Millions at risk in flood-hit Nigeria; relief chief highlights hunger in Burkina Faso

Infrastructure and farmland have also been damaged, said the statement issued on behalf of Secretary-General António Guterres, worsening the cost of living across the country.  

He extended his deepest condolences to the Government of Nigeria and to the affected families, reiterating the UN’s continuing “commitment to supporting the Government of Nigeria in this challenging time.”

© UNICEF/Esiebo/Abraham Achirga I More than 1.5 million children at risk as devastating floods hit Nigeria.

UN Children’s Fund, UNICEF, said that 60 per cent of those in need were children, who are at increased risk of waterborne diseases, drowning and malnutrition.

The floods have affected 34 out of the 36 states in the country, and over 600 people have lost their lives, with 200,000 houses either partially or fully damaged.

In the northeastern states of Borno, Adamawa and Yobe, a total of 7,485 cases of cholera and 319 associated deaths were reported as of 12 October, and rains are expected to continue for several weeks, along with rising humanitarian needs.

‘Extremely vulnerable’

“Children and adolescents in flood-affected areas are in an extremely vulnerable situation,” said Cristian Munduate, UNICEF Representative in Nigeria.

"They are particularly at risk of waterborne diseases and emotional and psychological distress. UNICEF is working closely with the Government and other partners to provide life-saving assistance to those who are most in need.”  

When I asked the families I met in Djibo #BurkinaFaso how we can help, they said:

“Please do one simple thing for us: Open that road so that food can come through for our children.”

Time is of the essence.

The road needs to open. pic.twitter.com/1cZYqLXjsG

— Martin Griffiths (@UNReliefChief) October 21, 2022

Immediate priority needs for children include health, water, sanitation, and hygiene; as well as shelter and food.

Humanitarian needs ‘rising fast’ in Burkina Faso: Griffiths

UN Emergency Relief Coordinator, Martin Griffiths, ended a short fact-finding mission to nearby Burkina Faso on Friday, saying it was a critical time for the landlocked West African nation.

“Humanitarian needs are rising fast. A quarter of the population, or some 4.9 million people need emergency assistance, a staggering 40 per cent more people than at the beginning of the year”, he said. “One in ten Burkinabe is displaced from their homes by devastating conflict and climate shocks.”

Growing insecurity from extremist armed groups operating across much of the Sahel, and blockades in many areas have left communities isolated, and with inadequate supplies of humanitarian aid.

“To provide critical life-saving relief to those in need with a level of dignity and respect that every human being deserves, we urgently require additional resources. Our US$805 million response plan in Burkina Faso is less than a third funded.”

Diet of leaves and salt

Relief chief Griffiths said he’d met some displaced in the town of Djibo, who had eaten “only leaves and salt, for weeks.”

“The situation is so bad that women are risking their lives, crossing lines of control at night in search of food. I spoke with community leaders who urged those in charge to open roads for food, water, and vital medicine to reach them, to save lives. There are peaceful initiatives to find solutions and there is still hope. The people of Djibo deserve our respect, admiration and much more support in this hour of dire need.”

OCHA USG Martin Griffiths talks to displaced people in the town of Djibo in northern Burkina Faso, where hundreds of thousands of people have sought safety due to a devastating conflict and changing climate.

He also met the new military leader of Burkina Faso, Ibrahim Traoré, who was sworn in on Friday vowing to defeat terrorism in the north, replacing a former coup leader who seized power in January.

Mr. Griffiths said he had stressed the need for protection of civilians, including for those caught up in conflict, and asked the transitional president to ensure “a conducive environment for humanitarian operations and enable humanitarian access, so that we can reach all Burkinabé in need, everywhere across the country.”

In the first nine months of this year, the UN and our humanitarian partners brought food assistance to 1.8 million people and supported 740,000 people with access to healthcare in areas where health facilities have closed down and where medical supplies are lacking.

Adapt and survive: 5 ways to help countries cope with the climate crisis

From devastating floods in Pakistan, to wildfires in Siberia, the effects of the climate emergency are being felt across the world, and the United Nations is calling for more investment now, to help nations to adapt to an increasingly unstable environment.

All nations need to make major cuts to fossil fuel emissions and transition to a low-carbon economy, if we are to have any chance of achieving the aim of reducing global temperatures to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels.

This continues to be the message from the UN but, with so many countries suffering as a result of more frequent extreme weather events, that are threatening food security and global stability, more urgent measures need to be taken, to help countries to adapt to an increasingly hostile planet.

Here are five tried and tested ways that nations can become more resilient, in the face of climate change.

1. Early warning systems

Research shows that a 24-hour warning of an oncoming heatwave or storm can reduce the subsequent damage by 30 per cent. Early warning systems that provide climate forecasts are one of the most cost-effective adaptation measures, yielding around nine dollars of total benefits for every dollar invested.

With timely warnings, people can take early action by blocking up doors with sandbags to anticipate floods, stockpiling resources or, in some extreme cases, evacuating from their homes.

In Bangladesh, for example, even as climate change becomes more severe, the number of deaths from cyclones has fallen by 100-fold over the past 40 years, due mainly to improved early warnings.

But today, one-third of the global population is still not adequately covered by early warning systems. And while efforts have focused mainly on storms, floods and droughts, other hazards like heatwaves and wildfires will need to be better integrated as they become more common and intense.

Earlier this year, the UN Secretary-General tasked the World Meteorological Organization to lead the development of an action plan to ensure every person in the world is covered by early warnings within the next five years. The plan will be presented at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP 27) next month.

2. Ecosystem Restoration

The UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration launched by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and partners in 2021 triggered a global movement to restore the world’s ecosystems. This global restoration effort will not only absorb carbon but also increase ‘ecosystem services’ to defend the world from its most devastating impacts.

In cities, restoring urban forests cools the air and reduces heatwaves. On a normal sunny day, a single tree provides a cooling effect equivalent to two domestic air conditioners running for 24 hours.

On coasts, mangrove forests provide natural sea defences from storm surges by reducing the height and strength of the sea waves. Moreover, protecting mangroves is 1,000 times less expensive per kilometre than building seawalls.

In high altitudes, re-greening mountain slopes protects communities from climate-induced landslides and avalanches. For example, on Anjouan Island in Comoros, deforestation was drying up the ground and turning forests into deserts. With support from UNEP, a project has set out to plant 1.4 million trees over four years to hold back erosion and retain water and nutrients in the soil.

3. Climate-resilient infrastructure

Climate-resilient infrastructure refers to assets and systems such as roads, bridges, and power lines that can withstand shocks from extreme climate impacts. Infrastructure is responsible for 88 per cent of the forecasted costs of adapting to climate change.

A World Bank report finds that climate-resilient infrastructure investments in low and middle-income countries could produce roughly $4.2 trillion in total benefits, around four dollars for each dollar invested. The reasoning is simple. More resilient infrastructure assets pay for themselves as their life-cycle is extended and their services are more reliable.

Tools for encouraging investments in climate-resilient infrastructure include regulatory standards like building codes, spatial planning frameworks such as vulnerability maps, and a strong communication drive to ensure the private sector is aware of climate risks, projections and uncertainties.

4. Water supplies and security

The story of climate change is, in many ways, a story about water, whether it is floods, droughts, rising sea levels, or even wildfires. By 2030, one-in-two people are expected to face severe water shortages.

Investing in more efficient irrigation will be crucial, as agriculture accounts for 70 per cent of all global freshwater withdrawals. In urban centres, roughly 100-120 billion cubic metres of water could be saved globally by 2030 by reducing leaks. Governments are being encouraged to develop holistic water management plans, known as Integrated Water Resource Management, that take into account the entire water cycle: from source to distribution, treatment, reuse and return to the environment.

Research shows that investments in rainwater harvesting systems need to be sustained to make them more widely available. In Bagamoyo town, Tanzania, for instance, rising sea levels and drought from declining rainfall were causing wells to dry up and become salty. With no other options, children from the local Kingani School had to drink salt water, leading to headaches, ulcers, and low school attendance.

With support from UNEP, the government began constructing a rainwater harvesting system involving rooftop guttering and a series of large tanks for storing water. Diseases soon began to fall, and the children returned to school. 

5. Long-term planning

Climate adaptation solutions are more effective if integrated into long-term strategies and policies. National Adaptation Plans are a crucial governance mechanism for countries to plan for the future and strategically prioritize adaptation needs.

A key part of these plans is to examine climate scenarios decades into the future and combine these with vulnerability assessments for different sectors. These can assist in planning and guiding government decisions on investment, regulatory and fiscal framework changes and raising public awareness.

Around 70 countries have developed a National Adaptation Plan, but this number is growing rapidly. UNEP is currently supporting 20 Member States in developing their plans, which can also be used to improve adaptation elements in Nationally Determined Contributions - a central part of the Paris Agreement.

Disaster risk reduction: Only half the world equipped with adequate early warning systems

Coinciding with the International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction , the numbers in the report are even worse for developing countries on the front lines of climate change, the report states. Less than half of the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and only one-third of Small Island Developing States (SIDS), have a multi-hazard early warning system.

The report, Global Status of Multi-Hazard Early Warning Systems - Target G, is based on new data that shows that countries with limited early warning coverage have mortality rates during disasters, that are eight times higher than countries with substantial to comprehensive coverage.

Deadly failure to invest

“The world is failing to invest in protecting the lives and livelihoods of those on the front line. Those who have done the least to cause the climate crisis are paying the highest price”, said UN Secretary-General António Guterres, in a video message marking the day.  

The report shows that LDCs, SIDS, and countries in Africa, require the most investment to increase early warning coverage and adequately protect themselves against disasters.

“As this report was being prepared, Pakistan is dealing with its worst recorded climate disaster, with nearly 1,700 lives lost”, said Mami Mizutori, UN Special Representative for Disaster Risk Reduction and Head of UNDRR.

“Despite this carnage, the death toll would have been much higher if not for early warning systems.”

‘Significant’ gaps

UNDRR/Chris Huby I Less than half of the Least Developed Countries and only one-third of Small Island Developing States have a multi-hazard early warning system.

“Worryingly, this report highlights significant gaps in protection as only half of the countries globally have Multi-Hazard Early Warning Systems”, she added. “This is a situation that needs to urgently change, to save lives, livelihoods, and assets”.

Petteri Taalas, WMO Secretary-General, said the number of recorded disasters has increased five-fold, “driven in part by human-induced climate change and more extreme weather. This trend is expected to continue. Early warning systems are a proven and effective climate adaptation measure, that save lives and money”.

“But we can and must do better. We need to ensure that early warnings reach the most vulnerable and that they are translated into early action,” he added. “This is why WMO is spearheading a UN initiative on Early Warnings for All in the next five years.”

Humanity ‘in the danger zone’: Guterres

As ever-rising greenhouse gas emissions are “supercharging extreme weather events across the planet”, Secretary-General António Guterres warned in his message for the International Day, that climate disasters are hurting countries and economies “like never before” 

He explained that increasing calamities are costing lives and hundreds of billions of dollars in loss and damage, and recounted how he witnessed first-hand, the devastation unleashed by the recent floods after his visit to Pakistan.

“Three times more people are displaced by climate disasters than war”, the UN chief said, adding that “half of humanity is already in the danger zone”.

He argued that the world is “failing to invest in protecting the lives and livelihoods of those on the front line”.

At the same time, Mr. Guterres continued, those who have done the least to cause the climate crisis are paying the highest price.

Adequate warning saves lives

“Entire populations are being blindsided by cascading climate disasters without any means of prior alert”, said the UN chief, stressing that “people need adequate warning to prepare for extreme weather events”.

For this reason, he reiterated his call for universal early warning coverage over the next five years.

“Early warning systems – and the ability to act on them – are proven life-savers”.

COP27 litmus test

At the UN climate conference (COP27) in Egypt next month, the Secretary-General said that he would launch an action plan to make his five year deadline a reality, and urged support from all “governments, international financial institutions and civil society”.

He said delivering on loss and damage at COP27 will be “an important litmus test” for rebuilding trust between developed and developing countries.

“On this International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction, I call on all countries to invest in early warning systems and support those who lack capacity”, concluded the UN chief.

INTERVIEW: Transform education, and avoid a global learning crisis

UN NEWS

Many education experts worry that the COVID-19 pandemic has caused untold damage to the education prospects of children around the world, exacerbating problems of falling standards that already existed, with millions of children receiving minimal, inadequate education, or no education at all.

Leonardo Garnier, Special Advisor to the Transforming Education Summit, by Marco Bassano

In the days before the Transforming Education Summit, UN News met Leonardo Garnier, an academic and former education minister in Costa Rica, who was appointed by the UN Secretary-General as Special Advisor for the Summit.

He explained why going back to the old ways of teaching is not an option, and how the UN can help to bring fresh ideas to classrooms around the world and raise educational standards for children everywhere.

UN News The UN is tackling so many big geopolitical issues right now, such as the climate crisis, the pandemic, and the war in Ukraine. Why has education been chosen as key theme this year?

Leonardo Garnier It’s precisely the right time to do it, because when there’s an economic slowdown, what usually happens is that education goes under the table: it ceases to be a priority. Governments need money, and they stop spending on education.

The problem here is that the damage this causes is only apparent after several years. If you take the Eighties education crisis, it wasn’t until the Nineties and 2000s that you started to see how countries had lost out because of a lack of educational investment.

© UNICEF/Veronica Houser I A family sit inside their home, in an informal settlement for internally displaced people in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Millions of children were left out of school because of the pandemic. But the pandemic also brought out what had been happening for years, because many of those who were in school were not really learning properly.

UN News Talk us through the 1980s educational crisis. What happened, and what were the consequences?

Leonardo Garnier What you saw in many parts of the world was stagflation, and a huge reduction in education budgets. Enrolment rates fell, teacher numbers fell, and many children missed out on education, particularly high school education.

And what that meant is that, in many countries, only around half the labour force finished primary school. When you look at increasing poverty, and increasing inequality in many countries, it is very difficult not to relate that to the reduced educational opportunities of the Eighties and Nineties.

UN News Do you think that what we're seeing now is going to potentially lead to a repeat of that situation?

Leonardo Garnier That could happen. From 2000 to 2018 we saw increases in school enrolment rates in most countries, and in educational investment. From then on, educational budgets started to be reduced, and then the pandemic hit.

And then what you have is really two years in which education stopped in many countries, alongside an economic crisis. So yes, there is a risk that, instead of recovering from the pandemic, we could be in an even worse position than we were in 2019.

What the Secretary General is saying is that we have to protect education from this big hit, and recover what we lost in this pandemic. But we actually have to go further.

With SDG 4 [the Sustainable Development Goal to improve access to quality education for all], the UN and global community have set themselves very ambitious targets.

You might think that everybody should have the right to education but, if we keep doing things as they were being done prior to the pandemic, we won’t get there. 

At the Transforming Education Summit, we want to send the message that, if we really want every young person in this planet to have the right to a quality education, we have to do things differently.

We have to transform schools, the way teachers teach, the way we use digital resources, and the way we finance education.

UN News What is your vision for an education system that is fit for the Twenty-First Century?

Leonardo Garnier It has to do with the content, with what we teach and the relevance of education.

©UNICEF/ Frank Dejongh I A girl studies online at home in Abidjan in Côte d'Ivoire.

On one side, we need the fundamental building blocks of education – literacy, numeracy, scientific thinking – but we also need what some people have called the Twenty-First Century skills. Social skills, problem solving skills.

Teachers need to impart knowledge by sparking curiosity, helping students to solve problems and guiding students through the learning process. But, to do that, teachers need better training, better working conditions, and better wages, because in many countries, the pay for teachers is very low.

They need to understand that their authority does not come from merely having more information than their students, but from their experience and capacity to lead the learning process.

In any labour activity, productivity results in part from the tools we use. When we talk about education, we've been using the same tools for around 400 years! With the digital revolution, teachers and learners could have access to much more creative tools for teaching and learning. 

At the Summit, we’re saying that digital resources are what economists call a public good: they require a lot of investment to be produced, and they are not cheap, but once they are produced, everybody could use them. 

We want digital learning resources to be transformed into public goods, so that every country can share their own resources with other countries. For example, teachers from Argentina could share content with teachers from Spain; Egypt has a lovely digital education project that could be shared with many other Arab countries.

The potential is there, but we need to bring everything together into a partnership for digital learning resources. This is something else that we are calling for at the Summit.

The Transforming Education Summit

• The Transforming Education Summit takes place on Friday 16, Saturday 17 and Monday 19 September.

• Friday 16 September is “Mobilization Day”, which will be youth-led and youth-organized, bringing young people’s concerns over their education to decision and policymakers, and will focus on mobilizing the global public, youth, teachers, civil society and others, to support the transformation of education across the world.

• Saturday 17 September is all about solutions, and is designed to be a platform for initiatives that will contribute to transforming education. The day is grouped around five themes (“Thematic Action Tracks”): inclusive, equitable, safe and healthy schools; learning and skills for life; work and sustainable development; teachers, teaching and the teaching profession; digital learning and transformation; and financing of education.

• Monday 19 September, is Leaders Day, capitalizing on the fact that so many Heads of State and Government will be descending on New York that week. Expect a host of National Statements of Commitment from these leaders.

Cop15: lack of political leadership leaves crucial nature summit ‘in peril’, warn NGOs

Patrick Greenfield and Peter Muiruri in Nairobi

Nairobi biodiversity talks end in stalemate, prompting open letter to world leaders calling for action before Montreal conference

On the dais in Nairobi, from left: UN biodiversity head Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, CBD co-chair Francis Ogwal, deputy executive secretary David Cooper and CDB co-chair Basile van Havre.Photograph: IISD/ENB

UN biodiversity negotiations have reached crisis point due to a lack of engagement from governments, leading NGOs have warned, three years after experts revealed that Earth’s life-support systems are collapsing.

Last week, countries met in Nairobi for an extra round of talks on an agreement to halt the human-driven destruction of the natural world, with the final targets set to be agreed at Cop15 in Montreal. Governments have never met a target they have set for themselves on halting the destruction of nature despite scientists warning in 2019 that one million species face extinction, and that nature is declining at rates unprecedented in human history.

While world leaders including Emmanuel Macron, Justin Trudeau and Boris Johnson have underscored the importance of the summit, which only takes place once a decade, the biodiversity negotiations have seen substantial divisions between the global north and south over money, proposals to protect 30% of land and sea by 2030, and implementation of any agreement. The Africa group warned it would not sign off the final post-2020 global biodiversity framework unless it includes a target on digital biopiracy.

In an open letter published on Monday, environmental groups including Greenpeace, Avaaz, the Campaign for Nature and the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity said progress on the final deal was not being made, and the talks lacked high-level political engagement. In the run-up to any Cop, negotiations are largely handled by technical specialists in the initial phases, with ministers typically getting involved at the end of talks.

The letter calls on the UN secretary general, António Guterres, and government ministers to inject political leadership into the process and avert disaster at Cop15 in Montreal in December. China will oversee the event as president after its zero-Covid policy forced organisers to move the summit earlier this month.

“Negotiations have become stagnant, and the post-2020 global biodiversity framework is in peril,” the letter reads. “Countries had once pointed to Cop15 as an opportunity to deliver a global deal for nature and people, similar in significance to the Paris climate agreement, but there is a notable absence of the high-level political engagement, will and leadership to drive through compromise and to guide and inspire the commitments that are required.”

Delegates meet in Nairobi, Kenya, last week to hammer out agreements in the run-up to Cop15 in Montreal. Photograph: Mike Muzurakis/IISD/ENB

During six days of talks last week, negotiations saw little agreement among countries over the final text, which includes draft targets on eliminating environmentally harmful subsidies, reducing pesticide use, and action on invasive species in an effort to cut extinction rates. Scientists warned again in 2020 that the sixth mass extinction of wildlife on Earth is accelerating.

A further round of pre-Cop15 talks has been scheduled in the days before the summit, which starts on 5 December and concludes on 17 December, the day before the football World Cup final.

If adequately funded and implemented in full, the agreement could see major changes to global agricultural practices and extractive industries, both major drivers of the eradication of wildlife and natural ecosystems.

It had been hoped that countries would use the extra round of talks in Nairobi to hammer out points of division ahead of Cop15. Yet one negotiator, speaking to the Guardian on the condition of anonymity, said they left the talks seeing more division.

“When the meeting ended yesterday, everyone was really frustrated. Many people were expecting to move forward, at least on some of the targets. It should be a wake-up call and might raise awareness among ministers that they need to find a way out of this conundrum,” they said.

Sharon Ruthia, of the Environment and Natural Resources Foundation, at the Nairobi talks last week. Photograph: Mike Muzurakis/IISD/ENB

Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, the UN’s biodiversity head, urged governments to work together on the agreement ahead of Cop15 to help reach consensus. “I call upon the parties, in the next months, to vigorously engage with the text, to listen to each other and seek consensus,” she said.

Basile van Havre, a co-chair for the UN convention on biological diversity (CBD) negotiations, said he was not as negative as others about the state of talks but agreed that ministerial input was important. “People came prepared. Delegates worked really hard and there was no blocking. The challenge we have is that there are a lot of difficult issues.

“We made progress but we are not where we need to be. We need ministers to get involved and give negotiators technical mandates to advance,” he said.

Top talking points from Nairobi

A quiet China When delegates travel to Montreal this December, Beijing will still hold the presidency of the much delayed Cop, even though it will be hosted from Canada, not Kunming as originally planned. China has so far played a largely passive role in negotiations and did so again in Nairobi.

African scepticism on 30x30 Several world leaders have put forward proposals to protect 30% of land and sea as a key target of the agreement. But many African countries have indicated that the goal will not make the final text without a substantial financial commitment from the wealthy global north.

Brazil accused of undermining talks At the end of the talks on Sunday, Marco Lambertini, director general of WWF International, accused Brazil of “actively working to undermine the negotiations”. Cop15 could become another chance for Bolsonaro to add to his destructive environmental legacy.

Ukraine: Dozens dead and injured as UN condemns ‘utterly deplorable’ shopping centre attack

UNDP/Oleksandr Ratushniak I Ukraine is suffering heavy damage to infrastructure that will be costly to repair or rebuild.

At least ten people have reportedly been killed by what Ukrainian authorities have said was a Russian missile strike on a crowded shopping centre, and attack which the UN condemned on Monday as “utterly deplorable”.

At least ten people have reportedly been killed by what Ukrainian authorities have said was a Russian missile strike on a crowded shopping centre, and attack which the UN condemned on Monday as “utterly deplorable”.

The mall in the eastern city of Kremenchuk – a city which has largely escaped being targeted – was hit in the late afternoon, with reportedly 1,000 or more shoppers inside.

Ongoing shelling has led to homes being destroyed with many living in bomb shelters without access to basic services. To help those in need, @UNHCRUkraine in this convoy, delivered tarps, jerry cans + solar lamps for over 10k families. https://t.co/t4QJrH4gl9 pic.twitter.com/c70FLpee9l

— UNHCR Ukraine (@UNHCRUkraine) June 27, 2022

At least 40 were injured in the strike, said authorities, and the number of dead and injured is likely to rise. Footage from the scene showed buildings on fire and widespread destruction.

Civilians should not be targeted

United Nations Spokesperson, Stéphane Dujarric, told correspondents at the daily briefing in New York that although casualties still had to be verified, “whatever the number is any attack that hits a shopping mall, is utterly deplorable.”

“Any sort of civilian infrastructure, which includes obviously shopping malls, and civilians, should never ever be targeted”, he added.

Mr. Dujarric said there had been “disturbing reports of a new wave of airstrikes and shelling over the weekend and again today, with civilians having been killed or injured. Homes, health facilities and other civilian infrastructure were reportedly damaged.”

In a statement issued later in the day,  Osnat Lubrani, UN Resident Coordinator for Ukraine, said she was appalled at news of the airstrike on the mall.

"My thoughts and my heart are with the families and loved ones, of the people that have been killed, with those injured, and with the people of Kremenchuk and Ukraine, that had to witness another tragic event."

She said it was one more example "of the massive suffering that Russia’s war on Ukraine is causing on the people of this country."

Kyiv hit

During the weekend, the capital, Kyiv, was hit again, and a residential building was damaged, with some people trapped in the debris, he added.

“Loss of life, injury, destruction of homes across Ukraine, wreak havoc in the lives of individuals, families, communities”, said Ms. Lubrani, in a tweet on Sunday. “Civilians must be protected wherever they are.”

Desperation in the Donbas

Meanwhile in the Donbas region on the front lines between the invading Russian forces and Ukrainian defenders, fighting has continued, with UN humanitarians facing “tremendous challenges” reaching civilians, “who are facing increasing needs”, said Mr. Dujarric.

“The challenges are not only due to insecurity, but also to lack of access due to administrative restrictions imposed by the parties. 

We once again stress that the parties are obliged under international humanitarian law to protect civilians and civilian infrastructure.”

The UN Crisis Coordinator for Ukraine, Amin Awad, tweeted at the weekend that as humanitarian needs grew, the UN would “continue to scale up and work side by side, with the Ukrainian Government and its people.”

Energy prices are causing chaos in Asia. Here's why the rest of the world should worry

Tara Subramaniam

In Sri Lanka, people queue for miles to fill a tank of fuel. In Bangladesh, shops shut at 8 p.m. to conserve energy. In India and Pakistan, power outages force schools to shut, businesses to close and residents to swelter without air conditioning through deadly heat waves in which temperatures top 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37 degrees Celsius).

These are just some of the more eye-catching scenes playing out in the Asia Pacific region, where various countries are facing their worst energy crisis in years — and grappling with the growing discontent and instability caused by knock-on increases in the cost of living.

In Sri Lanka and Pakistan, the sense of crisis is palpable. Public anger has already caused a wave of ministers to resign in Colombo and contributed to Imran Khan's downfall as prime minister in Islamabad.

Yet many suspect the political reckoning has only just begun; both countries have been forced into desperate measures, going cap in hand to the International Monetary Fund and introducing shorter working weeks in an effort to save energy. On Wednesday, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe said the Sri Lankan economy had "completely collapsed."

Elsewhere in the region, the signs of trouble may be less obvious but could yet have far reaching consequences. Even in comparatively rich countries, such as Australia, economic concerns are beginning to emerge as consumers feel the pinch of higher energy bills.

Wholesale electricity prices in the first quarter of 2022 were up 141% from last year; households are being urged to cut down usage and on June 15 -- for the first time -- the Australian government suspended indefinitely the national electricity market in a bid to bring prices down, ease pressure on the energy supply chain and prevent blackouts.

But it is the experience of India, where power demand recently hit record highs, that illustrates most clearly why this is a global — rather than regional — crisis.

Having suffered through widespread outages amid record temperatures, the world's third-largest carbon emitter announced on May 28 that state-run Coal India will import coal for the first time since 2015.

South Kolkata District Congress members join a demonstration against rising fuel prices in Kolkata, India on June 2.

What's causing the problem?

While each of these countries faces a unique set of circumstances, all have been hit by the twin effects of the coronavirus pandemic and Russia's war in Ukraine — two unforeseeable events that have turned on their heads previously reasonable assumptions about supply lines and regional security and in the process plunged the world of economic planning into chaos.

At root, experts say, the problem lies in a growing mismatch between supply and demand.

Over the past couple of years, the pandemic kept demand for energy unusually low, with global electricity consumption dropping by more than 3% in the first quarter of 2020 as lockdowns and other restrictions kept workers at home, cars off the road, and ships stuck in ports.

But now, as nations begin to put the pandemic behind them, demand for fuel is spiking — and the sudden competition is pushing the prices of coal, oil and gas to record highs.

Turbo-charging this trend is the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, the world's third largest oil producer and second largest crude oil exporter. With the United States and many of its allies sanctioning Russian oil and gas, many countries have been left scrambling to find alternative sources — heating up the competition for limited supplies even further.

"Energy demand has rebounded quite quickly from the coronavirus and more quickly than supply," said Samantha Gross, director of the Brookings Institute's Energy Security and Climate Initiative.

"So we saw high prices even before Russia's invasion of Ukraine (but then there was) really a shock to energy supply. Various actions taken in response to that are really a challenge for energy supply globally."

Why Asia?

While the price of energy imports has risen dramatically across the world, with international coal prices five times higher than a year ago and natural gas prices up to 10 times higher than last year, experts say there are reasons some Asian economies — particularly import-reliant, developing ones — have been hit hardest.

"If you're a country, especially an emerging economy like a Sri Lanka that has to buy those commodities, has to buy oil, has to buy natural gas, this is a real struggle," said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics.

"You're paying a lot more for the things you need but the things you sell haven't gone up in price. So you're shelling out a lot more money to try to buy the same things to keep your economy running."

Poorer countries that are still developing or newly industrialized are simply less able to compete with more deep pocketed rivals — and the more they need to import, the bigger their problem will be, said Antoine Halff, adjunct senior research scholar at Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy.

"So Pakistan certainly fits there. Sri Lanka I think fits there as well," he said. "They're taking the price hit but they're also taking the supply hit. They have to pay more for their energy supplies and in some countries like Pakistan, they actually have a hard time sourcing energy."

Canaries in the coal mine

This dynamic is behind the increasingly chaotic scenes playing out in those countries.

As recently as a week ago, Sri Lanka's power and energy minister said it was a matter of days before the country ran out of fuel. That bleak warning came as lines at fuel stations in Colombo extended up to 3 kilometers (nearly 2 miles) and in many towns clashes between police and the public broke out.

It is almost as if everyday life itself is shutting down. On Monday, public sector offices, government schools and government-approved private schools were closed for at least two weeks. Public sector workers have been told to take Fridays off for the next three months — with the suggestion they use the time to grow their own food.

Pakistan too has had to reduce its working week — back down to five days from six — though that may only make the situation worse. Its six-day week, only recently introduced, was supposed to improve productivity and boost the economy.

Instead, daily hours-long power outages have plagued the country of 220 million for at least a month and malls and restaurants in Pakistan's largest city of Karachi have been told to close early to save fuel.

The country's energy supply is almost 5,000 megawatts below demand — a shortfall that could power between 2 million and 5 million homes on some estimates.

As Information Minister Marriyum Aurangzeb put it on June 7: "We are facing a severe crisis."

A vendor sells fabrics under an emergency light connected to a motorcycle during a load-shedding power outage in Karachi, Pakistan on June 8.

And any notion that such problems are a matter only for poorer, less developed nations is dispelled by the experience of Australia — a country that has one of the world's highest levels of global median wealth per adult.

Since May, the "Lucky Country" has been operating without 25% of its coal-based energy capacity — partly due to planned outages for maintenance, but also because supply disruptions and soaring prices have caused unplanned outages.

Like their counterparts in Pakistan and Bangladesh, Australians are now being urged to conserve, with Energy Minister Chris Bowen recently asking households in New South Wales, which includes Sydney, not to use electricity for two hours each evening.

A bigger problem ahead

How these nations respond may be stirring up an even greater problem than rising prices.

Under pressure from the public, governments and politicians may be tempted to turn back toward cheaper, dirtier forms of energy such as coal, regardless of the effect on climate change.

And there are signs this may already have started.

In Australia, the federal government's Energy Security Board has proposed that all electricity generators, including coal-fired ones, be paid to keep extra capacity in the national grid in a bid to prevent power outages. And the government of New South Wales has used emergency powers to redirect coal from mines in the state to local generators rather than overseas.

Both measures have come in for criticism from those who accuse the government of betraying its commitment to renewable energy.

In India, a country of 1.3 billion people that relies on coal for about 70% of its energy generation, New Delhi's decision to increase coal imports is likely to have even more profound environmental effects.

Scientists say a drastic reduction in coal mining is necessary to limit the worst effects of global warming, yet this will be hard to achieve without the buy-in of one of the world's biggest carbon emitters.

"Any country, be it India, be it Germany, be it the US, if they double down on any kind of fossil fuel it will eat up the carbon budget. That's a global problem," said Sandeep Pai, senior research lead for the Center for Strategic and International Studies' Energy Program.

While Pai said that India's decision might only be a temporary "reaction to the crisis," if in one or two years' time countries were continuing to rely on coal this would significantly affect the war on global warming.

"If these actions happen, it will eat up the carbon budget which is already shrinking in India and the target of 1.5 or 2 degrees will become increasingly hard," Pai said, referring to the Paris Climate Agreement's goal of keeping the rise in global average temperature between 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius.

If the rise in temperature exceeds that range, even temporarily, scientists suggest some of the resulting changes to the planet could be irreversible.

As Pai put it: "India's scale and size and demand means that if it really doubles down on coal, then we'll have a really serious problem from a climate point of view."

Iqbal Athas contributed reporting.

Millions affected after deadly floods hit India and Bangladesh

Swati Gupta and Rhea Mogul

Millions of people across India and Bangladesh have been affected by raging floods and landslides that left more than 100 people dead and entire communities devastated.

People wade past stranded trucks on a flooded street in Sunamganj, Bangladesh on June 21, 2022.

The South Asian nations, home to more than 1.3 billion people, have been particularly badly hit by the rains, prompting some of the worst flooding in the region in years, as extreme weather events become increasingly frequent due to the climate crisis.

A man attempts to move his cattle through a flooded field to a safer place after heavy rains in Nagaon district, Assam, India, June 21, 2022.

In India, at least 48 people have died since June 14, after heavy rains battered the northeastern state of Assam, according to its disaster management authority, triggering landslides and causing river banks to swell. More than 5.5 million people have been affected in the state alone, the authority added.

Assam's Chief Minister, Himanta Biswa Sarma, on Tuesday visited one of the 1,687 relief camps, housing more than 260,000 displaced people in the state.

"Our Govt will soon launch a portal for the affected people to register their livestock loss and other damages caused by floodwaters," he wrote on Twitter. "A flood relief package too will be announced shortly."

Flood affected people queue in knee-deep flood waters to collect food relief following heavy monsoon rainfalls in Sunamganj district, Bangladesh on June 21, 2022.

In the nearby state of Meghalaya, at least 25 people have died since June 9, with 11 still missing and 22 more injured, according to state officials.

Video broadcast on local television showed people in affected cities wading waist deep in muddy water and streets turned into rivers, with vehicles submerged underwater.

In neighboring Bangladesh, flooding-related incidents, including electrocutions and landslides, have killed at least 22 people, according to officials.

As many as 4 million people, including 1.6 million children, have been stranded by the flash floods, according to UNICEF.

"Children need safe drinking water right now. Preventing deadly waterborne diseases is one of several critical concerns," Sheldon Yett, UNICEF Representative to Bangladesh, said in a statement Monday.

The downpour has caused catastrophic flooding in the northeastern Sylhet region, local officials said.

"The flooding is the worst in 122 years in the Sylhet region," Atiqul Haque, Director General of Bangladesh's Department of Disaster Management, told Reuters on Monday.

Health facilities have been inundated in Sylhet, while children were at heightened risk of drowning, according to UNICEF.

More than 36,000 children have sought refuge in overcrowded shelters, together with their families, UNICEF said.

Schools have been forced to close and exams have been canceled, further impacting their education following months of closures due to the coronavirus pandemic, it added.

An aerial shot of a flooded area following heavy monsoon rainfalls in Companiganj, Bangladesh on June 20, 2022.

Extreme weather events in South Asia are becoming increasingly frequent due to the climate crisis, with temperatures in parts of India and Pakistan reaching record levels during a heatwave in April and May. Scientists said the climate crisis had made the possibility of a record-breaking heatwave hitting India and Pakistan "100 times more likely."

A 2022 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said they had medium confidence that heatwaves and humid stress would become more "intense and frequent," and that "annual and summer monsoon precipitation will increase."

CNN's Esha Mitra contributed reporting.

5 Things to Know About NASA's New Mineral Dust Detector

Esprit Smith
NASA’s Earth Science News Team

Dust swirls over the Arabian Peninsula in this image captured by the Suomi NPP satellite in July 2018. NASA’s upcoming Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT) will help scientists better understand the role of airborne dust in heating and cooling the atmosphere. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory

Called EMIT, the Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation will analyze dust carried through the atmosphere from dry regions to see what effects it has on the planet

Each year, strong winds carry more than a billion metric tons – or the weight of 10,000 aircraft carriers – of mineral dust from Earth’s deserts and other dry regions through the atmosphere. While scientists know that the dust affects the environment and climate, they don’t have enough data to determine, in detail, what those effects are or may be in the future – at least not yet.

Launching to the International Space Station on June 9, NASA’s Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT) instrument will help fill in those knowledge gaps. EMIT’s state-of-the-art imaging spectrometer, developed by the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, will collect more than a billion dust-source-composition measurements around the globe over the course of a year – and in doing so, significantly advance scientists’ understanding of dust’s influence across the Earth system.

Here are five things to know about EMIT:

1. It will identify the composition of mineral dust from Earth’s arid regions.

Desert regions produce most of the mineral dust that makes its way into the atmosphere. They’re also largely remote, making it difficult for scientists to collect soil and dust samples over these vast areas by hand.

From its perch on the space station, EMIT will map the world’s mineral dust source regions. The imaging spectrometer will also provide information on the color and composition of dust sources globally for the first time. This data will help scientists understand which kinds of dust dominate each region and advance their understanding of dust’s impact on climate and the Earth system today and in the future.

Using image spectrometer technology developed at JPL, EMIT will map the surface composition of minerals in Earth’s dust-producing regions, helping climate scientists better understand the impact of airborne dust particles in heating and cooling Earth’s atmosphere. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

2. It will clarify whether mineral dust heats or cools the planet.

Right now, scientists don’t know whether mineral dust has a cumulative heating or cooling effect on the planet. That’s because dust particles in the atmosphere have different properties. For instance, some particles may be dark red, while others may be white.

The color matters because it determines whether the dust will absorb the Sun’s energy, as dark-colored minerals do, or reflect it, as light-colored minerals do. If more of the dust absorbs the Sun’s energy than reflects it, it’ll warm the planet, and vice versa.

EMIT will provide a detailed picture of how much dust comes from dark versus light minerals. That information will allow scientists to determine whether dust heats or cools the planet overall, as well as regionally and locally.

3. It will help scientists understand how dust affects different Earth processes.

Officials from NASA and JPL oversee vibration testing of the EMIT science instrument, including its telescope and imaging spectrometer. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Mineral dust particles vary in color because they’re made of different substances. Dark red mineral dust gets its color from iron, for example. The composition of dust particles affects how they interact with many of Earth’s natural processes.

For instance, mineral dust plays a role in cloud formation and atmospheric chemistry. When mineral dust is deposited in the ocean or forests, it can provide nutrients for growth, acting like fertilizer. When it falls on snow or ice, the dust accelerates melting, leading to more water runoff. And for humans, mineral dust can be a health hazard when inhaled.

EMIT will collect information on 10 important dust varieties, including those that contain iron oxides, clays, and carbonates. With this data, scientists will be able to assess precisely what effects mineral dust has on different ecosystems and processes.

4. Its data will improve the accuracy of climate models.

In the absence of more specific data, scientists currently characterize mineral dust in climate models as yellow – a general average of dark and light. Because of this, the effects that mineral dust may have on climate – and that climate may have on mineral dust – are not well represented in computer models.

Color and composition information gathered by EMIT will change that. When the instrument’s data is incorporated, the accuracy of climate models is expected to improve.

5. It will help scientists predict how future climate scenarios will affect the type and amount of dust in our atmosphere.

As global temperatures rise, arid regions may become even drier, possibly resulting in larger (and dustier) deserts. To what extent this might happen depends on several factors, including how much temperatures rise, how land use changes, and how rainfall trends change.

By incorporating EMIT’s global dust source composition data into models and predictions, scientists will gain a better understanding of how the amount and composition of dust in arid regions may change under different climate and land-use scenarios. They’ll also gain a better understanding of how these changes may impact climate in the future.

More About the Mission 

EMIT is being developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed for the agency by Caltech in Pasadena, California. It will launch from Kennedy Space Center in Florida to the International Space Station aboard SpaceX’s 25th commercial resupply services mission for NASA. Once EMIT begins operation, its data will be delivered to the NASA Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center (DAAC) for use by other researchers and the public.

To learn more about the mission, visit:

https://earth.jpl.nasa.gov/emit/

A Force of Nature: Hurricanes in a Changing Climate

Angela Colbert, Ph.D.,
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Due to global warming, global climate models predict hurricanes will likely cause more intense rainfall and have an increased coastal flood risk due to higher storm surge caused by rising seas. Additionally, the global frequency of storms may decrease or remain unchanged, but hurricanes that form are more likely to become intense.

From June 1 to November 30, many Americans turn their eyes to the tropics — not just because they’re dreaming of beach vacations, but because it’s hurricane season. Called by many names depending on where you live (hurricanes, typhoons, cyclones), scientists call these storms tropical cyclones. This is because they are large, rotating storms that need tropical conditions to form — so they originate mostly in the tropics.

Note: Technically, hurricanes are tropical cyclones that have winds of more than 74 miles per hour (about 120 kilometers per hour). However, “hurricanes” will be used as a general term in this article to include tropical storms, which are tropical cyclones below hurricane intensity.

With that said, let’s talk about some science behind hurricanes and how they may change due to global warming.

Recipe for a Hurricane

Hurricanes need four main ingredients to form and strengthen:

• warm ocean water

• lots of moisture in the air

• low vertical wind shear

• a pre-existing disturbance (e.g., a cluster of thunderstorms)

Thermal (heat) image view of Category 5 Hurricane Maria in 2017, as seen by NASA’s Terra satellite. Yellow and orange are the warm ocean waters, and blue and white are the hurricane’s tall, cool cloud tops. Credit: NASA 

Just like making a perfect cookie, a hurricane needs all the ingredients for it to grow. Change any ingredient too much and the cookie will be too flat, too dry, too crumbly, etc. The same is true for hurricanes: If any of the four main ingredients changes too much, the storm cannot form or will weaken.

Once a hurricane forms, scientists shift their focus to where it is going and how strong it will be when it gets there. Where a hurricane goes depends mainly on the large-scale weather patterns around it at the time. If it moves over land, it brings with it a fury of strong wind, drenching rain, dangerous storm surge and sometimes tornadoes.

With so many moving parts, forecasting a hurricane is hard. Large-scale changes in the climate, such as El Niño and La Niña conditions in the tropical Pacific Ocean, also impact hurricanes over an entire season. Thus, trying to determine how climate change will impact hurricanes may seem like an impossible task. However, important tools are in place to help scientists tackle it. These include sophisticated global climate models, scientific understanding of how hurricanes form and evolve, and expanding observational records of past hurricane activity.

What Do the Models Show?

Tom Knutson, senior scientist at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, is a leading scientist on hurricanes and climate change. He notes that “even if hurricanes themselves don’t change [due to climate change], the flooding from storm surge events will be made worse by sea level rise.” In addition, he says models show increases in a hurricane’s rainfall rate by 2100. This means that hurricanes are likely to cause more intense rain when they come ashore.

Scientists have long predicted that climate change would increase extreme rainfall events. In a warmer world, there is simply more moisture in the air in the form of gaseous water vapor. Think of heating up a pot of water on the stove. Once the liquid water becomes hot enough, it boils and creates steam (or hot water vapor). This process is called “evaporation,” or when a liquid changes to a gas.

A similar process happens at Earth’s surface. As surface temperatures rise, more liquid water evaporates from the land and ocean. Evaporation adds moisture to the air. How much water vapor the air can hold is based on its temperature. Warmer air temperatures can hold more water vapor. The increased moisture in the air leads to more intense rainfall, especially during extreme events.

In a hurricane, spiraling winds draw moist air toward the center, fueling the towering thunderstorms that surround it. As the air continues to warm due to climate change, hurricanes can hold more water vapor, producing more intense rainfall rates in a storm.

Moreover, according to Knutson, most models show that climate change brings a slight increase in hurricane wind intensity. This change is likely related to warming ocean temperatures and more moisture in the air, both of which fuel hurricanes. While most models show either no change or a decrease in hurricane frequency in a warmer climate, a greater proportion of the storms that form will reach very intense (Category 4 or 5) levels. In other words, while there may be fewer storms, the ones that form have a greater chance of becoming stronger.

Scientists continue to research these topics along with other important hurricane metrics, including any potential changes in the speed at which hurricanes move across the ocean, how large storms will get, and where hurricanes will go.

What Do Observations Show?

The record-breaking 2020 hurricane season as seen by satellites. Credit: NASA Science Visualization Studio

Climate models that help us understand future changes are a key part to the story, but have any changes in hurricane activity already been observed in recent years?

Since the 1980s, the hurricane record has shown a more active period in the North Atlantic Ocean. On average, there have been more storms, stronger hurricanes, and an increase in hurricanes that rapidly intensify. Thus far, most of these increases are from natural climate variations. However, one recent study suggests that the latest increase in the proportion of North Atlantic hurricanes undergoing rapid intensification is a bit too large to be explained by natural variability alone. This could be the beginning of detecting the impact of climate change on hurricanes, the paper states. In contrast, the frequency of hurricanes making U.S. landfall (a subset of North Atlantic hurricanes) has not increased since 1900, despite significant global warming and the heating of the tropical Atlantic Ocean.

One current focus of hurricane research is “sampling hurricanes by flying into them for more accurate data,” says Shirley Murillo, deputy director of NOAA’s Hurricane Research Division. These higher-quality data are important for improving hurricane model forecasts now and in the future. NOAA partners with NASA to collect measurements of various aspects of hurricanes over time. “NASA weather satellites are a powerful tool for observations, as people cannot fly into every storm to gather data,” Murillo says. Satellites help expand the observational record. With a longer, more detailed record, scientists can detect changes in long-term data trends over time.

This partnership is also developing the next generation of satellites to further improve hurricane observations for models. Dr. Marangelly Fuentes, meteorologist and program manager for one of NASA’s Earth research contracts, says researchers “run tests with potential new data to see how they would impact the model’s ability to correctly forecast a hurricane.”

For example, researchers may test to see if more detailed data about the ocean’s surface temperature in front of a storm help to accurately predict its intensity. If they find something useful, they can use this information to inform the design of instruments on future satellites. Then as more data are collected, this will lead to a better understanding of forecasting hurricanes and how they may be impacted by climate change.

What Does That Mean for Me?

Anyone who has experienced a hurricane knows how much damage it can cause to life and property. Flooding remains one of the biggest concerns when a hurricane comes ashore, and climate change will likely make that worse. With impacts from climate change (like sea level rise) already happening, the likelihood of a billion-dollar disasterfrom a hurricane remains very high.

If you live in hurricane-threatened areas, the best thing you can do is to be prepared. As we collect more data about hurricanes, we’ll better understand whether models correctly predicted hurricane changes from human-caused global warming. Fuentes says, “All of us have to do our part when seeing changes on the Earth, like the recent pattern of stronger hurricanes, to avoid it becoming something permanent.”

Rescue us from our environmental ‘mess’, UN chief urges Stockholm summit

Although there have been successes in protecting the planet since 1972, including rescuing the ozone layer, Mr. Guterres warned that “Earth’s natural systems cannot keep up with our demands.”

© UNEP I Secretary-General António Guterres (right) speaks at Stockholm+50 in Sweden, together with UNEP chief Inger Andersen and GA President, Abdulla Shahid

Triple planetary crisis

50 years ago, leaders came to #Stockholm & started the work of the environmental movement. Let us be the ones to finish it – by unleashing a paradigm shift to deliver a more caring world for all.

My statement at the opening of @StockholmPlus50
➡️https://t.co/XA1Bok3RTi pic.twitter.com/4YbmUjic0x

— Inger Andersen (@andersen_inger) June 2, 2022

“Lead us out of this mess”, he urged delegates at the Swedish summit convened by the UN General Assembly, in a call for action against a “triple planetary crisis” that’s been caused by the climate emergency – “that is killing and displacing ever more people each year” – biodiversity loss – which threatens “more than three billion people” – and pollution and waste, “that is costing some nine million lives a year”.

All nations should do more to protect the basic human right to a clean, healthy environment for everyone, Mr. Guterres insisted, focusing in particular on “poor communities, women and girls, indigenous peoples and the generations to come”.

GDP alert

Part of the solution lies in dispensing with Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a gauge of countries’ economic clout, the Secretary-General continued, describing it as an accounting system “that reward(s) pollution and waste”.

He added: “Let us not forget that when we destroy a forest, we are creating GDP. When we overfish, we are creating GDP. GDP is not a way to measure richness in the present situation in the world.” 

After calling on all nations to commit further to implementing the 17 Sustainable Development Goals and following the 2015 Paris Agreement to tackle these threats, the Secretary-General also insisted that greater efforts were needed to bring emissions to net zero by 2050.

Hot air

“Hot air is killing us,” he said, repeating his call to all countries to abandon fossil fuel subsidies and invest in renewable energy, while developed nations should “at least double” their support to poorer countries so that they can adapt to a growing number of climate shocks.

Stressing that nations have already cooperated to protect the planet on many fronts, Mr. Guterres noted that the final touches are expected to be added to a new global biodiversity framework to reverse nature loss by 2030.

Work is also ongoing to establish a treaty to tackle plastics pollution, the UN chief continued, and the 2022 UN Ocean Conference in Lisbon, is expected to galvanize efforts to save our seas.

“If we do these things we can avert climate catastrophe, end a growing humanitarian and inequality crisis and promote inclusive and sustainable development,” he said, adding that “every government, business and individual has a role to play”.

Tech-tonic push for sustainability

In a related development at Stockholm on Thursday, a UN-backed coalition of 1,000 stakeholders from more than 100 countries, launched their bid to use digital tools to accelerate environmentally and socially sustainable development.

The Coalition for Digital Environmental Sustainability (CODES) offers ways to embed sustainability in all aspects of digitalization. This includes building globally inclusive processes to define standards and governance frameworks for digital sustainability, allocating resources and infrastructure, while also identifying opportunities to reduce potential harms or risks from digitalization, said the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).

5 things you should know about the UN Ocean Conference, a chance to save the planet’s largest ecosystem

UN NEWS

The Ocean is the planet’s largest ecosystem, regulating the climate, and providing livelihoods for billions. But its health is in danger. The second UN Ocean Conference, due to take place in June, will be an important opportunity to redress the damage that mankind continues to inflict on marine life and livelihoods.

© Unsplash/Prolific Ke I Boats docked near a port in Mombasa, Kenya.

With delegates from Member States, non-governmental organizations, and universities attending, as well as entrepreneurs looking for ways to sustainably develop the “Blue Economy”, there are hopes that this event, taking place in the Portuguese city of Lisbon between 27 June and 1 July, will mark a new era for the Ocean.

1. It’s time to focus on solutions

The first Conference, in 2017, was seen as a game changer in alerting the world to the Ocean’s problems. According to Peter Thomson, the UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for the Ocean, Lisbon “is going to be about providing solutions to those problems”.

© Ocean Image Bank/Brook Peters I Fish swim in Red Sea coral reef.

The event is designed to provide a space for the international community to push for the adoption of innovative, science-based solutions for the sustainable management of the oceans, including combating water acidification, pollution, illegal fishing and loss of habitats and biodiversity.

This year’s conference will also determine the level of ambition for the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021-2030). The Decade will be a major theme in the conference, and will be the subject of several important events, laying out the vision of a healthier, more sustainable Ocean.

The UN has set 10 ocean-related targets to be achieved over this decade, as part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the Organisation’s blueprint for a fairer future for people and the planet. They include action to prevent and reducing pollution and acidification, protecting ecosystems, regulating fisheries, and increasing scientific knowledge. At the conference, interactive dialogues will focus on how to address many of these issues.

The role of youth will be at the fore in Lisbon, with young entrepreneurs, working on innovative, science-based solutions to critical problems, an important part of the dialogue.

From 24 through 26 June, they will participate in the Youth and Innovation Forum, a platform aimed at helping young entrepreneurs and innovators to scale up their initiatives, projects and ideas, by providing professional training, and matchmaking with mentors, investors, the private sector, and government officials.

© UNDP/Amunga Eshuchi I A local fisherman in Kenya who depends on fish for food and livelihood.

The forum will also include an "Innovathon," where teams of five participants will work together to create and propose new ocean solutions.

2. The stakes are high

The Ocean provides us all with oxygen, food, and livelihoods. It nurtures unimaginable biodiversity, and directly supports human well-being, through food and energy resources.

Besides being a life source, the ocean stabilizes the climate and stores carbon, acting as a giant sink for greenhouse gases.

According to UN data, around 680 million people live in low-lying coastal zones, rising to around one billion by 2050.

Plus, latest analysis estimates that 40 million people will be employed by ocean-based industries by the end of this decade.

3. Spotlight on Kenya and Portugal

Although the Conference is taking place in Portugal, it is being co-hosted by Kenya, where 65 per cent of the coastal population lives in rural areas, engaging primarily in fisheries, agriculture, and mining for their livelihoods. 

© Unsplash/Tamas Tuzes-Katai I Nazaré beach in Portugal.

For Bernadette Loloju, a resident of Samburu County, Kenya, the ocean is important for her country’s people because it allows them to get many of the goods they need. “The ocean contains many living organisms including fish. It also gives us food. When we go to Mombasa city, we enjoy the beach and swim, adding to our happiness”.

Nzambi Matee, UN Environment Programme (UNEP) Young Champion of the Earth winner, shares the same vision. Nzambi lives in Nairobi, Kenya, and is the founder of Gjenge Makers, which produces sustainable low-cost construction materials made of recycled plastic waste.

Ms. Matee takes plastic waste from the ocean, fished by fishermen, and converts it into paving bricks – “my work of recycling plastic waste from the ocean has enabled me to employ over 113 youth and women, whom together have produced 300,000 bricks. I get my livelihood from the ocean, and therefore the ocean is life to me”, she said.

The passion for the ocean is shared with Portugal, the largest coastal European Union Member State with some four million kilometers of continuous coastline, and as such, a country that plays a central role in the Atlantic basin.

“Our expectations for the UN Oceans Conference are that it will be a conference about action and not just about commitment”, says Catarina Grilo, Director of Conservation and Policy at Associação Natureza Portugal (ANP), a non-governmental organization working in line with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). ANP runs several projects in the areas of marine protection, sustainable fisheries, and ocean conservancy.

“The previous conference in New York was a really good moment to raise awareness about the role of the oceans for humanity’s well-being. At the time we had a lot of voluntary commitments from Member States and non-state organizations, but now it's time to move from words to actions”.

4. The ocean and the global climate are intrinsically linked

The ocean and global climate heavily influence one another in many ways. As the climate crisis continues to pose an existential threat, there are some key metrics scientists are watching closely.

According to the latest climate change report from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) global mean sea levels increased at an average of 4.5 mm per year between 2013 and 2021, due to ice sheets melting at an increasing rate.

The ocean absorbs around 23 per cent of CO2 generated by human activity, and when it does, chemical reactions take place, acidifying the seawater. That puts marine environments at risk and, the more acidic the water becomes, the less CO2 it is able to absorb.

Samuel Collins, a project manager at the Oceano Azul Foundation, in Lisbon, believes that the conference will serve as a bridge to COP27, due to take place in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt this November.

“The ocean is fundamentally integral to climate. It houses 94 per cent of the living space on the planet. I could reel off statistics that shock us all.”, says the 27-year-old Scot.

© FAO/Kurt Arrigo I Different fish species swim in a marine protected area outside the coast of Malta.

“The reason why the products that we buy in the shop are so cheap is because shipping transports 90 per cent of the goods in our homes, so there are many reasons why we are connected to the ocean, whether you're a landlocked country or not. There’s no living organism on earth that is unaffected by the Ocean”.

5. What can you do to help?

We asked some experts - including Catarina Grilo and biologist Nuno Barros at ANP, as well as Sam Collins at Oceano Azul Foundation - what citizens can do to promote a sustainable blue economy, while waiting for decision-makers and world leaders to move into action. Here are some ideas that you can incorporate to your daily lives:

1. If you eat fish, diversify your diet in terms of seafood consumption, do not always eat the same species. Also avoid consuming top predators and make sure what you eat is coming from responsible sources.

2. Prevent plastic pollution: with 80 per cent of marine pollution being originated on land, do your part to stop pollution reaching the sea. You can help by using reusable products, avoid consuming disposable products, and also making sure that you are placing your waste in the appropriate bins.

UN News/Teresa Salema I Beach clean-up at Praia da Poça, a popular little beach at the start of the Estoril - Cascais coast, in Portugal.

1. Pick up trash from the beach, and do not litter. But also think that any step you can take to reduce your environmental footprint will help the ocean in an indirect way.

2. Continue to advocate for solutions, whether that’s on the streets, writing letters to decision-makers, signing petitions, or supporting campaigns that aim to influence decision makers, at the national level or at a global level.

Egypt says climate finance must be top of agenda at Cop27 talks

Fiona Harvey

Host of November’s summit wants focus to be on ‘moving from pledges to implementation’

Rania Al Mashat, Egypt’s minister for international cooperation, called for Cop27 to be about ‘practicalities’. Photograph: Reuters

Financial assistance for developing countries must be at the top of the agenda for UN climate talks this year, the host country, Egypt, has made clear, as governments will be required to follow through on promises made at the Cop26 summit last year.

Egypt will host Cop27 in Sharm el-Sheikh in November. The talks will take place in the shadow of the war in Ukraine, as well as rising energy and food prices around the world, leaving rich countries grappling with a cost-of-living crisis and poor countries struggling with debt mountains.

Most of the world’s biggest economies, and biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, have yet to fulfil the pledges they made at Glasgow last November to strengthen their targets on emissions cuts. Work to turn the pledges of climate finance from rich countries into projects on the ground helping poor countries has also been slow.

Rania Al Mashat, Egypt’s minister for international cooperation, said: “For us, what we want this Cop[27] to be about is moving from pledges to implementation. And we want to highlight what are the practical policies and practices, the processes that can actually push the pledges [into action], to bridge that gap.”

She added: “We want this Cop to be about the practicalities: what is it that we need to do to operationalise the pledges into implementation?”

Some countries have difficulty gaining access to finance, she noted, and that must be addressed with new ways of “de-risking” finance, to attract private sector investors. This could be done through governments providing guarantees or other assurances to private lenders, or co-investing with them.

“One of the successes from Glasgow which will always be remembered is how the private sector was mobilised in a very important way,” Mashat told the Guardian. “So instead of just billions, the word trillions started coming up.

“However, these trillions from the private sector commitments or pledges can never make their way to the countries that need them most, unless we have more synergy between [public sector] development finance and private capital to create de-risking tools.”

Mohamed Maait, the Egyptian finance minister, also spoke of the need to address bigger finance issues, such as the “huge burden” of mounting debt that many poor countries are facing. “Most developing countries are in debt. Can we do something to engage those countries? Can we reduce this burden and assist them towards net zero?” he said.

Maait made it clear that tackling the debt burden, which inhibits countries from taking measures that would reduce emissions, and making investments that would help them cope with the effects of the climate crisis, would be a key priority for Egypt. “We need to sit down together and come up with a solution – the alternative is to let the risks increase, the challenges increase, and people’s suffering increase,” he said.

Helping poor countries cut their emissions, and become more resilient to the effects of extreme weather would benefit rich countries too, he added. “The risks of climate change are not for one country but for all of us,” he said.

Rich countries would also need to find ways to compensate poor countries for not extracting more oil and gas, he said. He gave the example of Senegal, where major gas discoveries are expected that could transform the economy – but would also constitute a vast “carbon bomb”, of the kind that if exploited would lead to temperatures far exceeding the 1.5C temperature limit targeted in Glasgow.

“Senegal were hoping this discovery would help them. Now you are coming to say, climate change means stopping the finance,” said Maait. “That is very worrying.”

Developing countries had done little to create the climate crisis but risked being penalised in ways that rich countries have escaped, he warned. “Poor countries’ responsibility for this problem is limited. Unless we can get a good solution to this, it will be very difficult. We need to ensure we do not add to suffering, to debt, and that countries can fulfil their ambitions.”

Poor countries could feel as if they were being “punished”, he added. “We [need] a situation where we ensure you are not punished but are encouraged to go green.”

He also cautioned against rich countries providing climate finance in the form of loans that require repayment or incur interest. “Don’t tell me you are going to offer green finance at the same cost as traditional finance,” he said, speaking at a small gathering in the City of London. “This will not work.”

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More than 59 million internally displaced in 2021

UN NEWS

© UNOCHA

A displaced persons camp in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

IOM has welcomed the report, produced by its partner the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), calling it a valuable tool for the organization, humanitarians, and governments, in supporting communities affected by disasters and other crises. 

“Understanding, managing, and adapting to human mobility trends is crucial to ensure humanitarian assistance and essential services are reaching people where they are most needed,” the UN agency said. 

Running from disasters 

For the past 15 years, most internal displacement was triggered by disasters, with annual numbers slightly higher than those related to conflict and violence. 

The number of people living in #internaldisplacement worldwide reached a record 59.1 million at the end of 2021, up from 55 million in 2020.

⚫️ 53.2 million by conflict & violence
⚫️ 5.9 million by disasters#GRID2022: https://t.co/nFkUalQklu

— IOM - UN Migration 🇺🇳 (@UNmigration) May 19, 2022

Last year was no exception, according to the report.  Weather-related events such as floods, storms and cyclones resulted in some 23.7 million internal displacements in 2021, mainly in the Asia-Pacific region. 

IOM warned that with the expected impacts of climate change, and without ambitious climate action, numbers are likely to increase in the coming years. 

Conflict and violence 

Meanwhile, conflict and violence triggered 14.4 million internal displacements in 2021, a nearly 50 per cent increase over the previous year. 

The majority took place in Africa, particularly Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, while Afghanistan and Myanmar saw unprecedented numbers of displacement. 

Young lives affected 

The report also includes a special focus on children and youth, who account for more than 40 per cent of the total number of those internally displaced last year.  

It looks at the impacts of displacement on their well-being now and in the future, and fills data and knowledge gaps that are critical to finding durable solutions. 

IOM added that gaps remain in understanding and addressing internal displacement in conflict. 

Driven by data 

The agency has partnered with the IDMC - which is part of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) - to provide reliable and accurate data through its Displacement Tracking Matrix (DTM), the world’s largest source of primary data on internal displacement. 

The two organizations signed an agreement four years ago to join forces on improving data and to accelerate policymaking and action. 

IOM has also co-chaired the International Data Alliance for Children on the Move (IDAC) since 2020. 

The coalition brings together governments, international and regional organizations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), think tanks, academics, and civil society, to improve statistics and data on migrant and forcibly displaced children. 

Earth given 50-50 chance of hitting key warming mark by 2026

The Associated Press

An elderly resident watches wildfire approach her house in the village of Gouves, on the island of Evia, Greece, on Aug. 8, 2021.Konstantinos Tsakalidis / Bloomberg via Getty Images file

In 2018, a major United Nations science report predicted dramatic and dangerous effects on people and the world if warming exceeds 1.5 degrees Celsius.

The world is creeping closer to the warming threshold international agreements are trying to prevent, with nearly a 50-50 chance that Earth will temporarily hit that temperature mark within the next five years, teams of meteorologists across the globe predicted.

With human-made climate change continuing, there’s a 48 percent chance that the globe will reach a yearly average of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels of the late 1800s at least once between now and 2026, a bright red signal in climate change negotiations and science, a team of 11 different forecast centers predicted for the World Meteorological Organization late Monday.

The odds are inching up along with the thermometer. Last year, the same forecasters put the odds at closer to 40 percent and a decade ago it was only 10 percent.

The team, coordinated by the United Kingdom’s Meteorological Office, in their five-year general outlook said there is a 93 percent chance that the world will set a record for hottest year by the end of 2026. They also said there’s a 93 percent chance that the five years from 2022 to 2026 will be the hottest on record. Forecasters also predict the devastating fire-prone megadrought in the U.S. Southwest will keep going.

“We’re going to see continued warming in line with what is expected with climate change,” said UK Met Office senior scientist Leon Hermanson, who coordinated the report.

These forecasts are big picture global and regional climate predictions on a yearly and seasonal time scale based on long term averages and state of the art computer simulations. They are different than increasingly accurate weather forecasts that predict how hot or wet a certain day will be in specific places.

But even if the world hits that mark of 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial times — the globe has already warmed about 1.1 degrees (2 degrees Fahrenheit) since the late 1800s — that’s not quite the same as the global threshold first set by international negotiators in the 2015 Paris agreement. In 2018, a major United Nations science report predicted dramatic and dangerous effects on people and the world if warming exceeds 1.5 degrees.

The global 1.5 degree threshold is about the world being that warm not for one year, but over a 20- or 30- year time period, several scientists said. This is not what the report predicts. Meteorologists can only tell if Earth hits that average mark years, maybe a decade or two, after it is actually reached there because it is a long term average, Hermanson said.

“This is a warning of what will be just average in a few years,” said Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald, who wasn’t part of the forecast teams.

The prediction makes sense given how warm the world already is and an additional tenth of a degree Celsius (nearly two-tenths of a degree Fahrenheit) is expected because of human-caused climate change in the next five years, said climate scientist Zeke Hausfather of the tech company Stripe and Berkeley Earth, who wasn’t part of the forecast teams. Add to that the likelihood of a strong El Nino — the natural periodic warming of parts of the Pacific that alter world weather — which could toss another couple tenths of a degree on top temporarily and the world gets to 1.5 degrees.

The world is in the second straight year of a La Nina, the opposite of El Nino, which has a slight global cooling effect but isn’t enough to counter the overall warming of heat-trapping gases spewed by the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, scientists said. The five-year forecast says that La Nina is likely to end late this year or in 2023.

The greenhouse effect from fossil fuels is like putting global temperatures on a rising escalator. El Nino, La Nina and a handful of other natural weather variations are like taking steps up or down on that escalator, scientists said.

On a regional scale, the Arctic will still be warming during the winter at rate three times more than the globe on average. While the American Southwest and southwestern Europe are likely to be drier than normal the next five years, wetter than normal conditions are expected for Africa’s often arid Sahel region, northern Europe, northeast Brazil and Australia, the report predicted.

The global team has been making these predictions informally for a decade and formally for about five years, with greater than 90 percent accuracy, Hermanson said.

NASA top climate scientist Gavin Schmidt said the figures in this report are “a little warmer” than what the U.S. NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration use. He also had doubts about skill level on long-term regional predictions.

“Regardless of what is predicted here, we are very likely to exceed 1.5 degrees C in the next decade or so, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that we are committed to this in the long term — or that working to reduce further change is not worthwhile,” Schmidt said in an email.

John Kerry warns a long Ukraine war would threaten climate efforts

Fiona Harvey

Exclusive: US presidential envoy says limiting global heating to 1.5C could be made harder by conflict

The longer the war in Ukraine carries on, the worse the consequences will be for the climate, the US presidential envoy John Kerry has warned.

Many countries are struggling with an energy crisis while also urgently needing to cut greenhouse gas emissions to limit global heating to 1.5C, he said.

John Kerry: ‘My message to people is we have to take advantage of the fact that the science tells us we still have time, but we have to greatly accelerate what we’re doing.’ Photograph: Orn E Borgen/AP

“If it’s a long period of time, obviously that makes [staying within 1.5C] very complicated,” Kerry said. “It depends on what happens with the war, where the war goes and how long it lasts. If miraculously we can somehow find a way to resolve some of the fundamental problems in the next six months, then maybe we could just accelerate everything together. I think we can make up some distance [in progress on tackling the climate crisis].”

But he added: “The longer this goes on, the harder it becomes [to stay within 1.5C]. There are a number of scientists who believe we are on the edge of 1.5C now. Anything that is not part of the acceleration [of emissions-cutting efforts] gets in the way.”

He said the agreement reached at the UN Cop26 climate summit last year would have “faced some big hurdles” if taking place in the current geopolitical circumstances, but there was still a chance of fulfilling its promises.

“This is not easy, but it hasn’t fallen apart,” he told the Guardian. “[The effort to stay within 1.5C] has met with an unexpected barrier, the war, and it has met with an unfortunate and dangerous resurgence of business as usual by some parties that threatens the acceleration necessary to get the job done, and it’s going to be up to us to push back and continue with the process.”

The world’s leading climate scientists recently warned it was “now or never” for the world to cut greenhouse gas emissions and avoid the worst ravages of the climate crisis.

Kerry said this showed there was still a chance of holding to the 1.5C goal. “The IPCC said to us a few weeks ago ‘we’re behind, it’s not getting better at the pace it should be, emissions have gone up, but you still have time to do this’,” he said. “And my message to people is we have to take advantage of the fact that the science tells us we still have time, but we have to greatly accelerate what we’re doing. We have to speed up very significantly.”

He said the disruption caused by the Ukraine war was forcing countries to reconsider their dependence on fossil fuels. “The promises of Cop26 were never going to be fulfilled in six months, or one year or two years. These are promises for 2030. A hiccup of a number of months may be something that we can work around or get through.”

Kerry also said the US would increase its production of natural gas, despite its climate targets, to help allies replace Russian fossil fuels. He said gas from the US produced lower carbon emissions than gas from Russia, owing to more efficient extraction, and could provide a short-term solution while countries ramp up renewable energy.

The US president, Joe Biden, has come under heavy criticism from green campaigners in the US for allowing the expansion of gas drilling, opening up new tracts of public land for exploration and development. Kerry said more gas was needed in the short term, to make up for supplies lost from Russia, but that companies should beware of building large amounts of new gas infrastructure that would be left as stranded assets when the energy crisis passes.

“Gas has always been part of the transition away from dirtier fossil fuels and towards this new energy economy,” he said. “I’d take a gas-fired power plant in the near term – I emphasise near term – over coal or oil any day of the week. But we don’t want to build out a huge new infrastructure around gas that has stranded asset challenges or is unabated [not fitted with technology to capture and store carbon] after a number of years.”

He hinted at moves to limit how long such plants could operate. “We have to decide how quickly we must have a requisite for abatement – maybe 10 years, eight years, who knows? But for the long run, gas is going to have to abate and live up to low emissions standards just like everybody else,” he said.

With six months to go before the next UN climate summit, Cop27 in Egypt, Kerry said the focus must be on the G20 countries, the world’s 20 biggest economies, which are responsible for about 80% of global greenhouse gas emissions. The emissions-cutting plans these countries brought to Cop26 were inadequate to meet the 1.5C target, so they have been asked to come to Egypt this November with more stringent proposals.

Kerry acknowledged that many countries were unlikely to meet the targets, including Russia, which is one of the biggest fossil fuel producers. He warned some countries were “indifferent” to the need to cut emissions, or have vested interests in not doing so.

“The war is not the only thing that’s in the way of the acceleration – an unfortunate indifference in some quarters, outright disinformation in others, and people who just love the status quo is perhaps one of our biggest problems,” he said.

But there were hopes that major emitters including China and India were embracing change, he added. “We’re prepared to try to help China or provide whatever China is willing to accept in terms of assistance.”

He also pointed to India, currently suffering a massive heatwave, where a large expansion of renewable energy is planned that could enable the country to cut emissions in line with a global 1.5C temperature goal.

Kerry said he was hopeful that the climate legislation currently stuck in Congress, largely because of the refusal of a single Democratic senator to pass it, would soon be resolved. He said other countries were unlikely to be discouraged from taking action themselves by the US’s own internal difficulties.

“Maybe they’ll say ‘screw them, they can’t get their act together, we’re going to do it’,” he said. “I can’t predict, but I can tell you this: that President Biden is committed to moving forward and obviously he has administrative powers and can issue certain executive orders and do certain things.

“Even while Donald Trump was president, pulled out of Paris, 75% of the new power that came online in the US was renewable. So the truth is that a lot of what happens in the US will be governed locally and some nationally by governors of states and mayors of cities who are deeply committed.”

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Ending the War of Attrition in Ukraine

JEFFREY D. SACHS

Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has degenerated into a savage war of attrition that each side believes it will win, but which in reality both sides will lose. Ukraine should intensify the search for a negotiated peace of the kind that was on the table in March, but which was abandoned following the Russian atrocities in Bucha.

NEW YORK – Wars often erupt and persist because of the two sides’ miscalculations regarding their relative power. In the case of Ukraine, Russia blundered badly by underestimating the resolve of Ukrainians to fight and the effectiveness of NATO-supplied weaponry. Yet Ukraine and NATO are also overestimating their capacity to defeat Russia on the battlefield. The result is a war of attrition that each side believes it will win, but that both sides will lose. Ukraine should intensify the search for a negotiated peace of the type that was on the table in late March, but which it then abandoned following evidence of Russian atrocities in Bucha – and perhaps owing to changing perceptions of its military prospects. 

The peace terms under discussion in late March called for Ukraine’s neutrality, backed by security guarantees and a timeline to address contentious issues such as the status of Crimea and the Donbas. Russian and Ukrainian negotiators stated that there was progress in the negotiations, as did the Turkish mediators. The negotiations then collapsed after the reports from Bucha, with Ukraine’s negotiator stating that, “Ukrainian society is now much more negative about any negotiation concept that concerns the Russian Federation.” 

But the case for negotiations remains urgent and overwhelming. The alternative is not Ukraine’s victory but a devastating war of attrition. To reach an agreement, both sides need to recalibrate their expectations. 

When Russia attacked Ukraine, it clearly expected a quick and easy victory. Russia vastly underestimated the upgrading of the Ukraine military following years of US, British, and other military support and training since 2014. Moreover, Russia underestimated the extent to which NATO military technology would counter Russia’s greater number of troops. No doubt, Russia’s greatest error was to assume that the Ukrainians would not fight – or perhaps even switch sides. 2

Yet now Ukraine and its Western supporters are overestimating the chances of defeating Russia on the battlefield. The idea that the Russian army is about to collapse is wishful thinking. Russia has the military capacity to destroy Ukrainian infrastructure (such as the rail lines now under attack) and to win and hold territory in the Donbas region and on the Black Sea coast. Ukrainians are fighting resolutely, but it is highly unlikely that they can force a Russian defeat. 

Nor can Western financial sanctions, which are far less sweeping and effective than the governments that imposed them acknowledge. US sanctions against Venezuela, Iran, North Korea, and others have not changed the politics of those regimes, and the sanctions against Russia are already falling far short of the hype with which they were introduced. Excluding Russian banks from the SWIFT international payments system was not the “nuclear option” that many claimed. According to the International Monetary Fund, Russia’s economy will contract by around 8.5% in 2022 – bad but hardly catastrophic. 

Moreover, the sanctions are creating serious economic consequences for the United States and especially Europe. US inflation is at a 40-year high and is likely to persist because of the trillions of dollars of liquidity that had been created by the Federal Reserve in recent years. At the same time, the US and European economies are slowing, perhaps even contracting, as supply-chain disruptions proliferate. 

US President Joe Biden’s domestic political position is weak and likely to weaken further as economic difficulties mount in the coming months. Public support for the war will also likely diminish as the economy sours. The Republican Party is splitover the war, with the Trump faction not much interested in confronting Russia over Ukraine. The Democrats, too, will increasingly resent the stagflation that is likely to cost the party its majority in one or both houses of Congress in the November midterm elections. 

The adverse economic fallout from the war and sanctions regime will also reach dire proportions in dozens of developing countries that depend on food and energy imports. Economic dislocations in these countries will lead to urgent calls worldwide to end the war and sanctions regime. 

In the meantime, Ukraine continues to suffer grievously in terms of deaths, dislocation, and destruction. The IMF now forecasts a 35% contraction of Ukraine’s economy in 2022, reflecting the brutal destruction of housing, factories, rail stock, energy storage and transmission capacity, and other vital infrastructure. 

Most dangerous of all, as long as the war continues, the risk of nuclear escalation is real. If Russia’s conventional forces were actually to be pushed toward defeat, as the US is now seeking, Russia might well counter with tactical nuclear weapons. A US or Russian aircraft could be shot down by the other side as they scramble over the Black Sea, which in turn could lead to direct military conflict. Media reports that the US has covert forces on the ground, and the US intelligence community’s disclosure that it helped Ukraine kill Russian generals and sink Russia’s Black Sea flagship, underscore the danger. 

The reality of the nuclear threat means that both sides should never forgo the possibility of negotiations. That is the central lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which took place 60 years ago this coming October. President John F. Kennedy saved the world then by negotiating an end to the crisis – agreeing that the US would never again invade Cuba and that the US would remove its missiles from Turkey in exchange for the withdrawal of the Soviet missiles from Cuba. That was not giving in to Soviet nuclear blackmail. That was Kennedy wisely avoiding Armageddon. 

It is still possible to establish peace in Ukraine based on the parameters that were on the table at the end of March: neutrality, security guarantees, a framework for addressing Crimea and the Donbas, and Russian withdrawal. This remains the only realistic and safe course for Ukraine, Russia, and the world. The world would rally to such an agreement, and, for its own survival and well-being, so should Ukraine.

Climate change: 'Fifty-fifty chance' of breaching 1.5C warming limit

Matt McGrath

The likelihood of crossing a key global warming threshold has risen significantly, according to a new analysis.

GETTY IMAGES I The recent heatwave in India has impacted millions of people

UK Met Office researchers say that there's now around a fifty-fifty chance that the world will warm by more than 1.5C over the next five years.

Such a rise would be temporary, but researchers are concerned about the overall direction of temperatures.

It's almost certain that 2022-2026 will see a record warmest year, they say.

The Met Office is the UK's national meteorological service.

As levels of warming gases in the atmosphere have accrued rapidly over the past three decades, global temperatures have responded by rising in step.

In 2015, the world's average temperature first went 1C above the pre-industrial levels, which are generally thought of as the temperatures recorded in the middle of the 19th century.

That was also the year that political leaders signed the Paris climate agreement, which committed the world to keeping the rise in global temperatures well below 2C while pursuing efforts keep them under 1.5C.

At COP26 in Glasgow last November, governments re-iterated their commitment to keeping "1.5C alive."

For the past seven years, global temperatures have stayed at or around that 1C mark, with 2016 and 2020 essentially tied as the warmest years on record.

VCG I Rising temperatures are linked to more extreme weather events such as these floods in China

Scientists say that with around 1C of warming the world is already experiencing significant impacts such as the unprecedented wildfires seen in North America last year, or the drastic heatwaves currently hitting India and Pakistan.

This update from the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), carried out by the UK Met Office, says that the chances of temporarily going over 1.5C in one of the next five years have never been higher.

The study suggests that temperatures between 2022 and 2026 will be between 1.1C and 1.7C higher than pre-industrial levels.

The Met Office researchers predict that for any one year in the period, the likelihood of breaching the 1.5C level is around 48%, or close to 50:50.

"The basic thing that's changing is that the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, are slowly creeping up," said Dr Leon Hermanson from the Met Office, the lead author of the report. 

"I think people are already quite concerned about climate change and it is worrying, it is showing that we continue to warm the planet and we're getting closer to this first threshold that was set in the Paris agreement - and we need to continue doing everything we can to cut the use of fossil fuels."

The researchers say that going over 1.5C for one year isn't the same as a sustained rise where temperatures don't fall below this figure. The likelihood is that if it is exceeded in the next five years, it will fall below 1.5C again. However there is now little room for complacency.

"For as long as we continue to emit greenhouse gases, temperatures will continue to rise," said Prof Petteri Taalas from the WMO.

"And alongside that, our oceans will continue to become warmer and more acidic, sea ice and glaciers will continue to melt, sea level will continue to rise and our weather will become more extreme," he said. 

According to the study, the Arctic region will likely feel a greater impact of warming over the next five years compared to the rest of the world. The researchers say that the difference in temperatures from the long-term average will be three times as large in these areas.

The researchers also believe that one of the coming years will likely break the 2016 and 2020 record for warmest year. 

GETTY IMAGES I At COP26 in Glasgow, political leaders reaffirmed their commitment to keep warming under 1.5C

That will happen, most likely in an El Niño year.

That's a natural, meteorological phenomenon associated with an unusual warming of the surface waters of the eastern Pacific ocean that can impact weather all over the world.

"The year we do exceed 1.5 degrees temporarily will probably be an El Niño year," said Dr Hermanson from the Met Office.

"It's on top of climate change, kind of like the wiggles on top of the trend, if you like, and the next record year will probably be an El Niño year, like 2016 was."

Crucial tropical forests were destroyed at a rate of 10 soccer fields a minute last year

Angela Dewan

A boat speeding on the Jurura river in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon Forest on March 15, 2020. The greatest tropical forest lost last year was in Brazil.

(CNN)The area of tropical forest destroyed in 2021 was enough to cover the entire island of Cuba, and sent more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as India does in an entire year from burning fossil fuels, according to an analysis published Thursday.

Some 11.1 million hectares (around 43,000 square miles) of forest was destroyed, predominantly by logging as well as fires, the analysis by the World Resources Institute's Global Forest Watch and the University of Maryland found. Some of those fires were deliberately lit to clear land and many were exacerbated by climate change.

Tropical primary forest loss

The loss was less severe than in 2020, but deforestation is still occurring at an alarming rate in the tropics. Of the area lost, 3.75 million hectares were primary tropical forest -- sometimes called virgin rainforest -- at the equivalent of 10 soccer fields every minute, WRI reported.

Primary tropical forests in particular are crucial for the ecological balance of the planet, providing oxygen that supports life and as biodiversity hotspots.

They are also rich in stored carbon, and when these forests are logged or burned, they release carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming. The destruction of primary tropical forest loss alone emitted 2.5 gigatons of CO2 last year, comparable to emissions from fossil fuel burning in India, which is the world's third-biggest greenhouse gas emitter.

"What's important to understand is that forests, especially tropical forests, are part of the global climate system," WRI senior fellow Frances Seymour told CNN. "So they're not mechanical carbon storage devices, they actually influence the energy transfer and the moisture content of the atmosphere in ways that affect rainfall, that affect global circulation patterns."

Fires are also playing an increasingly larger role in the tropical forest loss. Seymour said that there is a compounding effect between deforestation and climate change.

"When deforestation happens, when forests are lost, it not only contributes carbon to the atmosphere, but also disrupts rainfall patterns and increases local temperatures in ways that, for example, make remaining forests more vulnerable to fire, and the warmer, drier conditions that come with climate change," Seymour said.

The analysis looked primarily at tropical forests -- which can be found in countries from Brazil to Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) -- because more than 96% of deforestation, or human-caused removal of forest cover, occurs there.

The findings were based on satellite imagery that assessed how tree cover changed over time. A loss of tree cover, or canopy, in the tropics often means forest has been destroyed. In other countries, where logging is less common, it can mean that the tops of trees are destroyed, such as in the case of fire, but the forest remains otherwise intact

Nonetheless, Boreal forests -- which are found in particularly cold climates, including in Russia, Canada and Alaska -- experienced their highest loss of tree cover on record last year. More than 8 million hectares were lost, an increase of nearly a third from 2020.

That's largely because Russia experienced particularly severe fires, losing 6.5 million hectares of tree cover.

These fires can cause what scientists call feedback loops, "in which increasing fires lead to more carbon emissions, which leads to hotter, drier weather, which leads to more fires, and so on," the analysis says.

In the tropics, more than 40% of forest loss last year occurred in Brazil. Around 1.5 million hectares of forest in the country was wiped off the map, mostly from the Amazon. That's more than three times the DRC, which lost the second-largest amount of forest.

If Amazon reaches tipping point, climate goals 'blown out of the water'

In Brazil, a major driver for deforestation is agricultural expansion, which increased by 9% between 2020 and 2021.

The WRI analysis warns that forest loss is pushing the Amazon toward a tipping point, where it will no longer be able to serve as one of the world's most important carbon sinks and could even become a net emitter of CO2. The Amazon is the world's largest rainforest, and it plays a crucial role in biodiversity, regulating the climate, and providing ecosystem services to millions of people who live there.

If that tipping point is passed, the world's attempts to contain global warming to 1.5-2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels -- as laid out in the 2015 Paris Agreement -- would be "blown out of the water," Seymour said.

Brazil primary forest loss hotspots

Amid its sobering findings, the analysis gave some reason for optimism. Indonesia and Malaysia, which had for decades battled rampant deforestation, have both seen a reduction in the amount of tree cover it loses annually for five years in a row. In Indonesia, the amount of forest lost fell by 25% last year.

This is a sign that corporate commitments and government actions are working, according to Hidayah Hamzah, Forest and Peat Monitoring Senior Manager from WRI in Indonesia.

"This indicates that corporate commitments and government actions are clearly working," she told journalists at a briefing. "Indonesia is heading in the right direction to meet some of its climate commitments."

Malaysia, however, has already lost one-fifth of its primary tropical forest since 2001 and up to a third since the 1970s.

Hamzah added that the Indonesia's success was due in part to the government's moratorium on logging licenses for primary forests and peatland, as well as improved fire monitoring. A policycalled NDPE -- No Deforestation, No Peatland, No Exploitation -- now covers more than 80% of palm oil refining capacity in Indonesia and Malaysia, which are the world's biggest exporters of the oil, and over 80% of the pulp and paper industry in Indonesia.

But WRI warns too that as palm oil prices hit a 40-year high, these countries' forests could come under increasing pressure. Indonesia also lifted a temporary freeze on new permits for palm oil plantations.

While there was an overall reduction in tree cover loss last year, the annual improvement is not consistent enough to meet global commitments, including a declaration signed by more that 140 countries at climate talks in Glasgow last year to "halt and reverse forest loss by 2030."

Seymour also warned against relying too much on forests to offset greenhouse gas emissions, saying companies and countries should be using them to go above and beyond decarbonization efforts -- by dramatically reducing fossil fuel use -- or to offset emissions that are impossible to cut with current technology.

The airline industry is one example, as technology to fly carbon-free does not exist yet at scale.

"So, yes, we want them to be reducing those emissions as quickly as possible and investing in new technologies that will allow flights without carbon, but in the meantime, they are 'unabated' emissions," she said. "And compensating those with purchase of carbon credits can can provide a source of finance that we desperately need to incentivize the protection of the world's forests."

Ocean life projected to die off in mass extinction if emissions remain high

Evan Bush

Marine animals could die at levels rivaling the biggest mass extinctions in history, a study found, if seas become too warm and hold too little oxygen.

A green sea turtle swimming over coral reef in Indonesia.Georgette Douwma / Getty Images

Marine animals could die off at a level rivaling the biggest mass extinctions in geologic history if people don’t curb greenhouse gas emissions. 

That’s the takeaway from a study published Thursday in the journal Science, which found that many ocean creatures could face conditions too warm and with too little oxygen to survive if we don't turn things around. The more warming, the fewer species are likely to survive, the results show. 

The new analysis applies what the research team previously learned about the "Great Dying" 252 million years ago — when more than two-thirds of all marine life in the Permian Period went extinct — as well as other historic extinctions to today’s climate projections. Under a high emissions scenario, the results were disturbing. 

"If we don’t act to curb emissions, that extinction is quite high. It registers on the geological scale among the major biotic collapses of diversity in the Earth’s history," said Curtis Deutsch, an author of the paper and a professor of geosciences at Princeton University.

The new models suggest Earth could approach Permian levels of marine extinction by 2300 if emissions continue to increase. As temperatures rise, according to the research, species richness will decline near the tropics, with some animals migrating toward higher latitudes. Polar species are most at risk, as their habitat becomes a "disappearing climate niche," the paper explains. 

But that fate is far from sealed. If emissions stay near the levels world leaders set in the 2015 Paris Agreement, marine animals would fare far better, the study says.

"Extinctions are largely avoided" under that scenario, said Justin Penn, a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton who co-authored the study. 

Still, the analysis is a reminder that the pace of change on Earth today may be comparable to the most extreme events in history. 

"In the next few decades, we're determining if we’re really going to go deep into a mass extinction again — because of us, because of what we’re doing," said Eric Galbraith, a professor at McGill University studying human and Earth system dynamics, who was not involved in the new study. "It’s hard to wrap our heads around the importance of what we choose to do as a species in the coming decades."

Previous work from the team behind the new analysis revealed runaway global warming and a loss of oxygen in the ocean to be the causes of the Great Dying. Their model’s results matched patterns paleontologists had observed in Permian fossil records, giving it credibility. 

The revelation that extreme changes to the climate were the likely causes "was a real eureka moment," Deutsch said. 

Before that die-off, there was only one landmass — Pangea —  and the Permian ocean teemed with marine creatures. Scientists think these animals had similar traits, like metabolisms and oxygen needs, as those today. 

Scientists knew from prior studies of fossilized teeth that surface temperatures during this period soared about 10 degrees Celsius in the tropics, leading many sea animals to go extinct. The researchers suspected volcanic eruptions triggered the changes, so they modeled those conditions.

The results showed that many species were pushed past their physiological limits.  

As the climate warmed, animals needed more oxygen to perform bodily functions like breathing. But warmer water doesn’t contain as much dissolved oxygen — which made it more difficult for species to survive.

"Imagine facing inflation while your hours are also being cut or your salary is going down," Deutsch said. "The ocean is giving less oxygen to organisms in spite of the fact they have this inflationary need." 

A similar process is happening now, Penn said: "The Permian event was caused by climate warming and ocean oxygen loss — two environmental changes underway today."

The question driving Deutsch and his colleagues’ latest research was "how much of the same phenomenon would manifest" in Earth’s future.

They found stark differences depending on how much warming takes place. Extinctions grow at a linear rate in the model as temperatures increase, Deutsch said. 

"There’s a strong sentiment out there, probably among some of your readers and viewers: 'It's too late or the window is closed,'" he said. "That’s not what our results show." 

Currently, the world’s average surface temperatures are on pace to rise roughly 3.2 degrees Celsius (5.8 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century relative to preindustrial times. But limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius — a goal agreed to in the Paris accord — would lower the severity of extinctions by more than 70 percent, the paper found. 

"There’s still time to conserve the diversity that evolution has gradually built up in the ocean," Deutsch said. 

However, if emissions continue to increase, nations remain divided on climate goals and temperatures soar by nearly 5 degrees Celsius by century’s end, marine biodiversity would start to trend toward rates observed in previous mass extinctions.

Galbraith said the research relied on "mature" models, with conclusions based on simple, "reliable" equations.

"I hope this is a fairy tale — these terrible impacts on the marine ecosystem," he said. "It's just a question of building new infrastructure that gets us off fossil fuel infrastructure. We should be able to do that in the next couple decades." 

Galbraith added that the future of ocean life also depends on addressing other harmful human activity, such as intensive fishing or pollution, that could cause cascading effects in combination with climate change. 

“This is really just looking at one dimension of pressure,” he said.