Giving Women Voice

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

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

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

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

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

Changing Face of Financial Support

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

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

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

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

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

In practice, that funding has been slow to materialise.

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

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

Several structural constraints help explain the shortfall.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lag Between Training and Implementation

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

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

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

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

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

Benefits of Mercury-Free Mechanical Systems

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

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

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

But the obstacles, he adds, are basic.

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

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

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

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

planetGOLD’s Global Reach

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chasing Thin Seams of Gold Safely

Back in Bushiangala, that test is only beginning.

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

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

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

Inter Press Service (IPS) UN Bureau Report

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

The Altos de Florida neighbourhood in southwest Bogotá shows the shift from rural to urban landscapes. Credit: UNDP

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Dec 9 2024 (IPS)

Poverty, while declining in Latin America and the Caribbean so far this century, shows a new face, that of the looming vulnerability of the poor as they become less rural and more urban, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) says in a new analysis.

“Not only is there more urban poverty, but also a greater percentage of the population is highly vulnerable, that is, they are very close to falling – and any small shock will make them fall – below the poverty line,” Almudena Fernández, chief economist for the region at the UNDP, told IPS.“It is no longer enough to lift people out of poverty; we have to think about the next step, to continue on this path, so that the population can consolidate”: Almudena Fernández.

Thus, “there is a segment of the population that remains above the poverty line, but which is pushed below it by an illness or the loss of household income,” Fernández told IPS from New York.

Rosa Meleán, 47, who was a teacher for 20 years in Maracaibo, the capital of Zulia, in Venezuela’s oil-rich northwest, told IPS that “falling back into poverty is like the slides where children play in the schoolyard: they keep going up, but with the slightest push they slide down again”.

Meleán has experienced this in person several times, supporting her parents, siblings and nephews with her salary, falling into poverty when her working-class father died, improving with a new job, her salary liquefied by hyperinflation (2017-2020), leaving teaching to search for other sources of income.

“You have to see what it’s like to be poor in Maracaibo, walking in 40 degrees (Celsius) to look for transport, without electricity, rationed water and earning US$25”, the last monthly salary she had as a teacher before retiring five years ago.

And then came the covid-19 pandemic, limiting her new occupations as an office worker or home tutor. She has barely recovered from that blow.

“We live in a time when shocks are more common – from extreme weather events, for example – and we see a lot of economic and financial volatility. We are a much more interconnected world. Any shock anywhere in the world produces a very direct contagion, they are the new normal,” says Fernández.

Shoppers jostle for the best prices at the Lo Valledor street market in Santiago, Chile. Urban households that ride the poverty line are particularly sensitive to food inflation. Credit: Max Valencia / FAO

Poverty falling in numbers

Starting in the 1950s, Latin America and the Caribbean experienced a rapid process of urbanisation, becoming one of the most urbanised regions in the world.

Today, 82% of the population lives in urban areas, compared to the world average of 58%, according to the UNDP.

Over the last two decades, the region has made progress in reducing extreme poverty and poverty in general. Even with setbacks since 2014, it recorded its lowest poverty rate in 2022 (26%), with slight decreases estimated for 2023 (25.2%) and 2024 (25%).

The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) indicates in its most recent report that poverty in 2023 will affect 27.3% of the region’s population, which it puts at 663 million people this year. This means that “172 million people in the region still do not have sufficient income to cover their basic needs (general poverty)”.

Among them, 66 million cannot afford a basic food basket (extreme poverty). But these figures are up to five percentage points better than in 2020, the worst year of the pandemic, and 80% of the progress is attributed to advances in Brazil, where transfers of resources to the poor were decisive.

ECLAC points out that poverty is higher in rural areas (39.1%) than in urban areas (24.6%), and that it affects more women than men of working age.

Despite the progress, “the speed of poverty reduction is starting to slow down, it is decreasing at a much slower rate. This is a first concern, because the region is growing less,” said Fernández.

She recalled that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) forecasts point to an average economic growth in the region of two per cent per year, “well below the world average. Thus, it will be more difficult to continue reducing poverty”.

A hill overcrowded with informal dwellings in the populous Petare neighbourhood in eastern Caracas. Credit: Humberto Márquez / IPS

Changing face

The proportion of poor people living in the region’s urban areas increased from 66% in 2000 to 73% in 2022, and the change is more dramatic among those living in extreme poverty, with the proportion of the urban extreme poor rising from 48% to 68% over the same period.

Tracing this change annually, a UNDP analysis found that urban poverty increased markedly during the commodity crisis of 2014 – and also during the pandemic – “revealing that urban poverty is more likely to increase in times of economic downturn than rural poverty”.

It argues that the post-pandemic rise in the cost of living affected urban households more, pushing households into poverty and worsening the living conditions of those who were already poor.

Urban households are more tied to the market economy than rural households, making them more vulnerable to economic fluctuations and related changes in employment.

In contrast, rural livelihoods allow households to use strategies such as subsistence farming, reallocation of labour, community support or selling assets such as livestock to cope with shocks. These are options that urban residents generally do not possess.

Another salient feature of the new face of urban poverty is that it is often concentrated in informal settlements on the peripheries of cities, where overcrowding and limited access to basic services create additional challenges.

Thus, in the Venezuelan case, “the features of poverty and vulnerability that stand out in urban poverty have to do with the precariousness of public services and the lack of opportunities,” Roberto Patiño, founder of Convive, a community development organisation, and Alimenta la Solidaridad, a welfare organisation, told IPS.

Patiño believes that “the burden of the cost of living and inflation is difficult to bear for people living in poverty in both urban and rural areas, even though in rural areas the food issue may be less serious”.

This is because in rural areas “people have access to smallholdings, to their own crops, and also, being farming areas, food costs tend to be lower than in the city, but health issues and other services such as transport, health and education are very precarious”, the activist pointed out.

Patiño mentioned another mark on the new face of poverty, that of the millions of Venezuelans who migrated to other South American countries in the last decade and who “have not recovered from the pandemic, from an economic point of view, with many of the migrants living in a precarious situation”.

A teenager doing homework in the Delmas 32 slum in Port-au-Prince. Credit: Dominic Chávez / WB

Seeking solutions

The UNDP argues that addressing poverty in urban and rural areas requires differentiated strategies, as policies that work in rural areas, such as promoting agricultural productivity and improving access to assets and markets, do not sit well with the plight of the urban poor.

For them, the cost of housing and food inflation are relevant concerns.

Fernández said that “much of the social policy that was implemented in the region decades ago, which is ongoing, was designed with a very rural poverty in mind, how to help the agricultural sector, how to achieve greater productivity in agriculture, how to meet basic unsatisfied needs in rural areas”.

“Now we must move toward a social policy that focuses a little more on the unsatisfied needs of urban poverty,” she said.

She believes that “urbanisation allows for another series of opportunities. For example, the greater agglomeration of people allows for easier access to services”, although there may also be negative effects such as a more difficult insertion in the labour market or health problems associated with overcrowding.

Among the solutions, Fernández ranked the need for greater economic growth first, “because we are not going to be able to reduce poverty if we do not grow”.

The economist then ranked education, good in quantity (coverage), but which must now focus on quality, in second place, in order to address the digital transition that is underway and the need for more training for workers.

Finally, the need for social protection – and despite slower growth and a tighter fiscal balance across the region, Fernández acknowledges –and investment in protecting people more, with policies and measures that include, for example, care, employability, productivity and insurance.

“It is no longer enough to lift people out of poverty; we have to think about the next step, to continue on this path, so that the population can consolidate, with a stable middle class that has mechanisms so that in times of stress or shock its consumption does not fall sharply,” said Fernández.

In other words, so that those who have their basic needs covered do not have to slide back down the poverty chute with every economic or health shock.

A Himalayan settlement in the Everest region of Nepal. The impact of climate change is more intense in the mountain region than in others. Photo: Tanka Dhakal/IPS

By Tanka Dhakal
KATHMANDU, Jun 20 2024 (IPS)

The global public opinion research on climate change reveals that 80 percent, or four out of five, of people globally want their governments to take stronger action to tackle the climate crisis.

According to the Peoples’ Climate Vote 2024 (PCV2024), 86 percent want to see their countries set aside geopolitical differences and work together on climate change.

The UN Development Programme (UNDP) collaborated with the University of Oxford in the UK and GeoPoll on the study, which involved asking 15 questions about climate change to more than 75,000 people in 77 countries who spoke 87 different languages. The report released today (Thursday, June 20, 2024) claims to be the biggest ever standalone public opinion survey on climate change and questions were designed to help understand how people are experiencing the impacts of climate change and how they want world leaders to respond. The 77 countries polled represent 87 percent of the global population.

“The People’s Climate Vote is loud and clear. They want their leaders to transcend their differences, to act now and to act boldly to fight the climate crisis,” said UNDP Administrator Achim Steiner. “The survey results—unprecedented in their coverage—reveal a level of consensus that is truly astonishing. We urge leaders and policymakers to take note, especially as countries develop their next round of climate action pledges, or ‘nationally determined contributions’ under the Paris Agreement. This is an issue that almost everyone, everywhere, can agree on.”

Map showing public support for stronger country climate commitments. Source: Peoples’ Climate Vote 2024

Globally, climate change is on people’s mind

Regardless of differences, people across the world reported that climate change was on their minds. According to the report, globally, 56 percent said they were thinking about it regularly (daily or weekly), and some 63 percent of those in Least Developed Countries (LDCs), who are on the frontlines of the climate change impact, are waiting for external support to adapt and mitigate.

The report shows worry around climate change is growing; 53 percent, or more than half, of people globally said they were more worried than last year about climate change. Again, worry is higher in Least Developed Countries (LDCs), where 59 percent of people experience climate change-related fear. On average, across the nine Small Island Developing States (SIDS) surveyed, as many as 71 percent said they were more worried than last year about climate change.

Climate change has an impact on people’s major decisions. According to the report, 69 percent of people worldwide said that climate change was having an impact on their major decisions, like where to live or work. The proportion so affected was higher in LDCs at 74 percent but notably lower in Western and Northern Europe at 52 percent and Northern America at 42 percent.

People are in favor of fossil fuel phaseout

The survey results also show overwhelming support for a faster transition away from fossil fuels. For a few years now, whenever leaders meet for climate summits, their major disagreement is the phaseout of fossil fuels, but people are not only calling for bolder climate action; they also want a transition to “green energy.”

The survey shows support by a global majority of 72 percent in favor of a quick transition away from fossil fuels. This is true for countries among the top 10 biggest producers of oil, coal, or gas, including majorities of 89 percent in Nigeria and Türkiye, 80 percent in China, 76 percent in Germany, 75 percent of people in Saudi Arabia, 69 percent in Australia, and 54 percent of people in the United States. Only 7 percent of people globally said their country should not transition at all.

People are in support for stronger climate action in 20 of the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitters, with majorities ranging from 66 percent of people in the United States and Russia, to 67 percent in Germany, 73 percent in China, 77 percent in South Africa and India, 85 percent in Brazil, 88 percent in Iran and up to 93 percent in Italy.

Australia, Canada, France, Germany and the United States—in these five big emitters, women were more in favor of strengthening their country’s commitments by 10 to 17 percentage points. This gap was biggest in Germany, where women were 17 percentage points more likely than men to want more climate action (75 percent vs. 58 percent).

Additionally, a majority of people in every country surveyed said rich countries should give more help to poorer countries to address climate change. The poorest countries—those most immediately in need of international support to address climate change—were more likely to be in favor of rich countries giving more help to poorer countries—by upwards of 30 percent—than the world’s wealthiest countries—94 percent in Bhutan and 64 percent in the United States of America. Globally, around eight in ten people said they wanted rich countries to give more support to poorer countries.

Support for climate change education in schools

The survey results showed that people want climate change-related courses in schools; four in five people or 80 percent globally, called for schools in their country to teach more about the topic related to it. The report says education is a critical part of addressing the issue of climate change. In schools, especially, young people need to be taught the impact of our changing climate and given the opportunity to learn how to adapt to it and help identify future solutions.

Large majorities in all countries want schools in their countries to do more to teach people about climate change. Significantly higher proportions of people in LDCs (93 percent) supported more education on climate change compared to 74 percent support in G20 countries.  In Haiti 99 percent people want more education on climate change in schools. But support is low in some countries, with only 29 percent in the USA, 26 percent in Indonesia and 21 percent in Papua New Guinea.

Evidence to develop climate action

This is the first time the public has been asked about climate change in a way that relates to their day-to-day lives, and according to experts, this is important for upcoming discussions.

The first Peoples’ Climate Vote took place in 2021 and surveyed people across 50 countries through advertisements in popular mobile gaming apps.

Prof. Stephen Fisher, Department of Sociology, University of Oxford, said, “A survey of this size was a huge scientific endeavor. While maintaining rigorous methodology, special efforts were also made to include people from marginalized groups in the poorest parts of the world. This is some of the very highest quality global data on public opinions on climate change available.”

As world leaders decide on the next round of pledges under the Paris Agreement by 2025, these results seem to have an impact as evidence that people everywhere support bold climate action.

“The Peoples’ Climate Vote has enlisted the voices of people everywhere, including amongst groups traditionally the most difficult to poll. For example, people in nine of the 77 countries surveyed had never before been polled on climate change,” Cassie Flynn, Global Director of Climate Change, UNDP, said.

“The next two years stand as one of the best chances we have as the international community to ensure that warming stays under 1.5°. We stand ready to support policymakers in stepping up their efforts as they develop their climate action plans.”

IPS UN Bureau Report

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

With one-fifth of farming households dependent on palm oil production, policy considerations that look after the environment, lives, and livelihoods were essential.

By Joyce Chimbi
NAIROBI, Jun 20 2023 (IPS)

Oil palm has brought significant benefits and prosperity to Liberia. The export of crude palm oil is a major source of foreign exchange earnings for the government. The palm oil crop covers more than 1 million hectares, hundreds of thousands are employed in the palm oil sector, and at least 21 percent of the farming households produce palm oil.

Opportunities for the country’s palm oil and other palm products in the international markets are considerable—creating a temptation to prioritize development over environmental concerns.

In 2020, policymakers in the Inter-Ministerial Commission on Palm Oil Concessions in Liberia faced a significant challenge: developing a policy path that pursued quick short-term profits and faced long-term negative consequences to the environment, lives, and livelihoods—or a beneficial approach for people and planet.

Forests Belong to Humanity

“When decisions are too short-term, narrow, and short-sighted, we do not take into account the long-term impact of our action. We need to recognize that some goods are common goods or public goods, such as forests. They do not belong to one person or one company; they belong to humanity as a whole,” says Francisco Alpizar, Wageningen University and Research.

This was the case for Liberia’s palm oil sector, whose key stakeholders include government, the private sector, NGOs, business associations, smallholder associations, and households that directly or indirectly rely on it as their lifeline.

“From an economic perspective, the prices of goods and commodities should reflect the true cost to societies, not just the immediate cost of producing them but also the environmental impact the production of those goods and services carries for societies,” Alpizar says.

The Liberian National Oil Palm Strategy and Action Plan (NOPSAP) was facilitated by the Global Environment Facility-funded Good Growth Partnership. Here policymakers in Liberia decided to use the Targeted Analysis Scenario (TSA) to design a mutually beneficial policy path for communities, sectoral government agencies, and palm oil concessionaires.

Targeted Analysis Scenario Benefits All

As they developed the National Oil Palm Strategy and Action Plan (NOPSAP) facilitated by the Global Environment Facility-funded Good Growth Partnership, policymakers in Liberia decided to use the Targeted Scenario Analysis (TSA) to design a mutually beneficial policy path for communities, sectoral government agencies, and palm oil concessionaires.

UNDP developed the TSA to respond to the growing demand from decision-makers and stakeholders for more policy-relevant sustainable development analysis to support national SDG implementation facing diverse policy, management, and investment choices.

As an innovative analytical approach, the TSA captures and presents the value of ecosystem services within decision-making to help make the business case for sustainable policy and investment choices. By doing so, the TSA allows policymakers to calculate these costs and make decisions that harmonize with the environment.

In Liberia, policymakers needed economic data that compared the outcomes of continuing with conventional palm production with the results of taking a different route to make sound, informed decisions leading to sustainable palm concessions.

At the time, the situation in the West African country was characterized by contradictory forest management and concessions policies. The Commission had to balance the eagerness of communities and smallholder producers to engage in palm oil concessions because they brought employment and socioeconomic benefits and concerns in the global market about the environmental risks of palm oil production.

UNDP’s TSA provided an answer, enabling the Commission in Liberia to include all the relevant social, environmental, and economic impacts. TSA offered a systematic approach covering all aspects of the sector.

The TSA improves the decision-making process by capturing and presenting the value of ecosystem services and sectoral production to make policy decision-making more holistic. The tool applies to any sector, scenario, context, or country.

“TSA can, for instance, be applied for decision-making at the national level, when taking a national perspective, regional, company or even household level. For each and every one of those decisions, we need a careful analysis of what the current situation looks like and how it will look in the future and, what would be the alternative situation,” Alpizar explains.

Business-as-Usual Versus Sustainable Ecosystem Management

One is considered a business-as-usual scenario, and the other a sustainable ecosystem management scenario.

“When you compare one against the other, with a long-term perspective and focusing on the relevant indicators for the decision makers or the things that the decision maker cares for, then you can provide a better picture of the decision that is in front of us, and that is what targeted scenario analysis is.”

He says targeted scenario construction of business-as-usual versus sustainable ecosystem management outcomes is presented to the decision maker. When this is done, in principle, the decision maker will have a powerful decision-making tool to make informed decisions based on evidence.

“If we put ourselves in the feet of a decision maker, that is, for example, deciding whether to implement a series of policies to make the agricultural sector more sustainable, the business-as-usual scenario means you continue with the current practices. A sustainable ecosystem management scenario would be one in which you change a series of practices or actions, and with that, in principle, you achieve a different outcome,” Alpizar explains.

He gives an example of producing pineapples under a business-as-usual scenario with an impact on surrounding lands, agrochemicals, deforestation, land use change, competing diseases, or diseases that spread to the surrounding area, which might be viable but over a short period of time. The alternative scenario is to create and implement a more long-term, sustainable approach.

“Through UNDP’s application of TSA methodology, you can carefully construct the two scenarios by first asking this question: As the decision maker, what do you really care about? Is it employment, taxes, production, or reducing social unrest? Based on the answer, the analyst can construct a targeted scenario,” Alpizar says.

Returning to Liberia, the TSA was able to show that Smallholder Production (SPO) scenario and environmental sustainability were in the best interests of the concessionaire and the Liberian economy – with substantially greater benefits compared with the business-as-usual scenario (USD 333 million versus USD 188 million over 20 years).

When these results were discussed with the multistakeholder National Oil Palm Platform of Liberia, it was accepted and paved the way toward sustainable palm oil development in Liberia.

Across the world, TSAs have been conducted to assess the economic value of ecosystem services for various strategic economic sectors such as hydropower, agriculture, and tourism under the business-as-usual and sustainable ecosystem management scenarios to create a sustainable development path where humanity is in harmony with the environment.

IPS UN Bureau Report

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Conscious Food Systems Alliance (CoFSA) promotes consciousness as a key evidence-based practice to support systemic change – reframing how people think about food to unlock food systems transformation, nourishing all people, and regenerating planet Earth. Pictured here a farmer in Katfoura village on the Tristao Islands in Guinea benefits from opportunities to generate income and improve community life. Credit: UN Women/Joe Saade

By Joyce Chimbi
NAIROBI, Jun 12 2023 (IPS)

Deep in the Egyptian desert, the SEKEM community celebrates its first wheat crop – grown to alleviate shortages and price increases caused by the war in Ukraine, and the latest crop in a 46-year history of regenerative development, which has effectively made the desert bloom. On another continent, a consumer who buys acai collected and produced by the Yawanawá in Brazil helps protect 200,000 acres of land.

Food connects people, cultures, and planet Earth. But rather than nourishing global health and well-being, food systems remain at the heart of the global community’s social and environmental crises today.

Massive investment and efforts to transform food systems and existing policy and technical solutions are not delivering the desired impact. In the face of the global food systems crises manifested in food insecurity, unsustainable agricultural practices, and climate change, re-examining the origins of ongoing crises and barriers to transformation is critical.

Reframing How People Think About Food

Against this backdrop, the Conscious Food Systems Alliance (CoFSA) promotes consciousness as a key evidence-based practice to support systemic change. The alliance is built on the premise that reframing how people think about food is the key to unlocking food systems transformation, nourishing all people, and regenerating planet Earth.

“We know our food systems are in a critical state and sit at the core of the regeneration process this world greatly needs, and we believe this can only happen with a change of mindsets and heart-sets, with different values and worldviews,” says Thomas Legrand, CoFSA Lead Technical Advisor.

Convened by UNDP, CoFSA is a movement of food, agriculture, and consciousness practitioners united around a common goal: to support people from across food and agriculture systems to cultivate the inner capacities that activate systemic change and regeneration.

The alliance aims to leverage “the power of consciousness and inner transformation, including proven approaches such as mindfulness, compassion, systems leadership, indigenous and feminine wisdoms, to support systemic change towards sustainability and human flourishing in the food and agriculture sector.”

CoFSA Challenge Fund to Support Regenerative Food System Projects

The CoFSA Challenge Fund, which is about to be launched, intends to support the development of strategic, innovative ideas and solutions to scale up and accelerate progress toward the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development through the transformation of food systems, which is critical to achieving the UN’s SDGs.

The Challenge Fund focuses on cultivating inner capacities for regenerative food systems. This constitutes a new field of practice that requires testing and innovation to identify, develop and nurture potentially transformative solutions.

In this first round of calls for proposals, UNDP will support approximately four pilot projects of up to USD 20,000.

Conscious Food System Links Supply Chain

A conscious food system is a holistic approach to the well-being of people and ecosystems, and where there is a connection and awareness between stakeholders across the whole supply chain, says Helmy Abouleish, SEKEM’s CEO. He heads the holistic, sustainable development community established in 1977 by his father, Dr Ibrahim Abouleish, in the Egyptian desert.

According to UNDP, to transform the systems that harm people and the planet and how food is produced and consumed, “We need to look beyond the problems’ symptoms and even systems’ patterns and structures, at what fundamentally drives the systems.”

Consciousness and mental models, or regenerative mindsets and cultures, are increasingly recognized as the key to unlocking systems change in food and agriculture. To this end, CoFSA applies consciousness approaches to technical solutions to support the cultivation and consideration of inner capacities based on the premise that sustainable change comes from within.

Christine Wamsler, Professor of Sustainability Science at LUND University, emphasizes that there is “increasing scientific consensus that creating sustainable, regenerative systems do not only require a change in our external worlds. Instead, it has to go hand-in-hand with a fundamental shift in our relationships — in the way we think about ourselves, each other, and life as a whole.”

Graphic representation of the Conscious Food Systems Alliance (CoFSA) concept. Credit: UNDP/CoFSA

Similarly, senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Otto Scharmer, stresses, “You cannot change a system unless you change the mindsets or the consciousness of the people who are enacting that system.”

At the heart of it, mindful eating and activating transformation from the inside is a recognition that changing behavior is, at times, more about identity, emotions, and connections than data and analyses in the same way elections are campaigned and won against a backdrop of long-held beliefs and opinions.

Question Impact of Consumer Choices

“I think today, whatever you eat, however you dress, you need to ask yourself where they come from, what kind of impact they are giving back to the Mother Earth, cultural, economic, and spiritual environment,” says Tashka Yawanawá, Chief of the Yawanawá that has survived for centuries in the Brazilian rainforests.

Awareness of the people and processes in food and agriculture systems aligns with indigenous wisdom and is at the heart of the approach taken by the Yawanawá people. For instance, Tashka Yawanawá says: “When somebody drinks the acai collected and produced by the Yawanawá, they’re helping protect 200,000 acres of land.”

“They are also supporting the preservation of our language, our culture, our cultural and spiritual manifestation. Making that link gives value to where you source these products from … when you buy acai made by Yawanawá, you have an awareness that you’re supporting conscious food.”

UNDP stresses that farmers’ lives depend on being seen as human beings, not just economic agents, and says it is “Time to build safe, reflective and connecting spaces to engage in the deep conversations we need for right relationships to replace market rules.”

In the world of conscious thinking and mindful eating, everyone has a role.

A marker trader at a vegetable stall in the village of El-Maadi near Cairo with heaps of fresh vegetables. CoFSA aims to renew lost ties between producers, the foods they grow, cooks, and consumers. Credit: Gavin Bell

Teresa Corção, founder of Instituto Maniva, a non-profit in Brazil that values ​​traditional food knowledge and renews the ties lost between producers, the foods they grow, cooks, and consumers, says chefs have a critical role in listening more to the people who grow the food.

“I think we all see now more and more we need other ways of both changing ourselves and helping others change the way they think in order for us to have the right mindsets to make choices that are more sustainable,” says Andrew Bovarnick, UNDP’s Food, and Agricultural Commodity Systems, Global Head.

CoFSA is built on bringing consciousness to food systems to support the transition to a holistic, bio-regional approach and creating productive landscapes of regeneration.

That consciousness can help restore the balance in food systems between food production, conservation, and well-being, support the uptake of agroecological practices which regenerate the soil, and strengthen the capacity of food to distribute wealth and well-being in communities.

IPS UN Bureau Report

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

The replanting of palm oil plants aimed at producing better trees through good agricultural practices. The UNDP’s Good Growth Partnership (GGP) in Indonesia included several projects under one umbrella. Credit: ILO/Fauzan Azhima

By Cecilia Russell
JOHANNESBURG, Apr 27 2023 (IPS)

Smallholder farmers are critical to the success of Indonesia’s efforts to address deforestation and climate change. Creating an understanding and supporting this group, internally and abroad, is a crucial objective for those working towards reducing deforestation and promoting good farming practices, especially as smallholders often work hand-to-mouth and are vulnerable to perpetuating unsustainable farming practices.

Musim Mas, a large palm oil corporation involved in sustainable production, says smallholders “hold approximately 40 percent of Indonesia’s oil palm plantations and are a significant group in the palm oil supply chain. This represents 4.2 million hectares in Indonesia, roughly the size of Denmark. According to the Palm Oil Agribusiness Strategic Policy Initiative (PASPI), smallholders are set to manage 60 percent of Indonesia’s oil palm plantations by 2030.” 

Since last year a new World Bank-led programme, the Food Systems, Land Use and Restoration (FOLUR), incorporates the United Nations Development Programme Good Growth Partnership (GGP). It will continue to be involved in the success of palm oil production and smallholders’ support—crucial, especially as a study showed that the “sector lifted around 2.6 million rural Indonesians from poverty this century,” with knock-on development successes including improved rural infrastructure.

Over the past five years, GGP conducted focused training with about 3,000 smallholder farmers, says UNDP’s GGP Global Project Manager, Pascale Bonzom:

“The idea was to pilot some public-private partnerships for training, new ways of getting the producers to adopt these agricultural practices so that we could learn from these pilots and scale them up through farmer support system strategies,” Bonzom says.

Farmer organizations speaking to IPS explained how they, too, support smallholder farmers.

Amanah, an independent smallholder association of about 500 independent smallholders in Ukui, Riau province, was the first group to receive Indonesian Sustainable Palm Oil (ISPO) certification as part of a joint programme, right before the start of GGP, between the Indonesian Ministry of Agriculture, UNDP, and Asian Agri. This followed training in good agricultural practices, land mapping, high carbon stock (HCS), and high conservation value (HCV) methodologies to identify forest areas for protection.

“The majority of independent smallholders in Indonesia do not have the capacity to implement best practices in the palm oil field. Consequently, it is important to provide assistance and training on good agricultural practices in the field on a regular and ongoing basis,” Amanah commented, adding that the training included preparing land for planting sustainably and using certified seeds, fertilizer, and good harvesting practices.

A producer organization, SPKS, said it was working with farmers to implement sustainable practices. It established a smallholders’ database and assisted them with ISPO and Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) certifications.

Jointly with High Conservation Value Resource Network (HCVRN), it created a toolkit for independent smallholders on zero deforestation. This has already been implemented in four villages in two districts.

“At this stage, SPKS and HCVRN are designing benefits and incentives for independent smallholders who already protect their forest area (along) with the indigenous people,” SPKS said, adding that it expected that these initiatives could be used and adopted by those facing EU regulations.

SPKS sees the new EU deforestation legislation as a concern and an opportunity, especially as the union has shown a commitment to supporting independent small farmers—including financial support to prepare for readiness to comply with the regulations, including geolocation, capacity building, and fair price mechanisms.

Amanah also pointed to the EU regulations, which incentivize independent smallholders to adhere to the certification process.

“As required by EU law, the EU is also tasked with implementing programs and assistance at the upstream level as well as serving as an incentive for independent smallholders who already adhere to the certification process. The independent smallholder will be encouraged by this incentive to use sustainable best practices. Financing may be used as an incentive. The independent smallholders will be encouraged by this incentive to use sustainable best practices,” the organization told IPS.

SPKS would like to see final EU regulations include a requirement for companies importing palm oil into the EU to guarantee a direct supply chain from at least 30 percent of independent smallholders based on a fair partnership.

“In the draft EU regulations, it is not yet clear whether the due diligence is based on deforestation-related risk-based analysis. Indonesia is often considered a country with a high deforestation rate, and palm oil is perceived to be a factor in deforestation. Considering this, we hope the EU will consider smallholder farmers by ensuring that EU regulations do not further burden them by issuing Technical Guidelines specifically designed for smallholder farmers.”

In April 2023, the European Parliament passed the law introducing rigorous, wide-ranging requirements on commodities such as palm oil. UNDP is looking into how it can tailor its support to producing countries with compliance of this and other similar current and future regulations.

Setara Jambi, an organization dedicated to education and capacity building for oil palm smallholders for sustainable agricultural management, says that while they are concerned about the EU regulations, small farmers have “many limitations, which are different from companies that already have adequate institutions.

“This concern will not arise if there is a strong commitment from both government and companies (buyers of smallholder fresh fruit bunches) to assist smallholders in preparing and implementing sustainable palm oil management.”

The next five years with FOLUR will face significant challenges. There is a need to ensure that the National Action Plan moves to the next level because it is going to expire at the end of 2024. It will require updating and expanding.

In Indonesia, there are 26 provinces and 225 districts that produce palm oil. And at the time of writing, eight provinces and nine districts have developed their own versions of the pilot Sustainable Palm Oil Action Plan and developed their own provincial or district-level Sustainable Palm Oil Action Plans.

There is a lot to do, including supporting the Indonesian government’s multi-stakeholder process, capacity building for the private sector, supporting an enabling environment for all, and working with financial institutions to make investment decisions aligned with deforestation commitments.

The biggest issue is to get the smallholder farmers on board. Because they live a life of survival, often they are vulnerable to “short-termism.”

On the positive side, the FOLUR initiative has the government’s backing. At the launch in Jakarta last year, Musdhalifah Machmud, Deputy Minister for Food and Agriculture at the Coordinating Ministry for Economic Affairs, said that the implementation of the FOLUR Project was expected to be able to create a value chain sustainability model for rice, oil palm, coffee, and cocoa through sustainable land use and “comprehensively by paying attention to biodiversity conservation, climate change, restoration, and land degradation.”

At that launch workshop in Jakarta, the World Bank’s Christopher Brett, FOLUR co-leader, noted: “Healthy and sustainable value chains offer social benefits and generate profits without putting undue stress on the environment.”

Bonzom agrees: “At the end of the day, they (smallholders) will need to see the benefits—better market terms, better prices, better, more secure contracts—that’s what is attractive for them.”

IPS UN Bureau Report

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

A harvester checks the ripeness of oil palm fresh fruit. The UNDP’s Good Growth Partnership has worked with all sectors of the palm oil supply chain to reduce deforestation. Credit: ILO/Fauzan Azhima

By Cecilia Russell
JOHANNESBURG, Apr 27 2023 (IPS)

Indonesia finds itself in a delicate balancing act of uplifting people from poverty, managing climate change and biodiversity, and satisfying an increasingly demanding international market for sustainable farming practices—and at the pivot of this complexity is the management of its palm oil sector.

As the UNDP-led Good Growth Partnership (GGP) joins a new World Bank-led project with similar objectives—the Food Systems, Land Use, and Restoration (FOLUR) Impact Programme, it acknowledges that the government of Indonesia has made considerable advancements in improving the sustainability of the industry and the value chain over the past five years with GGP support.

The GGP, using a multi-stakeholder approach, included several projects under one programmatic umbrella, linking production, demand, responsible sourcing, traceability, and transparency, with supporting financial institutions and investors in relation to reducing deforestation from land use change. The project aimed to connect all components of the supply chain—which, in the case of Indonesian palm oil, represents 4.5 percent of the country’s GDP and 60 percent of global exports.

Late in 2022, Trase, in its report From Risk Hotspots to Sustainability Sweet Spots, confirmed Indonesia had reversed its deforestation trends in 2018-2020; deforestation for palm oil was 45,285 hectares per year—only 18 percent of its peak in 2008-2012. The improvement is attributed to strengthened law enforcement, moratoria, certification of palm oil plantations, and implementation of corporate zero-deforestation commitments.

“Importantly, deforestation has fallen during a period of continued expansion of palm oil production. Although the decline in deforestation has been linked to a drop in the market value of crude palm oil, the recent spike in palm oil prices has not yet been accompanied by a boom in palm-driven deforestation—a cause for cautious optimism,” Robert Heilmayr and Jason Benedict commented on Trase’s website.

However, CDP Palm Oil Report 2022 notes that while companies are adopting a wider range of actions to end deforestation, these “actions are not yet robust enough to end commodity-driven deforestation in the palm oil value chain.”

CDP says while 86 percent of companies implemented no-deforestation policies, only 22 percent have public and comprehensive policies: “Traceability systems have been implemented by 87 percent of companies, but only 25 percent have the capacity to scale these to over 90 percent of their production/consumption back to at least the municipality or equivalent.”

One major challenge is the inclusion of smallholders in the supply chains—and while 44 percent of companies work with smallholders to reduce or remove forest degradation, less than a third support “good agricultural practices and provide financial or technical assistance to help them achieve this.”

It is precisely these challenges the GGP confronted in Indonesia.

“Systemic change in commodity supply chains is one of the essential transformations that must occur this decade to mitigate the combined threats of catastrophic climate change, biodiversity loss, and food insecurity and to achieve resilience for humanity globally,” GGP says in its assessment report, Reducing Deforestation from Commodity Supply Chains.

These deforestation commitments are not new and followed the New York Declaration on Forests (NYDF), adopted in 2014, which called for the end of forest loss and the restoration of 350 million hectares of degraded landscapes and forestlands by 2030. Then came the Paris Climate Agreement, which in terms of its Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) agreements, was crucial for reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation in developing countries. More commitments flowed after the 2015/2016 fires, which were blamed on slash-and-burn agricultural practices, exacerbated by a dry El Niño; the fires raged for months, leading to deaths, respiratory tract infections, and cost, according to the World Bank, 16 billion US dollars.

The fires were also thought to cause a global rise in emissions and put wildlife, including the endangered orangutan population, at risk. Indonesia is a place where companies have been making commitments for some time, but implementing them with both direct and indirect suppliers is not easy.

Recognizing this challenge, the GGP supported the “improvement of sustainable production and land use policies and increased farmers’ capacities to shift to sustainable practices. At the same time, it has increased supply chain transparency and consumer demand for sustainable palm oil and built the awareness of financial institutions to invest sustainably and screen out deforesters in their portfolio.”

The GGP supported Indonesia’s National Action Plan—which is now being implemented at sub-national provincial, and district levels, too.

The action plan, along with Indonesia’s Enhanced Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC), recognizes the country’s climate change vulnerabilities, especially in the low-lying areas throughout the archipelago and its position in the so-called ring of fires. The Enhanced NDC has set ambitious deforestation and rehabilitation targets, including peat land restoration of 2 million hectares and rehabilitation of degraded land of 12 million hectares by 2030.

Despite good results, stress ratcheted up for the industry as a new European Union policy now excludes sourcing palm oil or produce from areas deforested and degraded after December 31, 2020.

The new regulation will require companies to prove their bona fides through recognized traceability techniques. The sector is still working out its detailed response to the requirements, which some see as a unilateral EU move that does not respect the rights of the producing countries.

While the EU is a small market for Indonesia compared with the domestic, Chinese, and Indian markets, the regulations put additional pressure on an industry still strongly associated with small-scale farmers. It is also likely that other large markets will eventually align themselves with these regulations.

Even before the regulations became an issue, the GGP involved itself in communication campaigns to sensitize the public to sustainable certification, from the Indonesia Sustainable Palm Oil (ISPO)to the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) standards.

The communication campaigns worked to create awareness about sustainability issues among consumers, but also with large retailers (including one called Super Indo) to place RSPO-certified palm oil products on their shelves.

It’s critical to get all players in the supply chain on board, which is where multi-stakeholder tactics work effectively; the GGP believes that this multi-faceted approach is crucial to influencing companies.

“You influence companies through government policies, through the market, but you also influence them through the financial institutions,” says UNDP’s GGP Global Project Manager, Pascale Bonzom. “If the financial institutions that fund these downstream companies require them to show that they have no deforestation commitments, and they are implementing them with results, then they (the companies) are going to have to do something about it.”

Elaborating on the strategy, she said GGP and its partner World Wildlife Fund (WWF) worked at a regional level on building capacity in financial institutions to understand the impacts of their investments.

Now a scorecard is available—to equip and influence the investors to make better decisions and to use this kind of Environmental, Social, and Governance factors (ESG) screening for deforestation.

See Part 2: Smallholders Key to Indonesian Deforestation Successes

IPS UN Bureau Report

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

María Luz Rodríguez stands next to her solar oven where she cooked lasagna in the village of El Salamar in San Luis La Herradura municipality. In this region in southern El Salvador, an effort is being made to implement environmental actions to ensure the sustainable use of natural resources. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/ IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN LUIS LA HERRADURA, El Salvador, Mar 31 2021 (IPS)

Salvadoran villager Maria Luz Rodriguez placed the cheese on top of the lasagna she was cooking outdoors, put the pan in her solar oven and glanced at the midday sun to be sure there was enough energy for cooking.

“Hopefully it won’t get too cloudy later,” Maria Luz, 78, told IPS. She then checked the thermometer inside the oven to see if it had reached 150 degrees Celsius, the ideal temperature to start baking.

She lives in El Salamar, a coastal village of 95 families located in San Luis La Herradura, a municipality in the central department of La Paz which is home to some 30,000 people on the edge of an impressive ecosystem: the mangroves and bodies of water that make up the Estero de Jaltepeque, a natural reserve whose watershed covers 934 square kilometres.

After several minutes the cheese began to melt, a clear sign that things were going well inside the solar oven, which is simply a box with a lid that functions as a mirror, directing sunlight into the interior, which is covered with metal sheets.

“I like to cook lasagna on special occasions,” Maria Luz said with a smile.

After Tropical Storm Stan hit Central America in 2005, a small emergency fund reached El Salamar two years later, which eventually became the start of a much more ambitious sustainable development project that ended up including more than 600 families.

Solar ovens and energy-efficient cookstoves emerged as an important component of the programme.

Aerial view of Estero de Jaltepeque, in San Luis La Herradura, a municipality on the Pacific coast in southern El Salvador where a sustainable development programme is being carried out in local communities, including the use of solar stoves and sustainable fishing and agriculture techniques. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala /IPS

The project was financed by the Global Environment Facility‘s (GEF) Small Grants Programme, and El Salamar was later joined by other villages, bringing the total number to 18. The overall investment was more than 400,000 dollars.

In addition to solar ovens and high-energy rocket stoves, work was done on mangrove reforestation and sustainable management of fishing and agriculture, among other measures. Agriculture and fishing are the main activities in these villages, in addition to seasonal work during the sugarcane harvest.

While María Luz made the lasagna, her daughter, María del Carmen Rodríguez, 49, was cooking two other dishes: bean soup with vegetables and beef, and rice – not in a solar oven but on one of the rocket stoves.

This stove is a circular structure 25 centimetres high and about 30 centimetres in diameter, whose base has an opening in which a small metal grill is inserted to hold twigs no more than 15 centimetres long, which come from the gliridicia (Gliricidia sepium) tree. This promotes the use of living fences that provide firewood, to avoid damaging the mangroves.

The stove maintains a good flame with very little wood, due to its high energy efficiency, unlike traditional cookstoves, which require several logs to prepare each meal and produce smoke that is harmful to health.

María del Carmen Rodríguez cooks rice on a rocket stove using a few twigs from a tree species that emits less CO2 than mangroves, whose sustainability is also preserved thanks to the use of the tree. Many families in the community of El Salamar have benefited from this energy-efficient technology, as well as other initiatives promoted along the Pacific coast in southern El Salvador. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala /IPS

The rocket stove can cook anything, but it is designed to work with another complementary mechanism for maximum energy efficiency.

Once the stews or soups have reached boiling point, they are placed inside the “magic” stove: a circular box about 36 centimetres in diameter made of polystyrene or durapax, as it is known locally, a material that retains heat.

The food is left there, covered, to finish cooking with the steam from the hot pot, like a kind of steamer.

“The nice thing about this is that you can do other things while the soup is cooking by itself in the magic stove,” explained María del Carmen, a homemaker who has five children.

The technology for both stoves was brought to these coastal villages by a team of Chileans financed by the Chile Fund against Hunger and Poverty, established in 2006 by the government of that South American country and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to promote South-South cooperation.

The Chileans taught a group of young people from several of these communities how to make the components of the rocket stoves, which are made from clay, cement and a commercial sealant or glue.

The blue crab is one of the species raised in nurseries by people in the Estero de Jaltepeque region in southern El Salvador, as part of an environmental sustainability project in the area financed by the Global Environment Facility’s Small Grants Programme. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

The use of these stoves “has reduced carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by at least 50 percent compared to traditional stoves,” Juan René Guzmán, coordinator of the GEF’s Small Grants Programme in El Salvador, told IPS.

Some 150 families use rocket stoves and magic stoves in 10 of the villages that were part of the project, which ended in 2017.

“People were given their cooking kits, and in return they had to help plant mangroves, or collect plastic, not burn garbage, etc. But not everyone was willing to work for the environment,” Claudia Trinidad, 26, a native of El Salamar and a senior studying business administration – online due to the COVID pandemic – at the Lutheran University of El Salvador, told IPS.

Those who worked on the mangrove reforestation generated hours of labour, which were counted as more than 800,000 dollars in matching funds provided by the communities.

In the project area, 500 hectares of mangroves have been preserved or restored, and sustainable practices have been implemented on 300 hectares of marine and land ecosystems.

Petrona Cañénguez shows how she cooks bean soup on an energy-efficient rocket stove in an outside room of her home in the hamlet of San Sebastián El Chingo, one of the beneficiaries of a sustainable development programme in the municipality of San Luis La Herradura, on El Salvador’s southern coast. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala /IPS

Petrona Cañénguez, from the town of San Sebastián El Chingo, was among the people who participated in the work. She was also cooking bean soup for lunch on her rocket stove when IPS visited her home during a tour of the area.

“I like the stove because you feel less heat when you are preparing food, plus it’s very economical, just a few twigs and that’s it,” said Petrona, 59.

The bean soup, a staple dish in El Salvador, would be ready in an hour, she said. She used just under one kilo of beans, and the soup would feed her and her four children for about five days.

However, she used only the rocket stove, without the magic stove, more out of habit than anything else. “We always have gliridicia twigs on hand,” she said, which make it easy to use the stove.

Although the solar oven offers the cleanest solution, few people still have theirs, IPS found.

This is due to the fact that the wood they were built with was not of the best quality and the coastal weather conditions and moths soon took their toll.

Maria Luz is one of the few people who still uses hers, not only to cook lasagna, but for a wide variety of recipes, such as orange bread.

However, the project is not only about stoves and ovens.

Some families living in coastal villages in the municipality of San Luis La Herradura have dug ponds for sustainable fishing, which was of great help to the local population during the COVID-19 lockdown in this coastal area of southern El Salvador. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala /IPS

The beneficiary families also received cayucos (flat-bottomed boats smaller than canoes) and fishing nets, plus support for setting up nurseries for blue crabs and mollusks native to the area, as part of the fishing component with a focus on sustainability in this region on the shores of the Pacific Ocean.

Several families have dug ponds that fill up with water from the estuary at high tide, where they raise fish that provide them with food in times of scarcity, such as during the lockdown declared in the country in March 2020 to curb the spread of coronavirus.

The project also promoted the planting of corn and beans with native seeds, as well as other crops – tomatoes, cucumbers, cushaw squash and radishes – using organic fertiliser and herbicides.

The president of the Local Development Committee of San Luis La Herradura, Daniel Mercado, told IPS that during the COVID-19 health emergency people in the area resorted to bartering to stock up on the food they needed.

“If one community had tomatoes and another had fish, we traded, we learned to survive, to coexist,” Daniel said. “It was like the communism of the early Christians.”

The project to repair and install new fog traps in the Peña Blanca Agricultural Community will be completed by the end of 2020. With funding from UNDP, the initiative will include infrastructure to receive visitors in this community in Coquimbo, the region that forms the southern border of Chile's Atacama Desert. CREDIT: Fundación Un Alto en el Desierto

By Orlando Milesi
OVALLE, Chile, Jul 15 2020 (IPS)

“The harvested water has helped us at critical times and the fog nets have also brought us visibility. Today we produce beer here and many tourists come,” says Daniel Rojas, president of the Peña Blanca Agricultural Community in Chile.

Located in the south of the Coquimbo region, 300 km north of Santiago, Peña Blanca is suffering a brutal drought and faces the threat of becoming part of the Atacama Desert by 2050, the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) warned two years ago.

¨In Peña Blanca until 2000, water ran off the surface, and the villagers had dikes to take turns to use the water,” Nicolás Schneider, a geographer with the “Un Alto en el Desierto” (A Stop in the Desert) Foundation, the NGO behind the installation of fog harvesters in the region, told IPS.

The official record of rainfall in the municipality of Ovalle, in the basin of the Limarí River, the main river in Coquimbo, indicates an annual average of just 102.6 millimetres in the last 30 years.

But in 2018 the average fell to 38.1 mm, and in 2019 to just 8.5 mm. In June, three non-consecutive days of rain were greeted with joy because they totaled more rainfall than in all of 2019.

Coquimbo is home to 771,085 people, 148,867 of whom live in rural areas. It is the southern border of the Atacama Desert, the driest desert on earth which has the most intense solar radiation on the planet. It encompasses six northern regions in this long, narrow country that stretches between the Andes Mountains and the Pacific Ocean and has a population of 18.7 million people.

“I am a livestock breeder and I also organise events for delegations that visit the fog nets in Cerro Grande,” Claudia Rojas, who at 53 is making the shift from livestock raising to a tourism microenterprise, told IPS.

“I was born and raised in Peña Blanca and I wouldn’t change it for any other place. Now I have only a few goats (20) and sheep (60). I had up to 200 goats but I have been reducing the herd because there is not enough natural pasture,” she said.

“I hope to continue receiving delegations when the pandemic is over. I serve them cheese, roasted kid (young goat) and local products. At my house or in the reserve,” she said.

What Claudia loves the most are the visits by hundreds of schoolchildren “who are happy to see nature.”

“From up above they can see the (Andes) mountain range and on the other side the sea. The main characteristic here is the fog. And they are amazed when the fog reaches the hill and they see how the water is harvested,” she said.

The Agricultural Community of Peña Blanca, made up of 85 families, has 6,587 hectares, 100 of which constitute the Cerro Grande Ecological Reserve, where the fog harvesters were installed 15 years ago. Back then, many locals could not imagine the impact and benefits the nets would have.

“They have made us well-known and that has brought the community resources for other projects,” said its president, Daniel Rojas, 60 (no relation to Claudia or other sources with the same surname, which is common in the area).

Hundreds of primary school students in Chile attend workshops and talks on the environment at the facilities of the Cerro Grande Ecological Reserve in Peña Blanca. University students also come to work on their theses, and researchers visit, interested in replicating water harvesting through fog traps in other locations in Chile. CREDIT: Fundación Un Alto en el Desierto

In Chile, the “agricultural community” is a legal figure for the collective property and usufruct of the land, in which the community members are given portions of land to use while another part is collectively managed.

“We have harvested a significant amount of water that has helped us in difficult times. At first to irrigate the vegetation and reforest with native species, and then to water the animals. We built a drinking trough, piping the water two km downhill.”

“Later, a 10,000-litre tank was made to collect water for people living nearby, to use when the tanker truck does not come,” he said.

Eight years ago, Peña Blanca beer began to be brewed, made with fog water, which is softer. Its light (Scottish) and dark (Brown) versions competed at the 2015 ExpoMilan and won the audience award.

Mario Alucema, 59, also born and raised in Peña Blanca, works in the artisanal brewery.

“Our beer made with 100 percent fog water is popular and successful. It has drawn attention to our farming community. I work (in the brewery) every (southern hemisphere) summer and receive 30 tourists a days, from Argentina, Brazil and other countries,” he told IPS proudly.

The plant produces 2,500 litres a week, and production is set to increase because the plant will be expanded.

“When these young entrepreneurs showed up I said to myself: ‘Who’s going to come all this way for the beer?’ We’re a long way from the Pan-American Highway. Then I thought, ‘Who’s going to drink this beer?’ And third, I thought it was money laundering. But everything was the other way around. Today, in the midst of this global pandemic, they’re still coming for the beer,” he said.

Daniel Ogalde, 47, who is also from Peña Blanca, has been the park ranger since March. He is dedicated to the maintenance, irrigation and replanting of native species in the ecological reserve.

“My idea is to be here for a long time. Because of the coronavirus, visits are suspended, but in August we plan to restart them,” he told IPS, adding that the reserve “is a source of pride for the community and everyone is concerned about its care and maintenance.”

Guido Rojas, 58, lives in Peña Blanca but works at the nearby lookout point at the Talinay Wind Park, owned by the ENEL Green Power company. “Harvesting water helps us because there have been many dry years,” he said.

The experience “has been maintained by the support of the community and the people who live here,” he added.

A qualitative leap has been made since July. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has granted 40,000 dollars to renovate and build fog nets, install lookouts, paths, signage and toilets. The programme ends on Dec. 31.

Since it was created in 2006, the reserve has had 24 fog-catchers, with a total of 216 square metres of double-layer 35 percent Raschel mesh.

“The expansion consists of the repair of 12 and the construction of 16 new fog nets. We will have 28 totaling 252 square metres, to harvest water,” said Un Alto en el Desierto’s Schneider.

Now 1,537 litres of water will be harvested per day, he explained.

In a calendar year, half of the fog water is harvested in September, October and November, when 20 litres/day are harvested per square metre, more than three times the average.

Fog traps were, in fact, an invention of Chilean physicist Carlos Espinosa, who donated the patent in the 1980s to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), making it possible for them to be used in different countries.

Fog catchers consist of fine mesh nets known as Raschel set up on foggy slopes to catch suspended drops of water, which gather and merge, running from small gutters into collection tanks.

The new systems have a design called “comunero” and created by Schneider and Daniel and Guido Rojas.

They are individual structures of nine square metres each that have several advantages: they are cheaper, easier to transport and to maintain and if any one suffers a flaw the others continue harvesting water.

They are expected to remain fully operational until 2028.

The first fog-catching project in Chile was in the mining town of El Tofo, in a region north of Coquimbo. But it was abandoned in the 1990s. In Coquimbo, there are other facilities for harvesting fog water, for individual and collective use. But none are as well-known as Peña Blanca’s.

In Alto Patache, near Iquique, in the far north of Chile, there are fog traps that harvest seven litres a day per square metre, but the project is for scientific research. Meanwhile, in Chañaral, a municipality in the Atacama region, there are fog catchers whose water is bottled and also used for aloe vera production.

According to Schneider, the fog catchers “can be replicated along the entire coastal strip between Papudo (centre) and Arica (far north), which is more than 2,000 km” of this South American country’s 6,435-km coastline.

“They are really useful for isolated areas, fishing coves and scattered populations neglected by public spending. And they are very important for combating desertification because so much water can be harvested in springtime, to use in the hot summers,” he said.

The problem standing in the way of expanding the use of fog traps, according to Rojas, the community president, is the lack of government funding for this technology and its implementation.

“We have a lot of coves that are only supplied by tanker trucks. Perhaps fog traps are not the total solution, but they can help a lot when water is scarce,” as is the case in northern Chile, he argued.

Mission 1.5 players will take on the role of climate policymakers trying to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius. Courtesy: UNDP

By Samira Sadeque
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 17 2020 (IPS)

The United Nations Development Programme is leading a climate change effort that might finally address concerns many advocates have: bridging the gap between people and governments. 

The “Mission 1.5, a campaign” was launched in New York on Thursday, with the purpose of bringing the people closer to their governments with their suggested — and even ambitious — climate action plans.

The campaign is designed around an internet and mobile-based video game, available here, that UNDP is targeting will reach 20 million people around the globe, providing them with an opportunity to voice their solutions.  

“One of the things that has been really important to us about Mission 1.5 is to really ensure that we can reach as many people as possible,” Cassie Flynn, UNDP climate change advisor, told IPS. “What we know that this is a huge industry, and how do we use that industry to tackle one of the biggest problems in the world?”

Jude Ower, founder and CEO of Playmob, a gaming company that works on social advocacy through their games and designed Mission 1.5, told IPS that climate-oriented games are their most popular.

She noted that the gaming industry’s “massive scale” of the industry — with 2.7 billion players around the world — can play a role in moving forward with climate action.

“The number one thing people do on their phone apart from social media is gaming,” she told IPS at the launch. “It’s a great way to reach people in an uninterrupted way and gaming is great for telling stories, for engaging people, for inspiring action as well.”

In this game, the players are asked questions about solutions for climate change in different fields such as green economy, fossil fuels, corporate responsibility, and more. 

The questions have three options for answers — while one of the three is usually an answer that is obviously against a progress towards appropriate climate action, the other two are more nuanced. And based on the answer one picks, they’re awarded either 700 points or 1,000 points. 

At the launch on Thursday, attendees played the game and shared their notes — the collective results were projected on the screen for everyone to see. 

“Mission 1.5 is learning from the world of gaming and digital technology,” Achim Steiner, UNDP Administrator said at the launch, “and together we tried to identify the different ways in which people throughout the world cannot just be spectators of climate change, not just sit in meetings and be lectured at, be told about the science, be told about the challenge, and often be told about the reasons about why we’re not acting.”

After the game, players are asked to vote on key climate actions they want to see adopted. This data will be analysed and delivered to governments, who often lack access to reliable information on public opinion on climate action. 

The game is not for just young kids — the organisers reiterated that this game can be played by anyone around the world, irrespective of their age and location. 

“This is a game for everybody. It’s a game that parents can play with their kids, and for friends to play,” Flynn told IPS. “We’re really excited for this being able to help everyone, no matter whether you know a lot about climate change or a little climate change, you can get something out of it, and you can learn.”

Dr. Armstrong Alexis, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) resident representative for Suriname tells IPS High Forest Cover and Low Deforestation (HFLD) nations need support as they continue to protect their forests. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Desmond Brown
PARAMARIBO, Feb 14 2019 (IPS)

As High Forest Cover and Low Deforestation (HFLD) nations meet in Suriname at a major conference, it is obvious that the decision made by these countries to preserve their forests has been a difficult but good one.

“It is a choice that governments have to make to determine whether they want to continue being custodians of the environment or whether they want to pursue interests related only to economic advancement and economic growth,” Dr. Armstrong Alexis, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) resident representative for Suriname, tells IPS in an interview.

The UNDP and the U.N. Department for Economic and Social Affairs (UN-DESA) have been instrumental in the coming together of the group of countries under the HFLD umbrella.

Both U.N. bodies have supported countries with the design and implementation of national policies and measures to reduce deforestation and manage forests sustainably, hence contributing to the mitigation of climate change and advancing sustainable development.

Forests provide a dwelling and livelihood for over a billion people—including many indigenous peoples. They also host the largest share the world’s biodiversity and provide essential ecosystem services, such as water and carbon storage, which play significant roles in mitigating climate change.

Deforestation and forest degradation, which still continue in many countries at high rates, contribute severely to climate change, currently representing about a fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Amid this, Alexis says HFLD countries need support as they continue to protect their forests.

Excerpts of the interview follow:

For a long time Suriname has maintained 93 percent forest cover of total land area which has been providing multiple benefits to the global community, in particular, combatting climate change for current and future generations. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

Inter Press Service (IPS): Can you give a brief synopsis of the work of the UNDP in Suriname?

Armstrong Alexis (AA): The UNDP is a partner in development in Suriname. We specifically focus on resources. We cover a whole spectrum of issues around climate change, renewable energy, the reduction of fossil fuels and adaptation and mitigation measures. We also focus on the issue of forests.

IPS: Why is this meeting important for Suriname, and what was the UNDP’s role in collaborating with the HFLD nations?

AA: Suriname is the most forested country on earth. Approximately 93 percent of the land mass of Suriname is covered by pristine Amazonian forests. So, with 93 percent forest cover, Suriname has traditionally, for centuries, been a custodian of its forests and have preserved its forests while at the same time achieving significant development targets for its people.

Given the role of forests as they relate to climate change and in particular the sequestration of carbon, Suriname genuinely believes, and the science will back that up, that Suriname in fact is a carbon negative country. It stores a lot more carbon than it emits. And there are a number of other countries in the world that the U.N. has defined as Heavily Forested Low Deforestation countries. These are countries that are more than 50 percent covered by forests and at the same time they have the deforestation rate which is way below the international average which I think is .02 percent of deforestation per annum.

These countries have come together through a collaborative effort supported by the UNDP and the UN-DESA.

We’ve brought these countries together because they all have a common purpose, they all have a common story and they all are working towards finding common solutions to ensure that there is:

1. Recognition of the fact that these countries have traditionally maintained their forests and have not destroyed the forests in the name of development;
2. Given the relevance of trees and forests to combatting climate change, that these are actually the countries that provide a good example and the best opportunity for serving the earth with high forest cover.

IPS: What is the way forward for the protection of forests?

AA: In every country where there are forests there are activities that result in two things – deforestation, where the trees are cut down and usually not replaced; and you also have what it called forest degradation where the forest is not totally destroyed but it is not as thick, it does not have as many trees and sometimes the trees are much younger for many different reasons, including timber production. So, you might be degrading the quality of the forest but not necessarily deforesting in total.

Those countries that form the HFLD have made commitments with the international community that they will continue to pursue their development objectives without necessarily destroying their forests. And destroying here means either deforestation or degradation.

It’s a challenge because in Suriname for example, the small-scale gold mining sector is the largest driver of deforestation—not timber production, not palm oil as in some countries, and not infrastructure.

IPS: So, what do you say to a country that has gold in the soil? That they should not mine that gold?

AA: It’s difficult to say that to a country when the economy depends on it. How do you say to a country don’t produce timber when the economy of the country depends on it?

There are ways and means of doing it [small-scale mining or timber production] in a sustainable way. There are ways and means of ensuring that in granting concessions whether it be for timber production or small-scale gold mining, that you take into consideration means and approaches for rehabilitation.

You have to take into consideration the biodiversity and the sensitivity of some of those forests and whether or not you value more the biodiversity of that area or the few dollars that you can make by destroying that area’s forests and extracting the gold and extracting the timer.

So, conscious decisions have to be made by governments and our role as UNDP is to provide the government with the policy options, which usually is supported by sound scientific research and data to indicate to them what their real options are and how they can integrate those options in the decisions that they make.

So, it is a difficult choice indeed, but it is a choice that governments have to make to determine whether they want to continue being custodians of the environment or whether they want to pursue interests related only to economic advancement and economic growth.

So far, they’ve done a good job at it. One of the areas that I want to emphasise is that a lot of this work cannot be done by the countries alone, because if you think about it, the market for the timber is not Suriname. The market for the gold is not Suriname.

Usually the companies that come into those countries to do the extractives, they are not even local companies. They are big multinational companies. A country like Suriname or Guyana—those countries cannot take on this mammoth task alone. They need the support of the international community, they need the support of agencies like the U.N., they need the support of the funds that have been established like the Green Climate Fund, the Global Environment Facility, the Adaptation Fund, and they need the support of the bilateral donors and the countries that have traditionally invested in protecting the forests.

Excerpt:

The Minister of Environment and Sustainable Development of Argentina, Rabbi Sergio Bergman, speaks during the opening of the Group of 20 (G20) Sustainability Working Group in Buenos Aires. Argentina, which chairs the Group this year, has the difficult task of seeking consensus on this thorny issue. Credit: Ministry of Environment of Argentina

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Apr 20 2018 (IPS)

As president this year of the Group of 20 (G20) developed and emerging nations, Argentina has now formally begun the task of trying to rebuild a consensus around climate change. It will be an uphill climb, since the position taken by the United States in 2017 led to a noisy failure in the group with regard to the issue.

The G20 Sustainability Working Group (CSWG) held its first meeting of the year on Apr. 17-18 in Buenos Aires, in the middle of a balancing act.

Argentine officials hope a full consensus will be reached, in order to avoid a repeat of what happened in 2017 in Germany, when the final document crudely exposed the differences between the U.S. standpoint and the views of the other 19 members, with respect to climate change.

“Since the United States does not recognise the Climate Action Plan agreed in Hamburg (where the last G20 summit was held), we did not formally table it. But what we are doing is addressing the contents of that plan,” Carlos Gentile, chair of the G20 Sustainability Working Group, told IPS.

“Today the United States is participating and we are confident that this time a consensus will be reached for the G20 document by the end of this year,” added Gentile, who is Argentina’s secretary of climate change and sustainable development.

The official stressed, as a step forward for the countries of Latin America and other emerging economies, the fact that the main theme of the Working Group this year is adaptation to climate change and extreme climate events, with a focus on development of resilient infrastructure and job creation.

“We know that mitigation is more important for the developed countries, which is why it is a victory that they accepted our focus on adaptation,” said Gentile.

The Working Group commissioned four documents that will be discussed at the end of August at the second and last meeting of the year, which will be held in Puerto Iguazú, on the triple border between Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay.

Two of the papers will be on adaptation to climate change and will be produced by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and UN Environment.

The other two will be about long-term strategies, prepared by the World Resources Institute, an international research organisation, and how to align funding with the national contributions established in the Paris Agreement on climate change, by the International Labour Organisation (ILO).

One of the highlights of the two days in Buenos Aires was that the countries that have already finalised documents on their long-term strategies (LTS) shared their experiences. Among these countries are Germany, Canada, the United States, Great Britain, Mexico and France.

The LTS are voluntary plans that nations have been invited to present, by the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Convention on Climate Change, about their vision of how it is possible to transform their productive and energy mix by 2050 and beyond.

While the national contributions included in the Paris Agreement, established at COP 21 in December 2015, are included in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and are to be reviewed every five years, the LTS look much further.

“Each of the countries designed their LTS in their own way. Some countries said they used it as a way to send a signal to the private sector about what kinds of technologies are foreseen for the climate transition and others spoke about job creation,” said Lucas Black, climate change specialist for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

The UNDP collaborates with the Global Resources Institute in its document on the LTS and it also plays a role in the agenda of issues related to the development of the G20, as an external guest.

What does not seem clear is where such ambitious transformation plans towards 2050 will find the resources needed to turn them into reality.

In this respect, Black acknowledged to a small group of journalists that for emerging economies it is particularly difficult to find the funds necessary for carrying out in-depth changes.

“The private sector, particularly in infrastructure, really needs long-term certainty. That is a crucial part of its decision to invest,” said the international official, who arrived from New York for the meeting.

For her part, María Eugenia Di Paola, coordinator of the UNDP Environment Programme in Argentina, said the financing for the transition must come from “a public-private partnership” and that “the incorporation of adaptation to climate change in the G20 agenda is mainly of interest to developing countries.”

This year’s G20 Leaders’ Summit will take place Nov. 30-Dec. 1 in Buenos Aires and will bring together the world’s most powerful heads of state and government for the first time in South America.

By that time, which will mark the end of the presidency of Argentina, this country hopes to reach a consensus on climate change, an issue that was first addressed in the official G20 declaration in 2008.

Black believes it is possible.

“Obviously, the G20 countries have different views. During the German presidency there was no consensus on all points. But all G20 members have a strong interest in the issues discussed this week: adaptation to climate change and infrastructure, long-term strategies and the need to align financing with national contributions,” he said.

The Working Group meeting in Buenos Aires was opened by two ministers of the government of President Mauricio Macri: Environment Minister Sergio Bergman and Energy and Mining Minister Juan José Aranguren.

Before joining the government, Aranguren was for years CEO of the Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell in Argentina.

Argentina launched a programme to build sources of generation of renewable energy, which is almost non-existent in the country’s electricity mix but drives the most important projects in other areas of the energy sector.

Thus, for example, it was announced that in May Aranguren will travel to Houston, the capital of the U.S. oil industry, in search of investors to boost the development of Vaca Muerta, a gigantic reservoir of unconventional fossil fuels in the south of the country.

The minister has also been questioned by environmental sectors for his support for the construction of a gigantic dam in Patagonia and the installation of two new nuclear power plants.

“Latin America has a series of opportunities to build a more sustainable energy system, to improve infrastructure and to provide safe access to energy for the entire population,” Aranguren said in his opening speech at the Working Group meeting.

Bergman, meanwhile, said that “we have all the resources to address the challenge of climate change to transform reality and open the door to a secure and stable future for all.”

Fanny Kaekat, indigenous leader of the Shuar Arutam people, has spent her life defending the territories of indigenous communities in southeastern Ecuador from the threat of mining. She poses at the 14th Latin American Feminist Meeting, in Montevideo, in front of a poster that reads: "my body, my territory", a slogan of women human rights defenders. Credit: Mariela Jara / IPS

By Mariela Jara
MONTEVIDEO, Nov 28 2017 (IPS)

Veiled and direct threats, defamation, criminalisation of activism, attacks on their private lives, destruction of property and assets needed to support their families, and even murder are some forms of gender violence that extend throughout Latin America against women defenders of rights.

“They want to throw us off our land, they do not leave us alone. The helicopters fly at midnight, there are rumours that they are going to attack us,” Fanny Kaekat, an indigenous leader of the Shuar Arutam people in Ecuador, who for decades have been resisting the harassment of mining companies interested in the gold in their territories in the southeast of the country, told IPS.

In 2016, the government of then President Rafael Correa (2007-2017) declared a state of emergency and the military entered to force the families out of their village. They focused their brutality on women, denounced Kaekat, at the 14th Latin American and Caribbean Feminist Conference (Eflac), held in the Uruguayan capital."Women rights activists challenge many traditional and cultural roles, breaking with the stereotype of women dedicated to the home, and they mobilise for a double agenda, the sovereignty of their bodies and of their territories, the freedom to decide over them. The system’s response is to discipline them." -- Denisse Chávez

“Because of our culture, we have a number of children, five or six, we cannot move easily as men, who quickly climb into the mountains. When the soldiers came, they burned our huts and kicked over ourpots with food,” Kaekat said, describing the destruction of homes and household implements necessary for sustenance.

The violence against women rights activists was one of the main topics discussed at Eflac, which brought together some 2,000 feminists between Nov. 23 and 25, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, which marks the start of 16 days of activism to eradicate a problem that is growing rather than declining in the region.

This is shown by the report “Commitment to Action: Public Policies to Eradicate Violence against Women in Latin America and the Caribbean”, launched on Nov. 22 by UN Women and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), which stresses that the region has the highest rates of gender violence not perpetrated by a partner and the second highest committed by an intimate partner.

One case discussed at the Eflac was the 2016 murder of internationally renowned environmentalist Berta Cáceres, a leader of the Lenca people in Honduras and a feminist activist who was leading the defence of the right to water and the fight against the construction of a dam on the Zarca River.

Although no one has been charged with planning her murder, Cáceres’ family blames Desarrollos Energéticos SA, the company in charge of construction of the dam.

That year was especially cruel for those who defend their territories from the greed of companies that develop extractivist projects without respecting the right to prior and informed consultation of indigenous peoples, and without taking into account the irreparable damage to the environment and local communities.

The 2016 annual report of the non-governmental organisation Global Witness points out that 60 percent of the 200 murders of human rights defenders in the world occurred in Latin America.

For Denisse Chávez, from the Peruvian group Women and Climate Change, there is an escalation of violence against women in local communities, with a greater emphasis on activists, because of the role they play in strengthening community ties.

Yanet Caruajulca, a Peruvian activist for the right to water and a healthy environment, stands in front of a poster at the 14th Latin American and Caribbean Feminist Conference, in the city of Montevideo, where one of the focal points was the analysis of gender-based attacks on women human rights defenders in the region. Credit: Mariela Jara / IPS

“This alliance of extractivist capitalism with patriarchy targets women and seeks to control and subdue both their bodies and their territories. Those who rebel, protest and defend their rights to be free and sovereign are repressed and subject to different forms of violence,” she told IPS.

Chávez recalled that the first Tribunal for Justice in Defence of the Rights of Pan-Amazonian and Andean Women, held within the VIII Pan-Amazonian Social Forum, in April in Peru’s central jungle, analysed emblematic cases from six countries, which showed that violence against women activists is due to their role in defending the territories and community life, along with specific gender biases.

“It is a role that also contributes to preserving nature and the cultures and worldviews that contribute to the sustainability of life,” said the activist, whose organisation, together with other groups, is carrying out a regional campaign for the rights of women defenders during the Eflac.

Nilde Sousa, of the Brazilian Women’s Articulation, denounced in the conference the plunder of territories in her country. One of the emblematic cases is that of the Belo Monte hydroelectric plant on the Xingu River, which began operating in 2016, in the Amazon state of Pará.

The construction of this megaproject, she said, entailed the displacement of families, the destruction of ecosystems and an increase in violence, especially the sexual exploitation of girls and adolescents.

“We have been fighting relentlessly, and we tell this encroachment by capitalism that our bodies should not be violated, our territories should not be violated, they should be respected,” Sousa declared.

In spite of everything, thanks to their struggles, women activists have gained a public space, participants in Montevideo concluded.

“Women rights activists challenge many traditional and cultural roles, breaking with the stereotype of women dedicated to the home, and they mobilise for a double agenda, the sovereignty of their bodies and of their territories, the freedom to decide over them. The system’s response is to discipline them,” said Chávez, alluding to the concept contributed by the Argentine feminist academic Rita Segato.

Yanet Caruajulca is one of the women who has shaken the traditional moulds and in the Andean highlands of Peru, in the region of Cajamarca, defends the right to water and demands the withdrawal of several mining companies.

She heads the Regional Federation of Rondas Campesinas (literally “peasant rounds”) and has taken to the streets numerous times to protest. She is currently on trial, for vandalism charges brought in 2013. “I am summoned on Dec. 12 to hear the sentence,” she told IPS, describing the judicial proceedings as tortuous.

“I had no defence counsel, the hearings are not in my district, Bambamarca, but in the capital city of Cajamarca, more than two and a half hours away by road. And I do not have the financial means for all those expenses,” she said.

The wrongful use of criminal law is precisely one of the methods reported by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), used to criminalise social protests and activism.

According to a 2015 report by the IACHR, the effects of criminalisation include damages to mental health, disruption of family life and implications for community life.

“For me it is a constant worry, I think about what will happen to my children if I am convicted, and also that if that happens, I would not be able to do anything. In addition, it would be a message to the population to not speak out, to not protest, to not claim their rights, because if they do, the same thing may happen to them,” said Carajualca.

As in her case or that of Berta Cáceres and other rights defenders, the institutions are weak to protect them.

The UN Special Rapporteurs on human rights and the IACHR have made successive appeals to countries in the region to comply with protecting and guaranteeing the rights of activists. There is even a UN resolution in this regard.

However, the dangers persist for women activists. But, as participants in the Eflac stressed, it is by joining efforts that women will find the support and the strength to continue, under the slogan of the meeting: “diverse but not dispersed”.

Excerpt:

Three generations of women from an Argentine family hold posters with the slogan "Ni Una Menos", which means "Not one [woman] less", in one of the demonstrations against femicides in Buenos Aires. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet / IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
BUENOS AIRES, Nov 23 2017 (IPS)

A “conservative and fundamentalist onslaught” in Latin America against a supposed “gender ideology” is jeopardising advances in the fight against violence towards women, feminist activists complain.

Susana Chiarotti, an Argentine lawyer who is a member of the Advisory Council of the Latin American and Caribbean Committee for the Defence of Women’s Rights (Cladem), described this as one of the issues “of concern”, while reflecting on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, celebrated on Nov. 25.

That day opens 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence, until Human Rights Day on Dec. 10, led by the campaign “UNiTE”, in which different United Nations agencies participate, whose theme this year is “Leave No One Behind: Ending Violence against Women and Girls.”"There is something perverse in this way of categorising things. They are trying to limit women once again to their traditional place: in charge of all care-giving and household work, without complaining; for them to return home and leave the few remaining jobs to men; and to be obedient again to the male head of the family." -- Susana Chiarotti

“These anti-women’s rights campaigns are not isolated, scattered or erratic. They are well organised, financed and coordinated. Conservative sectors in all countries are connected with each other and share strategies and activities,” Chiarotti told IPS when explaining the scope of the conservative offensive.

Chiarotti, who is also director of the Institute of Gender, Development and Law, said the attack against the supposed “gender ideology”, “is reproduced in the same format” in countries like Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru or Uruguay.

“In all of them, among other initiatives, they try to eliminate comprehensive sex education, or erase gender equality and non-discrimination based on sexual orientation from school curricula, and they oppose women’s autonomy over their bodies by preventing abortions, even legal ones,” she explained.

A report by UN Women and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), launched on Nov. 22, underscores that, although in the region the number of countries that have national policies to protect women increased from 24 in 2013 (74 percent) to 31 in 2016 (94 percent), the high rates of violence against women remain a serious challenge.

“In spite of the notable advances in national action plans, the region shows the highest rates of violence against women not perpetrated by an intimate partner and the second highest in intimate partner violence,” Chiarotti added.

The report, “From Commitment to Action: Policies to End Violence against Women in Latin America and the Caribbean“, warns that the number of femicides is increasing, and two out of five are the result of domestic violence.

In addition, the report by the UN agencies points out that about 30 percent of women have been victims of violence by an intimate partner, and 10.7 percent have suffered sexual violence not perpetrated by a partner.

For Chiarotti, the number of gender-based murders makes them “practically a genocide, which is also hidden.” If the same number of people were killed for ethnic, religious or other reasons, authorities and people in general would react differently, “but there is less sensibility since they are women, unfortunately,” she argued.

Images of victims gender violence, relatives of victims of femicide and crosses that symbolise women killed in gender-based murders form a collage of images in different countries of Latin America: A call to end violence against women, a goal that remains a long way off in the region. Credit: Juan Moseinco / IPS

“In Brazil they are trying to introduce mediation in the Maria da Penha Law on Domestic and Family Violence“, passed in 2006 and named after a bio-pharmacist who was left paraplegic after she was shot by her husband while she was sleeping, cited the expert, as an example of a setback in terms of gender violence in the region.

In that country, “they have also boycotted the possibility of legal abortion for women who get pregnant as a result of rape,” she said, even though that is one of the exceptions in which it is legal in Brazil to terminate a pregnancy.

“In my country, Argentina, this is being done through a campaign by some sectors, to install ‘probation’ in gender violence proceedings and to use mass conscientious objections to prevent legal abortions,” said Chiarotti.

In Paraguay, conservative groups have launched an offensive against some Education Ministry programmes, using this concept.

“By conceptualising it as an ideology, they take advantage of people’s refusal to be ‘ideologised’ or alienated in a line of thought. But gender is a category of analysis to study reality, not an ideology,” said Chiarotti.

“There is something perverse in this way of categorising things. They are trying to limit women once again to their traditional place: in charge of all care-giving and household work, without complaining; for them to return home and leave the few remaining jobs to men; and to be obedient again to the male head of the family,” she said.

With this offensive they also intend, she added, “to deny the existence of different kinds of families and install the idea that only one kind of family (heterosexual, nuclear) is natural, and that the only valid way to love is heterosexual, among other denials of reality.”

Karina Bidaseca, coordinator of the South-South Programme of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (Clacso), refers to this topic among others in the book she coordinated for that organisation together with the National University of San Martín: “Critical Genealogies of Colonialism in Latin America, Africa, the Orient” (2016).

“This reasoning reflects the scripts of what I define as ‘global colonial fundamentalisms’ (cultural, religious, political, economic and epistemic) and which are the foundations of the expanding fronts of those fundamentalist, conservative, moral and racist discourses such as the ones that refer to gender ideology,” she told IPS.

“It is an offensive that is anti-feminist and trans-homophobic and comes from an ultraconservative sector founded on evangelical Christian churches,” said Bidaseca, from Argentina, who holds a doctorate degree in Social Sciences from the University of Buenos Aires, and teaches the course “Sociology and Postcolonial Studies. Gender, Ethnicity and Subordinate Actors” in two universities.

“In Colombia, ‘gender ideology’ is crucial to understanding, for example, the peace processes that were traversed by this debate,” she said.

“In many cities in Colombia there were massive demonstrations by people claiming that they were parents who defended the values of the traditional heterosexual family, against the ‘gender ideology’ that, according to them, is being imposed on schools through the Education Ministry,” she said, to illustrate.

“Feminazis is the term used by this discourse to describe those of us who defend the rights of sexual diversity, and of women against femicides,” she added, referring to a term coined by American radio commentator Rush Limbaugh in 1992, when talking about women who defended the right to abortion, which he described as a “holocaust”.

But other organisations attribute the large number of teen or preteen pregnancies in Latin America, among other causes, to the lack of sex education or legal abortions in cases of sexual violence.

“Due to the young age, these cases are presumed to be pregnancies that are the result of sexual abuse or coercion. They are forced maternities and their number is increasing in countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, the only region in the world where they are growing,” more than 150 civil organisations said in a statement to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) in an Oct. 24 session in Montevideo.

A year ago, also in the capital of Uruguay, a Forum of Feminist Organisations stated that the region “was facing democratic reversals as a result of setbacks that had undermined the citizens’ will,” and due to the coming into power of governments that, among other consequences, “had served to exclude women further.”

Bidaseca said “the fundamentalist onslaught that has tried to disseminate the idea of the so-called ‘gender ideology’ has sought to frustrate the feminist struggle for equality.”

“What we see is a global movement, which has crossed countries such as France, Germany, Spain and even Mexico and Panama, where demonstrations have been organised against that alleged ideology,” said Bidaseca.

Excerpt:

Ma Jun, chief economist at the People’s Bank of China, together with Rubén Mercado, from the United Nations’ Development Programme (UNDP) in Argentina. The high-ranking Chinese official promoted Beijing’s green finance while in Buenos Aires. Credit: UNDP

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Jul 26 2017 (IPS)

Hand in hand with UN Environment and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) disembarked in the Argentine capital to prompt this country to adopt and promote the agenda of so-called green finance, which supports clean or sustainable development projects and combats climate change.

The PBOC, which as China’s central bank regulates the country’s financial activity and monitors its monetary activity, has been particularly interested in Argentina, because next year it will preside over the Group of 20 (G20) industrialised and emerging economies.

In 2018, Buenos Aires will become the first Latin American city to organise a summit of the G20 forum, in which the major global powers discuss issues on the global agenda.

“China started to develop strategies to promote green finance international collaboration in the G20 framework in 2016, the year when it took over the presidency. And Germany took over this year the presidency and decided to continue. We are looking forward to Argentina to continue with this topic of green finance in 2018,” said Ma Jun, chief economist at the PBoC, in a meeting with a small group of reporters at the UNDP offices in Buenos Aires. “Once the companies begin to release the environmental information, we’ll see that money will begin to change direction. Some of the money which is invested in the polluting sector will be redirected to the green companies. And that costs governments zero. It’s only a requirement for the companies to disclose their environmental information.” -- Ma Jun

Ma, a distinguished economist who has worked at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the Deutsche Bank, was the keynote speaker at the International Symposium on Green Finance, held Jul. 20-21 at IDB headquarters in Buenos Aires.

At that event, he told representatives of the public sector and private companies from a number of countries that over the past three years China has been making an important effort for its financial system to underpin a change in the development model, putting aside polluting industries and supporting projects that respect the environment and use resources more efficiently.

Ma, a high-ranking PBoC official since 2014, surprised participants in the Symposium stating that in 2015, China decided to change its development model because of the enormous environmental impact it had, which is reflected in the estimate he quoted: that “a million people a year die in China due to pollution-related diseases.“

He said four trillion yuan – approximately 600 billion dollars – will be needed to finance investments in environmentally sustainable projects over the next few years in China.

Simon Zadek, co-director of the UN Environment Inquiry into the Design of a Sustainable Financial System, concurred with Ma.

He explained that the UN agency he co-heads promotes the “mobilisation of private capital towards undertakings compatible with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and the commitments made in the Paris Agreement on climate change, by the financial markets, banks, investment funds and insurance companies.“

He added that “many countries have taken steps in that direction and China is one of the most inspiring, most ambitious at an internal level and most active in promoting international cooperation.“

“Financial markets and capital should take environmental and climate issues into account now, not tomorrow. We are hoping for Argentina’s leadership next year on this matter and we are ready to collaborate if it decides to do so,“ said the UN Environment official.

The Symposium was held a few days after this year’s G20 summit, which was hosted Jul. 7-8 by Hamburg, Germany.

During the summit the discrepancy became evident between the rest of the heads of government and U.S. President Donald Trump, who does not believe in climate change and withdrew his country from the Paris Agreement, which in December 2015 set commitments for all governments to reduce global warming.

In Hamburg, a meeting was held by the Green Finance Study Group (GFSG), created in 2016, the year China presided over the G20, and which is headed by Ma and Michael Sheren, senior advisor to the Bank of England, with UN Environment acting as its secretariat.

There are two main issues that the GFSG currently promotes for the financial industry to consider when deciding on the financing of infrastructure or productive projects: setting up an environmental risk analysis and using publicly available environmental data.

“PBoC, the largest Chinese bank, has verified that to invest too much in the polluting sector is not beneficial. The costs are higher and the profits lower, because lots of policies are more and more restrictive in the polluting sector,” Ma said, noting that the bank began to carry out environmental risk analysis two years ago.

For the chief economist, “the other focus is to allow financial markets to distinguish who is green and who is brown,” referring to the predominant model of development, based on draining natural resources and not preserving ecosystems.

“Once the companies begin to release the environmental information, we’ll see that money will begin to change direction. Some of the money which is invested in the polluting sector will be redirected to the green companies. And that costs governments zero. It’s only a requirement for the companies to disclose their environmental information,” added Ma.

An important part of the initiative is the promotion of the emission of so-called green bonds, to finance projects of renewable energy, energy saving, treatment of wastewater or solid waste, the construction of green buildings that emit less pollutants and reduce their energy consumption, and green transport.

But the promotion of green finance does not foresee the arrival of special funds for that purpose to countries of the developing South.

In fact, the “greening of the financial system“ mainly depends on the private sector, especially where the state has limited fiscal capacity, according to the conclusions of the G20’s GFSG.

For Rubén Mercado, UNDP economist in Argentina, governments can facilitate undertakings that are beneficial to the environment by changing policies, without the need for spending additional funds.

“The key issue is that of relative prices. In Argentina we have subsidised fossil fuels for years. Perhaps we would not even have to subsidise renewable forms of energy, but simply reduce our subsidies for fossil fuels so that the other sources can be developed,“ he said.

Ma took a similar approach, pointing out that “You don´t need to spend money, you just need to eliminate the subsidies” that are traditionally granted to fossil fuel producers, which hamper investments in clean energies.

In the Symposium in Buenos Aires a study was released about the economies of Germany, China and India, which revealed that in the last year they have invested in renewable energies just 0.7, 0.4 and 0.1 per cent of GDP, respectively.

“The massive demand for green financing simply cannot be met by the public sector or the fiscal system,” said Ma.

“In a country like China, 90 percent is being covered by the private sector. Globally, my feeling is that in the OECD countries the fiscal capacity is probably higher. Maybe more than 10 percent could be provided by governments,” he said.

“But in other economies with weaker fiscal capacity, the rate should be even lower than in China.”

Seated, from left to right: Nicholas Kotch, Lead trainer, Dr Kholiquzzaman, Chairman Palli Karma Sahayak Samity (PKSF), Farhana Haque Rahman, Director General IPS, Mr Abul Maal A Muhith, Finance Minister of Bangladesh, Mr Shahiduzzaman, Senior Advisor and IPS representative South Asia, Mr Robert Watkins, UN Representative and UNDP Resident Coordinator. Credit: Mauro Teodori/IPS

By Mahfuzur Rahman
DHAKA, Dec 20 2016 (IPS)

Though highly hopeful about achieving the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) well ahead of the 2030 deadline, Bangladesh is upset over the procedures to access the Green Climate Fund, calling them ‘ridiculously complex’ and warning that they may slow down its drive to achieve the SDGs.

Bangladesh, one of the most vulnerable countries in the world to climate change, wants to emerge as a star performer in implementing the SDGs, repeating its success with the earlier Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). But officials say developed nations are not delivering funds to the affected countries as promised.“The carbon emissions of developed countries are damaging the environment of smaller economies. They must ensure we’re provided enough funds to mitigate this damage.” --Finance Minister AMA Muhith

“The developed countries are mainly responsible for climate change. They’ve demonstrated goodwill in terms of financing climate change programmes all over the world, but Bangladesh is very unfortunate as it doesn’t get a fair share of it. The procedure of the Climate Change Fund is ridiculously complex,” said Bangladesh’s Finance Minister AMA Muhith.

Muhith was inaugurating a two-day media capacity building workshop titled ‘Reporting on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)’ in Dhaka on Dec. 18. The United Nations Foundation and Inter Press Service (IPS) jointly organised the programme under the theme ‘Working Together: Why and how should the media report on the SDGs?’ Journalists from leading media outlets participated in the workshop.

IPS Director General Farhana Haque Rahman also spoke at the inaugural session, while UN Resident Coordinator and U.N. Development programme (UNDP) Resident Representative in Bangladesh Robert D. Watkins presented the keynote paper. IPS South Asia Representative Shahiduzzaman moderated the session.

According to Muhith, “The carbon emissions of developed countries are damaging the environment of smaller economies. They must ensure we’re provided enough funds to mitigate this damage.”

The Green Climate Fund was announced at the UN Climate Change Conference in Mexico in 2010. Developed nations pledged 100 billion dollars a year to assist developing countries in adaptation and mitigation to cope with the adverse impacts of climate change.

Referring to the growing adverse impacts of climate change on Bangladesh, a worried Muhith said many poor people in rural Bangladesh have lost everything due to riverbank erosion across the country.

“We’re spending our own money to tackle climate change’s negative impacts, but we don’t get the support we should get as one of the worst sufferers of climate change,” he said.

Families who live on ‘chars’ – river islands formed from sedimentation – are extremely vulnerable to natural disasters. This family wades through floodwaters left behind after heavy rains in August 2014 caused major rivers to burst their banks in northern Bangladesh. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

According to a report by the Dhaka Tribune, an English daily, Bangladesh is set to lose 50 million dollars from the Green Climate Fund “because of tension between the World Bank and donors, and lack of government commitment. Even as the government is scrambling to find funds for dealing with climate change impacts, donors have decided to pull the plug on the Bangladesh Climate Change Resilience Fund (BCCRF).”

Despite these obstacles, Muhith remains upbeat about Bangladesh’s march forward from the MDGs. He said Bangladesh will be able to achieve the SDGs well before the stipulated time of 2030.

“I personally think Bangladesh will certainly reach the targets well before 2030, although the procedure to initiate the development takes time,” he said.

Bangladesh’s initiatives to eradicate poverty aim to leave no one behind, said the country’s Finance Minister, adding that it would be quite possible for some other countries to reach the targets ahead of 2030 as well.

Bangladesh received a U.N. award for its remarkable achievements in attaining the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), particularly in reducing the child mortality rate in 2010. It also received an FAO Achievement Award in 2015 for its success in fighting hunger, and a Women in Parliaments Global Forum Award, known as the WIP Award, in 2015 for its outstanding success in closing the gender gap in the political sphere.

Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina also received the UN’s highest environmental accolade – Champions of the Earth in 2015 – in recognition of Bangladesh’s far-reaching initiatives to address climate change.

Speaking at a high-profile discussion on ‘MDGS to SDGs: A Way Forward’, at UN Headquarters in New York on Sep. 30, on the sidelines of the 70th UN General Assembly, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina said, “We’ll take the country forward by setting another example by implementing SDGs as Bangladesh did in the case of the MDGs. In this journey, no one will be left behind as we aspire to build Bangladesh as a progressive, peaceful and prosperous country.”

The adoption of the SDGs on Sep. 25, 2015 by the United Nations was a ‘unique show of global unity’ as it holds the promise to build a better world with the first-ever common development agenda.

The 17 SDGs envisage a sustainable future for all by engaging the entire world in collective efforts to end poverty, fight inequality, establish peace and tackle climate change.

“Bangladesh has become a role model in South Asia and in the world in achieving the MDGs, the predecessor of SDGs. We believe Bangladesh will again lead the way in achieving the SDGs,” Nagesh Kumar, head of UN-ESCAP South and South-West Asia Office, told a seminar at the Prime Minister’s Office in Dhaka on Aug. 17.

Siddharth Chatterjee, the Representative of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) in Kenya, has been appointed UN Resident Coordinator, where he will lead and coordinate 25 UN agencies in East Africa. At the same time, he will also serve as the Resident Representative of the UN Development Programme (UNDP).

At UNFPA, he and his team spearheaded efforts to reduce the unacceptably high maternal deaths in Kenya putting the spotlight on the challenges faced by adolescent girls, including child marriage, Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) and sexual and gender based violence.

Before he joined UNFPA, Chatterjee served as the Chief Diplomat and Head of Strategic Partnerships and was also responsible for resource mobilization at the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) since 2011.

In 1997 he joined the UN in Bosnia and over the next two decades served in Iraq, South Sudan, Indonesia, Sudan (Darfur), Somalia, Denmark, and Kenya. He has worked in UN Peace Keeping, UNICEF, UNOPS, the Red Cross and UNFPA.

Welcoming the appointment, Ruth Kagia, Senior Advisor, International Relations and Social Sectors in the Office of the President of Kenya said, “Sid’s insightful understanding of clients’ needs as the UNFPA Representative in Kenya has translated into tangible gains in maternal, child and adolescent health. His relentless energy and focus on results has helped build relationships and networks of trust and confidence with the highest levels of Government, civil society, the private sector and development partners.”

Chatterjee is expected to continue his advocacy for women’s empowerment in Kenya where he has led notable initiatives to advance reproductive, maternal, neo-natal, child and adolescent health.

Dr Julitta Onabanjo, UNFPA’s Regional Director for East and Southern Africa said, “Sid resolutely pushed UNFPA’s mandate in the hardest to reach counties and service of the most vulnerable.  He mobilized resources and partners in the private sector to join this drive to leapfrog maternal and new-born health. This bold initiative was highlighted by the World Economic Forum in Davos and Kigali”.

Among Chatterjee’s other career achievements include mobilizing the Red Cross/Red Crescent movement to join the eradication of polio initiative; negotiating access with rebel groups to undertake a successful polio immunization campaign in the rebel controlled areas of Darfur; leading UNICEF’s emergency response when conflict broke out in Indonesia’s Aceh and the Malukus provinces; and overseeing UNICEF’s largest demobilization of child soldiers in South Sudan in 2001.

A prolific writer, Chatterjee’s articles have featured on CNN, Al Jazeera, Forbes, Huffington Post, Reuters, the Guardian, Inter Press Service, as well as the major Kenyan newspapers.  He was recently profiled by Forbes magazine in an article titled, “Passionate Leader of UNFPA Kenya Battles Violence against Women, FGM and Child Marriage.” 

His early career was in a Special Forces unit of the Indian Army, where he was decorated in 1995 for bravery by the President of India. Chatterjee holds a Master’s degree in Public Policy from Princeton University, USA and a Bachelor’s degree from the National Defence Academy in India.

Marta Maldonado, secretary of the “Siempre Unidos Minifundios de Corzuela” association, standing next to a prickly pear, a cactus that is abundant in this municipality in the northern Argentine province of Chaco. Making use of the fruit and the leaves of the plant has changed the lives of a group of local families. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
CORZUELA, Argentina , May 23 2016 (IPS)

Family farmers in the northern Argentine province of Chaco are gaining a new appreciation of the common prickly pear cactus, which is now driving a new kind of local development.

Hundreds of jars of homemade jam are stacked in the civil society association “Siempre Unidos Minifundios de Corzuela” (smallholders of Corzuela united), ready to be sold.

Until recently, the small farmers taking part in this new local development initiative did not know that the prickly pear, also known as cactus pear, tuna or nopal, originated in Mexico, or that its scientific name was Opuntia ficus-indica.

But now this cactus that has always just been a normal part of their semi-arid landscape is bringing local subsistence farmers a new source of income.

“The women who took the course are now making a living from this,” Marta Maldonado, the secretary of the association, which was formally registered in 2011, told IPS. “They also have their vegetable gardens, chickens, pigs and goats.”

“The prickly pear is the most common plant around here. In the project we set up 20 prickly pear plantations,” she said.

Local farmers work one to four hectares in this settlement in the rural municipality of Corzuela in west-central Chaco, whose 10,000 inhabitants are spread around small settlements and villages.

The initiative, which has benefited 20 families, made up of 39 women, 35 men and four children, has been implemented by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) through the U.N. Environment Programme’s (UNEP) Small Grants Programme (SGP).

The SGP, which is active in 125 countries, is based on the sustainable development concept of “thinking globally, acting locally”, and seeks to demonstrate that small-scale community initiatives can have a positive impact on global environmental problems.

The aim of these small grants, which in the case of the local association here amounted to 20,000 dollars, is to bolster food sovereignty while at the same time strengthening biodiversity.

The SGP has carried out 13 projects so far in Chaco, the poorest province in this South American country of 43 million people.

In the region where Corzuela is located, “there are periods of severe drought and fruit orchards require a lot of water. The prickly pear is a cactus that does not need water,” said Gabriela Faggi with the National Agricultural Technology Institute (INTA).

The large-scale deforestation and clear-cutting of land began in 1990, when soy began to expand in this area, and many local crops were driven out.

“The prickly pear, which is actually originally from Mexico but was naturalised here throughout northern Argentina centuries ago, had started to disappear. So this project is also important in terms of rescuing this local fruit,” said Faggi.

“Sabores de Corzuela” (Flavours of Corzuela) reads the label on the jars of prickly pear fruit jam produced by an association of local families in this rural municipality in the northern Argentine province of Chaco. Credit: UNDP Argentina

This area depends on agriculture – cotton, soy, sunflowers, sorghum and maize – and timber, as well as livestock – cattle, hogs, and poultry.

However, it is now impossible for local smallholders to grow crops like cotton.

“In the past, a lot of cotton was grown, but not anymore,” the association’s treasurer, Mirtha Mores, told IPS. “It’s not planted now because of an outbreak of boll weevils (Anthonomus grandis), an insect that stunts growth of the plant, and we can’t afford to fight it, poor people like us who have just a little piece of land to farm.”

Before launching the project, the local branch of INTA trained the small farmers in agroecological techniques for growing cotton, and helped them put up fences to protect their crops from the animals.

They also taught them how to build and use a machine known as a “desjanadora” to remove the spines, or “janas”, from the prickly pear fruits, to make them easier to handle.

“It’s going well for us. Last year we even sold 1,500 jars of prickly pear fruit jam to the Education Ministry,” for use in school lunchrooms, Maldonado said proudly.

The association, whose work is mainly done by women, also sells its products at local and provincial markets. And although prickly pear fruit is their star product, when it is not in season, they also make jam and other preserves using papaya or pumpkin.

“It has improved our incomes and now we have the possibility to sell our merchandise and to be able to buy the things that are really needed to help our kids who are studying,” Mores said.

The project, which began in 2013, also trained them to use the leaves as a supplementary feed for livestock, especially in the winter when there is less fodder and many animals actually die of hunger.

“We make use of everything. We use the leaves to feed the animals – cows, horses, goats, pigs. The fruit is used to make jam, removing the seeds,” said Mores.

The nutrition and health of the families have improved because of the properties of the fruit and of the plant, said Maldonado and Mores. And now they need less fodder for their animals, fewer of which die in the winter due to a lack of forage.

At the same time, the families belonging to the association were also trained to make sustainable use of firewood from native trees, and learned to make special stoves that enable them to cook and heat their modest homes.

In addition, because women assumed an active, leading role in the activities of the association, the project got them out of their homes and away from their routine grind of household tasks and gave them new protagonism in the community.

“Living in the countryside, women used to be more isolated, they didn’t get out, but now they have a place to come here. They get together from Monday through Friday, chat and are more involved in decision-making. In the association they can express their opinions,” said Maldonado.

“When women get together, what don’t we talk about?” Mores joked.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Jésica Garay, a young mother who is studying to become a teacher, gets water from the family tank built next to her humble home in the rural municipality of Corzuela in the northeast Argentine province of Chaco. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
CORZUELA, Argentina, Apr 25 2016 (IPS)

In a semiarid region in the northeast Argentine province of Chaco, small farmers have adopted a simple technique to ensure a steady water supply during times of drought: they harvest the rain and store it in tanks, as part of a climate change adaptation project.

It’s raining in Corzuela, a rural municipality of 10,000 inhabitants located 260 km from Resistencia, the provincial capital, and the muddy local roads are sometimes impassable.

But it isn’t always like this in this Argentine region where, as local farmer Juan Ramón Espinoza puts it, “when it doesn’t rain there is no rain at all, and when it does rain, it rains too much.”

“There have always been water shortages, but things are getting worse every year,” he told IPS. “There are seasons when four or five months go by without a single drop of water falling.”“I used to bring water from the public well. My husband would go with a pony carrying a water container and bring water for the tank we have back there. But other times we would have to go and buy water, and sometimes I even had to forget about buying meat so I could pay for the water.” -- Olga Ramírez

The local residents of Corzuela blame the increasingly severe droughts on deforestation, a consequence of the spread of monoculture crops in this area since the turn of the century.

“They started to invade us with soy plantations,” Espinoza said. “There’s a lot of deforestation. They come and use their bulldozers to knock everything down, on 4,000 or 5,000 hectares. They don’t leave a single tree standing.”

This is compounded by the global effects of climate change, which has led to longer, more intense droughts.

The result is that local peasant farmers don’t have water for drinking, washing, cooking or irrigating their vegetable gardens.

“We would lose half a day going back and forth, filling tanks and containers with water for washing, cooking and bathing,” recalled Graciela Rodríguez, a mother of 11 children who often helped her hauling water.

“Now if you’re in your house and you need water, you go and get some, in your own house,” she told IPS happily, explaining that she uses the extra time she now has to cook bread, clean the house and take care of her grandchildren.

The solution was to build tanks to collect and store rainwater. But the local peasant farmers had neither the funds nor the technology to implement the system.

Today, joined together in associations, the local residents receive funds and other assistance from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), through the Global Environment Facility’s (GEF) Small Grants Programme (SGP).

The project is carried out locally with technical assistance from the National Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA) for the construction of tanks using cement, bricks, sand, steel and stones, and from the National Institute of Industrial Technology (INTI), for training in safety and hygiene.

“This project helps solve a very pressing local problem: water scarcity in the region,” said SGP technician María Eugenia Combi. “The solution is to take advantage of whatever rainfall there is to harvest and store water, for times when it is scarce.”

Local small farmer José Ramón Espinoza stands next to a recently constructed community tank for harvesting rainwater, which will enable a group of families to weather the recurrent drought in Corzuela, a rural municipality in the northeast Argentine province of Chaco. The underground tank was provided by GEF’s Small Grants Programme. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

The first project was carried out in this area from 2013 to 2015, when five community water tanks were built, serving 38 families. A second project began in March this year, to build another eight community tanks and 30 single-household tanks.

The technology is simple and low-cost. The roofs of the “ranchos” or poor rural dwellings are adapted with the installation of rain gutters to catch the water, which flows into 16,000-litre family tanks or 52,000-litre community tanks.

“Once the beneficiaries are trained to build the tanks, they can go out and build them in every house,” Combi told IPS.

Traditionally the main source of water for human and agricultural consumption – small-scale livestock production and small gardens – in this region has been family wells.

But as Gabriela Faggi, an INTA technical adviser to the programme, explained to IPS, besides the drought that has reduced ground-water levels, many wells have high sodium levels and are contaminated with arsenic, and in extreme cases the water cannot even be used for watering livestock or gardens, which has exacerbated the region’s food supply problems.

The new year-round availability of water has now helped alleviate that problem as well.

“I used to bring water from the public well,” said another Corzuela resident, Olga Ramírez. “My husband would go with a pony carrying a water container and bring water for the tank we have back there. But other times we would have to go and buy water, and sometimes I even had to forget about buying meat so I could pay for the water.”

The local farmers depend on subsistence farming, growing traditional crops like sweet potatoes, cassava, pumpkin and corn, and raising small livestock.

“It’s a big help for the animals,” said Ramírez. “We use the stored rainwater for washing, cooking, drinking yerba mate (a traditional herbal infusion consumed in the Rio de la Plata region), watering our chickens and other animals and the garden – for everything.”

“Now that we have this tank we can even waste water,” said Jésica Garay, a young mother who is studying to be a teacher. “We even use it to water the garden. Before, we only had enough for drinking and bathing.

“We don’t have to worry anymore about not being able to eat something, in order to buy water,” she said.

The SGP, active in 120 countries, emerged in 1992 as a way to demonstrate that small-scale community initiatives can have a positive impact on global environmental problems. The maximum grant amount per project is 50,000 dollars.

“What we are aiming at are local actions with a global impact,” the head of the programme in Argentina, Francisco Lopez Sastre, told IPS. “That is, small solutions to global environmental problems like climate change.”

He said the promotion of vegetable gardens, which complement the water tank programme “will boost consumption of fruit and vegetables, which is very low among local families due to the high cost.

“This can improve the household economy and bolster the inclusion of healthy foods, which will result in better health and food sovereignty.”

The SGP is currently carrying out another 13 projects in Chaco, for which it has provided a combined total of 537,000 dollars in grants.

Two of them involve water supply for human consumption in rural communities, complemented by agroecological gardens.

The province, which has a population of one million people, has the highest poverty level in this country of 43 million, according to independent studies. In Chaco, more than 57 percent of the population lives in poverty, and 17 percent in extreme poverty.

It is also the region with the second-largest proportion of indigenous people. Population density is 10.6 inhabitants per square km, below the national average of 14.4.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

SANCHEZ, Petite Martinique. Climate-proofing the tiny island of Petite Martinique includes a sea revetment 140 metres long to protect critical coastal infrastructure from erosion. Credit: Tecla Fontenad/IPS

By Jessica Faieta
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 2 2016 (IPS)

The world is still celebrating the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, the main outcome of the 21st Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Its ambitions are unprecedented: not only has the world committed to limit the increase of temperature to “well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels,” it has also agreed to pursue efforts to “limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C.”

This achievement should be celebrated, especially by Small Island Development States (SIDS), a 41-nation group—nearly half of them in the Caribbean—that has been advocating for increased ambition on climate change for nearly a quarter century.

SIDS are even more vulnerable to climate change impacts —and risk losing more. Global warming has very high associated damages and costs to families, communities and entire countries, including their Gross Domestic Product (GDP) according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

What does this mean for the Caribbean? Climate change is recognised as one of the most serious challenges to the Caribbean. With the likelihood that climate change will exacerbate the frequency and intensity of the yearly hurricane season, comprehensive measures are needed to protect at-risk communities.

Moreover, scenarios based on moderate curbing of greenhouse gas emissions reveal that surface temperature would increase between 1.2 and 2.3 °C across the Caribbean in this century. In turn, rainfall is expected to decrease about 5 to 6 percent. As a result, it will be the only insular region in the world to experience a decrease in water availability in the future.

The combined impact of higher temperatures and less water would likely result in longer dry periods and increased frequency of droughts, which threaten agriculture, livelihoods, sanitation and ecosystems.

Perhaps the most dangerous hazard is sea level rise. The sea level may rise up to 0.6 meters in the Caribbean by the end of the century, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This could actually flood low-lying areas, posing huge threats, particularly to the smallest islands, and impacting human settlements and infrastructure in coastal zones. It also poses serious threats to tourism, a crucial sector for Caribbean economies: up to 60 percent of current resorts lie around the coast and these would be greatly damaged by sea level increase.

Sea level rise also risks saline water penetrating into freshwater aquifers, threatening crucial water resources for agriculture, tourism and human consumption, unless expensive treatments operations are put into place.

In light of these prospects, adapting to climate change becomes an urgent necessity for SIDS—including in the Caribbean. It is therefore not surprising that all Caribbean countries have submitted a section on adaptation within their Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs), which are the voluntary commitments that pave the way for the implementation of the Paris Agreement.

In their INDCs, Caribbean countries overwhelmingly highlight the conservation of water resources and the protection of coastal areas as their main worries. Most of them also consider adaptation initiatives in the economic and productive sectors, mainly agriculture, fisheries, tourism and forestry.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has been supporting Caribbean countries in their adaptation efforts for many years now, through environmental, energy-related and risk reduction projects, among others.

This week we launched a new partnership with the Government of Japan, the US$15 million Japan-Caribbean Climate Change Partnership (J-CCCP), in line with the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. The initiative will be implemented in eight Caribbean countries: Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, benefitting an estimated 200,000 women and men in 50 communities.

It will set out a roadmap to mitigate and adapt to climate change, in line with countries’ long-term strategies, helping put in practice Caribbean countries’ actions and policies to reduce greenhouse as emissions and adapt to climate change. It will also boost access to sustainable energy and help reduce fossil fuel imports and dependence, setting the region on a low-emission development path, while addressing critical balance of payments constraints.

When considering adaptation measures to the different impacts of climate change there are multiple options. Some rely on infrastructure, such as dikes to control sea level rise, but this can be particularly expensive for SIDS, where the ratio of coastal area to land mass is very high.

In this context, ecosystem-based adaptation activities are much more cost-effective, and, in countries with diverse developmental priorities and where financial resources are limited, they become an attractive alternative. This means healthy, well-functioning ecosystems to boost natural resilience to the adverse impacts of climate change, reducing people’s vulnerabilities as well.

UNDP, in partnership with national and local governments in the Caribbean, has been championing ecosystem-based adaptation and risk reduction with very rewarding results.

For example, the Government of Cuba partnered with UNDP, scientific institutes and forestry enterprises to restore mangrove forests along 84 km of the country’s southern shore to slow down saline intrusion from the sea level rise and reduce disaster risks, as the mangrove acts as a protective barrier against hurricanes.

In Grenada, in coordination with the Government and the German International Cooperation Agency, we supported the establishment of a Community Climate Change Adaptation Fund, a small grants mechanism, to provide opportunities to communities to cope with the effects of climate change and extreme weather conditions. We have engaged with local stakeholders to develop climate smart agricultural projects, and climate resilient fisheries, among other activities in the tourism and water resources sectors.

UNDP’s support is directed to balance social and economic development with environmental protection, directly benefitting communities. Our approach is necessarily aligned with the recently approved 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda and its associated Sustainable Development Goals, delivering on protecting ecosystems and natural resources, promoting food security and sanitation, while also helping reduce poverty and promoting sustainable economic growth.
While there is significant potential for climate change adaptation in SIDS, it will require additional external resources, technologies and strengthening of local capacities. In UNDP we are ideally placed to continue working hand-in-hand with Caribbean countries as they implement their INDCs and find their own solutions to climate-change adaptation, while also sharing knowledge and experiences within the region and beyond.

(End)

Excerpt:

Vineyards belonging to the Dominio del Plata winery in Luján de Cuyo in the Argentine province of Mendoza. It is one of the companies taking part in the Federal Programme for Cleaner Production, which involves a sustainable reconversion inthe wine-growing industry. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
LUJÁN DE CUYO, Argentina , Oct 20 2015 (IPS)

The region of Cuyo in west-central Argentina is famous for its vineyards. But it is one of the areas in the country hit hardest by the effects of climate change, such as desertification and the melting of mountain top snow. And local winegrowers have come up with their own way to fight global warming.

In the cup, malbec, Argentina’s flagship red wine, still has the same intense flavour and colour.

But behind the production process is a new environmental reconversion, which began four years ago in the arid province of Mendoza, where vineyards bloom in the midst of oases created by human hands.

Only 4.8 percent of the desert province of Mendoza is green; 3.5 percent is dedicated to agricultural production, which uses 90 percent of the water consumed, and the rest is urban areas.“Many people think investing in ecological practices has an additional cost and won’t necessarily bring the company any benefits. This shows that is not the case.” -- René Mauricio Valdés

“We are trying to maintain the same production levels, using less water and less energy, reducing waste, reusing waste products, and creating less pollution,” the provincial coordinator of the Federal Programme for Cleaner Production, Germán Micic, told Tierramérica.

The initiative, launched by the national Secretariat of the Environment and Sustainable Development, benefits some 1,250 small and medium-sized companies in Argentina.

It is carried out with technical and administrative support from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and funds from the Interamerican Development Bank. In Mendoza, 210 companies – 60 percent of them wineries – are participating. They receive advice and up to 28,000 dollars in funds.

“We’re producing the same wine, but in a sustainable manner,” said Luis Romito, the head of the Sustainability Commission of the Bodegas de Argentina wineries association, while participating in the Climate Change Forum organised this month in Mendoza by the National University of Cuyo and the UNDP.

Some of these practices have begun to be implemented by Dominio del Plata, a family winery at the foot of the Andes mountains, in Agrelo, a town in the department of Luján de Cuyo.

By changing equipment and modifying processes, the family business has managed to use less water in the production of its wine.

In the wine production process, water is mainly used for washing, rinsing, heating and cooling.

One example of the changes introduced was the replacement of manual washing of the grape picking lugs, which took some 20 minutes per unit, by automated industrial washers.

“The lug is washed in five minutes with this machine,” Marcelo del Popolo, the winery’s adviser on quality and environmental responsability, told Tierramérica. “We have reduced water consuption by some 60,000 litres a month. In three months of harvest, that’s 180,000 litres of water saved.

“And the water used in the washing process goes down a drain and is carried to a treatment plant, and is then used to irrígate the vineyards,” he said.

And irrigation systems are being improved in Mendoza, where 90 percent of water is used in agricultural activities, and where water shortages are increasingly severe as a result of global warming.

“Water is vital to our province, and we are being seriously affected by this problem,” Ricardo Villalba, an expert in geosciences and former director of the Mendoza-based Argentine Institute of Snow Research, Glaciology and Environmental Sciences, told Tierramérica. “Water is the element that controls regional development.”

Wine storage tanks with special jackets maintain temperatures more efficiently in wineries in the wine-growing region of Luján de Cuyo in the Argentine province of Mendoza, which are taking part in a special programme to create more green-friendly processes to help combat the effects of climate change. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

“Our province basically depends on the water that comes from the snow up in the mountains, and all of the global forecasts and models indicate that there will gradually be less and less snow,” said Villalba, who is a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The wine-growing industry, which represents six percent of GDP in Mendoza and 1.3 percent of GDP nationwide, also aims to reduce energy consumption, which in Argentina is responsible for 43 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.

In the wineries, energy is used for heating, cooling, pumping of liquids and lighting.

“In each one of these stages we can incorporate modifications of equipment or processes, which make significant energy savings possible,” Micic said. “From jackets on the tanks to maintain temperatures more efficiently to the installation of advanced new pumps for a stronger water flow and lower energy consumption, through the change of compressors and lighting.”

Del Popolo said: “We keep track here of the water that comes in and the temperature we manage to achieve. By doing this we have reduced the energy used for heating by 15 percent.”

The company also uses green-friendly materials like lightweight wine bottles and lighter boxes that use less cardboard. Plastic and other waste products like broken bottles are classified, recycled and reused.

“We’re using boxes that we have already recycled many times over,” he said.

The benefits to the environment also bring considerable cost savings.

“We have addressed two fundamental questions: savings in energy and in water. And in both of them, we’re also seeing significant economic savings,” said the head of the winery, which plans in the future to invest in a solar thermal system for heating and fermentation.

This, according to UNDP representative in Argentina René Mauricio Valdés, is what makes the project self-sustainable.

“Many people think investing in ecological practices has an additional cost and won’t necessarily bring the company any benefits. This shows that is not the case,” said Valdés during a visit to the winery.

Fincas Patagónicas Tapiz, an olive oil producer in the neighbouring department of Maipú, is another company taking part in the programme in Mendoza.

Among other measures, it implemented a system to circulate water heated by solar energy around the tanks of oil to eliminate that energy expense.

It also insulated the room holding the tanks of oil, to keep the temperature steady. This made it possible to avoid the need to use air conditioning in the entire plant, which consumed an enormous amount of energy.

“If the temperature of the oil drops below 14 or 15 degrees Celsius, it solidifies and I can’t filter it,” plant manager Sebastián Correas explained to Tierramérica. “Which means that in the (southern hemisphere) winter I have to keep heating the entire plant until the warmer temperatures of September and October make it possible to bottle the oil.”

Argentina is not one of the world’s top emitters of greenhouse gases. Producing 0.66 percent of all greenhouse gases released globally, it is 22nd in a ranking that counts the 28 European Union countries as a single bloc.

But Villalba, the scientific researcher, believes that Argentina, like Mendoza, has a role to play.

“We are going to have to prepare ourselves for this, for example to continue to be leaders in the production of malbec at a global level,” he said.

This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Cinthia Padilla, the 16-year-old who has revolutionised the village of Plan Grande on the Caribbean coast of Honduras, where she teaches local residents to use basic computer programmes and is using an Internet platform to help prevent teen pregnancy. Credit: Thelma Mejía/IPS

By Thelma Mejía
PLAN GRANDE, Honduras, Oct 14 2015 (IPS)

Four years ago, Cinthia Padilla, who is now 16, learned how to use a computer in order to teach children, adolescents and adults in this isolated fishing village in northern Honduras how to use technology to better their lives.

Now she is using her expertise in an online e-learning platform aimed at reducing teen pregnancies in her remote village and neighbouring communities.

Her father, Óscar Padilla, is the community leader who radically changed life in Plan Grande by bringing it round-the-clock hydroelectricity, as well as a project for the conservation and protection of the Matías River basin. His daughter learned a great deal accompanying him to village meetings from an early age.

“My dad would tell me: ‘Stay home little girl! What are you doing here?’” she told IPS. “But I would ignore him because I liked listening to the adults. That’s how I learned, with a computer project that came to the village, and today I teach kids and adults in my free time how to use programmes like Word, Excel and others that help them in their work and studies.“I’m in fourth grade and I like this idea because we’re going to learn by using games, and girls won’t get pregnant or fall in love so young,” Javier Alexander Ramos, eight years old

“I started out with a used computer that a businesswoman from the capital gave me four years ago. So far I have trained more than 60 kids and a number of adults. It hasn’t been easy, because who was going to believe in a girl?” said a smiling Cinthia, who is in the first year of secondary school.

Thanks to the skills of this young girl who dreams of becoming a systems engineer to help her community develop and use technology to protect the environment, the 500 inhabitants of Plan Grande discovered the advantages offered by the Internet and other information and communication technologies (ICTs).

Thanks to what they have learned from Cinthia, local fisherpersons have improved their financial skills when selling their catch and purchasing products.

She also launched the e-learning platform to raise awareness among and educate adolescents to prevent teen pregnancy, with the support of the Sustainable Development Network, a civil society organisation that boosts technology use in communities in this impoverished Central American nation of 8.8 million people.

The success of the initiative drew the interest of Noel Ruíz, the mayor of the municipality of Santa Fe, where Plan Grande is located, and of the Global Environment Facility’s Small Grants Programme (GEF SGP), implemented by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

With a 50,000 dollar grant from the SGP, the e-learning project will be expanded throughout the entire municipality of Santa Fe and the neighbouring Balfate, starting in 2016. The users will be students and teachers.

In Plan Grande, which is operating as a pilot programme for the platform, the schoolteachers are enthusiastic about the project because teen pregnancy is frequent in this region inhabited mainly by members of the Garifuna ethnic group – descendants of African slaves who intermarried with members of the indigenous Carib tribe.

The National Assembly of Afro-Honduran Organisations and Communities estimates that 10 percent of the country’s population is black.

“This will open kids’ minds and help them not make the mistake of getting pregnant due to a lack of sex education,” Julissa Esther Pacheco, the teacher in Punta Frijol, a hamlet next to Plan Grande, told IPS.

“They have taught us how to use it, even though we don’t have Internet, with interactive educational programmes created to help youngsters learn about their bodies,” she said.

In Punta Frijol, just over three km from the centre of Plan Grande, Pacheco teaches 22 children in grades one through six in the rural schoolhouse. She divides the children by grade and teaches some while the others do homework.

Students in the hamlet of Punta Frijol on the northern coast of Honduras welcome this IPS reporter visiting this remote area to learn about their e-learning programme aimed at bringing down the teen pregnancy rate. The teacher at the one-room rural schoolhouse, Julissa Esther Pacheco, is behind the group of children, to the right. Credit: Thelma Mejía/IPS

Pacheco says the children have been very open to the programme “and are motivated because they know life isn’t all peaches and cream.”

Eight-year-old Javier Alexander Ramos told IPS: “I’m in fourth grade and I like this idea because we’re going to learn by using games, and girls won’t get pregnant or fall in love so young.”

His remarks drew laughter from his fellow students and the parents who had gathered at the school to tell IPS about their expectations for the project, in a demonstration of the importance that local residents put on telling their story, and of their support for the initiative.

Javier said he dreams of a country that is “better educated, in peace and safe, like Plan Grande. I would like to be a congressman when I grow up, to help in so many ways here, and that’s why I like to study. I enjoy learning how to use the computer because although we don’t have our own computers we learn with the ones in the school, which we all share.”

Because of Plan Grande’s location, some 400 km from the capital of Honduras on the Caribbean coast, and only reachable by boat, there are few educational opportunities and locals depend on fishing and subsistence agriculture for a living, while some move away or find seasonal work elsewhere.

Teen pregnancy is frequent in the municipality of Santa Fe, which includes three villages and nine hamlets.

According to Health Ministry and United Nations figures, Honduras has one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in Latin America: one out of four adolescents between the ages of 15 and 19 have given birth.

The birth rate is 108 per 1,000 teenagers in that age group, according to official statistics.

To support the transformation that Cinthia has begun to bring about, Santa Fe Mayor Ruíz came to Plan Grande in September to lay the first stone in what will be a computer lab for the e-learning platform, set to open in January 2016.

“These are very neglected communities, but what they are doing in Plan Grande deserves support; the computer lab will have Internet and other appropriate technologies because we want adolescent girls to one day say: today I’m ready to be a mother,” he told IPS.

Cinthia broke in to say: “Young people here are losing their fear of expressing ourselves, and with this platform we’re going to teach them how to take care of themselves, and how to use the social networks.

“When the SGP proposed this idea, I was the first to say yes because they helped us before to bring electricity, they taught us the importance of nature, and now they’re going to help us educate people so our dreams as young people aren’t cut short at such a young age,” she said.

This remote village of poor fishing families on Honduras’ Caribbean coast has become a national reference point for community-run, clean self-sustainable energy.

And now they want to become an example to be followed in the prevention of teen pregnancy, led by a 16-year-old girl who has also launched a campaign for donations to her village of computers, whether new or used – because she has learned how to fix them as well.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

View from the Caribbean sea of the village of Plan Grande in the northern Honduran department of Colón. The isolated fishing community, which can only be reached after a 20-minute motorboat ride, is a 10-hour drive on difficult roads away from Tegucigalpa, and has become an example of sustainable energy management. Credit: Thelma Mejía/IPS

By Thelma Mejía
PLAN GRANDE, Honduras, Oct 1 2015 (IPS)

A small fishing village on the Caribbean coast of Honduras has become an example to be followed in renewable energies, after replacing candles and dirty costly energy based on fossil fuels with hydropower from a mini-dam, while reforesting the river basin.

They now have round-the-clock electric power, compared to just three hours a week in the past.

The community, Plan Grande, is in the municipality of Santa Fe in the northern department of Colón, and can only be reached by sea, after a 10-hour, 400-km drive from Tegucigalpa on difficult roads to the village of Río Coco on the Caribbean coast.

From Río Coco you take a motorboat the next morning, which takes 20 minutes to reach Plan Grande.

It’s 6:00 AM and the sun has started to come up. The sea is calm and the conditions are good, say the motorboat operators, who add that manatees used to be found in these waters but have since disappeared, which they blame on the damage caused to the environment.

Plan Grande, a village of 500 people, is at the foot of steep slopes, along the Caribbean coast.

On the boat ride to the village, seagulls can be seen flying in the distance as the fishermen return in their cayucos (dugout canoes) and small boats after fishing all night at sea. Others take jobs on larger fishing boats, which keeps them away from home for eight months at a stretch.

Fishing and farming are the only sources of work in the village, which makes electricity all the more important: in the past, because they couldn’t refrigerate their catch, they had to sell it quickly, at low prices.

“There was very little room for negotiating prices, and we would lose out,” community leader Óscar Padilla, the driving force behind the changes in Plan Grande, told IPS.

The village finally got electricity for the first time in 2004, thanks to development aid from Spain. But it was thermal energy, and for just three hours a week of public lighting they paid between 13 and 17 dollars a month per dwelling.

Óscar Padilla, a community leader in Plan Grande who was the main driving force behind the initiative that finally brought round-the-clock energy to the village, in the 21st century. Sustainable management of renewable energy, based on a plan marked by solidarity, has transformed this fishing village in Honduras’ northern Caribbean region. Credit: Thelma Mejía/IPS

“We couldn’t afford anything more than street lamps – no electricity for TV and no refrigerator, because the costs would skyrocket. We couldn’t keep things on ice for long, and our dairy products and meat would spoil,” said Padilla, 65.

But in 2011 the people of Plan Grande opted for hydropower after a visit by technicians from the Small Grants Programme (SGP), implemented by the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), who suggested a small community-owned hydroelectric plant.

The entire community got involved and designed their own project for renewable energy and sustainability. With 30,000 dollars from the SGP and aid from Germany’s International Cooperation Agency (GIZ) and the Honduran Foundation for Agricultural Research (FHIA), a round-the-clock power supply became possible and Plan Grande left candles and dirty energy based on fossil fuels in the past.

“Our lives have changed – we now have electricity 24 hours a day and we can have a refrigerator, a freezer, a fan, and even a TV set – although we have to use the energy rationally and respect the limits and controls that we set for ourselves,” another local resident, Edgardo Padilla, told IPS.

“If we’re not careful, demand for power will soar, which would create problems for us again,” said the 33-year-old fisherman, who is responsible for running the energy supply from the micro-hydroelectric power station.

Edgardo Padilla, who administers the use of the small hydroelectric dam, explains how the process works and the rules the community has established to ensure rational use and distribution of electricity in Plan Grande, a fishing village on the Caribbean coast of Honduras. Credit: Thelma Mejía/IPS

The rules and schedules set by the villagers to optimise and ration energy use include specific times for watching soap operas, turn on freezers, or use fans. For example, freezers are turned on from 10 PM to 6 AM, which is the time of lowest consumption, he said.

“For now, air conditioning is not allowed because it uses so much electricity, and light bulbs and freezers have to be the energy efficient kind,” said Edgardo Padilla, who added that they also focus on transparency and accountability in their energy policy.

The change in the source of energy has brought huge advantages. “We used to pay 360 lempiras (17 dollars) for three hours a week; now we pay 100 lempiras (four dollars) for a round-the-clock power supply,” he said.

The villagers also set a sliding pay scale. Families who have a refrigerator, fan, TV set, computer and freezer pay 11 dollars a month; those who have only a fan and a TV set pay six dollars; and families who just have light bulbs or lamps pay just four dollars.

The Plan Grande mini dam is 2.5 km from the centre of the village, along footpaths through a 300-hectare forest that runs along the Matías river, which provides them with electricity. The plant generates 16.5 kilowatt-hours (kWh).

The villagers also developed a conservation plan to preserve their water sources and installed cameras to monitor illegal logging and to identify the local fauna.

Belkys García is in charge of the Plan Grande nursery, where seedlings are grown to reforest the Matías river basin, which provides hydropower for the village, and to grow fruit and timber trees to generate incomes for this isolated fishing village in Honduras’ northern Caribbean region. Credit: Thelma Mejía/IPS

Belkys García runs a nursery created a year ago to grow trees such as pine, which can be used for timber, in order to reforest and keep the area green. She organises maintenance and reforestation crews, which all villagers take part in.

“If someone doesn’t come on the day they were scheduled to do clean-up and maintenance of the nursery or the streets and paths that lead to the dam, they have to pay for that day of missed work,” García, 27, told IPS while watering seedlings.

“We organise ourselves, and using the nursery we also want to become entrepreneurs in other income-generating areas, such as growing rambutan (Nephelium lappaceum),” said García.

The local population is of mixed-race heritage. The municipality of Santa Fe is mainly Garifuna – descendants of African slaves who intermarried with members of the indigenous Carib tribe. The mayor of Santa Fe, Noel Ruíz of the Garifuna community, is proud of the village. “It is a model at the national level for the good use of clean energy,” he told IPS.

“It’s worth investing here; this is a committed community and its leaders know about accountability, believe in transparency and love nature, three things that you can’t find easily,” said the 44-year-old mayor, who was reelected to a second term.

“These people are happy because while the country has energy problems, they don’t; they have understood that there is a correlation between conservation of nature and well-being for the community,” added Ruíz, an agronomist.

Energy demand in this country of 8.8 million people is estimated at 1,375 MW. Sixty percent of that is generated by the national power utility, ENEE, and the rest comes from private companies or is imported by means of interconnection with other Central American nations.

Energy in Honduras comes from four sources: thermal, hydropower, wind and biomass. In 2010, 70 percent came from thermal power stations, and 30 percent from renewable sources. But since 2013, that has changed, and thermal energy now represents 51 percent of the total, while the rest comes from renewables.

The village of Plan Grande is now an example of the rational use and conservation of renewable energy.

Thanks to the new power supply this isolated community now has its own bakery.

“As a little girl I would imagine that one day I would trade my candle for a lamp. Things have really changed for us!” a 55-year-old local resident, Julia Baños, told IPS.

This reporting series was conceived in collaboration with Ecosocialist Horizons

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

A mother eats lunch with her children in a rural Mexican school, as part of one of the programmes that fall under the umbrella of the Crusade Against Hunger. Credit: Government o Mexico

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Aug 5 2015 (IPS)

While most of Latin America has been reducing poverty, Mexico is moving in the other direction: new official figures reflect an increase in the number of poor in the last two years, despite the billions of dollars channeled into a broad range of programmes aimed at combating the problem.

The negative impact of the 2014 fiscal reform, poorly-designed and mismanaged public policies, sluggish economic growth, and family incomes that have been frozen are all factors underlying the rise in the number of people living in poverty in the region’s second-most populous country, according to experts consulted by IPS.

“We have some well-designed social programmes, but many others have got off track,” said Edna Jaime, the head of México Evalúa, a think tank on public policies. “They claim to fight poverty and foment employment, but they have no effect. Many are captive; they serve political clientele instead of the public,” she told IPS.“If productivity and wages don’t go up, poverty won’t be reduced via the route of incomes. The provision of social services like healthcare, education and housing must be guaranteed, as well as more rational and better designed budgets for anti-poverty programmes and policies.” – Edna Jaime

The criticism is focused on initiatives like the Programme of Direct Support for the Countryside (PROCAMPO), which will shell out some four billion dollars in subsidies this year – money that will mainly benefit big agroexporters in northern Mexico, even though the programme was initially aimed at helping small-scale farmers weather the impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in effect between Canada, Mexico and the United States since 1994.

Other targets of the criticism are the over 15 billion dollars a year in subsidies for gas and electricity, because they benefit the bigger consumers.

In Latin America’s second-largest economy, some seven billion dollars a year go into 48 federal programmes focused on production, income generation and employment services.

A similar amount goes towards financing Prospera, a programme to foment social inclusion – formerly known as Oportunidades and praised by international development agencies – and Seguro Popular.

Prospera is a conditional cash transfer programme which offers families cash grants conditional on school attendance and regular health checkups for children, while Seguro Popular extends health insurance to people not covered by other social security services.

According to the latest survey by the National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy (CONEVAL), published Jul. 23, 55.3 million people live in poverty in Mexico – three million more than in 2012 – equivalent to 46.2 percent of the population of 121 million.

Of the total number of people in poverty, CONEVAL found that 12 million have incomes of less than a dollar a day, and another 12 million have incomes of less than two dollars a day.

Mexico runs counter to the general trend as one of the few countries in the region that have not been successful in reducing poverty, along with Guatemala and El Salvador, according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Human Development Report 2014.

“Mexico is one of the few countries which, instead of reducing poverty, saw the progress made in the past decade grind to a halt. The elements that have hindered progress are the not so high economic growth, and the fact that spending does not have a redistributive effect,” the coordinator of the UNDP report in Mexico, Rodolfo de la Torre, told IPS.

Beneficiaries of one of the subsidies for farmers receive the assistance in a rural town in Mexico, as part of the Prospera social programme aimed at reducing poverty. But despite the billions invested in the war on poverty, the problem has grown in this country in the last two years. Credit: Government of Mexico

The expert said the momentum behind some of the anti-poverty programmes has let up, “which means they have started to lose their effect on reducing poverty.”

The poverty measurement takes into account a number of factors: coverage of basic services like education, healthcare, social security, housing and food, and family income.

On Jul. 29, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) downgraded its forecast for GDP growth in Mexico this year from 3.0 to 2.4 percent – too low to generate the one million new jobs needed.

With respect to income, the current minimum wage of roughly five dollars a day is one of the lowest in Latin America, according to the Observatory of Wages at the private Ibero-American University in Puebla, in the central Mexican city of that name.

The rise in poverty highlights not only the shortcomings of Prospera, but also of the National Crusade Against Hunger, conservative President Enrique Peña Nieto`s flagship programme, which targets people living in extreme poverty and suffering from malnutrition.

The aim of the Crusade, which is concentrated in 400 municipalities and involves 70 federal programmes, is to reach 7.4 million people, 3.7 million of whom live in urban areas and the rest in the countryside.

But Jaime said implementing the strategy “is a very complex task” because of its design and multisectoral structure, and the risk of falling into clientelism. “There are instruments for assisting the poor that have proven themselves to be more effective. The Crusade has not had the desired success,” she said.

Jaime’s think tank México Evalúa, which forms part of the Citizen Action Against Poverty network, has publicly expressed its concern about the initiative ever since it was launched in January 2013, a month after Peña Nieto was sworn in.

For De la Torre, it hasn’t been an outright failure. But, he added, “this is a wakeup call to revise how it functions.”

“The entire burden of poverty reduction cannot fall on one programme,” the UNDP expert said. “Health and education policies also have a role to play. If new resources are not invested, the strategy is not going to bring about a shift in the focus on poverty reduction.”

As of early August, the government had not yet announced the Crusade’s specific targets for this year.

Meanwhile, CONEVAL is to present its medium-term assessment of the strategy in December.

With a grim economic outlook, and the government holding tight to its austerity policies, the experts suggest redesigning the structure of the budget and reviewing the management of social programmes.

“If productivity and wages don’t go up, poverty won’t be reduced via the route of incomes,” said Jaime. “The provision of social services like healthcare, education and housing must be guaranteed, as well as more rational and better designed budgets for anti-poverty programmes and policies.”

In the view of the UNDP, Mexico cannot wait for economic recovery to fight poverty.

“The way spending is channeled towards the neediest must be modified. The funds don’t reach the poorest of the poor; the programmes are not sensitive to regional deficiencies or deficiencies affecting particular groups or individuals,” De la Torre complained.

The UNDP is preparing studies on public spending on children, to identify in which stages of life there are budget gaps, and on the evolution of human development and the labour market’s contribution to that development.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

By Paloma Duran
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 30 2015 (IPS)

With the enthusiasm of the recent Financing for Development conference behind us, the central issues and many layers of what is at stake are now firmly in sight. In fact, a complex issue like hunger, which is a long standing development priority, remains an everyday battle for almost 795 million people worldwide.

Courtesy of Paloma Duran, Director of the Sustainable Development Goals Fund.

While this figure is 216 million less than in 1990-92, according to U.N. statistics, hunger kills more people every year than malaria, AIDS and tuberculosis combined. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) defines hunger as being synonymous with chronic undernourishment and is measured by the country average of how many calories each person has access to every day, as well as the prevalence of underweight children younger than five.

So where do we stand if food security and nutrition is destined to be a critical component of poverty eradication and sustainable development. In fact, the right to food is a basic human right and linked to the second goal of the proposed Sustainable Development Goals, (SDGs) which includes a target to end hunger and achieve food security by 2030.

The United Nations Development Programme is engaged in promoting sustainable agricultural practices to improve the lives of millions of farmers through its Green Commodities Programme. According to the World Food Programme, the world needs a food system that will meet the needs of an additional 2.5 billion people who will populate the Earth in 2050.

To eradicate hunger and extreme poverty will require an additional 267 billion dollars annually over the next 15 years. Given this looming prospect, a question that springs to mind is: how will this to be achieved?

Going forward, this goal requires more than words, it requires collective actions, including efforts to double global food production, reduce waste and experiment with food alternatives. As part of the Sustainable Development Goals Fund (SDG Fund) mission, we are working to understand how best to tackle this multi-faceted issue.

With the realisation that there is no one-size-fits-all solution for how to improve food security, the SDG Fund coordinates with a range of public and private stakeholders as well as U.N. Agencies to pilot innovative joint programmes in the field.

For example, the SDG Fund works to tackle food security and nutrition in Bolivia and El Salvador where rural residents are benefiting from our work to strengthen local farm production systems. In addition, we engage women and smallholder farmers as part of our cross-cutting efforts to build more integrated response to development challenges. We recognise that several factors must also play a critical role in achieving the hunger target, namely:

Improved agricultural productivity, especially by small and family farmers, helps improve food security;

Inclusive economic growth leads to important gains in hunger and poverty reduction;

the expansion of social protection contributes directly to the reduction of hunger and malnutrition.

In the fight against hunger, we need to create food systems that offer better nutritional outcomes and ones that are fundamentally more sustainable – i.e. that require less land, less water and that are more resilient to climate change.

The challenges are almost as great as the growing population which will require 70 percent more food to meet the estimated change in demand and diets. Notwithstanding is if we continue to waste a third of what we produce, we have to reevaluate agriculture and food production in terms of the supply chain and try to improve the quality and nutritional aspects across the value chain.

Food security and nutrition must be everyone’s concern especially if we are to eradicate hunger and combat food insecurity across all its dimensions. Feeding the world’s growing population must therefore be a joint effort and unlikely to be achieved by governments and international organisations alone.

In the words of José Graziano da Silva, FAO Director General, “The near-achievement of the MDG hunger targets shows us that we can indeed eliminate the scourge of hunger in our lifetime. We must be the Zero Hunger generation. That goal should be mainstreamed into all policy interventions and at the heart of the new sustainable development agenda to be established this year.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

This little boy was one of hundreds whose schooling was interrupted due to violence in India. Credit: Priyanka Borpujari/IPS

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 13 2015 (IPS)

When international donors pledge millions of dollars either for post-conflict reconstruction or for humanitarian aid, deliveries are rarely on schedule: they are either late, fall far below expectations or not delivered at all.

The under-payment or non-payment of promised aid has affected mostly civilian victims, including war-ravaged women and children in military hotspots such as Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and most recently Yemen.“We found that on average, donors deliver less than half of what they pledged (47 percent). But, even that percentage might overstate the amount that actually arrives in recovering countries." -- Gregory Adams of Oxfam

But it also extends to earthquake-struck countries such as Haiti and Nepal, and at least three African countries devastated by the Ebola virus.

At an international Ebola recovery conference at the United Nations last week, the governments of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea requested more than 3.2 billion dollars in humanitarian aid to meet their recovery plan budgets. And donors readily pledged to meet the request.

But how much of this will be delivered and when?

At a question and answer press stakeout, Matthew Russell Lee, the hard-driving investigative reporter for Inner City Press (ICP), asked Helen Clark, the Administrator of U.N. Development Programme (UNDP), what steps are being taken to ensure that the announced pledges are in fact paid.

According to Lee, she said UNDP will be contacting the pledgers.

“But will they go public with the non-payers?” he asked, in his blog posting.

Lee told IPS that even amid the troubling lack of follow-through on previous pledges in Haiti, Lebanon, Gaza and Yemen, “it does not seem the UNDP has in place any mechanism for reporting on compliance with the Ebola pledges” announced last week.

“If the U.N. system is going to announce such pledges, they should follow up on them,” he said.

On Yemen, he pointed out, while the Saudi-led coalition has been bombing the country, it seems strange to so profusely praise them for a (conditional) aid pledge, especially but not only one that has yet to be paid.

Gregory Adams, Director of Aid Effectiveness at Oxfam International, which has been closely monitoring aid pledges, told IPS that in advance of the Ebola Recovery Conference held last week, Oxfam looked at three past crises to see how well donors followed through on recovery pledges.

“We found that on average, donors deliver less than half of what they pledged (47 percent). But, even that percentage might overstate the amount that actually arrives in recovering countries,” he said.

For example, in Busan, South Korea in 2011, donors pledged they would be publishing timely, accessible and detailed data on where their aid is going by the end of 2015.

But many donors still don’t publish complete information; information is only available for slightly more than half of overall ODA (Official Development Assistance).

As a consequence, said Adams, once aid reaches a recovery country, it is difficult to know exactly how much actually gets where it is most needed.

This lack of transparency makes it hard for communities to participate in planning and recovery efforts, and to hold donors, governments and service providers accountable for results, he noted.

One of the most important lessons of Ebola was that response and recovery efforts must be centered on community needs and incorporate their feedback, Adams said.

“If people do not know where aid is going, they can’t plan, they can’t provide feedback, and they can’t make sure that aid is working,” he declared.

Even Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon made a special appeal to donors last December when he announced 10 billion dollars in pledges as initial capitalisation for the hefty 100 billion dollar Green Climate Fund (GCF).

Announcing the pledges, he called on “all countries to deliver on their pledges as soon as possible and for more governments to contribute to climate finance.”

Last April, Saudi Arabia announced a 274-million-dollar donation “for humanitarian operations in Yemen” – despite widespread accusations of civilian bombings and violations of international humanitarian law in the ongoing conflict there.

Responding to repeated questions at U.N. press briefings, U.N. spokesperson Stephane Dujarric told reporters last week: “I think it’s right now in the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) phase between the Saudis and the various U.N. agencies to which the money will be allocated.  That process is ongoing.  We hope it concludes soon.  But those discussions are ongoing.”

He said a lot of the larger donors have standing MOUs with the U.N.

“Obviously, this is… I think my recollection this is probably the first time we’re doing it with Saudi Arabia, but I think it takes a little bit more time, but it makes things a lot clearer in the end.”

Asked if there was a conflict of interest given Saudi Arabia is one of the main belligerents in this conflict, Dujarric said: “I wouldn’t say conflict of interest.  We welcome the generous contributions from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and that… we welcome the fact that these contributions will be helped… used by U.N. humanitarian agencies, which are then the… but it… the agencies themselves are then free to use those resources in the way they best see fit to help the Yemeni people.”

Last March, at the third international pledging conference for humanitarian aid to Syria, which was hosted by Kuwait, donors pledged 3.8 billion dollars in humanitarian aid. The three major donors were: the European Commission (EC) and its member states (with a contribution of nearly one billion dollars), the United States (507 million dollars) and Kuwait (500 million dollars).

Several international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and charities, including the Turkish Humanitarian Relief Foundation, the Qatar Red Crescent Society and the Islamic Charity Organisation of Kuwait, jointly pledged about 500 million dollars.

But, so far, there has been no full accounting of the deliveries.

Oxfam’s Adams told IPS in order to make sure that the three countries affected by Ebola can help their people and communities recover, donors need to:

• publish timely, detailed, and comprehensive information on their aid, consistent with the priorities outlined in the recovery plans of the Governments of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone;
• seek to direct aid through local entities wherever possible, including national and local governments and civil society organisations;
• support strong community engagement and the independent role of civil society in Ebola recovery, so that they can hold donors, governments and service providers accountable for results.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

A worker prepares seeds in the nursery where Costa Rica’s energy utility, ICE, grows 300,000 trees a year in Cachí, in the central province of Cartago, which it distributes to the public as well as institutions and companies. Credit: Diego Arguedas Ortiz/IPS

By Diego Arguedas Ortiz
SAN JOSE, Jul 13 2015 (IPS)

Millions of Latin Americans have better access to clean water and decent housing than 25 years ago. But the region still faces serious environmental challenges, such as deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions – a legacy of the model of development followed in the 20th century.

Fifteen years after signing on to the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the countries of Latin America have made significant headway in eradicating slums, expanding sanitation services, and providing access to clean water.

But progress towards ensuring environmental sustainability is lagging due to a fossil fuel-intensive development model based on the extraction of minerals and monoculture agriculture and livestock raising that expand at the expense of the forests.

“There has been uneven progress, with ups and downs,” said Joseluis Samaniego, director of the Division for Sustainable Development and Human Settlements of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

“In general terms, you have clear, outstanding advances in terms of access to water and sanitation, and we have the impression that those targets will be met,” he told Tierramérica from ECLAC’s regional headquarters in Santiago.

These targets form part of the seventh MDG, which refers to ensuring environmental sustainability, with measurable time-bound targets for the end of this year, based on 1990 indicators.

At year-end, the MDGs will be replaced by 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which the heads of state and government of the 193 United Nations member states are to approve at a summit in September.

Of the targets set by the seventh MDG, this region met the one for halving the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water, five years before this year’s deadline. And between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of the population with sustainable access to an improved water source increased from 85 to 95 percent, although there are still millions of Latin Americans without clean water.

Furthermore, from 1990 to 2014, the proportion of Latin Americans living in slums was nearly cut in half, from 37 to 20 percent, according to U.N. figures.

But that means there is still a long way to go, with more than 100 million people in this region living in slums and shantytowns.

Samaniego said the progress made towards meeting these targets reflects the region’s public spending effort and the clarity of the goals.

“When the MDGs were approved…the clear targets and incentives for monitoring helped countries organise and move forward towards the goals,” the ECLAC official said.

But with respect to incorporating sustainable development and the environment in public policies, there have been fewer advances.

“In terms of deforestation, we’re not doing so well,” said Samaniego. “From 1990 to 2010, forest cover shrank from 52 to 47.4 percent.”

The latest U.N. report assessing global and regional progress towards the MDGs, published Jul. 6, shows that Latin America has not made impressive progress in achieving environmental sustainability.

“Forests are disappearing at a rapid pace, despite the establishment of forest policies and laws supporting sustainable forest management in many countries,” says a regional synthesis document on the report.

Latin America’s economies are still fairly carbon-intensive. One mechanism to measure this is carbon intensity, or how many grams of carbon it takes to produce one dollar of GDP.

While the global average dropped from 600 grams per dollar in 1990 to 470 in 2010, the regional average only fell from 310 to 280 grams per dollar of GDP – an almost statistically insignificant change, according to Samaniego.

That view is shared by United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) regional experts.

“There is an almost linear correlation between a country’s GDP growth and energy consumption, and as long as the energy mix is still based on fossil fuels, it will be directly linked to a rise in emissions,” said Gonzalo Pizarro, regional adviser on poverty, MDGs and human development at the UNDP regional service centre for Latin America and the Caribbean, in Panama City.

In 1990, the region emitted just under one billion metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) equivalent – less than five percent of the world total.

Although the region’s share remained the same in 2011, in just two decades emissions produced by Latin America and the Caribbean rose 80 percent, to 1.8 billion metric tons of CO2, according to the UNDP.

This target, included in the seventh MD, has one particularity: although policies arise from internal decision-making in each country, the results have a global impact.

Although indicators like emissions and loss of forest cover “are linked to people’s well-being, they also have to do with the development model followed by countries,” Pizarro told Tierramérica.

“In economies based on raw materials or commodities, like most of the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, the deforestation rate will remain high, because economic pressure to exploit the forests will continue to be extremely heavy,” he said.

According to the expert, the challenge to be met is modifying the energy mix, while the decisions taken by countries are still focused on the large-scale production of commodities that affect biodiversity.

“As long as decision-makers are incapable of comparing the short-term benefits of this exploitation with the real value of the ecosystemic services provided by forests, this is likely to continue happening on a large scale,” Pizarro said.

The ECLAC and UNDP experts recognised the environmental efforts made by countries in the region like Cuba and Costa Rica, which have reforested; Chile and Uruguay, which have successfully integrated forest industries in their economies; and Brazil, which reduced deforestation in the Amazon.

This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Women and children hold up signs at a rally against corruption in the northern Pakistani city of Peshawar. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Kanya D'Almeida
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 8 2015 (IPS)

A woman is stopped at a checkpoint; she gives birth, and dies. Another is sold in a slave market. A boy is killed by a tank. A young man drowns at sea, trying to reach a haven safe from oppression and poverty.

These were just some of the examples that Rima Khalaf, executive secretary of the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA), touched on during a panel discussion on the importance of the rule of law held at the U.N. headquarters on Jul. 7.

In each of scenarios laid out above, Khalaf said, had the person in question been of a different race, ethnic group, gender or religion, they might have been spared an untimely or violent death. In other words, they might have been under the protection of the law.

All too often, however, citizens are either unable or unaware of how to demand their legal rights – be it access to food, jobs or justice.

As the U.N. closes a 15-year chapter of poverty eradication efforts defined by the eight ambitious Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and moves towards a new, sustainable development agenda, legal experts came together Tuesday to discuss how the rule of law can help bolster the post-2015 blueprint for global change.

Organised by the International Development Law Organisation (IDLO), an intergovernmental body devoted to empowering citizens and enabling governments to establish robust legal systems worldwide, the two-part event series revolved around Goal 16 of the proposed Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which aims to build inclusive societies by providing equal justice to all.

Promoting and strengthening the rule law in the realm of international development would seem, as IDLO Director-General Irene Khan pointed out, “a no-brainer”.

“There is a paradox here at the U.N. that bothers me deeply,” Khan said at a panel co-hosted by the IDLO and the Law School of the University of Pennsylvania (Penn Law) Tuesday. “You can almost think of it as parallel railway lines, with two trains hurtling down these tracks through the landscape of the U.N. since its inception.

“One is the train that is running the development agenda, and the other is the train running the human rights agenda. I only hope that the principle of the rule of law that has now been acknowledged as part of the development agenda will bring these two tracks together – and that the meeting won’t be a crash but a synergy.”

Since its inception in 1988, the IDLO has remained the only organisation dedicated entirely to promoting the rule of law, repeatedly pushing for effective and accountable legal systems around the world as the basis for eradicating poverty, fighting discrimination and ensuring access to basic services.

It also highlights the links between inequality and lawlessness, where good governance seeps through cracks in weak justice systems, eroding the public’s confidence in the very structures that are designed to ensure their well-being.

Recounting a conversation she had with a chief justice in one of the IDLO’s partner countries, Khan said, “I was told that in this particular country people often say, ‘Why hire a lawyer if you can buy a judge?’ It is these situations that the rule of law addresses.”

In short, she said, the rule of law regulates power, a crucial step in the realisation of the SDGs.

“Poverty is not a matter of income,” she stressed. “It is a matter of powerlessness.”

Consider the following example from Uganda, where three-quarters of the population are subsistence farmers and where land disputes can have a heavy impact on livelihood and food security.

For many years, inefficient and informal justice systems meant that farmers, and particularly women, had no recourse to resolutions over even the most minor discord.

With the introduction in 1995 of the Uganda Land Alliance (ULA) – established to provide legal empowerment to rural communities through Land Rights Information Centres – fair land laws and policies, as well as swift access to justice, has become the norm, rather than the exception.

In Ecuador, an IDLO training programme on access to fair trade markets and the basic legal aspects of forming and running micro-enterprises has given local communities in predominantly rural areas significant leverage in tapping into new revenue streams.

And in Rwanda, where women held just 43 percent of seats in the lower parliament in 2003, a new constitution and the creation of women’s councils over the past decade pushed women’s political representation to 64 percent in 2013, resulting in stronger laws on violence against women and gender-based crimes.

Any number of similar examples, from Afghanistan to Kyrgyzstan to Kenya, stand as testimony to the sheer scope and significance of the rule of law for the global development agenda.

But while legal frameworks are vital to securing rights and enshrining the basic tenets of development in constitutions worldwide, they cannot and do not exist in a vacuum.

“Laws alone are not enough,” Khalid Malik, former director of the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Human Development Report noted during the panel discussion. “Many countries have all manner of statutes and conventions, but behaviors have not altered. If institutions are not pro-poor, change will not happen.”

He stressed that part of the problem lies in “institutions often being captured by the elites”, or other powerful interests, making them less accessible to marginalised groups.

What is needed, he says, is an approach to the rule of law that is rooted in justice, and the empowerment of ordinary people.

“When you have a universal approach to education and health,” he stated, “You empower people enormously. Think of the Arab Spring – it happened mostly in countries that were doing well on health and education. Why? Because once you’re educated, you become far more aware of your rights, you start expecting more from institutions, and the relationship between the citizen and the state starts to change.”

It is precisely this change that lawmakers hope to see as the U.N. finalizes its new development plans for a more just and sustainable world.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Portrait of a girl in Timbuktu, Mali. Credit: UN Photo/Marco Dormino

By Jean-Luc Stalon
BAMAKO, Jul 7 2015 (IPS)

The recent peace agreements in Mali offer grounds for optimism. It’s now time to capitalise on the accord to accelerate recovery, reconciliation and development. An important part of that process will entail placing the country’s youth at the center of the country’s agenda for peace and prosperity.

With its youthful population and track record of civil crises, Mali is the perfect case study on the relationship between youth and stability. Mali’s fertility rate is second only to Niger’s.The youth of today mix identities, from the traditional to the modern and need to be accompanied and mentored as they define their sense of self.

Yet in a country that doesn’t provide jobs, opportunities for decision-making and a sense of purpose, this youth bulge is more likely to be a powerful demographic time bomb rather than a driver of economic growth.

The complex crisis that hit Mali in 2012 compounded the issue, as armed groups found fertile ground for recruitment in Mali’s large pool of poor, disaffected, uneducated youths, enticed both by easy money and radical ideologies. The conflict also fueled important migration flows to North Africa and Europe.

Now more than ever, the country’s youth need solutions that are specific to their daily realities and will discourage them from going astray. Achieving that objective implies helping them out of the vicious cycle of unemployment, violence and poverty. Young women and men also need to be heard and should have a role in decision-making and peace processes.

To that end, the government and its partners have put into place a vast array of youth employment policies, as well as programmes to strengthen social cohesion, reintegrate displaced people and mobilise national volunteers.

These initiatives have done a lot for those targeted, but they fall short of a comprehensive, national solution for reintegrating youths and increasing their prospects for a better life.

In fact, unemployment rates among young women and men seem to have stagnated. In 2011, unemployment rates among 15 to 39 year-olds revolved around 15 percent, yet independent assessments suggest they could be as high as 50 percent when underemployment is taken into account.

As a result, in a country struggling against terrorism, organised crime and social cleavages, more and more young peole turn to violence and radicalism.

There needs to be a fundamental shift in the way that we look at youth development. Such an approach would look holistically at how to integrate young people in the economy and create new generations of entrepreneurs, while giving them a political voice and a sense of purpose within their communities and the wider nation.

First, we need to boost education, skills training and employment opportunities while at the same time serving Mali’s economic diversification and transformation agenda. This would require investing in promising sectors such as information technology, and creating learning centers and peer-to-peer networks in close collaboration with the private sector.

In this regard, Mali could learn from other successful initiatives, such as the public-private partnership developed in Kenya to create linkages between the formal and informal sectors of the economy.

Second, young Malians need to feel their likings and aspirations are taken into account in their country’s major decisions. Youth should be encouraged to vote and have a chance at running for office in a political system that favours inclusivity, trust and peaceful change.

The upcoming local elections and peace agreement implementation present an opportunity for better youth involvement and representation in the decision making process.

Third, young Malians need a sense of purpose but far too often their desires, opinions and spiritual leanings aren’t seriously considered. These can include joining a community, increasing their exposure to global events and causes, or creating a more affluent life.

The youth of today mix identities, from the traditional to the modern and need to be accompanied and mentored as they define their sense of self. Doing so would go a long way to eliminating intolerance, conflict and even radicalization.

Young women deserve our full attention. Much more needs to be done to ensure they can exercise their basic human rights, including those that relate to the most intimate or fundamental aspects of life, such as sexual and reproductive health, and freedom from violence.

There cannot be peace, poverty eradication and the creation of a more prosperous and open society in Mali without young people. A more holistic approach would be more effective and sustainable.

It could include new mechanisms such as a trust fund for youths, new channels of inter-generational dialogue and a more global outlook in the exchange of knowledge and development experiences. If we succeed in doing so, Mali could embark on an incredibly successful development path.

UNDP is working with young people from all walks of life so they can find a decent job, contribute to their communities and build a better future for Mali as a whole.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

Two health care workers clean their feet in a bucket of water containing bleach after they leave an Ebola isolation facility during an Ebola simulation at Biankouma Hospital in Côte d’Ivoire. Credit: Marc-André Boisvert/IPS

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 7 2015 (IPS)

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, addressing delegates in a run-up to an international Ebola recovery conference, said last month that “all of the investments, all of the sacrifices and all of the risks by relief workers” would be squandered if an outbreak of the disease recurs.

And it did – in Liberia, a country which had been declared free of the Ebola virus."The existing facilities need a complete overhaul, and many new structures need to be built. If another outbreak strikes, the toll would be far worse." -- Dr. Matshidiso Moeti

The World Health Organisation (WHO), which made that declaration on May 9, confirmed that a 17-year-old Liberian who died of Ebola last week had been in contact with nearly 200 people possibly triggering the spread of the infection.

As of last week, more than 27,100 people were affected by the highly contagious disease, which killed over 11,100, mostly in three African countries: Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia.

Against this backdrop, the United Nations is hosting a high-level international Ebola Recovery Conference July 10, primarily to provide a platform for the three countries to share their recovery plans and, more importantly, to raise funds to continue the fight against the disease and also strengthen health care systems in the region.

Nicolas Douillet of the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) in Africa told IPS the conference aims to mobilise the international community in support of the three countries.

The total needs identified by the three countries, and regionally, by the Mano River Union, he said, amount to 7.2 billion dollars for the next 24 months – 3.2 billion for the three countries and 4.0 billion for the Mano River Union, an Intergovernmental Institution comprising Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea and Cote d’Ivoire.

The total requested, however, is 9.0 billion dollars, of which 1.8 billion is already committed, leaving a financing gap of 7.2 billion dollars.

Speaking of the need for strong health care systems, former U.S. President Bill Clinton told a U.N. meeting last May that severely limited resources were a “staggering burden” – and countries in West Africa were requesting funds to build better and stronger health systems through multi-year plans.

Before the Ebola outbreak, he said, Liberia had just one physician for every 71,000 people. He said Ebola had been in many fundamental ways a “man-made disaster.”

“Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone entered the Ebola epidemic with severely underfunded health systems,” said Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, WHO Regional Director for Africa.

“After a year of handling far too many severely ill patients, the surviving staff need support, better protection, compensation, and reinforcements. The existing facilities need a complete overhaul, and many new structures need to be built. If another outbreak strikes, the toll would be far worse,” he warned.

Sarah Edwards, head of Policy & Campaigns at Health Poverty Action, told IPS: “Yes, there certainly needs to be a focus on the longer term need for health systems strengthening at this conference and across the wider Ebola response, and specifically this needs to consider how health systems in Ebola-affected countries can be funded sustainably.”

She said this should include measures to support affected countries to explore the potential for increased tax revenues to fund HSS; take action to stop illicit capital flight; and pay compensation for any health workers trained in affected countries who are now working in the UK.

After a visit to the region last October, Magdy Martínez-Solimán, U.N. Assistant Secretary-General and Director of UNDP’s Bureau for Policy and Programme Support, said: “This devastating health crisis is destroying lives and communities. It is also impairing national economies, wiping out livelihoods and basic services, and could undo years of efforts to stabilize West Africa.”

“As we work together to end the outbreak, now is the time to ensure these countries can also continue to function and swiftly get back on their feet,” he added.

Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, already suffering from some of the lowest levels of human development in the world, had emerged from years of civil conflict and political instability and were starting to make encouraging progress, according to UNDP.

Last September, the United Nations established the U.N. Mission for Ebola Emergency Response (UNMEER), a single structure that will aim to stop the spread of the disease and prevent it from appearing in unaffected countries, as well as treat and care for the infected.

The UNDP said gross domestic product (GDP) in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia has shrunk by two to three percentage points. The countries are now projected to lose a total of 13 billion dollars as a result of Ebola. People’s livelihoods are shrinking from lost wages and decreased productivity.

The participants in Friday’s conference at the United Nations include: President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Chair of the African Union (AU), Alpha Condé, President of Guinea; Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, President of Liberia and Ernest Bai Koroma, President of Sierra Leone.

The meeting is in partnership with the AU, the European Union (EU), the World Bank and the African Development Bank (AfDB).

The AU will hold its own “International Conference on Africa’s Fight Against Ebola” July 20-21 in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea.

Meanwhile the Washington-based ONE campaign said keeping track of pledges and monitoring their disbursement, has proved difficult and – at times – impossible “because of inconsistent, inefficient, and often opaque reporting processes and standards.”

In a white paper released Tuesday, it said: “One of the most fundamental questions asked during a humanitarian crisis is, ‘how much have donors promised to this effort?’

“But in the case of the Ebola outbreak, this question has been incredibly difficult to answer — and that’s a huge problem,” ONE’s Global Health Policy Director Erin Hohlfelder said.

“If we don’t know what has really been pledged and delivered, no one can adequately match promised resources to the needs on the ground. That means gaps cannot be easily identified and we risk losing time, resources, and lives.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

The answer to the question “How much money will it take to achieve the new SDGs?” is … drum-roll … every single dollar in the world. Credit: Bindalfrodo/cc by 2.0

By Paul Ladd and Pedro Conceição
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 7 2015 (IPS)

Ethiopia will host an important meeting on Financing for Development (FfD) Conference next week. One of the most-asked questions is:  How much will it cost us to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)?

The question sounds sensible at first glance and flows naturally from our experience of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).Everything we buy has little impacts across the SDGs. For example, when we buy a shirt we are also ‘buying’ the environmental waste and labour standards used when making that shirt.

The grand MDG deal was that poor nations would focus on reducing poverty and improving governance, in exchange for Official Development Assistance (ODA) that would top up resources mobilised by developing countries themselves.

This ‘gap filling’ logic led to expansive exercises in MDG costing, estimations of how quickly governments could improve their tax take, and campaigns to scale up aid.

Many governments responded, and a great deal of good has been done through development aid: Expanded vaccine programmes, more children in school, cleaner water for more people, and many more less measurable achievements like gradually strengthening institutional capacities.

But as we now move to a different development agenda – one that is more ambitious, complex, integrated and universal – our logic on financing also needs a radical overhaul.

While gap-filling will still be important for some countries with very low tax bases and underfunded challenges (like some communicable diseases), for the majority it will be much more about aligning existing resources.

So the answer to the question “How much money will it take to achieve the new SDGs?” is … drum-roll … every single dollar in the world.

This means that every dollar we spend as consumers should work in the direction of achieving the SDGs and not against them. This includes our spending on clothes, food, and travel.

Everything we buy has little impacts across the SDGs. For example, when we buy a shirt we are also ‘buying’ the environmental waste and labour standards used when making that shirt.

But voluntary action by consumers will not be enough. Companies will also have to play their part.

Some are starting to change their business models realising that building a sustainable business will require a sustainable world. Some are engaging in development impact investment.

But beyond these voluntary actions, governments will need to step up and play the critical role of creating the right incentives and regulations to align actions by all consumers, businesses and investors.

While aligning private finance is the big win, changing how we spend public monies will also require a major overhaul. The classic example is energy: If we continue to subsidise non-renewable energies, we are deliberately and consciously working against the Goals.

Globally, energy subsidies are estimated to reach five trillion dollars this year, approaching 20 percent of GDP in some countries. They are overwhelmingly directed towards fossils fuels.

Energy subsidy reform would increase government revenue globally by three trillion dollars a year, reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 20 percent, and cut premature air pollution deaths by half.

Sometimes incentives, regulation, and fiscal reform are seen as imposing costs. Attention is drawn to these costs by those directly affected, with less attention given to society-wide and long-term benefits.

And many inefficiencies that are staring us in the face can unlock trillions more in gains. For instance, advancing gender equality would directly advance the SDGs and generate economic benefits.

Arguing that aligning existing finance with sustainable development is more important than raising ever more money shouldn’t be interpreted as support for the anti-aid movement. Done well, aid has its place.

Donors should indeed meet their 0.7 percent commitments and make much faster progress on their commitments on improving how aid is done.

But if the Conference in Addis Ababa, scheduled to take place next week, only focuses on mobilizing more money and doesn’t do something about improving how that money is spent, then we will have missed the point, and will certainly miss the grand targets we have set for ourselves. This is why every dollar counts.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

Syrian children outside their temporary home, in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley. Credit: DFID – UK Department for International Development/CC-BY-2.0

By Zhai Yun Tan
WASHINGTON, Jul 2 2015 (IPS)

The United Nations’ food aid organisation, the World Food Programme (WFP), said on Jul. 1 that up to 440,000 refugees from war-torn Syria might have to go hungry if no additional funds are received by August.

WFP, the world’s largest humanitarian agency dedicated to fighting hunger, provides food every month to nearly six million people in need in Syria and the surrounding region.

“Every time we take one step forward, we fall ten steps back. I have given up the hope that we will ever live normally again. I know the world has forgotten us; we’re too much of a burden." -- Fatmeh, a Syrian refugee who fled to Lebanon three years ago
Though the agency received 5.38 billion dollars in 2014, the continuing emergencies in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere mean that needs now far outpace available funding.

From assisting an estimated 2.5 million refugees last year, limited funding has forced the organisation to scale back its operations, with the result that just 1.6 million refugees are currently receiving rations.

A United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) report published in March 2015 revealed that an estimated 3.33 million refugees have fled Syria since 2014, making Syrians the second largest refugee population in the world, after the Palestinians.

The cuts come at a time when Syrian refugees are spending their fourth year away from home, unable to celebrate the annual Ramadan festival, one of the most important religious occasions celebrated by Muslims worldwide.

The upcoming winter may leave up to 1.7 million people without fuel, shelter, insulation and blankets.

WFP is fully funded by voluntary contributions from governments, companies and private individuals. The organisation reports that its regional programme in the Middle East is currently 81 percent underfunded and requires 139 million dollars to help Syrian refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Turkey and Iraq through September 2015.

“Just when we thought things couldn’t get worse, we are forced yet again to make yet more cuts,” WFP Regional Director for the Middle East Muhannad Hadi said in a press release Wednesday. “Refugees were already struggling to cope with what little we could provide.”

The humanitarian funding crisis began in 2013, when the number of Syrian refugees receiving food assistance from WFP dropped by 30 percent.

Food parcels were downsized in October 2014, following a WFP announcement in September that they have no funding available in December 2014 for programmes in Syria.

Ertharin Cousin, executive director of WFP, appealed to the United Nations Security Council and member nations in April 2015 for more funding.

“When we announced the reductions in Jordan our hotlines were overwhelmed. Thousands of appeal calls come in each day. Calls from families that have exhausted their resources and feel abandoned […] by us all,” she said. “One woman told us, ‘I cannot stay […] if I cannot feed my children.'”

A fundraising campaign in December 2014 raised enough funds for WFP to carry on its programmes through December, but in January 2015, WFP cut the amount of money in electronic food cards provided to refugees from 27 dollars to 19 dollars.

Starting this month, the value fell to just 13.5 dollars.

This is not the first time WFP has faced a funding crisis. In 2009, aid operations in Guatemala, Bangladesh and Kenya faced reductions in supply of food rations due to a lack of funding. In 2011, a similar situation occurred in Zimbabwe.

When faced with funding shortfalls, WFP suspends programmes and only provides aid to the most vulnerable groups – pregnant women, children and the elderly.

International efforts to relieve suffering caused by the Syrian crisis culminated in the Jun. 25 Regional Refugee and Resilience Plan (3RP) that called for 5.5 billion dollars to fund the needs of host governments, United Nations agencies and NGO aid operations in the area.

According to the Financial Tracking Service (FTS) of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), only 25 percent of the appeal has been met.

“This massive crisis requires far more solidarity and responsibility-sharing from the international community than what we have seen so far,” said U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres in a Jun. 25 WFP press release.

“But instead, we are so dangerously low on funding that we risk not being able to meet even the most basic survival needs of millions of people over the coming six months.”

The United States has contributed over 609 million dollars to the effort, representing 26.4 percent of the total pledged. The United Kingdom follows behind with a contribution of over 344 million dollars.

A WFP interview with Syrian refugees in Lebanon captures the refugees’ desperation:

“Every time we take one step forward, we fall ten steps back. I have given up the hope that we will ever live normally again,” said Fatmeh, a refugee who fled to Lebanon three years ago, in the WFP interview.

“I know the world has forgotten us; we’re too much of a burden. They’ve given up on us too.”

The crisis in Syria began in 2011 after security forces killed several pro-democracy protestors. Unrest followed with demands for President Bashar al-Assad’s resignation, to which he responded with violence.

The situation worsened with the rise of the armed group calling itself the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in northern and eastern Syria. The country became a battleground between four forces – Assad’s pro-governmental forces, Kurdish fighters, ISIS, and rebel fighters eager to overturn Assad’s regime.

In the midst of the violence, Syrians are faced with a crumbling economy. The UNDP report revealed that four out of every five Syrians lived in poverty in 2014, and almost two-thirds of the population was unable to secure basic food and non-food items necessary for survival.

The death toll in Syria reached 210,000 by the end of 2014, with 840,000 people wounded.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Feast or famine: Just three years ago, flooding in Trinidad's capital of Port of Spain left residents little choice but to wade through the deluge. But lately drought has become a problem in the dry season. Credit: Peter Richards/IPS

By Jewel Fraser
PORT OF SPAIN, Jun 23 2015 (IPS)

Starting in 1999, the Water and Sewerage Authority (WASA) of Trinidad and Tobago began a 10-year effort to map the country’s water quality. They started to notice a worrying trend.

The watersheds in the western region of Trinidad had progressed from being of moderate quality in some places to being outright bad. By 2010, a survey of the country showed more than 20 per cent of the watersheds were in serious trouble.“By adopting these ecological measures to protect our river water supplies, we can reduce the need for more energy intensive and more costly measures of obtaining water such as desalination.” -- Dr. Natalie Boodram

“We have raised the alarm bell,” said senior hydrologist David Samm. ”WASA is concerned.”

WASA received a lot of bad press during the recently concluded dry season. Residents whose communities were roiled with protests almost weekly over lack of access to potable water vehemently criticised the agency while waving placards and publicly burning tyres.

WASA is the designated body responsible for all of Trinidad and Tobago’s water sources and supply.

But factors beyond its control, like climate change and climate variability, are significant contributors to the crisis.

“During the dry season we would have longer droughts so we will not have as much water for groundwater recharge,” explained Samm, adding, “there is more intense rainfall for a given time period and because of continued development we have more flooding problems during the rainy season.”

That has resulted in more surface runoff “and that water is being flushed through the watercourses and out to sea. Therefore, we have less recharge of our groundwater systems,” he explained.

He told IPS that 60 per cent of Trinidad and Tobago’s potable water comes from surface water sources.

There has also been major housing construction along the east-west corridor of Trinidad, he pointed out. “With climate change and the increase in impervious cover (due to urbanisation) the recharge of our groundwater system will be reduced,” Samm said. As well, “with urban growth, you see garbage in the rivers – refrigerators.”

The authority decided it needed to act to protect the health of the watersheds on which its water supply depends. It introduced the Adopt-A-River programme in the summer of 2013. Since its rollout, several of the country’s rivers have been adopted, including six of the most important, and there are 175 citizens working with the Adopt-A-River programme.

Though river adoption programmes are known in several states in the U.S., the programme in Trinidad and Tobago is among the first for the Caribbean.

WASA’s decision to focus on preserving ecosystems was a forward-looking approach to the issue of sustainably ensuring access to potable water for all, as evident from observations made in the Executive Summary of the United Nations World Water Development Report 2015. Commenting on the water situation worldwide the report states the following:

“Most economic models do not value the essential services provided by freshwater ecosystems, often leading to unsustainable use of water resources and ecosystem degradation. Pollution from untreated residential and industrial wastewater and agricultural run-off also weakens the capacity of ecosystems to provide water-related services.

“Ecosystems across the world, particularly wetlands, are in decline. Ecosystem services remain under-valued, under-recognized and under-utilized within most current economic and resource management approaches. A more holistic focus on ecosystems for water and development that maintains a beneficial mix between built and natural infrastructure can ensure that benefits are maximized.”

In keeping with the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals’ focus on reducing poverty and environmental degradation by helping communities to help themselves, the UNDP provided funds for one of Trinidad and Tobago’s Adopt-A-River participants

Through its Global Environment Facility’s Small Grants Programme (SGP), the UNDP provides funds and technical support to civil society organisations working on “projects that conserve and restore the environment while enhancing people’s well-being and livelihoods at the community level.”

The Social Justice Foundation, which works in underdeveloped areas of Central and South Trinidad, received funding of just under 50,000 dollars from the SGP, which it matched with 65,000 dollars of its own money to sponsor an Adopt-A-River programme involving at-risk and disadvantaged youths in the communities of Siparia and Carlsen Field.

The programme ran for nine months from September 2014 to June 2015, during which time young people have been trained as eco-leaders and taught skills in water testing to monitor the health of the rivers in their communities, using La Motte test kits, as well as video production to record the work done.

They learned how to test for temperature, pH, alkalinity, turbidity, dissolved oxygen, phosphate and nitrate and to record the changes in these parameters over the nine months of the project.

Mark Rampersad, administrative manager at the Social Justice Foundation, told IPS that WASA’s Adopt-a-River unit “further refined the project’s scope and depth as well as facilitating the various seminars and workshops, which featured environmental awareness.”

The Caparo River in Central Trinidad and Coora River in South Trinidad were the two rivers adopted by the Social Justice Foundation for their Adopt-A-River initiative.

Though the programme has enjoyed some favourable response from communities and schools, corporate support for the programme has not been as great as the Adopt-A-River unit would have liked. However, Samm said, the unit has been successful in its Green Fund application and will be furthering its community outreach with the funds awarded.

Preserving the health of the rivers was also based on financial considerations, said Raj Gosine, WASA’s head of Water Resources. “It is very expensive to treat poor water quality, so WASA’s motive was also financial.”

“The key thing is to stress that we can all make a positive contribution,” Gosine added.

Along with water quality monitoring and public education, WASA’s Adopt-A-River programme includes reforestation and forest rehabilitation, as well as clean-up exercises.

Global Water Partnership-Caribbean’s Programme Manager Dr. Natalie Boodram told IPS, “Programmes like Adopt-A-River which encourage reforestation of watershed and riparian zones (i.e., areas along the bank of a river or watercourse) help protect water supplies by encouraging water infiltration as opposed to surface runoff.

“By adopting these ecological measures to protect our river water supplies, we can reduce the need for more energy intensive and more costly measures of obtaining water such as desalination.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp