C E B O . org

Posted 2:06 PM by Mary

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The nonbinding Copenhagen Accord is at a critical moment that will decide whether it becomes a mandatory treaty for cutting greenhouse gases, the top U.S. climate official said Thursday.

It will only happen, Todd Stern told a gathering of Wall Street leaders and investors, if the "major players" provide the United Nations by the end of January with their promised plans for reducing carbon emissions by 2020.

'We have an accord that's kind of lumbering down the runway, and we need it to get enough speed so it can take off, the best way to make progress toward a legal agreement is to get the Copenhagen Accord implemented.'

Stern, the U.S. State Department's special envoy for climate change, struck a hopeful note about the uncertain outcome of the U.N. climate conference in the Danish capital in December, in his first public remarks since returning from Copenhagen.

The Copenhagen agreement fell short on specific steps to cool the planet, but urged deeper cuts in emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases blamed for warming the globe. It also set up the first significant program of climate aid to poorer nations and adopted a goal of holding the rise in global temperatures below 2 degrees Celsius. A $30 billion fund over the next three years, scaling up to $100 billion a year by 2020, was a key element.

Labels: climate, copenhagen

Posted 10:10 AM by Mary

Banning trade in Atlantic bluefin tuna is justified by the extent of their decline, an analysis by scientists advising fisheries regulators suggests.

The International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas' (ICCAT) advisers said stocks are probably less than 15% of their original size.The analysis has delighted conservation groups, which have warned that over-fishing risks the species' survival.ICCAT meets to consider the report in 10 days' time.

The analysis was triggered by Monaco's recent proposal to ban international trade in the Atlantic bluefin under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) - a proposal that has gathered support from several other European countries.

"What's needed to save the stocks is a suspension of fishing activity and a suspension of international commercial trade," said Sergi Tudela, head of fisheries with the environmental group WWF for the Mediterranean region.

"We must stop mercilessly exploiting this fragile natural resource until stocks show clear signs of rebound and until sustainable management and control measures are firmly put in place."

Posted 7:07 AM by Mary

Failed States Index Foreign Policy.com

It is a sobering time for the world’s most fragile countries—virulent economic crisis, countless natural disasters, and government collapse. This year, we delve deeper than ever into just what went wrong—and who is to blame.

Yemen may not yet be front-page news, but it’s being watched intently these days in capitals worldwide. A perfect storm of state failure is now brewing there: disappearing oil and water reserves; a mob of migrants, some allegedly with al Qaeda ties, flooding in from Somalia, the failed state next door; and a weak government increasingly unable to keep things running. Many worry Yemen is the next Afghanistan: a global problem wrapped in a failed state.

It’s not just Yemen. The financial crisis was a near-death experience for insurgency-plagued Pakistan, which remains on imf life support. Cameroon has been rocked by economic contagion, which sparked riots, violence, and instability. Other countries dependent on the import and export of commodities—from Nigeria to Equatorial Guinea to Bangladesh—had a similarly rough go of it last year, suffering what economist Homi Kharas calls a “whiplash effect” as prices spiked sharply and then plummeted. All indications are that 2009 will bring little to no reprieve.

Instead, the global recession is sparking fears that multiple states could slip all at once into the ranks of the failing. Now more than ever, failed-state triage could become a grim necessity for world leaders from the United Nations and World Bank to U.S. President Barack Obama’s White House. All of which puts a fine point on an old and uncomfortable dilemma: Whom do you help when so many need it?

This is a sober question for sober times, and it is the backdrop for the fifth annual Failed States Index—a collaboration between The Fund for Peace, an independent research organization, and Foreign Policy. Using 12 indicators of state cohesion and performance, compiled through a close examination of more than 30,000 publicly available sources, we ranked 177 states in order from most to least at risk of failure. The 60 most vulnerable states are listed in the rankings.

Labels: failed states

Posted 7:49 AM by Mary

Breakthrough in fight against malaria
Steve Connor, Science Editor

The fight against malaria has entered a new phase with an insecticide specifically targeted at older mosquitoes, which scientists believe will be more effective than existing pesticides.

Most malaria infections, which kill about one million people a year, result from humans being bitten by older mosquitoes. Yet existing insecticides kill mosquitoes of all ages and, as a result, the chemicals soon become ineffective because the insects develop pesticide resistance. Killing the younger creatures encourages the development of that resistance.

Researchers have begun the development of slow-acting pesticides that kill mosquitoes only after they have reached a certain age in their lifecycle, when they are most likely to transmit the malaria parasite to human hosts.

"If we killed only older mosquitoes we could control malaria and solve the problem of resistant mosquitoes," said Andrew Read, professor of biology and entomology at Penn State University. "It is one of the great ironies of malaria. Most mosquitoes do not live long enough to transmit the disease. To stop malaria, we need to kill only the old mosquitoes."

Female mosquitoes transmit malaria when they feed on blood, which they need to make their eggs. After they pick up a malarial parasite, it takes between 10 and 14 days, or two to six cycles of egg production, for the parasite to migrate to the insect's salivary glands, from where the malarial parasite can be transmitted.

Labels: Malaria, MDGs

Posted 1:24 PM by Mary

ISTANBUL (AFP) - The World Water Forum, a seven-day arena aimed at addressing the planet's deepening crisis of freshwater, was launched here Monday, drawing record-breaking participation by politicians, specialists, corporate executives and activists.

The forum, held only every three years, will address problems of water scarcity, the risk of conflict as countries squabble over rivers, lakes and aquifers, and how to provide clean water and sanitation to billions.

The world's population, currently more than 6.5 billion, is expected to rise to nine billion by mid-century, placing further massive demands on water supplies that are already under strain.

According to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the number of people living under severe water stress is expected to rise to 3.9 billion by 2030, amounting to nearly half the world's population. Most of these will live in China and South Asia.

That tally does not include the impacts of climate change. Global warming may already be affecting weather patterns, changing the time and place where rain and snow fall, say some experts.

Around 2.5 billion people today do not have access to decent sanitation, defying one of the targets of the UN's Millennium Development Goals.

Hydrologists say the crisis is rooted in excessive irrigation, leakage of urban water supplies, pollution of river water and unbridled extraction of water from nearly every type of source.

Labels: MDGs, Water, WWF

Posted 12:39 PM by Mary

Access to land improves women's lives around the world
By Tim Hanstad

WIKIPEDIA tells us that International Women's Day (IWD), celebrated each in March, is "a major day of global celebration for the economic, political and social achievements of women." While the international community has focused on initiatives that create opportunities for women, it is important to recognize those achievements are not equally shared, and much more needs to be done for women mired in poverty.

Many of us in the U.S. don't think much about the direct relationship between land ownership and poverty — and how women are disproportionately affected by lack of land ownership. Women represent 51 percent of the world's population and provide 60 to 80 percent of food production in most developing countries. But they own less than 2 percent of the world's titled land, largely because few have legal rights to land.

Raising awareness about the need for secure land rights for women is a critical component of the work by the Rural Development Institute (RDI), an international nonprofit advocating for secure land rights across the globe.

Labels: Development, gender

Posted 12:38 PM by Mary

UN climate chief: US carbon cuts could spark 'revolution'

The head of the UN body charged with leading the fight against climate change has conceded that Barack Obama will face a "revolution" if he commits the US to the deep carbon cuts that scientists and campaigners say are needed.

Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said domestic political constraints made it impossible for the US president to announce ambitious short-term climate targets similar to those set by Europe. And he questioned the value of a new global climate deal without such a US pledge.

His words come as scientists at the Copenhagen conference said that modest IPCC estimates of likely sea level rise this century need to be increased. Extra melting in Greenland could drive sea levels to more than a metre higher than today by 2100, they said.

Obama has said the US will work to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. Europe has pledged to cut them by 20-30% on 1990 levels by 2020. The IPCC says developed nations should aim for 25-40% cuts by then to avoid dangerous climate change.

Labels: carbon cap, kyoto

Posted 10:17 AM by Mary

On Rights Day: Yes to Social & Economic Rights! by Helena Cobban
December 10, 2008

On this day 60 years ago the UN General Assembly, meeting in Paris, adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That was a signal development. However, the language of the UDHR was kept fairly general and proclamatory. The actual content of the universal rights it proclaimed was spelled out in two subsequent documents, the International Covenants on, respectively, (1) Civil and Political Rights, and (2), Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights.

The United States, to our country's great shame, has never ratified the Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). When Jimmy Carter was president, in 1977, the US did at least sign it. But for the US to become a full party, that signature needs to be ratified by the Senate. By contrast, the US is a longstanding party to the covenant on civil and political rights.

The ICESCR spells out the universal right of all persons to such essential inputs for human wellbeing as a right to work, and the rights to housing, health care, education, and self-determination.

Given the threatening economic prospects that so many US citizens face today, it is more urgent than ever that we raise the demand that our country join the 159 states around the world that are full members of the ICESCR. You can see a map of them at the top of the page here. You can see the full listing of signatories and States Parties (right column), here.

What it would take for our country to become a full member of the ICESCR is that the US Senate should ratify the treaty.

Joining would have a number of clear advantages:

1. First and foremost, it would establish the responsibility of our legislators to establish a social order at home that ensures the protection of the listed rights. Just as all of us in the western human-rights movement hold responsible the governments of poorer, more vulnerable countries when they fail to assure the protection of their citizens' recognized human rights, so too-- and far, far more so!-- should we hold our own government similarly accountable.

Recognized economic and social rights include the right of everyone in the world to:
Article 12: "[T]he enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health."

Art. 7: A living wage, and "Safe and healthy working conditions."

Art. 9: "[S]ocial security, including social insurance."
2. Joining the ICESCR would also enable us to collaborate on an equal footing with rights activists everywhere else in the world as we all work together to try to make these very basic rights truly "universal"-- for Americans and for non-Americans. Until now, US government officials and far too many US-based NGOs have been quite happy to go around the world and "preach" to other governments elsewhere about the need to protect civil and political rights. But these Americans have had far less to say about the need to protect economic, social, and cultural rights. And all this preaching about civil and political rights has been far less effective than it can become once we can present ourselves to people in other countries as a nation that truly works for the full spectrum of the rights derived from the Universal Declaration.

3. Joining would also remind Americans that human rights-- in our country as in all others around the world-- really do come in a single package. There is no way that people in any country can really exercise the kinds of rights listed in the covenant on civil and political rights if they don't have enough to eat, don't have adequate shelter, literacy, or access to phone lines, etc.

... There are two main organizations working here in the US to win ratification of the ICESCR and US adherence to its provisions. They are the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative and the Center for Economic and Social Rights (which has numerous programs aimed at other governments, too.)

Labels: ECOSOC, Human Rights

Posted 7:30 AM by Mary

Girls flee circumcision in Kenya BBC

In some countries, girls tend to drop out of school after being circumcised
At least 300 girls in south-western Kenya have fled from home and sought refuge in churches in a bid to escape forced female genital mutilation (FGM).

The girls, some as young as nine, are at two rescue centres in rural Nyanza province, police told the BBC.Female circumcision is banned in Kenya, but remains common in some areas where it is considered to be part of a girl's initiation into womanhood.

The girls in Kuria District are now in the care of the two churches and Maendeleo Ya Wanawake, a women's organisation.

Police are providing security at the centres to ensure that the girls are not forcibly removed or harassed.Beatrice Robi, Maendeleo Ya Wanawake's district chairperson and a gender activist, says that at least 200 girls are undergoing circumcision in the district a day.She said she had found a seven-year-old girl who had just been circumcised.

"There are more girls who are still in their homes and they are undergoing it [circumcision], whether it is voluntarily or they are being forced," she told the BBC.

Labels: fgm

Posted 6:46 AM by Mary

EU calls for aid to poor nations - BBC

The European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso has called for a 'human rescue' package to help poor countries. Speaking at the opening of a high-level UN conference on aid, Mr Barroso said it would be 'obscene' to neglect the human cost of the global slowdown.

The UN Conference on Financing for Development is meeting in Doha, Qatar to track progress on development aid. There are fears that rich countries will cut back on development aid as a result of the looming recession.

Mr Barroso said that climate change, energy security and trade would add to the potential problems facing poor countries as result of the financial crisis.

The World Bank has said that developing countries are facing a 'perfect storm', with the convergence of slowing growth, a withdrawal of private capital, and higher interest rates on their debt. The Bank says that growth in developing countries will fall by two percentage points to 4.5% next year, as the volume of global trade contracts for the first time since 1982.

But aid agencies have criticised the fact that neither the head of the World Bank or the IMF, or many other world leaders from rich countries, have come to the talks.
"The fact that so few world leaders have chosen to travel to Doha is a real cause for concern," said Ariane Arpa of Oxfam

Six years ago, rich countries pledged to double their aid efforts to ensure that the poor countries reach their millennium development goals of halving poverty by 2015.

But UN figures show that the developed countries have only committed $20bn of the $50bn they promised at the G8 summit in 2005, leaving them far short of the $130bn that will be needed if the millennium development goals are to be met.

Labels: Doha, Ffd, MDGs

Posted 7:41 AM by Mary

For those fortunate enough to see the recent photo exhibit at the UN on violence against women in Nigeria, here is another article on the current attempt to keep gender violence in the news:

RIGHTS: Gender Violence "Pandemic" Highlighted at U.N.
By Nergui Manalsuren

UNITED NATIONS, Nov 25 (IPS) - Activists and U.N. officials called on governments to take stronger action to end violence against women Tuesday, with at least one out of every three women around the world having been beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused in her lifetime -- with the abuser usually someone known to her.

"Perhaps the most pervasive human rights violation that we know today, it devastates lives, fractures communities, and stalls development," and "is a problem of pandemic proportions," notes a report by UNIFEM, the U.N. Development Fund for Women.

More than five million people worldwide have joined UNIFEM's "Say NO to Violence against Women" campaign since its launch in 2007, and added their names to a call to make ending violence a top priority of governments.

"No less than 29 heads of state or government and 188 ministers representing 60 governments have added their names. Over 600 Parliamentarians from more than 70 countries have joined the effort," said Ines Alberdi, the executive director of UNIFEM.

"Now, we must use this momentum to implement laws and policies already in place. Despite the fact that more governments than ever have passed such laws, there is still a wide implementation gap," she emphasised.

"We urge the adoption of accountability standards with minimal standards of protection and response, such as prompt police response, health and legal services, shelters and safe options for women surviving or fleeing life-threatening situations, national hotlines, available 24 hours a day, and accountable judiciary and national action plans," she said.

Alberdi added that the U.N. Trust Fund to End Violence against Women, which UNIFEM manages on behalf of the U.N. system, will have provided new grants amounting to more than 19 million dollars in 2008.

This was more than the total disbursed through the Trust Fund since its inception in 1996.

One of grantees of UNIFEM is Marie Nyombo Zaina, coordinator of National Network of NGOs for Women's Development (RENADEF), Democratic Republic of Congo. She said that in the DRC, abuses are committed against women and children as a way to pacify combatants and soldiers, and provide them with sexual services.

"I am myself a victim of violence. During the second year of my graduate studies, my father forced me into polygamous marriage. I was beaten up virtually every day," she told reporters.

After fleeing her husband, she completed her graduate studies in South Kivu, and founded a group titled "Action for the Promotion and Defence of the Child and the Women," which later evolved into RENADEF. "However," she said, "women's organisations taking on the fight against violence and the spread of HIV/AIDS are not very popular. They don't receive the same funds as those led by men."

She said that funding from UNIFEM has allowed her help women like Madame Nadine from Goma, in the province of North Kivu, who was gang-raped by armed individuals in front of her husband and her four children.According to Zaina, they also gang-raped her two daughters aged 14 and 16 years. Later, they killed her husband and the two boys and took the two daughters with them to the mountains."Desperate, depressed, and inconsolable, Madame Nadine was welcomed into a RENADEF shelter where she is receiving support and care and undergoing psychological rehabilitation," said Zaina.

She stressed that in order to help more survivors such as Nadine, they must confront challenges like ending impunity; increasing the number of trained legal personnel in the judicial sector, and providing shelter, medical treatment and care for victims.

As one of the biggest supporters of initiatives on violence against women, the Netherlands contributed eight million dollars to the U.N. Trust Fund, and is planning to spend about 60 million euros for this cause over the next three years.

Labels: gender, UNIFEM, violence again women

Posted 7:51 PM by Mary

Annan says financial crisis must not undermine action on hunger
16 Oct 2008 Megan Rowling

DUBLIN, Oct 16 (AlertNet) - Former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said on Thursday the global financial crisis threatened to undermine political will to tackle hunger in poor nations but warned it must not be used as "an excuse for inaction".

"The food crisis of recent months is now compounded by the global financial crisis. While national governments and international lenders scramble to inject hundreds of billions of dollars into failing banks, the developing world goes hungry," he said in a speech at an international conference hosted by aid agency Concern Worldwide to mark World Food Day. "This is simply unacceptable. We must do something to reverse the strain," he said.

While Africa was unlikely to be directly hit by the credit crunch, it would be affected by "a serious economic downturn" and the poor would be the first to suffer, he told reporters. "My position is that the financial crisis is a serious one, and deserves urgent attention and focus, but so is the question of hunger, and millions (are) likely to die. Is that any less urgent?" he said.

Last week, the World Bank predicted that high food and fuel prices would increase the number of malnourished people in the world by 44 million this year to reach a total of 967 million.

Annan said wealthy governments would be told by their voters they should deal with problems at home, such as rising unemployment and shaky banks, and that would make it harder for them to keep to their aid commitments. But he urged leaders to stick to their promises of boosting aid to help poor farmers grow more food, questioning how much of the $12 billion promised at a U.N. food summit in June had actually been delivered...

"We should also use this crisis to come up with effective reforms of the world system, and we need to ensure that the poor will not be short-changed," he argued...

Development economist Jeffrey Sachs, who advises the U.N. secretary general, told reporters he was pessimistic about the future, given the lack of progress even when the food crisis had made headlines earlier this year.

"Structurally there has been no breakthrough in response, taking the world scene as a whole, and there are reasons to believe that on the current business-as-usual trajectory things will get worse...because of rises in population, more climate shocks, more environmental degradation, and lack of ability of the very poor places to respond adequately," he warned.

But Rwanda's state minister for agriculture, Agnes Kalibata, said that if African countries did receive enough support to develop agriculture, both from international donors and their own leaders, they could start to export food rather than relying on aid.

"With the response we've seen to the financial crisis, surely a considered effort like that can bail out Africa," she told the conference. "Given the right kind of help, Africa can be a good trading partner, and then we won't need to beg."

Labels: Food prices, hunger, MDGs

Posted 7:47 PM by Mary

Women need empowerment in fight against AIDS - UN
17 Oct 2008
BEIJING, Oct 17 (Reuters) - Women must be more involved in the fight against HIV/AIDS, a disease increasingly being spread through sex, and men must also be encouraged to respect women more, a senior U.N. official said on Friday.

Nafis Sadik, U.N. special envoy for HIV/AIDS in the Asia-Pacific region, told a poverty alleviation conference in Beijing that lack of respect for women was helping drive the spread of the virus.

"Gender-based violence and discrimination on grounds of gender drive the HIV and AIDS epidemic among women. Empowerment of women -- equipping them with self-esteem, the knowledge, the ability to protect themselves -- will be of critical importance in winning the battle," Sadik said.

"Women suffer doubly. First, from HIV and AIDS itself, and secondly from the stigma associated with the disease. Women are routinely blamed for infecting their husbands, though it is almost always the men who infect their wives," she said.

In Asia, at least 75 million men regularly buy sex from about 10 million female sex workers, she said. "The results of male behaviour can be seen in changing patterns of infection. Today, about one-third of all people living with HIV in China are women, compared with one in 10 in 1995," Sadik said.

In August, U.N officials at a major AIDS conference in Mexico warned that rising food prices around the world were likely to drive poor women to trade sex for basic goods like fish and cooking oil, raising the risk of new AIDS infections.

Sadik said that she hoped China's predominantly male politicians would get more involved in spreading the safe sex message. About 700,000 people live with HIV/AIDS in China and it is now mainly transmitted through sex.

"China must enlist the support of its male leadership and men generally, encouraging them to adopt consistently responsible sexual behaviour, and ensuring that they respect their partners, and all women, as equals," she said. (Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Nick Macfie and Paul Tait)

Labels: AIDS, Cedaw

Posted 11:03 AM by Mary

Ocean "dead zones" spread, fish more at risk-study
29 Sep 2008 21:10:46 GMT Source: Reuters
By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

OSLO, Sept 29 (Reuters) - The number of polluted "dead zones" in the world's oceans is rising fast and coastal fish stocks are more vulnerable to collapse than previously feared, scientists said on Monday.

The spread of "dead zones" -- areas of oxygen-starved water -- "is emerging as a major threat to coastal ecosystems globally," the scientists wrote in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Such zones are found from the Gulf of Mexico to the Baltic Sea in areas where algae bloom and suck oxygen from the water, feeding on fertilisers washed from fields, sewage, animal wastes and pollutants from the burning of fossil fuels.

"Marine organisms are more vulnerable to low oxygen content than currently recognised, with fish and crustaceans being the most vulnerable," said Raquel Vaquer Suner of the Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Studies in Spain.

"The number of reported hypoxic (low oxygen) zones is growing globally at a rate of 5 percent a year," she told Reuters.

Labels: Food prices, oceans

Posted 9:24 AM by Mary

Social injustice 'killing on a grand scale': WHO
28/08/2008 12h55 ©AFP/File - Joel Nito

GENEVA (AFP) - A "toxic combination" of poverty and social injustice is killing people on a grand scale, a World Health Organisation report said Thursday, urging states to fund healthcare to cut inequalities.

The Commission on the Social Determinants of Health, a report commissioned by the WHO and chaired by Sir Michael Marmot of University College London, said these health inequalities were avoidable but only if concerted efforts were made by governments and civil society.

"Reducing health inequities is an ethical imperative. Social injustice is killing people on a grand scale," the report said.

Marmot told journalists that a girl born in Zambia can expect to live 43 years, while one born in Japan can expect to live twice as long, to 86 years.

"There is no good biological reason why this should be the case," he said, instead pointing the finger at social factors that give rise to such a gaping disparity.

"These health inequalities are preventable. They arise from the circumstances in which people are born, grow, live, work and age -- the social determinants of health," he said.

"Taking action to deal with preventable causes of illness means taking social action... a toxic combination of poor social policies, unfair economic arrangements and bad politics is responsible," he added.

Health care must remain within the public sphere and universally available regardless of people's ability to pay, he said.

"The Commission considers health care a common good, not a market commodity," the report said.
A girl born in Zambia has a life expectancy of only 43 years
©AFP/File - Alexander Joe

"The Commission advocates financing the health-care system through general taxation and/or mandatory universal insurance ... the evidence is compellingly in favour of a publicly funded health-care system," it added.

Labels: health, MDGs, WHO