'Unseen' News and Views
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(UN News)* — A new report by the UN team combatting desertification reveals alarming trends over the past two years which have resulted in an unprecedented emergency due to human-induced droughts.
The Global Drought Snapshot report, released by the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) on Friday [], coinciding with COP 28, paint a grim picture of the scale of lives and livelihoods lost to droughts.
Ibrahim Thiaw, UNCCD Executive Secretary, emphasized the urgency of the situation. “Unlike other disasters that attract media attention, droughts happen silently, often going unnoticed and failing to provoke an immediate public and political response,” he said.
(UN News)* — Deadly torrential rains and floods have affected more than two million people in several areas of Somalia, with over 100 killed and 750,000 displaced from their homes, the authorities and humanitarian partners said on Thursday [30 November 2023] in the capital, Mogadishu.
© UNICEF | File photo from May 2023 when Beledweyne town was flooded after the Shabelle River burst its banks.
The crisis began with the start of the deyr rainy season in October and comes six months after the country emerged from a historic drought that brought it to the brink of widespread famine.
(UN News)* — The world is heating up at an unprecedented pace, new climate data shows, and leaders gathered for the COP28 conference which opened in Dubai on Thursday [30 November 2023] must get us out of “deep trouble”, UN chief António Guterres said.
While 2023 is not yet over, a provisional report from the UN World Meteorological Organization (WMO) confirmed that it is set to be the warmest on record, with global temperatures rising 1.4 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
Mr. Guterres said that the race is on to keep alive the 1.5-degree limit agreed by world leaders in Paris in 2015.
– Many in the wealthy West have misrepresented the causes of global warming, offering false solutions while claiming the high moral ground. This distracts attention from how they became wealthy while emitting greenhouse gases.
Tragedy or farce?
Growing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the industrial age have caused global warming, with their accumulation continuing to accelerate despite being close to exceeding 1.5°C warming and its associated tipping points.
Jomo Kwame Sundaram
This is sometimes depicted as due to the failure to sustainably manage the atmosphere as a shared resource.
The ‘tragedy of the commons’ refers to a community’s inability to manage a common resource sustainably.
Geneva/Dubai (WMO)* 30 November 2023 – 2023 has shattered climate records, accompanied by extreme weather which has left a trail of devastation and despair, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
(UN News)* — Amid hopes of a deal to extend the pause in fighting in Gaza between Israel and Hamas on Wednesday [], the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) reported that humanitarian assistance had reached its shelters in northern Gaza for first time since war erupted last month.
(UN News)* — As the pause in fighting in Gaza appeared to enter a fifth day on Tuesday [], UN humanitarians warned that aid deliveries needed to multiply immediately to save the lives of the injured and stem the risk of a deadly disease outbreak that has left doctors “terrified”.
Priorities include transporting fuel to the north of the war-torn enclave, so that it can be used to power hospitals, provide clean water and maintain other vital civilian infrastructure.
Such services have been massively impacted by weeks of Israeli bombardment in response to Hamas’s 7 October massacres in southern Israel that left some 1,200 dead and around 240 taken hostage.
– In recent decades, failure to sustain economic progress has been blamed on a supposed middle-income country (MIC) trap. Such blaming obscures as much as it supposedly explains.
Jomo Kwame Sundaram
The ‘middle-income trap’ fable began as a World Bank story about why upper MICs in Latin America failed to become high-income countries (HICs) after pursuing policies required or prescribed by the Bretton Woods institutions.
Bretton Woods’ Frankenstein
The 1944 Bretton Woods rules-based international monetary system ended in August 1971 when President Richard Nixon unilaterally repudiated US obligations. This happened after the US Treasury had borrowed heavily from the rest of the world from the 1960s.
The US government’s ‘exorbitant privilege’ of ‘spending well beyond its means’ has continued despite the resulting international monetary ‘non-system’.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 