'Unseen' News and Views
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.
It’s all about digitalization – they want to reduce life to software and end humans’ sacred relationship to their food and the land where it is grown.
I am writing this opinion essay today in my quality as the Convenor of Nobel Laureates and Leaders for Children, supporting the Fair Share to End Child Labour campaign.
My friend and colleague Kailash Satyarthi (Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, 2014) is an extraordinary man, very much in the tradition of Mahatma Gandhi.
Upon completion of his university studies at age 20 and as he was readying himself to wed his childhood sweetheart Sumedha, rather than starting a career as an electric engineer, Kailash sat down with his soon-to-be wife, told her, I want to help free children from slavery.
20 July 2021 (WMO)* — Amazonia hosts the Earth’s largest tropical forests and has been shown to be an important carbon sink. This carbon sink seems to be in decline, however, as a result of factors such as deforestation and climate change, according to a new paper published in Nature.
The study was led by Lucia Gatti, Group Leader, Brazil’s National Institute of Space Research /Center of Earth System Science and a member of the steering committee for the Integrated Global Greenhouse Gas Information System spearheaded by WMO.
Its main river inflows had been muffled by dams and many feared water levels were poised to drop by two-thirds, causing the lake to cleave into two smaller bodies of water. It was, one report said, an African “Aral Sea disaster in the making” – where only 10 per cent remains of the original sea.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 