'Unseen' News and Views – By Baher Kamal & The Like
The World Wildlife Crime Report found that along with threatening endangered species, wildlife crimes and exploitation of nature can promote climate change as well as negatively impact public health because of zoonotic disease transmissions.
(UN News)* — A new mechanism launched on 9 July 2020 aims to speed up action so that people everywhere will have access to water and sanitation by the end of the decade, in line with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The Global Acceleration Framework for SDG 6 addresses an issue which cuts across many areas of the UN’s work.
(UN News)* — A surge in demand for medical products to combat COVID-19 has led to a jump in the trafficking of substandard and faulty merchandise, according to new UN research published on 8 July 2020.
Among its countless other impacts, the coronavirus has further highlighted the shortcomings in regulatory and legal frameworks aimed at preventing the manufacturing and selling of these products, points out the UNODC research brief, entitled “COVID-19-related Trafficking of Medical Products as a Threat to Public Health”.
Miles Woodgate is part of the crew of helicopter pilots hired by FAO to spray the desert locusts in Somalia, helping to save people’s food and livelihood sources. ©FAO/Haji Dirir
8 July 2020 (FAO)* — The alarm went off a few minutes ago, before the morning call to prayer. It is now a quarter past five and still pitch-black outside. Miles Woodgate is eating breakfast and getting ready for the long day ahead fighting Desert Locusts.
This Englishman is one of the pilots conducting aerial spraying in the easternmost country of the Horn of Africa — the first time in 30 years that the security situation has allowed for this to happen in Somalia.
(UN News)* — Annual global temperature is likely to be at least 1°C warmer than pre-industrial levels in each of the coming five years, putting globally agreed climate change targets in jeopardy, new data from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) reveals.
The Global Annual to Decadal Climate Update, led by the United Kingdom’s Met Office, provides a climate outlook for the next five years, updated annually.
8 July 2020 (WMO)* — June 2020 was just 0.01°C below the record-breaking temperatures of June 2019, with exceptional heat in Arctic Siberia, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S). Globally, temperatures last month were 0.53°C warmer than the average June from 1981-2010.
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Over Arctic Siberia, average temperatures reached as high as 10 °C above normal for June, fuelling severe wildfires. During both June and for the last 12 months, Siberia stands out as the region with the largest anomalies.
– The coronavirus—which has claimed the lives of over 538,000 people and infected more than 11.6 million worldwide—has destabilized virtually every facet of human life ever since its outbreak in late December.
Credit: United Nations
Providing a grim economic scenario of the devastation caused by the pandemic– including rising poverty, hunger and unemployment– UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned last week of the possibility of an even worse disaster: the risks of bioterrorist attacks deploying deadly germs.
PublicDomainPictures.net/Linnaea Mallette. CC0 1.0.“Can we dare to think people are kind, and shape organisations around this view?”
7 July 2020 (openDemocracy)* — That’s the question Rutger Bregman examines in his latest book Humankind, and it’s one that anyone involved in youth and community work like me wrestles with on a daily basis. But is Bregman’s optimistic analysis grounded in reality?
To succeed, the struggle against racism needs to be understood in the context of the struggle against the culture of war.
In my history of the culture of war, I quote Malcolm X at length:
“”Book after book showed me how the white man had brought upon the world’s black, brown, red, and yellow peoples every variety of the sufferings of exploitation. I saw how since the sixteenth century, the so-called “Christian trader” white man began to ply the seas in his lust for Asian and African empires, and plunder, and power… First, always “religiously,” he branded “heathen” and “pagan” labels upon ancient non-white cultures and civilizations. The stage thus set, he then turned upon his non-white victims his weapons of war.”
