Something to encourage your heart

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Things are bad in the world and it feels like it’s getting worse, right?

—Wrong! Step-by-step, year-by-year, things are improving for billions of people worldwide!

  1. Over the past 20 years, the proportion of the global population living in extreme poverty has halved. This progress is absolutely revolutionary!
  2. The percentage of people worldwide who are undernourished has dropped from 28% (1970) to 11% in (2016).
  3. In 1950, the child mortality rate was 15%. (i.e. 97 million children were born and 14.4 million children died.) In 2016, the child mortality rate was down to 3%! (i.e.141 million children were born and 4.2 million died.) So we can rejoice there’s more than 10 million less dead babies per year than a relatively short time ago!
  4. Child deaths per thousand in Saudi Arabia have dropped from 242 to 35, in just 33 years. Countries like Sweden took 77 years to reach this same achievement.

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Something to encourage your heart Pt 2

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  1. As of 2016, 88% of all the children in the world today have been vaccinated.
  2. The point above also means almost all human beings alive today have some access to basic healthcare.
  3. HIV infections are down to less than half of what there were 10 years ago. From 549 per million in 1996 to 241 in 2016.
  4. As far as literacy goes, the share of adults who have the basic skills to read and write is up from 10% (1800) to 86% (2016).
  5. Worldwide, 90% of girls of primary school age are now enrolled in school, whereas in 1979 only 65% were.

[Source: “Factfulness, Why things are better than you think” by Hans Rosling]

 

India politely declines relief assistance for flooded Kerala

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In late July 2018, the worst floods in a century impacted the southern Indian state of Kerala a result of unusually high rainfall during the monsoon season. Over 373 people died within a fortnight, and hundreds of thousands evacuated.

India on Wednesday rejected an offer by the United Arab Emirates government to give $100 million to the disaster relief fund for flood-stricken Kerala state. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs added that foreign money could only be donated through Indian-origin individuals or foundations.

Politely declining the offer, India had expressed appreciation for the countries who were willing to help Kerala. Among other countries who have offered to assist India with relief efforts in Kerala are Maldives, Thailand and Qatar.

Today, Pakistan’s new Prime Minister Imran Khan said that his country stands with people of flood-ravaged Kerala who have suffered a devastating spell of flood and offered to extend humanitarian aid to the southern Indian state.

Trying to shed its long-time image as a poverty-wrecked nation, India has refused to accept aid from foreign governments since a 2004 tsunami, when New Delhi told potential government donors that India would contact them if it needed financial aid.

[The Times of India]

Things can be both bad and better

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There are a lot of good things happening. For example, academic education is within reach of far more people in poor countries, child mortality has dramatically improved, the number of malaria cases are down, and so forth.

Yet as long as things are still bad for so many people, we feel it’s heartless for us to say they’re getting better.  Everything in the world is not fine, but it’s ridiculous to not acknowledge the progress that has been made.

But things can be both bad and better.

Think of the world as a premature baby in an incubator. The baby’s health status is extremely bad and her breathing, heart rate and other important signs are tracked continually so that changes for better or worse can be quickly seen. After a week, she is getting a lot better though she still has to stay in the incubator because her health is still critical.

Does it make sense to say that the infant’s situation is improving? Yes!
Does it make sense to say her health is bad? Yes!

It’s both bad and better! That is how we must think about the current state of the world.

 

[Excerpt from “Factfulness – Why things are better than you think” By Hans Rosling]

Women and children most vulnerable in African crises

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The East and Southern Africa region is home to humanitarian crises that are having a devastating effect on the health, dignity and rights of women and girls.

Over a decade, an estimated 7.4 million people have been displaced by intercommunal violence and protracted armed conflicts. Of the 4.5 million of the total 7.4 internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), up to 80 per cent of whom have been on the move for more than 10 years and are suffering from extreme poverty and insecurity. The majority of these are women, young people and children.

In the Horn of Africa region, more than 13 million people are affected, 9.5 million of whom are IDPs and nearly 4 million are refugees, mostly from South Sudan.

More than 44 million people in East and Southern Africa are presently food insecure, nearly 36 million of them severely so.

In all these humanitarian crises, women and girls are especially vulnerable to gender-based violence and exploitation. Their day-to-day activities – such as looking for food and water for the family, collecting firewood, attending the market, or engaging in other household duties – more often than not further expose them to abduction, exploitation, and abuse.

And humanitarian crises dramatically elevate risks to the lives of pregnant women and newborn babies.

[UN Population Fund]

Extreme heat events wreak havoc on marine ecosystems

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Scientists analyzed satellite-based measurements of sea surface temperature from 1982 to 2016 and found that the frequency of marine heatwaves had doubled. These extreme heat events in the ocean’s surface waters can last from days to months and can occur across thousands of kilometres.

If average global temperatures increase to 3.5 °C above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century, as researchers currently project, the frequency of ocean heatwaves could increase by a factor of 41. In other words, a 1-in-100-day event at pre-industrial levels of warming could become a 1-in-3-day event.

“Marine heatwaves have already become more long-lasting, frequent, intense and extensive than in the past,” says lead study author Thomas Frölicher, a climatologist at the University of Bern in Switzerland. He adds that these changes are already well outside what could be expected on the basis of natural swings in Earth’s climate: the study’s analysis determined that 87% of heatwaves in the ocean are the result of human-induced global warming.

Episodes include the massive warm water ‘blob’ in the northeastern Pacific Ocean that killed off sea otters in Alaska and sea lions in California, and disrupted fisheries off North America from 2014 to 2015. They also included the massive 2015–16 El Niño that ravaged coral reefs around the world.

Ocean heatwaves will become more frequent and extreme as the climate warms, scientists report on August 15 in Nature. These episodes of intense heat could disrupt marine food webs and reshape biodiversity in the world’s oceans.

[Scientific American]

Trump administration to attempt to kill billions in foreign aid

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The White House budget office believes it has found a way to cancel billions of dollars of foreign aid even if it is never approved by Congress, according to a Republican aide familiar with the plan.

Using an obscure budget rule, administration officials are planning to freeze billions of dollars in the State Department’s international assistance budget — just long enough so the funds will expire. The current plan involves about $3 billion, though officials are said to have discussed as much as $5 billion.

The White House plans to submit the package of so-called rescissions in the coming days, which triggers an automatic freeze on those funds for 45 days. The cuts would largely come from the U.S. funding for the United Nations, according to the aide.

With exactly 45 days left in fiscal 2018, the State Department wouldn’t be able to use those funds even if Congress rejects the request because those dollars will have expired by Oct. 1.

It would be the second time the Trump administration has submitted this kind of presidential rescissions package. The White House’s last request, which would have reclaimed $15 billion across multiple agencies, narrowly passed the House and was rejected by the GOP-led Senate. It was the first time a president had used the rescissions process since 2000.

[Washington Post]

New Amnesty International leader on human rights and Trump

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The new leader of Amnesty International says many world leaders, especially President Trump, are rolling back gains made in respecting human rights, with the Trump administration’s separation of families at U.S. borders “one of the worst atrocities” seen in a long time.

“The presidency of Donald Trump is a major challenge for the people of the U.S. and the people of the world,” Kumi Naidoo said Thursday, suggesting the psychological damage of the border separation policy alone could be long-lasting.

“Overall on human rights he has set us back … and it should be no surprise that Donald Trump will be in my vision of activism and will be somebody who will receive quite close focus by Amnesty as a global movement.”

With a background of activism against apartheid in his native South Africa and for environmental issues as a director of Greenpeace, Naidoo said he intends to make Amnesty “bigger, bolder and more inclusive.” He began a four-year term at the helm of the London-based rights group this week.

“What I hope to do at Amnesty is to intensify our appetite for peaceful civil disobedience,” he said. Although world leaders often ignore letters and meetings, he said that “when you mobilize thousands of people on their doorstep … that seems to work much better.”

Despite the recent setbacks for human rights, Naidoo said he is optimistic. Amnesty has a global membership of 7 million people and he said he would like to see that increase to 70 million, especially among younger people. “Young people will not accept wisdom that they are the leaders of tomorrow; they will assert their leadership now,” he said.

[Los Angeles Times]

A message for World Humanitarian Day August 19

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August 19 was designated as World Humanitarian Day by the UN General Assembly in 2008 to mark the bombing that targeted the UN Assistance Mission in Iraq on Aug. 19, 2003.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has launched a petition with world leaders for the protection of civilians and aid workers in armed conflict. “Each year on World Humanitarian Day, we stand in solidarity with the millions of people affected by conflict and the aid and health workers who risk their lives to assist them. We take the day as an opportunity to remind the world of our collective responsibility to bring that suffering to an end,” said OCHA in a message.

Today, in conflict zones all over the world, civilians are routinely killed or maimed, towns and cities are damaged and destroyed, in targeted or indiscriminate attacks. Three out of four victims of explosive weapons in 2017 were civilians.

People are cut off from food, water and life-saving assistance, in some cases, starved as a deliberate tactic of war, it said.

Humanitarian and medical personnel are killed, injured, kidnapped or otherwise prevented from reaching people in need. They are exposed to legal obstacles and even forms of punishment for impartially providing aid and care to people who need it to survive, said the message.

The petition was launched prior to next month’s gathering of world leaders in New York for the annual UN General Assembly General Debate.

[Xinhua]

Aid workers in danger globally

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Last year, a total of 158 major attacks on humanitarian operations across 22 countries affected 313 aid workers globally, resulting in deaths, injuries or kidnappings.

While the number of attacks reduced in comparison to 2016 figures, there was an uptick in the number of victims, data from Aid Worker Security Database (AWSD) show. Of the 313 victims of attacks, 139 were killed—the second highest recorded annual death toll ever.

South Sudan, which has been a center of aid worker attacks, accounted for more than quarter of global incidents. AWSD says the kidnappings “suggests a troubling trend of armed groups using this tactic to assert control over aid operations.”

The lack of security for aid workers has a devastating cyclic effect on citizens in conflict zones. Unsure of their workers’ safety, humanitarian organizations often suspend operations in areas where insecurity is severe. And, as a result, citizens in those areas in dire need of critical aid items, including food and medicine, remain in want. As heightened conflicts often limit access of international aid organizations and their workers, a majority of killed aid workers in 2017 were with national and local humanitarian groups and non-profits.

[Quartz]