Niklas Hagelberg is Coordinator, Climate Change Programme, UN Environment

NAIROBI, Kenya, Jun 5 2019 (IPS) – Fossil fuels—oil, gas, coal and their derivatives—pollute the atmosphere and emit the greenhouse gases that are ramping up global heating to dangerous levels. But did you know that governments around the world are subsidizing this pollution?

Historically, governments around the world have used fossil fuel subsidies for a variety of reasons, including to promote energy independence, encourage industry and cushion the poorest in society.

But they never took sufficient account of what economists call “externalities” such as air pollution and the resu…

Credit: Paul Nevin.

UNITED NATIONS, Sep 24 2019 (IPS) – Describing it as an “important landmark” on our “journey to health for all”, Secretary-General António Guterres on Monday welcomed the UN Political Declaration on universal health coverage, or UHC, which commits countries to advance towards full coverage for their citizens in four major areas around primary care.

During a meeting of heads of State, ministers, health leaders, policy-makers, and universal health coverage champions, the UN chief UHC “the most comprehensive agreement ever reached on global health – a vision for Universal Health Coverage by 2030”.

World leaders made the public commit…

Veena S. Kulkarni, PhD is Associate Professor, Department of Criminology, Sociology and Geography, Arkansas State University, USA

ARKANSAS, Nov 20 2019 (IPS) – Humankind since almost the time that there is recorded history has grappled with the question of ‘how many is too many?’ The response is expectedly complex as it varies across time and space. The pace of population growth was slow till about approximately 250 years or so. It is only since the middle of the eighteenth century that there has been a palpable acceleration in population growth.

Veena S. Kulkarni

The intervals in which we have added a billion has been consistently narrowing. It took only 12 y…

Tim Wainwright is Chief Executive of .

Credit: WaterAid/ DRIK/ Habibul Haque

LONDON, Jan 31 2020 (IPS) – There was only one topic on everyone’s lips at Davos this year – c. The headlines focused on the cold war between Greta Thunberg and Donald Trump, but there was much greater consensus among those gathered for the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF).

The Forum itself updated its manifesto for responsible business – with climate right at its core.

Among those calling for urgent action was WaterAid’s own president, His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales. It’s more than 30 years since he last attended Davos and, as he reminded the audien…

International Assembly of the Peoples and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research

Kazimir Malevich, Children on the Grass, 1908 (Pushkin Museum State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow).

Mar 23 2020 – SARS-CoV-2 or COVID19, now declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organisation, has begun to wreak havoc in large parts of the world, with other parts waiting in anticipation. We are in a real struggle, which needs total mobilisation; a struggle that needs to put life before profit. We will only win this struggle – as China has already done – if our people are united and disciplined, if governments earn our respect by their actions, and if we act i…

Credit: Athar Parvaiz/IPS

AMSTERDAM, May 4 2020 (IPS) – The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated inequalities and revealed to what extent current economic models are not sustainable. It has also shown that most countries are not equipped to cope with a health crisis.

The that the lives and livelihoods of 265 million people in low and middle-income countries will be under severe threat unless swift action is taken to tackle the pandemic.

This is especially true for the in the world who still do not have access to electricity. And the further 3 billion who rely on inefficient stoves and polluting fuels like kerosene, biomass (wood, animal dung and crop …

Linda Eckerbom Cole is the Founder and Executive Director of . She shuttles between Santa Barbara, California and Uganda.

KAMPALA, Uganda, Apr 7 2020 (IPS) – We are living in uncertain times. All of us are experiencing the Corona pandemic in various ways. For most it means quarantine and physical isolation. We worry about family members, loss of income and not knowing what the future will look like- or how long this will continue.

While the spread of Covid-19 across Sub-Saharan Africa is a few weeks behindwhat is happening in the US and Europe, the situation in Uganda and other east African countries has begun to shift dramatically in recent days.

A month …

Ensuring sex workers’ rights was essential, not just for the workers themselves, but for any country’s wider society, including public health

The Russian capital, Moscow. Sex workers in the country say although public opinion about their work is shifting, they still face marginalisation and criminalisation. Credit: Ed Holt/IPS

BRATISLAVA, Apr 27 2020 (IPS) – Despite seeing a shift in attitudes towards them in recent years, Russian sex workers say they continue to struggle with marginalisation and criminalisation which poses a danger to them and the wider public.

Sex work is illegal in Russia and, historically, public attitudes to the women, and more recently men…

Yasmine Sherif is Director, Education Cannot Wait

NEW YORK, Jun 22 2020 (IPS) – To realize the concept of ‘build back better,’ we need a foundation. That foundation is education. This is an incontestable truth.

It has now been three months since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 as a global pandemic. The coronavirus has both exposed and exacerbated the global inequities that lay at the core of our frail social fabric as a human family. The World Bank estimates that as a result of COVID-19. The World Food Programme cautions that globally from 135 million to 265 million. UNDP forecasts human development is . Meanwhile, the number of displaced populations has continued to rise to an unprecedented 79.5 million by the end of 2019, according to UNHCR’s annu…

Sophapan Ratanachena-McWhortor is Tobacco Tax Program Manager of SEATCA* & Dr Hana Ross is the Principal Research Officer of Economics of Tobacco Control Project (ETCP) at the University of Cape Town.

Credit: SEATCA

BANGKOK, Thailand, Jul 21 2020 (IPS) – A factoid is unreliable information repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact. One such factoid repeatedly echoed across the globe by the tobacco industry is that tobacco tax increases worsen cigarette smuggling.

For governments facing challenges to curb smuggling, particularly in the global South, this factoid has scared political leaders from effectively using taxes as a public health tool.

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