4 billion people around the world lack social protection, a new International Labour Organization (ILO) report, World Social Protection Report 2020-22: Social protection at the crossroads says.

Social protection includes access to health care and income security, particularly in relation to old age, unemployment, sickness, disability, work injury, maternity or loss of a main income earner, as well as for families with children.

 There exists a  widening gap between countries with high and low-income levels and failing to afford the much-needed social protection that all human beings deserve.

ILO Director-General, Guy Ryder, explained, These can cushion people from future crises and give workers and businesses the security to tackle the multiple transitions ahead with confidence and with hope. We must recognize that effective and comprehensive social protection is not just essential for social justice and decent work but for creating a sustainable and resilient future too.”

Currently, only 47 per cent of the global population are effectively covered by at least one social protection benefit, while 4.1 billion people (53 per cent) obtain no income security at all from their national social protection system. There are significant regional inequalities in social protection. Europe and Central Asia have the highest rates of coverage, with 84 per cent of people being covered by at least one benefit. The Americas are also above the global average, with 64.3 per cent. Asia and the Pacific (44 per cent), the Arab States (40 per cent) and Africa (17.4 per cent) have marked coverage gaps.

 Worldwide, the vast majority of children still have no effective social protection coverage – only one in four children (26.4 per cent) receives a social protection benefit. Only 45 per cent of women with newborns worldwide receive a cash maternity benefit. Only one in three persons with severe disabilities (33.5 per cent) worldwide receive a disability benefit. Coverage of unemployment benefits is even lower; only 18.6 per cent of unemployed workers worldwide are effectively covered. And while 77.5 per cent of people above retirement age receive some form of old-age pension, major disparities remain across regions, between rural and urban areas, and between women and men.

Government spending on social protection also varies significantly. On average, countries spend 12.8 per cent of their gross domestic product (GDP) on social protection (excluding health), however high-income countries spend 16.4 per cent and low-income countries only 1.1 per cent of their GDP on social protection.

To guarantee at least basic social protection coverage, low-income countries would need to invest an additional US$77.9 billion per year, lower-middle-income countries an additional US$362.9 billion per year and upper-middle-income countries a further US$750.8 billion per year. That’s equivalent to 15.9, 5.1 and 3.1 per cent of their GDP, respectively.

More than 4 billion people still lack any social protection, ILO report finds – World | ReliefWeb

 On September 6,  Labor Day, around 35 million people (10% of the U.S. population) are scheduled to lose unemployment income. 9.2 million people are currently receiving benefits from either the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) program or the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program. According to the Census Household Pulse Survey, the average household that is receiving UI benefits has 3.8 members in it.

Around half of those on UI will see their benefits drop to $0 while the remaining half will see their benefits cut by $300 per week, which is equivalent to $15,200 per year. 

Those formerly on UI will also cut their spending by about $145 per week ($7,540 annually), which will have negative effects on the revenue and employment of the businesses they patronize.

 Labor Secretary Marty Walsh and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said that President Joe Biden believes it is “appropriate” for the $300-per-week federal UI boost to expire as scheduled. Twenty-six states—each led by a Republican governor except Louisiana—have already ended the emergency UI aid, and the Biden administration did not try to stop them.

Republicans have insisted that the emergency UI programs are dissuading people from returning to the workforce. Contrary to the claims — ending the benefits prematurely would do little to boost hiring. A Wall Street Journal analysis found that “states that ended enhanced federal unemployment benefits early have so far seen about the same job growth as states that continued offering the pandemic-related extra aid.”

 The benefit cut-off will come just days after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Biden administration’s nationwide eviction moratorium, putting millions of people at imminent risk of losing their homes.

“It’s going to be a perfect storm for a lot of folks,” Jordan Dewbre, a staff attorney for the New York-based community organization BronxWorks.

Andrew Stettner, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, explained, “The unwillingness to extend emergency benefits—or even debate it—shows how inured we’ve become to plight of the unemployed. With eviction protections ending at the same time, long-term unemployed workers are now vulnerable to lasting economic damage. Black and Latino workers have the least in savings built up to navigate this transitional period.”

‘Catastrophe’ Feared as 35 Million People Are Set to Lose Jobless Aid in 3 Days | Common Dreams News

Desertification is a growing problem. The threat of desertification and land degradation will increase as the climate crisis progresses. A 2018 report found that land degradation already affects the well-being of at least 3.2 billion people – more than a third of humanity. Rising temperatures are already predicted to reduce yields of staple crops such as wheat, rice, maize and soya beans. According to a 2015 UN report we are on track to degrade another third of global farmland over the course of the present century.

How we treat the land – how we farm and ranch – matters too. Healthy, life-filled soils better retain the moisture that falls on farmers’ fields. How farmers treat their soil remains essentially unregulated in regard to soil health.

 Farming practices that degrade the soil reduce the resilience of crops as worsening conditions affect harvests. Drylands in particular are sensitive to degradation from both tillage and overgrazing. If it continues, soil degradation will further increase the threat to agricultural production in regions that humanity depends on for food.

It’s clear that desertification and soil degradation are not new problems. Both Marx and Engels drew attention to how the adoption of capitalist farming practices depletes soil organic matter and disrupt soil ecosystems, leaving farmers around the world increasingly reliant on huge amounts of chemical fertilisers and pesticides. 

We need to reorient agriculture around farming and grazing practices that regenerate soil health.

Desertification is turning the Earth barren – but a solution is still within reach | David R Montgomery | The Guardian

In their writings Marx and Engels understood the necessity of retaining the fecundity of the land from the studies of biologist Justus von Liebig.

 The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Congress meets every four years to tackle the most pressing issues impacting people and the planet.

This year it will convene in Marseille, France from 3rd to 11th September. This important conservation event will address global deforestation and in particular, will discuss Congress motion 012 – the fight against imported deforestation.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) estimates global forest areas declined by 129 million hectares between 1990-2015, equivalent in size to South Africa.

Data from satellite imagery released on Global Forest Watch in June 2020 recorded 3.75 million hectares of tree cover loss in humid primary forests in the tropics in 2019, an almost 3% increase from 2018 and the third-largest tropical forest loss since 2000. 

Congress motion 012 calls on countries to stop imported deforestation through several ambitious strategies, including imposing additional taxes on imported products that generate deforestation. The aim is to recommend that private companies establish concrete action plans to guarantee supplies that did not result in deforestation.

Deforestation, a significant threat to biodiversity and climate change, is accelerated by global demand for commodities. However, a considerable share of this agro-commodity production is intended for export – driving massive deforestation.

Consumption patterns of G7 countries (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Britain, and the US) drive an average loss of 3.9 trees per person per year, over 15 years from 2001-2015, says a study published this year in Nature. More than 50% of global forest loss and land conversion is attributable to the production of agricultural commodities, and forestry products are driven by consumer demand, as shown by a 2020 WWF study on Switzerland’s overseas footprint for forest-risk commodities.

The list of imported agricultural products contains, first and foremost, soy, palm oil, cacao, beef and its by-products, rubber, timber, and derived products that do not come from sustainably managed forests. Others include coffee, tea, or even cane 

“…we are now at the point where significant and permanent changes to consumption patterns and legislative regulation can no longer be delayed,” said David Williams-Mitchell, Director of Communications, European Association of Zoos and Aquaria (EAZA). He cited examples of a hugely expanded meat industry leading to increases in greenhouse gases, carbon sink capacity loss, and biodiversity loss through habitat conversion.

In 2017 alone, the international trade of agricultural products was associated with 1.3 million hectares of tropical deforestation emitting some 740 million tonnes of carbon dioxide – this is equivalent to nearly a fifth of the EU28’s total greenhouse gas emissions that year.

To end deforestation, companies must eliminate 5 million hectares of conversion from supply chains each year.

“We need countries all over the world to participate in the fight against imported deforestation. We need to learn to use local resources and establish sustainable sources for exported products, especially without harming the forests,” says Jean-Pascal Guéry of Primate Conservation Trust, a co-sponsor Congress motion 012.

The world’s forests absorb 2.4 billion tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year, one-third of the annual CO2 released from burning fossil fuels. Forest destruction emits further carbon into the atmosphere, with 4.3–5.5 gigatons of total anthropogenic Green House Gas (GHG) emissions per year, generated annually mainly from deforestation and forest degradation, according to Cameroon-based NGO Environment and Rural Development Foundation (ERuDeF). ERuDeF, also a co-sponsor of Congress motion 012, estimates that half of the tropical forests worldwide have been destroyed since the 1960s. Every second, more than one hectare of tropical forest is destroyed or drastically degraded.

WWF mentions that despite more initiatives to halt deforestation, including certification, corporate commitments, and market incentives, the rate of commodity-driven land use doesn’t appear to be declining. This means the negative impacts on local people and nature continue.

In a study earlier this year, Greenpeace said that “certification is a weak tool to address global forest and ecosystem destruction”

By certifying their products as ‘sustainable,’ some certification schemes can help guide consumption choices and have a positive impact locally, “but it is (largely) greenwashing destruction of ecosystems and violations of Indigenous and labour rights.” So, while buyers think they are making the right ethical choice, they might still buy products linked to abuse and destruction.

Ranece Jovial Ndjeudja, Greenpeace Africa’s campaign manager in Cameroon, told IPS, “the limitations to the policy effectiveness for the IUCN Congress motion on imported deforestation is increased taxation aimed at deterring forest clearing. This, however, cannot always prevent deforestation.”

“Companies would just increase production to compensate for the tax hikes,” Ndjeudja said, speaking from Yaoundé, where Cameroonians rallied in early August to demand EU stop deforestation for rubber production.

“It is industrial logging and industrial agriculture which is the problem. Are these industrial productions really bringing in a large revenue to the exporting governments? No. If it did, Cameroon and Congo would not be so poor. A small group gets rich. While Cameroon’s natives lose access to food, health, and their culture,” Tal Harris, Greenpeace Africa’s international communications coordinator, explained. “A government cannot work out of a capital city thousands of miles distant from such extensive forests,” Harris said. “Devolution of power to the local population is necessary.”

Local communities play a vital role in wildlife conservation and environment protection. Comprising less than 5 percent of the world’s population, indigenous communities protect 80 percent of global biodiversity, says ERuDeF.

Cameroon’s Ndjeaudja echoes this. To ensure trees are not cut, there is the need to work with local communities because, for generations, they have been living with forests and have the knowledge of their sustainable management.

“We have a lot to learn from them and must allow indigenous communities to share this knowledge,” he said.

IUCN Congress to Push for Stronger Regulations against ‘Imported Deforestation’ | Inter Press Service (ipsnews.net)

 In July 2019, a British ecologist co-authored a study estimating that Earth had space for an extra trillion trees on land not used for agriculture or settlement. Its implications were intoxicatingly hopeful. By restoring forests in an area roughly the size of China, the press release accompanying the paper suggested two-thirds of all emissions from human activities still present in the atmosphere could be removed. The study, led by Jean-François Bastin, a postdoctoral researcher at Crowther’s lab in ETH Zürich, Switzerland, was the second most featured climate paper in the media in 2019, according to one analysis. 

It inspired the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) One Trillion Trees Initiative, launched last year after Salesforce billionaire Marc Benioff read the paper on the recommendation of Al Gore, the former US vice-president. 

The study has now faced intense scientific criticism. 

Several ecologists were outraged that forest restoration was framed as the “most effective climate change solution to date”, arguing that it was a dangerously misleading distraction from the urgency of cutting fossil fuel emissions. 

Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist and director at California’s Breakthrough Institute, pointed out problems with the paper when it came out. “Reforestation might buy us up to a decade of time – maybe six or seven years of current emissions,” he says. “It’s not nothing, but it doesn’t really fundamentally change the story: we still need some pretty massive reductions in our emissions. The brutal maths of climate change is that, as long as emissions are above zero, the world will continue to warm. You’re going to max out pretty soon if you only try to use forests. Tree planting is not an alternative to mitigation.”

   The paper dramatically overstated where new forests could grow by including savannahs and grasslands in its artificial intelligence-derived estimate of land suitable. Ecologists were divided over how to reforest: allow humans to plant enormous numbers of saplings or leave ecosystems to regenerate on their own? Some feared the paper would be used to justify indiscriminate tree-planting, with damaging consequences for biodiversity, agriculture and access to water.

The science behind the press release’s claim that new forests could suck in two-thirds of all historic human emissions remaining in the atmosphere was also questioned. In May 2020, the study’s authors made three corrections, including an acknowledgment that they were incorrect to state “tree restoration is the most effective solution to climate change to date”, and clarifying that new forests could absorb about half as much carbon from the air as the paper initially appeared to suggest, explaining that they did not mean reforestation was a potential magic bullet or a substitute for reducing fossil fuel use. Reforestation was a potent tool for climate crisis mitigation, just less so than initially suggested, and certainly not a replacement for decarbonisation.

Last month, a global review of tree-planting initiatives in the tropics and subtropics since 1961 found that while dozens of organisations reported planting a total of 1.4 billion trees, just 18% mentioned monitoring and only 5% measured survival rates.

The lesson the World Socialist Movement would like to point out is that capitalism will grasp at any supposed solution to the climate crises if it means not only is capitalism preserved but another money-making scheme is created for what can be called ecopreneurs

‘I’ve never said we should plant a trillion trees’: what ecopreneur Thomas Crowther did next | Trees and forests | The Guardian

 Universal credit is a government benefit paid to about six million people who are on a low income or don’t have a job. A £20 weekly drop in the payment, which will come into effect next month. It’s happening because the government’s ending a booster payment that was brought in last year to help support people when the UK first went into lockdown in April 2020.

 African American children are suffering long-term disadvantages as a result of vast and growing disparities in the wealth of US families, with Black families with kids having access to barely 1 cent for every dollar enjoyed by their white counterparts.

 Wealth Inequality and Child Development, a compilation of the latest research published by the Russell Sage Foundation, new research by scholars on US inequality shows that the basic wealth levels of families from different racial and ethnic backgrounds have diverged to such a stark degree in the past three decades that the future prospects of children from lower-wealth groups are likely to be grossly compromised.

In 2019, the median wealth level for a white family with children in the US was $63,838.

 The same statistic for a Black family with children was $808. Among Black families homeownership is much less common, as are savings or inheritance, which collectively shrinks the median wealth to the paltry figure of $808.

Hispanic families with kids fare little better. They have a median wealth of $3,175, which equates to 5 cents for every dollar of wealth in an equivalent white household.

Christina Gibson-Davis, a professor of public policy and sociology at Duke University who is co-editor of the new research, pointed to one of its central findings – that wealth inequality between American families has become so extreme that 1% of parents control 44% of all wealth held by households with children, while the top 10% control 82%.

“When the top 10% of parents control 82% of all the wealth in child households, that opens up opportunities and choices they make for their children that are not available to the bottom 90%,” Gibson-Davis said. “Wealth is so stratified by race and ethnicity that it perpetuates that racial inequality into the next generation,” Gibson-David explained. “ We are OK with having winners and losers in the childhood wealth lottery. White kids born to well-educated parents are going to enjoy relatively high levels of wealth – the vast majority of kids don’t have that luxury.”

Staggering US wealth inequality heaps long-term harm on to minority children | Inequality | The Guardian

 Over the past four decades, satellite records have shown how increasing global temperatures have had a profound effect on the Arctic. Warming in the region is far more pronounced than in the rest of the world and has caused a rapid shrinkage of summer sea ice. Scientists have long been concerned about the implications of this amplification of global change for the rest of the planet.

 More money is to be spent on the US military.

A House of Representatives panel on Wednesday approved a $37.5 billion increase to the Pentagon budget from last year.

The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2022 amendment would add $25 billion to President Joe Biden’s $753 billion topline military spending request for the next fiscal year.

It puts arms dealer profits before the needs of everyday people.

William Hartung, director of Arms & Security Program at the Center for International Policy, noted that “Biden’s proposed Pentagon budget was already at near-record levels before the House Armed Services Committee’s reckless recommendation.

Joseph Cirincione, a distinguished fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, called the move as “outrageous” and “strategically bankrupt.”

“In a time of climate crisis, a raging pandemic, rampant racial injustice, and growing income inequity,” he said, “Congress votes to increase the size of the trough for the arms dealers who fund their campaigns.”

‘Outrageous’ and ‘Shameful’: House Panel Approves $37.5B Boost to Pentagon Budget | Common Dreams News

Many Americans won’t make that connection with extreme weather because most media reporting doesn’t contain the words “climate change”.

 Six of the biggest commercial TV networks in the US – ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, NBC and MSNBC – ran 774 stories about Hurricane Ida from 27 to 30 August, an analysis by the watchdog group Media Matters found. Only 34 of those stories, barely 4%, mentioned climate change.

The vast majority of news coverage chooses climate silence, not climate science.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined others in linking the climate emergency to the nation’s growing inequality.

“Many of these deaths occurred in basement dwellings, many of which are illegal and growing in number due to the unaffordable housing crisis, but do not meet safety standards required to keep people safe in incidents like flash floods,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. “These are working class, immigrant, and low-income people and families.”

Once more the Green New Deal is being again being promoted as an answer to this global phenomenon. A lot more than some legislative palliatives is required.