HUMAN WRONGS WATCH

Human Wrongs Watch

United Nations Security Council held an already scheduled debate on conflict prevention on 17 November 2015 amid added urgency fueled by last week’s terrorist attacks in Beirut and Paris, with Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stressing that counter-terrorism must also tackle such root causes as bad governance, injustice and exclusion.*

 

**Photo: People who earn their living by collecting and sorting garbage and selling them for recycling, Payatas, Manila, Philippines. | Author: Kounosu | Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license. | Wikimedia Commons.

Human Wrongs Watch

MIAMI, Florida, 17 November 2015 (IPS) – We humans are acutely aware of risks. From our earliest times, the risks we faced were from hunger, predatory animals, extreme environmental conditions and, as our numbers grew, from other human tribes.

Fast forward to our growing mastery of nature, technological prowess and the Industrial Revolution.

The risks humans faced changed beyond those always present in extreme environmental conditions.

The technologies we developed against such risks – advancing our energy, shelter, food and health systems – also created new risks, often unforeseen for decades.

Conflicts with other humans grew as the human family colonized every part of our planet, stressing ecosystems and driving other species to extinction.

Today, in the 21st century, new risks dominate our political and social issues from terrorism, barbarous attacks on civilians as in Paris, nuclear meltdowns and weapons, financial crises, desertification and famines, disappearing glaciers in the Himalayas, Greenland and Antarctica, water shortages, polluted air, rising sea levels, new pandemics and drug-resistant diseases.