'Unseen' News and Views
Women in Nigeria collect food vouchers as part of a programme to support families struggling under the COVID-19 lockdown. Credit: WFP/Damilola Onafuwa
Sounds altruistic – even as the number of billionaires keep rising while the poorest of the world’s poor keep multiplying.
(UN News)* – As 18 million people in Africa’s Sahel region teeter on the edge of severe hunger over the next three months, the UN released on Friday [20 May 2022] an additional $30 million from its emergency humanitarian fund, to boost the humanitarian response across four countries.
Food insecurity is set to reach its highest level since 2014, warned the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
“Entire families in the Sahel are on the brink of starvation,” said Martin Griffiths, UN Humanitarian Affairs chief and Emergency Relief Coordinator. “If we don’t act now, people will perish”.
Sobering numbers
In the Sahel, 7.7 million children under five are expected to suffer from malnutrition, of which 1.8 million are severely malnourished.
And if aid operations are not scaled up, this number could reach 2.4 million by the year’s end.
“The good news is that human decisions are the largest contributors to disaster risk, so we have the power to substantially reduce the threats posed to humanity, and especially the most vulnerable among us” Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS
Others, instead, may think that such human ingenuity will once more address the symptoms rather than the causes provoking them. Thus, they would be right to want to be informed and aware of the root causes of such disasters in order to push for eradicating them.
GODE, Ethiopia, 19 May 2022 (UNFPA)* – “When I saw my baby’s hand coming out, I ran for our lives. We travelled nearly 90 kilometres to the nearest health facility… We are both lucky to be alive.”
Ayan Abadi Wali, 24, recounted her story while recovering from a life-saving caesarean-section delivery in Gode, a town in Ethiopia’s Somali region and one of the hardest hit by the country’s worst drought in four decades.
Ms. Abadi is currently living at an informal settlement in the Shabelle zone with her seven children and her mother-in-law, Ms. Barkhado, alongside hundreds of others displaced by the drought.
16 May 2022 (UNEP)* — As anyone who visits Egypt between the months of May to September can attest, the weather gets hot, often uncomfortably so.
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That is especially true in Cairo—a megacity home to nearly 22 million people—where the mercury can hit 40°C.
Those sky-high temperatures are partially a product of the so-called ‘heat island effect,’ which sees buildings, roads, and other infrastructure absorb and re-emit the sun’s warmth more than natural landscapes.
Research shows that things will only get worse for cities due to the climate crisis.
The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) estimates that by the year 2100, many cities across the world could warm as much as 4°C if greenhouse gas emissions continue “at high levels,” – a potential health hazard for inhabitants.
Global gas flaring increased to 144 billion cubic metres (bcm) in 2021 from 142 bcm in 2020. It is estimated that each cubic metre of associated gas flared results in about 2.8 kilograms of CO2-equivalent emissions. Credit: public domain
This is anything but a minor issue: in fact, as much as 144 billion cubic metres of gas was flared at upstream oil and gas facilities in just one year-2021. Such an amount caused the emission of 400 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) equivalent, according to the World Bank.
While elite control over human societies started to gather pace with the Neolithic revolution 12,000 years ago, it was rapidly accelerated with the dawn of human civilization 7,000 years later.
Robert J. Burrowes
Since that time, ‘ordinary’ human beings like you and me have fought an unending sequence of battles to defend ourselves against these ongoing efforts by elites to kill or control us and capture the bulk of Earth’s resources for their own use.
We have had to fight off elites in a vast range of contexts: Pharaohs and Emperors politically, the Popes and other Vatican officials religiously, the City of London Corporation and other financial elites economically, monarchs and political elites nationally, and now a Global Elite that exercises enormous control technologically, economically, politically, militarily and otherwise over the entire world. For a fuller explanation of this point, see ‘Why Activists Fail’.
Every year, 570 million tons of food are wasted at the household level people. Global food waste accounts for 8–10% of greenhouse gas emissions. Credit: Claudia Ciobanu/IPS
A child beneficiary holding a drawing portraying domestic violence, at the Centre for Youth Empowerment and Civic Education, Lilongwe, Malawi which partnered with the ILO/IPEC to support the national action plan aimed at combating child labour. Credit: Marcel Crozet/ILO
(UN NEWS)* — Humanity is “at a crossroads” when it comes to managing drought and accelerating ways of slowing it down must happen “urgently, using every tool we can”, said the head of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) on Thursday [12 May 2022], calling for a global commitment to support drought preparedness and resilience.
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Through its newly published Drought in Numbers report, released in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, during the 15th Conference of Parties (COP15), UNCCD’s compendium of drought-related information and data is helping inform negotiations for the final outcomes of the conference when it closes on 20 May.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 