The global humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders (Medicins Sans Frontieres) said it is imperative that rich countries stop stonewalling negotiations over a temporary patent waiver for coronavirus vaccines as the ultra-contagious Delta variant ravages poor and under-protected regions. Just 1.32% of people in low-income countries have been vaccinated, compared to 50.15% of people in rich nations.

“It is outrageous to see countries blocking the TRIPS waiver that is desperately needed as an important tool to remove legal barriers and allow production to be scaled up by multiple manufacturers for critical Covid-19 drugs, diagnostics, and vaccines,” Dr. Tom Ellman, director of Doctors Without Borders’ Southern Africa Medical Unit, said in a statement Monday, referring to the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights. “As many countries in Africa right now are reporting a high number of deaths due to the spread of new and existing variants of Covid-19,” said Ellman, “these governments are in dire need of vaccines, diagnostics, oxygen, and other treatments to help save lives of critically ill patients.”

He continued, “At a moment when we are in race against time to save lives and control the spread of unchecked transmission and development of new dangerous variants, pharmaceutical corporations’ business-as-usual approach is intolerable,” Ellman said. “With potentially promising treatments in the pipeline, opposing countries must stop filibustering the waiver proposal and support it to cover not just vaccines, but also treatments, diagnostics, and other health technologies.”

First introduced by India and South Africa in October, the TRIPS waiver aims to boost global vaccine supply by temporarily lifting intellectual property protections that have barred manufacturers around the world from producing generic vaccines. While backed by more than 100 WTO member nations, the proposed waiver has been mired in fruitless talks for months as powerful rich countries—including Germany, the United Kingdom, and Canada—remain opposed to suspending patents, leaving much of the developing world without access to life-saving shots.

Campaigners have argued that by helping pharmaceutical companies maintain monopoly control over vaccine technology and production, wealthy nations are prioritizing corporate profits over ending the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than four million people worldwide. Rich countries and pharmaceutical giants emphasise vaccine donation pledges and bilateral production deals, but critics call such approaches piecemeal that will not be enough to manufacture and evenly distribute the 11 billion doses necessary to end the pandemic.

Indonesia, the world’s fourth-most populous nation, this month overtook India and Brazil in the number of daily cases, becoming the new epicenter of the pandemic. Hundreds of children in Indonesia have died from the coronavirus in recent weeks, many of them under age 5, a mortality rate greater than that of any other country and one that challenges the idea that children face minimal risk from Covid-19. The jump in child deaths coincides with the surge of the Delta variant, which has swept through Southeast Asia, where vaccination rates are low, causing record outbreaks not only in Indonesia, but in Thailand, Malaysia, Myanmar, and Vietnam as well.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that the international community must “spare no effort to increase vaccine supply” for poor countries that have been denied access for months as pharmaceutical companies sell most of their supply to rich nations.  Tedros continued. “This pandemic is an unprecedented crisis that demands unprecedented action. With so many lives on the line, profits and patents must come second.”

‘A Race Against Time’: Doctors Without Borders Implores Rich Nations to Stop Stalling Patent Waiver | Common Dreams News

 Record-breaking heatwaves are set to become much more likely in future, according to research. Such extreme heatwaves are all but impossible without global heating.

The shocking temperature extremes suffered in the Pacific north-west and in Australia 2019-2020 were “exactly what we are talking about”, said the scientists. But they said the world had yet to see anything close to the worst impacts possible, even under the global heating that had already happened.

The highly populated regions in North America, Europe and China were where the record-shattering extremes are most likely to occur.

The new computing modelling study found that heatwaves that smash previous records by roughly 5C would become two to seven times more likely in the next three decades and three to 21 times more likely from 2051–2080, unless carbon emissions are immediately slashed. 

Prof Michael Mann, at Pennsylvania State University in the US, said: “This study underscores something that has been apparent in the record weather extremes we’ve seen this summer: dangerous climate change is here, and it’s now simply a matter of how dangerous we are willing to let it get.” He added, “If anything, this latest study, and our own, are underestimating the potential for deadly heat extremes in the future, in the absence of significant climate action.” 

In the UK, flash flooding will become a more common occurrence as the climate crisis worsens. Buildings will need to be redesigned and public areas revamped to include better drainage channels and storm drains.

Adam Winslow, the chief executive of Aviva General Insurance, said: “It’s too late to stop the effects of climate change from happening, but we can reduce the impacts it will have on our lives. Action is needed now to improve regulation about where and how properties are built, encourage the use of resilient materials, and consider innovative and natural solutions to climate change.”

‘Record-shattering’ heat becoming much more likely, says climate study | Climate change | The Guardian

Flash floods will be more common as climate crisis worsens, say scientists | Flooding | The Guardian

Even if all current Paris agreement climate pledges are met, the world is still set to see temperature rises of about 2.4C by the end of the century – well above the 1.5C of warming that scientists say will already lead to severe climate impacts. Nations are under pressure to up their climate ambitions and businesses, too, are being increasingly pushed to take meaningful action. In response, corporations have put out a flurry of climate commitments. 

At least a fifth of the world’s 2,000 largest public companies have now made some kind of “net zero” pledge to cancel out their carbon emissions. They are promising to invest billions in clean energy and pledging to halt deforestation.

Despite the record number of corporate climate assurances, an analysis of 9,300 listed companies in July found that they are still on course to exceed their “carbon budgets” – the total amount of emissions they can release and still keep in line with 1.5C of warming – within the next six years.

“It is easy to say that becoming net-zero is a high priority, but it is another to take action, especially immediate action.” said Remy Briand, head of environmental, social and governance at index provider MSCI. While some companies have placed climate change at the top of their agenda, he added, others have made weak pledges or failed to act at all. Many corporations’  net zero pledges decades away, and many offer few interim targets.

  Gonzalo Muñoz, UN climate expert, explains “It’s what we do today, and in these next five to 10 years, that will determine whether we succeed or not.”

The climate pledges are voluntary and the self-regulation appears to be a means to avoid government intervention.

There’s a lack of easy answers for some energy-intensive industries with huge carbon footprints, such as steel, cement, aviation and shipping, which are notoriously hard to decarbonize. Sectors which rely on high consumption of products with big climate footprints, such as fast fashion and meat, will also need to adapt significantly for the world to limit temperature rise to 1.5C.

Some of the boldest ambitious pledges rely on carbon removal technologies that don’t even exist yet, or at least not at the scale required.

Others are heavily reliant on carbon offsets, which allow companies to invest in “nature based” programs like tree planting or forest protection to counteract their own emissions. Offset projects, however, have been plagued by allegations of flawed accounting, greenwash and sometimes even of actively fueling climate change.

Many companies have publicly called for governments to take stronger climate action; behind the scenes it can be a different story, donating funds to politicians who oppose determined climate action. Business PR departments focus attention on personal responsibility with adverts for “more sustainable” products yet they continue business-as-usual models of consumption and production.

“The discussion that moves us away from corporate responsibility to personal responsibility is a huge distraction,” said Shannon Lloyd, an assistant professor of management at Concordia University in Canada. “As an individual, your choices have very little impact in terms of reducing the carbon or other environmental footprint of products. It’s more about getting laws put in place or policies in place than individual purchasing decisions.”

 Rockhopper Exploration, based in Salisbury, Wiltshire, bought a licence to drill for oil off Italy’s Adriatic coast in 2014. There had already been a wave of opposition to the project, with protests that drew tens of thousands of people. Within two years, the campaign won over the Italian parliament, which imposed a ban on oil and gas projects within 12 nautical miles of the Italian coast. Italy could be forced to pay millions of pounds in damages. Rockhopper, which used one of these services to bring its ISDS case, has a stock market value of just £42m, so an ISDS award potentially worth hundreds of millions of pounds would be significant for its finances.

Daniel Slater, an analyst at stockbroker Arden Partners, says any windfall would be “tremendously helpful” for funding Rockhopper’s project off the coast of the Falklands – an as yet untapped oilfield containing 1.7bn barrels of oil which, if burned, could produce around one and a half times the annual greenhouse gas emissions of the UK.

 The legal action is fuelling concern that oil firms will be suing using a relatively obscure legal mechanism known as investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) to prevent green policies, potentially hampering climate action. It allows companies to sue governments for introducing policies that could affect their future earnings. Reports suggest Rockhopper has spent $29m (£21m) on the offshore project to date and is claiming damages of $275m based on expected future profits from the oilfield.

Devised in the 1950s by a banker and the chief counsel for oil company Royal Dutch Shell, ISDS was designed to protect companies’ investments in newly independent countries, where it was feared that governments might try to wrest back control of their natural resources. The concept gradually took hold and it is now written into thousands of investment treaties worldwide. Decades later, fossil fuel companies are using it to protect their assets, this time in the face of an oncoming wave of climate legislation. That is because ISDS is part of the energy charter treaty (ECT), meaning energy companies can sue any of the 53 signatory countries if they take action that could dent those companies’ future earnings, such as banning the exploitation of coal, oil and gas reserves.

German energy company RWE is suing the Netherlands for €1.4bn (£1.2bn) over its plans to phase out coal. Several London-listed companies have recently launched lawsuits under ISDS, including mining companies Anglo American and Glencore, which are suing the Colombian government after they were banned in 2017 from exploiting part of a huge opencast coal mine because of its impact on the environment. Ascent Resources is suing Slovenia after the country’s environment agency asked it to carry out an environmental assessment (EIA) before embarking on a fracking project, which activists say could pollute critical water sources nearby. State’s assets abroad can be seized in order to pay any damages. Scottish oil and gas company Cairn Energy, for example, is attempting to seize the planes of state-owned Air India after India was ordered to pay the company $1.2bn in damages under ISDS.

Cases such as these could slow down action on the climate crisis, as governments await the outcome of legal battles that could take years to resolve. 

Ruth Bergan, senior adviser at the campaign group Trade Justice Movement, says: “People are watching these cases and there is evidence that they look at what is happening elsewhere and it puts the brakes on their own policies. It also just adds a huge price tag to climate action and we can’t afford it.” Bergan says there is concern that the UK could delay or water down climate change legislation for fear of being sued.

An analysis by Investigate Europe shows it is the most vulnerable of all the countries in Europe, with more than £120bn worth of fossil fuel infrastructure owned by foreign companies. France and Spain both want to withdraw from the treaty, but that would not protect them from claims related to past investments. Italy left the ECT in 2016 but is being sued under a “sunset clause” which means former members are subject to the treaty for 20 years after they have left.

Outrage as Italy faces multimillion pound damages to UK oil firm | Oil and gas companies | The Guardian

The United Nations will host a Global Food Systems Summit in New York in September on the future of agriculture. Many peasant and indigenous movements from Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas that collectively represent most of the world’s small-scale food producers have called for a total boycott of this summit. La Via Campesina and the World Forum of Fisher People, among many others, have refused to join the preliminary consultations set up by the organisers and stand firm in their decision to boycott the summit. They are supported by scientists, researchers, faculty members, and educators who work in agriculture and food systems, who also issued a call to boycott the event. The summit is firmly in the hands of “experts” known to be staunch defenders of industrial agriculture, and are driving the agenda. 

The current and the two former Special Rapporteurs on the Right to Food have criticised the current format of the summit for not building on past food summit experiences and pointed out that “the CFS [the UN’s Committee on World Food Security] already has the structure that the Summit organizers have been hastily reconstructing”.

 Food sovereignty is the right of people to determine their food and agricultural systems. It addresses the people’s most urgent and pressing need: to have healthy, nutritious and climatically appropriate food grown in their locality or neighbourhood. Agroecological and localised peasant production of food respects and co-exists with our natural surroundings and promotes humanist principles of solidarity and collectivism. It keeps away from harmful pesticides and chemical fertilisers and fosters a diversity of nutritious crops, unlike the industry practice of monocropping. 

Small-scale farmers play a crucial role in creating sustainable food systems. Small farms make a huge contribution to global food security, producing at least 30% of global food. In sub-Saharan Africa, the role of small-scale farms is even more significant, accounting for 80% of the food produced. Africa has the ability to feed the world. Progress in African agriculture has been impressive — production is up 160%over the past 30 years, far above the global average of 100%.

 Globally, around 500 million small-scale farms support the livelihoods of more than two billion people. Yet only 1.7% of climate finance goes to small farms. This is a tiny fraction of what is needed.

A handful of transnational companies dominate the current global food and commodity trade. For instance, just two firms – Dow Dupont and Monsanto-Bayer Crop Science – hold a 53 percent market share in the seed industry. Merely three firms own 70 percent of the global agrochemical industry that manufactures and sells chemicals and pesticides used on crops. This corporate concentration is also evident in the livestock breeding sector, animal pharmaceutical industry, farming machinery, commodity trade and so forth.

Therefore, from the sowing of seeds and growing of crops to the processing, distribution, and consumption of food, transnational agribusinesses control and decide everything. Most of these corporations are now entering into partnerships with Big Tech firms to digitalise the global food system to cement their dominance.

But here is what is striking about these giant corporations. Despite their control over nearly 75 percent of the world’s food production-related natural resources, they can barely feed a third of the global population. Furthermore, they are responsible for most of the $400bn worth of food lost annually and for the emission of large amounts of greenhouse gases.

The small-scale farmers, fisherfolk, farmworkers, peasants, pastoralists and Indigenous people – with barely a quarter of the world’s food-production-related natural resources to their name and often neglected in public policies – continue to provide about 70 percent of the world’s food. Their web of local small-scale food producers stepped up in every corner of the world when the industrial food supply chain crumbled under the COVID-19 pandemic.

Yet, when it comes to defining the future of our food system, guess who gets invited by the UN to conceive and construct the plan, principles and content of the global summit. It is big agribusinesses.

 Instead, we need to care about the people who plant the seeds around us, the world’s smallholder farmers. They are the custodians of our planet. Small farms actually have higher crop yields than larger farms, when the landscape conditions are similar. They also have much more biodiversity — not only of crops, but also more insect and animal life along the edges of the fields. Without a safe and secure food system, without crop biodiversity and pollinators, we could all face food scarcity

Here is why we are boycotting the UN Food Systems Summit | Food | Al Jazeera

Opinion: Small farms are the future of food systems | Opinion | DW | 25.07.2021

 In 2021, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), 955 people have already died trying to reach Europe by sea. NGOs believe these figures are underestimated.

According to the 1974 International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS), coastal states have a legal obligation to organise and assist searches in the event of a distress signal. 

They are ignoring that obligation.

Scientists have warned that China, Russia, Brazil and Australia all have energy policies associated with 5C rises in atmospheric temperatures, a heating hike that would bring devastation to much of the planet.

These countries are committed to climate targets that would lead to disastrous global warming and remain reliant on continued fossil-fuel burning that would trigger temperature rises of 5C if followed by the rest of the world. 

This dramatic discrepancy reveals a deep division over the energy and environment policies of the world’s richest nations. 

“Without more ambition from China, Brazil, Russia and Australia, Cop26 will fail to deliver the future our planet needs,” warned Tanya Steele, chief executive at WWF.

Yann Robiou du Pont, the lead researcher for the Paris Equity Tracker analysis explained, “The research underlines what many of us fear: major economies are simply not doing enough to tackle the climate crisis and, in many cases, G20 countries are leaving us on track for a world of more heatwaves, flooding and extreme weather events.”

 “The G20 is failing to deliver,” said the activist network Avaaz.

A world 5C hotter would be one in which a quarter of the global population would face extreme drought for at least one month a year; rainforests would be destroyed, and melting ice sheets would result in dangerous sea-level rises. In addition, loss of reflective ice from the poles could cause oceans to absorb more solar radiation while melting permafrost in Siberia and other regions would release plumes of methane, another pernicious greenhouse gas. Inevitably, temperatures would soar even further.

Plans of four G20 states are a threat to global climate pledge, warn scientists | Climate change | The Guardian

 Pay for nurses and other NHS staff in England will have fallen in real terms by more than 7% since 2010, even if they accept the latest offer from the government.

Figures produced by the TUC show that remuneration for nurses, community nurses, medical secretaries, speech therapists, physiotherapists, paramedics and radiographers will have dropped by between 7.3% and 7.6% in real terms in just over a decade, even after factoring in the 3% rise offered last week.

The TUC general secretary, Frances O’Grady, told the Observer: “It’s easy to understand the anger from NHS staff when you see what’s been done to their pay. It’s not just about the 3% – it’s the way their wages have been held back year after year. All our key workers deserve a decent standard of living for their family. But too often their hard work does not pay. And after the hardest year of their working lives, they deserve better.”

Unions representing teachers also reacted with fury after it was announced that pay for most of their members would be frozen. The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) last week highlighted how the decision on teachers’ pay went back on previous pledges from ministers and risked damaging recruitment into the profession. 

The IFS said:

 “At the last election, the Conservative party manifesto committed to increasing teacher starting salaries in England to £30,000 per year by September 2022. However, to ease pressure on school budgets and the public finances, the government has now announced a freeze on teacher pay levels in England for September 2021, and pushed back starting salaries of £30,000 to September 2023. The level of teacher pay is important. It plays a big part in determining the recruitment and retention pressures faced by schools. With the cost of employing teachers accounting for over half of school spending, what happens to salary levels also has a large bearing on the overall resource pressures faced by schools. And it is a key determinant of material living standards for over 500,000 teachers in England.”

Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: “Following a year in which teachers and leaders have worked flat out on managing a battery of Covid control measures, as well as assessing students following the government’s decision to cancel public exams, the decision to implement a pay freeze is an absolute insult.”

Nurses’ pay in England to fall 7% in a decade even after government offer | NHS | The Guardian

 When a disaster strikes the media highlight the international sympathy and the aid offered by world NGOs and how the government mobilises assistance. This article on the recent floods in Germany draws attention to the involvement of local people in providing relief to one another.

“The greatest help is provided by the local people,” observed the Berlin disaster researcher Martin Voss. “First of all, from those who are not yet so affected so that they can still do something: They lend a hand.”

Many, who otherwise perceive people as selfish and competitive, are amazed at the huge wave of helpfulness. However, research has shown for decades that people in disaster situations genuinely show solidarity, says Martin Voss. “At the moment when people get into this kind of emergency,  the primary behaviour clearly becomes being there for another.”

The solidarity, the willingness to help is enormous, as also is the effort put into going beyond the state or organisations to get involved.

Hubert Schilles, a man in his mid-sixties from an hour west in the Eifel region had unblocked the drain of a dam with his 30-ton excavator, risking his life in the process. He saved more than 10,000 people directly affected by a possible dam breach.

Karsten Steiner uses a heavy excavator in Sinzig to lift mud and garbage debris piled meters high to clear the road. Three days after the disaster, Steiner had driven his excavator onto his low-loader nearly 300 kilometres north of here to help, at his own expense. When asked about the loss of earnings, Steiner only replies: “Look around: the people here are much worse off than me”

“The doers are the real heroes in this situation,” says disaster researcher, Wolf Dombrowsky. “Those who get started right away and get things done. And the best are also those who coordinate and divide up the tasks, telling the others ‘you do this, you do that.’ ” The Bremen-based disaster researcher emphasizes how much the normal competitive mechanisms in society are overridden in a disaster situation. “Here the people are stripped of everything. And anyone who helps is a hero.”

Dombrowsky expects individual aid initiatives to decline. “The people who go there and help mostly have jobs. They have families, children, relatives… And then comes the feeling, that I have to go back to work or my family needs me too.” At that point, at least, the professional aid effort has to step up, says Dombrowsky. “But then even the worst is over and spontaneous help is no longer necessary.”

 That’s when the reconstruction phase begins.

Showing solidarity after the floods: People helping people  | Germany| News and in-depth reporting from Berlin and beyond | DW | 24.07.2021

 Thousands of residents have fled flooded communities and swollen rivers in the Philippine capital, Manila, and outlying provinces after days of torrential monsoon rains. The northern Philippines has been swamped by days of monsoon rains that flooded low-lying villages and set off minor landslides. Officials say they are struggling to open more emergency shelters.  In the city of Marikina in the capital region, nearly 15,000 residents were evacuated to safety overnight as waters rose alarmingly in a major river.

Marikina mayor, Marcelino Teodoro blamed years of illegal logging in nearby mountains and heavy siltation in the Marikina River for constant flooding in his city.

 Extreme weather events have hit nearly all corners of the globe in recent weeks, bringing floods to China, India and Western Europe and heat waves to North America and Russia’s Siberia, highlighting fears about the impact of climate change. The Philippines is hit by about 20 tropical storms a year but a warmer Pacific Ocean will make storms more powerful and bring heavier rain, meteorologists say.

The Philippines is also suffering one of the worst outbreaks of Covid-19 in Asia and has tightened curbs to prevent the spread of the more infectious Delta variant. 

With more than 1.54mn cases and 27,131 deaths, the Philippines has the second-highest number of Covid-19 infections and fatalities in Southeast Asia, after Indonesia. Authorities are struggling to allow social distancing among the displaced residents and prevent evacuation camps from turning into epicentres of Covid-19 infections