'Unseen' News and Views
BEIRUT, 23 July 2021 (UNICEF)* – More than four million people, including one million refugees, are at immediate risk of losing access to safe water in Lebanon.
22 July 2021 (UNEP)* — For the last half-century, money and meat have been a package deal: Across the globe, as wealth increases, so does consumption of animal-based foods. And by 2050, the demand for animal-based foods could increase by as much as 70 per cent.
The irony, of course, is that this voracious consumption has not necessarily improved the quality of human life.
In addition to the fact that many of us are eating more animal-sourced food than is healthy, livestock production is a major contributor to climate change, causes habitat loss and reduces biodiversity, and can facilitate the transmission of zoonotic diseases like COVID-19.
With funding from Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF), FAO supported Khialy Gul (pictured above) and 37 200 smallholder farmers across Afghanistan with emergency wheat cultivation packages and cash transfers so they could meet their food and other basic needs. ©FAO/Farshad Usyan
22 July 2021 (FAO)* — Beads of sweat run down through the wrinkles of Khialy Gul’s forehead. He is harvesting his wheat field today in Nawju village in the Nangarhar province of eastern Afghanistan.
Supposedly increased social protections may just be new words for old policies.
23 July 2021 (UNEP)* — Don’t be fooled by their modest appearance: mangroves are important players in some of the greatest challenges facing the world today. They provide a defense between land and sea, absorb carbon, contribute to economic and food security, and are home to some of the most rare and colourful species.
But mangroves are disappearing at an accelerating rate. In some areas of the Western Indian Ocean region – one of the two most important global mangrove hotspots, together with Southeast Asia – more than 80 per cent of mangroves have already been lost.
22 July 2021 (UNEP)* — It’s visible in satellite images from just off Sri Lanka’s coast: a thin grey film that snakes three kilometres out to sea before disappearing into the waves.
This, experts say, is fuel oil leaking from the X-Press Pearl, a Singapore-flagged cargo ship that caught fire and sank off Sri Lanka’s western coast last month.
The slick is a visceral reminder of what observers say is a slow-motion environmental disaster – one of the worst in the country’s history – and of the mammoth effort that will be needed to clean it up.
Geneva, 23 July 2021 (WMO)* – Water-related hazards dominate the list of disasters in terms of both the human and economic toll over the past 50 years, according to a comprehensive analysis by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
20 July 2021 (Wall Street International)* — Measurements of the carbon dioxide content of the earth’s atmosphere as a function of time have been made ever since 1958 at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii.
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CNN photo labeled “Cubans take to streets in rare anti-government protest”—but actually taken in Miami. (Note sign for Eighth Street in the background.)
A wave of protests in Cuba became the somewhat unlikely focus of global attention earlier this week, the events becoming the worldwide No. 1 trend on Twitter for over 24 hours, as celebrities, politicians and even the president of the United States weighed in on the action. A statement from Joe Biden’s office read:
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 