The Nairobi Summit Is about the Future of Humanity and Human Prosperity

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Opinion

Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta hailed the strong partnership between his government and UNFPA during a meeting with UNFPA’s Executive Director, Dr. Natalia Kanem in March 2019, which will jointly convene the ICPD 25 from 12 to 14 November 2019 along with the Government of Denmark. Credit: PSCU

NAIROBI, Kenya, Nov 8 2019 (IPS) – As we count down the remaining days to the opening of the Nairobi Summit or the International Conference for Population and Development(ICPD), I am confounded by how much humanity has managed to simultaneously empower more women than at any other time in history, while at the same time failing to see that ‘women’s issues’ are actually ‘everyone’s issues’.

That countdown evokes memories of my own grandmother, who followed a common trend in India at the time, dropping out of school to get married and give birth to her first child at age 11. In many parts of the world, girls have over the years faced unthinkable obstacles while trying just to get an education, often jeopardizing their personal safety and risking being ostracized by their families and communities.

It wasn’t until a mere 25 years ago at the ICPD in Cairo that the world agreed that population and economic development issues must go hand in hand, and that women must be at the heart of our efforts for development.

Back then, governments, donors, civil society, and other partners made commitments to reduce infant and child mortality, reduce maternal mortality, ensure universal education, and increase access to sexual and reproductive health and rights, amongst many others. These commitments were a massive step forward for the rights of women and girls.

At the Conference in Nairobi, we all have an opportunity to repeat the message that women’s empowerment will move at snail-pace unless we bolster reproductive health and rights across the world. This is no longer a fleeting concern, but a 21st century socio-economic reality.

We can choose to take a range of actions, such as empowering women and girls by providing access to good health, education and job training. Or we can choose paths such as domestic abuse, female genital mutilation and child marriages, which, according to a 2016 Africa Human Development Report by UNDP, costs sub-Saharan Africa $95 billion per year on average due to gender inequality and lack of women’s empowerment.

Fortunately, the world has made real progress in the fight to take the right path. There is no lack of women trailblazers in all aspects of human endeavour. It has taken courage to make those choices, with current milestones being the result of decades of often frustrating work by unheralded people, politics and agencies.

Leaders like the indefatigable Dr. Natalia Kanem the Executive Director of UNFPA and her predecessors, supported especially by the Nordic countries, are pushing the global change of paradigm to ensure we demolish the silo of “women’s issues” and begin to see the linkages between reproductive rights and human prosperity.

Numerous studies have shown the multi-generation impact of the formative years of women. A woman’s reproductive years directly overlap with her time in school and the workforce, she must be able to prevent unintended pregnancy in order to complete her education, maintain employment, and achieve economic security.

Denial of reproductive health information and services places a women at risk of an unintended pregnancy, which in turn is one of the most likely routes for upending the financial security of a woman and her family.

A lot has been achieved since the years of my grandmother, when girls were expected to be demure and remain in the background. In many places the current teenage girl believes that every door is open to them; they can rise to any heights.

Yet in a lot of other countries, girls are up against a system that seems rigged against them for the long-term. These are countries where greater leadership and the right policies are sorely missing; where women and girls are robbed of the education they deserve and the jobs they need to lift themselves and their families out of poverty; where they are victims of sexual and physical abuse in their own homes or sold into child marriage.

As the UN Resident Coordinator to Kenya, I am privileged to serve in a country, which is hosting this very important conference. It has shown leadership to advance the cause of women’s right-from criminalizing female genital mutilation to stepping up the fight to end child marriage and pushing hard on improving reproductive, maternal and child health.

When the ICPD opens in Nairobi on 12 November 2019, I wonder how my grandmother’s life might have been different if she had been able to learn how to read and write and achieve her full human potential, but also appealing to all Governments to work towards giving half the world population the final and absolute control over their own bodies.

Siddharth Chatterjee is the United Nations resident coordinator to Kenya.

 

Urgent Need to Replace Competition with Cooperation in the Aral Sea Basin

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Opinion

Stefanos Xenarios is a Professor at Nazarbaev University, Kazakhstan and co-editor-in-chief of the Central Asian Journal of Water Research; Iskandar Abdullaev is Deputy Director, CAREC Institute, China and Vladimir Smakhtin is Director, UN University Institute for Water, Environment and Health, Canada and series editor of the Routledge publishers’ Earthscan Series on Major River Basins of the World, in which the Aral Sea Basin Book is the latest addition.

The Aral Sea Basin, defined in red, straddles six countries in Central Asia. See detailed map in full at http://bit.ly/2BQPpRm. Credit: UNU-INWEH

NUR-SULTAN CITY, Kazakhstan, Nov 7 2019 (IPS) – The water resources in Central Asia’s Aral Sea Basin support the lives and livelihoods of about 70 million people — a population greater than Thailand, France, or South Africa.

And unless well-funded and coordinated joint efforts are stepped up, with competition replaced by cooperation, ongoing over-withdrawals compounded by climate change will cause dangerous water shortages in this huge, highly complex watershed spanning six nations: Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.

That’s the key message of a new book co-authored by 57 regional and international experts from 14 countries and the United Nations, who spent years examining a suite of challenges in the Aral Sea Basin.

The new book assembles the views of nearly all major regional and international experts on the great challenges faced in the Aral Sea Basin. They include three co-authors from the UN University’s Institute for Water, Environment and Health, in Hamilton, Canada.

And almost half of the authors are based in Central Asia, creating a unique blend of regional and international voices and expertise on these critical issues.

The Basin’s two major rivers, the Amu Darya and Syr Darya, discharge now only about 10% of what flowed into the Aral Sea until the 1960s, shrinking the sea by more than 80 percent — “one of the world’s most severe and emblematic environmental disasters.”

Freshwater is key to food, energy, environmental security and social stability among the six Aral Basin countries. And given the countries’ prospective economic and population growth, reliance on water resources will increase, compelling cooperation in sharing benefits and reducing costs.

Intensive, wasteful irrigated farming when the nations were part of the Soviet Union was the main cause of the Aral Sea drying up and irrigation continues to consume about 90 percent of the total water withdrawal in the Basin, with agriculture contributing from 10 to 45 percent of GDP, and 20 to 50 percent of rural employment.

Most irrigation, hydropower and other water-related infrastructural systems and facilities are in transition, a blend today of past and present. Unfortunately, the existing observational meteorological and hydrological networks in the Basin, which declined in the 1990s when the Soviet period ended, are insufficient to support informed water management, and regional water data sharing is suboptimal.

Degradation of land and water are among the major hindrances to sustainable development in the region, with land degradation alone estimated to cost about US$3 billion of losses in ecosystem services annually.

There has been uneven progress across the countries on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and particularly Goal 6 (Clean Water and Sanitation), with contrasting progress also between urban and rural populations within each nation, most particularly Afghanistan.

The new book suggests a number of interventions and initiatives to end and reverse deterioration of the Aral Basin. For example, if existing large hydropower projects were managed in a collaborative manner, they can bring all countries multiple benefits, including improved reliability of supply and availability of water for agriculture, domestic use and electricity generation.

Monitoring of snow and glaciers in high altitude mountain areas, as well as permafrost, is essential for sound estimates of water availability and water-related hazards. Such systems need to be re-installed.

Also needed: institutions for decentralized management of natural resources, such as water user associations to promote cooperative, sustainable, intra-regional management between upstream and downstream countries and integrated rural development approaches.

Existing regional frameworks must either be reformed or replaced by new mechanisms of cooperation in order to successfully translate political will into highly effective, integrated regional water management.

Reforming the water sector, however, goes well beyond new policies and initiatives, updating the legislative framework, and building new institutions. A key challenge is to achieve continuous, strong, high-level political engagement throughout the Basin countries, the active participation of stakeholders, and technical and financial support.

The Aral Basin’s many water-related issues must be addressed jointly by all involved states within the concept that water, energy, and food issues represent a critical, interlinked nexus of needs.

Major geopolitical and economic development interests are placing increasing pressure on countries of the Basin to end resource competition and find a way to closer cooperation and effective pursuit of their shared interests.

 

Red Alert for Blue Planet and Small Island States

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Farhana Haque Rahman is Senior Vice President of IPS Inter Press Service; a journalist and communications expert, she is a former senior official of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the International Fund for Agricultural Development.

The Pacific island is one of the countries worst affected by sea-level rise. Credit: UNICEF

ROME, Oct 31 2019 (IPS) – Barely a week passes without alarming news of the most recent scientific research into the global climate crisis compounding a growing sense of urgency, particularly the impact on small island states from rising sea levels and extreme weather.

Latest findings suggest that several hundred million more people than previously thought are at risk of coastal flooding due to climate change. Climate Central, a non-profit research and news organisation, found data used in past calculations overstated the elevation of many low-lying coastal communities.

And for the people of the Bahamas who had just endured Hurricane Dorian, the most intense tropical cyclone on record to hit their islands, it came as little surprise when the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) soon after released its landmark special report on the planet’s oceans and frozen regions, warning of “multiple climate-related hazards” for coastal regions.

“The ocean is warmer, more acidic and less productive,” the IPCC report stated.

The “Blue Pacific” concept sees the island states establishing themselves as “large ocean states” and guardians of the region rather than “small island states”

Oceans are absorbing heat twice as fast as just two decades ago, with hundreds of billions of tonnes of melting ice raising sea levels at an average rate of 3.6 millimetres a year, more than twice as fast as during the last century.

If greenhouse gas emissions “continue to increase strongly”, the IPCC report said, then levels could rise more than a metre by 2100.

Some island states in the Pacific face becoming uninhabitable. As UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres noted while visiting Tuvalu, the sea level rise in some Pacific countries is four times greater than the world average, posing “an existential threat” to several island states.

Against this background the UN COP25 climate change summit scheduled to be held in Santiago in December had been dubbed the Blue COP, with expectations of a focus on the oceans and commitments of aid to poorer nations most at risk. So it comes as a serious blow that President Sebastian Pinera has just announced that Chile is calling off its hosting of COP25 because of mass anti-government protests rocking the country.

While the UN anxiously looks for an alternative venue (and Santiago had been the second choice after Brazil’s newly elected president, Jair Bolsonaro, pulled out of hosting it), the small island states of the Pacific will be making their voices heard as they seek to confirm themselves in the role of custodians of the world’s largest region.

It is an existential struggle but it is not a blame game however.

As Micronesia’s President David Panuelo declared last week in The Diplomat: “Rather than point fingers, we must all point the way toward solutions.”

“No single country created this problem, and certainly a small country like ours is bearing far greater responsibility for the solution than we ever contributed to the crisis in the first place. But we sit shoulder to shoulder in a coalition which has set a goal of growing economies while achieving 30 percent marine protection globally,” he wrote in a plea for action to save the oceans.

“Everyone must do more when garbage patches larger than entire countries float in the Pacific, and rising carbon dioxide levels increase ocean acidity and devastate coral reefs and marine life.”

The Pacific Community, the principal scientific and technical organisation in the region and founded as the SPC in 1947, counts 22 Pacific island countries and territories among its members who see themselves as the “tip of the spear” in terms of the impacts of climate change and their efforts to adapt.

SPC has recently established the Pacific Community Centre for Ocean Science (PCCOS) to provide the framework to “focus its scientific and technical assistance on providing solutions that will build, sustain, and drive blue economies in Pacific Island countries and territories” and support SDG 14 of conserving and sustainably using oceans and marine resources.

The SPC’s new and growing Pacific Data Hub is a public resource of data and publications on the Pacific across key sectors, from education and human rights to oceans and geoscience.

Such initiatives reflect how Pacific Island states have grown more assertive in their diplomacy, becoming more active in global multilateral forums and using their voices and votes for increased leverage rather than the old reliance on support from Australia and New Zealand.

The “Blue Pacific” concept sees the island states establishing themselves as “large ocean states” and guardians of the region rather than “small island states”. As stewards of the Pacific with their cultural identity shaped by the ocean, the Blue Pacific framework seeks to establish leadership on issues, with smart policies backed by scientific expertise and data.

As Micronesia’s president has reminded us, the climate crisis is neither abstract nor “tomorrow’s faraway challenge”. It is happening now and as the IPCC’s special report on the oceans and cryosphere warned in September the crisis is gathering speed, as seen in the recent acceleration of sea level rise.

In Antarctica the rate of ice loss tripled in the decade 2007-2016. May and August in 2019 were the warmest on record for the Arctic while this year saw the summer minimum extent of sea ice reaching a joint-second lowest in 40 years of satellite records.

As summarised by Carbon Brief, the IPCC warns that this accelerating ice loss, and the more rapid sea level rises it causes, will continue to gather pace over this century regardless of whether greenhouse gas emissions are reduced. The “likely” maximum rise of 1.1 metres by 2100 is some 10cm above the top-end estimate from its previous estimate, while a rise of 2 metres cannot be ruled out.

Such warnings were intended to provide input at COP25 for world leaders who face mounting calls to adopt more ambitious goals for carbon emission cuts. Those negotiations will not be happening in December in Santiago after all. An alternative must be found urgently.

 

Austerity, the “New Normal”

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Isabel Ortiz is Director of the Global Social Justice Program at Joseph Stiglitz’s Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia University, former Director at the International Labour Organization (ILO) and UNICEF, and senior official at the UN and at the Asian Development Bank.
 
Matthew Cummins is senior economist who has worked at UNDP, UNICEF and the World Bank.

WASHINGTON DC, Oct 11 2019 (IPS) – While this week Ministers of Finance and economists meet in Washington to confront global economic challenges at the IMF and World Bank Annual Meetings, the majority of the world population lives with austerity cuts and see their living standards deteriorating. World leaders must reverse this trend.

Isabel Ortiz

Since 2010, most governments in both high income and developing counties have been implementing austerity policies, cutting public expenditures. Surprisingly, this trend is expected to continue at least until 2024, according to a global study just published by the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia University, global trade unions and civil society organizations. Austerity has become “the new normal.”

Based on IMF fiscal projections, the study finds that a new fiscal adjustment shock will start in 2020. By 2021, government expenditures as a share of GDP will be declining in 130 countries, nearly three-fourths of which are in the developing world. The reach of austerity is staggering: nearly 6 billion persons will be affected by 2021.

How are governments cutting their budgets and implementing austerity reforms? In practice, the most commonly considered adjustment measures in 2018-19 include: pension and social security reforms (in 86 countries); cutting or capping the public sector wage bill, including the number and salaries of teachers, health workers and civil servants delivering public services (in 80 countries); labor flexibilization reforms (in 79 countries); reducing or eliminating subsidies (in 78 countries); rationalizing and/or further targeting social assistance or safety nets (in 77 countries); increasing regressive consumption taxes, such as sales and value added taxes (in 73 countries); strengthening public-private partnerships (PPPs) (in 60 countries); privatizing public assets/services (in 59 countries); and healthcare reforms (in 33 countries).

All of these measures have negative social impacts. As a result, in many countries older persons have lower pensions; there are not sufficient teachers, medical and care staff, and the quality of public services suffers; there are less jobs, and people work under more precarious conditions; prices increase while wages are stagnant; and the low and middle classes are squeezed and under pressure.

Matthew Cummins

In perspective, the macroeconomic and fiscal choices made by governments over the last decade are alarming. The G20 alone committed US$10 trillion to support the financial sector in response to the global financial crisis, and then passed the costs of adjustment to populations, with millions of people being pushed into poverty and lower living standards.

The worldwide drive toward austerity or fiscal consolidation can be expected to aggravate the growth and employment crisis and diminish public support at a time of high development needs, soaring inequalities and social discontent.

Austerity is also being used as a trojan horse to induce “Washington Consensus” policies to cut back on public policies and the welfare state. Once budgets are contracting, governments must look at policies that minimize the public sector and expand private sector delivery, including PPPs. There are clear winners and losers from this renewed Washington Consensus, and governments must effectively assess and question these policies.

Austerity and budget cuts do not need to be “the new normal.” There are alternatives, even in the poorest countries. Governments can find additional fiscal space to fund public services and development policies through at least eight options, which range from increasing progressive tax revenues, cracking down on illicit financial flows, improving debt management and using fiscal and foreign exchange reserves, to adopting more accommodative macroeconomic frameworks, reprioritizing public expenditures and -for lower income countries- lobbying for greater aid. All these options are endorsed by the United Nations and the international financial institutions.

It is time for world leaders to abandon the myopic scope of macroeconomic and fiscal policy decisions that benefit few and, instead, look for new fiscal space and financing opportunities to foster a robust global recovery and the achievement of long-term global prosperity for all.

 

Translating Ambition to Action: High Hopes for United Nations Action Week

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Cameron Diver is Deputy Director-General, the Pacific Community (SPC)

New Caledonia, Sep 13 2019 (IPS) – In less than 10 days, countries from around the planet will come together in New York for the United Nations Secretary General’s Climate Action Summit. I look forward to representing the Pacific Community (SPC) at this important event, and throughout “Action Week” during the upcoming UN General Assembly.

Cameron Diver

The interconnections and synergies between major issues of global concern and the key role multilateralism and international cooperation can play in helping tackle these challenges are illustrated by the agenda of the week from 23 to 27 September. Underpinned by the Sustainable Development Goals, each of the high-level summits will focus on commitments to accelerate action across climate change, enhance efforts to secure healthy, peaceful and prosperous lives for all, mobilise sufficient financing to realise the 2030 Agenda and address the specific issues and vulnerabilities of small island developing states.

The week of summits kicks off with a focus on climate action. And this is, in my mind, highly appropriate. The multiplier effect of climate change undermines our efforts to achieve the sustainable development goals, it increases the challenges of biodiversity conservation and sustainable use, it intensifies competition and the potential for conflict around natural resources and it poses the single greatest existential threat to the lives and livelihoods of millions of people around the globe. From where I stand, the science on climate change is clear. To take only these examples, the IPCC Special Reports on the impacts of global warming of 1.5° above pre-industrial levels and climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food security and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems provide us with the most robust, high quality evidence base to understand the significant negative impact climate change is already having on our natural environment, on the wellbeing of people, ecosystems, flora and fauna and the massive and potentially irreversible consequences of inaction. As regards our ocean, the upcoming Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate is likely to confirm what the islands of the Blue Pacific continent, and others whose cultures, traditions and livelihoods are deeply attached to the ocean, have already sensed: the climate crisis is a real and present threat to ocean and coastal ecosystems and the human communities that depend on them.

The stakes are high, but where there is a threat there is also an opportunity. If we act now, there is still have time effectively to tackle the climate crisis! To put it simply: ambition without action is insufficient and simply not an option. SPC is committed to working with our Member States, international and regional partners to translate climate ambition into tangible climate action, for both mitigation and adaptation. The benefits could be huge, with the Global Commission on Adaptation estimating that investing $1.8 trillion in climate adaptation globally in just five areas from 2020 to 2030 could generate $7.1 trillion in total net benefits. We are also convinced that we must collectively harness the synergies between, for example, climate and the ocean, biodiversity, health, security, economic development, food systems, land use, gender and many other development areas to fully exploit the potential of the SDGs and ensure that future pathways to sustainable development are integrated, inclusive, nature-friendly, climate-informed and resilient. SPC is already implementing this approach with its Members and partners. One illustration is our EU funded PROTEGE project, whose intended outcomes include a transition to sustainable integrated agriculture and sound forestry resource management; sustainable fisheries and aquaculture management that is integrated in and adapted to island economies; sustainable integrated water resource management; and invasive alien species control, all against a backdrop of climate-change hazards that require ecosystem and biodiversity protection, resilience and restoration.

As was recently remarked to me at the Green Climate Fund Global Programming Conference in Korea: “we already know what we must do. We need to stop talking and start doing”. It is my sincere hope that “Action Week” in New York will indeed be a turning point for “doing”; a catalyst for firm, measurable commitments to tangible actions that match the level of ambition already expressed to address the climate crisis and the multiple development challenges that remain as we approach the final decade of the 2030 Agenda. If we do not translate ambition into action, we will fail ourselves, we will fail future generations and we will fail our planet. If, however, we take up the challenge and take sustained, coordinated and integrated action, we can win the battle against climate change, create new and innovative opportunities for development, deliver on the promise of the Global Goals and trace a positive pathway to new era of resilient and sustainable development. High hopes indeed…

 

Calls for Reform, Research and Reorganisation in Leprosy Healthcare

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The 20th International Leprosy Congress (ILC) is being held Sept. 10 to 13 in Manila, Philippines. The conference is hosted every three years and was last held in China in 2016. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

MANILA, Sep 12 2019 (IPS) – Rachna Kumari of Munger in Eastern India’s Bihar state is not yet 30. But she’s already been married at 18, abandoned by her husband after she was diagnosed with leprosy and become an award-winning advocate of the disease. She has traversed a long road. And this week she undertook another step in her journey to fly to Manila, Philippines, as a delegate at the 20th International Leprosy Congress (ILC).

The grassroots leader, who is employed by the International Leprosy Elimination Partnership (ILEP), has also previously traveled to Ethiopia and China to share stories about her life and her work.

Prior to attending the ILC yesterday Sept. 12, she participated in the Global Forum of People’s Organisations on Hansen’s Disease, an event co-organised by Japan’s  The Nippon Foundation (TNF) and Sasakawa Health Foundation (SHF). The global forum gave her valuable insights into the universal challenges of leprosy-affected and leprosy advocates such as stigma and lack of financial sustainability, Kumari said.

She said she also gained technical education and management skills, which she feels are crucial for success in advocacy.

She added that when she carries out her work in communities across Munger, she has no official identification to show many of the Hansen’s disease-affected persons she comes across, many of whom are weary of strangers as they continue to face discrimination and stigma.

This simple form of accreditation, Kumari said, played a huge role in advocacy against the disease.

“[In] my community, I have nothing to prove that I am an advocate, a knowledge builder. So, people doubt me, they don’t know if they [can] trust me. A simple document of identification can be a big step to build trust between a community worker and her community,” Kumari told IPS.

Maya Ranavare, who works as a treasurer in Association of People Affected by Leprosy (APAL), in western India’s Maharashtra state, says that partnerships among organisations must not remain in closed rooms but should instead result in collective action that reaches communities.

“There is a sense of competition among  people’s organisations. Instead, we must act collectively. Also, if it is a partnership, then there should not be duplicity. Tasks should be distributed evenly. If one organisation is doing mobilisation, other should work on technical education. This will increase everyone’s skill and ability,” Ranavare told IPS.

According to Dr Arturo Cunanan, the Chief Medical Officer of the Culion Sanitarium and General Hospital in the Philippines, there needs to be programmatic changes in the government public health system. Budgetary allocation, innovation, new research and sensitisation of healthcare workers are all needs of the hour.

“Leprosy elimination is now like a car that has run out of fuel. We need that fuel right now. The fuel is innovation. Take vaccination for example. Why is that even after centuries, we still don’t have a vaccination for universal application?

“Also, we need innovative, easier ways to diagnose leprosy. If you look at Tuberculosis, there are several ways to do a quick test and find out if a person has it. But for leprosy, we still have only clinical test. We need new tools, quicker ways and for all of that we need new investments in innovation, research,“ Cunanan told IPS.

The ILC started runs Sep 10 to 13. The congress will identify the priorities for a future course of action to end leprosy. Currently there are 200,000 new leprosy cases reported every year across the world, with 60 percent of those new cases originating in India.

According to the organisers, the congress will identify the priorities for the future course of action for achieving zero leprosy. The congress also emphasised the importance of partnerships and a new future partnership among the leprosy-affected people’s organisations has already started between HANDA – a Chinese NGO– and PERMATA, an NGO based in Indonesia.

HANDA, which has recently been recognised by the government of China for their skills in project management, finance management and organisational re-structuring, is set to share these crucial skills with PERMATA. 

“We will soon host a delegation from PERMATA in our Guanzhou office. They have a special interest in finance management and we are ready to share our expertise and experience in that area with them,” Sally Qi of HANDA told IPS.

SHF was instrumental in building this partnership and encouraged  both HANDA and PERMATA to start a dialogue on skill sharing, Qi added.