-
Rethinking Peacebuilding in Northeastern Nigeria
›In October 2024, women from countries across the globe converged on New York for the United Nations Security Council’s annual open debate on Women, Peace and Security (WPS).
In Nigeria, however, thousands of women and girls were sighing in despair. Many of them were thinking about where they might find their next meal. A humanitarian crisis in Nigeria’s northeast region remains critical, and people living there are in dire need of food, clothing and shelter.
-
US-Africa Energy Development: An Opportunity for the Trump Administration?
›China Environment Forum // Guest Contributor // December 12, 2024 // By Kalim Shah & Etchu TabenyangWhile traditional fuels likely will remain part of Africa’s energy portfolio for some time to come, the fossil fuel industry does face strong headwinds from a continuing global march towards alternative sources of clean energy. Indeed, the energy poverty experienced by nearly a billion Africans seems incomprehensible given the combination of massive untapped oil and gas resources, as well as available hydropower, solar and wind potential across the continent.
-
Swachh Bharat Mission: Intended and Unintended Consequences
›Open defecation (OD) has been demonstrated to be a major contributing factor to poor health, resulting in adverse social and economic impacts due to work and educational disruptions. Despite various policy-driven efforts since 1954 to eradicate OD, it remains highly prevalent in India—especially in rural areas where there is a lack of toilets. A survey conducted in 2012 revealed that 60% of rural households (and 9% of urban households) had no toilet access. India’s open defecation rate of 40% was one of the highest in the world—more than three times the global average of 12%.
-
US Agricultural Success Built on US-China Scientific Exchange
›China Environment Forum // Cool Agriculture // Guest Contributor // December 5, 2024 // By Karen Mancl“History teaches that China and the United States gain from cooperation and lose from confrontation” was part of the congratulatory note from Xi Jinping to President-elect Trump. Xi also stressed both sides should continue to uphold “mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation.” The cooperation between these two superpowers began in 1972 when President Richard Nixon and Premier Zhou Enlai signed the Shanghai Communiqué, years before they established diplomatic relations.
-
Obstetric Violence in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Struggle for Dignified Maternal Care
›In August 2013, Josephine Majani, a mother of three from Bungoma County in Kenya, endured a harrowing birth experience. Despite her repeated pleas for help during labor, the nurses in the hospital ignored her. She struggled to walk to the labor ward while in intense pain, but all of its beds were occupied. Majani was forced to give birth on the cold concrete floor. Subsequently, nurses there subjected her to verbal and physical abuse—even making her carry her placenta back to the labor ward.
-
Children and Slaves are Mining our Critical Metals (and Not Just Cobalt)
›This article is adapted from Vince Beiser’s “Power Metal” newsletter.
If you’ve heard anything about the dark side of the shift to renewable energy and digital tech—one of the main topics of my new book, Power Metal: The Race for the Resources That Will Shape the Future—you’ve probably heard about the children working in cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). That particular outrage has been covered by major international news outlets, human rights organizations and another recent book, Cobalt Red. But it turns out there are many other places where children, as well as enslaved adults, are producing the metals that go into our electric cars and cell phones.
-
Guam and Vanuatu: Different Paths from Environmental Change to Human Insecurity
›Our present ecocrisis drives human insecurity. Single weather events killed hundreds in 2024, even in wealthy countries such as the United States or Spain. And beyond that staggering toll in human lives lurk staggering amounts of money required to repair and rebuild. In the United States alone, inflation-adjusted disaster-attributable costs have reached on average $153 billion each year. These factors and others make global environmental change a severe risk to human security.
-
Confronting Pronatalism is Essential for Reproductive Justice and Ecological Sustainability
›Pronatalism, the push for women to have more children, has elbowed its way into prominence in public discourse. In the United States, cultural and institutional pressures on women to bear children are articulated in various ways, from negative portrayals of women who don’t consider having a child a viable choice for themselves, to a burgeoning Silicon Valley subculture that advocates having “tons of kids” to save the world, to policy proposals that would further restrict reproductive choice or limit the voting power of the childless. The stigmatization of people without children and the recent rise in contemporary pronatalism is a global phenomenon.
Showing posts from category Guest Contributor.