Children look at their destroyed homes in Rafah city, in the southern Gaza Strip. Credit: UNICEF/Eyad El Baba
GAZA STRIP, Feb 29 2024 (IPS) – Nothing could prepare me for my recently concluded mission into the Gaza Strip, where children face catastrophic conditions.
In my twenty years with UNICEF, traveling from one humanitarian crisis to the next – from famines to floods and war zones to refugee camps – I’ve simply never seen such devastation and despair as is happening in Gaza.
The intensity of the attacks, the massive number of child casualties, the desperation and panic of the people on the move – people who already have nothing – is palpable. It is humanitarian disaster on top of humanitarian disaster.
Near the start of the recent brief pause in fighting, we set out early in the morning at Rafah on the border with Egypt. Our convoy of trucks carrying vital humanitarian aid made its way slowly in a punishing journey north to Gaza City, which hadn’t seen aid in weeks.
The two cities are just 35 kilometres apart, but travelling through a war zone always makes distances seem more daunting. Along the way, I saw apartment building after apartment building, home after home, flattened by the bombings, a dystopian scene that stretched for miles.
In Gaza City I got out to look more closely at a building that had been reduced to rubble. Inside, I noticed bloodstains, but it’s impossible to know whether the people who were pulled out of this mass of concrete survived.
I will never forget how a man in his 60s walked out from the ruins of a recently bombed apartment building. At first, I thought he was indicating the number 10, as in 10 people had been killed. But he corrected this, using a stick to write in the dirt: 30. It wasn’t the number of people killed. It was the number of his extended family members killed in the blast.
This man had lost everyone, his whole extended family, everyone he loved. At the start of this war, UNICEF said Gaza was a “graveyard for children and a living hell for everyone else.” It has only gotten worse as the bombing and fighting have continued.
There was a hope that the devastation seen before the pause would not be repeated should the fighting resume. But after hearing hundreds and hundreds of rounds of artillery and more explosions, I could tell that it’s happening.
Within hours, the humanitarian pause felt too long ago.
I walked across the wreckage of what I was told was once a tight-knit community that is now broken glass, rubble and steel crunching under my feet. Homes sliced open, their contents exposed like doll houses, the inside of lives laid bare.
Against the grey rubble, eerie remnants of normalcy cropped up, like a sofa on a third-floor apartment with no walls, or a painting on the only wall left standing after a blast.
I looked at what was once a child’s bedroom, with pink blankets, a cupboard, shelves full of books, fluffy stuffed toys. It looked like the room of any 12-year-old girl, from any middle-class family, anywhere in the world. It was largely untouched. The little girl would have been safe if she wasn’t in another room with her family when the home was struck.
Driving through Gaza there’s never much time for reflection. The aid convoy needs to keep moving.
Along the route we saw the same theme repeated in neighborhood after neighborhood: basic needs are not being met. People need water and nourishment. Hospitals need medicine. This convoy has all those things. But despite our efforts and those of our UN colleagues, I know it’s not enough. It’s not nearly enough.
As one of my UNICEF colleagues noted just a couple of weeks into the war, the killing and maiming of children, abduction of children, attacks on hospitals and schools, and the denial of humanitarian access are a stain on our collective conscience. It was true then, it remains true now.
From Gaza City we pushed further north, to Jabaliya. The first thing I noticed were the piles of rotting garbage outside hospitals, offices and schools. Sanitation and rubbish collection services have broken down completely, of course, as trucks have no fuel to collect it and the conflict has displaced most of the workers who do these jobs anyway.
One hospital we visited, Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, was utterly chaotic. It was overcrowded, loud, intense. Our trucks were delivering medical supplies while wounded people were being rushed in bleeding.
We eventually made it back to the south of Gaza, to what we call the Joint Operation Centre. That’s where dozens of UN workers meet to discuss the next mission. The mood was sombre. We all know what Palestinian families need: they need more of everything, especially medicines, water, fuel, food.
But genuine safety for Gaza’s children depends on parties to the conflict ensuring that humanitarians have unimpeded access to civilians wherever they are… on our ability to bring water, essential food, nutrition supplements, fuel and other humanitarian supplies into the territory… and on parties implementing an immediate humanitarian ceasefire.
Unless those conditions are met, children in Gaza are now in danger from the sky, disease on the ground, and death from hunger and thirst. Nowhere is safe.
The children of Gaza have suffered enough. We need a humanitarian ceasefire, and peace, now.
James Elder is UNICEF’s spokesperson. Follow him @1james_elder
War in Sudan is putting the future of its 24 million youngest citizens at risk, the Representative of the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) warned. January 2024
Meanwhile geopolitical and geoeconomic fragmentation threaten the development and survival of children across the globe. But a more hopeful path exists.
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 23 2024 (IPS) – At the start of 2024, we stand at a critical juncture: Geopolitical tensions are escalating, economic integration is unravelling, and multilateral cooperation is faltering. This global fragmentation threatens to undermine decades of progress made for children worldwide.
The choices we make today – whether to continue on this path or whether we should bolster global cooperation – will have a profound impact on generations to come.
Children are always the most vulnerable in times of crisis – a reality highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic, when school closures, economic hardship and disrupted health services jeopardized children’s rights and wellbeing.
Tensions among major powers are rising and the threat of new conflicts emerging is high. Beyond the immediate physical dangers, children can experience lasting psychological trauma and violations of their basic rights.
If military spending continues increasing at the expense of investments in healthcare, education and social protections, children’s development will be further compromised.
Meanwhile, economic fragmentation is widening disparities between countries. Restrictive trade policies and supply chain disruptions are leading to rising energy and food prices, reducing access to essential goods and negatively impacting child nutrition and household incomes.
Competition for critical minerals essential for the green economy is increasing the risks of trade fragmentation while threatening the pace of the green energy transition. At the same time, the drive to expand mining for minerals puts mining communities and children at risk of exploitative practices.
Despite continued global economic growth, the lukewarm and uneven recovery is diminishing prospects for reducing child poverty. From now until 2030, 15 million more children a year will be living in poverty than would have otherwise, due to the unequal post-COVID recovery.
This gloomy picture is compounded by the weakening of multilateral institutions, which is further undermining the potential for progress for children. Why?
Because a fragmented multilateral system that is hamstrung by competing interests will struggle to deliver on conflict prevention, climate change, effective digital governance, debt relief and enforcing child rights standards, fuelling dissatisfaction in the Global South with rising inequalities.
Children in the poorest nations also face continued barriers to financing for basic services. Crippling debt, high remittance fees and lack of voice in global economic governance restrict investments in healthcare, education and social protections – investments vital to children’s survival and development.
But amid all these concerning trends, we see still signs of hope. Alternative alliances are emerging in the developing world to advance cooperation, bringing novel policy solutions, more nimble policymaking and effective results.
Despite expressing discontent with current democratic political structures, young people remain optimistic that opportunities exist to reform and resolve deficiencies in the political system, whether at the national or international level. They are engaging as change-makers, breathing new life into civic participation and democratic renewal.
In addition, technological innovations are unlocking new opportunities to empower children and enhance their rights. Green transition, if carried out in a just and sustainable way – one that prioritizes young people’s needs, skills and access to jobs in emerging sectors (such as the digital and green economy) – can benefit younger generations.
Reforms and modernization of global governance and financing arrangements could still deliver greater justice for developing countries. This more hopeful path will not unfold on its own. It requires global leaders to make an active choice – to double down on solidarity, inclusion and cooperation despite tensions and instability.
Prioritizing children and their rights must be at the centre of this choice.
Jasmina Byrne is Chief, Foresight & Policy, UNICEF Innocenti – Global Office of Research and Foresight.
Protesting against Israel’s attacks on Gaza, at the opening day march of the World Social Forum in Kathmandu. Credit: Marty Logan/IPS
KATHMANDU, Feb 17 2024 (IPS) – Romi Ghimire has a busy life running a non-profit organization dedicated to Nepal’s rural people, but she also feels driven to do something about Gaza. “There are a lot of issues happening in the world, but right now the genocide in Gaza is the most urgent one,” she said inside the Palestine tent at the World Social Forum (WSF) in Kathmandu on Saturday.
“We’re watching it live…. we’re seeing it on a daily basis: every morning and evening I’m consuming it and I just can’t stop thinking about it. I can’t pretend that it isn’t happening,” Ghimire told IPS. “We have to raise awareness about it around the world because we are all the (Palestinians) have. They don’t have any arms or ammunition, any military — it’s just people like us that they have.”
“People like us” include the roughly 30,000 activists expected to attend the WSF, the annual global gathering of social activists, happening this year in Nepal’s capital Kathmandu until Monday. This block of the city centre is bustling with activists, rushing to reach a scheduled workshop or bumping shoulders with peers from 90+ countries amid white tents set up as temporary classrooms in a fairground.
Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza, in response to an attack on Israel by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, is one of the most discussed issues.
“Israel has refined the art of colonization through what I call the best business practice of colonialism, which invites multinational actors and corporations to invest in their colonial project. And that provides an economic incentive to ensure that political positions are supportive of Israel”
On Friday, Dr Varsen Aghabekian spoke to 30 activists from Nepal, South Asia and beyond. The former Commissioner General for the Palestinian Independent Commission for Human Rights, Aghabekian detailed the history that has culminated in Israel’s occupation of Palestine, stressing the deep roots of the current assaults.
Historical “annexation” includes takeover of public and private property. In 1947, 90% of such property was owned by Palestinians; by 2023 they had been relegated to 22% of historic Palestine.
Israeli laws and policies “institutionalize the superiority and privilege the status of Jews,” added Aghabekian. They reserve the right of self-determination in Israel exclusively for the Jewish people, and declare Hebrew as the official state language, demoting Arabic, which had been the country’s official second language.
“We rightfully call (the situation) apartheid but when we do that many western countries frown and say: ‘It can’t be!’… Israel is trying to project that an occupier state is a victim of our resistance and our violence (but) we have the right to resist as an occupied people who want to be liberated.”
Eventually Israel must make peace with the Palestinians, added Aghabekian. “If they are prospering and we are in pain there will not be peace. The Gaza genocide, despite its disasters, is an opportunity… even the US said seriously ‘maybe we should think about the two-state solution’. I think we’re moving toward that.”
Not only is Israel misrepresenting its occupation and current attack on Gaza, the situation has revealed the hypocrisy of western legal, religious and cultural tradition, argued Mitri Raheb, the first president of Dar-al-Kalima University in Bethlehem, who spoke after Aghabekian.
Israel’s response to the Hamas attack has revealed the “warrior God,” not the God of peace, said Raheb, citing a personal example. A German bishop he met counselled Palestinians to remain non-violent. But just weeks later Raheb, who also served as the pastor of the Christmas Lutheran Church in Bethlehem from 1987 until 2017, saw the bishop on TV calling for western countries to provide Ukraine with tanks to counter Russia’s invasion.
Palestinians, he added, used to “believe in and fight for human rights because we thought they were international, they were for everyone. But I’m starting to question that. I think that human rights were meant for white Europeans, so they won’t kill each other any more, but it’s OK if the rest of the world is killed by the empire.”
“Business of colonialism”
Legal expert Wasem Ahmad dissected the economic structure that props up Israel’s occupation. “Israel has refined the art of colonization through what I call the best business practice of colonialism, which invites multinational actors and corporations to invest in their colonial project. And that provides an economic incentive to ensure that political positions are supportive of Israel.”
A human rights scholar, Ahmad told IPS he recognizes the limitations of the human rights system. “The more you do this work the more cynical you become of the system as it’s proposed. (Human rights) look very nice on paper but when you try to put them into practice you realize that there are a lot of political obstacles to that realization and it has to do with the broader imperial interests at play.”
“Our role,” he continued, “is to push that system and engage it, and force the wheels of justice to turn. Either it works in our benefit or we expose it and over time that system will change, even if it requires a breakdown to rebuild.”
But opposing Israel’s colonization through the legal system is only one approach, added Ahmad. “The idea that I’m only going to rely on the legal mechanisms, ignoring that the law is a social construct connected to economic, political and cultural interests and beliefs in society ignores that reality.”
Despite his critique of the West’s legal and cultural traditions, Raheb said he was invigorated by the throngs of people worldwide, and at the WSF, protesting Israel’s attacks. “Gaza was the wake-up call for all of us. And I think in the future this will just get stronger and stronger… Gaza galvanized the global South because it was the magnifying glass: suddenly we could see clearly. That was the turning point.”
Colombian President Gustavo Petro presented his environmental plans at COP28 in Dubai and added his country to the small group of nations that support the negotiation of a binding treaty to prevent the proliferation of fossil fuels, despite his country being an oil producer. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy / IPS
DUBAI, Dec 12 2023 (IPS) – One of the most heated debates at the annual climate summit coming to a conclusion in this United Arab Emirates city revolved around the phrasing of the final declaration, regarding the “phase-out” or “phase-down” of fossil fuels within a given time frame.
Experts who talked to IPS at the summit agreed on the magnitude of the bill, which for some Latin American nations could be unaffordable.
“Financial support will be needed. There must be a differentiated approach, differentiated timing, and developed countries must come up with the resources.” — Fernanda Carvalho
Fernanda Carvalho of Brazil, global leader for Energy and Climate Policy at the non-governmental World Wildlife Fund (WWF), referred to the amount without specifying a figure.
“Financial support will be needed. There must be a differentiated approach, differentiated timing, and developed countries must come up with the resources,” the expert, who was present at COP28, held at Expo City on the outskirts of Dubai, told IPS.
COP28 engaged in an acrimonious debate between phase-out and phase-down, with a definite date, of oil, gas and coal, which has already anticipated a disappointing end in Dubai, that in line with the tradition at these summits extended its negotiations one more day, to conclude on Wednesday, Dec. 13.
The “phase-down” concept has been in the climate-energy jargon for years, but it really took off at the 2021 COP26 in the Scottish city of Glasgow, whose Climate Pact alludes to the reduction of coal still being produced and the elimination of inefficient fossil fuel subsidies.
Throughout the climate summits since 1995, developing countries have insisted on differentiated measures for them, in accordance with their own situation, the need for financing from developed nations and the transfer of technology, especially energy alternatives.
Enrique Maurtúa of Argentina, senior diplomacy advisor to the Independent Global Stocktake (iGST) – an umbrella data and advocacy initiative – said they hoped for a political signal to determine regulations or market measures regarding a phase-down or phase-out.
“If a target date is not set, there is no signal. If you set a phase-out for 2050, that is a pathway for the transition. With a deadline, the market can react. And then each country must evaluate its specific context,” the expert told IPS in the COP28 Green Zone, which hosted civil society organizations at the summit.
Available scientific knowledge indicates that the majority of proven hydrocarbon reserves must remain unextracted by 2030 to keep the planetary temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius, the threshold agreed in the 2015 Paris Climate Change Agreement to avoid massive disasters.
On Sunday, Dec. 10 the non-governmental Climate Action Network (CAN) delivered at COP28 a dishonorable mention to the United States for its role in Israel’s carnage in Gaza, in the traditional Fossil of the Day award for “doing the most to achieve the least” in terms of progress on climate change at the summits. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy / IPS
Failed attempts
In the Latin American region there are unsuccessful precedents of fossil fuel phase-outs.
In 2007, the then president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa (2007-2017), launched the Yasuní-Ishpingo Tambococha Tiputini initiative, which sought the care of the Yasuní National Park in the Ecuadorian Amazon rainforest, in exchange for funds from governments, foundations, companies and individuals of about 3.6 billion dollars by 2024 to leave the oil in the ground.
The aim was to leave 846 million barrels of oil untouched underground. But a special fund created by Ecuador and the United Nations Environment Fund only raised 13 million dollars, according to the Ecuadorian government. So Correa decided to cancel the initiative in 2013, at a time when renewable energies had not yet really taken off.
In a referendum held in August, Ecuadorians decided to halt oil extraction in a block in Yasuní that would provide 57,000 barrels per day in 2022 – the same result sought by Correa, but without foreign funds.
The result of the referendum is to be implemented within a year, although the position of the government of the current president, banana tycoon Daniel Noboa, who took office on Nov. 23, is still unclear.
Meanwhile, in Colombia, President Gustavo Petro has put the brakes on new oil and coal exploration contracts, a promise from his 2022 election campaign.
In addition, the president announced on Dec. 2 in Dubai that his country was joining nine other nations that are promoting the formal initiation of the negotiation of a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Colombia will thus become the first Latin American nation and the largest oil and coal producer to join the initiative that first emerged in 2015 when several Pacific Island leaders and NGOs raised the urgent need for an international mechanism to phase out fossil fuels.
For the undertaking of a just energy transition to cleaner fuels, Petro estimates an initial bill of 14 billion dollars, to come from governments of the developed North, multilateral organizations and international funds.
The latest summit of hope for the climate kicked off on Nov. 30 in this Arab city under the slogan “Unite. Act. Deliver” – the least successful in the history of COPs since the first one, held in Berlin in 1995.
The hopes included commitments and voluntary declarations on renewable energy and energy efficiency; agriculture, food and climate; health and climate; climate finance; refrigeration; and just transitions with a gender focus.
In addition, there were financial pledges of some 86 billion dollars, without specifying whether it is all new money, to be allocated to these issues.
Like many countries, the host of COP28, the United Arab Emirates, has had a pavilion in the so-called Green Zone, which hosts non-governmental organizations, companies and other institutions. The Emirati government bet a lot on the climate summit to deliver results, but without directly targeting the fossil fuels on which its economy depends. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy / IPS
Billions
Given the production and exploration plans of the main hydrocarbon producing countries in the region, the magnitude of the challenge in the medium and long term is enormous.
In October, Brazil, the largest economy in the region and the 11th largest in the world, extracted 3.543 billion barrels of oil and 152 million cubic meters (m3) of gas per day.
This represented approximately two percent of the domestic economy that month.
Mexico, the region’s second largest economy, extracted 1.64 million barrels and 4.971 billion m3 of gas per day in October, equivalent to 52 million dollars in revenues.
Meanwhile, Colombia produced 780,487 barrels of oil in the first eight months of 2023 and 1,568 cubic feet per day of gas, equivalent to 12 percent of public revenues.
“We have to think about decarbonization measures. We want Latin America to be a clean energy powerhouse,” said Carvalho.
As of September, Brazil’s state-owned oil giant Petrobras was working on obtaining 9.571 billion barrels of oil equivalent, according to the Global Oil & Gas Exit List produced by the German non-governmental organization Urgewald.
This represents an excess of 94 percent above the limit set by the 2015 Paris Agreement to keep global warming below two degrees Celsius.
Meanwhile, Mexico’s state-owned oil company Pemex is producing 1.444 billion barrels of oil equivalent, 56 percent above the threshold set by the Paris Agreement.
Finally, the public company Ecopetrol, mostly owned by the Colombian state, is working to obtain 447 million barrels, 98 percent above the Paris Agreement limit, according to Urgewald.
In addition, the cost of action against the climate crisis is far from affordable for any Latin American nation.
For example, Mexico estimated that the implementation of 35 measures, including in the power, gas and oil generation sector, would cost 137 billion dollars in 2030, but the benefits would total 295 billion dollars.
But Maurtúa says the budget question is only relative. “There is a lot of public money with which many things can be done,” complemented by international resources, he argued.
LIMA, Sep 28 2023 (IPS) – Nearly 700,000 people have migrated internally in Peru due to the effects of climate change. This mass displacement is a clear problem in this South American country, one of the most vulnerable to the global climate crisis due to its biodiversity, geography and 28 different types of climates.
“We recognize migration due to climate change as a very tangible issue that needs to be addressed,” Pablo Peña, a geographer who is coordinator of the Emergency and Humanitarian Assistance Unit of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Peru, told IPS.
In an interview with IPS at the UN agency’s headquarters in Lima, Peña reported that according to the international Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, the number of people displaced within Peru’s borders by disasters between 2008 and 2022 is estimated at 659,000, most of them floods related to climate disturbances.
“We recognize migration due to climate change as a very tangible issue that needs to be addressed.” — Pablo Peña
In this Andean country of 33 million inhabitants, there is a lack of specific and centralized data to determine the characteristics of migration caused by environmental and climate change factors.
Peña said that through a specific project, the IOM has collaborated with the Peruvian government in drafting an action plan aimed at preventing and addressing climate-related forced migration, on the basis of which a pilot project will begin in October to systematize information from different sources on displacement in order to incorporate the environmental and climate component.
“We aim to be able to define climate migrants and incorporate them into all regulations,” said the expert. The project, which includes gender, rights and intergenerational approaches, is being worked on with the Ministries of the Environment and of Women and Vulnerable Populations.
He added that this type of migration is multidimensional. “People can say that they left their homes in the Andes highlands because they had nothing to eat due to the loss of their crops, and that could be interpreted, superficially, as forming part of economic migration because they have no means of livelihood. But that cause can be associated with climatic variables,” Peña said.
Pablo Peña, coordinator of the Emergency and Humanitarian Assistance Unit of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Peru, stands in front of the headquarters of this United Nations agency in Lima. He highlights the need to address the situation of internal migration driven by the impacts of climate change. CREDIT: Mariela Jara / IPS
The Central Reserve Bank, in charge of preserving monetary stability and managing international reserves, lowered in its September monthly report Peru’s economic growth projection to 0.9 percent for this year, partly due to the varied impacts of climate change on agriculture and fishing.
This would affect efforts to reduce the poverty rate, which stands at around 30 percent in the country, where seven out of every 10 workers work in the informal sector, and would drive up migration of the population in search of food and livelihoods.
“The World Bank estimates that by 2050 there will be more than 10 million climate migrants in Latin America,” said Peña.
The same multilateral institution, in its June publication Peru Strategic Actions Toward Water Security, points out that people without economic problems are 10 times more resistant than those living in poverty to climatic impacts such as floods and droughts, which are increasing at the national level.
The country is currently experiencing the Coastal El Niño climate phenomenon, which in March caused floods in northern cities and droughts in the south. The official National Service of Meteorology and Hydrology warned that in January 2024 it could converge with the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) global phenomenon, accentuating its impacts.
El Niño usually occurs in December, causing the sea temperature to rise and altering the rainfall pattern, which increases in the north of the country and decreases in the south.
The manager of Natural Resources of the Piura regional government, Juan Aguilar, described the vulnerability to climate change of this northern coastal region of Peru at a September meeting organized by the IOM in Lima. The official explained that the El Niño climate phenomenon has become more intense and frequent due to the effects of climate change, which aggravates its impacts on the population, such as severe flooding this year. CREDIT: Mariela Jara / IPS
Reluctance to migrate to safer areas
Piura, a northern coastal department with an estimated population of just over two million inhabitants, has been hit by every El Niño episode, including this year’s, which left more than 46,000 homes damaged, even in areas that had been rebuilt.
Juan Aguilar, manager of Natural Resources of the Piura regional government, maintains that the high vulnerability to ENSO is worsening with climate change and is affecting the population, communication routes and staple crops.
At an IOM workshop on Sept. 5 in Lima, the official stressed that Piura is caught up in both floods and droughts, in a complex context for the implementation of spending on prevention, adaptation and mitigation.
Aguilar spoke to IPS about the situation of people who, despite having lost their homes for climatic reasons, choose not to migrate, in what he considers to be a majority trend.
“People are not willing overall to move to safer areas, even during El Niño 2017 when there were initiatives to relocate them to other places; they prefer to wait for the phenomenon to pass and return to their homes,” he added.
View of the Rimac River as it passes through the municipality of Lurigancho-Chosica, in the Peruvian province of Lima. In this town, many families are still living in housing in areas at high risk, which is exacerbated during the rainy season that begins in December and has intensified due to climate change and the increased recurrence of the El Niño climate phenomenon. CREDIT: Mariela Jara / IPS
He explained that this attitude is due to the fact that they see the climatic events as recurrent. “They say, I already experienced this in such and such a year, and there is a resignation in the sense of saying that we are in a highly vulnerable area, it is what we have to live with, God and nature have put us in these conditions,” Aguilar said.
He acknowledged that with regard to this question, public policies have not made much progress. “For example after 2017 a law was passed to identify non-mitigable risk zones, and that has not been enforced despite the fact that it would help us to implement plans to relocate local residents to safer areas,” he added.
The regional official pointed out that “we do not have an experience in which the State says ‘I have already identified this area, there is so much housing available here for those who want to relocate’ , because the social cost would be so high.”
“We have not seen this, and the populace has the feeling that if they are going to start somewhere else, the place they abandon will be taken by someone else, and they say: ‘what is the point of me moving, if the others will be left here’,” Aguilar said.
Paulina Vílchez, 72, has always lived in the Peruvian municipality of Lurigancho-Chosica. Despite the fear every year that the Rimac River might flood and that mudslides could occur in one of the 21 ravines in the area, she has never thought of moving away. “I’m not going to go to an empty plot to start all over again, that’s why I’ve stayed. I leave everything in the hands of God,” she said. CREDIT: Mariela Jara / IPS
The fear of starting over
Some 40 km from the Peruvian capital, in Lurigancho-Chosica, one of the 43 municipalities of the province of Lima, the local population is getting nervous about the start of the rainy season in December, which threatens mudslides in some of its 21 ravines. The most notorious due to their catastrophic impact occurred in 1987, 2017, 2018 and March of this year.
Landslides, known in Peru by the Quechua indigenous term “huaycos”, have been part of the country’s history, due to the combination of the special characteristics of the rugged geography of the Andes highlands and the ENSO phenomenon.
In an IPS tour of the Chosica area of Pedregal, one of the areas vulnerable to landslides and mudslides due to the rains, there was concern in the municipality about the risks they face, but also a distrust of moving to a safer place to start over.
“I came here to Pedregal as a child when this was all fields where cotton and sugar cane were planted. I have been here for more than sixty years and we have progressed, we no longer live in shacks,” said 72-year-old Paulina Vílchez, who lives in a nicely painted two-story house built of cement and brick.
On the first floor she set up a bodega, which she manages herself, where she sells food and other products. She did not marry or have children, but she helped raise two nieces, with whom she still lives in a house that is the fruit of her parents’ and then her own efforts and which represents decades of hard work.
Vílchez admits that she would like to move to a place where she could be free of the fear that builds up every year. But she said it would have to be a house with the same conditions as the one she has managed to build with so much effort. “I’m not going to go to an empty plot to start all over again, that’s why I’ve stayed. I leave everything in the hands of God,” she told IPS.
Maribel Zavaleta’s home in the Peruvian municipality of Chosica is built of wood, near the Rimac River and just a meter from the train tracks. She arrived there in 1989, relocated after a mud, water and rock slide two years earlier in another part of the town. She constantly worries that another catastrophe will happen again, and says she would relocate if she were guaranteed safer land and materials to build a new house. CREDIT: Mariela Jara / IPS
Very close to the Rimac River and next to the railway tracks that shake her little wooden house each time the train passes by lives Maribel Zavaleta, 50, born in Chosica, and her family of two daughters, a son, and three granddaughters.
“I came here in 1989 with my mom, she was a survivor of the 1987 huayco, and we lived in tents until we were relocated here. But it’s not safe; in 2017 the river overflowed and the house was completely flooded,” she told IPS.
Zavaleta started her own family at the age of 21, but is now separated from her husband. Her eldest son lives with his girlfriend on the same property, and her older daughter, who works and helps support the household, has given her three granddaughters. The youngest of her daughters is 13 and attends a local municipal school.
“I work as a cleaner and what I earn is only enough to cover our basic needs,” she said. She added that if she were relocated again it would have to be to a plot of land with a title deed and materials to build her house, which is now made of wood and has a tin roof, while her plot of land is fenced off with metal sheets.
“I can’t afford to improve my little house or leave here. I would like the authorities to at least work to prevent the river from overflowing while we are here,” she said, pointing to the rocks left by the 2017 landslide that have not been removed.
A view of the Altos de Florida neighborhood in Bogotá, Colombia. Overcoming poverty is the first of the Sustainable Development Goals, and in the Latin American and Caribbean region there is not only slow progress but even setbacks in the path to reduce it. CREDIT: Freya Mortales / UNDP
CARACAS, Sep 15 2023 (IPS) – The Latin American and Caribbean region is arriving at the Sustainable Development Goals Summit on the right track but far behind in terms of progress, at the halfway point to achieve the SDGs, which aim to overcome poverty and create a cleaner and healthier environment.
“We are exactly halfway through the period of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, but we are not half the way there, as only a quarter of the goals have been met or are expected to be met that year,” warned ECLAC Executive Secretary José Manuel Salazar-Xirinachs.
“We are exactly halfway through the period of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, but we are not half the way there, as only a quarter of the goals have been met or are expected to be met that year.” — José Manuel Salazar-Xirinachs
However, the head of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) stressed, in response to a questionnaire submitted to him by IPS, that “the percentage of targets on track to be met is higher than the global average,” partly due to the strengthening of the institutions that lead the governance of the SDGs.
The 17 SDGs include 169 targets, to be measured with 231 indicators, and in the region 75 percent are at risk of not being met, according to ECLAC, unless decisive actions are taken to forge ahead: 48 percent are moving in the right direction but too slowly to achieve the respective targets, and 27 percent are showing a tendency to backslide.
The summit was convened by UN Secretary-General António Guterres for Sept. 18-19 at the United Nations headquarters in New York, under the official name High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development.
The stated purpose is to “step on the gas” to reach the SDGs in all regions, in the context of a combination of crises, notably the COVID-19 pandemic, inflation, new wars, and the climate and food crises.
The SDGs address ending poverty, achieving zero hunger, health and well-being, quality education, gender equality, clean water and sanitation, affordable and clean energy, decent work and economic growth, industry, innovation and infrastructure, and reducing inequalities.
They also are aimed at sustainable cities and communities, responsible production and consumption, climate action, underwater life, life of terrestrial ecosystems, peace, justice and strong institutions, and partnerships to achieve the goals.
Drinking water is distributed from tanker trucks in the working-class Petare neighborhood in eastern Caracas. Access to safe drinking water and sanitation is another of the goals that are being addressed with a great variety of results within Latin American and Caribbean countries, and there is no certainty that this 2030 Agenda target will be reached in the region. CREDIT: Caracas city government
Progress is being made, but slowly
“In all the countries of the region progress is being made, but in many not at the necessary rate. The pace varies greatly and we are not where we would like to be,” Almudena Fernández, chief economist for the region at the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), told IPS from New York.
Thus, said the Peruvian economist, “there is progress, for example, on some health or energy and land care issues, but we are lagging in achieving more sustainable cities, and we are not on the way to achieving, regionally, any of the poverty indicators.”
Salazar-Xirinachs, who is from Costa Rica, said from Santiago that “the countries that have historically been at the forefront in public policies are the ones that have made the greatest progress, such as Uruguay in South America, Costa Rica in Central America or Jamaica in the Caribbean. They have implemented a greater diversity of strategies to achieve the SDGs.”
A group of experts led by U.S. economist Jeffrey Sachs prepared graphs for the UN on how countries in the various developing regions are on track to meet the goals or still face challenges – measured in three grades, from moderate to severe – and whether they are on the road to improvement, stagnation or regression.
According to this study, the best advances in poverty reduction have been seen in Brazil, El Salvador, Guyana, Paraguay, the Dominican Republic and Uruguay, while the greatest setbacks have been observed in Argentina, Belize, Ecuador and Venezuela.
In the fight for zero hunger, no one stands out; Brazil, after making progress, slid backwards in recent years, and the best results are shown by Caribbean countries.
In health and well-being, education and gender equality, there are positive trends, although stagnation has been seen, especially in the Caribbean and Central American countries.
In water and sanitation, energy, reduction of inequalities, economic growth, management of marine areas, terrestrial ecosystems, and justice and institutions, Sachs’ dashboard shows the persistence of numerous obstacles, addressed in very different ways in different countries.
Many countries in Central America and the Caribbean are on track to meet their climate action goals, and in general the region has made progress in forging alliances with other countries and organizations to pave the way to meeting the SDGs.
Young people in a Latin American country share a vegetable-rich meal outdoors. The notion of consuming products produced with environmentally sustainable techniques is gaining ground, and a private sector whose DNA is embedded in the search for positive environmental and social repercussions is flourishing. CREDIT: Pazos / Unicef
Even before the pandemic that broke out in 2020, Fernández said, the region was not moving fast enough towards the SDGs; its economic growth has been very low for a long time – and remains so, at no more than 1.9 percent this year – and growth with investment is needed in order to reduce poverty.
In this regard, Fernández highlighted the need to expand fiscal revenues, since tax collection is very low in the region (22 percent of gross domestic product, compared to 34 percent in the advanced economies of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), “although progress will not be made through public spending alone,” she said.
Salazar-Xirinachs pointed out that “in addition to financial resources, it is very important to adapt actions to specific areas to achieve the 2030 Agenda. The measures implemented at the subnational level are of great importance. Specific problems in local areas cannot always be solved with one-size-fits-all policies.”
Fernández underlined that the 2030 Agenda “has always been conceived as a society-wide agenda, and the private sector plays an essential role, particularly the areas that are flourishing because it has a positive social and environmental impact on their DNA, and there are young consumers who use products made in a sustainable way.”
ECLAC’s Salazar-Xirinachs highlighted sensitized sectors as organized civil society and the private sector, for their participation in sustainable development forums, follow-up actions and public-private partnerships moving towards achievement of the SDGs.
Finally, with respect to expectations for the summit, the head of ECLAC aspires to a movement to accelerate the 2030 Agenda in at least four areas: decent employment for all, generating more sustainable cities, resilient infrastructure that offers more jobs, and improving governance and institutions involved in the process.
ECLAC identified necessary “transformative measures”: early energy transition; boosting the bioeconomy, particularly sustainable agriculture and bioindustrialization; digital transformation for greater connectivity among the population; and promoting exports of modern services.
It also focuses on the care society, in response to demographic trends, to achieve greater gender equality and boost the economy; sustainable tourism, which has great potential in the countries of the region; and integration to enable alliances to strengthen cooperation in the regional bloc.
In summary, ECLAC concludes, “it would be very important that during the Summit these types of measures are identified and translate into agreements in which the countries jointly propose a road map for implementing actions to strengthen them.”