'Unseen' News and Views – By Baher Kamal & The Like
“Biodiversity is life. Biodiversity weaves the web of life. It is not corporate ‘intellectual property’. It is not a financial asset of those whose greed drives biodiversity extinction and loss.”
— Dr Vandana Shiva
To celebrate World Biodiversity Day, Navdanya International presents Biodiversity Is Health.
We break down how all levels of biodiversity have a direct and tangible tie to human health.
– So busy as they are with strengthening military alliances and devoting billions of taxpayers’ money to double their war budgets and subsidise fossil fuels, European Governments seem not to care about the reiterated alerts that their continent faces a serious risk: the reduced availability -and the more polluted– drinking water.
It is estimated that more than one third of the European Union will be under “high water stress” by the 2070. Credit: Bigstock
Two specialised bodies –the UN Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), and the European branch of the World Health Organization (WHO)– have warned that plans to make water access possible in the face of climate pressures “are absent” in the pan-European region.
– A class war is being waged in the name of fighting inflation. All too many central bankers are raising interest rates at the expense of working people’s families, supposedly to check price increases.
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Workers’ share of national income, 1970-2015
Forced to cope with rising credit costs, people are spending less, thus slowing the economy. But it does not have to be so. There are much less onerous alternative approaches to tackle inflation and other contemporary economic ills.
Geneva, 25 May 2022 (UNEP)* – Paint reformulation is entirely possible, and the industry can produce paint without added lead. However, a lack of technical knowledge; a lack of awareness of the health and environmental hazard of lead and where to source lead-free alternatives, as well as a shortage of lead paint laws in the countries where they are based mean many small manufacturers around the world are still producing hazardous lead paint.
May 2022 (FAO)* — Step inside a tea merchant’s shop in China with its metal canisters lining the walls or scroll through the range offered by any of the country’s popular online shopping platforms and you’ll be able to choose among green teas, black teas or in-between, semi-fermented teas. But as an ancient industry turns its eyes to the future, another choice you might soon be able to make is low carbon teas.
Droughts represent 15% of natural disasters but took the largest human toll, approximately 650,000 deaths from 1970-2019, Credit: Guillermo Flores/IPS
But it is not about only them. Also you are already affected. In fact, around 1.700 billion of drylands, home to two billion people, are already covering 41% of the planet’s land surface.
Moreover, an additional 1 billion dryland hectares are now under threat.
Instead of buying into the World Economic Forum’s dystopian “Great Reset,” we can build an alternative system with a mandate to serve the people.
This is part two to a May 5, 2022 article called “A Monetary Reset Where the Rich Don’t Own Everything,” the gist of which was that national and global debt levels are unsustainably high. We need a “reset,” but of what sort?
Ellen Brown
The “Great Reset” of the World Economic Forum (WEF) would leave the people as non-owner tenants in a feudalistic technocracy.
The reset of the Eurasian Economic Union would allow participating nations to opt out of the Western capitalist system altogether, but what of the Western countries that are left? That is the question addressed here.
Our Forefathers Had Some Innovative Solutions
Fortunately for the United States, our national debt is in U.S. dollars. As former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan once observed, “The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default.”
(UN News)* — More than 33 million new jobs need to be created by 2030 in the Middle East and North Africa region by 2030, if the world’s largest unemployment hot spot is to be substantially improved, four United Nations agencies said on Monday [23 May 2022].
The joint-release by the UN labour agency, ILO, the UN Development Programme (UNDP), the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) and the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) was issued ahead of a two-day meeting in Amman, Jordan, aiming to address the youth transition from learning, to work, a key priority for adolescents and young people across the vast predominantly Arabic-speaking region.
(UN News)* — The recovery of the global jobs market is going into reverse, the UN labour agency, ILO, said on Monday [23 May 2022], blaming COVID-19 and “other multiple crises” that have increased inequalities within and between countries.
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(UN News)* — With a scorching summer fast approaching, food prices rising and access to water and electricity limited in many parts of Syria, donors must make good on $4.3 billion in humanitarian pledges committed at last week’s Brussels funding conference, the UN’s senior humanitarian official told the Security Council on Friday [20 May 2022].
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 