'Unseen' News and Views
17 November 2025 — Methane might only stay in the atmosphere for a short time, but its impact is powerful—and cutting it is one of the quickest ways to slow global warming.
The United Nations Environment Programme’s An Eye on Methane: From measurement to momentum report shows how credible, real-world data is reshaping what governments and companies can do right now.
Meanwhile, the EU rolls back and weakens its sustainability and green rules
17 November 2025 — New Oxfam, Fair Finance International and 11.11.11. report exposes how Europe’s banks and investors are blindly investing in mining companies linked to land grabs, pollution and human rights violations.
This comes ahead of the EU’s Raw Materials Week.
The report, “Financing Critical Minerals but Failing Critical Safeguards”, finds that Europe’s drive to secure critical raw materials needed for the green transition inadvertently fuels human rights abuses and environmental harm.
(UN News)* — In Somalia, where six out of ten births take place without a doctor, childbirth is often a matter of survival.
© UNFPA/Usame Nur Hussein | A patient recovering from fistula repair surgery is examined at Dayniile Hospital in Mogadishu, Somalia.
For women like 38-year-old Farhiya from rural Beletweyne, the consequences can be devastating — a painful obstetric fistula, a hole in the birth canal that left her incontinent, isolated, and cut off from her community.
“I was stressed, constantly worried, and isolated from my community. I was living in my house as if I had some sort of contagious disease,” she said.
In Somalia, 6 out of 10 births occur without a doctor present, which often leads to childbirth complications like obstetric fistula.
Family agriculture and land defenders in Colombia. Credit: Both Nomads/Forus
“Speak out, and you’ll pay for it”
No matter what lies ahead, we will always rely on sanitation to protect us from diseases and keep our environment clean.
Today, billions of people still live without a safe toilet — with the poorest, especially women and girls, worst affected.
As time goes by, the pressure on sanitation is only increasing. Across the world, ageing infrastructure is failing. Investment hasn’t kept pace with demand.
And climate change is reshaping our world – with glaciers melting, weather worsening, and sea levels rising.
(UN News)* — Diabetes is one of the world’s fastest-growing health challenges – and its impact stretches across every life stage, from childhood to older age.
This Friday [], for World Diabetes Day, the UN is highlighting how the disease affects pregnancy, in line with this year’s global theme of managing diabetes “across life stages”.
The organization has also launched its first-ever global guidelines on how to manage diabetes before, during and after pregnancy.
MANILA, 13 November 2025 – More than 1.7 million children are impacted by Super Typhoon Fung-wong, which made landfall in the Philippines on 9th November.
The severe storm has wreaked havoc to children’s homes, schools, and access to health services across 16 regions in the archipelago that is already exhausted by multiple climate-related and geophysical shocks this year.
– The 183 Parties to the global health treaty, WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) will convene in Geneva from 17 – 22 November with one objective – to strengthen their efforts to arrest the No.1 preventable cause of disease and 7 million deaths annually – tobacco use.
Credit: Global Center for Good Governance in Tobacco Control
The WHO FCTC is unique in that it serves to regulate a unique industry that produces and markets a uniquely harmful product.
(UN News)* — Images emerged this week of what appear to be mobs of masked Israeli settlers carrying out arson attacks on Palestinian homes and property, the UN human rights office (OHCHR) said on Friday [].
OHCHR condemned this week’s attacks as abhorrent and said they reflected a wider pattern of increased violence against Palestinians.
Several people were reportedly injured in the attacks, which included a raid on a dairy factory, while delivery trucks and homes were set ablaze.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 