Italy has been given, for 2021, the Chairmanship of the Group of 20 | Image from Wall Street International.
9 January 2021 (Wall Street International)* — Italy has been given, for 2021, the Chairmanship of the Group of 20, which gather the 20 most important countries of the world. They represent, on paper, 60% of the world population, and 80% of the World’s Gross Domestic Product.
While the shaky Italian government will somehow absorb this task (in the general indifference of the political system), fact remains that this apparently prestigious position is in fact very deceiving: the G20 is now a very weak institution, that does not bring anything to the rotating chairman.
8 January 2021 (UN News)* — People worldwide have overwhelmingly highlighted their faith in multilateralism to address global challenges, the results of a year-long survey by the United Nations has shown.
The UN75 initiative was launched by Secretary-General António Guterres, in January last year, to understand the global public’s hopes and fears for the future, as well as their expectations and ideas for international cooperation, and for the UN in particular.
More than 1.5 million people from 195 countries took part in the campaign through surveys and dialogues. “The UN75 global consultation showed that 97 per cent of respondents support international cooperation to tackle global challenges,” Mr. Guterres said on the results.
7 January 2021 (Wall Street International)* — By mid-February 2021, American deaths from Covid-19 may well surpass the country’s 405,400 deaths during the Second World War.
By around mid-May, more Americans will have died from Covid-19 than during the Civil War, which killed 655,000, and the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, when 675,000 are estimated to have perished.
‘Lockdown’ was declared by Collins Dictionary as the Word of the Year for 2020.
Looking back, the world will remember 2020 as the year that disrupted our present-day lives: most of us were locked up for months and doing everything from home, unable to see and be with friends and loved ones, when everyone wore masks, scrubbed our hands with soap or alcohol, and practiced social distancing. Many felt worried and anxious about the uncertainties that came with lockdown living.
But amidst a raging pandemic, humanity was not spared from a much bigger threat. While some were feeling safe and secure in their homes, thousands of people were fighting for their survival against a raging climate.
6 January 2021 (WMO)* — The record-breaking 2020 Antarctic ozone hole finally closed at the end of December after an exceptional season due to naturally occurring meteorological conditions and the continued presence of ozone depleting substances in the atmosphere.
5 January 2021 (Wall Street International)* — Here are some quotations from a December 2, 2020 article by Justin Rowlatt entitled Humans waging suicidal war on nature – UN chief Antonio Guterres:
Humanity is waging what he describes as a suicidal war on the natural world.
Nature always strikes back, and is doing so with gathering force and fury, he told a BBC special event on the environment.
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Jan 5 2021 (IPS)* – Goodbye 2020, but unfortunately, not good riddance, as we all have to live with its legacy. It has been a disastrous year for much of the world for various reasons, Elizabeth II’s annus horribilis. The crisis has exposed previously unacknowledged realities, including frailties and vulnerabilities.
Jomo Kwame Sundaram
For many countries, the tragedy is all the greater as some leaders had set national aspirations for 2020, suggested by the number’s association with perfect vision. But their failures are no reason to reject national projects.
As Helen Keller, the deaf and blind author activist, noted a century ago, “The only thing worse than being blind is having sight, but no vision.”
After JFK’s assassination in November 1963 ended US opposition to Western intervention in Indonesia, President Sukarno warned his nation in August 1964 that it would be ‘living dangerously’, vivere pericoloso, in the year ahead.
A year later, a bloody Western-backed military coup had deposed him, taking up to a million lives, with many more ruined.
4 January 2021 (Wall Street International)* — Looking at our planet, we see that it is mostly water.
So why are so many politicians, scientists, public officials in hundreds of global conferences all warning of a “Water Crisis”? These alarms are really just focused on the planet’s 3% of freshwater, ignoring the abundant 97% of our planet’s saltwater.
The broad assumption in most of these alarms is that 97% of saltwater is no use for the everyday needs of humans. So all these alarms warn of shrinking food supplies, rising hunger, malnutrition, dwindling drinking water, as taps almost ran dry in some cities, including Cape Town, South Africa in 2019.
4 January 2021 (UNEP)* — “It is unacceptable that hunger is on the rise at a time when the world wastes more than 1 billion tonnes of food every year. It is time to change how we produce and consume, including to reduce greenhouse emissions,” says United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres.
Photo by Reuters / 04 Jan 2021
The Secretary-General will convene a UN Food Systems Summit in 2021 to launch bold new actions to transform the way the world produces and consumes food, delivering progress on all 17 Sustainable Development Goals.
For decades, synthetic fertilizer – containing nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium – has been used all over the world to increase crop yields. Plants need phosphorus to grow but using too much of it can harm the environment.
2 January 2021 (UN News)* — In a bid of optimism for the new year, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) expressed confidence that clean energy would grow in 2021.
UNDP Yemen | Men install solar panels for a hospital in Yemen.
Despite that the world is not on track to meet climate objectives and achieve Sustainable Development Goal 7 (SDG7) for universal access to clean, affordable and reliable energy, Marcel Alers, UNDP Head of Energy, said that “clean energy solutions exist that can get us there”.
“There is growing momentum to make them political and investment priorities”, he added.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 