Day: December 15, 2019

Major States Snub Calls for Climate Action as UN Summit Grinds to Close

A U.N. climate summit ground towards a delayed close on Sunday with a handful of major states resisting pressure to ramp up efforts to combat global warming, prompting sharp criticism from smaller countries and environmental activists.

The Madrid talks were viewed as a test of governments’ collective will to heed the advice of scientists to cut greenhouse gas emissions more rapidly in order to prevent rising global temperatures from hitting irreversible tipping points.

But the conference was expected to endorse only a modest declaration on the “urgent need” to close the gap between existing emissions pledges and the temperature goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement to tackle climate change.

Many developing countries and campaigners had wanted to see much more explicit language spelling out the importance of countries submitting bolder pledges on emissions as the Paris process enters a crucial implementation phase next year.

“These talks reflect how disconnected country leaders are from the urgency of the science and the demands of their citizens in the streets,” said Helen Mountford, Vice President for Climate and Economics, at the World Resources Institute think-tank. “They need to wake up in 2020.”

Brazil, China, Australia, Saudi Arabia and the United States had led resistance to bolder action, delegates said, as the summit — known as COP25 — began wrapping up.

It had been due to finish at the two-week mark on Friday but has run on for two extra days – a long delay even by the standards of often torturous climate summits.

Earlier, talks president Chile triggered outrage after drafting a version of the text that campaigners complained was so weak it betrayed the spirit of the 2015 Paris Agreement.

The process set out in that deal hinges on countries ratcheting up emissions cuts next year.

The final draft did acknowledge the “significant gap” between existing pledges and the temperature goals adopted in 2015.

Nevertheless, it was still seen as a weak response to the sense of urgency felt by communities around the world afflicted by floods, droughts, wildfires and cyclones that scientists say have become more intense as the Earth rapidly warms.

“COP25 demonstrated the collective ambition fatigue of the world’s largest (greenhouse gas) emitters,” said Greenpeace East Asia policy advisor Li Shuo.

The Madrid talks became mired in disputes over the rules that should govern international carbon trading, favored by wealthier countries to reduce the cost of cutting emissions.

Brazil and Australia were among the main holdouts, delegates said, and the summit seemed all but certain to defer big decisions on carbon markets for later.

“As many others have expressed, we are disappointed that we once again failed to find agreement,” Felipe De Leon, a climate official speaking on behalf of Costa Rica. “We engaged actively, we delivered our homework, and yet we did not quite get there.”

Smaller nations had also hoped to win guarantees of financial aid to cope with climate change. The Pacific island of Tuvalu accused the United States, which began withdrawing from the Paris process last month, of blocking progress.

“There are millions of people all around the world who are already suffering from the impacts of climate change,” Ian Fry, Tuvalu’s representative, told delegates. “Denying this fact could be interpreted by some to be a crime against humanity.”

 

 

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Police Targets of Both Love and Anger in Hong Kong Rallies

Several thousand people shouting words of thanks to the police turned out in Hong Kong on Sunday in an unusual display of support for a force broadly criticized as abusive by the territory’s protest movement.

People made heart signs with their hands at officers, with some calling them heroes for their policing of six months of demonstrations.

The rally attracted a bigger crowd than a protest against the government a few hundred meters (yards) away. It brought together a few hundred people in a square.

There were also scattered small protests against the government in shopping malls.

Tensions flared in one mall after police arrested about eight protesters. Police used pepper spray when people threw bottles of water at them.

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Strong Quake Kills 1, Collapses Building in Philippines

A strong earthquake jolted the southern Philippines on Sunday, causing a three-story building to collapse and prompting people to rush out of shopping malls, houses and other buildings in panic, officials said.

The Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology said the magnitude 6.9 quake struck an area about 6 kilometers (3.7 miles) northwest of Padada town in Davao del Sur province. It had a depth of 30 kilometers (18 miles).

Ricardo Jalad, who heads the Office of Civil Defense, said his office received an initial report that a small three-story building collapsed in Padada as the ground shook and that authorities were checking if people got trapped inside. The building housed a grocery store, Jalad said without elaborating.

Officials in the southern cities of Davao and Cotabato, where the quake was felt strongly, suspended classes for Monday to allow checks on the stability of school buildings. Some cities and town lost their power due to the quake, officials said.

The Davao region has been hit by several earthquakes in recent months, causing deaths and injuries and damaging houses, hotels, malls and hospitals.

The Philippine archipelago lies on the so-called Pacific “Ring of fire,” an arc of faults around the Pacific Ocean where most of the world’s earthquakes occur.

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Decades on, Soviet Bombs Still Killing People in Afghanistan

Gholam Mahaiuddin sighs softly as he thinks of his 14-year-old son, who was killed in the spring by a bomb dropped last century in the hills of Bamiyan province in central Afghanistan.

“We knew the mountain was dangerous,” said Mahaiuddin, who found his son’s remains after he didn’t come home one day.

“We were aware of mines but we could not find them. They were buried in the soft sand after the rain.”

Forty years after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan – and three decades since the conflict ended – the war’s legacy continues to claim lives across the country.

Mahaiuddin’s son, Moujtaba, was killed along with two friends, aged 12 and 14, on May 17 when they went looking for berries in this idyllic landscape where chocolate-colored mountains are topped with snow.

When none of them had returned the next day, Mahaiuddin and other residents from his tiny village, called Ahangaran, started searching.

“I found my son with just his chest and head left,” Mahaiuddin recalled.

Moujtaba and his friends had been killed by what is known as an AO-2.5 RTM submunition.

The cluster bombs were used extensively by Soviet forces, who dropped them like deadly rain across Afghanistan in the years following their December 1979 invasion.

Mahaiuddin, 44, remembers the war well. He said he used to bring tea to mujahedeen fighters who would hide in the mountains and launch ambushes against Soviet patrols.

More recently, the cluster weapons have been used in Syria, according to a 2016 Human Rights Watch report.

“It is the most dangerous, it is very sensitive to vibrations,” said Bachir Ahmad, who heads a team of deminers from the Danish Demining Group (DDG).

1980s battlefield

The humanitarian organization has been working in several Afghan provinces since 1999 to clear explosives left from a war most of the country’s current, young population never lived through.

The hills of Bamiyan, which is famous as the home of two giant 6th-century Buddha carvings that the Taliban blew up, have been extensively scoured for mines and other explosives.

Near the site of the blast that killed Moujtaba and his friends, DDG workers have painted white pathways showing which areas are clear of danger.

“This is the last battlefield we are cleaning in Bamiyan, it dates back to 1986,” said Habib Noor, the DDG’s head for the province.

Bamiyan, a region dominated by Shiite Hazaras and relatively unaffected by today’s violence ravaging the rest of Afghanistan, will soon be the first of the 34 provinces in Afghanistan where all known contaminated areas have been cleared.

The DDG found 26 explosive devices just in the area around Ahangaran.

“We explored the area with information from the people, finding locals who had fought up there,” Noor said.

Tedious work

At the site near Ahangaran visited by AFP, deminers worked under a bright blue sky, with a doctor and team leader always on hand.

The team of eight, wearing bright blue body armor, picked quietly at the ground, their silence broken only by the sound of crows crying and metal detectors buzzing.

Zarkha, 26, said she had found her first cluster bomb a few days earlier.

“I was very scared,” she said, describing how her team had carefully dug around the sensitive device and then destroyed it in a controlled explosion.

Last year, mines and other “explosive remnants of war” (ERW) killed or wounded 1,391 Afghans, according to government statistics. More than half of the victims were children.

“The explosive is still operable after one hundred years. The metal and plastic will degrade but not the explosives,” said Abdul Hakim Noorzai, DDG’s chief of demining operations based in Kabul.

Ahmad, the demining team leader, said he was angry his country remained devastated by the Soviet war.

“They destroyed our lives. Because of them we have to do demining instead of being a doctor or engineer or teacher,” he said, adding that he had been demining since 2003 and was bored with the tedious work.

While heading down the mountain, the team finds a gang of children playing outside the village’s modest school.

Nahida, 11, smiles shyly under the little white scarf covering her hair.

She remembers Moujtaba well. “He was my cousin. I cried when I learned that he was dead,” she said.

Asked if she knew anything about the war with the Soviets, she replied: “I don’t know where the bombs came from.”

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In Pakistan, Free Surgeries, A Lifetime of Smiles

A cleft lip or palate is one of the most common birth defects among infants. In developed countries like the U.S., corrective surgeries are often performed during the first couple of years of a child’s life. But in some places like Pakistan there are thousands of children with the birth defect, but not enough doctors who can perform the corrective surgery. Now there is hope thanks to a group of volunteers. VOA’s Asim Ali Rana has more from Gujrat, Pakistan in this report narrated by Bezhan Hamdard

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