Day: November 14, 2024

A study by the World Bank on Thursday said urgent action is needed to address rising sea levels in the Pacific atoll islands of Kiribati, the Marshall Islands and Tuvalu, which under current projections could be 50% to 80% submerged in the next 50 years.

The World Bank’s “Pacific Atoll Countries Country Climate and Development Report” says the low-lying nations and the roughly 200,000 people who live on them face some of the most severe existential threats from climate change of any region in the world.

The study cites projected sea level rises of up to a half meter in the last half of this century and suggests 50% to 80% of major urban areas in the countries could be underwater.

The region is already seeing annual losses from climate events — such as more frequent and powerful storms — equivalent to 7% of the total economic output in Tuvalu. About 3% to 4% of output in the Marshall Islands and Kiribati are projected to increase.

The bank said that without urgent global and local action, a 1-in-20-year climate event in Tuvalu could lead to damage and losses equivalent to 50% of current annual output by 2050.

The study makes near-, medium- and long-term recommendations for the island nations. The near- and medium-term suggestions include investments in sustainable construction to protect freshwater resources, fisheries and energy supplies, among other crucial infrastructure.

The study’s long-term suggestions include investments in education, legal and regulatory frameworks, economic development and climate resilience.

The study also called on the international donor community to make contributions to the Pacific atoll countries, which still face a significant climate funding gap.

The World Bank produces diagnostic country climate and development reports, CCDRs, that integrate climate change and development considerations and suggest concrete actions that countries can take to mitigate and adapt to climate change. The bank has completed over 45 CCDRs around the world as of October 2024.
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Brussels — The European Commission on Thursday fined Meta Platforms $840.24 million over abusive practices benefiting Facebook Marketplace, it said in a statement, confirming an earlier report by Reuters.

“The European Commission has fined Meta … for breaching EU antitrust rules by tying its online classified ads service Facebook Marketplace to its personal social network Facebook and by imposing unfair trading conditions on other online classified ads service providers,” the European Commission said.

Meta said it will appeal the decision, but in the meantime, it will comply and will work quickly and constructively to launch a solution which addresses the points raised.

The move by the European Commission comes two years after it accused the U.S. tech giant of giving its classified ads service Facebook Marketplace an unfair advantage by bundling the two services together.

The European Union opened formal proceedings into possible anticompetitive conduct of Facebook in June, 2021, and in December, 2022, raised concerns that Meta ties its dominant social network Facebook to its online classified ad services.

Facebook launched Marketplace in 2016 and expanded into several European countries a year later.

The EU decision argues that Meta imposes Facebook Marketplace on people who use Facebook in an illegal “tie” but Meta said that argument ignores the fact that Facebook users can choose whether to engage with Marketplace, and many do not.

Meta said the Commission claimed that Marketplace had the potential to hinder the growth of large incumbent online marketplaces in the EU but could not find any evidence of harm to competitors.

Companies risk fines of as much as 10% of their global turnover for EU antitrust violations.
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Islamabad — The World Health Organization has labeled a forced repatriation of Afghan nationals from Pakistan as a “major setback” for polio eradication efforts, contributing to the regional resurgence of the paralytic disease.

Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan are the only two polio-endemic nations, reporting 49 and 23 cases respectively, so far this year, up from only six cases each in 2023. 

The latest case in Pakistan was confirmed Thursday in the southwestern province of Balochistan, which sits on the Afghan border and accounts for half the cases reported in 2024.

“Until you get rid of polio completely, it will resurge and come back, and this is what we are seeing now in Pakistan [where] nearly half of the districts are infected, and in Afghanistan, a third of the provinces are infected,” Hamid Jafari, the WHO director for the Eastern Mediterranean, said Wednesday while discussing causes of polio resurgence in both countries. 

“I think the major setback was a forced repatriation of Afghan nationals that led to a massive and unpredictable movement of populations within Pakistan and across both borders and within Afghanistan, so the virus moved with these populations,” Jafari told the virtual discussion hosted by the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, or GPEI. 

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has said that Pakistan’s crackdown on undocumented foreign nationals has resulted in more than 730,000 Afghan migrants returning to Afghanistan since August 2023.

Jafari also mentioned other factors contributing to the rise of polio in Pakistan, including authorities’ inability to consistently carry out vaccination campaigns in areas affected by militancy, where children cannot be effectively immunized against the crippling disease. He also highlighted the presence of “significant vaccine hesitancy and community boycotts” rooted in public frustration over the lack of essential services in impoverished districts.

Pakistani and WHO officials say vaccine boycotts in some regions also result from the false propaganda that anti-polio campaigns are a Western plot to sterilize Muslim children. Additionally, anti-government militants in violence-hit regions occasionally stage deadly attacks on polio teams, suspecting them of spying for authorities, routinely disrupting vaccination drives in districts near the Afghan border. 

Afghan polio ban

While sharing the latest polio situation in Afghanistan, the senior WHO official stated they are collaborating with various humanitarian actors and partners to promote vaccination against polio and all other diseases.

“We cannot implement house-to-house vaccination,” Jafari stated, referencing the ban imposed by Taliban authorities on polio teams over security concerns. 

“The program is working closely with [Taliban] authorities to re-update micro plans and work closely with the communities and local officials to make sure children are mobilized to vaccination sites,” he added. 

In September, the Taliban abruptly halted house-to-house vaccine deliveries in parts of southern Afghanistan, including Kandahar, without publicly stating any reason. 

An independent monitoring board of the GPEI recently said that the Taliban’s action had stemmed from their “administration’s concerns about covert surveillance activities.” The report quoted de facto Afghan authorities as explaining that their leadership is living in Kandahar and has concerns about their security.

Jafari stated that Pakistan and Afghanistan are taking measures to address the challenges in their bid “to rebuild community confidence” and work closely with security agencies in both countries to be able to access all children. 

He cautioned that the current resurgence of polio in Pakistan and Afghanistan does not guarantee a low point next year.

“We are confident that we will come very close to elimination, but the key is to make sure that in these final safe havens for poliovirus in insecure areas, among migrant and mobile populations, and vaccine-hesitant communities, we can finally overcome these residual challenges to make sure that finally polio is eradicated,” the regional WHO director said. 

Polio once paralyzed an estimated 20,000 children in Pakistan each year until the country initiated national vaccination campaigns in the 1990s to control the infections, according to the WHO. In 2019, there were 176 reported cases in Pakistan and Afghanistan. In 2021 and 2022, however, the countries reported only one and two infections, respectively.
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BAKU, Azerbaijan — For the third straight year, efforts to fight climate change haven’t lowered projections for how hot the world is likely to get — and recent developments in China and the United States are likely to slightly worsen the outlook, according to an analysis Thursday.

The analysis comes as countries come together for the 29th edition of the United Nations climate talks, hosted in Baku, Azerbaijan, where nations are trying to set new targets to cut emissions of heat-trapping gases and figure out how much rich nations will pay to help the world with that task.

But Earth remains on a path to be 2.7 degrees Celsius warmer than pre-industrial times, according to Climate Action Tracker, a group of scientists and analysts who study government policies and translate that into projections of warming.

If emissions are still rising and temperature projections are no longer dropping, people should wonder if the United Nations climate negotiations known as COP are doing any good, said Climate Analytics CEO Bill Hare.

“There’s an awful lot going on that’s positive here, but on the big picture of actually getting stuff done to reduce emissions … to me it feels broken,” Hare said.

Climate action is stifled by the biggest emitters

The world has already warmed 1.3 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times. That’s near the 1.5-degree limit that countries agreed to at 2015 climate talks in Paris. Climate scientists say the atmospheric warming, mainly from human burning of fossil fuels, is causing ever more extreme and damaging weather including droughts, flooding and dangerous heat.

Climate Action Tracker does projections under several different scenarios, and in some cases, those are going up slightly.

One projected track based on what countries promise to do by 2030 is up to 2.6 degrees Celsius, a tenth of a degree warmer than before. And even the analysts’ most optimistic scenario, which assumes that countries all deliver on their promises and targets, is at 1.9 Celsius, also up a tenth of a degree from last year, said study lead author Sofia Gonzales-Zuniga of Climate Analytics, one of the main groups behind the tracker.

“This is driven highly by China,” Gonzales-Zuniga said. Even though China’s fast-rising emissions are starting to plateau, they are peaking higher than anticipated, she said.

Another upcoming factor not yet in the calculations is the U.S. elections. A Trump administration that rolls back the climate policies in the Inflation Reduction Act, and carries out the conservative blueprint Project 2025, would add 0.04 degree Celsius to warming projections, Gonzales-Zuniga said. That’s not much, but it could be more if other nations use it as an excuse to do less, she said. And a reduction in American financial aid could also reverberate even more in future temperature outlooks.

“For the U.S. it is going backwards,” said Hare. At least China has more of an optimistic future with a potential giant plunge in future emissions, he said.

“We should already be seeing (global) emissions going down” and they are not, Hare said. “In the face of all of the climate disasters we’ve observed, whether it’s the massive floods in Nepal that killed hundreds of people or whether it’s the floods in Valencia, Spain, that just killed hundreds of people. The political system, politicians are not reacting. And I think that’s something that people everywhere should be worried about.”

Experts say $1 trillion is needed in climate cash for developing nation

The major battle in Baku is over how much rich nations will help poor countries to decarbonize their energy systems, cope with future harms of climate change and pay for damage from warming’s extreme weather. The old goal of $100 billion a year in aid is expiring and Baku’s main focus is coming up with a new, bigger figure.

A special independent group of experts commissioned by United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres issued its own estimate of costs and finances on Thursday, calling for a tripling of the old commitment.

“Advanced economies need to demonstrate a credible commitment” to helping poor nations, the report said.

A coalition of poor nations at the Baku talks are asking for $1.3 trillion in annual climate finance. The independent experts’ report said about $1 trillion a year is needed by developing nations from all outside sources, not just government grants.

The report detailed how expensive decarbonizing the world’s economy would be, how much it would cost and where the money could come from. Overall climate adaption spending for all countries is projected to reach $2.4 trillion a year.

“The transition to clean, low-carbon energy, building resilience to the impacts of climate change, coping with loss and damage, protecting nature and biodiversity, and ensuring a just transition, require a rapid step-up in investment in all countries,” said the report.
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Washington — National Geographic scientists say they’ve discovered the world’s largest coral near the remote Solomon Islands in the Pacific Ocean — an undersea mass that is so big, it can be seen from space.

The man who found it, Manu San Felix, director of cinematography for National Geographic Society’s Pristine Seas, a program dedicated to marine conservation, says the giant organism measures 34 meters wide and 32 meters long and is “close to the size of a cathedral.”

“I see this as a living library that has the information of the conditions of the oceans for centuries,” he told reporters this week, underscoring it is a reminder of the need to better protect the ocean from global climate change.

Eric Brown, a Pristine Seas coral scientist, said the enormous coral species, Pavona clavus, is healthy and has “high reproductive potential,” making it essential to help other coral reef ecosystems recover from the damage of a warming ocean.

Corals “are very vulnerable ecosystems. So, it’s important for us to do whatever we can to protect these environments that are both small and mighty,” Brown said at a Tuesday press briefing to announce the find.

The announcement comes as world leaders gather for the United Nations climate conference, known as COP29, in Azerbaijan. Attendees are trying to agree on new mechanisms to finance a global energy transition to renewables and help nations like the Pacific Islands pay for the cost of adapting to rising oceans.

Pristine Seas is also encouraging nations to designate marine protected areas, or MPAs. The goal is to protect 30% of the world’s oceans by 2030.

Palau President Surangel Whipps Jr. is attending the summit. Palau has walled off 80% of its waters to development, while the nearby Pacific Island nation of Niue has designated 40% of its waters for protection.

“It cannot just be big countries. Small countries need to do their part,” he told VOA in an interview. “So, it’s all of us working together … protecting our oceans, because we know that healthy oceans are an important part of the ecosystem and important in regulating climate.”

Solomon Islands Prime Minister Jeremiah Manele agreed.

“Our survival depends on healthy coral reefs, so this exciting discovery underlines the importance of protecting and sustaining them for future generations,” he said in a press release.

But so far, the Solomon Islands has created a network of 79 designated ocean conservation areas — less than 1% of its exclusive economic zone. What’s more, its economy is largely dependent on forestry — the very industry that threatens the viability of coral through sedimentation.

“All that sediment is going onto a reef, and it’s smothering the reef, thereby preventing the corals from being able to feed, to grow, to reproduce,” Molly Timmers, Pristine Seas lead scientist on the Solomon Islands, said at the press briefing.

According to the Observatory of Economic Complexity, an online platform that seeks to visualize the distribution of international trade, the Solomons exported $308 million in rough wood in 2022, with $260 million of it going to China.

VOA asked Chief Dennis Marita, director of culture at the Ministry of Culture & Tourism, how the government can find a balance.

“Much of the logging activities are happening on the mainland” away from the coral, Marita said in an interview, but “there needs to be a serious awareness about the impacts of what’s happening in the logging industry to the marine environment.”

Marita sees this coral discovery as a way to attract researchers, biologists and tourists to bring in revenue to the small island nation of 740,000 people. Earlier this week, the Solomon Islands signed an agreement with China to provide visa-free travel between the two countries.

“Suddenly, people will start coming to the island, but then we need to be prepared for them, and also, we need to ensure that the coral is safeguarded,” Marita said.

Dr. Daniel Barshis of Old Dominion University’s Ecological Sciences Department in Norfolk, Virginia, said that idea has merit.

“I would imagine this discovery would draw tourists to the area, similar to how old-growth trees inspire folks to visit,” he told VOA via email.

“The fact that [corals] like this still exist is a reminder that coral reefs are still surviving and deserve us working as hard as we possibly can to save them from some of the worst-case scenarios if we don’t reverse course on greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible,” said Barshis.

William Yang contributed to this report.
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The world’s largest coral colony has been discovered near the remote Solomon Islands in the Pacific Ocean – an undersea mass that is so big, it can be seen from space, National Geographic scientists announced Nov. 12, 2024.   
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