The 2022 Global Hunger Index (GHI) brings us face to face with a grim reality. The toxic cocktail of conflict, climate change, and the COVID-19 pandemic had already left millions exposed to food price shocks and vulnerable to further crises. Now the conflict in Ukraine—with its knock-on effects on global supplies of and prices for food, fertilizer, and fuel—is turning a crisis into a catastrophe. But the speed and severity of the global food crisis reflect the fact that millions of people were already living on the precarious edge of hunger—a legacy of past failures to build more just, sustainable, and resilient food systems.

 Hunger is at alarming levels in 5 countries—Central African Republic, Chad, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Madagascar, and Yemen— and is provisionally considered *alarming *in 4 additional countries— Burundi, Somalia, South Sudan, and Syria. In a further 35 countries, hunger is considered serious. 

2022 Global Hunger Index: Food systems transformation and local governance [EN/DE] – World | ReliefWeb

Scientists believe we are living through the sixth mass extinction – the largest loss of life on Earth since the time of the dinosaurs.

Earth’s wildlife populations have plunged by an average of 69% in just under 50 years, according to a leading scientific assessment, as capitalism continues to clear forests, consume beyond the limits of the planet and pollute on an industrial scale.

From the open ocean to tropical rainforests, the abundance of birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles is in freefall, declining on average by more than two-thirds between 1970 and 2018, according to the WWF and Zoological Society of London’s (ZSL) biennial Living Planet Report. The Living Planet Index combines global analysis of 32,000 populations of 5,230 animal species to measure changes in the abundance of wildlife across continents and taxa, producing a graph akin to a stock index of life on Earth.

Latin America and the Caribbean region – including the Amazon – have seen the steepest decline in average wildlife population size, with a 94% drop in 48 years.

Robin Freeman, head of the indicators and assessments unit at ZSL, said,  “In order to see any bending of the curve of biodiversity loss … it’s not just about conservation it’s about changing production and consumption…”

 Tanya Steele, chief executive at WWF-UK, said: “ This report tells us that the worst declines are in the Latin America region, home to the world’s largest rainforest, the Amazon. Deforestation rates there are accelerating, stripping this unique ecosystem not just of trees but of the wildlife that depends on them and of the Amazon’s ability to act as one of our greatest allies in the fight against climate change.” Steele continued, “Despite the science, the catastrophic projections, the impassioned speeches and promises, the burning forests, submerged countries, record temperatures and displaced millions, world leaders continue to sit back and watch our world burn in front of our eyes. She added, “The climate and nature crises, their fates entwined, are not some faraway threat our grandchildren will solve with still-to-be-discovered technology.”

Africa had the second largest fall at 66%, followed by Asia and the Pacific with 55% and North America at 20%. Europe and Central Asia experienced an 18% fall. The UK has only 50% of its biodiversity richness compared with historical levels, according to the biodiversity intactness index, making it one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world.

Land use change is still the most important driver of biodiversity loss across the planet, according to the report. Mike Barrett, executive director of science and conservation at WWF-UK, said: “At a global level, primarily the declines we are seeing are driven by the loss and fragmentation of habitat driven by the global agricultural system and its expansion into intact habitat converting it to produce food.” 

Researchers describe the increased difficulty animals are having moving through terrestrial landscapes as they are blocked by infrastructure and farmland. Only 37% of rivers longer than 1,000km (600 miles) remain free-flowing along their entire length, while just 10% of the world’s protected areas on land are connected.

Almost 70% of animal populations wiped out since 1970, report reveals | Wildlife | The Guardian

Kakistocracy

Mark the rise of the Kakistocracy,

Misrulers of wherever they occur,

Prime minister here, a president there,

Or some such grandiose sobriquet.

Falsely claiming visions they don’t possess,

Being rendered myopic by vanity

They can no longer see humanity;

Making worse every problem they address.

Politicians who are vulgarly dense,

Enriching the rich, impoverishing the poor,

Slaughtering our young through their acts of war;

Gross mismanagement through incompetence.

But they only rule from their gilded towers

Because people surrender them their powers.

D. A.    

 “Time is not on our side, and our climate is changing before our eyes. We need a complete transformation of the global energy system,” 

World Meteorological Organization Secretary-General Prof Petteri Taalas.

2022 State of Climate Services: Energy – World | ReliefWeb

  Education is a fundamental right for every child according to Article 28 of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child 

The report Fixing a Broken System: Transforming Education Financing by Save the Children revealed that 1 in 3 of the world’s poorest nations spends more on paying off debt to wealthy countries and investors than on educating its own children.

It shows that 21 out of 70 low- and lower-middle-income countries with available data spent more on external debt repayment than on education in 2020.

 According to the publication, interest payments are expected to account for an average of 10% of the annual budget in this category of countries by 2024, up from 7% in 2015.

“Education systems desperately need more and better funding across low- and lower-middle-income countries. Instead, they are being gutted to service unmanageable debts,” Hollie Warren, Save the Children U.K.’s head of global education policy and advocacy, said in a statement. “It is wrong that the world’s poorest children are having to suffer because of a debt crisis that was not of their making,” she continued. 

Nearly 1 in 3 children in low-income countries still do not finish primary school.

1 in 3 of World’s Poorest Countries Spend More on Debt Repayments Than Education (commondreams.org)

 United Nations experts joined people across the globe on Monday in marking the 20th World Day Against the Death Penalty by calling for an end to capital punishment. Despite more than 170 states having repealed the death penalty or adopted moratoriums, there was a reported 20% increase in the number of executions last year. At least 579 people were killed by 18 countries that used four methods: beheading, hanging, lethal injection, and shooting.

“Abolition of the death penalty is the only viable path,” asserted Alice Edwards, the U.N. special rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.

Morris Tidball-Binz, the special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions, stated, “The death row phenomenon has long been characterized as a form of inhuman treatment, as has the near total isolation of those convicted of capital crimes and often held in unlawful solitary confinement,”

UN Experts Say Abolishing Death Penalty ‘Is the Only Viable Path’ (commondreams.org)

 Research by two thinktanks, Common Wealth and the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), showed investors had benefited from a boom in dividend payouts since the Covid pandemic at a time of meagre growth in workers’ pay. The value of dividends paid to shareholders in UK-listed companies has returned to 2017-18 levels after a drop during the Covid pandemic, without an equivalent increase in wages for workers.

Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng is pushing ahead with a multimillion pound tax cut for wealthy individuals with a reduction in the rate of income tax on dividends. Dividend tax will be reduced by 1.25 percent.

Chris Hayes, a senior data analyst at Common Wealth, who wrote the report, said: “It is a shame that the chancellor’s U-turn does not extend to his tax cuts on dividends, which benefit the very wealthy and are already subject to very generous treatment. For two decades, shareholders have been enjoying ever greater payouts that could have been invested productively or paid to workers. Further tilting the balance in favour of shareholders will not unleash economic dynamism. It will only deepen our stagnation.” 

Among firms currently listed in the FTSE All Share index dividends steadily climbed in value at a faster rate than employee earnings during the decade from the 2008 financial crisis up to the Covid pandemic, up from £17.3bn in 2014 to £28bn in 2019.

Share buybacks, an alternative form of corporate payout whereby companies purchase shares from their investors to raise the price of the stock, have also risen sharply. The research showed share buybacks more than doubled from £3.4bn in 2015 to £8.2bn in 2019, and have since more than quadrupled from 2015 levels to reach £16.2bn in the second quarter of 2022.

George Dibb, head of the Centre for Economic Justice at the IPPR, said the rise in dividend payments and share buybacks since the pandemic showed companies were prioritising shareholder payouts over productivity-boosting investment and higher wages for workers.

“It raises serious concerns for the prospects of increasing the UK’s low levels of investment. Companies engage in share buybacks when they are unable to identify investment opportunities better than driving up their own share price. This is a symptom of an economy where firms don’t lack funds to invest – they lack the stable environment to invest in.”

Kwasi Kwarteng’s tax cuts will benefit richest amid dividend boom – report | Economic policy | The Guardian

 World Economic Forum warns of the cataclysmic consequences of climate change. 

The 2030s:

Ice caps and crucial ice sheets continued to melt, swelling sea levels by 20 centimeters [7.87 inches]

90 percent of coral reefs are threatened by human activity, while around 60 percent are highly endangered

Dwindling crop yields have pushed more than 100 million more people into extreme poverty

Climate change-related illnesses are killing an extra 250,000 people each year

The 2040s:

The world has already shot past its 1.5-degree Celsius [2.7-degree Fahrenheit] Paris Agreement temperature rise limit

Bangladesh, Vietnam, and Thailand are threatened by annual floods, sparking mass migration

Eight percent of the global population has seen a severe reduction in water availability

The Arctic is now ice-free in summer

Sea levels have risen 20 centimeters [two feet] in the Gulf of Mexico, where hurricanes now deliver devastating storm surges.

 Peter Sands, the executive director of the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, said the combined death toll from the diseases could be halved in the next four years in the countries where the fund invests. Without enough money, Sands warned, governments on the frontline of the fight will be forced to prioritise “basic life-saving essentials” over more sophisticated efforts to curb the diseases once and for all.

However, he said that “extraordinary opportunity” would only be possible with sufficient financial resources to allow badly affected countries to use new scientific tools such as Oxford University’s promising malaria vaccine and a groundbreaking HIV prevention drug developed by a British pharmaceutical company.

Britain has been the third-largest donor to the Global Fund, which provides two-thirds of all international financing for malaria programmes and three-quarters of the money for TB programmes. But at a recent conference aimed at securing the fund’s resources for the next three years, Britain failed to make a pledge. The government has until late October, when the fund will begin the process of allocating its resources to the countries in which it invests.

“The challenge is that if most of the money is just going on delivering … essentials [such as antiretroviral treatment and insecticide-treated bed nets] there’s very little resource to enable the rapid introduction of the newer tools that will actually win against the disease,” Sands explained.

Pledge aid or deprive Commonwealth’s poorest in diseases fight, UK warned | Global development | The Guardian

Across the world, people with mental health issues like depression and anxiety are on the rise. 

According to the WHO World Mental Health report published earlier this year, depression and anxiety rose 25% in the first year of the pandemic, bringing the total number of people living with a mental disorder to nearly 1 billion people.

“What’s more, mental health services have been severely disrupted in recent years, and the treatment gap for mental health conditions has widened,” a WHO spokesperson explained.

Mental health issues like depression and anxiety on the rise globally | Science | In-depth reporting on science and technology | DW | 10.10.2022