Tuesday, March 31, 2020

'Defining moment’ in Afghanistan requires leaders to work together, top UN official tells Security Council


UNOCHA/Shahrokh Pazhman
The return home of some 136,00 Afghan people since the beginning of the year and a weakened health system is putting Afghanistan at risk of the coronavirus.
    
31 March 2020
Peace and Security

With the COVID-19 pandemic as a backdrop, political parties in Afghanistan are being urged to prioritize national interests and come together for peace talks with the Taliban, the UN Deputy Special Representative for the country told a videoconference meeting with Security Council members on Tuesday.

Ingrid Hayden, also Officer-in-Charge at the UN mission in the country, UNAMA, reported that despite international engagement, President Ashraf Ghani and rival Abdullah Abdullah remain at loggerheads over the outcome of the presidential election held in September.

“Afghanistan appears to be reaching a defining moment. Almost two decades after the start of the coalition intervention, the question for the Islamic Republic now is: can its leaders rally together to engage in meaningful talks with the Taliban to achieve a sustainable peace?”, she asked.

“The choice is made stark by the all-encompassing threat of COVID-19, which poses grave dangers to the health of Afghanistan’s population and, potentially, to the stability of its institutions”.

Diversity in dialogue

The peace talks, known as the intra-Afghan dialogue, stem from an agreement signed in February between the United States and the Taliban. It also calls for the withdrawal of foreign forces in the country.

Ms. Hayden was heartened that despite deep-seated grievances, the Afghanistan establishment has agreed a diverse negotiating team for the process.

Representatives come from all major ethnic groups and include five women: an important recognition that women must be involved in efforts to achieve a lasting peace.

“UNAMA has encouraged the Taliban to reciprocate by including women in their delegation who have an empowered decisive voice at the table. Doing so would send a tangible signal that the movement has fundamentally reformed”, she said.

Under the US agreement, the Taliban also promised to reduce attacks targeting international forces. However, assaults against the national defence and security forces have been on the rise, while civilians also are affected by hostilities.

Ms. Hayden insisted this trend is reversible, pointing to the “significant reduction” in violence nationwide in the lead-up to the signing of the agreement.

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Coronavirus threat looms

To move forward, UNAMA is urging Afghanistan’s political parties to resolve their differences and work together, particularly with COVID-19 raring to threaten the country’s fragile healthcare system.

The seriousness of the impasse is reflected in the recent announcement that the US  will reduce its $4.5 billion in annual assistance to Afghanistan by $1 billion, with a further cut next year.

Ms. Hayden warned that the consequences could be severe, given Afghanistan’s “heavy reliance” on donor funding.

“Now is not the time for divisions,” she said. “Now is the time for statesmanship, accommodation and inclusivity. The interests of Afghans must come first – including the rights of all women, minorities and youth”.

Courtesy:UN News

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posted by Sunny @ March 31, 2020   0 Comments

UN launches COVID-19 plan that could ‘defeat the virus and build a better world’

UN launches COVID-19 plan that could ‘defeat the virus and build a better world’

UN Photo/Mark Garten
UN Secretary-General António Guterres briefs the media on the socio-economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.
    
31 March 2020
Health

The UN chief launched on Tuesday a new plan to counter the potentially devastating socio-economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, calling on everyone to “act together to lessen the blow to people”.

“The new coronavirus disease is attacking societies at their core, claiming lives and people’s livelihoods”, said Secretary-General António Guterres, pointing out that the potential longer-term effects on the global economy and individual countries are “dire”.

The new report, "Shared responsibility, global solidarity: Responding to the socio-economic impacts of COVID-19",  describes the speed and scale of the outbreak, the severity of cases, and the societal and economic disruption of the coronavirus.

“COVID-19 is the greatest test that we have faced together since the formation of the United Nations,” underscored the UN chief.

 “This human crisis demands coordinated, decisive, inclusive and innovative policy action from the world’s leading economies – and maximum financial and technical support for the poorest and most vulnerable people and countries.”

As strong as weakest health system

Mr. Guterres called for “an immediate coordinated health response to suppress transmission and end the pandemic” that “scales up health capacity for testing, tracing, quarantine and treatment, while keeping first responders safe, combined with measures to restrict movement and contact.” 

He underscored that developed countries must assist those less developed, or potentially “face the nightmare of the disease spreading like wildfire in the global South with millions of deaths and the prospect of the disease re-emerging where it was previously suppressed”.

“Let us remember that we are only as strong as the weakest health system in our interconnected world”, he stressed. 

Focus on most vulnerable

In tackling the devastating social and economic dimensions of the crisis, the UN chief pushed for a focus on the most vulnerable by designing policies that, among other things, support providing health and unemployment insurance and social protections while also bolstering businesses to prevent bankruptcies and job losses. 

Debt alleviation must also be a priority he said, noting that the UN is “fully mobilized” and is establishing a new multi-partner Trust Fund for COVID19 Response and Recovery to respond to the emergency and recover from the socio-economic shock. 

“When we get past this crisis, which we will, we will face a choice”, said the UN chief, “we can go back to the world as it was before or deal decisively with those issues that make us all unnecessarily vulnerable to crises”. 

Referencing the 2030 Agenda and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), he maintained that in recover from the COVID-19 crisis must lead to an economy focused on building inclusive and sustainable economies that are more resilient in facing pandemics, climate change, and the many other global challenges. 

Measures to cope with coronavirus impacts

•    Global actions must include a stimulus package reaching double-digit percentage points of the world’s GDP, with explicit actions to boost the economies of developing countries. 

•    Regional mobilization must examine impacts, monetary coordination, fiscal and social measures, while engaging with private financial sector to support businesses and addressing structural challenges.

•    National solidarity needs to prioritize social cohesion and provide fiscal stimulus for the most vulnerable along with support to small- and medium-sized enterprises, decent

 work and education.

Courtesy:UN News

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posted by Sunny @ March 31, 2020   0 Comments

First Person: Humankind’s ‘modern mentality to tame’ the environment: A volcanologist’s view



    
31 March 2020
SDGs

The 17 goals agreed by the global community to reduce poverty and create a sustainable planet are the responsibility of all people, wherever they are in the world, according to the United Nations. The Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs represent a boundary-pushing blueprint for the future of the Earth and it’s anticipated they will be realized by 2030. UN News joined the International Labour Organization on a visit to Hawaii where many people are already living or studying aspects of the goals in their everyday work.

Ken Rubin is a professor of volcanology and geochemistry specializing in volcanoes and sea level change. Based in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Hawaii, he travels the world to observe active and dormant volcanoes, both on the land and beneath the sea.

“In my work, I look at specifically at how volcanic eruptions impact populations. It doesn't have to be human populations; it could be marine communities that live in and around the submarine volcanoes. 

When I'm studying volcanoes on land, I focus mostly on understanding how frequently events happen and what hazards people face. Up until maybe a thousand years ago, humans were much more tuned into their environment and tended to stay away from the most dangerous places like volcanic areas, but it's our modern mentality that we can tame anything. So, we encroach much more closely on very dangerous environments.

This whole area that we're standing in was inundated in the 1940s by a tsunami created by a big earthquake in Alaska. It's part of the reason why this coastline is now protected and there are no buildings. A tsunami event like that only happens every several decades; the last one was in 1964 and we haven't had a big one since.  

Treating the water like a trash can

Living and working on an island, you understand quickly that there's a lot of reliance on the nearshore environment as a resource for marine life and the protection of the coastlines. A healthy coral ecosystem, for example, helps to protect coastlines from events like tsunamis. 

There's a legacy of people treating everything below the waterline with less direct regard than what is above water; for instance, the dumping of all types of trash. I do a fair amount of work in the submarine environment in manned submersibles and there are places around Hawaii that we can't go because of thousands of unexploded bombs and strings of bullets. 

The damaging effects of human activity

The way I like to think about climate change is to recognize that the planet has been changing ever since it formed and that the climate fluctuates over different time scales. So, there's a long-term time scale, which has to do with the what we call the rock cycle, the forming of materials on the land and their subsequent breakdown which affects the carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere. So, over the course of Earth history, CO2 levels have naturally been slowly going down. 

Then we have factors like how the Earth orbits the sun which affects the cycles of ice ages and warm periods such as the warm period that we're in now. 

And there's of course the shorter-term damaging human-produced or anthropogenic effects resulting from human activity which picked up pace following the industrial revolution.

Volcanic eruptions and global cooling

There's always been a certain amount of volcanism. It waxes and wanes and affects climate in both positive and negative ways in terms of temperatures. Volcanoes can inject aerosols into the upper atmosphere which reflect light and can cause planetary cooling, rather than warming. But, it's really only the very big eruptions, the sort which occur once or twice a century, that have any kind of measurable impact on climate.

Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted in 1991 and caused a couple years of cooling afterwards which gave a lot of fuel to the anthropogenic climate naysayer types because they said, “look it's getting cool.” In Hawaii, our eruptions aren't so violent and don’t cause the same effect. But when volcanoes erupt in a big way, they affect climate in one place or another for a brief period of time.

What volcano eruptions mean collectively is the outgassing of the interior of the Earth which brings a lot of CO2 and water to the surface; those are the two things that modulate our atmosphere and temperature patterns. If we didn't have water vapour and CO2 in our atmosphere, if we didn't have the greenhouse effect, we wouldn't be able to live here. That atmosphere is provided by volcanism.

Climate change and increased volcanic activity

I'm looking specifically at the period after the last ice age, when we had a 140-metre sea level rise over about ten thousand years. It was the last period in our history where we had sea-level change of the magnitude we predict for the next several hundred years.

Climate change can also have an impact on volcanic activity, although we have to look at this from a geologists’ timeframe. In Iceland after the ice age, when the glaciers started to retreat, the amount of volcanism increased dramatically, but it didn't happen right away. It took several thousand years.

So, I wouldn't want to go out on a limb and say there's going to be more volcanism in a hundred or a thousand years as the full effects of anthropogenic climate change are felt, but that's what we would predict based on our observations from the past.

I would say that in all the myriad ways that anthropogenic climate change is going to affect us, volcanism is pretty far down the list of things we need to worry about. But it is one of the reasons why we like to study volcanic cycles.”
 

Courtesy:UN News

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posted by Sunny @ March 31, 2020   0 Comments