'Unseen' News and Views
15 October 2019 (UN Women)* — This year on International Day of Rural Women (15 October), we’re celebrating the vital role that rural women play in climate action with a spotlight on “Rural women and girls building resilience” theme.
As the world faces an increasingly critical need to address climate change, the important impact that rural women and girls have on building resilience is undeniable.
We Need Solidarity to Face Future Stress
Stress can produce conflict. For example shortages of food or water can lead to regional wars. But wars only make original problems worse. Today the world is facing a number of severe problems, and solidarity will be needed to minimize the suffering with which we and future generations are threatened.
John Scales Avery
The problems include shortages of fresh water, rising temperatures due to climate change, and food insecurity.
These problems are especially acute in the Middle East, a region that is already torn by bitter conflicts and wars.
In order to successfully minimize suffering, it is vital that peace be achieved in the Middle East. Let us look at some of the problems in detail:
Today it is in the news that 906,000 hectares have burned in the Amazon forests so far in 2019. It is in the news that an even larger –although harder to determine- number of hectares have burned this year in African forests and savannahs.
Prof. Howard Richards
The media often mention that the fires of 2019 continue an ominous trend. There has been worldwide a steadily increasing loss of vegetation to flames that has been accelerating for several decades. The feedback loop is negative. Less vegetation means less rainfall means less vegetation.
It is in the news that millions of people around the world –inspired by a Swedish teenager so honest that looking at a picture of her will cure a headache—have taken to the streets demanding that something must be done.
12 October 2019 (UN News)* — People across the world need to embrace “fundamental change” in order to combat climate change and meet the target of restricting the increase in global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius, Claudio Forner, from UN Climate Change in Bonn, told UN News in an interview that took place following the Climate Action Summit.
(FAO)* — World Hunger is on the rise; yet, an estimated 1/3 of all food produced globally is lost or goes to waste. We all have a part to play in reducing food loss and waste, not only for the sake of the food but for the resources that go into it.
14 October 2019 (UN Environment)* — The polar oceans are among the most rapidly changing oceans in the world. The yearly cycle of the build-up and melting of Artic sea ice is one of the earth’s vital signs and a key climate variable monitored by scientists.
Photo by Pxhere (Posted here from UN Environment)
While they may be far from the world’s major population centres, changes in the polar regions have global implications: they affect the world’s climate through carbon storage and/or release, heat balance, and other environmental and ecological impacts.
One of the most visible indicators of this change is the reduction in the extent of Arctic sea ice by the end of September each year.
Impeachment Finally Under Way
The long-delayed impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump are finally starting, but at present the focus is on a relatively minor crime–the Ukraine/Biden scandal. However, Trump has committed (and is still committing) major crimes and these ought to be in the spotlight. Let us look at a few of them.
Let’s Look at His Major Crimes, Rather than at Minor Ones:
– While this week Ministers of Finance and economists meet in Washington to confront global economic challenges at the IMF and World Bank Annual Meetings, the majority of the world population lives with austerity cuts and see their living standards deteriorating. World leaders must reverse this trend.
Isabel Ortiz
Since 2010, most governments in both high income and developing counties have been implementing austerity policies, cutting public expenditures.
Based on IMF fiscal projections, the study finds that a new fiscal adjustment shock will start in 2020.
DAYLESFORD, Australia, 13 October 2019 — Violence is pervasive throughout human society and it has a vast range of manifestations.
Robert J. Burrowes
Moreover, some of these manifestations – particularly the threat of nuclear war (which might start regionally), the climate catastrophe and the ongoing ecological devastation, as well as geoengineering and the deployment of 5G – threaten imminent human extinction if not contained.
Separately from these extinction-threatening manifestations, however, violence occurs in a huge range of other contexts denying many people the freedom, human rights and opportunities necessary for a meaningful life.
LOOKING BACK
The first World Social Forum in 2001 ushered in the new century with a bold affirmation: “Another world is possible.”
Roberto Savio
That gathering in Porto Alegre, Brazil, stood as an alternative and a challenge to the World Economic Forum, held at the same time an ocean away in the snowy Alps of Davos, Switzerland.
A venue for power elites to set the course of world development, the WEF was then, and remains now, the symbol for global finance, unchecked capitalism, and the control of politics by multinational corporations.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 