United Nations – Page 10 – Desdemona Despair

Projected coal demand in the Stated Policies Scenario in the World Energy Outlooks 2021, 2020, and 2016. The International Energy Agency’s flagship outlook in October 2021 projected that under nations’ existing policies, global demand doesn’t begin falling again for several years. Then it declines but in 2050 is still at 70 percent of today’s levels. The IEA’s roadmap for reaching net-zero global emissions by 2050 requires a 55 percent decline by 2030. Graphic: IEA

November 17, 2021

After COP26: The long road to phasing down coal – “It is hard to shut down coal facilities because few countries have sufficient spare capacity in their electricity systems to be able to do so”

By Ben Geman 16 November 2021 (Axios) – Let’s leave to history to see whether the COP26 deal to “phase down” coal instead of “phase out” makes any real-world difference, but what’s clear is that any meaningful “phasing” at all is hard. Why it matters: Coal is the most carbon-intensive fuel. Any pathway to meeting the Paris Agreement […]

Total Annual CO2-e emissions in Australia during the Labor and Liberal governments. Photo: The Juice Media

November 6, 2021

Honest Government Ad: COP26 Climate Summit – “Fuck you: we’ll keep digging, burning and exporting fossil fuels, let you to do the hard work, and then take all the credit”

27 October 2021 (The Juice Media) – I’m from the Australien Government with a message for the world as we gather in Glasgow for this crucial climate summit: Fuck you. Over the coming days our Prime Marketer will be there trying to shake a lot of hands and saying a lot of blah blah blah […]

A woman collects water from a puddle in the dried Manambovo river bed in Tsihombe, Madagascar, 2 May 2021. Photo: Viviane Rakotoarivony / UN / REUTERS

July 20, 2021

UN says 400,000 are approaching starvation in Madagascar amid back-to-back droughts – “This is not because of war or conflict, this is because of climate change”

UNITED NATIONS, 26 June 2021 (AP) – The U.N. World Food Program says southern Madagascar is in the throes of back-to-back droughts that are pushing 400,000 people toward starvation, and have already caused deaths from severe hunger. Lola Castro, WFP’s regional director in southern Africa, told a news conference Friday that she witnessed “a very dramatic […]

Number of undernourished people and prevalence of undernourishment globally, 2005-2020. The number of undernourished people in the world has been on the rise since 2015 and is back to levels seen during the global financial crisis in 2008–2009. Graphic: FAO

July 15, 2021

UN: World hunger continued its six-year rise in 2020 – Up to 160 million more people faced hunger in 2020 than in 2019 – “The world is at a critical juncture”

12 July 2021 (UNFAO) – The world is in a very different place to where it was six years ago when it committed to the goal of ending hunger, food insecurity and all forms of malnutrition by 2030. At the time, we were optimistic that with transformative approaches, past progress could be accelerated, at scale, […]

Global quantities of cocaine seized, by region, 1998–2019. Quantities of cocaine seized reached record levels in 2019. In 2019, the global quantity of cocaine seized increased by 9.6 percent compared with the preceding year to reach 1,436 tons (of varying purities), a record high. The 90 percent increase in the quantities of cocaine seized between 2009 and 2019 is likely a reflection of a combination of factors, including an increase in cocaine manufacture (50 per cent between 2009 and 2019) and a subsequent increase in cocaine trafficking, as well as an increase in the efficiency of law enforcement, which may have contributed to an increase in the overall interception rate. Graphic: UNODC

June 28, 2021

Illegal drug trade back to business as usual in 2020 and 2021 – Cocaine production hits record high – Number of people using illegal drugs increased by 22 percent in 2010-2019 decade

By Pia Lee-Brago 28 June 2021 (The Philippine Star) – Around 275 million people used illegal drugs worldwide in the last year of unprecedented upheaval caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, up by 22 percent from 2010, and it is “business as usual” again for drug traffickers, according to the latest annual world drug report by […]

Risk levels for climate-sensitive health outcomes based on different greenhouse gas emissions and adaptation scenarios. Graphic: IPCC WG 2 Sixth Assessment Report / AFP

June 23, 2021

Hunger, drought, disease: UN climate report reveals dire health threats – “The basis for our health is sustained by three pillars: the food we eat, access to water, and shelter. These pillars are totally vulnerable and about to collapse.”

By Patrick Galey 23 June 2021 (AFP) – Hunger, drought and disease will afflict tens of millions more people within decades, according to a draft UN assessment that lays bare the dire human health consequences of a warming planet. After a pandemic year that saw the world turned on its head, a forthcoming report by […]

FAO Food Price Index, May 2020-May 2021. The FAO Food Price Index (FFPI) averaged 127.1 points in May 2021, 5.8 points (4.8 percent) higher than in April and as much as 36.1 points (39.7 percent) above the same period last year. The May increase represented the biggest month-on-month gain since October 2010. It also marked the twelfth consecutive monthly rise in the value of the FFPI to its highest value since September 2011, bringing the Index only 7.6 percent below its peak value of 137.6 points registered in February 2011. The sharp increase in May reflected a surge in prices for oils, sugar and cereals along with firmer meat and dairy prices. Graphic: UN FAO

June 5, 2021

Global food prices rise at rapid pace in May 2021 – Food Price Index hits highest value since September 2011, only 7.6 percent below its all-time peak

ROME, 4 June 2021 (FAO) – Global food prices rose in May at their fastest monthly rate in more than a decade, even as world cereal production is on course to reach a new record high, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) reported today. The FAO Food Price Index averaged 127.1 points in […]

Projected geographical shift of the human temperature niche. (Top) Geographical position of the human temperature niche projected on the current situation (A) and the RCP8.5 projected 2070 climate (B). Those maps represent relative human distributions (summed to unity) for the imaginary situation that humans would be distributed over temperatures following the stylized double Gaussian model fitted to the modern data (the blue dashed curve in Fig. 2A). (C) Difference between the maps, visualizing potential source (orange) and sink (green) areas for the coming decades if humans were to be relocated in a way that would maintain this historically stable distribution with respect to temperature. The dashed line in A and B indicates the 5% percentile of the probability distribution. Graphic: Xu, et al., 2020 / PNAS

December 17, 2020

Broken societies put people and planet on a collision course, says UNDP – “No country in the world has yet achieved very high human development without putting immense strain on the planet”

NEW YORK, 15 December 2020 (HDRO) – The COVID-19 pandemic is the latest crisis facing the world, but unless humans release their grip on nature, it won’t be the last, according to a new report [pdf] by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), which includes a new experimental index on human progress that takes into account countries’ […]

Aerial view of mass graves in Manaus, Brazil, 22 April 2020. Photo: Sandro Pereira / Fotoarena / Folhapress

December 4, 2020

U.N. warns 2021 shaping up to be a humanitarian catastrophe – “The worst humanitarian crisis year since the beginning of the United Nations 75 years ago”

By Michelle Nichols 4 December 2020 NEW YORK (Reuters) – Next year is shaping up to be a humanitarian catastrophe and rich countries must not trample poor countries in a “stampede for vaccines” to combat the coronavirus pandemic, top U.N. officials told the 193-member U.N. General Assembly on Friday. World Food Programme (WFP) chief David […]

Number of global undernourished, 2010-2020 and projected to 2030 under three Covid scenarios. Graphic: UNFAO

August 2, 2020

UN report sends “sobering message” of deeply entrenched hunger globally – Number of undernourished people in the world continued to increase in 2019

13 July 2020 (UN News) – In much of the world, “hunger remains deeply entrenched and is rising”, the UN chief said on Monday, launching this year’s major UN food security update, highlighting that over the past five years, tens of millions of people have joined the ranks of the chronically undernourished. As countries “continue […]