Breaking barriers for Rohingya refugee women

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Since August 2017, over 700,000 Rohingya people have fled from Myanmar to Bangladesh seeking safety and lifesaving assistance. While safe from the unimaginable atrocities they suffered in Myanmar, refugees managed to find shelter in improvised and overcrowded refugee camps such as Cox’s Bazar. Rohingya women in particular face additional challenges: insecurity, violence, very limited mobility or ability to speak up and influence decisions in their communities. Oxfam support these women and girls to proactively overcoming these barriers through the following approaches:

Clothes and tailoring vouchers – As the camp situation forces many women (particularly those from female-headed households) to move outside the ‘home’, it is important to ensure they have access to the clothing that helps them feel safe and dignified. Oxfam is providing families with a tailoring voucher using local vendors from the host community.

Women refugees co-design hygiene facilities – The lack of enough latrines in a big overcrowded camp like Cox’s Bazar is a big issue, especially for women, which leads to very poor hygiene practices, lack of privacy and unsafety, increasing the risk of sexual abuse and harassment. Apart from building more latrines and hygiene facilities, Oxfam has collaborated with architecture students to work with Rohingya refugee women to design toilets and laundry areas that afford more safety and privacy and truly meet their needs. “Women told us it’s important for them not to feel stared at when entering or leaving the toilets. We want to make the routes into the toilets and washing facilities less obvious and more private so that women feel more comfortable to use these facilities” says Freya Emerson, one of the architects.

Solar lighting in the communities – Lack of privacy and fear of assault contribute greatly to women remaining in their shelters. When asked whether they felt safe walking alone in the camp, 29% of women said ‘no’, compared with 5% of men. Furthermore, over a third of women did not feel they had safe access to a water point, bathing facility or latrines. Apart from providing portable solar lamps to the families, Oxfam helped design a solar lighting community-based program in Cox’s Bazar.

And as part of our humanitarian response, we are working with local organizations and communities to tackle wider issues such as early marriage, gender-based violence and men and women’s traditional roles, through women’s groups and musical performances.
[Oxfam International]

UN report on global hunger

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New evidence continues to signal that the number of hungry people in the world is growing, reaching 821 million in 2017 or one in every nine people, according to The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2018 released today.

Hunger has been on the rise over the past three years, returning to levels from a decade ago. This reversal in progress sends a clear warning that more must be done and urgently if the Sustainable Development Goal of Zero Hunger is to be achieved by 2030.

The situation is worsening in South America and most regions of Africa, while the decreasing trend in undernourishment that characterized Asia seems to be slowing down significantly.

The annual UN report found that climate variability affecting rainfall patterns and agricultural seasons, and climate extremes such as droughts and floods, are among the key drivers behind the rise in hunger, together with conflict and economic slowdowns.

“If we are to achieve a world without hunger and malnutrition in all its forms by 2030, it is imperative that we accelerate and scale up actions to strengthen the resilience and adaptive capacity of food systems and people’s livelihoods in response to climate variability and extremes,” the heads of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the World Food Programme (WFP) and the World Health Organization (WHO) warned said.

[FAO]

Indigenous peoples allies of climate mitigation

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As global warming continues to outpace the tepid international response, a range of environmentalists are raising their collective voice to demand full rights and recognition for those long associated with land stewardship connected to climate mitigation: indigenous peoples.

Researchers have released what they called “the most comprehensive assessment to date of carbon storage” on forested lands occupied by indigenous peoples and local communities in 64 tropical countries. And one of the main findings of the research is that indigenous peoples are far better stewards of the land than their countries’ governments.

Indigenous communities often work to keep forests intact, which, in turn, keeps carbon locked in trees, vegetation, roots, and soil instead of seeing it released into the atmosphere through deforestation and soil disturbance for ranching, mining, or timbering.

The study’s release is timed to coincide with the September 12 opening in San Francisco of the three-day Global Climate Action Summit hosted by California Gov. Jerry Brown and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The connection between indigenous rights and environmental protection is expected to be a summit highlight.

[Mongabay]

Costa Rica’s recipe for happiness and long life

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Every Sunday, when his health allows, 100-year-old Francisco Gómez gets a ride from his daughter to the outskirts of town, where he spends the day at a community center dancing. Gómez didn’t really learn to dance until he started attending these weekly gatherings for the elderly and their caretakers. He says the dances have given him something to look forward to since the death of his wife earlier this year.

The dances are just one of the activities coordinated by Progressive Attention Network for Integral Elder Care, a program created by Costa Rica’s Health Ministry in 2010 to help elderly people stay active and socially engaged. Though the network spans Costa Rica, it is particularly robust on Nicoya, a peninsula on the country’s Pacific coast that is among five world regions known as blue zones, where people live the longest. Researchers from National Geographic identified high levels of spirituality, a strong cultural base and close social relationships as ingredients in the peninsula’s recipe for a long life.

This government strategy seems to have paid off, and Costa Rica continuously ranks as one of the happiest places on earth. The countries at the top of the happiness scale are relatively wealthy; Costa Rica is a notable exception. The country’s GDP per capita is $11,630, compared with $59,531 in the U.S., which lags behind Costa Rica in happiness.

“Costa Rica tells us that there is something beyond money that is important,” said Mariano Rojas, a happiness expert from Costa Rica and an economics professor at the Latin American Social Sciences Institute. “There is a difference between the quantity of money you have and the way you use it. There is a way to spend money that contributes to the happiness of the people.”

In 1948, Costa Rica abolished its military, rededicating its defense budget to education, health and pensions. Even as new administrations have come and gone, this basic budgeting tenet has remained intact. In 2016, Costa Rica spent more on education as a proportion of GDP than any country except one, according to data from the World Bank.

Since the mid-20th century, Costa Rica has had public health care to which all Costa Ricans have access, along with free and compulsory primary and secondary education. And it is the only country in Central America where 100 percent of the population has access to electricity.

[Huffington Post]

Enormous iceberg bobbing like a giant cork after splitting from ice shelf

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A trillion-ton iceberg the size of the American state of Delaware has been on the move since breaking off Antarctica in July 2017.

The iceberg will probably bump around in its current location near the ice shelf that calved it for at least a few months, periodically getting stuck on shallow seamounts on the ocean floor, said Theodore Scambos, a senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado. “There are lots of little pinnacles that can snag an iceberg,” Scambos told Live Science.

At around 2,240 square miles (5,800 square kilometers) in surface area, the iceberg is among the largest iceberg observed since satellite tracking began.  “I think, right now, it would be the biggest floating object on the ocean,” said Scambos.

The iceberg was bumping around like a huge bobbing bath toy. It mashed into the side of the Larsen ice shelf a handful of times in the past year, splintering off several smaller bergs.

“Eventually, with snags and twists and bends and probably a little bit of inherent rotation … it will drift to the north,” Scambos said. The giant iceberg will get caught up in a current called the West Wind Drift, or Antarctic Circumpolar Current, which will pull the berg into warmer waters, where it will break up and melt, Scambos said.

[Scientific American]

Wind and solar farms could totally transform the Sahara Desert

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Installations of largescale wind and solar farms don’t just have the power to supply the world with an immense amount of energy, they have the power to actually change climates on massive scales, potentially for the better. A new climate-modeling study has found that wind and solar plants throughout the Sahara Desert could significantly increase precipitation across the region and increase vegetation, reports Phys.org.

The Sahara is the largest hot desert in the world, and it’s growing. It covers a massive swathe of Northern Africa, making much of the terrain uninhabitable. So any increase in precipitation here would likely be a good thing, study authors speculated.

“We found that the large-scale installation of solar and wind farms can bring more rainfall and promote vegetation growth in these regions,” explained Eugenia Kalnay, co-author on the study. “The rainfall increase is a consequence of complex land-atmosphere interactions that occur because solar panels and wind turbines create rougher and darker land surfaces.”

If wind and solar installations covered this barren terrain it could supply about 3 terawatts and 79 terawatts of electricity respectively. That would meet global energy demands several times over. “In 2017, the global energy demand was only 18 terawatts, so this is obviously much more energy than is currently needed worldwide,” said lead author Yan Li.

Massive amounts of clean energy, plus a more habitable landscape (which means more viable agricultural and economic development), plus more greenery over a large area that could become a significant carbon sink.

It’s remarkable to think that instead of burning fossil fuels and creating catastrophic climate change, which involves increased desertification, that we could instead use clean energy to produce positive climate change and transform the world’s largest desert into a habitable oasis.

[MNN.com]

Humanitarian catastrophe feared as Syria war reaches final rebel stronghold

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As the Syrian government prepares to launch an offensive on Idlib province, humanitarians are on edge. Estimating the area may hold as many as three million people, UN Secretary-General António Guterres has said he is “deeply concerned about the growing risks of a humanitarian catastrophe”, calling on Russia, Iran, and Turkey to seek a last-minute deal to avoid violence, while UN envoy Staffan de Mistura is offering to personally escort civilians out of the warzone.

With the border with Turkey sealed, hundreds of thousands of civilian may have nowhere to run if the tanks come rolling in. “The only thing people are talking about now is the coming battle,” said Rajaai Bourhan, a former business student who now ekes out a living as a freelance journalist in northwestern Syria. Speaking to IRIN from Idlib last week, he described a city hostage to circumstances outside its control.

For years, Sunni rebel groups have controlled Idlib. The surrounding area is mostly under al-Assad’s control. As one of few remaining opposition sanctuaries and an entry point for cross-border aid, Idlib has seen its population swell with the arrival of hundreds of thousands of internally displaced Syrians like Bourhan.

Two thirds of the estimated 3 million population of Idlib are said to be in need of some sort of humanitarian assistance, and “these people are extremely vulnerable”, said Linda Tom, a Damascus-based spokeswoman for OCHA, the UN’s emergency aid coordination body.

Pawel Krzysiek, head of communications for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Syria, said that fighting in Idlib “will put thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, on the move.”

Turkey already hosts 3.5 million Syrian refugees, according to UNHCR statistics, and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is under pressure from the Turkish public and the EU to secure his borders.

[IRIN]

The future of humanitarian water provision is solar

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For World Water Week, Oxfam Engineering Adviser Brian McSorley reflects on the achievements of the Global Solar Water Initiative and the potential of solar water pumps to transform lives:

Solar power offers so many possibilities for development and humanitarian aid, from lighting, to internet connectivity and water provision. Why rely on diesel fuel -which is expensive, difficult to source in remote areas, to power a generator, which is a complex piece of mechanics, that frequently breaks down with skilled expertise and spare parts hard to find?

Less than six years ago (2012), Oxfam installed the first solar water pumping system in Dadaab refugee camp, Kenya. At the time Dadaab was already 20 years old and recognised as the largest refugee camp in the world with a population of nearly half a million people.

Since then, a two-person team has visited 55 camps and communities, conducted training workshops in eight countries and addressed technical queries from 80 organizations, across five continents.

By analyzing 140 different water schemes, we have found that switching to solar will pay for itself within four years, and in some circumstances, solar is cheaper than a diesel generator from day one.

Over the life time of these systems solar will be 40-90% cheaper.

[ReliefWeb]

Hurricane Maria killed 2,975 people in Puerto Rico, the 2nd deadliest US storm in over a century

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Puerto Rico’s new death toll of almost 3000 casualties from Hurricane Maria has made the storm one of the deadliest hurricanes in US history, killing more people than 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, which numbered 1,833 people.

By comparison, the September 11 attacks killed 2,996 people.

Authorities yesterday officially raised the death toll from last year’s Hurricane Maria (September 20, 2017) to 2,975, which surpasses:
– Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which is responsible for 1,833 deaths, and
– the 1928 Okeechobee hurricane in Florida, which killed 2,500 people.
– the Great Galveston Hurricane of 1900 remains the deadliest recorded hurricane in US history, with estimates of 6,000-12,000 people killed.

News organizations and some members of Congress have raised questions about the official death toll in Puerto Rico, which had remained at 64 for months.

CNN reporters surveyed about half of the funeral homes across the island and found that funeral home directors identified 499 deaths they considered to be hurricane-related. In December, The New York Times estimated 1,052 “excess deaths” occurred after Maria. The findings of George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health are nearly triple most estimates of the hurricane’s death toll.

Democrats in the House, including some Hispanic Caucus members, have requested an investigation into the Trump administration’s response to Hurricane Maria. The Category 5 storm knocked out power on the island, leaving much of it without electricity for almost a year. Meanwhile, residents struggled to get medical care, repair their homes, or even find food and water. Thousands have since left for the mainland United States.

[CNN]

Sharing the humanitarian story with an external audience

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Humanitarian work is challenging, complicated, and complex — and capturing those complexities for an external audience is a challenge in itself. For humanitarian communicators, it’s an opportunity to reach donors, policymakers, and the media, and to give them a chance to engage.

More and more humanitarian organizations are pivoting to a focus on individual stories, relatable entry points and, in some cases, more unfiltered and raw content from the frontlines.

A key driver of this trend is technology such as social media and video streaming. “Technology allows you the ability to bring these situations to people in an intimate way on their phones and computers,” said Erin Taylor, director of communications for humanitarian response at Save the Children. People respond and engage with more direct and personal content. It’s not uncommon for organizations to open a real time video stream from emergency response centers, refugee camps, or search and rescue missions in the Mediterranean sea.

In the days following the Lombok earthquake, the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) report that an unfiltered cell phone video uploaded in the first hours of the earthquake outperformed all other content on their feeds.

“There’s a sense that people are becoming cynical to highly polished and produced pieces of content,” Matthew Cochrane, media and advocacy manager and spokesperson at the IFRC, said. “There’s a real interest in authentic, ‘rougher’ content [of] what’s actually happening on the background.”

[Devex]