“Climate change is no longer a ticking timebomb, it is exploding before our eyes. It is making extreme weather such as droughts, cyclones and floods – which have increased five-fold over the past 50 years – more frequent and more deadly,” Gabriela Bucher, executive director of Oxfam International, said.

Extreme hunger is closely linked to the climate crisis, with many areas of the world most affected by extreme weather experiencing severe food shortages.  Oxfam examined 10 of the world’s worst climate hotspots, afflicted by drought, floods, severe storms and other extreme weather, and found their rates of extreme hunger had more than doubled in the past six years.

The 10 countries covered by the report – Somalia, Haiti, Djibouti, Kenya, Niger, Afghanistan, Guatemala, Madagascar, Burkina Faso and Zimbabwe – were those with the highest number of UN appeals driven by extreme weather events.

Within the countries studied, 48 million people are currently suffering from acute hunger, up from about 21 million people in 2016. Of these, about 18 million people are on the brink of starvation, according to the Oxfam report.

 The profits of fossil fuel companies over 18 days would be enough to fulfil the UN’s $49bn appeal for humanitarian aid this year, the Oxfam report found.

Bucher said: “Leaders of rich polluting countries must live up to their promises to cut emissions. They must pay for adaptation measures and loss and damage in low income countries, as well as immediately inject lifesaving funds to meet the UN appeal to respond to the most impacted countries.” 

Somalia is experiencing its worst drought on record, and 1 million people have been forced to flee, while in Kenya 2.5 million livestock have died and 2.4 million people are going hungry.

Cereal production in Niger has fallen by 40% owing to extreme weather, leaving 2.6 million people in a state of acute hunger, while the desertification of crop and pasture land in Burkina Faso has resulted in more than 3.4 million people in extreme hunger.

Extreme hunger soaring in world’s climate hotspots, says Oxfam | Climate crisis | The Guardian

A poll of more than 2,000 workers earning less than the real living wage of £9.90 an hour, or £11.05 in London, by the Living Wage Foundation found that 78% said this was the worst financial period they had ever faced. As many as 4.8 million people in the workforce have earnings of less than the real living wage.

More than half had used a food bank in the past year, while 42% reported regularly skipping meals for financial reasons. 

More than a fifth of these workers, 21%, said they had no money at all left over after paying for essentials, such as rent and food.

More than two-thirds of the workers surveyed said their financial situation was negatively affecting their levels of anxiety, and their overall quality of life – with women particularly badly affected.

Katherine Chapman, director of the Living Wage Foundation said: “Everyone is feeling the pressure from soaring inflation, but our polling shows that low-paid workers are being hit harder than most. These shocking findings bring to life what it’s like to be paid less than a real living wage during a cost of living crisis.” She added: “It’s more important than ever that those employers who can, step up and provide a wage based on the cost of living.”

Britain’s lowest-paid workers say finances have never been worse | UK cost of living crisis | The Guardian

 David Beasley, executive director of the U.N. World Food Program, told the U.N. Security Council that 345 million people facing acute food insecurity in the 82 countries where the agency operates.

It is 2½ times the number of acutely food insecure people before the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020. And 70 million pushed closer to starvation by the war in Ukraine.

50 million of those people in 45 countries are suffering from very acute malnutrition and are “knocking on famine’s door.”

“What was a wave of hunger is now a tsunami of hunger,” he said. “…There is a real and dangerous risk of multiple famines this year,” adding, “And in 2023, the current food price crisis could develop into a food availability crisis if we don’t act…The hungry people of the world are counting on us, and we must not let them down.”

U.N. humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths warned, “Famine will happen in Somalia, be sure it won’t be the only place either.”

UN warns up to 345 million people marching toward starvation | AP News

  The government announced a substantial increase in the price of fuel that will further squeeze a population already struggling with soaring costs of living. It announced on Wednesday that the price of gas will more than double, with slightly smaller increases for diesel and kerosene. The government has justified the price increase by saying that it is no longer tenable to subsidise fuel as much as it used to.

Haiti had previously received its petroleum from Venezuela’s Petrocaribe programme, which shut down several years ago. Since then, it has helped subsidise local distributors who import fuel.

Protesters blocked roads throughout the capital Port-Au-Prince, closing off usually busy areas of the city to traffic. Schools and businesses closed as streets were blocked with rocks, vehicles, and burning tyres. Many people in Haiti depend on fuel not only for transportation, but also for electricity and cooking.

“It’s a very challenging time for Haiti right now,” Haitian journalist Harold Isaac explained. “We’re facing a compounding set of crises, the latest one being the gas crisis that really has made life very difficult for everyday folks here.” 

Haiti sees more protests as fuel price hike worsens public anger | Inflation News | Al Jazeera

Background Reading

Material World – A forlorn and forgotten nation – worldsocialism.org/spgb

 According to Japan’s Environment Ministry, an impressive 210,000 metric-tons (231,485-ton) of metal was recovered in 2020 by specialist companies that operate as “urban miners.” The aim is to increase the amount gathered to 420,000 tons by 2030.  

Tons of disused electronic equipment that are wastefully dumped every year, Discarded mobile phones and television sets, computer motherboards and refrigerators, microwave ovens, car components and countless other household items contain varying amounts of gold and silver, lithium, nickel, cobalt, copper and zinc. They provide key components of batteries and high-tech electronics and can be reused if processed properly.

So much is discarded every year that a 2020 estimate suggested that there could be as much as 6,800 tons of discarded gold alone in Japan, which is more than the known deposits still waiting to be mined in South Africa.  

Japan harvesting junk electronics to tackle resource shortages | Asia | An in-depth look at news from across the continent | DW | 14.09.2022

 The United Nations has warned in a new report that Syria is on the verge of another flare-up that could spell a return to large-scale combat.

“Today, Syrians face increasing and intolerable hardships, living among the ruins of this lengthy conflict. Millions are suffering and dying in displacement camps, while resources are becoming scarcer and donor fatigue is rising,” said Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro, chair of the UN’s Syria commission. “Syria cannot afford a return to larger-scale fighting, but that is where it may be heading.”

In recent months, an intensification along Syria’s northern front has increased the suffering of citizens, warned the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic in its report.

Under the threat of another Turkish ground operation, the commission recorded continued mobilisation and fighting between Turkish and Turkish-backed forces and Kurdish-led forces in the north. In addition, Russia is still actively supporting the Syrian government, particularly concerning air strikes that have killed civilians and targeted food and water sources. Russian air raids over opposition-held areas had increased in the last few months, said commissioner Hanny Megally.

“We had an idea at some point that the war was completely finished in Syria,” Pinheiro told journalists, adding that incidents documented in the report proved this was not the case. The report found that “grave violations of fundamental human rights and humanitarian law” had increased across the country in the first six months of this year.

“Tens of thousands of Syrians remain forcibly disappeared or missing to date. Government forces continue to inflict cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment on the relatives of the missing by deliberately concealing the fate and whereabouts of the missing,” the report outlined.

“We also see continued operations by Israel, as well as the US, Turkey and Iran-backed forces, in this protracted conflict,” commissioner Lynn Welchman warned. The report documented more than a dozen Israeli strikes across Syria in the first six months of 2022, including an attack on Damascus International Airport that put the site out of commission for nearly two weeks. The UN revealed that it had been unable to fly in humanitarian assistance to Syria during that time.

The UN also documented cases of people and families who have been unable to return to their hometowns and villages because their properties were confiscated by forces, or because they cannot return to their properties and land, fearing arbitrary detention. Against this backdrop, the commission noted that some neighbouring countries are creating concrete plans for mass returns of Syrian refugees. 

“Returns must be a choice and take place in a safe, dignified, and voluntary manner,” Pinheiro said.

Syria could return ‘to larger-scale fighting’, UN warns | Syria’s War News | Al Jazeera

A team at the University of Oxford reveals that transitioning to 100% clean energy within the next three decades could save not only lives and the planet but also $12 trillion. The study from the Oxford Martin Program on the Post-Carbon Transition, published in the journal Joule, comes as scientists continue to warn about the climate and health impacts of fossil fuels.

“There is a pervasive misconception that switching to clean, green energy will be painful, costly, and mean sacrifices for us all—but that’s just wrong,” Oxford professor and study co-author Doyne Farmer said in a statement. “Renewable costs have been trending down for decades.”

“They are already cheaper than fossil fuels in many situations, and our research shows that they will become cheaper than fossil fuels across almost all applications in the years to come. And if we accelerate the transition, they will become cheaper faster,” he explained.

The study’s lead author, Rupert Way, pointed out that “past models predicting high costs for transitioning to zero carbon energy have deterred companies from investing and made governments nervous about setting policies that will accelerate the green transition and cut reliance on fossil fuels.”

“But past models have overestimated key green technology costs again and again, leaving modelers to play catch-up as real-world costs plunged over the last decade,” he stressed.

As the researchers detailed in their paper: “We use an approach based on probabilistic cost forecasting methods that have been statistically validated by backtesting on more than 50 technologies. We generate probabilistic cost forecasts for solar energy, wind energy, batteries, and electrolyzers, conditional on deployment. We use these methods to estimate future energy system costs and explore how technology cost uncertainty propagates through to system costs in three different scenarios.”

The first scenario, which they call the “fast transition,” would feature an end to fossil fuels by 2050; this is the path that they estimate would save the world $12 trillion. The second scenario, or “slow transition,” would involve shifting to clean energy by around 2070. The third scenario is “no transition,” meaning the energy system would remain dominated by fossil fuels.

“Only a few years ago, net-zero by 2050 was believed to be so expensive that it was barely considered credible, yet now even the most pessimistic models concede that it’s entirely within reach,” noted Way. “Accelerating the transition to renewable energy is now the best bet not just for the planet, but for energy costs too.”

Farmer highlighted that currently, “the world is facing a simultaneous inflation crisis, national security crisis, and climate crisis, all caused by our dependence on high cost, insecure, polluting, fossil fuels with volatile prices.”

Rapid Green Energy Transition by 2050 Could Save the World at Least $12 Trillion (commondreams.org)

 Private equity refers to an opaque form of financing away from public markets in which funds and investors buy and restructure companies including startups, troubled businesses and real estate operations. Globally, private equity manages trillions of dollars for wealthy individuals and institutional investors such as mutual funds, endowments and pension funds. The industry has invested an estimated $1tn in the energy sector since 2010, and while there’s been growth in renewables, the lion’s share is still in oil, gas and coal.  Unlike banks and other publicly listed companies, private equity firms are exempt from most financial disclosure rules, making it extremely difficult to track their assets – or risks. This means ordinary workers like firefighters, nurses and teachers – whose pension funds are invested in private equity funds – have little way of knowing if their retirement nest egg is tied up in fossil fuels, which scientists warn must be phased out to limit the extent of global heating.

Private equity firms pumping billions of dollars into dirty energy projects are exposing investors, including pensioners, to unknown financial risks as the planet burns and governments face escalating pressure to act, new research finds. 

The first-of-its-kind climate risks scorecard ranks Carlyle, Warburg Pincus and KKR as the worst offenders among eight major private equity companies with significant fossil fuel portfolios. All three continue investing heavily in greenhouse-gas-emitting projects with no adequate plan on transitioning away from oil and gas, according to the analysis by two financial watchdog non-profits of publicly available information. The firms also have scant transparency on political and climate lobbying, the report finds. The eight firms on the scorecard manage a combined $3.6tn in assets including about $216bn in energy projects – an amount equivalent to the fossil fuel financing by the world’s five biggest banks last year.

More than three-quarters of Carlyle’s energy investments are in fossil fuels, and just over 60% of its 2022 first half profits came through its subsidiary NGP Energy Capital, which focuses almost exclusively on oil and gas projects.

KKR, one of the world’s wealthiest private equity firms, has said it will continue to invest in fossil fuel projects

Private equity still investing billions in dirty energy despite pledge to clean up | Private equity | The Guardian

 According to a recent report by the International Labour Organization, 27.6 million people are engaged in forced labor worldwide; an increase of 2.7 million over the past five years.

Forced labor is when people are coerced to work through the use of violence or intimidation, or even to pay off a debt. It’s common in many sectors around the world, from manufacturing to mining.

If you buy products in the European Union, you might assume that those products are free from forced labor. But this assumption would be wrong.

That is supposed to change with a new EU policy proposal released today, intended to prohibit products made with forced labor from being bought or sold on the common EU market. After various versions of the proposal being leaked to the press, the European Commission has now released its take at attempting a ban on forced labor. Though the proposal was broadly welcomed by both labor rights organizations and businesses, critics point to deficiencies — which might cut into its effectiveness.

“There seems to have been a reluctance to be very ambitious with this proposal from the very beginning,” said Christopher Patz, a policy officer with the European Coalition for Corporate Justice in Brussels. With groups campaigning for more than a decade, “It’s a disgrace it’s taken so long.”

The proposed regulation would allow any actor to submit a complaint over suspected forced labor to the national authority responsible for policing imports in an EU country, which the authority would then investigate. That body would be able to stop the product from entering the EU or even destroy it. Covering all products, it would also include setting up a public database indicating the likelihood of whether forced labor is taking place in a particular region.

“For maybe the first time, forced labor is clearly illegal to use and put on the market,” said Muriel Treibich, a lobby and advocacy coordinator with Clean Clothes Campaign.

“The Commission proposes to exclude goods from the market only after the existence of forced labor in their supply chain has been established, not when it is suspected,” said Anna Cavazzini, the German member of European Parliament who negotiated for the Greens on the topic.

This is different to US legislation, where authorities may prohibit imports based on reasonable suspicion. The US framework also places the onus on companies to prove their products are free from forced labor. The EU proposal, in contrast, places the burden of proof on European authorities, which are under-resourced and would end up doing piecemeal enforcement, critics say.

“I would have indeed been happier to see the burden of proof with the company in question as it is easier for them to gather information inside their supply chain,” Cavazzini explained.

The EU proposal’s high standard of evidence “makes it a bar that’s very high to meet for civil society and for national enforcers,” said Ben Vanpeperstraete, a senior legal adviser at the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights.  “It’s very unlikely that we’ll see much enforcement on this proposal.” 

Vanpeperstraete pointed out that companies have various means of handling potential cost increases; for example, by reducing their margins. With clothing, he said, wages make up about 1% of the retail price (marketing can comprise 50%). A company could shift resource allocation in production or raise prices. “A 1% price increase on a t-shirt — I don’t think that’s a bad idea.”

Patz pointed out, “If you can’t be sure your business model is not contributing to forced labor, then you shouldn’t be in business.” 

EU ban too feeble to fight forced labor, groups say | Europe | News and current affairs from around the continent | DW | 14.09.2022

Children make up about one-third of all refugees and migrants arriving in Europe. A significant percentage of these children fleeing conflicts and insecurities in the countries of South, Central and Western Asia, come through Balkans route, which is part of the Eastern Mediterranean route towards Western and Northern Europe.

 The countries on the Balkans route, including Greece, Bulgaria, and Croatia, which are members of the EU, are mainly seen as transit countries by refugees and migrants, as they try to continue their way towards the more developed countries of Western Europe.

An in-depth analysis by Save the Children reveals:

·Likely all children who migrate using the Balkans route to cross Europe are subjected to violence which threatens their physical or emotional survival

·According to children’s testimonies, police at the borders are the most common perpetrators, as well as smugglers they rely on to cross borders

·Children report smugglers sometimes kill or leave children and adults in conditions they would not be able to survive on their own, and the dead bodies then remain to be seen by other children travelling on the same route

·The deterrence and containment policies prioritised by the European Union and countries along the Balkans route are the cause of the violence

·Inadequate and often inhumane reception conditions in prison-like camps exacerbate the suffering of children, and the lack of adequate mental health support increases the risk of harm.

The report reveals a critical lack of protection for child migrants across Europe, with children reporting violence is now an integral and an almost inevitable part of their migration experience. About one in three of the children now believe that no one can help them on their journey, and some believe they are no longer able to help themselves.

The report reveals child migrants are at enormous risk of sexual violence, with boys travelling alone particularly vulnerable, and that children are being exploited at work during the journey and at their destination, including being recruited by smugglers for criminal and sex work. Almost two-thirds of children interviewed listed one or more incidents where they recognised or witnessed sexual abuse of a child.

 Those who were travelling unaccompanied, gave examples of self-harm, suicide attempts, and abuse of alcohol and other drugs as passive strategies for coping with stress and difficulty. Some children sought protection by becoming involved in criminal and sexual activities with smugglers and other adults.

Bogdan Krasic, Balkans Migration and Displacement Hub Programme Director, said:

“These findings are striking because they show the violence in these children’s lives is so present it has become normalized. Children are exposed to all types of violence, at all times – in their countries of origin, along the journey, in the countries of transit. A migration experience that includes multiple, prolonged exposure to violence may have incomprehensible harmful effects on the development of children.”

 Ylva Sperling, Save the Children Europe director, said:

“The lack of protection at European borders has terrible consequences for children. Europe’s overwhelming emphasis on deterring arrivals means children are subjected to shocking violence by police and border guards; violence which is carried out with impunity.

“Wherever we go, Someone does us Harm”: Violence against refugee and migrant children arriving in Europe through the Balkans – World | ReliefWeb