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Profits vs. Disaster in Arctic Meltdown
Hubbard glacier in Seward, Alaska. Credit: Bigstock
Many eyes are turning north to the Arctic, some in horror at the rapid decline of a key component of our life support system, others in eager anticipation at the untapped resources beneath the vanishing snow and ice.
“I’ve worked in the north for 21 years and the scale and speed of change up there is astonishing,” said Douglas Clark of the University of Saskatchewan."This has and will have spectacular consequences for the rest of the world." -- Sarah Cornell of the Stockholm Resilience Center
“These changes, taken as whole, and reflected in our report, keep me awake at night,” Clark told IPS.
Rapid and even abrupt changes are occurring on multiple fronts across the Arctic, according to the Arctic Resilience Report (ARR).
And what happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic.
“It’s the first international report to tell the world to buckle up, we’re on a wild roller coaster ride and we don’t know what’s coming,” he said.
The ARR report is a two-year collaboration between experts in the Nordic countries, Russia, Canada and the United States, and includes indigenous perspectives. It is a cutting edge assessment of how changes in climate, ecosystems, economics, and society interact.
The report was prepared for and released at the Arctic Council Ministerial Meeting in Kiruna, Sweden on Wednesday.
“What is happening in the Arctic has profound implications for every part of the world,” said Sarah Cornell, lead author of the study.
Global warming is not only melting snow and ice, it is warming the Arctic ocean and the surrounding lands. Seasons are changing, permafrost is thawing, new species are invading, Arctic species are struggling, lakes are vanishing, and rivers are being redirected by the melting landscape, the report documents.
Some Arctic ecosystems are undergoing catastrophic changes, and some of these are large-scale and irreversible, Cornell, a scientist at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, told IPS.
While the Arctic is as remote as the moon for many people, it is intimately interconnected with the rest of the world. Weather is driven largely by the cold Arctic and Antarctic regions balanced by the hot tropics. But the Arctic is rapidly defrosting – last summer the sea ice shrunk to half of what it was less than 30 years ago. The ice decline and the heating up of the Arctic have been accelerating in recent years.
“This has and will have spectacular consequences for the rest of the world. We don’t know what they’ll all be,” Cornell said.
The Arctic is home to cultures and species found nowhere else and they can’t go any further north to escape the rising temperatures. It is a real struggle to survive, said Tero Mustonen, president of Snowchange Cooperative, a network of local and indigenous cultures around the world.
“The Arctic is undergoing fundamental changes. Moose are showing up in the tundra for the first time along with new insects, plants and even trees,” Mustonen told IPS from his home in northern Finland.
Mustonen, a co-author of the ARR, works with Chukchi reindeer herding communities from northeastern Siberia who have roamed those remote lands for hundreds of the years. Like many indigenous communities living on the land, they have a deep ecological, cultural and spiritual connection to their landscape. And that landscape is changing so much they sometimes don’t recognise their own home, he said.
“The Chukchi don’t easily share their thoughts. But the elders have a clear and powerful message to convey to the world: ‘Nature doesn’t trust humans any more’.”
However, the focus of the eight-nation Arctic Council was primarily on future shipping opportunities, access to oil, gas and mineral resources, and geopolitics, with China, Japan, India, South Korea, Singapore and Italy granted observer status on the Council while Canada blocked the European Union’s application.
The Council is the world’s main international forum on northern issues and will be led by Canada for the next two years. Canada said it will focus on economic development. Estimates show that the region may have 13 percent of the world’s undiscovered oil, 30 percent of undiscovered gas deposits, and vast quantities of mineral resources.
The Council’s much-lauded scientific research will now be focused on how to develop northern resources for the benefit of northerners. Canada recently drew criticism for re-directing its own scientific research to supporting business and industry.
Secretary of State John Kerry represented the U.S. at the Arctic Council, demonstrating Washington’s renewed interest in the Arctic. The White House also released its new National Strategy for the Arctic Region. While acknowledging the profound impacts of global warming on the region and indigenous people, the U.S. strategy says the region will help to supply U.S. energy needs well into the future.
At the meeting, members adopted an agreement on marine oil pollution preparedness. Some indigenous and environmental groups urged the Council to place a moratorium on drilling for oil in the Arctic given the dangerous conditions and difficulties of clean up.
Greenpeace International said the oil pollution agreement offered no specific practical minimum standards and had no provisions to hold companies liable for the full costs and damages.
“There were two conferences going on here — one that warned of the dangers of climate change and rapid industrialisation in this fragile region, and another, attended by foreign ministers, that took almost no concrete steps to address them,” said Ruth Davis, Greenpeace International senior policy advisor.
Arctic peoples aren’t necessarily opposed to economic development but they do want to be in control of what happens. However, Arctic nations and local communities are at very different stages. In Finland and Russia, indigenous people have no official land or water rights, unlike Canada or Alaska, said Mustonen.
“The rights and cultures of indigenous peoples in these regions have to be taken seriously in order to integrate their needs into any form of development,” he said.
South Asia in Search of Coordinated Climate Policy
A man carries water through a busy alley in Kathmandu. Experts say water management is vital in South Asia due to erratic rain patterns. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS
With a combined population of over 1.7 billion, which includes some of the world’s poorest but also a sizeable middle class with a growing spending capacity, South Asia is a policymaker’s nightmare.
The region’s urban population is set to double by 2030, with India alone adding 90 million city dwellers to its metropolises since 2000.
Over 75 percent of South Asia’s residents live in rural areas, with agriculture accounting for 60 percent of the labour force, according to recent statistics released by the World Bank.
Thus the impact of changing weather patterns on this region is staggering.
In Sri Lanka, an island of 20 million, close to two million have been affected by prolonged drought and intermittent yet deadly floods in the last year.
When Cyclone Nilam slammed Southern India last November it left half a million hectares of agricultural land in tatters, over 1,300 small tanks damaged and an estimated 7,000 kilometres of roadways in dire need of repairs – all from just four days of heavy ran.
South Asia has always been a climatic hot spot. According to Pramod Aggarwal, South Asia principal researcher and regional programme leader for agriculture and food security for the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), over 70 percent of the region is prone to drought, 12 percent to floods and eight percent to cyclones.
“Climate stress has always been normal (here); climate change will make things worse,” he said.
The fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that possible long-term impacts on the region include melting of glaciers in the Himalayas leading to intense flooding; coastal erosion as a result of sea-level rise; and enourmous stress on limited natural resources to support a growing urban population.
“South Asia is a very complex, complicated, vulnerable region,” Ganesh Shah, Nepal’s former minister of science and technology, told IPS, adding that as the effects of changing climate patterns increase, he and other policymakers will be forced to put political mistrust aside to achieve a common action plan.
W L Sumathipala, former head of Sri Lanka’s national Climate Change Unit and current advisor to the ministry of environment, told IPS the region is looking at a “very significant policy shift” towards better communication and sharing of technical know-how, to find common solutions to global warming.
Lessons in the agricultural sector
As warmer weather and ever more frequent natural disasters batter this region, populations have been forced to improvise and innovate in order to survive.
Aggarwal cited the example of Indian apple farmers discovering new growing areas on higher grounds in the northern state of Himachal Pradesh, after rising temperatures drove them from their traditional farmlands.
He also pointed out that moderate increases in carbon dioxide concentrations can result in 20 to 30-percent higher yields of plants categorised as “C3” such as wheat, rice, potatoes or yams, all of which make up large portions of the South Asian diet.
Still, these “advantages” will be manifest only in the short term, until around 2030, after which point we can “expect a larger negative impact,” he said.
Meanwhile, rising temperatures could lead to yield losses of between seven and 10 percent for other, less resistant, crop varieties. Bleaker forecasts predict that many South Asian crops will experience 30 percent decreases in yield by the middle of this century.
To avoid this scenario, Aggarwal feels that research generated through such agencies as the New Delhi-based Indian Agricultural Research Institute – with its controlled environment facilities that recreate possible future climate scenarios and assess the real-time impact on crops – needs to be shared.
“We have to understand the opportunities and exploit them,” the scientist said, adding that the impact of changing climate patterns is likely to be more pronounced in tropical countries, which will also experience food shortages.
For years South Asia has been teetering on the brink of a food crisis: according to John Stein, sector director for sustainable development for the South Asia region of the World Bank, the region is already home to half the stunted and wasted children in the world. This will likely increase as a result of climate change.
Thus Aggarwal also stressed that “preventive action” is needed, such as identifying crops that can perform better under warmer temperatures and new locations for growing climate-resistant crops. This information must then be quickly disseminated, he said.
Water, water everywhere
Besides agriculture, another major issue for the region is water management, which will have to be urgently addressed in light of “changing monsoon patterns,” Sumathipala said. Already, 20 percent of the region’s residents do not have access to safe, clean water.
Water management becomes even more complex in the Indian Subcontinent where rivers flow across national boundaries, such as the Ganges, which originates in the Indian Himalayas and flows through Bangladesh before emptying into the Bay of Bengal.
Sumathipala believes better sharing of monsoon-related forecasts, generated mostly in India, could be a first step towards greater climate security in the region. Just last month the Indian Meteorological Department announced that it was enhancing its pre-monsoon forecasting capacities.
South Asia is also under threat from short-lived climate pollutants (SLCPs) such as black carbon, which have a shorter life span than CO2 but are thought to be responsible for about a third of current global warming.
According to the World Bank, black carbon “also influences cloud formation and impacts regional circulation and rainfall patterns such as the monsoon in South Asia,” as well as outdoor air pollution.
“The four countries with the highest air pollution impact on human health,” wrote World Bank Senior Economist Maria Sarraf earlier this month, “are all in South Asia: India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Pakistan.”
South Asia currently accounts for around 10 percent of global emissions, of which India is responsible for between seven and eight percent.
Despite all this evidence on the need for stronger regional cooperation, experts like Shah know how difficult it is to get countries to come together. Platforms have already been put in place, especially through bodies like the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), but very little has been achieved.
He puts the lack of action down to lack of pressure, stressing, “Climate activists need to be raising this (issue) at each SAARC summit,” the last of which concluded in Addu City, the southernmost atoll of the Maldives, in 2011.
Rafsanjani’s Presidential Bid Elicits Hope, Scorn
The last-minute entry of former president and current chair of the Expediency Council Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani into the presidential polls set for Jun. 14 has inspired vastly different reactions in a conflicted Iran.
Chair of the Expediency Council Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Credit: Amir Farshad Ebrahimi/cc by 2.0
Those calling for change hail his candidacy as a hopeful sign. Deeming his entry a response to serious societal demands, even many reformists think that as a centrist, Rafsanjani is the best choice for changing the direction the country has taken under the eight-year presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Prior to his decision to enter the fray, representatives of many groups, including the business community and university students and professors, had met and appealed to Rafsanjani to run. Even many reformists and supporters of former president Mohammad Khatami thought that Rafsanjani would be a better candidate to challenge the conservatives’ hold over the country.
Ali, one of the protesters who took to the streets after the 2009 disputed election, considers Rafsanjani the best choice since “he is faithful to the foundations of the Islamic Republic and [the 1979] revolution and also has sufficient personal power to create not only a balance in the relations between the president and the Leader [Ayatollah Ali Khamenei], but also return the country to a normal situation with the collaboration of the latter.”
Likewise, many in the business community see Rafsanjani as the right person to rectify what they consider to be the “economic mess” Ahmadinejad’s administration has created.
One source, who spoke with IPS on condition of anonymity, said, “Hashemi [Rafsanjani] has the experience of reconstruction after the [Iran-Iraq] War, and the current destruction is nothing less and perhaps even more than the destruction during the war, and there is a need for someone who can take charge of the situation.”
In a statement issued Wednesday, former president Khatami also described the country’s situation as critical in the face of the lack of popular trust in the government and the external threats that confront it. He called on his supporters to “understand this historical moment… and stand on Mr. Hashemi’s side.”
But this is only one face of Iran. Rafsanjani’s entry has so disrupted the calculations of his opponents in the conservative camp that they spared no time in attacking him and his record in unprecedented terms.
If, in the 2005 and 2009 elections, it was only Ahmadinejad who spoke against Rafsanjani, now many potential conservative candidates are using anything they can get their hands on to attack him, even suggesting, in some cases, that they are doing so on Khamenei’s behalf or to protect the Leader against the threat posed by Rafsanjani’s candidacy.
One of those potential candidates, Tehran Mayor Mohammad Baqer Ghalibaf, who used to be a member of the Revolutionary Guard (IRGC), went so far as characterising Rafsanjani’s return as “militarism”. He did not explain what the phrase meant precisely, but described Rafsanjani’s conduct since the end of his presidency in 1997 as wholly negative.
“In the debates, Mr. Rafsanjani has to explain his conduct to the people for the past 16 years,” he asserted, apparently referring to the alleged challenges Rafsanjani has posed to Khamenei’s authority.
Gholamali Haddad Adel, another potential candidate who is deemed close to the Leader, implied in an interview with Fars News that Rafsanjani has been engaged in “sedition” and said that his supporters are the same ones who voted for opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mussavi in 2009 and then attempted to undermine the system by protesting against the results of the disputed election.
Even Ali Akbar Velayati, who served as Rafsanjani’s loyal foreign minister during his presidency, accused his former boss of not taking “the position he should have taken” in 2009 and “in those circumstances not remaining on the side of the Leader.”
Given the support and excitement Rafsanjani’s candidacy has generated among various groups, these reactions are hardly unexpected. No one doubts that his entry will impact the race in significant ways. Although public opinion polls taken inside Iran are not considered reliable due to the lack of transparency regarding their methodology, one conducted by Iran Student News Agency (ISNA) suggested that Rafsanjani had moved past Khatami and others in terms of popularity as a candidate by receiving the support of 30.5 percent of over 10,000 respondents.
But while criticism of Rafsanjani is considered fair game, the question of whether Ayatollah Khamenei actually approves of the extent to which conservative candidates are questioning Rafsanjani’s loyalty to the Islamic Republic is a source of great speculation. After all, as the Khamenei-appointed chair of the Expediency Council, Rafsanjani remains a high-ranking official. Accusing him of sedition in such a public manner is unusual even for the raucous politics of the Islamic Republic.
This is why some close observers of Iranian politics are not convinced that Khamenei has given the green light for such destructive criticism. At the same time, his silence has opened the path for everyone to attack.
According to a Tehran University political science professor who spoke to IPS on the condition of anonymity, Khamenei’s silence has allowed “those who want to climb the ladder of power to think that the easiest way to move up is to claim absolute obedience to the Leader and then use that as a prop to attack their political opponents, many of whom are long-standing and experienced officials of the Islamic Republic.”
Rafsanjani seems aware of this phenomenon and, in his first statement after registering his candidacy, lamented tactics that have forced “experienced managers of the Islamic Republic to sit at home.” In this statement he identified his campaign slogan as e’tedal Alavi (“moderation” with Alavi being a reference to the political conduct of the first Shi’ite Imam Ali) and thus affirmed his apparent intent to bring many of those managers and officials back into the government.
This call for moderation against the “extremism” that has taken hold of the country also appeals to a number of traditional conservatives with strong ties to the business and clerical communities. Many of them have also been pushed out of power during Ahmadinejad’s tenure.
Indeed, one conservative politician who did not want to be identified questioned the charges being made by his colleagues that are amplified in the media, insisting that Rafsanjani’s return does not pose a serious threat to Iran’s Leader.
“Despite the different views that Mr. Hashemi has, he will maintain respect for the position and standing of the Leader. But temperament-wise he is the only one able to bring back equilibrium to the power system of the Islamic Republic,” the politician said.
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Mexican Communities Sue Pemex for Environmental Justice
Fed up with oil spills from facilities belonging to Mexico’s state oil company Pemex, residents of two communities in the southeastern state of Tabasco are taking the country’s largest company to court in a bid for compensation for damage to the environment and agriculture.
The people of Cunduacán and Huimanguillo, which have a combined population of 300,000, will present a class action lawsuit against Pemex in June.
Oil rigs and pumps. Credit: Bigstock
“There have been several harmful effects; we have carried out tests on soils, sediments and water and we are about to receive the results,” Marisa Jacott, the head of Fronteras Comunes (Common Borders), an environmental NGO, told IPS.
Fronteras Comunes and the Asociación Ecológica Santo Tomás (Santo Tomás Ecological Association) are providing legal advice to the local population, mainly small farmers and fisherfolk, who have incurred great losses due to oil spills and gas explosions.
Mexico’s 2011 Class Action Law allows individuals and the federal consumer protection agency to sue state and private companies. However, the law does not provide for reparations.
The oil industry has been active in Tabasco since the early 1950s, and expanded there from the 1970s onwards with the construction of petrochemical plants, pipeline networks and storage facilities, sparking an economic boom.
But the boom did not result in benefits for the local communities. Instead, the oil industry displaced traditional activities like banana farming and cattle ranching.
The oil industry is active in 13 of Tabasco’s 17 municipalities, producing 500,000 barrels per day (bpd) – of a national total of 2.5 million bpd – according to the Mexican Petroleum Institute (IMP).
“There is environmental pollution and crop destruction, and there are soils that have lost their fertility. This means that harvests are not as abundant as they were before,” Lorena Sánchez, head of the Tabasco Human Rights Committee (CODEHUTAB), an NGO that has received complaints from local people about these problems, told IPS.
“It has affected people’s diets and caused respiratory health problems as well as blood and skin diseases,” she said.
Since 2011, CODEHUTAB has brought four lawsuits to the federal environmental protection agency, PROFEPA, that have resulted in fines for Pemex, but not in reparations for victims in local communities.
The most recent case, this year, was related to seven gas flares burning in the municipality of Paraíso, where CODEHUTAB took blood samples from 50 children between the ages of seven and 15. Ten percent of the samples had chromosome alterations, linked by the epidemiologists to oil industry activity.
PROFEPA estimates there are an average of 20 crude spills a year in Tabasco. Between 2008 and 2012, the environment ministry recorded 102 sites contaminated by environmental emergencies in the country caused by Pemex, including three in Tabasco.
In addition to Tabasco, the eastern and southeastern states of Veracruz, Tamaulipas, Hidalgo and Puebla and the highways connecting them to Mexico City are regarded as vulnerable to oil industry activity.
The oil industry in this region produces pollution with heavy metals, ozone, sulphur dioxide, nitric oxide, volatile aromatic compounds like benzene, hydrogen sulphide, salts, ammonia, cadmium and acids, all of which are harmful to the environment and human health, the NGOs complain.
Manuel Pinkus-Rendón and Alicia Contreras, academic researchers at the Autonomous University of Yucatán, concluded in a study published last year that “the social and environmental fabric of Tabasco reflects a regional development potential considerably below that which existed over 60 years ago, as a result of environmental degradation.”
For their study “Impacto socioambiental de la industria petrolera en Tabasco: el caso de Chontalpa” (Social and environmental impact of the oil industry in Tabasco: The case of Chontalpa), the authors interviewed 200 residents of four towns in the municipality of Cárdenas, 65 percent of whom expressed negative views about oil industry activity, especially because of the pollution and destruction it causes.
“It is a case that has not been addressed. We want the judges to have the fewest possible reasons to reject it,” said Jacott, of Fronteras Comunes.
In April, the local residents presented a complaint to the National Commission on Human Rights. In 2004 they had filed a legal complaint against Pemex in the attorney general’s office, but it went nowhere.
The environmental organisations and local residents have spent two years building their case. The next step will be legal action over damage suffered in the adjacent state of Veracruz, another major oil-producing region.
“We want them to take the required preventive measures. All Pemex does is supposedly carry out remediation of the damage, but it does not invest in maintaining the pipelines and guarding the area,” CODEHUTAB’s Sánchez complained.
The organisations are asking for an assessment of the state of ecosystems in Tabasco, and the dissemination of Pemex’s policies and guidelines for preventing leaks, addressing environmental contingencies and cleaning up polluted sites.
They are also calling for the gradual replacement of fossil fuels with alternative energy sources, as well as regular measurements of the main atmospheric pollutants in affected areas.
Mexican Communities Sue Pemex for Environmental Justice
Fed up with oil spills from facilities belonging to Mexico’s state oil company Pemex, residents of two communities in the southeastern state of Tabasco are taking the country’s largest company to court in a bid for compensation for damage to the environment and agriculture.
The people of Cunduacán and Huimanguillo, which have a combined population of 300,000, will present a class action lawsuit against Pemex in June.
Oil rigs and pumps. Credit: Bigstock
“There have been several harmful effects; we have carried out tests on soils, sediments and water and we are about to receive the results,” Marisa Jacott, the head of Fronteras Comunes (Common Borders), an environmental NGO, told IPS.
Fronteras Comunes and the Asociación Ecológica Santo Tomás (Santo Tomás Ecological Association) are providing legal advice to the local population, mainly small farmers and fisherfolk, who have incurred great losses due to oil spills and gas explosions.
Mexico’s 2011 Class Action Law allows individuals and the federal consumer protection agency to sue state and private companies. However, the law does not provide for reparations.
The oil industry has been active in Tabasco since the early 1950s, and expanded there from the 1970s onwards with the construction of petrochemical plants, pipeline networks and storage facilities, sparking an economic boom.
But the boom did not result in benefits for the local communities. Instead, the oil industry displaced traditional activities like banana farming and cattle ranching.
The oil industry is active in 13 of Tabasco’s 17 municipalities, producing 500,000 barrels per day (bpd) – of a national total of 2.5 million bpd – according to the Mexican Petroleum Institute (IMP).
“There is environmental pollution and crop destruction, and there are soils that have lost their fertility. This means that harvests are not as abundant as they were before,” Lorena Sánchez, head of the Tabasco Human Rights Committee (CODEHUTAB), an NGO that has received complaints from local people about these problems, told IPS.
“It has affected people’s diets and caused respiratory health problems as well as blood and skin diseases,” she said.
Since 2011, CODEHUTAB has brought four lawsuits to the federal environmental protection agency, PROFEPA, that have resulted in fines for Pemex, but not in reparations for victims in local communities.
The most recent case, this year, was related to seven gas flares burning in the municipality of Paraíso, where CODEHUTAB took blood samples from 50 children between the ages of seven and 15. Ten percent of the samples had chromosome alterations, linked by the epidemiologists to oil industry activity.
PROFEPA estimates there are an average of 20 crude spills a year in Tabasco. Between 2008 and 2012, the environment ministry recorded 102 sites contaminated by environmental emergencies in the country caused by Pemex, including three in Tabasco.
In addition to Tabasco, the eastern and southeastern states of Veracruz, Tamaulipas, Hidalgo and Puebla and the highways connecting them to Mexico City are regarded as vulnerable to oil industry activity.
The oil industry in this region produces pollution with heavy metals, ozone, sulphur dioxide, nitric oxide, volatile aromatic compounds like benzene, hydrogen sulphide, salts, ammonia, cadmium and acids, all of which are harmful to the environment and human health, the NGOs complain.
Manuel Pinkus-Rendón and Alicia Contreras, academic researchers at the Autonomous University of Yucatán, concluded in a study published last year that “the social and environmental fabric of Tabasco reflects a regional development potential considerably below that which existed over 60 years ago, as a result of environmental degradation.”
For their study “Impacto socioambiental de la industria petrolera en Tabasco: el caso de Chontalpa” (Social and environmental impact of the oil industry in Tabasco: The case of Chontalpa), the authors interviewed 200 residents of four towns in the municipality of Cárdenas, 65 percent of whom expressed negative views about oil industry activity, especially because of the pollution and destruction it causes.
“It is a case that has not been addressed. We want the judges to have the fewest possible reasons to reject it,” said Jacott, of Fronteras Comunes.
In April, the local residents presented a complaint to the National Commission on Human Rights. In 2004 they had filed a legal complaint against Pemex in the attorney general’s office, but it went nowhere.
The environmental organisations and local residents have spent two years building their case. The next step will be legal action over damage suffered in the adjacent state of Veracruz, another major oil-producing region.
“We want them to take the required preventive measures. All Pemex does is supposedly carry out remediation of the damage, but it does not invest in maintaining the pipelines and guarding the area,” CODEHUTAB’s Sánchez complained.
The organisations are asking for an assessment of the state of ecosystems in Tabasco, and the dissemination of Pemex’s policies and guidelines for preventing leaks, addressing environmental contingencies and cleaning up polluted sites.
They are also calling for the gradual replacement of fossil fuels with alternative energy sources, as well as regular measurements of the main atmospheric pollutants in affected areas.
With Billions of Euros Pledged, Mali Risks Aid Overflow
International donors pledged yesterday to mobilise 3.25 billion Euros to rebuild Mali, a figure that surpassed all expectations. But experts warn that the country does not have the absorption capacity for so much aid, while others say donors should pressure the Malian government to stop ongoing human rights abuses.
In January of this year, a French-led intervention ended more than a year of sectarian violence in the north of Mali. The intervention managed to stall the conflict, but the situation in the region remains tense.
More than 467,000 people, around one third of the population in the north, are currently displaced, and the United Nations announced on Tuesday that it needs at least 222 million Euros to address immediate food and other humanitarian needs.
Northern Mali is also facing its second food crisis in two years, the country’s economy is in decline, and over the last year it fell to one of the five poorest countries in the world, according to the United Nations (U.N.) Human Development Index.
The 3.25 billion Euros were pledged by the international community at a donor conference in Brussels yesterday for the reconstruction of this West African country. The high level meeting, organised by the European Union and France, together with Mali, welcomed 100 delegates from countries, regional organisations, U.N. agencies, EU member states and other development partners.
Pledges were made on the basis of the “Plan for the Sustainable Recovery of Mali, 2013-2014″, presented by the Malian government, which says that an amount of 4.343 billion Euros is needed to fully implement the plan.
Aid agencies and non-governmental organisations were careful in welcoming the influx of aid, however. “These pledges need to be seen as a down payment and not a one-off cheque,” Marietou Diaby, Malian country director for the NGO Oxfam, said in a press release following the meeting."These pledges need to be seen as a down payment and not a one-off cheque."
-- Marietou Diaby,
“Donors must now support a new development contract between the people of Mali and their government which tackles poverty, corruption and inequality – issues that lie at the heart of the crisis,” Diaby noted, adding that crises such as Afghanistan and Somalia show that winning a military conflict is never enough to achieve sustainable peace and security.
EU officials in the field have also expressed concern about the enormous amount of money about to flow into a country that is not yet ready for it. According to one official, who requested anonymity, “The country does not have the absorption capacity yet. Other issues have to be dealt with first.”
“Donors want to move quickly, get the country back on its feet and show results as quickly as possible,” Tidhar Wald, EU conflict and humanitarian policy advisor at Oxfam Brussels, explained.
“But if we inject this amount of money, without proper guarantees in terms of sources management and transparency, into a country that is poorly governed, services are not functioning and some parts of society are benefiting more than others, the situation will hardly get any better,” Wald cautioned.
Just ahead of yesterday’s high-level meeting, Oxfam published a report stressing the need for smart development aid. “The Brussels meeting was intended to bring Mali back to normal,” Wald told IPS, “but even before the rebellion in the north started, Mali was in a crisis.”
“Its society has been eroding for decades because of previous ethnic conflicts, corruption, lack of transparency and other governance issues,” he described. “There needs to be a new contract between the Malian government and its people. The reconstruction plan needs to be inclusive; all Malians should benefit from it.”
“We have to make sure that the government is made accountable to its people, that people can influence decision making, that civil society is part of the decision-making process,” Wald concluded.
According to Oxfam’s report, donors should commit to providing aid at least for the next 15 years, the amount of time needed to successfully undertake necessary government reforms and tackle the root causes of poverty. This time frame, however, stands in stark contrast with the two years mentioned in the Malian government’s reconstruction plan.
Other experts also point to the fact the conflict in Mali is not over yet and human rights violations persist. On Tuesday, Amnesty International accused government forces of carrying out extrajudicial executions in the north. Islamic militants have been reported recruiting child soldiers and killing civilians and wounding government soldiers.
U.N. officials, meanwhile, have expressed grave concern about retaliatory attacks against Tuared and Arab communities in the north after government troops retook towns held by Islamic rebels. As a result, both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch urge donors to pressure the Malian government to end to human rights abuses in the country.
Evolution Summit Held On October 21-23, 2013
Climate Change Is Happening… So What?
US Army Corps of Engineers tours flooded areas in Burlington, North Dakota in 2011. Credit: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers photo by Patrick Moes
Seven in 10 U.S. citizens believe climate change is real and happening now. Yet most have never even contacted a government official about the issue, let alone volunteered with an environmental organisation or taken other action.
These findings are part of an exploration of Climate Change in the American Mind issued by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication."This is about something much deeper. It’s about identity, about values, it’s about emotions." -- Anthony Leiserowitz of the Yale Project
“They think it’s about polar bears or developing countries, not the United States… not my community, not my friends and family,” Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project, told IPS.
Researchers divided the U.S. population into “six Americas” that share similar beliefs about climate change. Seventy percent belong to three major “Americas” that believe, to a more or less strong degree, that climate change is happening, is harmful and is caused by humans.
After falling between 2008 and 2010, public awareness on the topic here has been rising again, probably because of the number and severity of extreme weather events in the last two years. The trend was confirmed by an opinion poll released in April by the Gallup Institute.
The latest dire warning came just this week, when the executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, Christiana Figueres, announced that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had passed the critical threshold of 400 parts per million.
To put this number in perspective, the last time the Earth had a similar concentration of CO2 was three million years ago during the Pliocene era, when sea levels were up to 80 feet higher.
“The main way people know about this issue is through media reporting,” Leiserowitz explained. “And when the media don’t report it, it’s literally out of sight and out of mind.”
Bringing climate change down to earth
Television weather forecasters seem ideally suited to become climate change educators: they speak to thousands or even millions of people every day, often three to four times a day, and they are already trusted by their audiences.
The Yale Project is providing them with tools and training to discuss climate change, connecting them with the climate science community and organising debates with meteorologists who hold varying opinions of climate change to foster dialogue.
The idea of making information more accessible also inspired Climate Commons, an online interactive map of the United States, launched on Apr. 22 by the organisation Internews, as part of its Earth Journalism Network (EJN).
Data on climate change indicators – such as temperature, weather events and emissions – and related news stories are visualised on the map, tracking the impact of global warming and the presence, or absence, of media coverage.
“We are hoping that journalists and other communicators, as well as the general public, can all use this visualisation and can understand better what’s going on,” James Fahn, global director of EJN, told IPS.
“Eventually we do definitely want this map to become a source for bottom-up news and information and then observations and news from the public,” he said.
Because while a “good understanding of the problem … is necessary, it’s not sufficient,” he said, adding that more spaces are needed for citizen participation in actual policy making.
Shaping environmental democracy
“Ultimately, how we protect our environment is a fundamental question of how we … exercise our democracy,” Michael Marx, director of the Beyond Oil Campaign at Sierra Club, the largest grassroots environmental organisation in the U.S., told IPS.
David Eisenhauer of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) agreed, telling IPS that “providing an opportunity for citizen input is foundational to our democracy”.
In March, the USFWS released its “Climate Adaptation Strategy” outlining nationwide strategies for the next five to 10 years to protect species and resources in a changing climate. It benefited, during its draft stage, from nearly 55,000 comments from individuals and organisations.
The range of actions that can be taken by ordinary citizens to address climate change is broad, and can be as simple as keeping the thermostat in one’s home on a lower setting, as one commenter suggested.
“The combination of personal behaviour choices and civic engagement and activism is a potent tool that has global scale consequences,” said Marx.
According to Leiserowitz, changing individual lifestyles in the United States could cut emissions by 10 percent. “The other 90 percent really has to come from a systemic change,” he said.
That means that public demands for change in the U.S need to be more systematic and urgent, said Leiserowitz.
On Feb. 17, the Sierra Club participated in a Forward on Climate Rally that drew an estimated 40,000 people in Washington D.C.
“We do not see the diversity and occasional conflict within the climate movement as a bad thing,” Marx said. “We accept that a democratic approach – as divisive and chaotic as it can appear – is also the most resilient and strongest [one].”
Fears of “big government”
Climate change is not only an environmental issue, Leiserowitz pointed out. It cuts across multiple aspects of society, including the economy, national security, and cultural and religious beliefs.
Some opponents of actions like mandatory emissions cuts fear they could be a pretext to usher in more intrusive government, as has been seen in other hot-button debates over issues like gun control and health care.
“They’re so afraid of the policy response that they suddenly become very sceptical of the problem itself,” said Leiserowitz.
“This is about something much deeper. It’s about identity, about values, it’s about emotions, and if you don’t know that that’s what you’re dealing with, you will eternally be frustrated when you provide them with more and more facts and they don’t respond the way you think they are going to.”
Climate Change Is Happening… So What?
US Army Corps of Engineers tours flooded areas in Burlington, North Dakota in 2011. Credit: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers photo by Patrick Moes
Seven in 10 U.S. citizens believe climate change is real and happening now. Yet most have never even contacted a government official about the issue, let alone volunteered with an environmental organisation or taken other action.
These findings are part of an exploration of Climate Change in the American Mind issued by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication."This is about something much deeper. It’s about identity, about values, it’s about emotions." -- Anthony Leiserowitz of the Yale Project
“They think it’s about polar bears or developing countries, not the United States… not my community, not my friends and family,” Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project, told IPS.
Researchers divided the U.S. population into “six Americas” that share similar beliefs about climate change. Seventy percent belong to three major “Americas” that believe, to a more or less strong degree, that climate change is happening, is harmful and is caused by humans.
After falling between 2008 and 2010, public awareness on the topic here has been rising again, probably because of the number and severity of extreme weather events in the last two years. The trend was confirmed by an opinion poll released in April by the Gallup Institute.
The latest dire warning came just this week, when the executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, Christiana Figueres, announced that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had passed the critical threshold of 400 parts per million.
To put this number in perspective, the last time the Earth had a similar concentration of CO2 was three million years ago during the Pliocene era, when sea levels were up to 80 feet higher.
“The main way people know about this issue is through media reporting,” Leiserowitz explained. “And when the media don’t report it, it’s literally out of sight and out of mind.”
Bringing climate change down to earth
Television weather forecasters seem ideally suited to become climate change educators: they speak to thousands or even millions of people every day, often three to four times a day, and they are already trusted by their audiences.
The Yale Project is providing them with tools and training to discuss climate change, connecting them with the climate science community and organising debates with meteorologists who hold varying opinions of climate change to foster dialogue.
The idea of making information more accessible also inspired Climate Commons, an online interactive map of the United States, launched on Apr. 22 by the organisation Internews, as part of its Earth Journalism Network (EJN).
Data on climate change indicators – such as temperature, weather events and emissions – and related news stories are visualised on the map, tracking the impact of global warming and the presence, or absence, of media coverage.
“We are hoping that journalists and other communicators, as well as the general public, can all use this visualisation and can understand better what’s going on,” James Fahn, global director of EJN, told IPS.
“Eventually we do definitely want this map to become a source for bottom-up news and information and then observations and news from the public,” he said.
Because while a “good understanding of the problem … is necessary, it’s not sufficient,” he said, adding that more spaces are needed for citizen participation in actual policy making.
Shaping environmental democracy
“Ultimately, how we protect our environment is a fundamental question of how we … exercise our democracy,” Michael Marx, director of the Beyond Oil Campaign at Sierra Club, the largest grassroots environmental organisation in the U.S., told IPS.
David Eisenhauer of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) agreed, telling IPS that “providing an opportunity for citizen input is foundational to our democracy”.
In March, the USFWS released its “Climate Adaptation Strategy” outlining nationwide strategies for the next five to 10 years to protect species and resources in a changing climate. It benefited, during its draft stage, from nearly 55,000 comments from individuals and organisations.
The range of actions that can be taken by ordinary citizens to address climate change is broad, and can be as simple as keeping the thermostat in one’s home on a lower setting, as one commenter suggested.
“The combination of personal behaviour choices and civic engagement and activism is a potent tool that has global scale consequences,” said Marx.
According to Leiserowitz, changing individual lifestyles in the United States could cut emissions by 10 percent. “The other 90 percent really has to come from a systemic change,” he said.
That means that public demands for change in the U.S need to be more systematic and urgent, said Leiserowitz.
On Feb. 17, the Sierra Club participated in a Forward on Climate Rally that drew an estimated 40,000 people in Washington D.C.
“We do not see the diversity and occasional conflict within the climate movement as a bad thing,” Marx said. “We accept that a democratic approach – as divisive and chaotic as it can appear – is also the most resilient and strongest [one].”
Fears of “big government”
Climate change is not only an environmental issue, Leiserowitz pointed out. It cuts across multiple aspects of society, including the economy, national security, and cultural and religious beliefs.
Some opponents of actions like mandatory emissions cuts fear they could be a pretext to usher in more intrusive government, as has been seen in other hot-button debates over issues like gun control and health care.
“They’re so afraid of the policy response that they suddenly become very sceptical of the problem itself,” said Leiserowitz.
“This is about something much deeper. It’s about identity, about values, it’s about emotions, and if you don’t know that that’s what you’re dealing with, you will eternally be frustrated when you provide them with more and more facts and they don’t respond the way you think they are going to.”
Unravelling the Civil War Propaganda
An Afghan soldier protects the palace of King Amanullah (1919-1929) that was partly destroyed in the 1992-1996 civil war. Credit: Giuliana Sgrena/IPS
Western fears of a civil war in Afghanistan are growing ahead of the scheduled pullout of international troops in 2014. However, experts here say the situation on the ground is not comparable to either 1988, when the Soviets withdrew from the country, or the mujahideen’s rise to power in 1992, which plunged the country into civil war.
Speaking to BBC’s Radio 4 last month, British Defence Secretary Philip Hammond described the future of Afghanistan as uncertain, echoing a British Parliamentary Defence Committee warning that the country could descend into civil war within a few years.
But locals who have been watching the situation closely do not share this bleak prognosis of the country’s future.
Retired Colonel Mohammad Sarwar Niazai, a military observer, says the situation is different to what it was in the early 1990s when the Soviets pulled out, leaving the communist government of Mohammed Najibullah without support and presenting seven jihadi parties, armed and aided by the United States, with the perfect opportunity to seize power.
This time around, “no one can get the government out forcibly,” Niazai told IPS, referring to the fact that the U.S. and its coalition partners in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) have promised to stand by Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his government for the foreseeable future.
Recently retired ISAF Commander General John Allen, speaking in Washington on Mar. 25, said the U.S. and its allies would retain a presence in Afghanistan big enough to bolster Afghan forces after the withdrawal of international combat troops at the end of 2014.
Still, Kabul Regional Chief of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) Shamasullah Ahmadzai warned that the roughly 336,000-strong Afghan National Army, though highly motivated, is in serious need of the weapons and arms promised by western allies during talks about the pullout.
Strategic interests
As international media reports of “impending” or “inevitable” conflict continue to proliferate, experts here contend that Western countries with a vested interest in maintaining their military presence have conjured the bogey of civil war to justify continued engagement.
“Their…goal is to create fear in Afghanistan,” Ghulam Jailani Zwak, head of the Afghan Analytical and Advisory Centre, told IPS, adding that he sees “no substance” in the predictions of chaos after 2014.
“Over the last 11 years, Afghanistan has built up a functioning civil society and a strong parliament that has shown it can stand up to the executive,” he said referring to the fact that at the end of 2012, 11 ministers were issued summons to appear in parliament or face impeachment for failing to spend 50 percent of their annual budgets in the last financial year.
Abdul Ghafoor Lewal, head of the Regional Studies Centre, believes threats of civil war are a deliberate Western ploy to maintain a military presence here, particularly in the Bagram airfield, one of the largest U.S. military bases in Afghanistan, located in the Parwan province.
Western powers would like Afghans to believe that foreign troops are their “best bet for security,” Lewal told IPS. The government must be “wise, prudent and…protect itself from the machinations of the West,” he added.
Meanwhile, Major General Rahmatullah Raufi, former commander of Paktia Army Corps and erstwhile governor of the southern province of Kandahar, dismisses the fears of war, claiming Afghans are more united now than they were 11 years ago.
A clear example of this was seen at the third ministerial conference of the Istanbul Process, held in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city, on Apr. 26.
Originally intended to foster regional cooperation in the so-called ‘heart of Asia’ – primarily between Afghanistan and its neighbours – this year’s high-level gathering delved into a host of social issues, from education to disaster management, to help strengthen the war-torn country’s economic stability.
The independent Afghanistan Analysts Network said the Afghan government’s participation made clear that it saw the regional initiative as crucial to securing its future after 2014.
Afghan Foreign Minister Zalmai Rassoul, who led the delegation, said Afghanistan was “determined to reclaim (its) rightful place” as an economic centre connecting South Asia, Central Asia, Euroasia and the Middle East.
Moreover, according to experts like Member of Parliament (MP) Habibullah Kalakani – a former jihadi commander who fought against the Soviets – Afghan civil society is no longer “pliant” to foreign interests.
Independent media and human rights organisations including the AIHRC, whose president Sima Samar won the Alternative Nobel Prize last year, are widely respected and have earned international recognition for their efforts to build a culture of peace here.
Kalakani also pointed to the increasing number of educated young Afghans who are perfectly positioned to help their country make a democratic transition.
According to the Institute of International Education (IIE), only 4,000 students submitted applications for university admission in 2004. In 2005 this number increased tenfold to 40,000, reached 52,000 in 2006 and finally passed the 120,000-mark in 2012.
Girls now occupy 25 percent of the seats in public universities, a numbers that is increasing annually, while 52 new private universities have popped up around the country.
Defence Ministry Deputy Spokesperson Siamak Herawi agreed that 2014 will be a “year of change” but insisted there was good reason to believe “the change will be positive not negative,” he told Killid, adding that, this time around, “Afghan hands” will help to build the country.
* Lal Aqa Shirin writes for Killid, an independent Afghan media group in partnership with IPS.
Against Push for Peace Talks, Outposts Continue Israeli Land Grab
Ibrahim Makhlouf stands on the roof of his home in the West Bank, from where he can see the Israeli settlement outpost of Shalhevet Farm. Credit: Jillian Kestler-D'Amours/IPS
Ibrahim Makhlouf reaches for two wooden planks lying in the hallway and places them expertly in an L-shape along the seams of his front door.
“Open [the door],“ he beckons, knowing that doing so is nearly impossible. “Every night, we put this here,” he explains. “For the settlers.”
Makhlouf’s home sits on the outskirts of the West Bank village of Asira Al-Qibliya, only 500 metres from the illegal Israeli settlement outpost of Shalhevet Farm, an offshoot of the equally illegal settlement of Yitzhar.
Makhlouf told IPS that his house is attacked by Israeli settlers at least two times per week and has been vandalised over 100 times. The windows on Makhlouf’s two-story home all have bars on the outside to prevent them from shattering when settlers throw stones.
“When we see the settlers, we send the children to another house. What can we do?” Makhlouf, who lives with his wife and six children, said. “We’re afraid. There is no safety.”"When we see the settlers, we send the children to another house."
-- Ibrahim Makhlouf
Since the Shalhevet Farm outpost was established in 1999, Makhlouf said he has been barred from accessing some 16 dunams of his family’s land, which was traditionally used to plant figs, grapes, olives and other trees, and from using a freshwater spring.
“It is my father and grandfather’s land, but now settlers are planting, and I can’t even enter it. They want to confiscate the land and houses and control the whole area to extend their settlements,” Makhlouf said.
“The [Israeli] government encourages them, with money and protection from the soldiers,” he added. “The government and the settlers are one.”
Illegal settlements
In recent weeks, international actors, including the United States, have renewed efforts to get Israel to freeze settlement construction in the West Bank in order to restart long-stalled peace talks with the Palestinians. On Apr. 30, the Arab League said it would support potential land swaps along the 1967 Green Line in negotiations of final borders between Israel and a future Palestinian state.
But the growth of Israeli settlement outposts in the West Bank, like Shalhevet Farm, has been almost entirely omitted from the conversation. Such outposts are often precursors to full-fledged settlements, both of which are illegal under international law. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention also forbids an occupying power from transferring its civilian population to the territory it occupies.
For Palestinians, both settlements and outposts have the same negative impact on their lives. But the Israeli government views only outposts, not settlements, as illegal, sometimes dismantling them for being built without the required permits and then relocating residents to nearby settlements.
Settlements are generally much larger than outposts and receive full services and infrastructure, although the Israeli government does also provide outposts, which generally begin as a few caravans on a hilltop, with basic services such as water and electricity. The Israeli army also protects outpost residents, as it does all other Israeli settlers.
Israeli settlement outposts were first built in the mid-1990s, during a freeze on settlement construction imposed by then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. A few years later, Israeli leader Ariel Sharon famously urged Israeli settlers to seize every hilltop. “Whatever you grab will be ours. What you don’t grab will not be ours,” he said.
In 2005, at the behest of the Israeli government, lawyer Talia Sasson reported that the outposts are illegal under Israeli law. To be considered legal, a settlement must be established by a government decision, be built on “state land”, possess a building plan, and have clear, territorial boundaries.
Outposts fail to meet these criteria, although earlier this week, the Israeli government announced plans to examine whether it could retroactively legalise four outposts.
Expansion for control
Today about 100 Israeli settlement outposts dot the West Bank. While most begin small, they develop quickly, and many have cement houses, paved roads, playgrounds and daycare centres.
In the case of Shalhevet Farm, Peace Now, an Israeli non-governmental organisation that works against Israeli settlements in the West Bank, found that the Israeli Ministry of Housing and Construction spent 1.1 million Israeli shekels (over 300,000 U.S. dollars) to connect the outpost to basic infrastructure. The national water company, Mekorot, provides it with water.
Many outposts also serve an important geopolitical aim.
According to Israeli human rights group Yesh Din, some outposts aim “to create Jewish continuity and connect isolated settlements with settlement blocs, in order to prevent future evacuation. Even though each of these outposts is home to only a few dozens of families, the outposts can completely control the land or the road around it.”
Violence against Palestinians and their property emanating from settlement outposts has also been well documented. After a Palestinian man killed an Israeli settler earlier this month near Nablus, Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq documented 13 settler attacks against Palestinians in one week in the area.
38-year-old Munir Jibreel Qaddous, a farmer from the West Bank village of Burin, told IPS about being viciously attacked by Israeli settlers in 2011, while the Israeli army and police looked on and did nothing.
White caravans of the settlement outpost of Bracha B, an extension of the Bracha settlement, overlook much of Burin’s farmland, and settlers regularly vandalise Palestinian property and attack their homes in the village, Qaddous explained.
Data collected by Yesh Din shows that between 2005-2012, over 91 percent of complaints filed by Palestinians against acts of Israeli settler violence were closed without an indictment. Of this, 84 percent were closed due to the Israeli police’s failure to properly investigate the crimes.
“All of them are the same,” said Qaddous, referring to Israeli settlers living in settlements and unauthorized outposts. He told IPS that he witnessed the Bracha B outpost’s construction and gradual expansion.
“In 1999, a watch-tower was put up, then trailers were erected. Then, there were 15 cement houses. Before the settlers came, they put [in] a road, electricity and water,” he said.
“This area is a very strategic area of the West Bank. After five or ten years, maybe you will see settlers on every hill.”
