In the southern city of Taiz, 11-month-old Ameer Hellal receives WFP supplementary food for malnutrition. Photo: WFP/Albaraa Mansoor
by Alexander Kozul-Wright (geneva)
Inter Press Service
GENEVA, Mar 03 (IPS) – At a high-level UN event, global donors pledged US$1.2 billion in aid operations to Yemen in 2023. Millions of Yemenis require humanitarian assistance as the country continues to suffer from the fallout of a prolonged civil war.
While the Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths noted that the UN had received 31 commitments during the conference on February 30, 2023, in Geneva, the amount pledged remains well below the organisation’s target of US$4.3 billion.
The conflict in Yemen started in 2014 when Iranian-backed Houthi rebels – representing the country’s Zaidi Shia Muslim minority – seized the capital, Sanaa. The war intensified in 2015 when a Saudi-led coalition intervened on behalf of the government against the Houthis.
Owing to repeated Saudi-led bombardment campaigns and deep territorial divisions (half of the country remains under Houthi control in the north and the other half under government control in the south), Yemen’s economy has ground to a halt.
Last year, exogenous factors also led to steep falls in Yemen’s Rial relative to the U.S. dollar, pushing inflation up to 45 percent. Elsewhere, food prices surged by 58 percent. In 2022, 13 million people in Yemen relied on the UN’s World Food Program for basic staples.
To date, the conflict has killed more than 375,000 people, sixty percent from indirect causes (mainly from malnutrition and disease). The war has also razed the country’s civilian and physical infrastructure, including its oil sector – Yemen’s only source of foreign exchange.
Last year, warring parties agreed to an UN-brokered cease-fire. Though it expired in October, the six-month truce led to a reduction in casualties. It also enabled commercial traffic to flow through the port of Hodeida, increasing the supply of goods and aid into the country.
A slight improvement in food security at the end of last year meant two million fewer Yemenis suffered from acute hunger. The number of people in famine-like conditions also dropped from 161,000 to zero. But progress remains fragile.
Yemen continues to rely on foreign aid. “More than 21 million people, or two-thirds of the country’s population, will need humanitarian assistance in 2023,” said UN secretary-general António Guterres.
Among those in need, more than 17 million are understood to be living below Yemen’s poverty line. Meanwhile, an estimated 4.5 million Yemenis are internally displaced, largely due to climate-change-related events.
According to the UN, Yemen is “highly vulnerable” to the effects of rising global temperatures (notably arid weather). In recent years, severe droughts have exacerbated food shortages caused by the war.
Yemen Remains in Need of External Support
The UN’s US$4.3 billion funding objective is nearly double what it received last year. Looking ahead, reliance on external aid will be particularly acute in 2023 due to constrained oil exports linked to Houthi attacks on government-held oil terminals last October.
This week’s conference took place as the country’s rival groups agreed to an informal suspension of hostilities. Efforts are underway to declare a lasting peace after the parties failed to extend their UN-backed peace agreement last year.
“We have a real opportunity to change Yemen’s trajectory and move toward peace by renewing and expanding the truce,” noted Guterres at the pledging event, co-hosted by Sweden and Switzerland.
The meeting was attended by officials worldwide, including U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock. In his speech, Blinken called on donors to step up their contributions, citing last year’s funding shortages.
The UN missed its financing target for Yemen by US$2 billion last year. Blinken also urged the international community to help restore Yemen’s economy, suggesting this would “reduce people’s suffering over the long term.”
“Large-scale investment will be needed to rebuild Yemen’s physical infrastructure. Securing peace, however, remains the top priority. “Without it, millions will continue to face extreme levels of poverty, hunger and suffering,” added Blinken.
Meanwhile, the UN secretary-general warned that aid funding would not provide a panacea for Yemen.
“Humanitarian assistance is a band-aid. It saves people’s lives but cannot resolve the conflict itself.”
IPS UN Bureau Report
Mangroves in Tai O, Hong Kong. Coastal wetland protection and restoration is an example of the kind of multifunctional solution that is needed to address multiple global crises together. Credit: Chunyip Wong / iStock
Opinion by Paula Harrison – Pamela McElwee – David Obura (bonn)
Inter Press Service
BONN, Mar 02 (IPS) – When global crises are interlinked, they overlap and compound each other. In such cases, the most effective solutions are those that work at the nexus of all these challenges.
In September, almost every Government on Earth will gather at the UN Sustainable Development Summit in New York to take stock at the halfway mark of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of what has been achieved and what remains to be done.
Despite some progress, global development efforts have been hamstrung by unprecedented environmental, social and economic crises, in particular biodiversity loss and climate change, compounded of course by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Tackling these interlinked challenges separately risks creating situations even more damaging to people and communities around the world, and exacerbates the already high risk of not meeting the goals and targets of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
This is especially true because the myriad drivers of risk and damage affect many different sectors at once, across scales from local to global, and can result in negative impacts being compounded. For example, when demands for food and timber combine with the effects of pollution and climate change, they can decimate already degraded ecosystems, driving species to extinction and severely reducing nature’s contributions to people.
The global food system offers another example of this negative spiral of interlocking crises – where food that is produced unsustainably leads to water overconsumption and waste, pollution, increased health risks and loss of biodiversity. It also leads to excessive greenhouse gas emissions, contributing to climate change.
Yet policies often treat each of these global threats in isolation, resulting in separate, uncoordinated actions that typically address only one of the root causes and fail to take advantage of the many potential solution synergies. In the worst cases, actions taken on one challenge directly undermine those needed to tackle another because they fail to account for trade-offs, resulting in unintended consequences, or the impacts being externalised, as someone else’s problem.
This is why almost 140 Governments turned to the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) – requesting IPBES to undertake a major multiyear assessment of the interlinkages among biodiversity, water, food and health in the context of the rapidly-changing climate. This ‘Nexus Assessment’ is among the most complex and important expert assessments ever undertaken – crossing key biophysical domains of climate and biodiversity and elements central to human wellbeing like food, water and health. It will also address how interactions are affected by energy, pollution, conflict and other socio-political challenges.
To fully address this ‘nexus’, the assessment is considering interactions across scales, geographic regions and ecosystems. It also covers past, present and future trends in these interlinkages. And, most importantly, it will offer concrete options for responses to the crises that address the interactions of risk and damage jointly and equitably – providing a vital set of possible solutions for the more sustainable future we want for people and our planet.
One example of the mutifunctional solutions that will be explored is nature-based solutions – such as coastal wetland protection and restoration. When coastal wetland ecosystems are healthy – whether conserved or where necessary, restored – they are a refuge and habitat for biodiversity, improving fish stocks for greater food security and contributing to improve human health and wellbeing. They can also sequester carbon, helping to mitigate climate change, and protect adjacent communities and settlements from flooding and sea level rise.
To develop and implement these kinds of multi-functional solutions, responses for dealing with the major global crises need to be better coordinated, integrated, and made more synergistic across sectors, both public and private. Decision-makers at all levels need better evidence and knowledge to implement such solutions.
Work on the nexus assessment began in 2021 – with the final report expected to be considered and adopted by IPBES member States in 2024. A majority of the 170 expert authors and review editors from around the world are meeting in March in the Kruger National Park in South Africa to further strengthen the draft report, responding to the many thousands of comments received during a first external review period.
The assessment will also include evidence and expertise contributed by indigenous peoples and local communities – whose rich and varied direct experiences and knowledge systems that consider humans and nature as an interconnected whole have embodied a nexus approach for generations.
The Paris Agreement on Climate Change and the recently-agreed Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework provide the roadmaps for tackling the climate and biodiversity crises. The IPBES nexus assessment will offer policymakers a practical guide to bridge the vital interlinkages across the two challenges, to other relevant frameworks, and link to the sustainable development agenda.
For more information about IPBES or about the ongoing progress on the nexus assessment, go to www.ipbes.net or follow @ipbes on social media.
Prof. Paula Harrison is a Principal Natural Capital Scientist and Professor of Land and Water Modelling at the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, United Kingdom.
Prof. Pamela McElwee is a Professor in the Department of Human Ecology in the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, USA.
Dr. David Obura is a Founding Director of CORDIO (Coastal Oceans Research and Development – Indian Ocean) East Africa, Kenya.
Israel’s separation barrier as seen from Al Ram.. Credit: Jillian Kestler-D’Amours/IPS
Opinion by Joseph Chamie (portland, usa)
Inter Press Service
PORTLAND, USA, Mar 02 (IPS) – Israel of today as a Jewish and democratic state is a contradiction of terms and as such may possibly become transformed into a genuinely democratic Israel tomorrow with justice and equality for all.
In Israel today, citizens who are not Jewish are treated differently than those who are Jewish, who benefit from certain rights and privileges. In a national opinion poll, most Jewish Israelis, about 80 percent, say Jews should get preferential treatment in Israel. Also, nearly half of Jewish Israelis say that Arab Israelis should be expelled or transferred from Israel.
In addition, several years ago Israel passed the “nation-state law”, which among other things, states that the right to exercise national self-determination in Israel is unique to the Jewish people and also established Jewish settlement as a national value. While embraced by many Jewish Israelis, the nation-state law was considered apartheid by the country’s non-Jewish population, ostensibly making them second-class citizens.
In a democratic Israel, in contrast, all Israelis irrespective of their religious affiliation would have the same rights and privileges. In such a state, justice and equality would prevail across the entire country’s population, not just for a single dominant religious group.
A democratic Israel would be similar in many respects to Western liberal democracies such as the United States. In that democracy, all religious groups, including Jewish Americans, have the same rights, privileges and equality under the law.
Most Jewish Israelis, some 75 percent across the religious spectrum, continue to believe that Israel can be a Jewish state and a democracy. In contrast, non-Jewish Israelis, including the majorities of Muslims, Christians and Druze, generally do not believe Israel can be a Jewish state and a democracy at the same time; it’s simply viewed as inconsistent.
Further complicating political, legal and human rights matters for Israelis as well as Palestinians are the new government’s recent proposals for judicial reform, which would impact the independence of the Israeli Supreme Court.
Many Israelis have gone to the streets to protest the proposed reform. Objections to the reforms are being raised by former government officials, military officers, business investors and others. Foreign allies, especially officials, Jewish leaders and journalists in America, have also expressed concerns over the proposals. In addition, the majority of Israelis, about two-thirds, oppose the proposed judicial reform.
Turning to demographics, Israel’s population stood at 9.656 million at the end of 2022. The composition of the population was 74 percent Jewish, 21 percent Arab (largely Christian and Muslims) and 5 percent others (Figure 1).
Source: Israel, Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS).
In 1948 when Israel was established, the country’s proportion Jewish was 82 percent of its population of 806 thousand. By the 1960s the proportion Jewish reached a record high of nearly 90 percent. Since that high, the proportion Jewish in Israel has been steadily declining to its current level of 74 percent.
In addition to Israel’s changing demographics, the Jewish Israeli population has not been confined to its 1948 borders. Large numbers have expanded to settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
Israel’s Jewish settler population in the West Bank, for example, is now estimated at more than half a million. Many of the estimated 700 thousand Jewish Israelis now living in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are motivated by their religious mission to restore historic Israel to the Jewish people.
The Jewish settler population is continuing to increase rapidly in the West Bank, which is a top priority of ultranationalist parties who oppose Palestinian statehood.
The Israeli government has also pledged to legalize wildcat outposts and increase the approval and construction of settler homes in the West Bank.
In contrast, the United Nations Security Council and much of the international community of nations, including the United States, the European Union and the United Nations, continue to support the idea of an independent Palestinian state. However, the changing demographics in the West Bank have virtually eliminated the possibility of the two-state solution.
Without the two-state solution, Jewish Israelis face a major challenge affecting their majority status, namely the possibility of the one-state solution.
The one-state solution would involve the entire Israeli and Palestinian populations now living between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River. In such a population numbering approximately 15 million inhabitants, the Jewish population would become a ruling minority of approximately 47 percent, a fundamental change from the sizable Jewish majority of 74 percent in Israel today (Figure 2).
Source: Times of Israel.
Even today the Israeli government is confronting human rights issues with its expansion throughout the occupied Palestinian territories. International, Israeli and Palestinian human rights organizations as well as independent observers have found Israeli authorities practicing apartheid and persecution in the occupied Palestinian territories.
According to those human rights organizations, Israeli government policy is to maintain the domination by Jewish Israelis over Palestinians as well as the abuses and discriminatory policies against Palestinians living in the occupied territories.
Israel rejects those accusations, saying it is a democracy and committed to international law and open to scrutiny. The government cites security concerns and protecting the lives of Israelis for its imposition of travel and related restrictions on Palestinians, whose violence in the past included suicide bombings of Israeli cities and deadly attacks against Israelis.
Many have come to the conclusion that given the policies of the current Israeli government, a political path for Israel and an independent Palestinian state to coexist peacefully is simply wishful thinking. For some the two-state solution is effectively dead and it is simply waiting for its formal funeral.
In addition, the human cost of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been high and is rising. So far in 2023, the conflict has resulted in the deaths of an estimated 63 Palestinians and 13 Israelis.
From 2008 to 2020 the numbers of killed and injured from the conflict among Israelis and Palestinian documented by the UN were 251 and 5,590 deaths, respectively, and 5,600 and 115,000 injuries, respectively. In brief, over that time period approximately 95 percent of those killed and injured due to the conflict were Palestinians (Figure 3).
Source: UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
It is evident that the Israeli government and many Israelis would like to continue the Jewish settler expansion in the West Bank. That expansion clearly has serious consequences for the resident Palestinian population and the Israelis as well as the prospects of an independent Palestinian state.
The demise of the two-state solution and the possible one-state solution also creates a major foreign and domestic dilemma for the United States, Israel’s major political, military and economic supporter and biggest ally.
Israel is the largest recipient of U.S. foreign assistance, estimated at more than 3 billion dollars annually and more than 150 dollars cumulatively. Also, America has vetoed scores of United Nations Security Council resolutions critical of Israel, including at least 53 since 1973.
Given America’s commitment to democratic values, freedom of religious beliefs and equality of citizenship, the White House, U.S. Senators, Congressional Representatives as well as the nation’s citizens will be faced with how to respond to the absence of a possible Palestinian state and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.
In the absence of the two-state solution, it will become increasingly difficult for the United States to continue its unwavering commitment and unequivocal support in light of Israeli policies and treatment of the Palestinians. Perhaps, consistent with its values and laws, America will decide to support the one-state solution with equality of all inhabitants, regardless of religious identities.
More importantly, in the absence of a truly independent Palestinian state, Israel may slowly come to embrace the one-state solution. Eventually then, especially given the unavoidable demographic realities strikingly visible on the ground, Israel may possibly come to realize that it’s time to transform the Israel of today into a truly democratic Israel of tomorrow with justice and equality for all.
Joseph Chamie is a consulting demographer, a former director of the United Nations Population Division and author of numerous publications on population issues, including his recent book, “Population Levels, Trends, and Differentials”.
Patients in Africa often cannot access treatment as per the WHO hepatitis B guidelines. Now researchers have found a way to improve the diagnosis and care of people living with hepatitis B. Credit: Charles Mpaka/IPS
by Charles Mpaka (blantyre)
Inter Press Service
BLANTYRE, Mar 02 (IPS) – Researchers have found that cheaper and more accessible blood testing methods can improve the care of patients with chronic hepatitis B in Africa.
In a study published in Nature Communications, the researchers recommend revising the current World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines on managing the condition.
“Our data are important for informing clinical practice in and should be considered in the next revision of the WHO hepatitis B guidelines,” say the researchers who make up the Hepatitis B in Africa Collaborative Network (HEPSANET).
Lead author of the study, Asgeir Johannessen, tells IPS that clinicians working in Africa have “repeatedly reported that very few patients in Africa” are eligible for treatment using the current WHO guidelines published in 2015.
“The lack of data from Africa is a major challenge, and we wanted to use African data from African patients to inform African treatment guidelines,” says Johannessen, a specialist in internal medicine and infectious diseases at the Institute of Clinical Medicine, University of Oslo in Norway.
According to the study, Africa represents one of the high-burden regions for chronic hepatitis B virus. Of the estimated 316 million people that live with chronic hepatitis B virus infection worldwide, 82 million are in Africa.
The research further says that antiviral therapy effectively reduces the risk of complications resulting from hepatitis B virus infection.
But with current WHO-recommended guidelines, early diagnosis and treatment are impacted because often only picked up when there is advanced liver damage.
The challenge in clinical practice in Africa has been to identify patients at risk of progressive liver disease who should start antiviral therapy in good time.
“In resource-limited settings, however, these fibrosis assessment tools are rarely available, and antiviral treatment is therefore often delayed until the patients have developed symptoms of advanced chronic liver disease,” the research paper says.
So, the researchers set out to deal with this question: “Can we diagnose advanced liver fibrosis in the Africa region, using routinely available and low-cost blood tests for patients with hepatitis B?” says Alexander Stockdale, a member of the team and senior clinical lecturer at the University of Liverpool and Malawi Liverpool Wellcome Programme.
In the study, the 23 researchers reviewed data for 3,548 chronic hepatitis B patients living in eight sub-Saharan African countries, namely Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, The Gambia, Malawi, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, and Zambia.
They evaluated the existing WHO treatment guidelines and a simple liver damage biomarker developed in West Africa.
They established that the conventional hepatitis B care standards are unsuitable for patient management in Africa. They found that the diagnosis level as set by the WHO “is inappropriately high in sub-Saharan Africa,” which is often constrained by a lack of resources.
The problem, the researchers say, is that the existing WHO guidelines are not adapted for the African population.
The study that informed these guidelines was performed among active chronic hepatitis C patients in the USA, much older than Africa’s hepatitis B virus population and on a very different patient population compared to African chronic hepatitis B patients.
“Our data are important for informing clinical practice in SSA and should be considered in the next revision of the WHO hepatitis B guidelines,” says Johannessen.
He says they have shared their findings with the WHO and the Centre for Disease Control (CDC) in Africa.
“We believe our findings will inspire the first ever African hepatitis B treatment guidelines, and even the WHO is now changing their guidelines because of our work,” he tells IPS.
“Africa is now the epicenter of the hepatitis B epidemic. In fact, 2 of 3 new infections occur on the African continent. To combat the hepatitis B pandemic in Africa, we need African data to inform practice,” Johannessen says.
Initially, the researchers thought their main challenge would be to get people to share data.
“But in fact, everyone we reached out to were eager to participate. It is obvious that this is a topic that feels like a priority to colleagues working throughout Africa,” he says.
The study is the largest, most comprehensive, and geographically representative analysis ever conducted in Africa.
“We, therefore, believe our results are generalizable,” the researchers conclude.
However, they admit some limitations of their study. For example, the method used to assess liver damage has been associated with technical limitations, including unsuccessful measurements reported in patients with certain health conditions such as obesity. The researchers did not ascertain the rates of failure of these tests.
“This may affect the overall applicability of our findings to the entire population with HBV,” they say.
But Adamson Muula, Professor and Head of Community and Environmental Health at the Kamuzu University of Health Sciences (KUHES) in Malawi, says in terms of the methodology used in this study, the systematic review of data was relevant in answering the question at hand.
“In the hierarchy of evidence, systematic reviews and meta-analyses are high up with respect to the rigor of the findings,” says Muula, who was not part of the research.
He noted, however, that there are downsides to this approach, including the fact that in the interpretation of the findings, there is an implicit sense that Africa is one place. Muula argues that African health systems can be different even within the same country.
Within a country, you can find a health system comparable with developed countries; others are more closely aligned to developing countries. The studies applied more to those with less sophisticated health systems.
Regardless, the study is vital, he acknowledges.
Hepatitis B diagnosis on the continent has been a luxury. In Malawi, for example, where 5 percent of the adults are estimated to be infected, virtually no screening or diagnostic system exists.
Individual patients may interact with the health system, but more so when things are already out of hand when irreversible liver damage has already happened.
“Efforts to reduce the time at which diagnosis can happen are therefore commendable. This study adds guidance as to when such earlier diagnosis may be attained.
“However, research is one thing, health systems strengthening another. Studies like this one add to the impetus and arm the policymakers to make the right decisions,” he says.
But he urges communities to take charge of these findings instead of leaving action in the hands of “sometimes incapacitated policymakers’ hands.”
“The question should be, what is the community saying about findings such as these? If we wait for policymakers to decide when they are going to invest in hepatitis B interventions, we will wait for the rest of our lifetimes.
“Time has come for community groups to work with the duty-bearers to the extent that hepatitis B is not a neglected tropical disease anymore,” he says.
The WHO’s goal is to have hepatitis eliminated by 2030.
The world economy is currently going through a lot of turmoil. The re-organization is in full swing. To survive, not only companies but entire nations need to adapt their development models.
Opinion by Marc Saxer (berlin)
Inter Press Service
BERLIN, Mar 02 (IPS) – When tectonic plates shift, the earth shakes. Tsunamis race around the globe in the form of shock waves. The global economy has experienced three such earthquakes in recent years. The Covid-19 pandemic has made us aware of the vulnerability of a globally integrated economy.
When important components are stuck in quarantine in China, production lines in Germany come to a halt. Thus, in the organization of global supply chains – which for decades have been trimmed down for efficiency (‘just in time’) – resilience (‘just in case’) will play a more important role in the future.
After the end of the unipolar moment, larger and smaller powers are vying for the best positions in the new world order. In the hegemonic conflict between China and the United States, the government under Joe Biden has verbally disarmed, but its export controls in the high-tech sector have all the more bite.
This politicizes the framework conditions for investment decisions. Market access, infrastructure projects, trade agreements, energy supplies and technology transfers are more and more being evaluated from a geopolitical point of view.
Companies are increasingly faced with the decision of choosing one IT infrastructure, one market and one currency system over the other. The major economies may not decouple from each other across the board, but diversification (‘not all eggs in one basket’) is gaining momentum, especially in the high-tech sector. As this develops, we cannot rule out the possibility that economic blocs will form.
Marc Saxer
The experience with the ‘human uncertainty factor’ in the pandemic is also resulting in the acceleration of digital automation. Robots and algorithms make it easier to protect against geopolitical risks.
In order to bring these vulnerabilities under control, the old industrialized countries are reorganizing their supply chains. It remains to be seen whether this is purely for economic or logistical reasons (re-shoring or near-shoring), or whether geopolitical motives also play a role (friend-shoring).
Bloc formations
China must respond to these challenges. The fate of the People’s Republic will depend on whether it succeeds in charging to the head of the pack in worldwide technology, even without foreign technology and know-how. Anyone who believes that Beijing has no countermeasures up its sleeve will soon be proven wrong.
In order to compensate for the closure of the developed export markets, the Silk Road Initiative has been opening up new sales markets and raw material suppliers for years. At the last party congress, the Chinese Communist Party officially approved a reversal of its development strategy.
From now on, the gigantic home market will be the engine of the ‘dual circular economy’. Export earnings are still desired, but strategically they are being relegated to a supportive role.
One impetus behind China’s massive build-up of gold reserves serves is the goal of having its own (digital) currency take the place of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Because China benefits more than anyone else from open world markets, it is continuing to rely on a globally networked world economy for the time being. Alternatively, Beijing could also be tempted to create its own economic bloc.
The foundations for this have already been put into place, with the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), the BRICS Development Bank (NDB), the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the Silk Road Initiative (BRI) and bilateral cooperation in Africa, Latin America and the Middle East.
The difficulties that Western companies face in the Chinese market should provide just a sample of what is looming if China makes market entry into such a bloc contingent on good political will.
But it is not just China. Generally, for all of Asia as the new center of the world economy, these geoeconomic disruptions are tantamount to a tsunami. And the disruptions could hit developing countries particularly hard.
Whether they are being cut from global supply chains for the sake of resilience or due to geopolitical factors, this brings equally devastating results. Of course, some economies are hoping to benefit from the diversification strategies of developed countries (i.e. the ‘China plus one’ strategy).
But digital automation neutralizes what is often their only comparative advantage – cheap labor costs. Why should a European medium-sized company have to deal with corruption and power cuts, quality problems and sea routes lasting weeks, when the robots at home produce better and cheaper?
Algorithms and artificial intelligence are also likely to replace millions of service providers in outsourced back offices and call centers. How are developing countries supposed to feed their (sometimes explosively) growing populations if, in the future, simple jobs are to be performed by machines in industrialized countries? And what do these geoeconomic disruptions mean for the social and political stability of these countries?
As with Europe, most Asian states depend on China’s dynamism for their economic development – and on the guarantees of the US for their security. Therefore, to varying degrees, they resist pressure to choose sides.
Whether it will be possible to escape the pull of geoeconomic bi-polarization over the long term, however, is still an open question. If the splitting of IT infrastructures continues, it could be too costly to play in both technological worlds.
American regulations prevent products with certain Chinese components from entering the market; but those who want to play on the Chinese market will not be able to avoid a steadily increasing share of Chinese components.
Reducing economic vulnerabilities through diversification
This type of global economy would also pose an existential challenge to export nations such as Germany. Even the short-term cutting off of Russian energy is a Herculean task. Decoupling from China at the same time seems difficult to imagine. But burying one’s head in the sand will not be enough.
Neither nations nor businesses will be able to escape the pressure from Washington and Beijing. In the future, important economic, technological, and infrastructural decisions will increasingly be subject to geopolitical considerations. Therefore, reducing one-sided vulnerabilities through diversification is the right thing to do.
On the other hand, some of the lessons drawn from the over-reliance on Russian energy before the war seem short-sighted. For decades, the German economy has integrated itself more deeply into the world economy than many other countries, with the goal of avoiding violent conflicts through interdependence.
It cannot break out of these interdependencies from one day to the next. Reducing economic vulnerabilities through diversification is therefore the right move, while decoupling for ideological reasons is the wrong one. Germany should therefore beware of sacrificing its economic future to an overly ambitious value-based foreign policy.
This is because losses of prosperity translate into fears of the future and social decline at home – a fertile breeding ground for right-wing populists and conspiracy theorists.
The geopolitical race, digital automation and the reorganization of supply chains according to resilience criteria are mutually reinforcing processes. It is not only companies that have to rethink their business models – entire national economies need to adapt their development models in order to be able to survive in a rapidly changing global economy.
The particular difficulty lies in having to make investment decisions today without being able to foresee exactly what the world of tomorrow will look like. Looking into the crystal ball, some think they can see an age of de-globalization. And in fact, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the peak of globalization, as measured by the volume of world trade and capital exports has already passed.
However, de-globalization is not synonymous with a relapse into autarkic national economies. A stronger regionalization of the more networked global economy is more likely. In view of the political, social and cultural upheavals of turbo-globalization, this need not be the worst of possible outcomes.
One thing is certain: A geoeconomic tsunami will roll around the globe, crushing old structures in its path. The hope is that out of the ‘creative destruction’ that Joseph Schumpeter spoke of, there will emerge a more resilient, sustainable and diversified global economy.
However, without political shaping of the new world economic order, the opposite could also occur. Politically, this means adapting the rule-based world order so that it remains a stable framework for an open world economy because even the organization of a regionalised world economy needs global rules of the game that everyone adheres to.
Therefore, with few exceptions, nearly all nations have a great interest in the functioning of rules-based multilateralism. However, in the Global South, there is already a great deal of distrust towards the existing world order.
In reality, according to some, this amounts to the creation of the old and new colonial powers, whose supposedly universal norms do not apply to everyone but are instead violated at will by the permanent members of the UN Security Council.
In order to break through current blockages, such as those of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the emerging powers must be granted representation and a voice in the multilateral institutions that would be commensurate with their newfound importance.
Europe will have to accept a relative loss of influence because, as a rule-based supranational entity, its survival and prosperity depend on an open, rule-based world (economic) order.
Instead of morally elevating itself above others, Europe must concentrate all its energies on maintaining the conditions for the success of its economic and social model. In order to prevent the regionalization of the world economy from turning into the formation of competing blocs with high prosperity losses for everyone, there is a need for new partnerships on an equal footing beyond the currently popular comparisons of democracies and autocracies.
In order for new trust to develop, the global challenges (climate change, pandemics, hunger, migration) that particularly affect the Global South must finally be tackled with determination.
Marc Saxer coordinates the regional work of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) in the Asia Pacific. Previously, he led the FES offices in India and Thailand and headed the FES Asia Pacific department
Source: International Politics and Society (IPS)-Journal published by the International Political Analysis Unit of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Hiroshimastrasse 28, D-10785 Berlin
A million plant and animal species are threatened with extinction, we have lost half of the world’s corals and lose forest areas the size of 27 football fields every minute, finds WWF report. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS
by Baher Kamal (madrid)
Inter Press Service
MADRID, Mar 01 (IPS) – Wildlife is indeed far much more than a safari or an ‘exotic’ ornament: as many as four billion people –or an entire half the whole world’s population– rely on wild species for income, food, medicines and wood fuel for cooking.
In spite of that, one million species of plants and animals are already facing extinction due to the voracious profit-making, over-exploitative, illegal trade and the relentless depletion of the variety of life on Planet Earth.
In fact, billions of people, both in developed and developing nations, benefit daily from the use of wild species for food, energy, materials, medicine, recreation, and many other vital contributions to human well-being, as duly reports the UN on the occasion of the 2023 World Wildlife Day (3 March).
Much so that 50,000 wild species meet the needs of billions worldwide. And 1 in 5 people around the world rely on wild species for income and food, while 2.4 billion people depend on wood fuel for cooking.
The world’s major multilateral body reminds us of the “urgent need to step up the fight against wildlife crime and human-induced reduction of species, which have wide-ranging economic, environmental and social impacts.”
Variety of life, lost at an “alarming rate”
A world organisation leading in wildlife conservation and protection of endangered species: the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) warns that unfortunately, we’re losing biodiversity — the rich variety of life on Earth — at an “alarming rate.”
“We’ve seen a 69% average decline in the number of birds, amphibians, mammals, fish, and reptiles since 1970, according to the 2022 Living Planet Report.
“A million plant and animal species are threatened with extinction, we have lost half of the world’s corals and lose forest areas the size of 27 football fields every minute.”
WWF highlights the following findings, among several others:
69% average decline in wildlife populations since 1970,
Wildlife populations in Latin America and the Caribbean plummeting at a staggering rate of 94%,
Freshwater species populations have suffered an 83% fall.
Major causes
The 2022 Living Planet Report points out some of the major causes leading to the shocking loss of the world’s biodiversity.
“The biggest driver of biodiversity loss is the way in which people use the land and sea. How we grow food, harvest materials such as wood or minerals from the ocean floor, and build our towns and cities all have an impact on the natural environment and the biodiversity that lives there.”
Food systems: the biggest cause of Nature loss: according to findings provided by WWF, food production has caused 70% of biodiversity loss on land and 50% in freshwater. It is also responsible for around 30% of all greenhouse gas emissions.
As a global population, what we’re eating and how we’re producing it right now is good for neither us nor the planet. While over 800 million people are going hungry, over two billion of those who do have enough food are obese or overweight.
The WWF provided findings also indicate that meat tends to have the highest environmental impact, partially because livestock produce methane emissions through their digestive process – something called enteric fermentation – but also because most meat comes from livestock fed with crops.
And that around 850 million people around the world are thought to rely on coral reefs for their food and livelihoods.
WWF’ report also refers to the invasive non-native species: Invasive non-native species are those that arrive in places where they historically didn’t live and out-compete local biodiversity for resources such as sunlight and water. This causes the native species to die out, causing a shift in the makeup of the natural ecosystem.
Future depends on reversing the loss of Nature
“The world is waking up to the fact that our future depends on reversing the loss of nature just as much as it depends on addressing climate change. And you can’t solve one without solving the other,” said Carter Roberts, president and CEO of WWF-US.
“These plunges in wildlife populations can have dire consequences for our health and economies,” says Rebecca Shaw, global chief scientist of WWF.
“When wildlife populations decline to this degree, it means dramatic changes are impacting their habitats and the food and water they rely on. We should care deeply about the unravelling of natural systems because these same resources sustain human life.”
In view of all the above, the causes of the fast destruction of the variety of life have been scientifically identified as well as the dangerous consequences. However, the dominant private business continues to see more profits in destroying than in saving.
In July 2021, widespread civil unrest spread across KwaZulu Natal and other South African provinces. While it followed the incarceration of former President Jacob Zuma, analysts also attributed it to widespread unemployment and inequality. Credit: Lyse Comins/IPS
by Lyse Comins (durban)
Inter Press Service
DURBAN, Mar 01 (IPS) – South Africa’s almost record level food price inflation, load shedding, rising energy costs, and further fuel and interest rate hike forecast have eroded workers’ disposable incomes and further disadvantaging the poor – leaving analysts predicting that the country was at heightened risk, including civil unrest.
Head of Policy Analysis at the Centre for Risk Analysis, Chris Hattingh, cautioned that the lower fuel price, which the latest Statistics SA data showed last week, had largely contributed to driving annual consumer inflation down from 7,2 percent in December 2022 to 6,9 percent in January, could prove to be only a temporary reprieve. The fuel price index declined by 10.5 percent between December 2022 and January, the data showed.
United Trade Union of SA (UASA) spokesperson Abigail Moyo said the state’s failure to supply food producers and retailers with sufficient water and electricity to run businesses efficiently had fuelled inflation that eroded workers’ disposable income.
“Economically driven financial stress through no fault of their own has been a factor in workers’ lives for years. With items such as maize meal going up 36,5 percent since January last year, onions up 48.7 percent, samp up 29.6 percent, and instant coffee up 26.4 percent, it is clear that difficult times are not nearly over for households,” she said.
Hattingh added: “This inflation relief afforded by the lower fuel price could prove to be temporary. The reopening of the Chinese economy will likely drive international oil prices higher, impacting down the line in the form of higher fuel prices. South Africa is also more exposed to imported inflation. Should the costs and prices of manufactured and consumer goods and inputs increase, this will then drive inflation higher locally.”
“Of great concern regarding pressure on consumers is that the food and non-alcoholic beverages inflation rate was recorded at 13.4 percent (annually) in January. The previous time this reading was so high was April 2009, at 13.6 percent,” he said.
Additionally, the category of bread and cereals recorded the biggest increase of any product group at 21.8 percent, while meat inflation rose from 9.7 percent in December 2022 to 11.2 percent in January.
“A fundamental weakness in the economy – unreliable electricity supply – could likely push prices and inflation higher throughout the year. This will result in more pressure on consumers and businesses and add to the potential for civil unrest,” he said.
He said load shedding was now a priced-in “feature of South African life,” as shown by the Rand weakening to R19 against the US Dollar.
Annual inflation, at 6.9 percent, was also outside the South African Reserve Bank’s (SARB) target range of 3 – 6 percent.
“With the latest data for January now in, the SARB could continue its rate hiking cycle with another 25 basis points increase at the next meeting of the Monetary Policy Committee,” Hattingh said.
Independent crime and policing expert and a former senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies, Dr Johan Burger, warned that signs of potential unrest due to the rising cost of living and disillusionment were visible across the country.
He said most households in the middle and higher income brackets had been forced to cut back on spending due to higher interest rates and the rising prices of basic foods.
“Those of us with a relatively stable income are already finding it increasingly difficult and have to think twice before we buy something, so one can only imagine the pressure people in lower income groups must be feeling,” he said.
“For many, this has been the situation for many years, and it has become worse. Unemployment is at 32,9 percent, and the unofficial unemployment rate is even higher. High levels of unemployment lead to high levels of poverty, creating all sorts of social problems,” he said.
Burger said during the looting in July 2021, much of what was stolen was foodstuffs and goods that could be sold for cash.
“In some cases, people who went out to shop for food were attacked and robbed of their food. Other instances that we see now are when a truck breaks down on the road near a community, and all of a sudden, a flood of people come in and strip it of whatever it’s carrying – whether food or something they can exchange for food,” he said.
Burger said these incidents showed a “general instability” against the backdrop of a weakened criminal justice system that cannot deal effectively with criminals.
“The potential for large-scale disruptions and looting and for large groups of people to come together and engage in popular uprisings could happen. When large groups of people are exposed to extreme levels of property over a long period of time, they build resentment and feel neglected by the state. They feel their needs are not acknowledged, and with this resentment comes a disregard for the state, its laws, and the police, and they feel they have the right to rise up and take what they need,” Burger said.
“And if they rise up in large enough numbers, it will be very difficult for the state to suppress this kind of uprising. The potential for this to happen is very real – it’s almost visible; it’s just beneath the surface,” he said.
Burger said all that was needed to spark unrest was a potential trigger, as had occurred in KwaZulu-Natal with a pro (former president Jacob Zuma campaign ahead of the July 2021 riots.
“The danger is it could spread very quickly because those levels of poverty and deprivation exist in almost all our communities across the nation. In 2008 the Xenophobic riots spread in a question of days, and we saw 69 people killed and many more injured and displaced,” he said.
He warned that localized protests about service delivery had been occurring for years, and if left unattended, these could also get to a point where “resistance will explode.”
“It is growing dissatisfaction with their situation, and many of poor communities see themselves as the neglected part of South Africa. They have not shared in anything promised when democracy came in terms of employment and service, and they go hungry once this happens; there is a division between a part of our population and the institutions that govern us, which is why there is real potential for large scale insurrection,” Burger said.
Head of the Justice and Violence Prevention Programme at the Institute for Security Studies, Gareth Newham, said rising food security and hunger, with around 60 percent of the population now living in poverty and a large proportion of households facing hunger weekly, created a high level of despair and frustration.
“This challenge has been around some time, and increasing food prices could make that worse,” he said.
However, he said the current causes of most public violence were labor-related disputes and service delivery failures.
“We historically don’t have an issue where food insecurity has been a major driver of public violence, but it doesn’t mean it won’t be. There could arguably be a level of hunger that does lead to it,” he said.
Shahd, a 12-year-old girl with a hearing disability, stands in front of a window facing her father, in the house her family live in, Azaz, Aleppo, Syria. Credit: Human Rights Watch.
Opinion by Emina Cerimovic (new york)
Inter Press Service
NEW YORK, Feb 28 (IPS) – Emina Cerimovic is a senior disability rights researcher at Human Rights Swatch.A few days ago, I saw a photo shared to Twitter of Sham, a young Syrian girl rescued from under the rubble in northwest Syria, sitting upright in her hospital bed, According to the Syrian Civil Defense, a volunteer humanitarian group also known as the White Helmets, Sham will lose both her legs because of injuries from the quake.
Looking at her photo, I couldn’t help but think of the additional human rights abuses Sham will experience on the basis of her disability. She will join the ranks of all the children with disabilities who are surviving the 12-year-conflict in Syria without equal access to humanitarian aid.
And so will others who experienced traumatic physical and psychological injuries in the wake of the earthquakes: a girl who had spent 30 hours under the rubble in the heavily affected town of Jindires in northwest Syria and who had lost both her legs; a 3-year-old boy in Jinderis who was trapped for 42 hours and whose left leg was amputated; a young Syrian man living in Gaziantep, Turkey, whose right hand was amputated.
As issues of humanitarian aid access to various affected parts of Syria dominatethe news, relief efforts should not overlook the short and long-term needs of people with disabilities and the thousands of earthquake survivors who have sustained physical and psychological injuries that could lead to permanent disabilities.
As two more powerful earthquakes struck the region on February 20, panic and fear spread among earthquake survivors in both Syria and Turkey, bringing into sharp focus the psychological trauma caused by the natural hazard and, for Syrians, by over 12 years of war.
In Syria, approximately 28 percent of the current population – nearly double the global average – are estimated to have a disability, and their rights and needs are largely unmet. As I found in my September report on the greater risk of harm and lack of access to basic rights for children with disabilities caught up in the Syrian war, the design and delivery of humanitarian programs in Syria are not taking into account the particular needs of children with disabilities. In some cases, such programs explicitly exclude them.
As an example, some educational activities and child-friendly spaces excluded children with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Children with disabilities are growing up without safety, basic necessities, education, assistive devices, or psychosocial support, in ways that put their lives and rights at risk.
They experience stigma, psychological harm, and higher levels of poverty. The situation is no better for adults with disabilities who also face systematic challenges in accessing humanitarian services on an equal basis with others.
This crisis should serve as a wake-up call for UN agencies, donor states, humanitarian organizations, and charities to properly respond to all children’s rights by ensuring the rights and needs of children with disabilities are also met.
They should develop and implement their response and recovery action plans with people with disabilities at their core. The attention and investment in children – like Sham – and adults with disabilities will enhance human rights for everyone.
One of the key virtues of criminalizing ecocide is that it would give a means of redress for the peoples of the Global South who are the biggest victims of it, says Sue Miller, Head of Global Networks for the Stop Ecocide campaign. Photo courtesy of StopEcocide.
by Paul Virgo (rome)
Inter Press Service
ROME, Feb 28 (IPS) – Genocide, war crimes, aggression, ecocide, crimes against humanity – which is the odd one out? The right answer is ecocide – destroying, polluting or damaging the natural living world on a large scale is not among the crimes that can be prosecuted at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
So ecocide, which literally means to “kill one’s home”, can take place constantly in much of the world at the moment and no one is held responsible.
Deforestation, oil spills, air contamination – the corporations behind episodes of severe environmental harm like this may sometimes be sued, and occasionally fined, but they can simply budget for this. No one gets arrested, so there is no real disincentive.
A growing global network of lawyers, diplomats and activists are campaigning to rectify this and have ecocide join this exclusive club of ‘crimes against peace’ that the International Criminal Court can punish in order to make the perpetrators liable to prosecution.
“We call ecocide the missing crime,” Sue Miller, the Head of Global Networks for the Stop Ecocide campaign, told IPS.
“Right now, corporations are causing serious environmental damage in pursuit of profits. Mostly they get away with it.
“If they are called to account, they may end up paying a fine, some civil damages or even possibly a bribe to make the problem go away.
“Whatever the penalty, it is monetary and can sit on the company’s balance sheet as a business expense”.
One of the key virtues of criminalizing ecocide is that it would give a means of redress for the peoples of the Global South who are the biggest victims of it.
“At the moment, it is predominantly corporations based in the Global North that are causing environmental damage in the Global South, where the rule of law is often not as strong,” said Miller.
“An International law of ecocide will not only strengthen national laws, but will also provide a court of last resort for those affected by ecocide who cannot obtain justice in their own countries”.
But, above all, it would also create a deterrent to trashing the environment that currently does not exist.
Miller believes that this would be a game-changer when it comes to business practices.
“A new crime of ecocide would place personal criminal liability on the key decision makers – the controlling minds – in most cases the company directors,” she said.
“As such, an ecocide law will reach into the boardrooms where the decisions are made and act as a brake on the projects which cause the worst environmental harms.
“Faced with prosecution and possible imprisonment, company directors are likely to be far more circumspect about the projects they approve.
“Funding and insurance for potentially ecocidal projects will dry up and funds, effort and talent will be diverted into healthier, more sustainable practices.
“Whilst it will enable justice to be pursued if damage is done, more importantly, an ecocide law has the power to stop the damage happening in the first place”.
Rather than being hostile to the law, Miller argues that many CEOs actually want legislation that would forbid them from making profit at the expense of the natural world.
“There is no business on a dead planet and many businesses are coming to that realisation now,” she said.
“They are also realising that there are advantages to working with, rather than against, nature.
“These include: unlocking innovation; stimulating investment in new, regenerative business models; levelling the playing field for sustainable enterprise; stabilising operational and reputational risk; and providing a steer towards more sustainable business practices”.
These are among the reasons that make Miller confident the drive to have ecocide criminalized will ultimately be successful, despite the power of lobbies who opposite it.
The campaign has won the backing of figures including United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres, Pope Francis, Greta Thunberg and Paul McCartney.
In June 2021 an independent expert panel presented its formal definition of the proposed crime of ecocide as “unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts”.
When discussions were taking place for the creation of the International Criminal Court at the end of the 1990s and in the early 2000s, ecocide was one of the crimes which was going to be included alongside genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes – aggression, the use of armed force by a State against the sovereignty, integrity or independence of another State, did not come under its jurisdiction until 2018.
In the end, ecocide was dropped during a closed doors meeting for reasons that remain unclear.
The world today would likely be a better place if it had been in there from the start.
“If it had been in place, so many events since might not only have been punished but might not have happened at all,” Miller said.
“Had ecocide law been in place it is unlikely, for example, that (former Brazilian president) Jair Bolsonaro would have been so keen to encourage destruction of the Amazon in Brazil.
“It is unlikely that corporations would now be prospecting for deep sea mining sites.
“So much of the damage we are now seeing could have been avoided”.
Opinion by Kwan Soo-Chen, David McCoy (kuala lumpur, malaysia)
Inter Press Service
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Feb 28 (IPS) – Global warming and climate breakdown are going to be disruptive to say the least. Humanity’s insistence on unsustainable development and rising greenhouse gas emissions will make the settlements of millions of people increasingly prone to extreme weather events and full-blown natural disasters.
Many places will also become uninhabitable. As a consequence, many people are going to have to move from their current homes, either temporarily or permanently.
The term ‘climate mobility’ is used to describe three forms of climate-induced movement of populations: displacement, where people are forced to leave their homes; migration, where movement is to some degree voluntary; and planned relocation, where movement in proactively instigated, supervised and carried out by the state.
In reality, these three forms of mobility overlap and may occur concurrently, making it difficult to accurately quantify and monitor trends over time. Furthermore, when considering the impacts of climate change on human mobility, there is a need to consider the inability or unwillingness of communities to move despite being at risk from harm, loss and damage.
There are several drivers of ‘climate mobility’. The most obvious is the direct destruction of homes and infrastructure by acute severe weather events and floodings. Less obvious drivers include the more chronic impact of sea level rise, soil erosion, erratic weather patterns, salination and forest degradation on water supply, agriculture and livelihoods.
Data on climate mobility are sketchy and it is hard to attribute any instance of displacement or forced migration to only one set of factors. Political and economic factors may often be significant co-factors. Similarly, movements and migration attributed to economic forces or armed conflicts may have some underlying relationship to environmental degradation.
According to the 2022 Global Report of Internal Displacements (GRID) by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center (IDMC) in Geneva, there were 38 million individual instances of displacement in 2021 globally, with 14.3 million (37.6%) coming from the East Asia and Pacific region.
These numbers include people who were displaced more than once. More than half of these displacements (23.7 million) globally, and 95% in the East and Pacific region were due to weather-related disasters, and most of these were concentrated in LMICs.
In the Asia Pacific region, 225.3 million internal displacements caused by disasters have been recorded from 2010 to 2021, where 95% were weather related and the other 5% were geophysical. The Southeast Asian countries with the highest incidence of displacements due to natural disasters in 2021 were the Philippines (5,681,000), Indonesia (749,000), Vietnam (780,000) and Myanmar (158,000).
The two biggest causes of disaster-related displacements in the region are floods and storms which were responsible for over 80% of disaster-related displacements between 2008 and 2020.
Attempts are also being made to monitor the scale of planned relocations. One study, for example, identified 308 planned relocations globally in 2021, of which more than half were in Asia (160). This included 29 cases in the Philippines, and 17 in both Vietnam and Indonesia.
Importantly however, half all of these ‘planned relocations’ involved populations in rural areas including the indigenous communities, and half of them had already been displaced by acute weather events. The number of households involved in each planned relocation ranged from as little as four households to 1,000 households, with the majority involving less than 250 households.
Although Southeast Asia is known as being a ‘hot spot’ for acute severe weather events, it is also vulnerable to the effects of more chronic environmental degradation. For example, the large low-lying coastal areas of the region – such as in Vietnam and Thailand and around the Mekong delta – are already being affected by sea level rise and its impacts on settlements through coastal erosion and saltwater intrusion.
Although projections of the scale of future climate mobility are uncertain, significant growth is indicated. Already we have seen the number of internal displacements increased from 3.9 million per year in 2008-2010 to 6.4 million per year in 2019-2021.
According to the Groundswell Report of the World Bank, the number of internal climate migrants in the East Asia and Pacific region will reach 49 million by 2050, representing 2% of the regional population. The lower Mekong subregion in Southeast Asia is projected to see between 3.3 million and 6.3 million new climate migrants between now and 2050 (1.4% to 2.7% of the country population) depending on different scenarios.
The high-risk outmigration hotspots include the coastal areas of Vietnam (threatened by sea level rise) and central Thailand and Myanmar (threatened by water scarcity and reduced agriculture productivity).
While most climate mobility occurs within a country, there will be growing pressure on national borders as climate change worsens. However, there appears to be little modelling of future scenarios involving cross-border migration due to climate change and environmental breakdown.
Such pressure might be expected around land borers within the Greater Mekong sub-region affecting Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Laos. But given the physical geography of the region, cross-border migration by sea may become an issue as the effects of climate change worsen.
Clearly this will pose international security as well as humanitarian challenges. Currently however, the 1951 Refugee Convention does not give people fleeing from environmental disasters or climate-related threats the right to be recognized as refugees, even though the term ‘climate refugees’ is increasingly used in popular and academic discourse.
The non-binding Global Compact for Migration which was developed in line with the SDG target 10.7 on migration policies and adopted by majority of the UN Member States in December 2018 is a good start to strengthening international cooperation in tackling the challenges and human rights-related aspects of cross border migrants from climate change.
The negative health impacts of being forcibly moved from one’s home are significant, but will also depend on the form of migration (temporary or permanent, short or long distance, internal or cross-border) and the social, economic and political conditions of their home and new environments.
Furthermore, there are different health needs and impacts for populations on the move and those that are settled, as well as for receiving communities and those that are left behind. While certain risks and threats will be reduced by movement, many will face new health hazards in their new settings including a lack of economic opportunities, as well as the mental health risks associated with social and cultural loss.
Climate mobility is a current and pressing issue in Southeast Asia. Even if everything is done to mitigate further global warming, millions of people in the region will likely be forced to move from their current settlements over the next few decades.
Whether we are adequately prepared for this is at best an open question. What is clear however is that the responsibilities of governments towards both current and future climate migrants is considerable.
Crucially, health systems will have to provide for both physical safety and health of vulnerable populations, as well as the burden of mental illness produced by forced migration.
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