DAR ES SALAAM (IDN) — Issa Abdul’s desperate urge for solar power began when he realised a smoke-spewing generator at his barber shop was costing him too much.
“Solar power is very cheap. I regret spending my money on this fuel-guzzling machine,” he said.
The 32-year-old barber in Tanzania’s port city spent roughly Tanzanian shillings 150,000 ($65) to purchase a small solar system, which now powers his hair-cutting business.
By Gareth Bryant, Devleena Ghosh, Jake Morcom, and Priya P Pillai*
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
MELBOURNE, Australia (IDN) — India, like many other countries, is looking to renewables as an antidote to soaring fossil fuel prices and to tackle climate change. Prime Minister Narendra Modi sees renewables as vital for a “developed India”.
But while renewables are seen as a major positive on a societal scale, these large scale facilities can—if done poorly—make life harder for people who live close to them.
Viewpoint by Jonathan Power
LUND, Sweden (IDN) — The U.S. is not the only well-built actor on the Western stage. Some argue, quite understandably after the missed opportunities and mistaken steps of recent decades, that there is a lot to be said for trying to ignore the U.S. as much as possible or, at least, go round it.
Just let the U.S. pay as little or as much as it wants to the UN and its affiliate institutions and rely on the rest of the rich countries to make up the difference. This will clear the air in the UN, take its mind off the perennial struggle with Washington over arrears, and allow its energies to be better concentrated on how best to make use of the UN without waiting for Godot.
UNEP and Other Organisations Support the Call
By J C Suresh
TORONTO (IDN) — Cities are on the front line of the socio-economic impacts of climate change and ecosystem loss. They play a significant role in view of the planet experiencing a decline in nature at rates unprecedented in human history—and the largest loss of animal and plant species since the dinosaurs.
Mayors from 15 cities around the world have therefore availed of the biodiversity conference in Montreal—the largest city in Canada's Québec province—to call for increased direct financing to enable them to implement greening and ecosystem restoration projects.
Nature-Based Solutions Could Generate 20 million New Jobs
By Jaya Ramachandran
GENEVA (IDN) — A joint report by three UN organisations says that 20 million jobs could be created by further harnessing the power of nature to address the major challenges facing society, such as climate change, disaster risk and food and water insecurity.
According to the report by the International Labour Organization (ILO), the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), investing in policies that support Nature-based Solutions (NbS), would generate significant employment opportunities, particularly in rural areas.
By Jan Servaes*
BRUSSELS (IDN) — After nearly three years of fighting Covid-19 tooth and nail with a so-called 'zero-Covid' policy and denouncing Western countries for choosing to live with the virus at the cost of millions of lives, China's rhetoric seems to be moving in a more nuanced direction.
The current number of 5,235 Covid-related 'official' deaths in China is a small fraction of the population of 1.4 billion and, to global benchmarks, extremely low.
By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, Zimbabwe (IDN) — Jobless and weighed down by idleness, 53-year-old Jasper Mhandu, in the Zimbabwean capital, now has to spend time sited at a street corner chatting with gangs of drug-taking jobless youths in Highfield, a poor income suburb here.
Mhandu used to work for a clothing factory that shut its operations in 2007 when Zimbabwe’s comatose economy forced many firms to close down.
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- US Foundation Commits $19.2 Million to Bolster Nigerian Media
- Lusaka Demands Probe of Zambian Student Killed on Battlefield in Ukraine
- China May Have Surpassed US in Number of Nuclear Warheads on ICBMs
- UNCTAD: This Time is Indifferent
