Discussions about Green Economy often ignore the Social, this video considers this issue.
See and read more on Focus on the Global South
Green Economy and Sustainable Development: Bringing Back the Social
Discussions about Green Economy often ignore the Social, this video considers this issue.
See and read more on Focus on the Global South
New report calls for sweeping agricultural reform
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Destructive Extraction and the Climate Crisis in Africa
By Nnimmo Bassey,, Pambazuka Press, £14.95
People in Africa argue that natural resources are a blessing; it is the way these are plundered and used that can turn them into a curse. The continent has plenty of experience of such plunder. Rich in resources, Africa is a net supplier of energy and (…)
By Glenn Ashton
Significant developments in the energy sector are underway in western Limpopo because of the extensive coal resources in that region. Besides Eskom’s massive Medupi power station, near the existing Matimba power station, there are several other mega-projects in the pipeline. The question is (…)
Boris Kagarlitsky: People fed up with lack of economic and democratic rights used in fight within Russian elite
Read more on the Real News
By Khalil Habash
The Syrian popular movement has witnessed an increasing mobilisation in recent weeks – the most important since last summer – despite the continuous violent repression. Defections within the army are still happening on a growing scale. Ten months after the beginning of the revolution – and (…)
By Jane Duncan
In the next few weeks, the Press Freedom Commission will be holding public hearings into the adequacy of the self regulatory system for the press. In terms of this system, complaints of unethical reporting are handled by the Press Council of South Africa (PCSA), which was set up and is run by (…)
By Bill McKibben
Buying Congress in 2012
My resolution for 2012 is to be naïve — dangerously naïve.
I’m aware that the usual recipe for political effectiveness is just the opposite: to be cynical, calculating, an insider. But if you think, as I do, that we need deep change in this country, then cynicism is a (…)
Edited by Frédéric Bazin, Jamie Skinner, Jérôme Koundouno, IIED Publications, 128 pages, download the pdf version on the website
Over 150 large dams have been built in West Africa over the last 50 years. Many more are in the planning stages to meet the region’s demands for energy, water and (…)
Science and technology can seem remote from the unfolding dramas of the world but they were never far from the front line in the first months of the Arab Spring.
When revolution broke out in Egypt’s Tahrir Square in January, scientists were there in force, helping to plant the seeds of change. (…)
In the aftermath of the 2003 US invasion, Iraq has struggled to rebuild infrastructure critical to providing citizens basic tools for economic, political, and social justice and prosperity.
Among the government’s main initiatives is increasing access to the internet and other channels of (…)
By Marie Juul Petersen
The Independent Permanent Human Rights Commission heralds an expansion of dialogue about human rights abuses in member states. Could a Muslim human rights commission also revitalize the image of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation?
In June 2011, 57 foreign ministers met in Kazakhstan to (…)
As the Arab Spring unfolded throughout 2011, and as Spain’s indignados and the now worldwide ‘Occupy’ movement gained momentum, important social movements also rose up across Central and South America.
In 2011, Latin Americans took to the streets in big cities and small towns to defend their (…)
By Marcela Salas Cassani
Hundreds of activists and academics from around the world gathered at the International Seminar “Planet Earth: Anti-Systemic Movements” to discuss the importance of the 1994 Zapatista uprising on its 18th anniversary. In the context of the popular insurrections that have emerged this year across (…)
Global Alliance of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities against REDD and for Life.
Indigenous leaders returning from Durban, South Africa condemn the fiasco of the United Nations climate change talks and demand a moratorium on a forest carbon offset scheme called REDD+ which they say (…)
The La Mata and La Ventosa wind park in the state of Oaxaca is the World Bank’s flagship Clean Technology Fund (CTF) project in Mexico. The UK government has provided £385 million in capital to the CTF from its overseas aid budget, 14% of the CTF’s total funding.
This study shows that:
The (…)
By Robert Fisk
Writing from the very region that produces more clichés per square foot than any other "story" – the Middle East – I should perhaps pause before I say I have never read so much garbage, so much utter drivel, as I have about the world financial crisis.
But I will not hold my fire. It seems to (…)
A growing number of US citizens raise their voices “demanding a new social contract” as the multiple world crises are increasing “poverty and income inequality at historic levels.” This unprecedented movement nurtures hope in a change of policies and behaviors “geared toward the well-being of (…)
Civil society organizations that participated in the High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness held this week in Busan, South Korea, regretted that the deal reached at the conference was not binding for all the donor countries, and the lack of a rights based approach, especially on gender, and of (…)
By Federico Fuentes
A summit of huge importance was held in Venezuela on December 2-3, 2011. Two hundred years after Latin America’s independence fighters first raised the battle cry for a united Latin America, 33 heads of state from across the region came together to form the Community of Latin American and (…)