Governments can either come up with a collaborative and urgent plan to tackle the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency that is already wreaking deadly havoc across the globe or keep allowing corporations to pollute the atmosphere without limit, thereby condemning humanity to a grim future.
That stark warning comes from United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, who said Monday: “We have a choice. Collective action or collective suicide.”
“It is in our hands,” he told diplomats from 40 countries gathered in Berlin for a three-day conference called the Petersberg Climate Dialogue. The meeting, hosted annually for the past 13 years by the German government, marks one of the last chances to work out an international agenda for mitigation, adaptation, and compensation before the U.N.’s COP27 climate summit kicks off in Egypt this November.
At the conclusion of COP26 eight months ago, Guterres noted, the Paris agreement’s goal of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5ºC above preindustrial levels was left “on life support.”
“Since then, its pulse has weakened further,” he continued. “Greenhouse gas concentrations, sea level rise, and ocean heat have broken new records.”
“Half of humanity is in the danger zone from floods, droughts, extreme storms, and wildfires,” Guterres pointed out. “No nation is immune.”
The U.N. chief’s latest warning comes as large swaths of the planet are being pummeled by heatwaves and wildfires, with no immediate respite in sight—at around 1.2ºC of warming.
Extreme heat has killed more than 1,000 people in Portugal and Spain in recent days, and France is experiencing what experts are calling a “heat apocalypse.” Thousands of people in the region have been forced to evacuate due to wildfires. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom is bracing for its hottest day on record, with temperatures expected to climb even higher on Tuesday.
It’s not just Europe that is being seared. The United States, China, and parts of Africa and the Middle East are also suffering from heatwaves and wildfires, which climate scientists have long warned will increase in frequency and severity as a result of unmitigated greenhouse gas pollution.
And yet, “we continue to feed our fossil fuel addiction,” Guterres lamented Monday. Global energy market disruptions triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have led many nations to double down on coal, gas, and oil extraction at a moment when investments in a swift green transition are sorely needed.
Most troubling of all, said Guterres, is that governments of the world “are failing to work together as a multilateral community.”
“Nations continue to play the blame game instead of taking responsibility for our collective future,” he said. “We cannot continue this way. We must rebuild trust and come together—to keep 1.5 alive and to build climate-resilient communities.”
“First, we need to reduce emissions—now,” Guterres stressed. “Everyone needs to revisit their Nationally Determined Contributions,” he continued, referring to currently inadequate and nonbinding emission reduction targets. “We need to demonstrate at COP27 that a renewables revolution is underway. There is enormous potential for a just energy transition that accelerates coal phase-out with a corresponding deployment of renewables.”
“Second, we must treat adaptation with the urgency it needs,” he said. “One in three people lack early warning systems coverage. People in Africa, South Asia, and Central and South America are fifteen times more likely to die from extreme weather events. This great injustice cannot persist.”
“Third, let’s get serious about the finance that developing countries need,” he added.
While wealthy governments originally vowed to contribute $100 billion annually by 2020 to help low-income nations switch to sustainable energy sources and improve infrastructure, they have missed that target, which is a small fraction of the $4 trillion the World Bank says is necessary. Just $80 billion is expected this year, with the $100 billion pledge now postponed until 2023.
In addition to redistributive investments in mitigation and adaptation, the provision of more money to address the mounting losses and damages from a rapidly changing climate and increasingly frequent and intense extreme weather disasters “has languished on the sidelines for too long,” said Guterres. “It is eroding the trust we need to tackle the climate emergency together.”
“We need a concrete global response that addresses the needs of the world’s most vulnerable people, communities, and nations,” he added. “This has to be the decade of decisive climate action.”
Originally published in CommonDreams.org
Europe’s second heat wave this summer is setting record temperatures across the continent. Much of Southern and Western Europe will reach highs of 40-47°C (104-117°F). Thousands of people are dying, large swaths of land are burning, and harvests are being destroyed in what climate change is making an increasingly common and severe phenomenon.
Wildfires are raging across Portugal, Spain, France, Croatia, Greece and Turkey. A meteorologist described the southwest of France as an “apocalypse of heat,” and the French government has already been forced to evacuate 25,000 people, Turkey over 3,500 and Portugal over 800. Some 3,200 in southern Spain have been forced to flee what Spain’s ABC newspaper called “an avalanche of fire.”
Besides the destruction caused by fire, the heat wave is already producing a wave of heat deaths, usually by heart attack or stroke. Portugal has reported over 650 so far, with one person killed every 40 minutes between July 7 and 13. Spain has reported over 510. These numbers will soar. During the 2003 European heat wave, when temperatures reached high levels for a prolonged period, an estimated 72,000 people died across the continent, according to UN figures, including roughly 15,000 in France and 13,000 in Spain.
Compounding the danger, the vast majority of European households are not air conditioned. According to a survey by AC manufacturer Inaba Denko, 3 percent of homes in the UK and Germany have air conditioning, 5 percent in France, 7 percent in Italy, 8 percent in Portugal and 30 percent in Spain. In the UK, just 65 percent of office space and 30 percent of retail space have AC.
The response of the British government to this heat wave exemplifies the irresponsibility and reckless indifference to loss of life that characterise all of Europe’s governments. As global warming claims thousands of lives, threatens food supplies with devastating droughts and produces severe flooding, Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab cynically told the British people to “enjoy the heat” and to be “resilient.”
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is infamous around the world for saying about the COVID-19 pandemic, “Let the bodies pile high in their thousands.” He did not even bother to attend an emergency cabinet meeting on Monday, after Britain declared its first-ever “red extreme heat warning.” The same day, rail services and airports shut down due to the effects of the heat, and hospital surgeries cancelled procedures because operating theatres were too hot to function.
Denouncing workers for wanting to shelter at home from COVID-19 and from the heat, the Daily Telegraph’s Associate Editor Camilla Tominey complained on Saturday: “Work-shy Britons have found a new reason to stay at home.”
This is a particularly stark example of the official indifference and inaction over climate change that have produced the current heat wave and drought.
After decades during which capitalist governments across the globe took no meaningful action on global warming, humanity is confronted with a catastrophe. Last November, the respected Climate Action Tracker forecast a 2.4°C rise in the world’s temperature by the end of the century based on the countries’ short-term emissions goals, well beyond the already dangerous limit of 1.5°C set by the 2015 Paris Agreement.
Extreme heat in Europe will rapidly become more common. A paper published this month in Nature Communications found that the continent had seen a “particularly strong increase in heat extremes,” with European heat waves “projected to increase disproportionately compared to the global mean temperature in the future.”
During last year’s wildfire season, Levent Kurmaz of Istanbul’s Bogazici University told the Independent: “It’s going to be a desert climate all around the Mediterranean by the end of the century.” By then, the Independent noted, “the climate in southern Turkey, southern Greece and southern Italy will be similar to that of Cairo and the southern Iraqi city of Basra now.”
Today, even as food prices rise sharply, crop harvests are in serious danger. Nearly half of Europe is at drought warning level and nearly a tenth at alert level. The European Drought Observatory has warned, “Water and heat stress are driving crop yields down from a previously already negative outlook for cereals and other crops. France, Romania, Spain, Portugal and Italy will need to deal with this reduced crop yield. Germany, Poland, Hungary, Slovenia and Croatia are also impacted.”
Northern Italy is suffering its worst drought in 70 years, with major rivers like the Po and the Serchio drying out almost completely. According to the country’s largest agricultural union, more than 30 percent of its agricultural production is threatened.
Another paper, published in Earth’s Future this March, found that the 2018-2020 European drought had been the worst in 250 years. Droughts as long as eight years could be expected in a medium case emissions scenario and 25 years in the worst case.
Rising ocean levels due to global warming threaten mass flooding and damage to crops and coastlines. Without enormous work on infrastructure to guard against flooding, the cost of flood damage would be massive. In 2014, the European Union (EU) estimated that this cost could rise by century’s end to 4 percent of Gross Domestic Product, or over a half-trillion dollars; in 2018, the Carbon Brief consortium estimated that cost at €961 billion.
Global warming is a critical threat requiring the planned, globally-coordinated mobilisation of humanity’s resources to avert disaster. Enormous technological, scientific and industrial resources must be dedicated to slashing carbon emissions, expanding public infrastructure, refitting billions of homes, and transforming world industry. This alone can protect lives, food supplies, and vital infrastructure and minimize the damage caused by climate change.
It has proven impossible to devise such a response within the bankrupt framework of the capitalist nation-state system, and under the diktat of the EU and the Johnson government, which are undisguised tools of the financial aristocracyand the City of London.
Instead, capitalist governments around the world are plunging trillions of dollars into building up their militaries and waging war with each other. Europe has increased its collective military spending by nearly $100 billion over the last decade, in the run-up to the outbreak of open war between US-NATO and Russia this year in Ukraine.
As they cut off natural gas imports from Russia, moreover, the NATO powers are even returning to heavily-polluting energy sources: Germany, Austria and the Netherlands all restarted coal power stations. Under the authority of German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock of the Green Party, Germany’s climate envoy Jennifer Morgan told a recent climate conference in Berlin, “the Russian war of aggression is forcing us to take short-term decisions we don’t like.”
Workers and youth must draw the lessons of the inaction and murderous indifference of Europe’s capitalist governments. The struggle against global warming—like the struggle against war, and against the COVID-19 pandemic that has claimed nearly 1.9 million lives in Europe—is a political and class issue. The interests of workers and youth around the world are diametrically opposed to those of the ruling elite. The struggle against climate change requires the revolutionary mobilization of the working class in a struggle for socialism and a planned economy under the democratic control of the workers.
Originally published in WSWS.org
In the backdrop of international development agencies such as International Labour Organisation (ILO) warning an imminent rise in incidence of child-trafficking during the pandemic, the Railway Police Force aims to use technology to outsmart unscrupulous elements trafficking children. It is rolling out a new set of SOPs (standard operating procedures) issued in December 2021 which spells out much more clearly the roles and responsibilities of different official arms—ranging from station officials to railway police officials. Stakeholders such as civil-society organisations say things are looking up, but there is scope for improvement including some processes which prioritise privacy rights over pressing humanitarian concerns.
Preventing unaccompanied children – runaway, missing or those getting trafficked – from falling into the trap of child labour at Railway stations had been on the radar of the government and civil society organisations for many years now. The pandemic – that saw an increase in the number of children who lost their parent/s or whose parents had been pushed to poverty – further accentuated the need to be vigilant.
In July 2021, the Railway Police Force (RPF) ‘formally’ heightened its efforts to reach out to every child whose path crossed the Indian Railways’ ecosystem to protect the children from trafficking. Following inputs from various stakeholders, the RPF institutionalised a revised SOP for care of children in contact with railways in December-end 2021, which has called for closer monitoring of railway ecosystem across the country, clearer demarcation of roles and responsibilities for all railway stakeholders involved and spelt out ways for greater use of technology.
Tech-solutions can help bust trafficking
Railways Police Force is planning to use security cameras with facial recognition, biometric records, and online searchable database to nab offenders and help children who fall victim to trafficking. “Lately, to avoid getting caught, child traffickers are changing strategies,” said multiple civil society stakeholders working in the space. Traffickers are using stations with lesser surveillance, dressing children in decent clothes so that appearance is not a give-away, using fake Aadhaar identity cards to show a ‘higher age’ of kids, they point out.
To counter these, Railways is promoting use of technology such as CCTVs with facial recognition, cameras at red-flagged railway stations (based on past data of children rescued to prevent trafficking and reunite children with their families), an official said. As of March 2022, Railways had already installed CCTVs at 840 odd stations, according to a railway official.
Railways is also planning to record the biometrics, photographs, among other details of children. RPF is readying an online database of children rescued at railway stations with photos in searchable format. This information can be shared on a need-to-know basis with law enforcement agencies, according to the new SOP.
“So, if an NGO or a law enforcement agency were to search for the particulars of a child from any other place through Aadhaar, etc, then they could be matched through the railways’ database,” said the official. Many child-labour victims also have a history of repeatedly getting abandoned by extended family or leaving homes by design, making such a database a useful tool.
More child-help desks, more robust child helpline on cards
The revised SOP re-prioritised the issue by specifying in a much clearer manner the roles and responsibilities of people at a railway station, stressing on the need to intensively sensitise RPF, Government Railway Police (GRP) personnel, station staff, travelling ticket examiners, railway and private employees at railways stations and CCTV control rooms.
“Authorities from different railway agencies in some stations used to feign ignorance regarding earlier SOP that specified their duties and responsibilities. Now, we find many of them, particularly the Railway police personnel, much more responsive when we approach with requests,” said a civil society stakeholder.
The nature of outreach activities has been specified clearly as well, said another civil society member. Making the Childline (the common helpline number) more functional and robust has been made a priority, he added. The execution of the concept of “imprest money” which is to be provided from the Railways to feed the children when they are rescued has been paid attention, added the civil society stakeholder.
Clearly taking note of how Covid-19 has made children more vulnerable, the revised SOP says that children who have “lost one or both parents during the pandemic, whose parents were driven to poverty due to unemployment and were compelled to work as child labour –are more vulnerable to be trafficked for labour or illegally adopted, among others.”
Railways is planning to increase the child help desks to more stations. “In mid-2021, only 132 stations out of 7,400 odd railway stations in the country had a dedicated child help desk. We have 1000 major stations, and at least 202 stations with heavy footfalls. We have to expand the help-desk network to be effective,” a railway official admitted.
Privacy rights clashing with reunion of lost children with families?
To trace the family of lost, runaway, or missing children, UIDAI’s Aadhaar database serves as an important tool. “There have been several cases where such children have been reunited with their families by matching their photos or other details through Aadhaar cards” reckon multiple activists in the space.
That said, some civil society organisations are facing a different kind of challenge. “Even if a child has a previous Aadhaar card, there is no government provision that allows Aadhaar service centres dealing with such children to extract the address and other such information due to privacy concerns,” informs a stakeholder.
According to a representative of Jeevodaya, an organisation that works with children rescued from railway stations, “We have cases where children were in our Child Care Institution for three-four years and we were not able to trace their address. Though the Aadhaar system showed that their address existed, we were unable to access the address details. After four years of consistent efforts, we were able to get their Aadhaar details with the help of a district collector, who personally requested some authorities to get the information.”
The representative of Jeevodaya felt that had there been a system to match identities, children would have found their families much earlier. “Our request is to specify a process or standard operating procedure so that some authority – any government agency – is made responsible for accessing details of the children with Aadhaar data with a special provision, so that we can search the details of the child once we rescue any child from anywhere,” urged the Jeevodaya official.
How successfully the existing Aadhaar system is used to find out the real addresses of missing or runaway children depends on time and energy accorded to such cases of missing children. There was a case of a runaway child, who had given his false name and it was through an Aadhaar database search that his true name and particulars were discovered, said a civil society member. At times, the civil society organisation discovers about the presence of a prior Aadhaar card, when it tries to make a new Aadhaar card – which cannot be formed as there is an existing card – but they are unable to extract the original details.
A provision that mandates checking of Aadhaar details to find a child’s original whereabouts within specified days before a child is sent to a child-care institution or before his new Aadhaar card is made can help, said the Jeevodaya representative, offering a solution. Mandating a Aadhaar based search within a certain number of days – to reunite children with family or make a new Aadhaar card — also addresses the issue of ‘unreliable’ child-care institutes that save children with an aim to get grants, added a colleague of his from civil society.
The article is written as a part of Work: No Child’s Business (WNCB) fellowship.
Mamuni Das is a senior journalist based in Delhi. Share your feedback on
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