#Africa Food Crisis

[dandelionsresilience]

Good News - July 22-28

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1. Four new cheetah cubs born in Saudi Arabia after 40 years of extinction

“[T]he discovery of mummified cheetahs in caves […] which ranged in age from 4,000 to as recent as 120 years, proved that the animals […] once called [Saudi Arabia] home. The realisation kick-started the country’s Cheetah Conservation Program to bring back the cats to their historic Arabian range. […] Dr Mohammed Qurban, CEO of the NCW, said: […] “This motivates us to continue our efforts to restore and reintroduce cheetahs, guided by an integrated strategy designed in accordance with best international practices.””

2. In sub-Saharan Africa, ‘forgotten’ foods could boost climate resilience, nutrition

“[A study published in PNAS] examined “forgotten” crops that may help make sub-Saharan food systems more resilient, and more nutritious, as climate change makes it harder to grow [current staple crops.] [… The study identified 138 indigenous] food crops that were “relatively underresearched, underutilized, or underpromoted in an African context,” but which have the nutrient content and growing stability to support healthy diets and local economies in the region. […] In Eswatini, van Zonneveld and the World Vegetable Center are working with schools to introduce hardy, underutilized vegetables to their gardens, which have typically only grown beans and maize.”

3. Here's how $4 billion in government money is being spent to reduce climate pollution

“[New Orleans was awarded] nearly $50 million to help pay for installing solar on low to middle income homes [… and] plans to green up underserved areas with trees and build out its lackluster bike lane system to provide an alternative to cars. […] In Utah, $75 million will fund several measures from expanding electric vehicles to reducing methane emissions from oil and gas production. [… A] coalition of states led by North Carolina will look to store carbon in lands used for agriculture as well as natural places like wetlands, with more than $400 million. [… This funding is] “providing investments in communities, new jobs, cost savings for everyday Americans, improved air quality, … better health outcomes.””

4. From doom scrolling to hope scrolling: this week’s big Democratic vibe shift

“[Democrats] have been on an emotional rollercoaster for the past few weeks: from grim determination as Biden fought to hang on to his push for a second term, to outright exuberance after he stepped aside and Harris launched her campaign. […] In less than a week, the Harris campaign raised record-breaking sums and signed up more than 100,000 new volunteers[….] This honeymoon phase will end, said Democratic strategist Guy Cecil, warning the election will be a close race, despite this newfound exuberance in his party. [… But v]oters are saying they are excited to vote for Harris and not just against Trump. That’s new.”

5. Biodegradable luminescent polymers show promise for reducing electronic waste

“[A team of scientists discovered that a certain] chemical enables the recycling of [luminescent polymers] while maintaining high light-emitting functions. […] At the end of life, this new polymer can be degraded under either mild acidic conditions (near the pH of stomach acid) or relatively low heat treatment (> 410 F). The resulting materials can be isolated and remade into new materials for future applications. […] The researchers predict this new polymer can be applied to existing technologies, such as displays and medical imaging, and enable new applications […] such as cell phones and computer screens with continued testing.”

6. World’s Biggest Dam Removal Project to Open 420 Miles of Salmon Habitat this Fall

“Reconnecting the river will help salmon and steelhead populations survive a warming climate and [natural disasters….] In the long term, dam removal will significantly improve water quality in the Klamath. “Algae problems in the reservoirs behind the dams were so bad that the water was dangerous for contact […] and not drinkable,” says Fluvial Geomorphologist Brian Cluer. [… The project] will begin to reverse decades of habitat degradation, allow threatened salmon species to be resilient in the face of climate change, and restore tribal connections to their traditional food source.”

7. Biden-Harris Administration Awards $45.1 Million to Expand Mental Health and Substance Use Services Across the Lifespan

““Be it fostering wellness in young people, caring for the unhoused, facilitating treatment and more, this funding directly supports the needs of our neighbors,” said HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra. [The funding also supports] recovery and reentry services to adults in the criminal justice system who have a substance use disorder[… and clinics which] serve anyone who asks for help for mental health or substance use, regardless of their ability to pay.”

8. The World’s Rarest Crow Will Soon Fly Free on Maui

“[… In] the latest attempt to establish a wild crow population, biologists will investigate if this species can thrive on Maui, an island where it may have never lived before. Translocations outside of a species’ known historical range are rare in conservation work, but for a bird on the brink of extinction, it’s a necessary experiment: Scientists believe the crows will be safer from predators in a new locale—a main reason that past reintroduction attempts failed. […] As the release date approaches, the crows have already undergone extensive preparation for life in the wild. […] “We try to give them the respect that you would give if you were caring for someone’s elder.””

9. An optimist’s guide to the EV battery mining challenge

““Battery minerals have a tremendous benefit over oil, and that’s that you can reuse them.” [… T]he report’s authors found there’s evidence to suggest that [improvements in technology] and recycling have already helped limit demand for battery minerals in spite of this rapid growth — and that further improvements can reduce it even more. [… They] envision a scenario in which new mining for battery materials can basically stop by 2050, as battery recycling meets demand. In this fully realized circular battery economy, the world must extract a total of 125 million tons of battery minerals — a sum that, while hefty, is actually 17 times smaller than the oil currently harvested every year to fuel road transport.”

10. Peekaboo! A baby tree kangaroo debuts at the Bronx Zoo

“The tiny Matschie’s tree kangaroo […] was the third of its kind born at the Bronx Zoo since 2008. [… A] Bronx Zoo spokesperson said that the kangaroo's birth was significant for the network of zoos that aims to preserve genetic diversity among endangered animals. "It's a small population and because of that births are not very common," said Jessica Moody, curator of primates and small mammals at the Bronx Zoo[, …] adding that baby tree kangaroos are “possibly one of the cutest animals to have ever lived. They look like stuffed animals, it's amazing.””

July 15-21 news here | (all credit for images and written material can be found at the source linked; I don’t claim credit for anything but curating.)

[alwaysbewoke]

This might help to get an overview of the humaniterian crisis in sudan

[african-international-magazine]

Below is a picture showing starved children of somalia and food waste generated in Africa

The world's most influential environmental firm, The UNEP is running a launch

Of the 2024 Global Report on Food Crises#GRFC24 to hear from experts on food security.

This following a statement by UNEP reporting; Global hunger is increasing. Yet, 1.05 billion tonnes of food is wasted per year, while the climate crisis increasingly threatens food security in many parts of the world.

Environmental issues like this are still in addressed due to unawareness of the issues and/ or ways to tackle them.

One of the most vital and effective ways tackle environmental issues that involve waste production is RECYCLING.

Here are 4 ways to reduce food waste individually/ domestically

Recycling food by planting the parts that re-grow. These parts include seeds, skin the core and others. Planting of these parts will not only re-produce food but reduce market consumption and the plants performs as carbon sinks thereby reducing carbon and other pollutants in the atmosphere that cause climate change.

Unlike tossing food and contributing to the tonnes of food waste while others linger in hunger crisis, There are many delicious food dishes that can be created with left over food. Leftover food can be put to good use with minimal Internet research.

Food waste can be recycled into compost. The food waste produced by domestic homes can be Millions of tones of food waste that can be used as compost that can be used in gardens to for a good produce of a lot of healthy organic food.

A lot of people around the globe depend on pastoral and poultry produced food. These have been affected by climate change having contributed to the hunger crisis the globe is facing. Food waste produced domestically can be recycled to ideally organic animal feed or at least donated to animal feed producing firms. This can help increase food production, that is healthier as well as reduce food waste.

[bumblebeeappletree]

Climate change and conflict have led Africa to face the biggest food crisis ever seen — here’s what we know

#Earth #Environment #ClimateCrisis #NowThis

[newsbites]

News from Africa, 8 June

Seventeen nations in West Africa and the Sahel have signed the "Lomé Declaration on Fertilizers and Soil Health" to combat the escalating food crisis exacerbated by the impacts of climate change.

2. Forex markets took a dim view of South Africa's decision to grant diplomatic immunity to all attendees of the BRICS summit, including Vladimir Putin,

The decision has increased tensions with the US and EU, potentially leading to billions of rands in lost trade.

The South African Reserve Bank has warned that the government's stance toward Russia increases the risk of sanctions being imposed on the country, which may hold dire consequences for the entire financial system.

3. Attendees at a meeting of FAO and MFMRN representatives in Swakopmund heard that Namibia's 1922 plan of action for small-scale fisheries lacks sufficient funding.

[kp777]

By Fiona Harvey, Environment editor

The Guardian

April 27, 2023

The devastating drought in the Horn of Africa would not have happened without the human-made impact of the climate crisis, new science has shown.

The drought has affected about 50 million people in the Horn of Africa directly and another 100 million in the wider area. About 20 million people are at risk of acute food insecurity and potentially famine.

The region has been suffering its worst drought in 40 years since October 2020, with extended dry conditions punctuated by short intense rainfall that has often led to flash flooding. There have been five consecutive seasons of rainfall below normal levels.

At least 4.35 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance, and at least 180,000 refugees have fled Somalia and South Sudan for Kenya and Ethiopia, which have also been affected by the drought.

According to a study by the World Weather Attribution group of scientists published on Thursday, the ongoing drought would not have happened without human actions that have changed the climate.

Read more.

[scientificinquirer-blog]

DAILY DOSE: Is a white moth causing blindness in children?; Magnolia Bakery jumps into the edibles market with Red Velvet goodies.

WHITE MOTH SUSPECTED OF CAUSING BLINDNESS. In Nepal, the end of the monsoon season marks the onset of a mysterious eye infection known as seasonal hyperacute panuveitis (SHAPU), primarily affecting children. Symptoms include a painless red eye and pressure loss, which can lead to blindness within 24–48 hours if untreated. In 2023, Nepali researchers are utilizing environmental surveys, genomic…

[videogamepoc]

Before Israel’s war in Gaza, Palestinian programmer Doaa Ghandour was working on Palestine Skating Game’s grind rails. Any skater — be that skateboarding or roller skating — knows rails are essential to street-style skating. In Palestine Skating Game, these grind rails weave through the West Bank, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater-style, for use as you spray graffiti on the Israeli-built separation wall. It’s easy to see the appeal of Palestine Skating Game in its early prototype on Itch.io: The futuristic Bethlehem is made all the more colorful with paint splatters and graffiti, set to what the team describes as “Arabic electronic music.” And it’s designed to be enticing: “The idea is that if you immerse Westerners in that kind of art and music from the region, you’ll start to actually see people from the region as human beings,” Palestine Skating Game’s current project lead told Aftermath in November.

Palestine Skating Game has been in development for roughly two and a half years. The inspiration initially hit after the project lead, who was granted anonymity by Polygon, saw We Are Lady Parts, a TV show about an all-women Muslim punk band. Development has changed since then — it had to. “We have to acknowledge the existence of a lot more suffering,” the project lead told Polygon. “We are having to do the thing where we had one creative vision for the project, and now we have to figure out how that changes with respect to the events unfolding.” Israel’s war in Gaza is entering its fourth month. Nearly 28,000 people have been killed in Gaza, 388 in the occupied West Bank, and 1,139 in Israel, according to Al Jazeera. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) is currently hearing a genocide case against Israel, wherein it argues that “the acts and omissions by Israel complained of by South Africa are genocidal in character because they are intended to bring about the destruction of a substantial part of the Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group,” as reported by Vox. Israel denies the accusation, saying its attacks are justified as a response to Hamas’ terrorist attack in Israel on Oct. 7, where roughly 1,200 people were killed. “Israeli Occupation Forces have cut off all medical supplies, as well as water and food, from Palestinians in Gaza, amidst the continued carpet bombing and genocide. It has left our friends to navigate the most severe humanitarian crisis of our time,” the fundraiser reads. Palestine Skating Game has been in development for roughly two and a half years. The inspiration initially hit after the project lead, who was granted anonymity by Polygon, saw We Are Lady Parts, a TV show about an all-women Muslim punk band. Development has changed since then — it had to. “We have to acknowledge the existence of a lot more suffering,” the project lead told Polygon. “We are having to do the thing where we had one creative vision for the project, and now we have to figure out how that changes with respect to the events unfolding.” The project lead said the team, which is Ghandour, writer Hadeel, and himself with four other developers and volunteers, want to make it easy for people — even those unfamiliar with the conflict — to see what’s happening in Gaza. “We want to make it easier for people to see, Oh, here’s how the West Bank has been slowly eaten up and balkanized,” he said. “We also just want it to be something that people want to share with their friends. There should be so many fucking cool things in this game that people will immediately want to say, ‘Hey, you’ve got to see this.’” The Palestine Skating Game team — the core group, four paid developers, and roughly 15 volunteer developers — is working on a full vertical slice, or a polished, short demo, of the game. They’re also hoping to run a Kickstarter, GoFundMe campaign, or other investment to fund more development.

[probablyasocialecologist]

We cannot understand industrialization outside the history of colonialism, and its relationship to a system of accumulation of surplus value – capitalism. Following the insights of Samir Amin, Celso Furtado, Raul Prebisch, Eric Williams, Utsa and Prabhat Patnaik, and Walter Rodney, amongst others, this perspective characterizes the seemingly apolitical process of industrialization as linked the violence of primitive accumulation, commodification, exchange, and war. That is, the slave trade, the colonization of the United States, the erection of colonial plantations in Africa, the Caribbean, Asia, and Latin America, all contributing the raw materials, food items, and export markets which subtended the low-waged process of European and eventually US industrialization. These processes, whose echoes are still reverberating, produced a massive amount of CO2 emissions. Furthermore, contemporary patterns of exchange, although not occurring under direct colonial patterns of control, are still unequal on South-North lines. That is, trade between formally independent states, based on the seemingly efficient price system, hides a new mode of control. An hour of labor in the North continues to receive a far higher reward than an hour of labor in the South, even when using similar or identical technologies, and northern products exchange for ever-increasing amounts of southern resources over time. As a result, wealth concentrates in the North, in part because wages and profit concentrate there, and produce and reproduce social-economic polarization within the world system.

[luthienne]

"On April 4, 1967, exactly one year before his assassination, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stepped up to the lectern at the Riverside Church in Manhattan. [...] Many of King’s strongest allies urged him to remain silent about the war or at least to soft-pedal any criticism. They knew that if he told the whole truth about the unjust and disastrous war he would be falsely labeled a Communist, suffer retaliation and severe backlash, alienate supporters and threaten the fragile progress of the civil rights movement.

King rejected all the well-meaning advice and said, 'I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. […] A time comes when silence is betrayal' and added, 'that time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.'

It was a lonely, moral stance. And it cost him. But it set an example of what is required of us if we are to honor our deepest values in times of crisis, even when silence would better serve our personal interests or the communities and causes we hold most dear. It’s what I think about when I go over the excuses and rationalizations that have kept me largely silent on one of the great moral challenges of our time: the crisis in Israel-Palestine.

I have not been alone. Until very recently, the entire Congress has remained mostly silent on the human rights nightmare that has unfolded in the occupied territories. Our elected representatives, who operate in a political environment where Israel's political lobby holds well-documented power, have consistently minimized and deflected criticism of the State of Israel, even as it has grown more emboldened in its occupation of Palestinian territory and adopted some practices reminiscent of apartheid in South Africa and Jim Crow segregation in the United States. [...]

Reading King’s speech at Riverside more than 50 years later, I am left with little doubt that his teachings and message require us to speak out passionately against the human rights crisis in Israel-Palestine, despite the risks and despite the complexity of the issues. King argued, when speaking of Vietnam, that even 'when the issues at hand seem as perplexing as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict,' we must not be mesmerized by uncertainty. 'We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.'

And so, if we are to honor King’s message and not merely the man, we must condemn Israel’s actions: unrelenting violations of international law, continued occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, home demolitions and land confiscations. We must cry out at the treatment of Palestinians at checkpoints, the routine searches of their homes and restrictions on their movements, and the severely limited access to decent housing, schools, food, hospitals and water that many of them face.

We must not tolerate Israel’s refusal even to discuss the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes, as prescribed by United Nations resolutions, and we ought to question the U.S. government funds that have supported multiple hostilities and thousands of civilian casualties in Gaza, as well as the $38 billion the U.S. government has pledged in military support to Israel.

And finally, we must, with as much courage and conviction as we can muster, speak out against the system of legal discrimination that exists inside Israel, a system complete with, according to Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, more than 50 laws that discriminate against Palestinians — such as the new nation-state law that says explicitly that only Jewish Israelis have the right of self-determination in Israel, ignoring the rights of the Arab minority that makes up 21 percent of the population. [...]

Indeed, King’s views may have evolved alongside many other spiritually grounded thinkers, like Rabbi Brian Walt, who has spoken publicly about the reasons that he abandoned his faith in what he viewed as political Zionism. To him, he recently explained to me, liberal Zionism meant that he believed in the creation of a Jewish state that would be a desperately needed safe haven and cultural center for Jewish people around the world, "a state that would reflect as well as honor the highest ideals of the Jewish tradition.” He said he grew up in South Africa in a family that shared those views and identified as a liberal Zionist, until his experiences in the occupied territories forever changed him.

During more than 20 visits to the West Bank and Gaza, he saw horrific human rights abuses, including Palestinian homes being bulldozed while people cried — children's toys strewn over one demolished site — and saw Palestinian lands being confiscated to make way for new illegal settlements subsidized by the Israeli government. He was forced to reckon with the reality that these demolitions, settlements and acts of violent dispossession were not rogue moves, but fully supported and enabled by the Israeli military. For him, the turning point was witnessing legalized discrimination against Palestinians — including streets for Jews only — which, he said, was worse in some ways than what he had witnessed as a boy in South Africa."

— Michelle Alexander, from her essay Time to Break the Silence on Palestine, as featured in the New York Times in 2019

[soon-palestine]

Israel’s assault on Gaza had killed at least 172 dependents of United Nations staff by the end of June, according to a confidential UN report obtained by Drop Site, in addition to 195 staff members.

The previously unreported data reflects the extraordinary toll not just for employees of the United Nations but for their families, and emerges as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu prepares to address a joint session of Congress Wednesday.

Netanyahu, the subject of a potential arrest warrant from the U.N.’s International Criminal Court, will meet while in the United States with outgoing President Joe Biden, former President Donald Trump, and presidential hopeful/Vice President Kamala Harris. Harris, while meeting with Netanyahu privately, has declined to appear behind him during his address. At least 21 lawmakers, including some establishment figures such as Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., and Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., will be boycotting Netanyahu’s address.

The data put together by the U.N.’s Crisis Coordination Centre also includes a breakdown by agency, finding five U.N. Development Program dependents, four UNICEF dependents, three World Food Program family members, and two World Health Organization dependents have been killed. 158 dependents of staff for UNRWA, or the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, have been killed.

In May, the U.N. reported that 188 staff members of UNRWA had been killed by then, but has not previously disclosed the extent of the familial casualties.

Among staff, the killings are similarly concentrated among UNRWA employees. The report was circulated internally July 1, before the U.N.’s International Court of Justice announced its landmark finding that Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank is illegal and must be ended. The UN did not respond to a request for comment.

Israeli attacks on U.N. staff have continued since. This weekend, a U.N. spokesperson said that a U.N. convoy was fired on by Israeli forces despite tight coordination ahead of time. State Department spokesperson Matt Miller said Monday the U.S. had requested information from Israel about its latest strike on the convoy, adding that he appreciated the “enormous sacrifice and enormous risk humanitarian workers put themselves under.” Miller said that Secretary of State Antony Blinken had met Monday with a top U.N. official and discussed the issue. Asked if the U.S. was prepared to dole out consequences if Israel continued killing aid workers, he said, “I don’t have anything to read out on that at this time.”

The UN report is the latest in a series of alarming findings regarding Israel’s actions in Gaza. Most recently, the UN Special Rapporteur reported "reasonable grounds to believe" that Israel’s actions in Gaza may constitute genocide, a finding echoing International Court of Justice (ICJ), which ruled in January that “the Court considers that the plausible rights in question in these proceedings, namely the right of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip to be protected from acts of genocide and related prohibited acts identified in Article III of the Genocide Convention and the right of South Africa to seek Israel’s compliance with the latter’s obligations under the Convention, are of such a nature that prejudice to them is capable of causing irreparable harm.”

However, Israel’s massacre in Gaza continues unabated. On July 22, Israel killed 89 people and injured at least 250 in a new assault on Khan Younis after ordering 400,000 people to leave their homes and refugee camps in the rapidly shrinking “safe zones” of Gaza, 83 percent of which is now a “no-go zone.” Bombings in the no-go zone have also not stopped; in the past 12 hours, dozens have been killed in Al Sabra, Jabalia, and Gaza City neighborhoods.

On Tuesday, Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud said in an interview with Breaking Points that Michigan voters supportive of Palestinian rights, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, were holding out hope that a Harris administration would be less ideologically rigid in its support for Israel’s war. “The door is open,” he said, adding that representatives of the Harris team had already begun reaching out to local Muslim leaders to set up meetings.

Republican candidate Trump, meanwhile, has left little hope there would be a significant departure from Biden’s policy were he to be elected. Basem Naim, a member of the political bureau of Hamas in Gaza, told Drop Site’s Jeremy Scahill that Trump’s recent belligerence was a reminder that there is little difference between the two parties on the question of Israel and Palestine.

“Sad to hear such statements, because it reflects that the complicit American policies towards the conflict here is a non-partisan issue and regardless who will win the election the blind and disgraceful support of USA to Israel will continue,” Naim said in a comment issued following Trump’s speech at the Republican National Convention, before Biden dropped out. “But we can very confident[ly] reassure Mr. Trump, that the Democrats have already done the maximum to help their puppet in the region and they both have failed to achieve any of their goals, therefore use your time to put a new strategy to rescue your puppet from its ominous demise, a new strategy based on justice and genuine rights of all people to freedom, dignity, and self determination.”

Robust protests inside the Cannon House Office Building were held on Tuesday by Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow, with more planned for Wednesday to coincide with Netanyahu’s speech.

[whencyclopedia]

Mutapa

Mutapa (aka Matapa, Mwenemutapa, and Monomotapa) was a southern African kingdom located in the north of modern Zimbabwe along the Zambezi River which flourished between the mid-15th and mid-17th century CE. Although sometimes described as an empire, there is little evidence that the Shona people of Mutapa ever established such control over the region. Prospering thanks to its local resources of gold and ivory, the kingdom traded with Muslim merchants on the coast of East Africa and then the Portuguese during the 16th century CE. The kingdom went into decline when it was weakened by civil wars, and the Portuguese conquered its territory around 1633 CE.

Great Zimbabwe Decline

By the 15th century CE, the kingdom of Great Zimbabwe (est. c. 1100 CE) was in decline and any links with the lucrative coastal trade of the Swahili coast had ceased. This may be because gold deposits had run out in the territory controlled by the kingdom. Additional factors may have included overpopulation, overworking of the land, and deforestation, leading to food shortages which were perhaps brought to crisis point by a series of droughts.

By the second half of the 15th century CE, the Bantu-speaking Shona peoples had migrated a few hundred kilometres northwards from Great Zimbabwe to a land where they displaced the indigenous pygmies and smaller tribes who fled to the forests and desert. The exact relationship between Great Zimbabwe and Mutapa is not known other than that archaeology has shown both kingdoms had very similar pottery, weapons, tools, and luxury manufactured goods like jewellery.

The Shona thus formed a new state, the kingdom of Mutapa, from around 1450 CE, although it may well have been a case of the Zimbabwe ruling elite changing capital rather than a general population movement from the south. The founder and first Mutapa king was Nyatsimba Mutota. According to Shona oral tradition, Mutota had been sent to investigate the land around the north bend of the Zambezi River and he came back with the glad tidings that it was plentiful in salt and wild game. The second king, Mutota's son Nyanhehwe Matope, would expand the kingdom even further, capturing both land and cattle.

Continue reading...

[quotesfrommyreading]

African countries are being forced to spend billions of dollars a year coping with the effects of the climate crisis, which is diverting potential investment from schools and hospitals and threatens to drive countries into ever deeper poverty.

Dealing with extreme weather is costing close to 6% of GDP in Ethiopia alone, equating to a spend of more than $1 repairing climate damage for every $20 of national income, according to research by the thinktank Power Shift Africa.

The warning comes just before the major new scientific report from the global authority on climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This report, the second part of the IPCC’s comprehensive summary of global climate science, will set out the consequences of climate breakdown across the world, looking at the floods, droughts, heatwaves and storms that are affecting food systems, water supplies and infrastructure. As global temperatures have risen in recent decades, and as the impact of extreme weather has become more apparent around the world, efforts to make infrastructure and communities more resilient have largely stalled.

Africa will be one of the worst-hit regions, despite having done least to cause the climate crisis. According to the Power Shift Africa study, titled Adapt or Die: An analysis of African climate adaptation strategies, African countries will spend an average of 4% of GDP on adapting to climate breakdown.

These countries include some of the world’s poorest people, whose responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions is many times less than those of people in developed countries, or in large emerging economies such as China. Sierra Leone will have to spend $90m a year on adapting to the climate crisis, though its citizens are responsible for about 0.2 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions a year each, while US citizens generate about 80 times more.

Mohamed Adow, director of Power Shift Africa, said: “This report shows the deep injustice of the climate emergency. Some of the poorest countries in the world are having to use scarce resources to adapt to a crisis not of their making. Despite only having tiny carbon footprints compared with those of the rich world, these African countries are suffering from droughts, storms and floods which are putting already stretched public finances under strain and limiting their ability to tackle other problems.”

He called for more funding from developed countries, which promised at the Cop26 UN climate summit to double the money available to help poor countries adapt to the climate crisis. Rich countries promised in 2009 to provide $100bn a year to help poor countries cut their greenhouse gas emissions and cope with the effects of climate breakdown. But so far they have fallen short of that target, and most of the funds that have been provided have gone to projects to cut emissions, such as windfarms and solar panels, rather than efforts to help countries adapt.

The study examined national adaptation plans submitted to the UN by seven African countries: Ethiopia, Kenya, Liberia, Sierra Leone, South Africa, South Sudan and Togo. South Sudan, which is the world’s second poorest country, was hit by floods last year that displaced 850,000 people, and led to outbreaks of water-borne diseases. The country is to spend $376m a year on adaptation, about 3.1% of its GDP.

Chukwumerije Okereke, director of the centre for climate change and development at the Alex Ekwueme Federal University in Nigeria, said rich countries must respond to the findings, and to the IPCC report.

“It is both irresponsible and immoral for those that are the chief cause of climate change to look on while Africa, which has contributed next to nothing to climate change, continues to bear a disproportionate share of the impact,” he said. “The time for warm words is long gone. We need urgent, scaled-up, long-term support from the world-leading climate polluters.”

  —  African countries spending billions to cope with climate crisis

[good-old-gossip]

His evilness will shame the DEVIL!!!

Israeli minister Bezalel Smotrich has said letting two million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip die of hunger might be “justified and moral”.

Speaking at a conference hosted by the Israel Hayom outlet on Monday, he expressed support for blocking aid to the Gaza Strip but said Israel lacked international legitimacy to do so.

“We are bringing in aid because there is no choice,” the far-right minister said, according to the Times of Israel.

“We can't, in the current global reality, manage a war. Nobody will let us cause two million civilians to die of hunger even though it might be justified and moral until our hostages are returned,” he added.

He said that Israel needed “international legitimacy for this war”.

For nearly 10 months, the Israeli military has imposed a tight siege on the Gaza Strip, extremely limiting the flow of life-saving essential food and medical items.

Aid delivery is scarce, unprotected and restricted. In June, independent UN investigators said Israel was using starvation on the Palestinian population as a weapon of war.

The hunger crisis has led to the death of dozens of people due to malnutrition, mostly children. A high risk of famine persists across the Gaza Strip as almost the entire population faces high levels of acute food insecurity or worse, including half a million suffering starvation, the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) said in June.

Smotrich is one of many Israeli ministers and officials who have made statements described as genocidal against Gaza's Palestinians since 7 October.

On 9 October, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said Israel was fighting “human animals” as he announced a “complete siege” on Gaza. “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed,” Gallant said.

Other ministers and officials have advocated using a nuclear bomb on Gaza, turning the enclave into a “slaughterhouse” and “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth”.

South Africa said these statements are evidence of genocidal intent in its ongoing case at the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza. Israel denies the accusation of genocide.

Smotrich has also been accused of making genocidal statements about the occupied West Bank.

In March 2023, he said the Palestinian village of Huwwara near Nablus "needs to be wiped out".