20 November 22
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ALSO SEE: Despite Its Brutal Tactics, Iran’s Regime Fails to Contain Mass Protests
Rights groups say children as young as eight are among the victims of the crackdown by security services since the death of Mahsa Amini
According to Human Rights Activists in Iran (HRA), 46 boys and 12 girls under 18 have been killed since the protests began on 16 September, sparked by the death of the 22-year-old Mahsa Amini while in police custody.
In the past week alone, five children were reportedly killed by security forces as violence continued across the country.
Those who died last week include the nine-year-old Kian Pirfalak, who was one of seven people – including a 13-year-old child – killed in the western city of Izeh on Wednesday.
Speaking at Kian’s funeral on Friday, his family said security services had opened fire on the family car, where Kian was sitting next to his father. Iranian security services have denied responsibility for his death, blaming the shooting on “terrorists”.
Iran’s mounting child death toll comes amid escalating violence in cities across the country, with protests showing no sign of abating.
Families in Iran spoke exclusively to the Observer about the death of their children, who they say were killed by government forces.
Hassan Daroftadeh said his son Kumar had always told his family he would grow up to be a “great man”. Instead, they said, Kumar has become a martyr after dying on the streets of his home town of Piranshahr in west Iran on 30 October. His father said he died after being shot multiple times with metal pellets at close range.
“Kumar was just standing on the street. He didn’t even say a word. I don’t know with what conscience they martyred him. Piranshahr is a small town. There were no protests that night, yet they martyred my son. He was just a little boy,’’ said Daroftadeh. A video of Daroftadeh weeping by his son’s grave went viral on social media.
“I’m shattered. Kumar was his mother’s lifeline,” he said. “The Iranian regime denies killing him. They later said ‘foreigners’ have killed him. I don’t know how the officer who killed my son hugs his own children. I don’t know how he sleeps at night.”
The same afternoon, a month before Kumar’s death – which human rights groups have since called “Bloody Friday” after 93 people were killed across Iran – Mohammad Eghbal, 17, was on his way to Friday prayers when he was shot in the back by a sniper in Zahedan, the capital of the Sistan and Baluchistan province. According to Amnesty International, 10 children were killed in Zahedan that day.
Mohammad Eghbal had worked as a construction worker from the age of nine to support his large family and had dreamed of saving up enough money to buy a smartphone so he could open an Instagram account.
His last words were to a stranger, according to one of his relatives. “He asked a bystander, ‘Please take my cellphone from my pocket and call my dad. Tell him I’ve been shot.’” The relative added that when they arrived at the hospital to look for him, the family found a “war zone”.
“Dead bodies were lying across the floor with the screams and cries of mothers filling the air,” the relative said.
The family member said that after his death, the teenager was labelled a terrorist in pro-regime media outlets. “They said Mohammad was a separatist. He was only a child, he had no idea about what being a separatist means. His father is even feeling worse than his mother. Mohammad used to sleep beside his dad at night.”
According to the human rights group Hengaw, 12 children have died in the Kurdistan province since the beginning of the protests – and three died in the custody of Iranian special forces. An additional 200 Kurdish teenagers have been arrested and 300 injured after being fired on by government forces.
A week after Mohammad Eghbal died, the 17-year-old Abolfazl Adinehzadeh went into the streets of his home town of Mashhad and never came home.
“We buried Abolfazl with more than 50 shotgun pellets still inside his body,” said a family member. “The medical team could only remove 27. We fear for his mother and sisters who are broken and will never be able to come to terms with his death.”
His family said the teenager had been motivated to take to the streets out of love for his three sisters. “Abolfazl was a well-mannered kid and, having been raised with three sisters, he was well aware of the challenges Iranian women face. He was truly a feminist who wanted equal rights for men and women,” one of his relatives told the Observer.
“As soon as his sisters heard of the news [that he had been shot], they ran towards the street screaming his name. The entire family is inconsolable. He was adored by us all.”
Young people have been at the forefront of anti-regime protests, which started after Mahsa Amini died in the custody of Iran’s morality police. She had been arrested for not wearing her hijab correctly.
The deaths of two teenage girls, Nika Shakamari and Sarina Esmailzadeh, both allegedly beaten to death by security forces for protesting, provoked further outrage.
Videos of schoolgirls across the country protesting against their killing by removing their hijabs and taking down pictures of Iran’s supreme leaders went viral on social media, leading to raids on schools where children were beaten and detained. According to Iran’s teachers union, another 16-year-old girl, Asra Panahi, died after she was attacked by security forces in her classroom in the north-western town of Ardabil on 18 October.
The attacks on children in schools is continuing, according to Hengaw, which said a 16-year-old girl from Kurdistan is on life support after throwing herself from a school van, having been arrested at her school last week.
HRA says more than 38o protesters have been killed since the protests began and more than 16,000 people have been detained, including children. The figure is disputed by the authorities.
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Robb Elementary School on June 9, 2022, in Uvalde, Texas. (photo: Eric Gay/AP)
That's according to data from the Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as an incident where at least four people are shot or killed, not including the shooter.
Mass shootings have devastated communities in nearly every corner of the nation this year. A racist attack at a Buffalo, N.Y. supermarket killed 10 people and injured three more on May 14. Ten days later, a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, making it the deadliest school shooting in the U.S. since Sandy Hook. The attack that killed five people at Club Q in Colorado Springs late Saturday was only the latest mass shooting in the Gun Violence Archive database.
A total list of mass shootings in 2022 can be found here.
The year 2021 saw 690 mass shootings. The previous year had 610. And 2019 had 417.
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Allen Weisselberg is questioned by prosecutor Susan Hoffinger as Judge Juan Merchan presides during the Trump Organization's criminal tax trial in Manhattan. (image: Jane Rosenberg/Reuters)
Finance chief Allen Weisselberg, whose plea deal depends on him telling the truth, claims he acted alone in Trump Organization tax fraud trial in New York
Alan Weisselberg, the longtime financial chief of the Trump Organization, told a jury that he had betrayed the trust of the Trump family when he dodged $1.7m in income taxes on company perks, including a Manhattan apartment, tuition for his grandchildren and luxury cars.
Weisselberg’s testimony is at the center of a criminal case that charges the Trump Corporation and its payroll affiliate, Trump Payroll Corp, with tax fraud. Over the summer, the executive, who remains a paid employee of the company, pleaded guilty to 15 counts of tax fraud and is scheduled to be handed a reduced five-month sentence – but only if he is judged to have testified truthfully in court.
“I believe in telling the truth,” he told the court on Friday, a day after breaking down on the witness stand after testifying that it had been “my own personal greed that led to this”. Asked if he was embarrassed by his actions, Weisselberg said: “More than you can imagine.”
Weisselberg’s task has been to meet the requirements of his plea deal but also to assert that he was acting solely for himself, and not that he was acting “in behalf of” the company, despite acknowledging on the witness stand that the company might have benefited from the arrangement.
Weisselberg, who once described himself as Trump’s “eyes and ears”, has been careful to avoid implicating his boss, or sons Eric and Donald Trump Jr, with knowledge of the fraud. It is a narrow tightrope to walk. On the witness stand on Friday, Weisselberg was asked if he had the best lawyers in town. “I hope so,” he replied to laughter from the jury.
“He’s saying I might be guilty, and the company might be guilty, but none of the Trump individuals are guilty,” said former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann.
But that has not prevented prosecutors from reminding jurors that the businesses on trial are “owned by Donald Trump”, as Susan Hoffinger remarked during opening arguments. Neither Trump nor his children have been accused of wrongdoing and the company has pleaded not guilty.
Weisselberg has said that Trump’s children did not discipline him and even raised his salary after they learned in 2017 that he had cheated on taxes for more than a decade. “Were you in fact given a raise … that totaled approximately $200,000?” Hoffinger asked on Friday.
“Correct,” Weisselberg replied, adding that the company also did not discipline other executives who had engaged in similar practices.
Jurors have heard that Trump and his sons would sign tuition checks for as much as $100,000 to pay for private schooling for Wiesselberg’s grandchildren, which were not reported as taxable income.
A guilty verdict against the organization could come with fines and affect its ability to do business in terms of future loans and existing borrowing. “If there are convictions, then it can be hard to borrow money or to get licenses,” says Weissmann. “A violation can also trigger anti-fraud obligations that may be in existing loans.”
A conviction could also potentially bolster a separate civil lawsuit claiming Trump and his three elder children engaged in a pattern of fraudulent and illegal business activity.
In that case, the New York attorney general, Letitia James, was earlier this month granted a request for an independent monitor to oversee the Trump Organization’s submission of financial statements. Trump’s lawyers have said James’s request is “a politically motivated attempt to nationalize a highly successful private enterprise”.
But on Friday, the US justice department appointed a special counsel to oversee criminal investigations against the former president concerning the january 6 insurrection and retention of government documents, a move that came days after the Republican mega-donors Stephen Schwarzman and Thomas Peterffy, along with the cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder, announced they would not be backing Trump’s 2024 presidential candidacy, which was also announced this week.
In court, the excitement that came with Weisselberg’s indictment last year and guilty plea in August, and the hopes that he would become a cooperating witness – which he did not – have not been fully realised in Justice Juan Merchan’s courtroom.
The trial has provided insights into the inner workings of the Trump company, presented here as a familial business in which Donald Trump himself signed Christmas cards and bonus checks until he became US president in 2017, but not drama.
For two weeks jurors have looked a spreadsheets of cable TV bills and other financial records presented as evidence in the case. But fraud trials are rarely feisty, and the quality of the counsel on both sides of the case been able to keep it largely tamped down.
Weisselberg’s lead attorney, Nick Gravante, is known as powerhouse defense lawyer who once worked for Gerald Shargel, whose clients included mob bosses. Gravante also found himself representing Joe Biden’s brother James and son Hunter in a lawsuit over their purchase of a hedge fund in 2006.
“This is an unusual case in that you have very good prosecutors and very good defense lawyers, and both are doing their jobs”, says Weissmann.
Weisselberg’s refusal to flip on his former boss has limited what might have otherwise been insight into the family business. He began working for Trump’s father in 1973 and joined Trump as an executive at his then-fledging Trump Organization in 1986, just as The Donald was becoming a noisy, tabloid-friendly institution in the city.
As Trump’s celebrity grew, and with it his reputation for brashness along with multiple headline-grabbing marriages and divorces, Weisselberg helped the company become a golf, hotel and real estate empire. But he also oversaw many of Trump’s failures in the early 1990s, including casino bankruptcies in Atlantic City and the collapse of the Trump Shuttle airline.
But Weisselberg, pressed on whether he was thinking during his testimony about the prospect of a 15-year prison sentence if Judge Merchan rips up his plea deal, said he was not. “It’s in my mind to tell the truth at this trial,” he said. But he reiterated that while there might have been some benefit to the company from his tax fraud, “it was primarily due to my greed”.
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Starbucks workers strike outside a Starbucks on Nov. 17, 2022 in Brooklyn. (photo: AFP/Getty Images)
We spoke to strikers in Boston, New York, Chicago, and Pittsburgh about their fight to bring the multi-billion dollar company to the bargaining table
The strike was strategically timed. Starbucks’ annual Red Cup Day is a late fall tradition where customers can get certain beverages in reusable, limited-edition holiday cups. The marketing muscle that goes into Red Cup Day and the popularity of the cups makes it one of the company’s busiest and most lucrative days in a year. “We would probably make between $8,000 and $9,000 just at this store [on Red Cup Day]. So they’re losing a lot of money from all these stores being shut down,” said Nicole Deming, who has worked at the Starbucks store in Chicago’s Bucktown since January. “It’s really a great way of saying we hold the power and your profits come from us.”
Red Cup Rebellion shuts down a day that workers normally find “tedious and stressful,” according to Aaron Cirillo, a barista who has worked for Starbucks for a year and a half and is now at a new Starbucks location that is attached to an Amazon Go market near New York’s Times Square. “We all hate Red Cup Day,” echoed Kylah Clay, a barista at New England’s first-ever unionized Starbucks store in Boston’s Allston neighborhood. “Customers are coming in nonstop and we are always understaffed,” Clay told In These Times. Reed Essex, a barista at the Bucktown location, said workers did not receive overtime pay on Red Cup Day despite the extra work expected of them. Starbucks’ press department did not respond to a request for comment by press time.
Poor working conditions on Red Cup Day only magnify many of the issues that Starbucks workers face throughout the year. Hal Battjes, a barista who works alongside Cirillo at the Times Square location, said that many of their colleagues have visible burn scars from working in a cramped and dangerous hot foods section — work they are expected to do without additional pay. Battjes and Cirillo told In These Times that in addition to their regular jobs, workers are also expected to do “laborious” and “time-consuming” inventory and stocking work for Amazon, also without additional pay. Battjes’s time working at Starbucks has left them with health problems such as carpal tunnel, but Starbucks insurance takes so much out of their paycheck that they can no longer afford to see a doctor.
Underlying these individual workplace grievances is anger that Starbucks has refused to bargain in good faith with unionized workers. SBWU successfully unionized its first store in Buffalo, N.Y. in December 2021. Since then, more than 6,500 workers at over 250 stores have joined SBWU. For months, Starbucks has dragged its feet when it came to negotiating a contract with these workers. As of August, the company had initiated contract negotiations with only three of its more than 200 unionized stores. In October, the company agreed to negotiate with additional workers at locations in New York, Michigan, Illinois, Kentucky and California, but negotiations collapsed when Starbucks representatives walked out of five separate bargaining sessions on October 24.
Workers at other Starbucks locations have had similarly disappointing bargaining experiences. At Deming’s store in Chicago, workers came to a scheduled bargaining session on October 26 and waited for over six hours, but no one from Starbucks management showed up. The company failed to reschedule, leaving workers wondering if the meeting will happen next spring or not at all. At a Starbucks location in Pittsburgh, shift supervisor Jake Welsh said that after a round of introductions, Starbucks management left a bargaining session to “caucus” and never returned. The company has supplemented its bad faith bargaining efforts with a systematic anti-union campaign, with tactics including withholding raises from unionized workers, dismissing pro-union employees, cutting workers’ hours, and disciplining union organizers for petty offenses. With this nationwide strike, workers are hoping to pressure Starbucks into negotiating in good faith instead of engaging in often-illegal union busting.
Red Cup Day is often chaotic, and this year was no different; one photo of a Starbucks counter filled with abandoned orders — made so late customers gave up and left — quickly spread on social media. The strike has only magnified the disruption. At the Times Square location, practically no one came in to work, Battjes said, “because we were all striking and nobody wanted to come to our store and work for such a low wage.” The store remained closed for two to three hours on Thursday morning, but Starbucks management eventually managed to scrape together enough district and store managers from the surrounding area to open the store in time for the 8 a.m. rush. “It felt really good to finally see our district managers pulling some weight,” Battjes said. “Some of those store managers are … making a damn latte for probably the first time in their life. It feels good to know that they had to do the stuff we do every single day.”
To prevent the company from strike-breaking, SBWU kept the plan for the action under wraps for months. Welsh, who is a member of SBWU’s National Bargaining Committee, emphasized how hard it was to keep the news of the planned action from reaching management before the morning of November 17. Plans for the strike had been mentioned in mass communications involving thousands of workers, he said, adding: “All it takes is one person who accidentally says something to a manager.” Organizers were careful when discussing strike plans. Clay said she first started talking to fellow workers about the action in May, but preparations only began in earnest two months ago. The union has a National Contract Action Team composed of workers from multiple stores who are in charge of planning direct actions to pressure Starbucks to negotiate a contract. This team helped compile social media materials and prepare individual stores participating in Thursday’s strike.
Workers told In These Times that pressuring Starbucks through disruption was only one of the goals of the strike. “One of the best parts about going on strike is getting to talk to your customers and finally be frank about your working conditions,” said Clay, adding that the Red Cup Rebellion was a strategic success for exactly that reason. “By having one on one conversations on the busiest day of the year, we can make more of a dent, and help show [customers] what our fight is all about.” Customers’ response to the strike, organizers agreed, has largely been positive. “The customers … are incredibly understanding,” Battjes told In These Times. “They see the hard work that we do, and they recognize that we really don’t get paid enough.” Like community members who offered warm wishes and pizza, the Democratic Socialists of America in Chicago and New York also showed strikers some love by coming out to the picket lines and amplifying the action on social media.
On the picket lines, workers held signs and shared laughs, hugs, and snacks. “I’ve been here since 5:45 a.m.,” Battjes said at the Times Square picket. “I feel like it’s the coldest day of the entire week. My voice is just about to give out. But so many people have come to support us. It’s been great to see.”
That fight won’t be over soon though, said Essex. “I’ll continue to say it [to Starbucks]: ‘Come to the table, cowards.’”
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Twitter headquarters. (photo: Built In SF)
Earlier this week, Elon Musk gave remaining staff an ultimatum to commit to working “hardcore” or to leave. But some staff who would like to leave the company feel like they can’t because doing so, may leave them no choice but to depart the US, multiple former Twitter employees told CNN.
Tech companies in the US, including Twitter, have leaned on an employment-based visa, known as H-1B, to bring skilled foreign workers into the country. The program allows companies in the US to employ foreign workers in high-skilled occupations like architecture, engineering, mathematics, among other fields.
In fiscal year 2022, Twitter had nearly 300 people approved to work on H-1B visas, according to US Citizenship and Immigration Services data. It’s unclear how many have chosen to stay.
Facebook – another company that’s undergoing mass layoffs – had more than 1,300 people approved to work on H-1B visas, the data shows.
Employees on temporary visas, like H-1B or other work visas, are especially vulnerable to the layoffs happening at Twitter and across the tech industry. Some staff who were on employment-based visas and have already been laid off by Musk have found themselves scrambling.
“Firing folks who are on a H-1B in a major economic downturn is not just putting them out of the job, it’s tantamount to ruining their lives,” one former employee told CNN, adding that some people who had accepted Musk’s ultimatum had accepted it “out of self-preservation.”
Fiona McEntee, an immigration lawyer based in Chicago, represents immigrants who are on H-1B visas and are part of the recent tech layoffs.
While McEntee stressed everyone’s situation is unique, one of the primary challenges employees on H-1B visas face is that they have a limited window of time to find a new employer, adjust to another visa, or leave the United States. The 60-day grace period usually starts from the last day of employment.
“It’s a short time period to line these things up.” McEntee said, noting that filing a visa transfer, for example, can take time. McEntee’s firm has been receiving multiple calls from people affected by the layoffs who are concerned about next steps.
“A layoff is hard enough on people to begin with but when you’re faced with having to leave what’s been your home for a significant time, it adds a whole layer of trauma to this,” she told CNN.
One former Twitter employee described the challenges facing a former colleague who is in the US with his family on an employment-based visa and now faces the prospect of having to leave.
For that reason, some staff at Twitter who are on H-1B visas are staying on despite wanting to leave the company, a former employee told CNN, adding that they’re “concerned with being forced into a flooded job market where they may be unable to find a job and before being forced out of the country.”
The US Department of Homeland Security issues 65,000 H-1B visas annually as mandated by Congress, in addition to another 20,000 for those who have a masters’ degree or doctorate from a US university. The visa can be granted for up to six years.
“These are people who didn’t just necessarily arrive last year or the year before, or even when they were approved,” said David Bier, associate director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute. Bier noted that some people may have been working for Twitter under a different visa before being hired on an H-1B.
“Many of these people will have been in this country for over a decade,” Bier said.
One former Twitter employee stressed the importance of visa holders and their contribution to US innovation and technological leadership.
“For companies to turn their backs on them now is particularly callous and destructive and undermines the trust talented people have around in the world in the hope of America and its opportunities,” they added.
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Two F-16 Fighting Falcon fighter aircraft of the Turkish Air Force. (photo: Anadolu)
Turkey has launched air strikes on Kurdish targets in Iraq and Syria, a week after a bombing in Istanbul which it blames on Kurdish militants.
A Syrian-Kurdish spokesperson said two villages populated with internally displaced people were hit.
The banned Kurdish PKK group denies carrying out the Istanbul attack.
As the air strikes began, the Turkish defence ministry tweeted that the "hour of reckoning" had arrived, alongside a picture of a fighter plane taking off and footage of an explosion.
"Terrorists' shelters, bunkers, caves, tunnels, and warehouses were successfully destroyed," said Turkey's Defence Minister Hulusi Akar. The Turkish defence ministry later said the strikes on Kurdish militant bases in northern Syria and northern Iraq destroyed 89 targets.
Kurdish-led forces in Syria vowed to retaliate and said the city of Kobane was hit as well as two densely populated villages.
Later on Sunday a rocket fired from Syria reportedly injured three people on the border with Turkey, Turkish state media said.
At least 31 people were killed in northern Syria alone, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
It is not clear which targets were hit in Iraq.
The strikes come a week after a bombing on one of Istanbul's busiest streets which killed six people and injured more than 80.
Turkish authorities blamed the bombing on the Kurdish militant group the PKK, which Turkey, the EU and US regard as a terrorist organisation.
However, the PKK said it would not "directly target civilians" and denied responsibility.
Authorities have arrested dozens of people in connection with the attack including a Syrian woman who they say planted the bomb.
Before the arrest, the Turkish justice minister said a bag had exploded near a bench after a woman sat there for 40 minutes.
Five people have also been charged in Bulgaria over the attack, according to the AFP news agency.
Kurdish militants have been battling for decades to achieve Kurdish self-rule in south-east Turkey.
In recent years, Turkey has conducted a number of cross-border operations targeting Kurdish groups based in northern Iraq and Syria, aiming to prevent attacks on Turkish territory.
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A climate researcher. (photo: Mongabay)
A rare analysis has uncovered a striking pattern: more than 75% of funds earmarked for Africa-related climate research go to institutes in the U.S. and Europe, according to the study in the journal Climate and Development, which tracked grants from more than 500 funders.
There is already a deep funding deficit: less than 5% of the funds allocated for climate research globally focus on African countries, even though the 10 nations considered most vulnerable to climate change impacts in 2020 were all in Africa.
Of the $620 million that financed Africa-related climate research between 1990 and 2020, research institutions based in Europe and the United States received most of the funding ($480 million), while those based in Africa got less than 15% ($89.15 million).
The study analyzed research grants logged on the Dimensions database. They collated information about which countries and entities financed Africa-related climate change research, where the work was happening, who was receiving the money, and what topics were covered.
While the Dimensions database is large, it’s far from complete or a perfect reflection of how climate research is financed. It leaves out a host of agencies that fund climate research, like aid organizations, and crucially is restricted to English-language research. As such, the researchers could only provide a “best estimate” for financing trends.
Their analysis showed that the U.K., U.S. and EU provide the most financing for Africa-related climate research.
Who funds research is a factor in determining research priorities and how opportunities for pursuing inquiries are distributed. That in itself may not be a problem, but it often comes at the cost of producing knowledge that’s useful for decision-makers and local partners.
The study authors draw attention to one way this can compromise a project’s utility: data availability and access to field research sites can sometimes trump concerns about relevance and the potential impact on policies.
One reason for the lopsided distribution of research funding is that African institutions and governments themselves are not big funders of climate research.
This is evident in the absence of African institutes in the Dimensions database. Of the 521 funding organizations listed, only one was based in Africa: the National Research Foundation of South Africa. This would bias results about who funds Africa-related research but not enough to undermine the broader patterns, the researchers argue.
Yet, according to a roundup from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, researchers at more than 150 institutes in African countries study various aspects of climate change.
Foreign funding can come with strings attached, such as agencies requiring grantees from the country where funds originate to take a lead on projects. While these institutes often collaborate with local researchers, only a small fraction of projects have scientists from African institutions as lead investigators or first authors on published papers.
Within Africa, too, organizations in a few countries command a disproportionate share of the funds: Kenya (2.3%), South Africa (2.2%) and Tanzania (0.92%).
What is equally, if not more, worrisome, is that the prioritization of countries does not align with the severity of the climate risks or impacts a country faces. Most of the climate research funded by the grants analyzed in the recent study was focused on South Africa, Kenya and Tanzania. Yet these countries are in a relatively better position among African nations to tackle the impacts of climate change. The most vulnerable, by contrast, are Niger, Somalia and Chad, followed by Guinea-Bissau and Sudan.
There is also a glaring omission of Central African countries, particularly the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), which is home to the world’s second-largest swath of tropical rainforest, after Brazil, and hosts a vital peatland carbon sink. Yet, according to the study, it received only $7 million of the $620 million in climate research funding over three decades.
However, one of the biggest drawbacks of the analysis is that it only considers papers published in English. The DRC is a French-speaking country, one of at least 21 in Africa.
Though the share of climate research funds for African remained low (less than 5% of the global total), there was more of it between 2010 and 2020 than in the previous two decades.
Apart from calling for greater funding for Africa-based research organizations and more contributions from African nations, the authors also recommend that funding agencies enable “marginalized groups to lead and set research agendas.”
The uneven distribution of climate research funds reflects and feeds into a stark underrepresentation of African scientists (residing in or from African countries) in the climate change debate. When Reuters published a list of the 1,000 most influential climate scientists in 2021, there were only five scientists based in Africa, of whom four were in South Africa, and none of the five were people of color.
Citation:
Overland, I., Fossum Sagbakken, H., Isataeva, A., Kolodzinskaia, G., Simpson, N. P., Trisos, C., … Vakulchuk, R. (2021). Funding flows for climate change research on Africa: Where do they come from and where do they go? Climate and Development, 14(8), 705-724. doi:10.1080/17565529.2021.1976609
This article was originally published on Mongabay.
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