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By Kwame Buist
LUSAKA, Zambia (IDN) – Billions of uninsured individuals, families and small businesses are exposed to risks which can result in catastrophic losses, delegates to the 14th International Microinsurance Conference (IMC) on ‘Inclusive Insurance for Emerging Markets’ in Lusaka were told.
Despite encouraging signs of increased insurance cover uptake in some markets, climate change and extreme weather events are exposing the poorest and most vulnerable to risk as never before.
By Katharine Pulvermacher*
The author is Executive Director of Microinsurance Network.
LUXEMBOURG (IDN) – Life is hard enough for small-scale farmers, businesses, families and communities who live with the daily threat of losing everything to natural disasters, extreme weather or other catastrophes. Even if you are insured, it can be tough to start again after drought has taken your cattle, pests have destroyed your crop or the main breadwinner has died in an accident. But for the four billion people around the world who have no access to financial services, insurance remains a distant dream.
By Lisa Vives, Global Information Network
NEW YORK (IDN) – The world’s largest air pollution hotspot is not where you might think. No, it’s not in New Jersey. But if you said South Africa you’d be right, according to a newly-released study by the environmental group Greenpeace.
With coal and transport as the two principal sources of air pollution, Eastern Mpumalanga province in South Africa has the most polluting cluster of coal-fired power stations in the world, producing record levels of nitrogen dioxide, according to the Greenpeace report.
By Jeffrey Moyo
CHIMOIO, Mozambique (IDN) – As the blazing heat of the sun beats down on her, 25-year-old Maria Sinorita from Chimoio, a Mozambican town lying approximately 100 km east of the country’s border with Zimbabwe, struggles to draw water from the well in her yard.
For Sinorita, even the water she is drawing from the well is running out and, because she has no option as climate change impacts hit her and many other Mozambicans, she has to dig deeper and deeper for the precious liquid.
Viewpoint by Dokku Nagamalleswara Rao & Atmaja Gohain Baruah
Dokku Nagamalleswara Rao and Atmaja Gohain Baruah are research scholars at the Center for East Asian Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi India. This article first appeared in East-West Forum on 25 September 2018. – The Editor.
NEW DELHI (IDN-INPS) – The environmental impact of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has been fraught with contradictions. While there are efforts to finance and promote green development through some BRI projects, other projects are raising serious environmental concerns.
By Fabiola Ortiz
SAN JOSE, Costa Rica (IDN) – It has been twenty two years since Costa Rica embarked on its national program of payment for environmental services (PES), the first in the world to start a nationwide scheme for compensating landowners for keeping the forests standing for people and the planet.
Now that the world struggles to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and limit the global temperature rise by the end of the century, this Central American nation of five million people has served as an example of public policies addressing the taxation of fossil fuels in favour of the protection of nature. The country pledges to become carbon neutral by 2021.
By Justus Wanzala
NAIROBI (IDN) – African governments have been availing of two conferences at the UN Environment Headquarters in the Kenyan capital in September to gear up for the Biological Diversity Summit in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, and the Climate Summit in Katowice, Poland.
The African Ministerial Conference on the Environment (AMCEN) from September 17 to 19 provided an opportunity to prepare for the 14th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD-COP14) from November 17 to 29, 2018 in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt.
Viewpoint by Mariam Traore Chazalnoël
The writer is a specialist in environmental and climate migration at the International Organization for Migration (IOM)'s Office to the United Nations in New York. She has been working since 2013 on the global governance of environmental migration and regularly publishes on the topic. This article first appeared in UNCCD Science to Policy Weblog on 17 August 2018. – The Editor
NEW YORK (IDN) – The plight of people migrating in the context of environmental degradation, climate change impacts and natural disasters and the potential governance responses to such challenges have received a lot of attention in recent years.
By William S. Becker*
MILWAUKEE, USA (IDN) – It happened in July 2016. A flash flood roared through Ellicott City, Maryland, killed two people and caused tens of millions of dollars in damages to the historic buildings along Main Street. The experts said it was one of those rare 1,000-year flood events. The city set about the job of rebuilding. It takes a long time – often years – for a community to recover from a devastating flood.
Then in May 2018, while Ellicott City was still getting over the 2016 disaster, it happened again, another one of those “extremely rare” 1,000-year floods.
Neither Climate Change Deniers Nor Technology Enthusiasts Hold the Key to Addressing Global Warming
Viewpoint by Franz Baumann
The author is a visiting professor at New York University and a former UN assistant secretary-general, special adviser on environment and peace operations. Dr. Baumann joined the UN Development Program in 1980, began working in the UN Secretariat in 1985, and retired in 2015 after about a dozen assignments under five secretaries-general, in four duty stations and on three continents. – The Editor
NEW YORK (IDN) – United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, on September 10, 2018 spoke eloquently and with urgency about the frightening prospect of a climate catastrophe. "Climate Change is the defining issue of our time, and we are at a defining moment," he said. Everything in his powerful speech was backed by science and evidently correct. Yet, because Secretaries-General cannot say everything, it was incomplete.
UN Messenger of Peace @JaneGoodallInst introduces @IRIforests, a new global effort uniting people of all faiths to end tropical deforestation. Watch the video and share this important message: InterfaithRainforest.org/video #FaithsForForests.
