Africa

Thousands have died in a conflict that has been largely ignored by the rest of the world.

Shoaib Bashir's six-wicket haul breaks Zimbabwe's feisty resistance and leads England to victory by an innings and 45 runs inside three days of the one-off Test.

Tanzanian authorities are not commenting on the allegations, which include sexual assault.

The two crashes happened in 2018 and 2019 and left 346 people dead.

Striker Mohamed Salah has 28 goals and 18 assists in Liverpool's title-winning season.

England will receive an offer to tour Zimbabwe before 2031, with a new ground near Victoria Falls earmarked as a potential venue.

England will receive an offer to tour Zimbabwe before 2031, with a new ground near Victoria Falls earmarked as a potential venue.

The calm reaction of South Africa's president to the Oval Office ambush might boost his standing at home.

The calm reaction of South Africa's president to the Oval Office ambush might boost his standing at home.

The calm reaction of South Africa's president to the Oval Office ambush might boost his standing at home.

Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan accused one of the country's top politicians of trying to kill her.

Ben Stokes hints at a return to his best and Brian Bennett strikes a sparkling century before England make Zimbabwe follow on on the second day at Trent Bridge.

Of the six most recent victims of farm killings, five were black and one white, the latest figures show.

The state department is imposing new sanctions on the country's government because of the findings.

Kenya legend Victor Wanyama says the welcoming nature of Scottish football fans was part of the reason for his surprise decision to join Dunfermline Athletic.

Kenya legend Victor Wanyama says the welcoming nature of Scottish football fans was part of the reason for his surprise decision to join Dunfermline Athletic.

By Yasmine Sherif
NEW YORK, May 23 2025 (IPS-Partners)

22 May 2025, New York – In the past two months alone, more than 950 children have reportedly been killed in strikes across the Gaza Strip. That’s 15 children every day who lose their lives in this horrific conflict. Those who survive face the risk of famine, illness, and the collapse of essential services, including education.

As the global fund for education in emergencies and protracted crises in the United Nations, Education Cannot Wait (ECW) stands ready with our partners to support the delivery of mental health and psychosocial services as part of our education in emergency response to the children who have suffered so much over the past 19 months. Today, no child is safe in Gaza.

The education system is in ruins. Since the onset of hostilities, more than 95% of schools in Gaza have been partially or completely destroyed and 88% will require significant reconstruction before they can function, according to the Global Education Cluster.

More than 658,000 children are out of school – they are deeply traumatized, have lost their homes and their loved ones, and are living a daily life of extremely painful survival.

As UNICEF recently stated: “The daily suffering and killing of children must end immediately.”

For the well-being of children to be protected, safe access to education must urgently be restored. Even amidst the destruction, Gaza’s families, teachers and local organizations are doing what they can to mitigate the enormous impact on children, including limited learning activities where conditions allow. Through ECW’s support to partners on the ground, we must help these innocent children.

But this is far from being enough to meet the needs of the entire population of school-aged girls and boys. To scale up urgent education support, a ceasefire is crucially needed. We call for:

• An end to hostilities and respect for international humanitarian law by all parties
• Safe, unimpeded humanitarian access
• The immediate release of all hostages
• Protection of civilians and civilian infrastructure, including schools

As Tom Fletcher, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, said in his statement to the UN Security Council: “Our response as humanitarians is to make a single ask of the Council: let us work. The UN and our partners are desperate to resume humanitarian aid at scale across Gaza, in line with the fundamental principles of humanity, impartiality, independence and neutrality.”

Where children suffer excruciating pain, nothing can wait. Yet, the children in Gaza are desperately waiting for a response to this single ask.

 

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Excerpt:

Statement by Education Cannot Wait Executive Director Yasmine Sherif on the need for life-saving education in Gaza

Joseph Kabila faces the prospect of being tried in a military court for allegedly backing M23 rebels.

Indonesia’s largest coal mining company in operation. Even "green" energy requires destructive mining for trace minerals. Credit: Dominik Vanyi

By Kirsten Stade and Alan Ware
SAINT PAUL, Minnesota, May 23 2025 (IPS)

As the United States lurches toward isolationism and authoritarianism, its political problems are now bleeding into pocketbook anxieties that Trump’s policies will torpedo economic growth, both domestically and globally.

The UN forecasts a slowdown in global economic growth due to Trump’s destructive tariff and trade policies. Though stocks rallied as the US suspended some tariffs, and some analysts are spinning the numbers positively, economic growth signals have turned decidedly negative.

US GDP shrank 0.3% in the first quarter. Moody’s downgraded the United States’ credit rating citing burgeoning US debt and an unfavorable debt-to-GDP ratio.

In most countries, GDP is an indicator of a society’s success — even though it includes things like military expansion, oil spill cleanups, and prison construction. Growthism goes mostly unchallenged and passes for a rational guiding principle for governance and proxy for human well-being.

Yet it ignores important things like climate change, biodiversity collapse, and pollution which are the consequences of endless economic growth, and which threaten the survival of humanity and the millions of species with whom we share this planet.

Economic growth is not just failing as an indicator of human progress. It is failing as an indicator of economic health. The vast majority of economic growth in recent years has accrued to the top 1%. Meanwhile rates of growth in rich countries have been slowing for decades while global debt continues to rise more rapidly.

Understanding why requires understanding the central role of cheap energy in modern civilization. Roads, bridges, sewers, airports, and the electrical grid were all constructed on the back of cheap energy and materials.

With the discovery and extraction of fossil fuels 200 years ago began the modern industrial era, and a frenzy of human enterprise that would not have otherwise been possible.

Now maintenance of all this infrastructure has come due. Those roads, bridges, sewer and water systems are disintegrating and require expensive and ongoing maintenance, on top of new construction to provide for growing populations and economies. But the energy and materials required for all this are no longer as easy to come by.

Skyrocketing debt is a claim on future resources, as all economic activity is dependent on minerals, wood, clean water, and of course fossil fuels that are increasingly scarce and expensive.

Growing risks of climate catastrophes add further to escalating costs, as skyrocketing homeowners insurance adds to the cost of housing. Against this backdrop, prospects for continued economic growth look bleak indeed.

These realities are largely absent from mainstream discourse about economic growth, suffocated under endless proclamations of faith in human ingenuity. Growth proponents are fond of invoking a seamless “green energy transition” without acknowledging that electricity is only 20% of global energy demand, and essential building blocks of growth – steel, cement, fertilizer, and plastics – are manufactured using fossil fuels in processes that cannot be decarbonized at scale.

Renewable technologies themselves require vast amounts of these materials in their construction, along with trace minerals like lithium, cobalt, and other metals whose mining ravages ecosystems, pollutes water, exploits child labor, and requires massive inputs of fossil fuel energy.

Renewables boosters fail to acknowledge that with constant population growth there has never been an energy transition, only energy addition. Even as uptake of “renewable” technologies has expanded since 2000, global coal use went up by 80% over the same period.

Rather than deal with this, growth enthusiasts espouse boundless faith in human innovation. But innovation is slowing according to many measures, and has done little to change the cost of life’s essentials: food, housing, transportation, health care, and education have proven remarkably resistant to breakthroughs that would lower prices or improve quality. As one of Donald Trump’s favorite growth proponents, Peter Thiel, argues, we’re seeing innovation in bits, not atoms.

AI is perhaps the last bastion of hope for continued economic growth, with allegedly unlimited potential for finding new sources of energy and driving production while minimizing capital and labor costs. For all the hype, though, real breakthroughs in materials and energy remain to be seen from AI, which is simply a means to turbocharge extraction of finite materials that will still run out, only sooner.

Meanwhile, AI data centers guzzle fossil fuel energy and require billions of gallons of water to cool all that frenetic digital activity.

No doubt there are still some ways we can squeeze a bit more economic growth out of a system already in ecological overshoot and demanding more of the planet than it has to give or can regenerate. But further growth will require further ravaging nature and the world’s poor, already pushed to the brink.

Is that truly the best path to improve human well-being, especially for the most impoverished who are the most directly impacted by further exploiting and depleting the land, water, trees and minerals?

Ultimately, the question is not how we can tweak the growth system to prolong it indefinitely. It is whether we will face disaster brought on by economic and environmental collapse and all its consequent human suffering, and to make the choice to shrink our population and economy.

It’s whether we are wise enough to choose simplicity over excess and relationships over commodities. Continued economic growth benefits the few already at the top, but conscious, gradual contraction enables the basics of a good life for all. The choice should be clear.

Kirsten Stade is a conservation biologist and Lead Writer at the NGO Population Balance. Alan Ware is a researcher and writer who cohosts Population Balance’s OVERSHOOT podcast.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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Philemon Yang (centre), President of the seventy-ninth session of the United Nations General Assembly, addresses the high-level meeting on Harmony with Nature and Sustainable Development. Credit: UN Photo/Loey Felipe

By Oritro Karim
UNITED NATIONS, May 23 2025 (IPS)

Since 2000, the United Nations (UN) recognizes May 22 as the International Day for Biological Diversity, in hopes of promoting international cooperation and conversation surrounding biodiversity issues. Through the 2025 theme; Harmony With Nature and Sustainable Development, the UN seeks to increase public awareness around biodiversity loss and promote progress in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

In addition to the SDGs, this year’s event highlights the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, a set of goals for 2050 that focus on the impacts of human activity on ecological health. Some of these goals include reversing ecosystem damage by 20 percent and reducing the introduction of invasive species by 50 percent.

Recognizing the key drivers of biodiversity loss and ecological issues are of the utmost importance for the preservation of human health. According to figures from the UN, the current practices that undermine ecological health are estimated to undermine progress toward 80 percent of the SDGs. Additionally, humanitarian organizations have expressed concern as the current rate of extinction is higher than ever before. It is estimated that approximately 1 million plant and animal species are currently at risk of extinction, which pose significant threats for human stability.

“Biodiversity is the bedrock of life and a cornerstone of sustainable development.Yet humanity is destroying biodiversity at lightning pace – the result of pollution, climate crisis, ecosystem destruction, and – ultimately – short-term interests fuelling the unsustainable use of our natural world,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres. “No one country, however rich or powerful, can address it alone. Nor can they live without the rich biodiversity that defines our planet.”

Currently, several vital ecosystems that are integral to human health, including lakes, forests, oceans, and farmlands, are under threat of extreme biodiversity loss. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), biodiversity is a “key environmental determinant of human health”. Figures from the Geneva Environment Network indicate that roughly 75 percent of terrestrial ecosystems and 66 percent of marine ecosystems have been significantly “altered” by human actions.

This poses a massive risk to human health as roughly 80 percent of the human diet is composed of plants that are cultivated in these threatened areas. It is also estimated that at least 80 percent of individuals in rural communities depend on traditional plant medicines for their healthcare. Additionally, a third of freshwater species are currently threatened by biodiversity loss. This puts 3 billion people who rely on fish for animal protein at risk of food insecurity.

High levels of biodiversity among crop species is essential in ensuring adequate food security. Degraded agricultural ecosystems are highly vulnerable to damage from pesticides, disease, and natural disasters. It is estimated that anywhere from 1.3 to 3.2 billion people are dependent on food that is supplied from areas affected by environmental degradation.

Additionally, the UN underscores the importance of ecological health in relation to human life as environmental degradation increases the severity of natural disasters, conflict, and zoonotic disease. Vulnerable populations, such as the elderly, indigenous communities, the disabled, women, and people living in poverty, are disproportionately affected.

For example, damage to the coastal mangroves in South Asia has been known to exacerbate the severity of tropical cyclones. Deforestation has also been observed to contribute to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Wildfires, ocean acidification, and rising global temperatures are also linked to biodiversity loss.

Additionally, widespread biodiversity loss threatens to significantly damage the worldwide economy, totaling billions of dollars in potential losses if unaddressed. The World Economic Forum (WEF) estimates that approximately 44 trillion USD, which is about half of the world’s gross domestic product, is dependent on natural resources.

Furthermore, it is projected that the world could experience an average economic decline of 2.7 trillion annually by 2030 if biodiversity loss continues at the current rate. Several building blocks of human society, such as social wellbeing, equality, and economic development, will be impacted around the world.

Biodiversity loss also threatens to exacerbate the climate crisis. Carbon sinks, which are known as ecosystems which store significant amounts of carbon and help to offset global greenhouse gas emissions, are essential in preventing the progression of climate change. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Amazon rainforest is one of the biggest carbon sinks in the world, storing approximately 123 billion tons of carbon above and below the ground. However, due to deforestation, the Amazon’s carbon storage capabilities have weakened and at times, emit more carbon than it stores.

In order to ensure the longevity of human life and planetary wellbeing, it is imperative that regulations are put in place to allow for sustainable consumption practices at a wide scale.

Cooperation between governments, scientists, policymakers, and citizens is the only way to reverse biodiversity loss and ensure the stability of global food systems. Governments should also consult with independent bodies such the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) and the Independent Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), when drafting comprehensive policies and solutions.

Furthermore, solutions to biodiversity loss must frame the most vulnerable populations at the center as a sustainable future must include people from all walks of life.

“As we pursue sustainable development, we must transform how we produce and consume, and how we value nature, and deliver on the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. We need policies, regulations, and other incentives to support sustainable livelihoods and build strong, green economies,” said Guterres.

“That means governments building on progress made at CBD COP16, including by delivering domestic and international finance, and shifting public subsidies and other financial flows away from activities that harm nature. And it means countries delivering National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans that put the Framework into effect, address inequality, advance sustainable development, respect traditional knowledge, and empower women, girls, Indigenous People and more”.

IPS UN Bureau Report

 

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