'Unseen' News and Views
Nairobi (UNEP)* – Global cities are key to overcoming the climate crisis, biodiversity loss and pollution. A new vision of future cities is detailed in a report released on 18 November 2021 by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the UN Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat).
(UN News)* — Young entrepreneurs have been swapping inspiring stories at a UN-partnered youth summit on Thursday [18 November 2021] about how they’ve driven positive change for their communities and the environment – and how everyone can do the same.
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Miss Rao, who is from the US and also TIME Magazine’s first Kid Of The Year, told the audience in the Swiss city and online that her new smartphone app, which is called Kindly, was designed to make bullies reconsider sending or revising potentially hurtful messages online.
– It sounds incredible: while politicians have been cackling about the climate emergency and profiling in empty promises to halt it, they have spent six trillion US dollars from taxpayers’ money to subsidise fossil fuels in just one year: 2020. And they are set to increase the figure to nearly seven trillion by 2025.
An offshore oil rig drilling platform. Globally, fossil fuel subsidies amounted to 5.9 trillion US dollars in 2020, according to an IMF report. Credit: Bigstock
Add to this that governments will double the production of energy from these very same, highly dangerous, global warming generators.
Leaders at the COP26 summit have no intention of tackling the growing environmental impacts caused by their ‘defence’ spending.
Physicians for Social Responsibility
World leaders gathered in Glasgow last week for the COP26 summit in a bid to demonstrate how they are belatedly getting to grips with the climate crisis.
Agreements to protect forests, cut carbon and methane emissions and promote green tech are all being hammered out in front of a watching world.
The climate emergency we face today is part of several interlocking crises involving our health, our soils, and the biodiversity on the planet. The same line of thinking and actions that are driving climate change is leading to biodiversity loss and extinction of species and has also created the current hunger, malnutrition, and health emergencies. The climate crisis is a symptom of the broader ecological crisis being perpetuated by an extractivist and profit-driven system.
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Drought, a complex and slowly encroaching natural hazard with significant and pervasive socio-economic and environmental impacts, is known to cause more deaths and displace more people than any other natural disaster.
(UNCCD)* — By 2025, 1.8 billion people will experience absolute water scarcity, and 2/3 of the world will be living under water-stressed conditions (1).
– Developing countries will surely remember the Glasgow climate summit, the most important since 2015, as a fiasco that left them as an afterthought.
Demonstrations demanding ambitious, substantive and equitable measures to address the climate crisis continued throughout the 14-day climate summit in Glasgow, which ended on the night of Saturday Nov. 13 with disappointing results for the global South. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS
That was the prevailing sentiment among delegates from the developing South during the closing ceremony on the night of Saturday Nov. 13, one day after the scheduled end of the conference.
— We need urgent action to phase-out fossil fuels and cut emissions fast.
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People fleeing the eruption of Mount Nyiragongo volcano in the Democratic Republic of the Congo seek shelter in the town of Sake, May 2021. UNHCR immediately began providing assistance. © UNHCR/Guerchom Ndebo
The report, for January-June 2021, showed an increase from 82.4 million at end 2020. This resulted largely from internal displacement, with more people fleeing multiple active conflicts around the world, especially in Africa. The report also noted that COVID-19 border restrictions continued to limit access to asylum in many locations.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 