Day: September 3, 2021

MARSEILLE, FRANCE – The perilous state of the planet’s wildlife will be laid bare when the largest organization for the protection of nature meets Friday hoping to help galvanize action as the world faces intertwined biodiversity and climate crises.

Relentless habitat destruction, unsustainable agriculture, mining and a warming planet will dominate discussion at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) conference, hosted by France in the city of Marseille.

The meeting, delayed from 2020 by the pandemic, comes ahead of crucial United Nations summits on climate, food systems and biodiversity that could shape the planet’s foreseeable future.

“Our common goal is to put nature at the top of international priorities — because our destinies are intrinsically linked, planet, climate, nature and human communities,” said French President Emmanuel Macron in a statement ahead of the IUCN meeting.

He said the conference should lay the “initial foundations” for a global biodiversity strategy that will be the focus of UN deliberations in China in April next year.

The international community is grappling with a near set of goals to “live in harmony with nature” by 2050, with interim goals to be set for this decade.

Nutritious food, breathable air, clean water, nature-based medicines — humans are dependent on the health of the ecosystems they are destroying.

Previous IUCN congresses have paved the way for global treaties on biodiversity and the international trade in endangered species.

But efforts to halt extensive declines in numbers and diversity of animals and plants have so far failed to slow the destruction.

In 2019 the UN’s biodiversity experts warned that a million species are on the brink of extinction — raising the specter that the planet is on the verge of its sixth mass extinction event in half a billion years.

Interwoven threats

The nine-day IUCN meeting, which opens at 1500 GMT Friday, will include an update of its Red List of Threatened Species, measuring how close animal and plant species are to vanishing forever.

Experts have assessed nearly 135,000 species over the last half-century and nearly 28% are currently at risk of extinction, with habitat loss, overexploitation and illegal trade driving the loss.

Big cats, for example, have lost more than 90% of their historic range and population, with only 20,000 lions, 7,000 cheetahs, 4,000 tigers and a few dozen Amur leopards left in the wild.

The meeting is likely to hammer home the message that protecting wildlife is imperative for the healthy function of ecosystems and for humanity.

Loss of biodiversity, climate change, pollution, diseases spreading from the wild have become existential threats that cannot be “understood or addressed in isolation,” the IUCN said ahead of the meeting in a vision statement endorsed by its 1,400 members.

Motions on the table include protecting 80% of Amazonia by 2025, tackling plastic in the oceans, combatting wildlife crime and preventing pandemics.

The IUCN will also, for the first time in its seven-decade history, welcome indigenous peoples to share their deep knowledge on how best to heal the natural world as voting members.

Source: Voice of America

HARARE – The future looked promising for Tinashe Mapuranga, an intern at a leading bank in Zimbabwe who appeared set to get a staff position as soon as he completed his college degree. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

Amid the lockdowns, the 24-year-old was one of the first to be laid off and has no idea when he’ll be able to get his degree because of frequent school closures.

“It has really affected me a lot in my studies. I have no money to buy data and I don’t have a personal laptop to study online and keep up like what others are doing,” said Mapuranga, who lives with his mother in Chitungwiza, a sprawling working-class area southeast of Harare, the capital.

“I was supposed to finish in November or December 2021, but as of now, we haven’t completed much of the work,” he said. “Truly speaking, I am not sure when I will finish the degree. I can’t wait to graduate and find a job and do something tangible in life.”

Mapuranga spends most of his time at home, tending a tiny vegetable garden that is the family’s main source of food. His mother ekes out a living traveling to South Africa to sell things like stone carvings and brooms on the streets, a trade also badly hit by the pandemic.

“We’ve been trying to hustle to get some money,” he said. “I tried to do a small business selling cooking gas but the authorities chased us away from the streets. My father passed away. My mother is into informal business, but it’s also down with these lockdowns. Things are not well right now. It’s tough.”

Mapuranga’s situation might look dire, but he says he’s concerned about some of his unemployed peers who have fallen into alcohol, drugs and prostitution.

“Many youths have lost hope,” he said.

Across Africa, many others like Mapuranga are battling the economic downturn caused by COVID-19, losing jobs and seeing their education disrupted, a survey of people aged 18-24 in 15 countries has found.

The pandemic increased the already-high level of unemployment among the group, according to preliminary findings of the second annual Africa Youth Survey.

Nearly 20% of the 4,500 respondents said they became unemployed because of the pandemic and 37% were forced to stop or pause their education. Another 8% saw their pay docked, 18% had to move back home and 10% said they had to care for family members, according to the survey, which was commissioned by the Johannesburg-based Ichikowitz Family Foundation, whose founder, Ivor Ichikowitz, runs Paramount Group, an aerospace, security and military contractor.

Of the 1.3 billion people in Africa’s 54 countries, an estimated 250 million are aged 18-24. The study was conducted in major urban and trading centers in Angola, Congo, the Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Sudan, Uganda and Zambia. The researchers for PSB Insights, a global polling company, were nationals of each country where the survey took place and went door-to-door for in-depth, face-to-face interviews.

People surveyed said the pandemic caused substantial disruptions to their schooling, emphasizing the need for more computers and internet access in Africa for online education.

Bola Badejo, 29, saw her salary at the broadcast station where she worked in Abuja, Nigeria, cut in half, and she complained that she could not make it on the equivalent of $146 a month.

“I was already poor and I was working just for the sake of doing the job,” she said. Then, in April 202, she was laid off.

“I fell into depression because the whole thing was really sad. I felt I had nowhere to go,” Badejo said.

After seven months without a job, she started a home cleaning business, and that has boosted her outlook, she said.

Badejo is typical of many who have found different ways to support themselves.

In 2020, about 40% of those surveyed expressed optimism about the future. The pandemic dented that confidence, lowering it to 31%, according to the survey.

Uganda has had two lockdowns since April 2020, the second of which was relaxed in July. But businesses involving close human interaction — bars, gyms and nightclubs — remain closed by presidential order, leaving many young people without work.

Ronald Maathe, a 25-year-old janitor at a gym outside Uganda’s capital of Kampala, shook his head sorrowfully when saying that his monthly salary is now the equivalent of $43. That’s half of what he used to earn before the pandemic.

“After I pay the rent, I am left with almost nothing,” he said. “The half salary doesn’t do anything.”

His face lights up when describing how he makes ends meet by selling passion fruit — or grenadillas — that he buys from farmers near the border with Congo. He makes a small profit on every sack of fruit he sells in Kampala.

“My business is still small. But I have a dream,” he said. “If I can get someone to hold my hand, and give me a loan to expand my business, that’s what I want. I am not waiting for the government to help me.”

Source: Voice of America

The African Union has announced that Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccines assembled in South Africa will no longer be exported to Europe and will instead be distributed among African countries.

In addition, millions of J&J vaccines already shipped to Europe, but currently stored in warehouses, will be returned to South Africa, African Union COVID-19 envoy Strive Masiyiwa said Thursday.

The deal between J&J and Aspen Pharmacare, the South African facility manufacturing the J&J vaccines that were sent to Europe, had received harsh criticism as less than 3% of the population of the African continent has been inoculated, compared to richer regions of the world that have begun or will soon begin booster shot campaigns.

The World Health Organization has warned that the pandemic cannot be brought under control unless all the world’s regions are equitably vaccinated.

Meanwhile, WHO has listed a new coronavirus strain as a “variant of interest.” The Mu variant is responsible for nearly 40% of the COVID cases in Colombia where it was first identified.

Greek health care workers demonstrated Thursday against a COVID mandate that went into effect Wednesday.

Under the new regulation, workers will be suspended without pay if they have not been inoculated or recovered from the coronavirus in the last six months.

Musicals are back on Broadway, after an absence of more than a year because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Tony Award-winning Hadestown, a modern interpretation of the ancient Greek legend of lovers Orpheus and Eurydice, opened Thursday.

Also, the musical Waitress began a limited run Thursday, starring singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles.

Hamilton, The Lion King, and Wicked return to Broadway theaters Sept. 14.

The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center has recorded 219 million COVID infections and 4.5 million coronavirus deaths. The center said early Friday that 5.3 billion vaccines have been administered.

Some information for this report came from the Associated Press.

Source: Voice of America