GLOBAL ISSUES – Page 187 – IDN-InDepthNews

GLOBAL ISSUES2014-07-312023-07-10

Interfaith Harmony Can Generate Development

By Valentina Gasbarri* | IDN-InDepth NewsAnalysis

ROME (IDN) – Worldwide, there is increasing recognition that faith and religion play a vital role in promoting peaceful and harmonious relationships within and between nations.

For more than half a century, the United Nations, the European Union and numerous other international and regional organizations have affirmed the principle of religious freedom. Journalists and pro-human rights organisations have reported on persecution of minority faiths, outbreaks of sectarian violence and discrimination practices against religious individuals and communities in many countries.

HUMAN DEVELOPMENT2014-07-282023-07-10

Social Protection For The Poor Too

By Martin Khor* | IDN-InDepth NewsAnalysis

GENEVA (IDN) – “Social security” and “social protection” feature increasingly in the global policy atmosphere these days. The two terms encapsulate the idea that people should be able to have a basic income and access to health care and education, and that includes those who are poor or jobless.

Climate Change2014-07-282023-07-10

Strengthening Community Forest Rights Mitigates Climate Change

By Caleb Stevens, Robert Winterbottom, Sarah Parsons and Carni Klirs*

WASHINGTON DC (IDN | WRI) – Deforestation and other land changes produce about 11 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions globally. A new report reveals an undervalued and often-overlooked strategy for curbing these emissions – strengthening the rights of forest communities.

Governments around the world legally recognize at least 513 million hectares of community forests, land held collectively by either rural populations or Indigenous Peoples. This area stores about 37 billion tonnes of carbon – 29 times the annual carbon footprint of all the passenger vehicles in the world. Securing Rights, Combating Climate Change, a new report from WRI and the Rights and Resources Initiative, shows that by protecting and expanding the amount of officially recognized community forests, national governments can meet their climate goals while also improving citizens’ livelihoods.

Health2014-07-242023-07-10

WHO Warns Of A Post-Antibiotic Era

By Martin Khor* | IDN-InDepth NewsAnalysis

GENEVA (IDN) – The World Health Organisation (WHO) has sounded a loud alarm bell that many types of disease-causing bacteria can no longer be treated with the usual antibiotics and the benefits of modern medicine are increasingly being eroded.

ARMAMENTS2014-07-152023-07-10

Nuke Proliferation in East Asia Affects International Security

By Valentina Gasbarri* | IDN-InDepth NewsAnalysis

ROME (IDN) – The 10th anniversary of the adoption of the UN Security Council Resolution 1540 on April 28, 2014 can be especially propitious for standing back from the perennial present of international security issues and evaluating longer-term trends.

The threat posed by the spread of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles is one of the main security challenges of the 21st century. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War led to a gradual reduction both in the security framework and in the perception of security.

In order to address this challenge and develop appropriate solutions, accurate risk factors analysis is required, as well as the ability to generate a multi-dimensional response: promoting the development of a comprehensive non-proliferation regime while also trying to explore how nuclear energy can safely be harnessed for sustainable economic development. The implications of nuclear proliferation for international relations are difficult to predict but profound.

GLOBAL ISSUES2014-07-092023-07-10

A New German Fiction

By Julio Godoy* | IDN-InDepth NewsAnalysis

BERLIN (IDN) – A rather strange debate is taking place in Germany for several months. Most strange, because it refers to a fiction, to a bizarre aspiration – of German troops waging war in different parts of the world, contrary to the role stipulated by the German constitution for the country’s army – an aspiration that hardly fits into the present reality or in the probable future.

This delusion, which began several years ago, and was abandoned for all practical purposes, reached climax again last January, at the Munich Security Conference during which, in an obviously concerted action, two German ministers and the country’s federal president argued that Germany, as the foreign minister Frank Walter Steinmeier put it, “must be ready for earlier, more decisive and more substantive engagement in the foreign and security policy sphere.”

ARMAMENTS2014-06-302023-07-10

Remembering Hiroshima For The Sake Of Our Common Future

By Monzurul Huq* | IDN-InDepth NewsEssay

TOKYO (IDN) – Human memory is short, particularly when it comes to record war and destruction. Countless details of various times portraying the accounts of misery and human suffering probably remind us of something vague and abstract; something distant and detached, not at all related to the realities that we face at any given time. Since what is seen as vague or blurred hardly serves as solid evidence, and what is distant hardly seems inspiring for stirring our conscience to the level of awakening, we tend to forget about what war and destruction brings to mankind soon after the waves of tragic realities subside and pave the way for a relative tranquil setting, at least for a short time.

CIVIL SOCIETY2014-06-292023-07-10

Faith Can Move Mountains . . . and Remove Hatred

By Baher Kamal* | IDN-InDepth NewsFeature

CAIRO (IDN) – One does need to think back half a century ago, to remember how much harmony and peaceful coexistence reigned in Arab countries between Muslims, Christians and Jewish.

Nor does one need to recall how hundreds of Muslims gathered to protect Christians praying in their churches in Egypt during and after the 2011 popular upraising. Or how organised groups of Copts acted as a human shield to save Muslims praying in Cairo’s Tahrir Square from extremists’ attacks during the successive waves of popular protests.

Coexistence between adepts to the three monotheist religions in the Arab region has always been taken for granted. In Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine or Syria, Iraq and Morocco, no citizen would ever ask another citizen to which religion does he or she belong.

What happened then?

CIVIL SOCIETY2014-06-282023-07-10

Faith Based Organizations Keen To Influence UN Development Agenda

By Kalinga Seneviratne* | IDN-InDepth NewsAnalysis

BANGKOK (IDN) – 2015 is expected to become a watershed year for shaping the global development agenda with the post-2015 Millennium Development Goals, Sustainable Development models and Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) frameworks, all coming up for review at major UN conferences during the year.

Thus, the 6th Asian Ministerial Conference On Disaster Risk Reduction (AMCDRR) that concluded in the Thai capital on June 26gave a taste of things to come with a lot of emphasis given to discussion on community based solutions.

ARMAMENTS2014-06-092023-07-10

Egypt Continues Efforts For A WMD-Free Mideast

By Baher Kamal* | IDN-InDepth NewsAnalysis

MADRID (IDN) – In spite of social, economic and political instability in Egypt and other Arab countries, Cairo has lastly intensified its efforts aimed at eliminating, as soon as possible, all weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the Middle East.

Egyptian diplomacy fears that further delays in taking specific actions to declare the Middle East a nuclear free zone, may lead to a nuclear armament race in the region, in view warnings that some major countries in the region, such as Saudi Arabia, might decide to go nuclear to face Israeli and Iranian nuclear threat. | READ JAPANESE TEXT VERSION PDF