The number dying of the infection rose for the first time in 10 years. In 2020, 1.5 million were killed by TB and 10 million infected. 

Public health campaigners want funding of  $1bn (£730m) every year into vaccine research. It has never exceeded more than $120m (£87m) in a year.

Earlier this month, the WHO warned that the pandemic had reversed progress against TB and fewer people were being diagnosed and treated as resources went to tackling Covid-19. Global funding for TB fell by £500m from 2019 to 2020.

Mike Frick, co-director of the TB project at Treatment Action Group, said: “Governments cumulatively spent $104bn on research and development of Covid-19 vaccine and therapeutics in the first 11 months of the pandemic. That is 75 times more than the money governments and other funders spent on TB vaccine research over the 11 years from 2005 to 2019. Despite high mortality rates, the only existing vaccine is the 100-year-old BCG (Bacillus Calmette-Guérin) vaccine, which is less effective for adults and older teenagers.

“This disparity signals a clear abdication of responsibility on the part of governments to protect the human rights of people with TB to health and scientific progress. It is past time that we as a TB community start expecting – and demanding – more.”

Early diagnosis of TB is crucial because undetected cases increase the risk of the disease spreading. A person can be infected by inhaling a small number of bacteria that can take years to become active. The WHO estimates that around a quarter of the world’s population has latent TB.

Around the world, fewer infections were diagnosed and reported; a drop from 7.1m in 2019 to 5.8m in 2020. India made up 40% of this global drop in notifications, while numbers were down 14% in Indonesia and 12% in the Philippines. The number of people given preventive treatment fell by a fifth. WHO said it believes 4.1 million people newly infected with TB in 2020 have not been diagnosed, compared with 2.9 million the year before.

Call for action on TB as deaths rise for first time in decade | Global development | The Guardian

The Arctic has already heated to more than 2C (3.8F) above its pre-industrial average, with temperatures tipped to rise further. These northern latitudes are heating at more than twice the rate of the global average due to the rapid loss of sea ice, replacing a highly reflective white surface with the sea’s highly heat-absorbing blue-black.

For thousands of years, permafrost – ground that is frozen for two or more years in a row – has kept dead plant and animal matter locked in the deep-freeze beneath the tundra. These ancient remnants total up to an estimated 1,600 billion tonnes of organic carbon, almost twice as much as currently found in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Among those gases is methane, a gas up to 34 times more potent than carbon dioxide (CO2) at trapping heat in Earth’s atmosphere during a 100-year period. Across 20 years, it can be 86 times more potent. Then there’s nitrous oxide – its warming potential roughly 300 times more than CO2 across a 100-year timescale.

Covering a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere, this frozen vault is being thawed by rising temperatures, extensive wildfires and unprecedented heatwaves in Siberia and other far-northern regions. In turn, that is transforming the carbon sink of the Arctic into a source of greenhouse gases.

Scientists are increasingly warning that the melting Arctic could push the planet into a vicious cycle of uncontrolled heating as vast stores of carbon in thawing ground release powerful greenhouse gases by creating a dangerous feedback loop – one in which human activities such as burning fossil fuels and farming livestock heat up the atmosphere, prompting permafrost to thaw and release additional greenhouse gases. That causes further heating, further thawing and further emissions, threatening to bring about the worst impacts of climate changes far faster than expected.

“This is likely to accelerate because of the scale of the warming we’re seeing in the Arctic,” Rachael Treharne, an Arctic ecologist at Woodwell Climate Research Center, who studies the impact of thawing permafrost and wildfires on climate change, explained. “Already, we’re looking at irreversible changes.”

Scientists have been shocked that higher temperatures conducive to permafrost thawing are occurring roughly 70 years ahead of projections. Permafrost’s polluting potential begins when the damper, warmer conditions of thawing ground jumpstart microbes to produce carbon dioxide or methane as they feast on decomposing organic matter in boggy, once-hard soil. Thawing bedrock compounds this problem. As temperatures rise and pressures change, frozen deposits of naturally occurring methane and other hydrocarbons inside the permafrost turn into gas, which may be released through cracks into the atmosphere.

“We can more or less control the burning of fossil fuels through political decisions and economic regulations,” said Dmitry Zastrozhnov, a lecturer and geologist at the Institute of Earth Sciences at St Petersburg State University who is studying the release of methane from Siberian limestone areas. “But we cannot ask permafrost to stop releasing methane. We cannot control nature.”

Arctic ground ‘literally collapsing’ amid abrupt thaw | Climate Crisis News | Al Jazeera

 Jubilee Debt Campaign, a leading anti-poverty charity, show that 34 of the world’s poorest countries are spending $29.4bn (£21.4bn) on debt payments a year compared with $5.4bn (£3.9bn) on measures to reduce the impact of the climate emergency.

Uganda had said it would spend $537m between 2016 and 2020, including funds from international agencies and donors, on climate-related projects to adapt the country’s infrastructure and deal with climate emergencies. However, the $107.4m annual budget is dwarfed by external debt payments which will total $739m in 2021, rising to $1.35bn in 2025.

Ausi Kibowa, from the Southern and Eastern Africa Trade Information and Negotiations Institute (SEATINI), based in Uganda, said: “Owing to the immense financial pressure on Uganda from the debt crisis, the Ugandan government is unable to spend what is need to protect people from the damage inflicted by climate change. Furthermore, it is intensifying fossil fuel extraction in order to pay the debt. To address climate injustice, debt relief must be part of the forthcoming UN climate talks.”

Heidi Chow, executive director of Jubilee Debt Campaign, said, “Lower income countries are handing over billions of dollars in debt repayments to rich countries, banks and international financial institutions at a time when resources are desperately needed to fight the climate crisis,” she said.“In Glasgow, wealthy polluting nations need to stop shirking  their responsibilities and provide climate finance through grants, as well as cancel debts.”

International bodies such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have encouraged developing world countries to fund development projects using bank loans and bonds. Borrowers expect interest rates to fall over time as they became trusted to make regular repayments. But low income countries still regularly pay more than 10% interest on loans compared to an average 1.5 to 2.5% paid by rich countries.

Poorer countries spend five times more on debt than climate crisis – report | Climate crisis | The Guardian

Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman presented a series of plans to address the dangers of global warming.

But critics say the moves are just a smokescreen to keep fossil fuels propelling its economy. Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, announced it planned to raise crude production from 12 million barrels a day to 13 million barrels by 2027 – a move scientists, energy experts say goes against what is needed to stave off the most catastrophic effects of climate change.

Saudi Arabia has justified the contradictory moves of reducing its own carbon emissions while still taking oil out of the ground and selling it worldwide as part of a plan to create a “circular carbon economy“. This envisions continuing to extract carbon-filled fuel out of the earth while employing new technologies to capture, store or sell its emissions – essentially an offset scheme.

 Critics have accused the Saudis of “greenwashing” – or claiming something is good for the environment when in reality the opposite is true.

Matthew Archer, a researcher at the Graduate Institute Geneva, explained, “It’s absurd to think that an economy based on the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels can be ‘circular’ in any meaningful sense of the word. The only way it works is if you rely on technologies that don’t exist yet,” said Archer. “These initiatives are … full of language that’s as ambitious as it is ambiguous, with very few concrete plans and no accountability mechanisms.” 

Archer said, the only way to rapidly decarbonise to avert catastrophic consequences of global warming is to ban new fossil fuel developments and invest massively in renewable energy and public infrastructure projects. “Anything short of that isn’t just greenwashing, it’s dangerous and delusional.”

‘Dangerous and delusional’: Critics denounce Saudi climate plan | Climate Crisis News | Al Jazeera

Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman presented a series of plans to address the dangers of global warming.

But critics say the moves are just a smokescreen to keep fossil fuels propelling its economy. Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, announced it planned to raise crude production from 12 million barrels a day to 13 million barrels by 2027 – a move scientists, energy experts say goes against what is needed to stave off the most catastrophic effects of climate change.

Saudi Arabia has justified the contradictory moves of reducing its own carbon emissions while still taking oil out of the ground and selling it worldwide as part of a plan to create a “circular carbon economy“. This envisions continuing to extract carbon-filled fuel out of the earth while employing new technologies to capture, store or sell its emissions – essentially an offset scheme.

 Critics have accused the Saudis of “greenwashing” – or claiming something is good for the environment when in reality the opposite is true.

Matthew Archer, a researcher at the Graduate Institute Geneva, explained, “It’s absurd to think that an economy based on the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels can be ‘circular’ in any meaningful sense of the word. The only way it works is if you rely on technologies that don’t exist yet,” said Archer. “These initiatives are … full of language that’s as ambitious as it is ambiguous, with very few concrete plans and no accountability mechanisms.” 

Archer said, the only way to rapidly decarbonise to avert catastrophic consequences of global warming is to ban new fossil fuel developments and invest massively in renewable energy and public infrastructure projects. “Anything short of that isn’t just greenwashing, it’s dangerous and delusional.”

‘Dangerous and delusional’: Critics denounce Saudi climate plan | Climate Crisis News | Al Jazeera

Experts estimate that some 18 million people in Bangladesh will be forced to move by rising sea levels by 2050.  

Every 17 hours a billionaire is created, and every 17 hours 17,000 people die from hunger.

World Food Programme executive director, David Beasley, is calling upon U.S. billionaires to give just 0.36% of the increase in their collective wealth since the start of the pandemic to help prevent 42 million people from starving to death.

“Billionaires need to step up,” he said, with a one-time donation of “six billion dollars to help 42 million people that are literally going to die if we don’t reach them.” Beasley said governments are “tapped out” and that addressing the hunger crisis was especially critical amid “a perfect storm of conflict, climate change, and Covid.”

“It’s not complicated,” said Beasley. “All I’m asking for is .36% of your net worth increase. I’m for people making money, but, God knows, also for you helping people who are in great need right now. The world is in trouble… and you’re telling me you can’t give me .36% of your net worth increase?”

“What if it was your daughter starving to death?” Beasley asked. “What if it was your family starving to death?”

“I am not opposed to anyone making money, but I AM opposed to people dying of hunger when there’s $400 trillion of wealth in the world today.”

In an earlier statement Beasley warned that the climate emergency stands to worsen an already grim scenario of global food insecurity.

“The climate crisis has the potential to overwhelm humanity. The world is not prepared for the unprecedented rise in hunger we will see if we do not invest in programs that help vulnerable communities adapt and build resilience to our changing climate,” adding that “the climate crisis is fueling a food crisis.”

WFP Chief: Billionaires Should Donate Mere 0.36% of Pandemic Profits to Feed 42 Million Starving People (commondreams.org)

Should the world be beseeching and begging billionaires to end hunger? 

Should the world be depending upon the billionaires’ largesse and philanthropy?

 Livestock generate about 32% of anthropogenic, or human-generated, methane, mainly from the planet’s billion-plus cattle. Climate scientists have warned that methane is playing an ever greater role in global heating. Cutting methane emissions, it has been said, is the strongest lever we have to slow climate heating over the next 25 years.

Failure to take action on methane emissions by the world’s biggest meat and dairy companies is fuelling the climate crisis, say campaigners.

The new ranking, published today, names the three worst-performing meat and dairy corporations as two French companies – Groupe Bigard and Lactalis – and the Japanese company Itoham. The ranking was based on an examination of the companies’ climate targets “to see if they had any methane action plans or reporting and to see what research they were doing”, said Nuša Urbancic of Changing Markets Foundation, the ranking’s co-author.  Urbancic added that meat and dairy corporations were being “given a free pass by governments”.

Even companies that ranked best – Switzerland’s Nestlé, France’s Danone and New Zealand’s Fonterra – were doing too little, said the report. 

 For example, none of the 20 companies, which together represent the “vast majority” of livestock sector emissions, have concrete methane reduction targets, it said. The company closest to having a methane action plan, the ranking found, was Nestlé, although it failed to “include any milestones or key performance indicators”.

Although more than half the ranked companies were undertaking research into methane reduction, mainly via methane-reducing feed, the report said none appeared to be contemplating lowering animal numbers or replacing animals with other protein sources.

New Zealand is the only country to pass legislation to cut greenhouse gases from livestock, but with farming emissions still rising, the government has been advised cow numbers will need to be cut to meet targets.

Meat and dairy giants feed climate crisis by dragging their heels on methane | Meat industry | The Guardian

 “[climate] Goals are aspirational. If they are not backed up with policies and financing, they remain empty promises.” – Tania Miranda, director of Policy and Stakeholder Engagement in the Environment and Climate Change Programme at the Institute of the Americas. 

 Poorer households have been found to pay as much as 50 per cent more on their energy bills than those with more money.

It was revealed that those living in poverty pay a significantly higher proportion of their household budget on energy bills, with the poorest households spending around seven times as much of their funds on energy as the richest households, and three-and-a-half times the national average.

Figures also show Britain’s poorest 10 per cent of households pay on average £756 a year per person for electricity, gas and other fuels. This is compared with an average of £504 per person in the richest households, as well as a national average of £530.

As of 1 October, the cap on what energy companies could charge households for their monthly consumption rose by £139 for people on default tariffs and £153 for people on pre-payment meters. As a result, millions face higher monthly bills.

People living in poverty ‘hit harder by gas and electricity bills’ | The Independent