Seven charges were made during routine vehicle stops last week. Photo / NZME
OPINION
It was patches to tuxedos last Friday, with a Mongrel Mob procession through town shortly before the Unison Great Lake Taupō Business Awards.
The gang members were in the area because of a tangi in Mangakino and rode through town to the funeral home alongside the deceased’s whānau.
Extra police staff, including our specialist gang harm reduction team, were sent to Mangakino on 24-hour shifts to reassure locals and ensure public spaces were safe.
I’d like people to think – given there’s only a painted line between an intoxicated driver and the other traffic on the road – about the impact they want to have on their community.
You can be stopped by police at any point when you’re on the road, and tested for alcohol, so this applies all the time.
One person from out of town has been arrested and charged over the recent robbery at Hunting and Fishing Taupō. Detectives in the…
BERLIN, Aug 16 (IPS) – Reintegration assistance for migrants returning to their countries of origin is becoming increasingly salient. Germany and the EU cooperate closely with countries of origin to support local reintegration.
Here, assistance goes beyond purely monetary support and can also include additional assistance, such as vocational training and psychological support.
Still, such efforts encounter criticism and limitations: short-term and individualised support cannot address the root causes of migration and displacement, such as poverty, insecurity and a lack of opportunities, which are among the factors leading to migration in the first place.
One way to increase the effectiveness of this assistance can be the involvement of initiatives and groups led by returnees themselves. This not only makes it possible to strengthen the credibility and effectiveness of the projects, but also to implement sustainable structures beyond project cycles.
Diverse and transregional networks
The so-called ‘returnee networks’ are varied and active in a multitude of regions around the world. For instance, returnees in Nigeria have formed informal social media groups, and in Bangladesh, with the help of a local NGO, formalised networks of returnees emerged in various parts of the country.
These groups are sometimes made up exclusively of persons who recently returned but can also be led by those who do not, or no longer, struggle with the problems of reintegration.
Although the emergence of such networks is not a regional phenomenon, they cannot be found in all countries. There are different factors to explain this.
On the one hand, it can be observed that returnee networks develop in contexts in which a large number of migrants return in the same time period. They then get to know one another in registration processes or reintegration programmes and remain in contact.
Another factor is an already existing returnee network, which can serve as a role model. Common challenges, such as coping with trauma and stigmatisation, play just as much a role as a lack of reintegration support and family support systems.
Both these challenges make meeting like-minded peers a more urgent need. Support from external actors and an active civil society also contribute to the emergence of networks.
Regardless of how they developed and their level of formalisation, these networks can effectively support the reintegration of new returnees. They offer practical help with regard to housing, employment and bureaucratic hurdles.
They also act as trustworthy intermediaries, informing newcomers about the available support and acting as advocates for returnees’ interests. They can therefore play an important role in shaping reintegration policies and educating their communities about the realities of migrants’ lives during and upon return to their country of origin.
However, in addition to these indispensable strengths, returnee networks also harbour risks. Competition for resources, such as funds raised through projects with international organisations, and the lack of women participation can limit the representativeness of some networks.
Moreover, most networks have a very low degree of professionalisation, which is not negative in itself, but can lead to the groups duplicating existing support services and providing these only in a moderate quality.
Finally, involvement in the networks could result in members further distancing themselves from the rest of society due to their solid and longstanding identification as a ‘returnee’, thus delaying or even preventing their reintegration.
The notion of returnee networks being an exclusively positive force, which can and should be engaged under all circumstances, is therefore incorrect. Yet, this does not mean that cooperation should be ruled out either.
Inspite of the risks, the integration of networks is long overdue and is possible in compliance with safeguards. The perspective of returnees should always form a part of reintegration programmes.
Sophie Meiners is a Research Fellow in the Migration Programme of the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP). Previously, she was a Carlo Schmid Fellow at the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in the Office of the Special Representative on Climate.
Source: International Politics and Society (IPS)-Journal published by the International Political Analysis Unit of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Hiroshimastrasse 28, D-10785 Berlin
The inauguration of the Nineteenth ordinary session of the African Ministerial Conference on the Environment (#AMCEN), in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Credit: Richard Munang, UNEP
Opinion by Elizabeth Maruma Mrema (nairobi, kenya)
Inter Press Service
NAIROBI, Kenya, Aug 15 (IPS) – There has never been a time in human history when collaboration between nations was more sorely needed than now, and there is no place that would benefit more from it than in Africa.
As 54 of our Environment Ministers gather this week (August 14-15) in Addis Ababa for the next session of the African Ministerial Conference on the Environment (AMCEN), their agendas are packed with a long list of burning environmental issues. They will need to act in unison and with determination to achieve positive movement on these challenges.
We live in an era of climate change-induced hunger, of collapsing ecosystems – the continent’s forests are disappearing, and we face the bleak prospect of dwindling biodiversity.
We experience killer floods from Senegal to Nigeria to Malawi, Mozambique to South Africa, lethal heat and fires in North Africa, and drought across East Africa, and suffocating air and plastic pollution from Cairo to Ouagadougou.
As nature erodes, food security is undermined by climate-induced locust attacks, conflicts between humans and wildlife closer encounters with some species that risk the spread of deadly viruses.
But we also live in an exciting era of opportunities, one of information and innovation, and one in which African policy leadership – nationally, regionally and continentally – is increasingly cognizant of the challenges presented by the triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution and waste.
The inauguration of the Nineteenth ordinary session of the African Ministerial Conference on the Environment (#AMCEN), in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Credit: Richard Munang, UNEP
Cognizant that despite the African continent contributing the least to climate change, Africans are already facing some of the worst impacts of the climate crisis, which must be urgently addressed.
This awareness is already translated into actions, from the Tarfaya and Ras Ghareb wind farms in Morocco and Egypt, through massive solar projects in South Africa, Namibia, and Ghana, to pioneering use of geothermal energy in Kenya. Restoration initiatives like the Great Green Wall aim to halt desertification and support livelihoods across the entire width of Africa. And a majority of African governments already banned single-use plastics, albeit with mixed results.
In September, we expect leaders to convene in Nairobi for an Africa Climate Summit and in November, a meeting – also in Nairobi – will continue negotiations on a global treaty to end plastic pollution.
The UN Climate Change Conference (COP28) in Dubai will cap a year of multilateral and national work to strengthen global action on climate, while one year following the historic Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, we’ll be closely monitoring its implementation.
At these meetings, Ministers and their governments will flesh out the details of a legally binding international agreement – will single-use plastic polluters have to own the brunt of its costs?
They will address natural resources – how will the extraction of critical minerals benefit a rapid global shift away from carbonized economy, while respecting human rights and maximizing the economic benefits to resource-rich nations?
Other issues may be less contentious, but are vital for a just transition and a sustainable environment for Africans: a common African demand for climate finance and contributions for a fund for the loss and damage resulting from the climate crisis carries more weight than such a demand made by individual governments.
When setting up early warning systems against extreme weather events, like those adopted decades ago in Bangladesh, it is much more beneficial to gather data across regions and even the entire continent. When it concerns biodiversity, protected areas restricted along the lines of national borders can overlook how endangered species move about and neglect conserving crucial corridors.
We are not short of forums to churn out resolutions – it is just critical that decisions already taken are implemented. The African Forum of Environment Protection Agencies is a forum to enhance the implementation of important work that is already underway.
And that must guide the ministerial meeting in Addis Ababa. As the seat of the African Union, it is the ideal location to advance a united African approach. Decades ago, Kwame Nkrumah, former President of Ghana, said: “We face neither East nor West; We face forward.”
More recently, UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, similarly said of a Climate Ambition Summit next month in New York: “There will be no room for back-sliders, greenwashers, blame-shifters or repackaging of announcements of previous years.”
And Kenyan President William Ruto, during the last Africa Energy Forum in Nairobi (home to the UN Environment Programme) reminded us: “This is not the time for finger-pointing and passing blame. We want to have a conversation of equals.”
To deliberate as equals is essential within Africa, as it is for when Africa’s leaders embark on engagements and partnerships beyond the continent. It means grounding positions and commitments in science and on a breadth of issues that are too important to the continent’s people to be split on.
Elizabeth Maruma Mrema of Tanzania, is Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations and Deputy Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme
Or it could help 12,000 struggling families stay in their apartments or homes, avoiding eviction.
And that’s just the potential impact of the $36 million in tax revenue Wisconsin could collect every year from its residents now buying cannabis in Illinois. If marijuana were legalized here — as it has been in some form in every state surrounding Wisconsin — the tax collections would easily top $100 million, according to the state Legislative Fiscal Bureau.
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Minnesota, for example, which legalized recreational marijuana Aug. 1, expects to receive $110 million in annual tax revenue by 2027. That’s enough money to employ and train some 5,000 young people in the Wisconsin Conservation Corps, building trails, managing wildlife habitats and completing carpentry projects.
More important than tax receipts, legalizing marijuana in Wisconsin would recognize reality: Cannabis has gone mainstream. Most Americans now live in states where it is legal, and it hasn’t caused lots of problems.
Half of Wisconsin adults 21 or older live within a 75-minute drive to a…
NEW YORK, Aug 12 (IPS) – International Youth Day Statement by ECW Executive Director Yasmine SherifTo save our people and our planet from the life-threatening risks of the climate crisis, we must invest in the education of today’s youth. They will be the climate activists, climate scientists, climate innovators, game-changers and leaders of the 21st century green economy.
On International Youth Day, ECW and our global partners urge world leaders in the public and private sectors to ensure today’s youth have the green skills they need to save our planet. The climate-change challenges and the detrimental impact are enormous – severely affecting the planet, as well as basic services and our very survival.
According to the recent position paper by the United Kingdom Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO): “Addressing the climate, environment, and biodiversity crises in and through girls’ education”, the climate crisis is impacting the education of 40 million children every year. “Education is an assumed, but hugely undervalued, component of responses to climate change impacts, and efforts to mitigate and adapt to them. It is essential for reducing vulnerability, improving communities’ resilience and adaptive capacity, identifying innovations, and for empowering individuals to be part of the solution to climate and environmental change,” states the position paper.
Recent global estimates from Education Cannot Wait (ECW) – the United Nations global fund for education in emergencies & protracted crises – indicate that the number of crisis-impacted children who urgently need education support has spiked by as much as 25 million over the past year.
According to the new ECW Global Estimate Study: “Climate change interacts with underlying crisis drivers to increase crisis severity and worsen education outcomes. For example, droughts in East Africa deplete livelihoods, boost displacement, and undermine food security, worsening access to education and learning and accelerating protection needs.”
As we ramp up efforts to deliver on the Paris Agreement, Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction and Sustainable Development Goals at this year’s SDG Summit and Climate Talks (COP28), we must ensure that quality education, as a critical response to climate change adaptation, mitigation and resilience – especially for children and adolescents caught in emergencies – is inserted into the climate agenda, funding decisions and global policy. Because, climate change is not a stand-alone sector. It impedes and prevents the education of 224 million children and youth today, and their ability to survive and protect our planet tomorrow.
As we build toward COP28, ECW will work closely with the Green Climate Fund, Global Environment Facility, Adaptation Fund and other multilateral and bilateral funds – along with the private sector – to develop solution-oriented and actionable commitments to ensure that education in emergencies both responds to immediate crises, while also equipping communities with the knowledge and skills they need to adapt, mitigate, and build resilience in the face of an uncertain future.
For today’s youth, this means ensuring they receive a quality education in some of the highest-risk climate disaster areas on the globe. It also means to empower them with the knowledge and skills they need to develop, access and advance the green economy, and have the capacity to lead and make sustainable decisions for their communities and countries.
Youth are the human power of a green economy and of climate action and climate resilience. Financial investments in climate change mean financial investments in the education of 224 million children and adolescents. Empowered with an education, they will save their communities, their countries and our planet. If not them, who? Without them, how?
Categorizing countries into “low- and middle-income countries” and “high income countries” is not appropriate for studying healthcare systems and population health. It is misleading to categorize countries for convenience of data analysis and interpretation. Credit: Charles Mpaka/IPS
Opinion by Ifeanyi Nsofor, Sowmya R Rao (abuja)
Inter Press Service
ABUJA, Aug 11 (IPS) – A recent publication in the journal PLOS Medicine reviewed the relationship between COVID-19 and mental health in eight low- and middle-income countries, collectively referred to as LMICs. As important as this publication is, we are appalled by the widespread use of the term “low- and middle-income countries” utilized in this article, and indeed in the majority of the global health literature and discourse.
This term vastly oversimplifies the relationship both between individual LMICs, and between LMICs and High-income countries (HICs). It isn’t an exaggeration to say that the term is colonial and racist. It divides rather than unites. It is time to change the narrative and use an equitable term to describe countries in the Global South.
We are both from the Global South and now work in the Global North. Sowmya is from India while Ifeanyi is from Nigeria. We both live in the U.S. Indeed, Sowmya has lived there for more than 30 years. In our global health careers, we have experienced inequities meted to us and people like us simply because of where we are from.
Terms such as “low- and middle-income countries” perpetuate these inequities and use the same brush to paint 85% of the world’s population as the same. The Global South has almost six times the population of the Global North, is incredibly diverse, and has pockets of high-, middle- and low-income communities. Even within a single LMIC there is incredible diversity.
Without a doubt, categorizing countries into “low- and middle-income countries” and “high income countries” is not appropriate for studying healthcare systems and population health. It is misleading to categorize countries for convenience of data analysis and interpretation.
According to Google Scholar, so far in 2023, over 12,100 publications have used “low-and-middle income countries ” in their titles or in the text. A couple of editorials calling for a change in the classification were published in 2022 and yet, the same journal has over 15,000 publications since 2022 (more than 6000 in 2023) using these terms. Is this classification appropriate for healthcare-related research? We also do not believe that World Bank classification of countries using the gross national income (GNI) is appropriate in this scenario.
Furthermore, funding agencies and peer-reviewed journals perpetuate this problem by requiring the investigators to generalize studies conducted in one country (even one city/town/village) to not only the entire country but beyond that to other “low- and middle-income countries”.
Countries vary in their population sizes, demography, cultures, type of governments, education systems, health care policies, health care access, diseases, and socio-economic problems. Summarizing data across these countries and studying them as a unit to find a one-size-fits-all solution undermines the problems.
For instance, Nigeria has an estimated population of more than 200 million, more than 250 ethnicities that speak over 500 languages. On the other hand, India is the most populous country in the world, with a population of over 1.4 billion. It has more than 2000 ethnic groups that speak over 19,000 languages or dialects.
First, begin to rectify this issue by ensuring that studies are customized to each country so appropriate policies can be implemented to improve healthcare in the country being studied. Most problems and solutions are local and must be studied in this context.
Second, funding institutions and peer-reviewed journals should not insist on generalizability of the results beyond the targeted populations but focus on the possibility of the solutions being adaptable to different populations and situations.
Studies that can positively impact these populations even if small are worth being conducted and published. It may then be further researched and adapted as necessary in different settings but that should not be a condition for funding or publishing.
Third, knowledge transfer should be bi-directional and not unidirectional as is currently done. Therefore, countries in the Global North should be open to learning from solutions found in the Global South (what are also termed as “resource-limited or resource-poor” countries).
There are many lessons in this regard: African Union’s coordination of country COVID-19 responses through the Africa Centre for Disease Control, and diverse experiences on managing epidemics in the Global South.
Finally, researchers must tap into the power of local knowledge. This means including Ministries of Health and local investigators to identify the main problems that need studying and finding solutions to mitigate them – another step towards creating equity.
Having countries from the Global South involved with setting study priorities and also funding portions of studies will ensure that they are vested in the process and are equal partners in studies that impact their own populations. Indeed, no country has infinite resources as was seen during the recent COVID-19 pandemic and any solution that uses the available resources efficiently should be welcomed.
LMICs and HICs are vestiges of colonialism. They divide instead of unite by making the most populous parts of the global community inferior to the least populous. Most importantly, they perpetuate inequities which pose serious consequences for global solidarity.
Using ‘Global South’ versus ‘Global North’ to refer to LMICs and HICs respectively in global research vocabulary is the most equitable thing to do.
Dr. Ifeanyi M. Nsofor, MBBS, MCommH (Liverpool) is Senior New Voices Fellow at the Aspen Institute, Senior Atlantic Fellow for Health Equity at George Washington University, 2006 Ford Foundation International Fellow.
Dr. Sowmya R Rao is a Senior Research Scientist with the Department of Global Health at Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH), a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and a biostatistician primarily interested in global health disparities.
Opinion by Robert Jenkins – Lauren Rumble – Verena Knaus (united nations)
Inter Press Service
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 11 (IPS) – Did you know that the power of computers has been doubling roughly every two years since the 1960s? Every day it seems there’s a new app or piece of tech that unlocks new and efficient ways to do things; to better engage with the world, or with learning.
However, the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the longstanding gender digital divide. Even though digital tech can be used to continue education at scale and is rapidly becoming core to the educational enterprise, it only benefits those who can access it.
And millions of girls often don’t have access to digital technology for many reasons: because communities, schools or families think that technology is a male-only domain, because of online safety risks, because they have been uprooted from their homes or forced to leave school before they learn to use computers, or because they never go to school in the first place.
Even when girls can access digital learning, the content may be rife with harmful gender norms – just as it often is in textbooks. Stereotypes are perpetuated and girls’ education suffers.
Providing access to the tech hardware can make an enormous difference, but it is not a silver bullet. Digital learning isn’t just putting existing materials on a screen instead of on a chalkboard or in a textbook.
It is about taking the opportunity to make education systems better and more responsive to the gender-specific needs of children and young people and equipping teachers with the skills to do so. It can only do that if we’re intentional about how we want to use it.
Recently, the Transforming Education Summit (TES) has committed to doing just that: to “harness the power of the digital revolution to ensure quality education is provided as a public good and a human right, with a particular focus on the most marginalized.”
Unlocking the power of digital learning for these children and young people, especially girls, relies on three keys:
Connecting children to digital learning irrespective of their gender identity, or where they live or where they come from, UNICEF is working to connect every school to the Internet by 2030 through the Giga initiative.
Developing and adapting high quality learning content so that it’s context-specific, curriculum-aligned, and accessible to all. UNICEF with UNESCO and partners launched Gateways to Public Digital Learning, a new global initiative to ensure that every learner, teacher, and family – especially the most marginalized – can easily access and use high-quality digital education content. To facilitate access to high quality content, UNICEF’s Learning Passport is helping meet the specific needs of learners- especially those forced to leave their homes – and educators in over 28 countries reaching three million children.
Equipping teachers with the capacity to use digital technology to improve learning as well as with gender-responsive pedagogical skills so they can support children in all their diversity to develop the skills they need for school, life, and work – including supporting girls and young women to develop digital literacy.
One way UNICEF is forging this third key is through the new Gender Responsive Digital Pedagogies guide for educators. The Guide uses practical exercises to help teachers produce gender-responsive lesson plans, learning materials, and instruction, as well as guidance on protecting girls and boys from online bullying, violence, and sexual violence – critical skills in the digital age.
It also outlines strategies to engage parents and caregivers in their child’s learning using digital tools. In Lebanon, UNICEF has worked closely with the Center for Educational Research and Development (CERD) – a national organization charged with modernization and development of education, based on educational planning – to integrate part of the guide into their teachers’ training curricula.
This national uptake reflects our commitment:
We want to ensure that, as the world accelerates the use of digital technologies for education, we don’t simply carry over existing biases and harmful gender norms into teaching and learning.
With digital tech, learning tools can easily be replaced or updated – unlike printed materials. Educators can thus hone materials to be context-specific and, critically, remove harmful gender references and stereotypes from curricula.
How teachers interact with girls and boys can model more equal and gender-transformative expectations of themselves and each other.
Digital learning has the advantage of being mobile, opening doors for alternative learning pathways for children and adolescents who are excluded or need flexible arrangements.
It can make quality learning accessible to children who speak minority languages and children and young people on the move – especially important for girls on the move, some of the most vulnerable people in the world.
In situations that are otherwise hostile and uncertain, digital learning can be a way to help children to feel included and prepare them to succeed in school, work, and life.
Ensuring that girls’ access to digital technology is keeping pace with its proliferation and technological changes is and will not be easy. But it is essential.
The new Guide is a global public good – a critical building block for action on the TES commitments. Furthermore, as the 67th Conference on the Status of Women focuses on how innovation and education in the digital can promote gender equality, policymakers can be catalyst for digital learning.
To keep pace, our learning tools, practices, and policies need to stay up to date to match the technology – and champion the rights of all children, in all their diversity.
Robert Jenkins is the Global Director of Education and Adolescent Development at UNICEF; Lauren Rumble is the Associate Director of Gender Equality at UNICEF; Verena Knaus is the Global Chief of Migration and Displacement at UNICEF.
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 11 (IPS) – Going back to the 16th century and continuing through the late 1960s, France was described as the world’s second largest colonial power—just behind the British Empire.
As the old saying goes: The sun would never set over the British Empire because God wouldn’t trust an Englishman in the dark. But would that also apply to the French colonial empire?
The military coups in three former French colonies — Burkina Faso, Mali and more recently Niger – are perhaps an indication of the beginning of the end of French post-colonial and neo-colonial ties to West Africa.
The three military leaders are turning towards Russia and the Russian mercenary group Wagner for new political, economic and military alliances.
The headline in a New York Times article last week read: “Waning Influence for France, the Colonizer that Stayed in West Africa “
The coup in Niger, a landlocked country of about 25 million people, is likely to result in the departure of more than 2,500 Western troops, including 1,100 Americans, who were stationed in the West African country to battle anti-US and anti-Western militant groups.
In Niger, there was also strong public support for the Russians, with demonstrators waving Russian flags.
Stephen Zunes, Professor of Politics at the University of San Francisco, told IPS many Africans harbor understandable resentment towards French neocolonialism and their local collaborators.
“Unfortunately, despite the lack of a colonial legacy, the Russian influence is even worse. They are backing some of the region’s worst warlords, reactionary military leaders, and criminal elements,” he said.
Asked for his comments, US State Department Spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters: “I have heard questions about these protests, sometimes in this briefing room, and sometimes you see people assume that because you see people on the streets it is an expression of actual support rather than people who might have been paid to show up at protests”.
Playing down the pro-Russian demonstrators, he said: “It does seem odd to me that if your country is suffering an attempted military takeover, the idea that the first thing anyone would do is run to a store and buy a Russian flag. That strikes me as somewhat an unlikely scenario.”
Miller also said that Yevgeniy Prigozhin, head of the Wagner Group, was publicly celebrating the events in Niger and “we certainly see Wagner take advantage of this type of situation whenever it occurs in Africa”.
“We, as I’ve stated before, did not see any role by Wagner in the instigation of this attempted takeover, and we have not seen any Wagner military presence as of yet in Niger. I don’t have any specific Wagner activities to – that I can make public at this point, but we saw Yevgeniy Prigozhin publicly celebrating what’s happened. And as I said, it did seem a very odd event that we had a bunch of Russian flags show up at so-called protests – in support of the junta leaders,” he added..
Perhaps the longest and bitterest battles against French colonialism took place in North Africa during the Algerian war of independence.
That battle was a major armed conflict between France and the Algerian National Liberation Front (NLF) from 1954 to 1962, which led to Algeria winning its independence from France and represented “the most recent and bloodiest example of France’s colonial history on the African continent”, with approximately 1.5 million Algerians killed and millions more displaced in the eight-year struggle for independence.
A posting on the Foreign Policy website August 8 said Niger’s coup leaders had one week to relinquish power and reinstate ousted President Mohamed Bazoum or else face military intervention by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).
At midnight on Sunday, that deadline expired without Bazoum being reinstated. Now, Niger and its neighbors are preparing for possible war—and ECOWAS, which plans to hold a second emergency summit is questioning whether issuing its unprecedented threat was a smart idea to begin with.
On Sunday, Niger’s junta government sent troop reinforcements to the capital, Niamey, and closed Niger’s airspace to brace for ECOWAS’s potential invasion. A senior U.S. diplomat held “frank and at times quite difficult” talks on Monday with junta leaders, who rejected calls to restore democracy, according to Foreign Policy.
Asked about the Russian influence in Niger, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters August 7 “for sure we have concerns when we see something like the Wagner Group possibly manifesting itself in different parts of the Sahel, and here’s why we’re concerned: because every single place that this group, Wagner Group, has gone, death, destruction, and exploitation have followed.”
He said insecurity has gone up, not down. It hasn’t been a response to the needs of the countries in question for greater security.
“I think what happened and what continues to happen in Niger was not instigated by Russia or by Wagner, but to the extent that they try to take advantage of it – and we see a repeat of what’s happened in other countries, where they’ve brought nothing but bad things in their wake – that wouldn’t be good,” Blinken declared.
A Security Council meeting in progress. Credit: United Nations
Opinion by Tim Murithi (cape town, south africa)
Inter Press Service
CAPE TOWN, South Africa, Aug 10 (IPS) – The world’s institutions are ill-prepared and poorly designed to effectively address global challenges such as major power conflicts, pandemics, the climate catastrophe, refugee crises, violent extremism, illicit profiteering from natural resources, and the regulation of artificial intelligence systems.
In particular, the United Nations, which was created to address the problems of the world in 1945, is no longer fit for purpose. The multilateral organization has outlived its usefulness; there is an urgent need to design a global institution that is reflective of the twenty-first century.
The UN was created with a recognition of the limitations of the League of Nations in mind. In particular, the League was unable to prevent the conquest of Europe by Nazi Germany and the Japanese invasion of China.
History is repeating itself in the form of the powerful Permanent Five (P5) members of the UN Security Council (UNSC) repeatedly ignoring the legal provisions of the UN Charter and weakening the legitimacy of this international institution, by invading countries in contravention of international law.
The dysfunctionality of the UNSC was exposed once more on February 24, 2022, when Russia was simultaneously chairing the Presidency of the Council and launching an illegal invasion of Ukraine. This war is impeding global stability. Ukrainians suffer the most from this conflict, which also inflicts great damage to Global South countries’ economies and human security.
Yet, other major conflicts are also looming, for example between the United States and China over Taiwan, and it is unlikely that the planet can endure another full-blown major-power war.
A confrontation between two nuclear weapons-bearing permanent members of the UNSC would leave us all in an extremely precarious state of affairs, but there are currently no effective mechanisms to constrain the UNSC’s permanent members’ actions.
The founders of the UN recognized that the moment would arrive when it became imperative to transform the organization, and they included a practical mechanism to review the body’s Charter.
According to Article 109 (1), a UN Charter Review Conference should have been convened 10 years after the signing of the document. Today, it could be initiated by a majority vote of the members of the UN General Assembly (UNGA) and by a vote of any seven members of the UNSC, according to Article 109 (3).
This provision means that the P5 members cannot veto any proposed UN Charter Review Conference. In practice, a dozen or more UN member states drawn from different continents would need to create a “Coalition of the Willing” within the UNGA, which would have to draft a Resolution to trigger and launch a UN Charter Review Conference.
Such a Review Conference could, through the collective decision of the members of the UNGA, identify the key issues that need to be addressed, including reform of the UNSC. The Review Conference could also adopt a recommendation to substantially alter the UN Charter and introduce completely new provisions, including even a change in the name of the institution.
More than 60 percent of the issues discussed by the UNSC are focused on Africa, yet the continent does not have any representation among the P5 members of the Council.
Given the fact that the P5 can veto all manner of decisions before the Council, it is a travesty of justice at its most basic level that African countries can only participate in key deliberations and decision-making processes as non-permanent members of the Council.
UNSC negotiations and decision-making processes are, in effect, the highest manifestation of unfairness in the international system. If achieving fairness in negotiations among states is the preferred route to global legitimacy, then a fundamental transformation of the UNSC and the elimination of the veto for the P5 is a necessary pre-requisite action.
Tim Murithi is Head of the Peacebuilding Interventions Programme, Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, and Professor of African Studies, University of Free State and Stellenbosch University, South Africa, @tmurithi12
Investors should think twice before picking an actively managed mutual fund according to its style category. By “style category,” I’m referring to the widely used method of grouping mutual funds according to the market-cap of the stocks they invest in and where those stocks stand on the spectrum of growth-to-value.
This matrix traces to groundbreaking research in 1992 by University of Chicago professor Eugene Fama and Dartmouth College professor Ken French, and has since been popularized by investment researcher Morningstar in the form of its well-known style box.
In urging you to think twice before picking a fund based on this matrix, I’m not questioning the existence of important distinctions between the various styles. Fama and French’s research convincingly showed that there are systematic differences between them. My point is that there also are huge differences within each style as well. You can pick a style that outperforms all others on Wall Street and still lose a lot of money, just as you can pick the worst-performing style and turn a huge profit.
This points to the two types of risk you face when picking an actively managed fund. You have the risk associated with the fund’s style (category risk) and you also have the risk associated with the particular stocks that the fund’s manager selects (so-called idiosyncratic risk). Idiosyncratic risk often overwhelms category risk, especially over shorter periods.
To illustrate, consider the midcap-growth style. As judged by the Vanguard Mid-Cap Growth ETF VOT,
this style produced a 28.8% loss in 2022. Yet, according to Morningstar Direct, the best-performing actively managed midcap-growth fund last year produced a gain of 39.5%, while the worst performer lost 67.0%.
This best-versus-worst performance spread of over 100 percentage points is illustrated in the accompanying chart. Notice that the comparable spread was almost as wide for many of the other styles as well. Though I haven’t done the research to compare 2022’s spreads with those of other calendar years, I have no reason to expect that they on average were any lower.
“ The only way to eliminate idiosyncratic risk when investing in particular styles is to invest in an index fund.”
The only way to eliminate idiosyncratic risk when investing in particular styles is to invest in an index fund benchmarked to the style in question. If you are enamored of a particular fund manager and willing to bet he will significantly outperform the category average, just know that you also incur the not-significant idiosyncratic risk that the fund will lag by a large amount.
The bottom line? By investing in an actively managed fund in a style category, you will be incurring the risk not only of that category itself but also the not-insignificant idiosyncratic risk of that particular fund. Fasten your seatbelt if that’s the path you take.
Mark Hulbert is a regular contributor to MarketWatch. His Hulbert Ratings tracks investment newsletters that pay a flat fee to be audited. He can be reached at mark@hulbertratings.com
This time it’s in the latest Charles Schwab Retirement Survey. Among 1,000 people surveyed, the average respondent figured he or she needed to save $1.8 million to retire. (That figure is up from $1.7 million in the same survey a year earlier.)
Touchingly, 86% also told Schwab they were either “somewhat” or “very” likely to achieve their goals.
Er, no.
If the numbers show anything, it’s that most people don’t understand math, don’t understand finance and are wildly out of touch with reality.
Some simple calculations will show that these figures are all wrong.
First, let’s start with the bad news. There is no way 86% of people should be “very” or “somewhat” confident that they are going to hit that $1.8 million target, or anything like it. Let alone that 37% think they are “very” likely to hit it.
Median retirement-account balance at the moment? Try $27,000 and change, says 401(k) giant Vanguard.
Even that’s overstating the picture. The Federal Reserve’s most recent triennial Survey of Consumer Finances says the median American household has $26,000 in total financial assets, including savings accounts, life insurance, 401(k) plan and the like. Among those aged 45 to 54, the figure is $37,000, and among those 55 to 64 it’s $47,000. How anyone thinks they are getting from there to $1.8 million by retirement age is a mystery. Magic carpets? Magic beans?
Granted, the survey is from 2019, but the intervening pandemic period won’t have changed the picture that much — in either direction.
It’s not clear from the survey whether those polled included the value of the equity in their homes. Throw that in, and the median household’s total net worth rises to $122,000. Among those aged 45 to 54 it rises to $169,000, and among those 55 to 64 to $213,000. COVID policies helped drive up average U.S. home prices by about 30%, so those figures will have risen since 2019.
But again we are not nearing $1.8 million.
Not even close.
The good news, though, is that you don’t actually need this amount or anything like it to retire.
Naturally if someone hasn’t figured life out by the time they retire, and they still think that buying yet more stuff is the route to happiness, no amount is going to be enough.
How much we’d like and how much we need are very different things.
A $1.8 million balance would buy a 65-year-old couple an immediate annuity paying a guaranteed lifetime income of $9,500 a month, or just over $110,000 a year.
The average Social Security benefit on top of that for a retired couple is just under $3,000 a month, or $36,000 a year. So in total you’d be on about $146,000 a year. What are these people planning to do in retirement?
Even with a 3% annual rise, to account for inflation risk, that annuity will pay out $83,000 a year, and that’s for a couple, not just for one person. The money continues until both of you have gone.
How much do we really need? Well, while acknowledging that each person and each person’s situation is going to be different, let’s do some simple math.
Actual seniors are living on median annual incomes of around $45,000 to $50,000, says the Federal Reserve. And most of them say they are either reasonably satisfied with retirement or actually happy. So, at least, they tell Gallup and the Employee Benefit Research Institute.
Meanwhile, a new survey from Schroders finds that the average person thinks a comfortable retirement can be had on around $5,000 a month, or $60,000 a year.
The average Social Security benefit for a retired couple is $36,000 a year. To bring that income up to $50,000 you’d need an annuity paying $14,000 a year.
Current cost in the annuities market: $225,000.
To bring that up to $60,000 the annuity would cost $385,000.
For $350,000 you can get an income of $18,000 with a 3% annual increase to deal with inflation.
For $800,000 you can double your Social Security income, bringing in another $36,000 a year — with a 3% annual increase to deal with inflation.
Retirement savings generally are grossly inadequate, and many people face genuine hardship in their senior years. And, of course, pretty much everyone could use more money. On the other hand, you can retire in comfort with a lot less than $1.8 million.
Opinion by Jomo Kwame Sundaram (kuala lumpur, malaysia)
Inter Press Service
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Aug 09 (IPS) – The primary commodity price boom early this century has often been attributed to a commodity ‘super-cycle’, i.e., a price upsurge greater than what might be expected in ‘normal’ booms. This was largely due to some minerals as most agricultural commodity price increases were more modest.
This minerals boom improved many developing country growth records, not least in Africa. With growing pressures to act urgently in response to accelerating global warming, mitigation efforts have been stepped up, promising energy transitions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Jomo Kwame Sundaram
These require major shifts from fossil fuel combustion to renewable energy and complementary (e.g., transport) technologies. This energy transition requires more of specific minerals like lithium, copper and cobalt. This increased demand for minerals offers resource-rich economies more opportunities for greater domestic resource mobilization for development.
The Intergovernmental Forum on Mining, Minerals, Metals and Sustainable Development (IGF) and the African Tax Administration Forum (ATAF) report, The Future of Resource Taxation: 10 policy ideas to mobilize mining revenues, reviews major problems faced by African and other governments trying to greatly increase revenue from mining.
Great expectations, little taxation
Colonial and neo-colonial mining arrangements have rarely delivered the revenue needed by post-colonial governments. Weak governance, overly generous tax incentives, poor fiscal policies, bad contracts, as well as tax avoidance and evasion have all eroded mineral revenues for developing countries.
Resource-rich countries have been rethinking how to benefit more from mining in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, worsening developing country debt crises, and increasingly uncertain government revenues and expenditures.
Mining royalties and taxation have remained largely unchanged for decades, while corporate income tax is hard to collect, vulnerable to profit shifting and often minimized with the aid of tax professionals and corrupt officials.
Improving taxation
Taxing transnational corporations has long posed major challenges. Poor laws and enforcement as well as limited funding and staff mean most developing countries are poorly equipped to apply complex international tax norms, such as the ‘arm’s-length principle’ and ‘double taxation treaties’.
Developing nations are especially vulnerable to tax base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS). International Monetary Fund staff estimate African countries have lost annual mining revenue up to $730 million annually due to BEPS.
Many developing countries identified ‘transfer pricing’ as the greatest challenge to taxing mining. The problem has been made worse by mining tax regimes and investment agreements favouring investors, especially from abroad.
Such agreements often contain fiscal incentives making mining revenue collection difficult. Worse, many governments believe generous tax incentives are necessary to attract mining investment. But these typically undermine effective tax administration, causing significant revenue losses.
Also, policy conditionalities typically ‘lock in’ poorly designed fiscal conditions and mining contracts, often required or recommended by the IMF or World Bank. These tend to benefit investors, potentially resulting in costly disputes for host governments.
Generating substantial government revenue from artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) is difficult. As ASM induces more local spending, rather than extraction or export taxes, indirect taxes and wealth taxes are probably better for such incomes.
Governments of resource-rich developing countries require finance and reliable personnel for successful implementation, to ensure accountability and curb corruption. Sufficient financial and technical assistance can greatly improve mining revenue collection, ensuring companies pay all royalties and taxes due.
Effective implementation needs to be well supported by international agreements and organizations, development partners, and civil society. Tax incentives undermining government policy objectives and legal systems should be avoided.
Taxing better not easy
More access to information and expertise can greatly improve mining tax administration. Information, particularly from other jurisdictions, is critical for tax administrations to better collect taxes due. Sadly, progress has been painfully slow in many developing countries.
Instruments designed to improve information exchange include bilateral investment and tax treaties, tax information exchange agreements, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters, and the ATAF Multilateral Agreement on Assistance in Tax Matters.
Mining revenue collection needs to be able to verify the quantity and quality of mineral reserves and extracts. Key challenges include enhancing tax audit capacity and getting up-to-date knowledge of mining, including implications of changes in mining techniques.
Better inter-agency cooperation is often necessary for better regulation and to avoid an incoherent, fragmented approach. Many mining revenue BEPS problems are due to capacity constraints, e.g., whether governments can effectively verify the costs of goods and services and mineral prices.
Many transactions also require tax auditors to have detailed knowledge of the mining value chain. Many aspects of mining operations allow inflating actual costs to evade taxes. Valuing intangibles, such as intellectual property, is also difficult. Many countries also lack regulations to tax the sale of offshore indirect mining assets, often losing much revenue as a consequence.
Too little too late?
Mineral-rich developing countries hope for more ‘resource rents’ from mining to significantly enhance government revenue. They hope mining taxation will collect much more revenue, subject to other policy goals. However, in most cases, mining has failed to deliver the expected revenues.
Inappropriate laws and investment agreements, overly generous tax incentives, as well as tax evasion and avoidance have contributed to this failure. Some authorities lack the expertise, information and means to more effectively tax mining. Corruption and poor revenue management also remain challenges.
Thankfully, mining revenue collection has improved, albeit modestly. Many countries are improving their mining tax regulations and strengthening their tax audit capacity.
Better international cooperation can address many problems, including information asymmetries. All countries implementing the Extractives Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) are now required to disclose mining, oil, and gas contracts. This can significantly improve transparency.
Although welcome, such improvements are still far from enough to meet the considerable domestic revenue mobilization needs of developing countries soon enough to adequately accelerate sustainable development after dismal progress for almost a decade.
Opinion by Patricia Wong Bi Yi, Arman Bidarbakht-Nia (bangkok, thailand)
Inter Press Service
BANGKOK, Thailand, Aug 09 (IPS) – The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are relevant to all countries, whether high, middle or low income. With increasing attention to the SDGs, countries are progressively turning to data as a source to assess and validate the progress that they have made towards achieving them.
Through many iterations of the Asia and the Pacific SDG Progress Report and through ESCAP’s work with individual countries, it is clear that (i) no single country is achieving all the SDGs, (ii) all countries can benefit from assessing progress on the SDGs, and (iii) if countries use a mix of assessment approaches this will provide a more accurate picture of progress.
To simplify things, we can divide progress measures into two clusters, (i) those measuring the level of achievement and (ii) those measuring trends and rates of progress.
No single country is achieving all the SDGs
A common assumption may be that the countries with highest gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in the region should be among the best performers in terms of SDG progress, given that they have better capacities and resources available to advance the sustainable development agenda.
However, data shows that it is not necessarily so. The countries with the highest GDP per capita in the region – Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Republic of Korea, Singapore – are lagging behind on many of the seventeen SDGs. Indeed the National SDG trends at the target and indicator level also show that some goals in these countries are not faring any better than the region’s average.
The fairy tale of a single country is shattered. In its place, we see that each country can be a champion for some of the SDG targets whilst simultaneously lagging behind on others.
Lessons from the tortoise and the hare
For zero hunger (Goal 2), high-income countries such as Australia and Japan are indeed closer to achieving the 2030 target than the rest of the region. However, data also shows that these countries have largely remained stagnant in their progress toward this goal. Trend data shows that despite better than regional average status of food insecurity in Australia, this indicator is regressing.
In Japan, despite being lower than the regional average, moderate or severe food insecurity in the population has increased by almost 50 per cent since 2015. Even where countries show initial achievements or advantages, there is a need to continuously monitor and look at current trends to ensure that emerging negative trends are detected early on for appropriate actions to be taken.
For quality education (Goal 4), we see that Bangladesh started with a lower level of achievement but was listed as one of the well-performing countries in the Asia and the Pacific SDG Progress Report 2023.
At the target level, Bangladesh is a top performer in the region in terms of improving effective learning outcomes as well as adult literacy and numeracy. Such countries which are making good strides in their rate of progress need to ensure that such progress is maintained so they can move above the regional average and so they can meet the targets.
The ugly duckling: Unleashing the true potential
There are instances when the level of achievement is low, and the trends show a country is making little or no progress in achieving the targets. What happens then? Firstly, let’s recall that there is no one country achieving all the SDGs.
Similarly, there is no one country making no progress on any of the SDGs. But for those countries which are off-track they will need to prioritize the targets which are most off-track and will need to work at speed to bring about a change in direction. An ugly duckling could flourish into a beautiful swan.
Regardless of a country’s level of achievement on a single goal, target or indicator, a combination of progress measures is required to take the right action. There are different ways to look at SDG progress, but whichever methods are used we need to be honest in our assessment. ESCAP offers complementary tools and products that could be used by countries to better assess SDG progress.
• Data Explorer allows countries to explore the underlying data beyond the aggregated analysis shown in reports.
• National SDG Trends provides countries with several dashboards that help in exploring the data trends and identifying priority areas for action. .
• National SDG Tracker offers countries a specific tool which they can customize to include their own SDG indicators and targets along with tools to assess SDG progress. ESCAP can also provide expertise to assist governments to implement this tool in assessing SDG progress in their countries.
We look forward to embarking on this voyage together to tell your country’s SDG data story!
Patricia Wong Bi Yi is Associate Statistician ESCAP, Arman Bidarbakht-Nia is Statistician ESCAP.
Women of color have long forged pathways of defiance and liberation through a legacy of serving lewks. Fashion — even at the highest and most superficial echelons — is inherently political and, when executed with the intention, culturally transformative.
We witnessed this viscerally throughout the 20th century, with Black women dressing in their Sunday best to juxtapose the ignorant characterization of Black people as being unclean, impoverished, and uneducated. This paradox was on full display during moments of protest that turned violent. Civil rights strategists like Fannie Lou Hamer and Dr. Dorothy Height understood that the stark visuals of seeing well-dressed Black women in skirts and pantyhose brutally beaten with water hoses and police canines would be a powerful alarm for the American psyche. They were right. These deliberate sartorial choices laid the foundation for enticing white America’s attention, sympathy, and ultimately support to condemn the oppressive state of Jim Crow.
“Then and now, women of color have used threads to fashion their resistance.”
There is a remarkable link between some of the most significant Black and Brown social justice movements, cultural shifts, and empowerment campaigns, and the aesthetic choices that were adopted. Fashion in itself is a tool of disruption — articulating taste, cultural agency, and, at times, political dissonance. Our style serves as a universal language. Then and now, women of color have used threads to fashion their resistance amidst invisibility, intolerability, and injustice.
Back in 2019, we witnessed “The Squad” walk through the halls of Congress dressed in all white for President Trump’s State of the Union. Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib deliberately chose stark white ensembles as a reference to the suffragist movement of the 1920s. But there was something acutely powerful seeing Black and Brown women stylized in all-white power suits and dresses, in a sea of mostly white men — it called out the lack of representation in Congress and referenced how women of color were not invited to participate in the suffragist movement or subsequent women’s movements. Even in the halls of Congress, women of color are forced to contend with America’s devaluing of their existence. But what AOC and her squad offered was a style guide for ongoing disruption.
Now, a few years later — as we engage in discourse around bodily autonomy, reproductive rights, and the lack of protection of Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people — women across the country continue to make bold statements with their attire: confronting societal expectations, demanding acknowledgement of our existence, and challenging practices of systemic equity.
This year, the stylization of cultural dissonance is taking place from the halls of Congress to the runways of New York Fashion Week to the streets of our hometowns. Back in May, in response to the questionable choice to honor Karl Lagerfeld (a known misogynist with harmful ideals of beauty) at the Met Gala, a few guests offered bold rebuttals. Actresses Viola Davis and Quannah Chasinghorse both chose to wear pink gowns. According to fashion writer Patrick Mauriès’s book “The World According to Karl,” Lagerfeld once said, “Think pink. But don’t wear it.” Davis’s extravagant, feathered, hot pink dress seemed to be a literal and figurative shading of the designer, and she called on a decades-long tradition of Black women asserting their power and refashioning ideas of beauty through the natural state of our hair.
Chasinghorse sported a more subtle pink shade than Davis, choosing a subdued powder pink dress. But like Davis, she styled her hair and makeup with nods to her heritage, inspired by her Han and Lakota Indigenous traditions. The look challenged the often siloed and silenced visibility of Indigenous women that has instigated the Missing and Murdered and Indigenous Women movement, which seeks to elevate the staggering statistics of Indigenous women who are silently abused and killed. These stylized choices offered autonomy and agency in spaces that have been reluctant, if not refused, to offer such power to women of color. In a cultural arena historically unconcerned with our stories, Chasinghorse and Davis unapologetically took up space.
If there is anything that the rise of the Black Lives Matter, Stop Asian Hate, and Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women movements have taught us in the past few years, it is that “fear of the other,” and protection of power predicated on dehumanization, is at the core of the American social fabric; woven together by policy, social politics, and language. Perhaps there is power in examining and renegotiating the ways in which we have literally and figuratively fashioned our national paradigms, cultural practices, and misguided policies to disenfranchise, disempower, and disregard the voices and humanity of women of color and the communities they represent.
“I challenge us to assume a new aesthetic of equity, one that becomes a uniform we all try on this year.”
We can all agree that the summer of 2023 hasn’t just been one of the hottest recorded in the Earth’s history, but one of the most politically and thus socially hellish. We watched the undermining of our humanity from all sides. The Supreme Court has voted to deconstruct and, in some cases, abolish abortion rights, affirmative action, and debt relief, transforming a generation and deepening the already painful wounds of entrenched racial oppression. It was particularly demoralizing to watch affirmative action get overturned a few days before we celebrated the most recent federal holiday, Juneteenth. While we prepared to honor a public declaration of freedom for Black America and thus, America, we witnessed the ongoing contradiction of the American dream.
As I prepared for my weekend celebrations in Austin, TX, I found myself oscillating between jubilee, joy, and jadedness. I’d been invited to speak at a Juneteenth Summit at the Lyndon B. Johnson School at the University of Texas in partnership with the Emancipator to discuss what Black freedom means today. Aesthetics, like writing, has always been a way to express my emotional state and my current posture in the world, and I knew my outfit choice would need to reflect my state of anger. While the idea of Juneteenth evokes celebration, I was overcome with righteous indignation, and thus chose to select an all-black ensemble that articulated militancy and rage. I put on a somewhat risqué black blazer with peek-a-boo moments throughout and black cargo pants. The monochromatic look was interrupted only by the intentional color accents of a red lip (Mac’s “Feel So Good” matte, of course) and lace-up green heels — my not-so-subtle nod to Black liberation (or Pan African flag) colors. And adorning my blazer were lapel pins highlighting the faces of some of my inspirations: James Baldwin and Rosa Parks.
Image source: Alyssa Vidales
Of course, I stood out from the suits and Austin business casual attire that filled the auditorium. It called into question the politics of appropriateness in an academic institution and a grand hall named after Lyndon B. Johnson. There was a cyclical operation at play that day. My outfit articulated my emotional state and stylized my intellectual posture before I ever spoke a word on stage; simultaneously, I felt emboldened to speak unfiltered, unapologetic, and unabashed.
With the help of the tasseled blazer and vintage lapel pins, I fashioned these words to the audience: “We are less than three years removed from the so-called racial reckoning of 2020, and yet companies and institutions are saying, ‘I thought we already did that work? We wrote that check, I did that one march, we did that workshop.’ But we are talking about 400 plus years of harm; 400 plus years of creating systems that were predicated on the understanding of who would be valued as human and who would not. So, I think it’s going to take a bit longer than three years, or even sixty years, and it’s going to take a bit more than policy. It’s going to take sustained investment and a pervasive shift in our cultural paradigm.”
And, perhaps, it will take stylizing new tactics of resistance. So, my challenge to us all is to reflect on these and other stories of resistance to inspire, inform, and set intentions for the ways we can continue to disrupt spaces and agitate the system. I challenge us to assume a new aesthetic of equity, one that becomes a uniform we all try on this year.
Virginia Cumberbatch is racial justice educator, writer, creative activist, and the CEO/Co-Founder of Rosa Rebellion, a production company for creative activism by and for women of color. She splits her time between her hometown of Austin, Texas, and Brooklyn, New York. When she’s not elevating the voices of women of color, you can catch her styling outfits with her latest vintage finds and the designer shoes she found on sale at Nordstrom Rack. She’s a graduate of Williams College and The University of Texas at Austin’s Lyndon B. Johnson School and the author of “As We Saw It: The Story of Integration at UT.”
LONDON, Aug 08 (IPS) – Last week the IMF offered a cautious estimate of positive global economic growth for this year, warning ‘we are on track, but not out of the woods’. But with the IMF and governments continuing to use gross domestic product (GDP) as the dominant measure of economic progress, a more appropriate warning might be that ‘we’ are failing to see the wood for the trees.
As multiple crises wreak havoc across the world, as inequality continues to rise inexorably, as we approach near irreversible climate breakdown, it strains credulity that governments remain fixated on a metric that is incapable of capturing these momentous changes and their profound consequences for our lives.
GDP was developed to measure the monetary value of the marketed goods and services produced in an economy but it rapidly became the predominant measure of national welfare. As such it is flawed.
We should recall the warning issued by Simon Kuznets, founding father of GDP, back in 1934: the welfare of a nation could not, and should not, be inferred from the measurement of its GDP.
GDP is blind to the distribution of the marketed goods and services it measures; it equates progress with growing wealth, even if that wealth is concentrated among a small minority of the world’s population.
It fails to distinguish between market activities that harm people and planet and those that are beneficial. It ignores the value of unpaid care. And it only recognizes natural resources when they can be exploited for profit.
Credit: UN Women/Zhanarbek Amankulov
As the feminist economist Marilyn Waring put it, GDP embodies an economic system that counts oil spills and wars as positive contributions to growth but deems the unpaid care of children and families as valueless.
Take the example of unpaid care work, overwhelmingly carried out by women across the world. According to data cited in an Oxfam paper this week, almost two-thirds of women’s weekly working hours – and forty-five percent of the total for all adults – do not enter estimates of GDP because they do not enter the market.
That means nearly 90 billion hours of unpaid care work, without which economic growth would come to a grinding halt, do not count as part of that growth!
History has shown us that fixation on GDP-oriented growth has led to government policies that directly harm women, particularly those at the intersection of multiple inequalities, such as race, class, caste and disability.
This is evident in the consequences of repeated and sustained austerity cuts to public services, here in the UK and elsewhere, including many countries in the Global South. These showed up clearly in the UK during the pandemic.
Cuts in welfare services on which many women depended in order to take up paid work meant that they had to compensate with increased unpaid labour. Cuts to jobs and pay in the public sector where women workers made up most of the work force meant higher rates of female unemployment.
And where public services were retained, as in the health sector, women from poor and minority households made up the majority of frontline workers, were those most exposed to infection.
There are alternative measures of wellbeing to GDP. Some are based on indigenous conceptualizations that stress harmony between people and planet. Others seek to build on common values found across the world: values that stress care and capabilities, culture and leisure, connections with nature and community and, very importantly, democratic participation and social justice.
What these measures all have in common is that GDP is no longer considered the primary goal of national efforts but just one of the means by which shared goals can be achieved.
This proliferation of concepts is indicative of the deep dissatisfaction with GDP on the part of many and the need to go beyond it. They include international organizations like the UN, the OECD and the EU, governments like New Zealand, Canada, Bhutan, Peru, Ecuador as well as numerous networks of activists and academics.
The fact that they have not arrived at an agreed alternative to GDP reflects at least two major challenges. The first is methodological but one that can be resolved through debate and deliberation. Do we want a single, multidimensional index to track how we are doing, more complex than GDP but closer to shared values?
Or should we opt for a dashboard of indicators that allow us to track where we are doing well and where we are falling behind? Should the alternative be nationally determined or internationally?
One argument in favour of an internationalist consensus is the need to factor in ‘the wellbeing elsewhere’ dimension: what we do within one country can have positive or negative repercussions for people in other countries.
The second challenge is political and harder to resolve, as economic elites have been able to capture political power. The richest 1% are not just the wealthiest, they have greatest political clout. They also have strong vested interest in defending a measure of progress that ensures they can legitimately capture the bulk of the wealth generated by markets.
Conversely, those who have most to gain from alternative measures of progress are dispersed and divided – in no small way through the efforts of the 1%. The second challenge therefore is to find a bridge across these divisions and dispersions so that we can collectively engage in the task of revolutionizing the way we think about ourselves in relation to each other and to our planet.
Professor Naila Kabeer is a feminist economist, Department of International Development, London School of Economics (LSE).
Opinion by Olivier De Schutter (brussels, belgium)
Inter Press Service
BRUSSELS, Belgium, Aug 07 (IPS) – The fragile state of global food systems has reached a crossroads. Recent headlines underscore the profound challenges we now confront.
The United Nations released sobering statistics that 122 million more people are going hungry than in 2019, erasing years of progress. One week later, Russia announced it was ending the crucial deal that allowed Ukraine’s vast grain production to be shipped to the outside world.
This deal was an important factor in alleviating last year’s record high food prices. Russia then proceeded to bomb grain facilities in Ukraine, causing wheat and corn prices to surge. Simultaneously, soaring heat, blazing wildfires, and devastating floods are jeopardising harvests around the world. Meanwhile the food industry has recorded billions in profits.
These events tell us we are facing both acute shocks to food security, and chronic underlying food poverty. Even while the industrial globalised food system generates bountiful profits. These are all symptoms of the same disease – and highlight the urgent need for major changes in our food systems.
Two statistics from the UN’s hunger report are perhaps most concerning.
First, the projection that almost 600 million people could be chronically undernourished in 2030. This shows that the Sustainable Development Goals – in which governments committed to end hunger by that date – lie in tatters, unless urgent action is taken.
Second, the finding that a decent nutritious diet is now out of reach for nearly half the planet. The cost of a healthy diet has shot up just as people are seeing disposable incomes tumble. What an indictment of our failing food system.
Olivier De SchutterThis is not because the world does not produce enough food. Global agriculture has never produced so many calories – its growth outpacing population growth. The streamlined chains of the industrial food system are well tuned to deliver cheap and uniform biscuits, crisps and fizzy drinks across the planet, increasingly to even the most remote areas.
Rather, the industrial food system is simply not delivering. It prioritises market demand and profit, over meeting human needs. It is more profitable to produce mass commodities for animal feed, biofuels and processed foods, ultimately serving rich consumers with an ability to pay, rather than the needs of poor communities and hungry populations. The industrial food system is not built to ensure access to food and healthy diets for all.
Hence only about 55% of people around the globe live in countries with enough fresh fruits and vegetables available to meet the World Health Organization’s minimum recommended daily consumption target.
Our food system has had some unlucky shocks these last three years – from Covid-19, climate impacts and conflict. But it was also disastrously vulnerable. The industrial food system is built upon layers of concentration which are liable to disruption.
Half the calories consumed around the world come from just three staple crops (wheat, maize and rice), grown from a narrow range of seed varieties, exported from a small number of countries, shipped around the world by a handful of powerful trading firms. This is profitable, but it is not robust.
Record high debts in many Global South countries are also preventing them from investing to combat hunger, trapping them in a vicious cycle. Global South countries have been forced to specialise in growing and exporting cash crops like cocoa, coffee and cotton in order to pay down debts – at the expense of growing food for their own populations.
They are thus required to import food – food which is now much more expensive – and unable to invest in resilient local food production. Africa is today a net importer of food – with net food imports of $35 billion in 2015, expected to triple by 2025.
Governments will no doubt agree on the need to raise ambitions. But when we are so far off course, the time is up for small adjustments. We need a completely new recipe to address hunger and build resilience. Based on breaking dependence on the global market to provide adequate nutrition and feed the hungry, and rebuilding countries’ capacity to produce the food they require.
Social protection schemes must guarantee food access for the world’s poorest – with proven policies like the successful ‘Fome Zero’ programme deployed by Brazil in the 2000s that took the country off the hunger map. Urgent debt relief for heavily indebted low-income countries is also crucial to allow them to invest in anti-hunger schemes and domestic food production.
In a world of climate crisis in which more shocks are to come, resilience throughout the system must be the goal. More diverse agroecological food production, shorter food chains, and countries producing more nutritious food for their own people can unlock the food security that too many are denied. It’s time we admit the industrial food system is starving people.
Let these alarming headlines be a turning point to a different road, a route towards resilience.
Olivier De Schutter is co-chair of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) and UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Aug 04 (IPS) – The title shouldn’t fool you: Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen is one of the world’s longest-ruling autocrats. A political survivor, this former military commander had been bolted to his chair since 1985, presiding over what he turned into a de facto one-party system – and now apparently a dynastic regime.
On 23 July, running virtually unopposed, Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) took 82 per cent of the vote, winning almost all seats. The only party that could have offered a challenge, the Candlelight Party, had been banned on a technicality in May.
Following the proclamation of his ‘landslide victory‘, Hun Sen finally announced his retirement, handing over his position to his eldest son, Hun Manet. Manet had already been endorsed by the CPP. Winning a parliamentary seat, which he just did, was all he had to do to become eligible. To ensure dynastic succession faced no obstacle, a constitutional amendment passed in August 2022 allows the ruling party to appoint the prime minister without parliamentary approval.
Hun Sen isn’t going away: he’ll remain CPP chair and a member of parliament, be appointed to other positions and stay at the helm of his family’s extensive business empire.
A slippery slope towards autocracy
Hun Sen came to power in a world that no longer exists. He managed to cling onto power as everything around him changed.
He fought as a soldier in the Cambodian Civil War before defecting to Vietnam, taking several government positions under the 1980s Vietnamese government of occupation. He was appointed prime minister in 1985, and when 1993 elections resulted in a hung parliament, Hun Sen refused to concede defeat. Negotiations resulted in a coalition government in which he served as joint prime minister, until he orchestrated a coup to take sole control in 1997. At the head of the CPP, he has won every election since.
In 2013 his power was threatened. A new opposition party, the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP), offered a credible challenge. The CPP got its lowest share of votes and seats since 1998. Despite obvious fraud, the CNRP came dangerously close to defeating Hun Sen.
In the years that followed, Hun Sen made sure no one would challenge him again. In 2015, the CNRP’s leader Sam Rainsy was summarily ousted from the National Assembly and stripped of parliamentary immunity. A warrant was issued for his arrest, pushing him into exile. He was then barred from returning to Cambodia, and in 2017 convicted for ‘defaming’ Hun Sen. His successor at the head of the CNRP, Kem Sokha, soon faced persecution too.
In November 2017, the Supreme Court ordered the dissolution of the CNRP and imposed a five-year political ban on 118 opposition members.
As a result, the only parties that eventually ran on a supposedly opposition platform in 2018 were small parties manufactured by government allies to give the impression of competition. In the run-up to the vote, the CPP-dominated National Election Committee (NEC) threatened to prosecute anybody who urged a boycott and warned voters that criticising the CPP wasn’t allowed. What resulted was a parliament without a single dissenting voice.
There was no let off after the election, with mass arrests and mass trials of former CNRP members and civil society activists becoming commonplace. Rainsy was sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment, and Sokha was given 27 years for ‘treason’. At least 39 opposition politicians are behind bars, and many more have left Cambodia.
But as the CNRP faded, the torch passed to the Candlelight Party. In June 2022 local elections, Candlelight proved that Hun Sen was right to be afraid: in an extremely repressive context, it still took over 20 per cent of the vote. And sure enough, in May 2023 the NEC disqualified Candlelight from the July election.
The crackdown on independent media, underway since 2017, intensified in the run-up to the latest electoral farce. In March 2022, the government stripped three digital media outlets of their licences after they published stories on government corruption. In February 2023, Hun Sen ordered the closure of Voice of Democracy, one of the few remaining independent media outlets, after it published a story about Manet. Severe restrictions weigh on foreign media groups, some of which have been forced out of the country.
In contrast, government-owned and pro-government media organisations are able to operate freely. Major media groups are run by magnates close to the ruling family. One media conglomerate is headed by Hun Sen’s eldest daughter. As a result, most information available to Cambodians comes through the filter of power. Most media work to disseminate state-issued disinformation and discredit independent voices as agents of propaganda.
The right to protest is heavily restricted. Gatherings by banned opposition parties are prohibited and demonstrations by political groups, labour unions, social movements and essentially anyone mobilising on issues the government doesn’t want raised are routinely dispersed by security forces, often violently. Protesters are subjected to threats, intimidation, arbitrary arrests and detention, and further criminalisation.
As if leaving people with no choice wasn’t enough, Hun Sen also mounted a scare campaign to force them to vote, since a low turnout would undermine the credibility of the outcome. People were threatened with repercussions if they attempted to boycott the election or spoil ballot papers. The election law was hastily amended to make this a crime.
Experience gives little ground to hope that repression will let up rather than intensify following the election. There’s also no reason to expect that Manet, long groomed for succession, will take a different path from his still-powerful predecessor. The very least the international community should do is to call out the charade of an election for what it was and refuse to buy the Cambodian regime’s whitewashing attempt.
Women are still woefully underrepresented in leadership positions, even in industries where women constitute the majority of workers. Credit: Patricia Grogg/IPS
Opinion by Jemimah Njuki, Jocelyn Chu (new york)
Inter Press Service
NEW YORK, Aug 04 (IPS) – Last week, there was uproar in Kenya when a report about one of the largest banks, Equity Bank, revealed a 52 percent gender pay gap between their female and male employees working in similar positions. This difference is neither okay nor acceptable. However, documenting the gap is laudable because that is the first step in trying to fix it.
Of course, the gender pay gap is not unique to Kenya nor to the banking sector. Worldwide, on average, women only make 80 cents for every dollar earned by men. No country has successfully closed the gender pay gap. As a result of this gap, there’s a lifetime of income inequality between men and women. This has many consequences, including that more women are retiring into poverty than men.
The gender pay gap is even worse for some demographics of women, such as women of color and women raising children. In the United States Black women are paid only 69.5% of white men’s wages while Hispanic women are paid only 64.1% of white men’s wages. In sub–Saharan Africa, women with children are paid 37% less than men, and in South Asia, they are paid 35% less.
Women’s educational gains have not ended the gap. For example, in the U.S., despite gains in educational attainment, women still face a significant wage gap. While women are more likely to graduate from college than men, at every education level, they are paid less than men.
The wage gap actually widens with higher levels of educational attainment. Among workers who have only a high school diploma, women are paid 78.6% of what men are paid. Among workers who have a college degree, the share is 70.2%, and among workers who have an advanced degree, it is 69.8%. The gender pay gap also increases with age.
Within all sectors and both formal and informal economies, there is striking occupational segregation, with women typically occupying the lowest occupational categories, earning less, and having fewer entitlements to social security and pensions.
Women are overrepresented in sectors that are underpaid and undervalued, such as in social work and health care. They are still woefully underrepresented in leadership positions, even in industries where women constitute the majority of workers.
If women take time off due to unpaid care work responsibilities and then go back to a job market where pay histories are used to determine job entry bands, their pay ends up lower than their male counterparts. Discrimination and gender stereotypes also give rise to biased judgments and decisions, impeding women’s advancement and pay.
Pay audits and pay transparency measures can help expose pay differences between men and women and identify the underlying causes. This is because addressing the gender pay gap requires knowing that it exists and what is causing it, which is why the Equity Bank sustainability report, while heavily criticized, is important.
A study in Finland found that 73% of human resource representatives found equal pay audits, in line with national legislation on pay transparency, to be useful in promoting workplace equality.
In fact, about 55% of enterprises surveyed reviewed job descriptions and/or altered wages, continued examining their gender pay gap or reformed their remuneration framework, because of information discovered from audits.
Pay transparency can also provide women, unions and other employees with the information and evidence they require to negotiate pay rates and provide as well as provide them with the means to challenge potential pay discrimination.
Other actions that can help close the pay gap are laws that require reporting of pay by gender, race, and ethnicity, and that prohibit employers from asking about pay history. Requiring employers to post pay bands when hiring has also been shown to have impact.
While this is positive, further action is required from governments and employers to address the gender pay gap. The Equal Pay International Coalition, convened by UN Women, the International Labour Organization and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is a mechanism to bring together stakeholders to commit to pay transparency and to closing the gender pay gap. But while many countries have adopted pay transparency legislation, more time is needed to assess the impact and effectiveness of the measures adopted.
There is also need for policies that lift wages for most workers while also reducing gender and racial/ethnic pay gaps. Minimum wages and strengthening workers’ rights to bargain collectively for higher wages and benefits is critical for closing the gender pay gap.
Women, who tend to occupy lower-paying jobs, have been shown to benefit the most from increases in minimum wages. An analysis of the increase of minimum wages in Poland between 2008-2009 concluded that higher minimum wages contributed to a lower gender wage gap among young workers.
Deeper changes in societal and cultural norms, especially those on care for children and interventions that seek the equal sharing of responsibilities in caregiving and domestic work by men and boys are needed.
The inequalities between women and men in the world of work will persist unless we act. And we need to act together.
For Equity Bank, this transparency is the first step in taking action to close this gender pay gap. A lot, however, depends on what they do next.
Jemimah Njuki is the Chief, Economic Empowerment at UN Women, and an Aspen New Voices Fellow
UN inspectors of the Joint Coordination Centre go to inspect a grain shipment aboard the merchant vessel LADY SPERANZA under the Black Sea Grain Initiative, Istanbul, 17 February 2023. Credit: UN/Duncan Moore
Opinion by John R. Bryson (birmingham, uk)
Inter Press Service
BIRMINGHAM, UK, Aug 04 (IPS) – Russia’s special military or colonization operation in Ukraine continues to surprise. These surprises come from a decided absence of strategic thinking by Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin.
“Russia is now deliberately targeting Ukraine’s grain storage and export infrastructure… There is a form of madness here as Putin has decided to weaponise food and perhaps his plan is to create a global food crisis.”
Fundamentally, a paradox sits behind Putin’s war with Ukraine. This paradox reflects the tension between Putin’s desire to demonstrate that Russia is still a major power on the world stage and actions that continue to undermine Russia’s economy and international standing.
Central to this tension are differences between Russia and Ukraine regarding the value of human life. A recent battlefield incident highlights this difference.
Serhiy had been wounded and separated from his Ukrainian unit. He was spotted by a Ukrainian drone operator who reacted rapidly to save him. The drone operator from the 15th National Guard stated that they did not want to leave Serhiy as “every life is important to us”.
Putin and the Kremlin place no value on life. Whilst Serhiy was been rescued a Russian priest from the orthodox church proclaimed on Russian state television that Russian forces “came to war not to kill but to die” as a form of sacrifice.
This type of statement reflects the value placed by the Russian establishment on the life of Russian citizens. This then reflects Putin’s paradox as his war with Ukraine has made matters much worse for nearly all Russian citizens.
Putin’s decision to leave the UN-brokered grain export arrangement is another indicator of the value that the Kremlin places on human life. This is another paradoxical decision.
On the one hand, Russia is now deliberately targeting Ukraine’s grain storage and export infrastructure. This is civilian infrastructure, and moreover it is infrastructure that plays a critical role in world food markets and in feeding some of the most vulnerable people living on this planet.
There is a form of madness here as Putin has decided to weaponise food and perhaps his plan is to create a global food crisis. On Wednesday 2 August, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy stated that “Moscow is waging a battle for a global catastrophe. In their madness, they need world food markets to collapse, they need a price crisis, they need disruptions in supplies”.
On the other hand, it is important to explore which countries benefited the most from the Black Sea grain deal. The answer is perhaps surprising – China. Ukraine exported 7.9 million tonnes of grain or just under a quarter of the grain involved in the Black Sea initiative to China.
Putin’s decision to prevent grain from being exported from Ukraine to China raises some interesting questions regarding the special relationship that is supposed to exist between these countries.
Putin’s war with Ukraine has led to Russia’s on-going isolation from international affairs. Putin is trying to address this isolation by trying to make friends. This process includes his intention that Russia “will be ready to provide Burkina Faso, Zimbabwe, Mali, Somalia, Central African Republic and Eritrea with 25-50,000 tonnes of free grain each in the next three to four months”.
There is a problem here in that Putin’s offer of between 150,000 and 300,000 tonnes of grain does not compensate for the 750,000 tonnes of Ukrainian grain that was purchased by the World Food Programme (WFP) and shipped immediately to countries like Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, and Sudan.
The WFP is the largest humanitarian organization in the world and importantly this is not controlled by a single nation but was established by the United Nations.
There are rather too many Putin paradoxes. This includes his proclamation regarding the end of “neo-colonialism” and the emergence of a multi-polar global order.
There is the obvious tension here in that Putin states that he is against the application of power and influence to subjugate other countries, but then offers ‘free food’ to some countries and yet free food always comes with strings attached.
Evidently, Putin favours colonialism but also practices neo-colonialism.
Putin’s rhetoric regarding his vision of a new multipolar world must be treated with caution. Putin’s imaginary new world has much in common with George Orwell’s novel ‘Animal Farm’ in that all nations would be equal, but Russia would be more equal than others.
A truly multi-polar world would be one in which initiatives led by organisations like the UN take priority over any initiatives led by any one country. It is time to shift away from one nation trying to dominate global affairs to a world in which effective supranational organisations try to ensure that all living on planet earth are treated equably.
Of course, this is a utopian vision. The realty will be a continued struggle between competing politicians/nations, and this will result in negative outcomes for all.
John R. Bryson is Professor of Enterprise and Economic Geography – University of Birmingham
The University of Birmingham is ranked amongst the world’s top 100 institutions, and its work brings people from across the world to Birmingham, including researchers and teachers and more than 8,000 international students from over 150 countries.
View of the Itaipú hydroelectric plant shared by Brazil and Paraguay on the Paraná River. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS
Opinion by Philippe Benoit, Anne Sophie Corbeau (washington dc)
Inter Press Service
WASHINGTON DC, Aug 03 (IPS) – The Colorado river basin has recently been wracked by an extended drought which brought to the fore major concerns regarding hydroelectricity production. Up on the Colorado sits the iconic Hoover Dam, which transforms water into enough electricity to power 1.3 million people in Nevada, Arizona and California.
Although an agreement was reached by the three dependent Western states to cut water use, it served as a reminder of the dependency of energy production on water … a dependency that is being subjected to greater uncertainties because of climate change.
This phenomenon is not only impacting citizens dependent on the Colorado River but stretches across the United States and the world. Over the past two years, Europe, China, Brazil, Iraq, the Horn of Africa, have experienced the worst droughts in (sometimes hundreds of) years.
Importantly, the water-to-energy relationship also runs the other way: water production and delivery are themselves dependent on energy.
Moreover, the need of water services for energy is likely to increase, driven by growing populations, rising prosperity (notably in developing countries) and novel uses of energy for water in desalination plants and elsewhere. As we feel the impact of increasingly intense heat waves and droughts, the time has come to revisit the challenges of the water-energy nexus.
The dependence of energy production on water has long been recognized by energy experts, but has surprised many others. Beyond very visible hydropower plants, like the Hoover Dam, water is used to cool down nuclear power plants (through the cooling towers emitting steam that many may have noticed, without perhaps always identifying the purpose), as well as in natural gas and coal-fired plants. Water is also used in various stages of the energy supply chain, including for production and processing.
Climate change is expected, through its impact on water supply and availability, to increase vulnerabilities in energy production. For example, changing rain patterns will create uncertainties for hydropower production, which represents 15 percent of global power generation, even if the overall level of rainfall doesn’t change.
And in a completely different dynamic, various coal power plants dependent on barge transport for resupply have seen their operations imperiled by low water levels. These are aspects that have received some, but altogether inadequate, attention to date.
Both hydroelectricity and nuclear generation, two low-carbon sources of electricity, are expected to increase significantly over decades to come under various government programs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Moreover, even as the need for water to cool down coal-fired plants is eventually expected to drop as countries transition from this carbon intensive fuel source, new uses for water are emerging, including for the production of hydrogen through electrolysis.
What has attracted less attention is the impact of growing demand for energy from developments in water systems. The UN projects that the world’s population will increase by over 1.2 billion by 2040, with about two-thirds of that increase occurring in emerging economies and other developing countries.
These nations are also projected to see significant increases in their income levels, increasing the ability of their populations to access water services, at home, at the office or for pleasure. Moreover, the demand for food is also similarly projected to increase, and with that, the need for more water irrigation services inevitably powered by energy.
These factors are helping to drive an increase in the demand for energy. For example, the International Energy Agency projects that the amount of energy required by the water sector will more than double within 20 years. The major driver under the IEA’s modelling is the demand from desalination plants.
These are no longer confined to the dryer climates of the Middle East and North Africa, but also in regions which once thought that their water supplies were ample, such as Europe or Asia. Other important growing demand for water is also coming from waste water treatment plants and the supply of clean drinking water and sanitation services to both the billions of poor who currently lack it and the other more prosperous billions across the developing world whose consumption is projected to increase.
Unfortunately, efforts to meet this demand will be exacerbated by climate change. For example, droughts are likely to require the transport of water over longer distances to satisfy the needs of populations suffering from water scarcity, an effort that will require more energy.
Similarly, over the past year, droughts have heightened the possibility of water restrictions for millions of people in Southern Europe, including drinking water, which might in turn require more desalination.
But though tensions are inevitable, actions can be taken to, if not avoid the problems, dampen its impact. Actions lie in the water or energy sectors, and, often, at the intersection of the two. In the water sector, these include reducing water losses, allowing construction of rainwater collection tanks for agricultural use, increasing waste-water facilities, and fast-tracking the installation of desalination plants.
The energy-for-water dimension will become increasingly fraught, driven by the combination of climate change, growing populations and increasing prosperity. Not only do we need to redouble our efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we also require stronger concerted actions on adaptation and resilience.
Like for energy, we need to be more efficient at using water, whether this is for households needs, industrial processes, agriculture or energy; meanwhile concerted action and discussion between those sectors will be needed.
The recent events along the Colorado River serve as an important wake-up call. Water is at the essence of our quality of life, and energy is an integral part of that story. We need to do a better job of managing our thirst for water and the energy required to satisfy that demand … and we need to do this in the face of a changing climate.
(First published in The Hill on July 7, 2023)
Philippe Benoit is research director forGlobal Infrastructure Analytics and Sustainability 2050 and previously held management positions at the World Bank and the International Energy Agency. He is also adjunct senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.
Anne-Sophie Corbeau is global research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University and a visiting professor at Sciences Po.
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