It is shocking to see how soldiers can, willingly, misuse their powers. The soldiers in this video are beating up a helpless youth as though he was an animal.

The Police Commissioner now says he will act.

The Kenya government should do something with the soldiers in this video and compensate the boy. These soldiers do not deserve to be in service.

End

CLIMATE CHANGE: Understanding Rio+20

Photo: Jason Gutierrez/IRIN

We have to take action now to sustain life in the coming years

JOHANNESBURG,  – A Nobel laureate, a Swedish environmentalist’s idea, the “doughnut” concept, Scandinavia’s sense of social capital, measuring the quality of life, and valuing the oceans are just some of the things trending in the run-up to the Rio+20 UN Conference on Sustainable Development due to be held on 20-22 June 2012.

Rio+20 will look at how economies have grown at the expense of natural resources and human capital since the last Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, when the concept of “sustainable development” gained currency.

The idea of growth meeting “the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” has not gained much traction since the 1992 conference – largely because countries continued to equate development with economic growth, and sustainable development languished as a fringe environmental concern, says a UN-commissioned study. 

Twenty years later, “sustainable development remains a generally agreed concept, rather than a day-to-day, on-the-ground, practical reality,” says a report by the UN High-level Panel on Global Sustainability. 

Since 1992, alarm bells on several interconnected factors with a far-reaching impact on growth, resources and the quality of life – accelerated man-made climate change, population growth, increasing numbers of hungry people, rapidly depleting and more expensive fossil fuels, and a decline in food production – have been ringing louder.

“Achieving sustainability requires us to transform the global economy. Tinkering on the margins will not do the job,” said the UN Panel’s report.

Optimists in the scientific and aid community hope Rio+20 will develop from an opportunity to reflect into a collective effort to plot the world’s future growth path.

IRIN aims to make the conference more relevant and accessible by examining some of the ideas circulating ahead of it.

1. Elinor Ostrom: Fast emerging as the moral and academic compass of the conference, Ostrom’s work, which won her the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2009, shows that growth combined with the sustainable use of natural resources is achievable. Ostrom looked at certain rural communities in Asia, Africa and Europe which have for centuries successfully managed in a sustainable way their common resources – grazing land, water and forests.

When the Scandinavian countries had to set targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, they did not consider the markets… but went ahead because they value the well-being of humans and environment…

The communities developed while preventing problems such as overgrazing, misuse of forests or over-consumption of water. The fact that Ostrom took a multidisciplinary approach (rooted in economics, environment and social capital, successfully combining the three pillars of sustainable development), makes her the expert everyone wants to hear from. She was the chief scientific adviser to the recent Planet Under Pressure conference – an attempt by the scientific community to set the agenda for Rio+20.

2. Planetary Boundaries and Future Earth: The concept of Planetary Boundaries proposed in 2009 by Johan Rockstrom of the Stockholm Resilience Centre and 28 scientists, posits that there are nine critical Earth-system processes and associated thresholds that we need to respect and keep within, in order to protect against the risk of irreversible or even catastrophic environmental change on a continental or global scale.

Doing so would create a safe operating space for humanity. According to the concept’s authors, three of the nine suggested thresholds have already been crossed (climate change, biodiversity and the nitrogen cycle). The threshold for the phosphorus cycle (linked, within the concept, to the nitrogen cycle) has also been crossed, according to a scientific paper in 2011. 

The status of the concept grew after being mentioned in the UN Panel report. The Boundaries concept has inspired the “nexus approach” between food, water and energy, which was also noted by the UN panel. “All three [food, water and energy] need to be fully integrated, not treated separately if we are to deal with the global food security crisis,” said the report.

Rockstrom, last week announced the launch in Rio of Future Earth, a 10-year collaborative initiative which will provide the knowledge to help societies meet their sustainable development goals. The International Council for Science, the Belmont Forum (a high-level group of donors who fund climate research), the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), the UN University, and the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) are all part of the initiative.

Tom Mitchell, head of climate change at the UK’s Overseas Development Institute (ODI), was a bit skeptical about how “10 years of science inquiry” would help. He said countries needed solutions now – embedded in governments and designed to cater for national requirements.

3. The doughnut: In February 2012, Kate Raworth, a senior researcher with Oxfam, pointed out that human growth was glaringly absent from Rockstrom’s concept. She combined social boundaries (such as access to water, health services, food, jobs, energy and education for all) within the planetary boundaries – highlighting the need for an environmentally safe space which needed to be compatible with poverty eradication and rights for all. Between the planetary ceiling and the social foundation lay an area – shaped like a doughnut – which is a “safe and just space for humanity to thrive in”, her paper said. 

Raworth said well-designed policies can promote both poverty eradication and environmental sustainability. She told IRIN the objective was to be able to take care of everyone’s minimum needs, while re-defining the meaning of prosperity, which is equated with material wealth and associated with over-consumption (e.g. food, vehicles). “Governments need to look beyond taking care of people’s material needs and focus on quality of life, qualities of social relationships.”

The concept has picked up a lot of momentum.

“The concept of Planetary Boundaries is almost pure science,” noted Andrew Scott, researcher with ODI, while the “doughnut” concept was grounded in human reality and the need to agree on a minimum standard of living, whilst guarding against over-consumption. This calls for the need to review UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which were not very ambitious to begin with, he said. “Instead of calling for the eradication of poverty it [the MDGs] settled for the halving of poverty by 2015.”

Felix Dodds, eminent author and head of the Stakeholder Forum for a Sustainable Future, also enthused about the “doughnut proposal” in the Planet Under Pressure conference, and suggested the world should strive to turn everyone into a member of the middle-class.

4. Sustainable agriculture: After years of lobbying for an agriculture system which would respect the biosystem and at the same time increase the production of quality food to keep the numbers of malnourished down, scientists feel they are making headway. The proposed draft outcome document of the Rio+20 conference makes note of their concerns. But is that good enough – will that force a change and make sustainable agriculture a part of mainstream policy in countries?

Kenyan scientist Judi Wakhungu, a member of the Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change, says attitudes are changing on the ground: Sustainable agriculture is now being taught in universities in developing countries; donors particularly in Scandinavian countries are more willing to fund such initiatives tailored by developing country governments; and at government levels, sectors such as water, energy and agriculture have begun to talk to each other. 

Christopher Barrett, who teaches economics and agriculture at Cornell University in the USA, said: “The central issue is high-level political commitment to enacting the necessary policies.” He said the “lofty rhetoric” of the L’Aquila G-8 summit, or earlier summits such as Gleneagles, have “not been matched by significant new investments or policy innovations by the world’s major economies”. Progress towards sustainable agriculture was “incremental and dwarfed by the fiscal and employment challenges faced by the OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] countries,” he added, and we should “not hold our breath for any great breakthrough” at Rio+20.

5. Social capital versus market-based approaches: Academically, social capital is a concept which places value on social relations and the role of cooperation to get collective results. The concept is making waves among development experts and the scientific community in the Rio+20 context, particularly as it forces societies to reflect on their value systems.

“It [social capital] is too technical a word,” says Oxfam’s Raworth, but essentially the concept is about valuing quality of life and interpersonal relations more than material wealth. Brazilian scientist Carlos Nobre, a member of the Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change, explained: “It is a concept followed by Scandinavian countries – where human well-being is more important than the market value of a particular resource.

Photo: Shayne Robinson/Greenpeace

Multilateral processes to make life on earth sustainable such as the UN talks on climate change have been moving at a snail’s pace

“For instance when the Scandinavian countries had to set targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, they did not consider the markets and industries but went ahead because they value the well-being of humans and environment more than anything else.”

But the reality is that most countries value markets more than human and environmental well-being, say experts, so a value has to be attributed to a natural resources to make people take care of it. As UNEP head Achim Steiner says, “we have to place ecology in economics.”

“We need to create markets around natural resources such as provision of environmental services,” said ODI’s Mitchell. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change did that with trees and carbon, but the process has not got very far.

Both Raworth and Nobre said that to achieve real change, attitudes to wealth needed to be changed, but this could only happen from the bottom up. “Market-based mechanisms to control and exploit the use of our natural resources should be seen as a means to get to a state of well-being and not as the goal,” said Nobre.

Richard Norgaard, one of the founders of ecological economics, said at the Planet Under Pressure conference that instead of markets dictating and shaping our economies, “we need to ask what kind of economy we want to live in and then design incentives for the markets.”

6. Measuring wellness: Putting a value on the quantity of natural resources that had to be exploited to achieve certain outcomes could help in terms of sustainability, argued Pablo Muñoz, an economist working on the Inclusive Wealth Report (IWR) project, a joint initiative of UN Univeristy-International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Climate Change (IHDP) and UNEP, aiming to measure, among other forms of wealth, the Natural Capital of countries. The report will be released at Rio+20.

“A country can exhaust all its natural resources while posting positive GDP [Gross Domestic Product] growth,” said Muñoz. The world needs “an indicator that estimates the wealth of nations – natural, human and manufactured and ideally even the social and ecological constituents of human well-being,” he added.

Some findings of the reports were released at the Planet Under Pressure conference.

Between 1990 and 2008, the wealth of Brazil and India in terms of per capita GDP rose 34 percent and 120 percent respectively. Natural capital, the sum of a country’s assets, from forests to fossil fuels and minerals, declined by 46 percent in Brazil and 31percent in India, according the new indicator. Brazil’s “Inclusive Wealth” rose by 3 percent and India’s rose by 9 percent over that time. But do not expect countries to start using the new indicator any time soon. “It took years for countries to come round to using GDP – so it will be a few years yet,” said Muñoz.

7.Valuing the oceans: Attempts to put a value on the exploitation of natural resources are ongoing globally. A new book by the Stockholm Environment Institute calculates the impact of climate change on the economic value of the oceans. It says climate change (in the last 200 years the oceans have absorbed 25-30 percent of the global accumulated emissions of carbon dioxide) alone could reduce the economic value of the oceans by up to US$2 trillion a year by 2100. 

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source www.irinnews.org

UGANDA: Hearing impaired demand inclusion in HIV programmes

Photo: Samuel Okiror/IRIN

Hearing impaired children at school in Kampala, Uganda

KAMPALA, – Leaders of the hearing impaired community in Uganda say the government’s HIV programmes have failed them because their special needs are not taken into consideration.

“I am disappointed with the way the government has acted… they are not sensitive to deaf persons. There are no specialized health facilities where the deaf can access HIV services,” Alex Ndezi, a hearing impaired Ugandan legislator for persons with disabilities, told IRIN/PlusNews.

“The government has failed to train health workers in sign language. Whenever they [hearing impaired people] go to health centres they need interpreters, who require payment… [few] can afford to pay… [them].”

According to UNAIDS, people with disabilities may be at risk of HIV infection for a number of reasons, including “insufficient access to appropriate HIV prevention and support services, and their higher risk of experiencing sexual assault or abuse… They may also be turned away from HIV education forums or not be invited by outreach workers because of assumptions that they are not sexually active, or do not engage in other risk behaviours such as injecting drugs.”

Alex Lawoko, chairperson of northern Uganda’s Gulu Association, told IRIN/PlusNews that hearing-impaired girls and women were particularly vulnerable to sexual exploitation and often became sex workers due to poverty.

“We need to include livelihood projects in fighting against HIV/AIDS in the deaf community… deaf females we interviewed in regard to their reasons for sexual trade said they are looking for income, as they lack money to support their life,” he said.

Hearing impaired people miss out on radio programmes and adverts aimed at educating people about HIV, while television broadcasts on the topic are rarely accompanied by sign language interpretation.

Christine Ondoa, Uganda’s Health Minister, told IRIN/PlusNews that her ministry had finalized a document on HIV/AIDS strategic plans, programmes, services, and “all the HIV and related issues among people with disabilities; all [the points] they have raised are addressed in the document”.

Survey

The Ministry of Health, the US Centres for Disease Control (CDC) and the School of Public Health at Makerere University in the capital, Kampala, will soon begin the first ever HIV-related survey among hearing impaired people in the greater Kampala area. There are no statistics on HIV levels among the hearing impaired.

Whenever they [hearing impaired people] go to health centres, they need interpreters, who require payment… [few] can afford to pay them

Using a video-based sign language questionnaire, the research will investigate respondents’ general health status, alcohol, tobacco, and drug use, as well as access to health care, HIV testing, treatment and care, and HIV-related risk behaviours. It will also offer participants the option to test for HIV and syphilis. Treatment for syphilis will be provided while HIV-infected respondents will be referred to care and treatment providers.

The survey, funded by the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), aims to interview a sample size of 1,000 deaf adults residing in Kampala, Mukono, Wakiso and Mpigi districts. It is expected to start by June 2012 and run for six months.

“Surveillance is a core public health function. It informs both policy-making and programme planning. Surveys are also used for public health advocacy and general community awareness,” said Wolfgang Hladik, an epidemiologist at CDC-Uganda.

The survey is the first step towards an opportunity to create well-informed, effective HIV prevention, treatment and care strategies for hearing impaired people. “It’s a welcome move. We are going to support and ensure it succeeds,” said Ndezi. “There has been no information and data on HIV among the deaf persons.”

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source www.irinnews.org

CLIMATE CHANGE: Farmers and forecasts

Photo: Olivier Monnier/IRIN

Farmers in Côte d’Ivoire learn to use rain gauges

BINGERVILLE/DAKAR,  – Unpredictable rainfall in parts of Côte d’Ivoire cost some farmers over half of their harvest in 2011 producers told IRIN, but, armed with more knowledge about how to get weather reports and interpret them, they might still have been able to boost their output, say agricultural specialists.
 
Marc Kouamé, a farmer in the north who grows okra, peanuts and cassava, told IRIN that farmers “no longer know where to turn” because of the changing seasons. “I lost half of my peanut production because I didn’t plant it at the right time,” he said. Many farmers feel more and more helpless in the face of such uncertainty.
 
Between 1971 and 2000, rainfall in Côte d’Ivoire dropped by 15 percent, according to Augustin Kouakou Nzue, head of agro-climatic studies in the National Weather Service (Direction Météorologie Nationale), although it has increased slightly since 2000.
 
In southern Côte d’Ivoire, farmers took clearly defined seasons for granted until the 1980s: rains from April to mid-July; a short dry season from mid-July to September; a short rainy season until November; and finally a long dry season from December to March. Now, the rains come later and finish earlier, with longer dry seasons and patchy distribution, says Nzue.
 
Most growers rely on rain-fed production, so the long-term impact of this shift could devastate Ivoirian farmers, who make up 60 percent of the workforce. Cocoa, the country’s main export crop, could also be affected – a September 2011 study by the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture, based in Cali, Colombia, predicts that rising temperatures may make it too hot to grow cocoa by 2050.
 
Sidiki Cissé, head of the National Agency to Support Rural Development (ANADER) in the commercial capital, Abidjan, is clearly worried. “The desperation of farmers is clear to see,” he told IRIN.
 
Poor and erratic rainfall in 2011 and the subsequent poor harvests across the southern Saharan band have thrown 13 million people into a food security crisis in the Sahelian zones of Burkina Faso, Mauritania, Nigeria, Niger, Chad, Mali and Senegal.
 
Donors and investors are channelling climate adaptation funds into improved weather forecasting and more sophisticated climate science, but few groups are focusing on how climate information can better be used by farmers and communities in disaster-prone areas.
 
“People don’t see this kind of stuff as a critical research priority,” said Amane Tall, who is affiliated to the US-based Johns Hopkins University and the International Committee of the Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre in The Netherlands. “They invest in improving the science of climate change – which is great – but how do we make links between the science and the decision-making at all levels?”
 
The various communities working on climate change – scientists, environmentalists, humanitarian NGOs, disaster risk reduction experts – have tended to work separately, in their silos, but now dialogue is needed, said Emma Visman, Futures Group Manager at the Humanitarian Futures Programme (HFP), which tries to prepare the humanitarian community for future disaster scenarios. “Dialogue seems to be the key word,” she said, “but we don’t yet have the resources or space to do it.”
 
A few groups are attempting to bridge the information gap, including various national meteorological agencies, the World Meteorological Organization, the HFP, and some humanitarian and development NGOs such as Christian Aid.
 
Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Gambia, Mali, Guinea and Togo, among others, are part of the West Africa Metragri programme, co-funded by the World Meteorological Organization and the State Agency for Meteorology (AEMET) in Spain. The plan is to train 200 farmers in Côte d’Ivoire to become more aware of rainfall patterns in their areas, and how to use rain gauges to monitor precipitation.
 
Nzue told farmers at a training session in Bingerville, Côte d’Ivoire the best time to sow certain crops is one or two days after the first 20mm of rain has fallen. In 2011 this would have been on 21 March in Bouaké in central Côte d’Ivoire, and on 11 April in San Pedro in the southwest.
 
Farmers are asked to send the rainfall data they collect to the National Weather Service [Direccion Météorologie Nationale), so that agronomy research centres can draw up new crop calendars to help them adapt planting schedules to their particular micro-climate, said Amin Gbo, chief executive officer of ANADER.
 

Photo: Nancy Palus/IRIN

Studies predict cocoa plants may not withstand higher global temperatures

Sidiki Cissé, head of ANADER, says corn, rice, sorghum and millet are most affected by changing rainfall patterns. In Burkina Faso local corn varieties suffer most because unlike imported varieties, they have not been designed to grow more quickly with less water, said Judith Bienvenue Fanfo, head of the Burkina Faso National Meteorological Office, which also collaborated on a project that has trained 450 farmers since 2007 to use climate and weather information.
 
HFP has worked on pilot studies in the Mbeere district of eastern Kenya and flood-prone Kaffrine in central Senegal to bring together communities, humanitarian partners (Christian Aid Kenya and the Senegalese Red Cross) and National Met offices to determine how to improve the exchange and use of weather information.
 
In Senegal, weather forecasts are broadcast on national radio, in newspapers, on television and via the internet, but these avenues are not readily accessible by local communities, said Visman.
 
The Kenya Meteorological Department (KMD) makes available daily, weekly, monthly and seasonal forecasts, but most people are unable to access the channels it uses to distribute this information and find the format difficult to understand, so they resort to using inaccurate information in uncertified channels instead.
 
Catering to the information preferences of individual groups can be resource-intensive. In one Senegalese village, asked to set up a climate road show women traders wanted a face-to-face information exchange; men wanted to use the mosque, while youths thought it best to share information under “talking trees” where they gather in the late afternoons.
 
After just a few months, the information exchange in Senegal started paying off, said Tall. Families said they kept their children home from school when forecasts predicted strong winds and rain. “There is also a psychological element – people are relieved to have the information and it can be very empowering,” she said. In Kenya the project has run less than 12 months and it is too soon to measure the results.
 
The Met Offices in both countries have signed memorandums of understanding with the humanitarian partner involved to ensure better collaboration.
 
Funding
 
Richard Ewbank, Climate Change Coordinator at Christian Aid, says such projects are likely to remain limited, due to a lack of funding for mitigation and resilience-building. Despite a complex web of climate change adaptation funds – including those of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), money from foundations and multilaterals, and promises by developed countries to mobilize US$100 billion to boost adaptation efforts by 2020 – it took HFP two years to find funding for its 12-month pilot project, before it eventually tapped into the UK Department for International Development’s Climate and Development Knowledge Network.
 
Christian Aid has its own church-based funding source. “It’s hard to persuade donors to pre-fund season forecast information – they prefer to fund humanitarian situations when they hit,” Ewbank told IRIN.
 
However, as donors start to see the pay-off from more detailed weather information in the right hands, it may generate more interest. “If climate services get more accurate,” he said, “then clearly our scope to use these tools will also improve.”
 
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source www.irinnews.org