'Unseen' News and Views
I am a child of the Ganga Himalaya , nourished materially and spiritually by Dev Bhoomi, our sacred land. The mountains , forests and Ma Ganga have shaped my imagination, my knowledge ,my science , my life , my activism.
Ankara, 20 February 2021 (IOM)* – Turkey, host to almost four million refugees and migrants, has established a dedicated United Nations Network on Migration (UNNM). The initiative flows from the 2018 Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM), the first cooperative framework addressing international migration.
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As GCM convenor, IOM hosted a gathering in the Turkish capital Ankara on 18 February 2021, which brought together United Nations representatives to formally bring the country’s UNNM into being.
The world we live in has been built around an economic system that prioritises never-ending growth over the welfare of people and the planet. This system plunders our planet’s resources while oppressing our most vulnerable. It perpetuates structural inequalities and deepens the climate crisis and fossil fuels are at its core and is known as “Fossil Capital”.
20 February 2021 (UNEP)* — The COVID-19 pandemic is drawing young people around the world into the fight against climate change, as witnessed this week during the Youth Environment Assembly.
The gathering, which is being held virtually, as part of the UN Environment Assembly, is the planet’s largest youth-led environmental event. It has zeroed in on climate change, which participants described as a dire threat to the planet.
19 February 2021 (WMO)* — Large swathes of North America have been gripped by cold and heavy snowfall, causing loss of life, major traffic chaos and power outages for millions of people. The prolonged freeze, which saw many new record cold maximum and minimum temperatures, was caused by an Arctic blast of air moving down from Canada all the way into Texas.
More than 100 million people over 1.6 million km² were under winter storm warnings, according to the US National Weather Service. Some 73% of the Continental USA was covered in snow as of midnight February 16, the greatest extent on record in the database, which dates back to 2003.
20 February 2021 (UNEP)* — A clothing company in the Philippines that uses scrap material to make shoes. A technology startup in Ireland that allows strangers to swap little-used clothes. And a fashion house in Brazil that produces zero waste and repurposes old clothes into new ones.
Photo: Frame China / Shutterstock.com / 19 Feb 2021
These are three of a growing number of companies that are bucking an environmentally destructive trend towards fast fashion.
The textile industry, say observers, has long been primed for a circular makeover.
Amid rapacious demand for cheap, on-trend clothing, it has become a major driver of climate change: some sources say that the textile sector accounts for about 8 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.
– Yemen is heading towards the worst famine the world has seen in decades, the United Nations Security Council was warned in a briefing yesterday [18 February 2021].
Volunteers teach people living in settlements about COVID-19. This photo was taken in Sana’a, Yemen. At a Security Council briefing yesterday UN Under Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator said people in Yemen are more worried about hunger than the COVID-19 pandemic. Credit: Dhia Al-Adimi/UNICEF
A Call for Social Justice in the Digital Economy
20 February 2021 (United Nations)* — The digital economy is transforming the world of work. Over the past decade, expansion in broadband connectivity, cloud computing, and data have led to the proliferation of digital platforms, which have penetrated several sectors of the economy and societies.
Since early 2020, the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic have led to remote working arrangements and allowed for the continuation of many business activities, further reinforcing the growth and impact of the digital economy.
In the east of the country, a succession of brutal attacks by fighters using machetes and heavy weapons have forced whole communities to flee with only the barest of possessions. Entire families — including children – have been hacked to death. Health centres and schools have been ransacked, and whole villages set ablaze.
(UN News)* — Extreme violence and attacks involving thousands of fighters at a time have engulfed more than three-quarters of South Sudan, UN human Rights Council-appointed investigators said on Friday [19 February 2021], warning that the bloodshed faced by civilians are “the worst recorded” since the country’s civil war began in December 2013.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 