Monthly Archives: June 2019

As Venezuela reopens border to Colombia, UN envoy Angelina Jolie urges support for 20,000 stateless children

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Thousands of people crossed into Colombia on Saturday to buy food and medicine after Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro reopened a border between the countries that had been shut down for the past four months. With the reopening, a flood of people seized on the opportunity to secure items that are all but unattainable in Venezuela.

The once-wealthy oil nation is now facing severe shortages of basic goods and hyperinflation that is expected to surpass 10 million per cent this year, according to a recent IMF estimate.

The chaos has been further aggravated by US sanctions on Venezuelan oil exports and has forced an estimated 5,000 people to leave the country each day, according to the United Nation’s High Commissioner for Refugees.

On Saturday, the UNHCR’s special envoy Angelina Jolie met with Colombian President Ivan Duque to advocate for the estimated 20,000 children of Venezuelan migrants left with uncertain status after their parents fled their crisis-wracked home country. In a meeting in the port city of Cartagena, the American actress urged Duque to resolve the legal limbo facing the children since Colombia does not automatically recognize children born in its territory as nationals.

[South China Morning Post]

New World Atlas of Desertification shows unprecedented pressure on our natural resources

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The Joint Research Centre (JRC) published a new edition of the World Atlas of Desertification in 2018, which provides the first comprehensive, evidence-based assessment of land degradation at a global level and highlights the urgency to adopt corrective measures. 

Tibor Navracsics, Commissioner for Education, Culture, Youth and Sport, responsible for the JRC, said: “Over the past twenty years, since the publication of the last edition of the World Atlas of Desertification, pressures on land and soil have increased dramatically. To preserve our planet for future generations, we urgently need to change the way we treat these precious resources.”

The main findings show that population growth and changes in our consumption patterns put unprecedented pressure on the planet’s natural resources:

  • Over 75% of the Earth’s land area is already degraded, and over 90% could become degraded by 2050.
  • Globally, a total area half of the size of the European Union (4.18 million km²) is degraded annually, with Africa and Asia being the most affected.
  • The economic cost of soil degradation for the EU is estimated to be in the order of tens of billions of euros annually.
  • Land degradation and climate change are estimated to lead to a reduction of global crop yields by about 10% by 2050. Most of this will occur in India, China and sub-Saharan Africa, where land degradation could halve crop production.
  • As a consequence of accelerated deforestation it will become more difficult to mitigate the effects of climate change
  • By 2050, up to 700 million people are estimated to have been displaced due to issues linked to scarce land resources. The figure could reach up to 10 billion by the end of this century. 

 [EU Science Hub]

UN: Two million Somalis could die of starvation amid drought

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A United Nations emergency relief coordinator says more than 2 million men, women and children could die of starvation in Somalia by summer’s end if international aid is not sent quickly to the drought-stricken African country.

U.N. Undersecretary-General Mark Lowcock says about $700 million is needed after a rainless season that has killed both livestock and crops. He said Tuesday that the U.N.’s Central Emergency Response Fund has allocated $45 million to cover immediate food shortages, water and daily necessities in Somalia as well as parts of Kenya and Ethiopia affected by droughts.

Of a Somali population of 15 million people, more than 3 million are struggling just to meet minimum food requirements, he said, and the shortages are about 40 percent worse now than this past winter.

Somalia’s humanitarian fund is currently depleted. If financial aid is delayed, the cost of saving lives on the margin of death are much higher, Lowcock said, adding that the option then is to turn to expensive, therapeutic feeding programs. “We could have a quick response now, which would be cheaper, reduce human suffering and more effective, or we can wait for a few months until we get all those horrible pictures on our TV screens and social media of starving kids,” Lowcock said.

Lowcock, who heads the U.N. Office for Humanitarian Affairs, said that in past decades droughts came about every half dozen years but recently they have hit every two or three years. “There’s not really any question in my mind that these more frequent droughts are related to global warming and climate change,” the U.N. official said.

[Times of India]

Frequency of downpours of heavy rain has increased across the globe in the past 50 years

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The number of extreme downpours increased steadily between 1964 and 2013—a period when global warming also intensified, according to research published in the journal Water Resources Research.

The frequency of ‘extreme precipitation events’ increased in parts of Canada, most of Europe, the Midwest and northeast region of the U.S., northern Australia, western Russia and parts of China.

The USask study of over 8,700 daily rain records from 100,000 stations monitoring rain worldwide found the frequency of torrential rain between 1964 and 2013 increased as the decades progressed.

Between 2004 and 2013, there were seven per cent more extreme bouts of heavy rain overall than expected globally. In Europe and Asia, there were 8.6 per cent more ‘extreme rain events’ overall, during this decade. 

Global warming can lead to increased precipitation because more heat in the atmosphere leads to more atmospheric water which, in turn, leads to rain.  

More than half a million deaths were caused by rain-induced floods between 1980 and 2009. Heavy rain can also cause landslides, damage crops, collapse buildings and bridges, wreck homes, and lead to chaos on roads and to transport, with huge financial losses.

Co-author Alberto Montanari, professor of hydraulic works and hydrology at the University of Bologna and president of the European Geoscience Union, said: “Our results are in line with the assumption that the atmosphere retains more water under global warming. The fact that the frequency, rather the magnitude, of extreme precipitation is significantly increasing has relevant implications for climate adaptation. Human systems need to increase their capability to react to frequent shocks.”

[Global Institute for Water Security at the University of Saskatchewan]

EU migrant policy: Lawyers call it a crime against humanity

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More than 40,000 people have been intercepted in the Mediterranean and taken to detention camps and torture houses under a European migration policy that is responsible for crimes against humanity, according to a legal document asking the International Criminal Court to take the case Monday.

The request filed with the ICC alleges that European Union officials are knowingly responsible for migrant deaths on land and at sea, as well as culpable for rapes and torture of migrants committed by members of the Libyan coast guard, which is funded and trained at the expense of European taxpayers. The filing names no specific EU officials but cites an ongoing ICC investigation into the fate of migrants in Libya .

“We leave it to the prosecutor, if he dares, if she dares, to go into the structures of power and to investigate at the heart of Brussels, of Paris, of Berlin and Rome and to see by searching in the archives of the meetings of the negotiations who was really behind the scenes trying to push for these policies that triggered the death of more than 14,000 people,” said Juan Branco, a lawyer who co-wrote the report and shared it with The Associated Press. He was referring to the deaths and disappearances at sea, which come on top of the interceptions by the Libyan forces.

The ICC is a court of last resort that handles cases of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide when other countries are unwilling or unable to prosecute. It is up to the prosecutor, who receives many such requests, to decide whether to investigate and ultimately bring a case.

The first crime, according to the document, was the decision to end the Mare Nostrum rescue operation near the end of 2014. In one year, the operation rescued 150,810 migrants in the Mediterranean as hundreds of thousands crossed the sea. [See also] As a result, deaths in the Mediterranean then soared.

Omer Shatz, the other lead lawyer responsible for the document, said internal EU documents showed officials hoped that ending Mare Nostum would create a deterrent effect. “Deterrent effect – what does it mean? It means sacrifice the lives of some, in this case of many, to change the behavior of others, to discourage others from doing the same thing.”

[Associated Press]

The economic cost of devastating hurricanes and other extreme US weather

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June marks the official start of hurricane season. If recent history is any guide, it will prove to be another destructive year thanks to the worsening impact of climate change. 

But beyond more intense hurricanes and explosive wildfires, the warming climate has been blamed for causing a sharp uptick in all types of extreme weather events across the United States, such as severe flooding this spring and extensive drought in the Southwest in recent years.

Late last year, the media blared that these and other consequences of climate change could cut U.S. GDP by 10% by the end of the century – “more than double the losses of the Great Depression,” as The New York Times intoned.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, in 2018 hurricanes Michael and Florence each caused about US$25 billion in damages, contributing to a total toll of $91 billion from that year’s weather and climate disasters. In 2017, the NOAA’s total was even bigger: $306 billion, due to the massive destruction from hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria. 

But these tallies are not really valid measures of economic damage. Instead, they simply reflect estimates of what people think will need to be invested to rebuild what was damaged or destroyed in the storms, floods or fires. To really understand the economic costs of an extreme weather event, it’s important to consider all the investment that is being “crowded out” or lost to cover those rebuilding costs. Put another way, there’s only so much money to go around. And that $25 billion being used to rebuild means $25 billion is not being used for other public and private investment opportunities that are more forward-looking or more likely to promote growth.

If similar experiences in extreme events occur for the next 10 years – which is not a bad assumption given that four of the most expensive years in history have occurred in the last five – U.S. GDP in 2029 would be about 3.6% lower than it would have been otherwise, based on my calculations using growth accounting. 

That amounts to an economy that’s $1 trillion poorer as result of these extreme weather events crowding out productive investment. This is the real cost of a world in which these types of massively destructive disasters happen more frequently. 

[Prevention Web – Excerpts of article by Gary W. Yohe, Huffington Foundation Professor of Economics and Environmental Studies, Wesleyan University]