In war-torn northern Yemen, UN official assesses needs of 150,000 displaced

A senior United Nations humanitarian official is on a four-day visit to Yemen to assess the needs of tens of thousands of people uprooted by armed conflict in the north as the world body seeks to arouse international donor awareness to the crisis.

Gaza’s water supply in danger of collapse, warns UN report

The Gaza Strip’s underground water system is in serious danger of collapse after recent conflict compounded years of overuse and contamination, a report released by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) today warns.

UN food agency gives a helping hand to farmers in Zimbabwe

In a bid to tackle hunger in Zimbabwe, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) will give farmers a boost in the African nation boost by distributing seeds and fertilizers, it was announced today.

Kenya: UN Ambassador Jolie visits 'dire' camp for Somali refugees

Visiting the world's largest refugee camp, housing refugees from Somalia, on the Horn of Africa nation's border with Kenya, Academy award-winning actress and Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations refugee agency Angelina Jolie today characterized the site as “one of the most dire” she has ever seen.

Rasmussen v. Lord Myners (and the rest of the City)

In case you missed it, Open Europe last week organised a debate on the EU’s proposed new rules for hedge funds, private equity firms, and various other funds currently not regulated by EU law. In good-old Brussels fashion the the proposal goes under the acronym AIFMD (Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive), and has been recieved with some scepticism in the City of London - to put it mildly.

In a Guildhall filled to the brink with angry pin-striped suited City people, the AIFM Directive’s key proponent, Poul Nuryp Rasmussen, fearlessly explained why he didn’t think the proposal goes far enough. The arguments aside, you have to give Rasmussen a lot of credit for his dedication, courage and willingness to walk in to a what can only be described as a lion’s den. And he certainly stood his ground. During the course of the debate, it became evident that Rasmussen knows more about the alternative investment industry than what the alternative investment industry itself perhaps wants to believe. It would be a huge mistake to underestimate him, particularly as he still - although not being an MEP anymore - has a lot of input into what kind of amendments the socialists in the EP will put down on the draft Directive.

And he carries a lot of respect around Europe. During the 90s he took on the unions in Denmark in a bid to get the Danish economy up and running again - a point he was keen to make at the end of the debate. This, he said, highlights that he’s a “pragmatic Scandinavian” and a “pro-growth guy” (in addition to being an economist), not out to getting the City of London. A Scandianvian economist with pragmatist credentials is actually the nighmare opponent for the alternative investment industry, insofar as he he’ll draw a lot of sympathy from around Europe (and hedge fund managers aren’t exactly the most popular kids in the bock). However, notwithstanding his courage and the rest of it, the arguments are against Rasmussen on this issue - as we’ve outlined here.

The main counter-blast to Rasmussen’s arguments did not come from any of the industry representatives, but from City Minister Lord Myners, who used surprisingly strong rethoric - no doubt mindful of his audience. In particular Lord Myners hit out at “the lamentable lack of consultation” which preceded the Directive, and said that the proposal amounted to”protectionism hiding as if it were protection”.

One of the most interesting admissions from Rasmussen was that the Directive was designed to keep hedge fund managers from the rest of the world out of the single market, unless they “pay a price”. “No one can have my Danish passport”, Rasmussen said. As we’ve argued many times before, this type of protectionist thinking remains of the EU’s greates flaws. Whether it’s raising barriers to global capital flows and investment, or free trade in products and agricultural commodities.

Rasmussen did not

Highland Towers in the Dark for 11 Days

Highland Towers in the dark

Asthmatics, diabetics, seniors suffer

By Diane Bukowski
Michigan Citizen

DETROIT — Over 150 residents of the Highland Towers at 12850 Woodward in Highland Park remain without power after DTE Energy, a company with $13.8 million in sales last year and $9.8 billion in assets, cut it off Aug. 31.

Highland Towers LLC owns the building, according to Wayne County deed records.

Tenants said they received no advance notice of the shut-off.

Many are asthmatics who need electric nebulizers, diabetics whose insulin has gone bad in shut-off refrigerators, and seniors who can’t climb completely darkened stairwells with the elevators shut down. Many younger tenants were helping the seniors get food and other supplies.

“My eight-year-old daughter is traumatized,” said tenant Latanya Lloyd. “She and I have chronic asthma and need to use our nebulizer when inhalers don’t do the job. We have paid our rent, but the landlord up and disappeared. He knew before it happened, because he stopped coming every day and only showed up to collect rents.”

Senior Gene Weiss, who has lived in the building for 30 years, said she has diabetes, heart trouble, high blood pressure, three broken ribs, is blind in one eye, and just got out of rehabilitation after a hip replacement.

“This is the worst I’ve seen in this building since I’ve lived here, and we’ve had rent strikes over bad conditions before,” said Weiss. “The landlord just walked away with our money.”

Taron Smith lives there with his 50-year-old father, and Jonathan Moses lives with his fiancee, both of whom are diabetic. They reported that the insulin in their refrigerators had gone bad.

They all participated in demonstrations at DTE’s downtown Detroit headquarters Aug. 27 and 28, organized by the Moratorium NOW! Coalition to Stop Foreclosures, Evictions and Utility Shut-offs, and met with DTE representative Mike Wood, to no avail.

“DTE is obligated under state law to give each tenant an individual 30-day notice of shut-off and immediately restore power to anyone with medical emergencies,” attorney Jerome Goldberg of the Coalition said. “They must pay a fine of $200 a day to each tenant if they violate this policy.”

Sandra Hines of the Coalition said, “This is nothing but an effective and illegal eviction by DTE itself.”

A reporter for Channel Four’s “Ruth to the Rescue” said she had contacted the mayors of Highland Park and Detroit, state legislators, and other officials, to get them to intervene to have the power turned back on, but even their efforts did not dissuade the utility.

Robert Day and other representatives of the Legal Aid and Defender Association interviewed tenants for a possible class action lawsuit and temporary restraining order Aug. 29.

Updated information on their efforts was not available at press time.

On July 16 Vaughn Reed, a laid-off autoworker, and his children Mar’Keisha Reed, 16, DeMarco Owens, 12, and DeMarte Owens, six, died from carbon monoxide poisoning after DTE shut off the utilities at the Reed home despite his bankruptcy filing. Reed was using a generator to power nebulizers for his wife Marquetta Owens and son DeMarco.

“Our heart goes out to the residents of Highland Towers and we do understand the difficult situation they are in,” said DTE spokesman Scott Simons. “We have been working with the building owner to get his bills paid over many years, but he continued to renege on payment plans, and currently owes over $100,000. That left us no other choice. We have sought assistance from United Way and other social service organizations to remedy their situations.”

He claimed the building’s account was “posted” June 17, and that each tenant did receive individual notices in addition to notices posted at the building’s entrance. When informed that the tenants denied this, he said, “Somebody must have been tearing the notices down.”

He said they had no plans to restore power to the building until the bill is paid. Asked how much it would cost DTE to turn the power back on for 30 days to give the tenants time to move, he said that was not a possibility, although DTE earlier extended a deadline for tenants at 59 Seward for 30 days.

Simon also said DTE has many other multi-family units in the city with arrearages that evidently could face the same fate, but would not disclose information regarding any commercial or industrial facilities with past due bills who have not been shut off.

DTE has turned off all residential street lighting in the city of Highland Park which owes the utility.

County tax records for Highland Towers show that a defunct business named RHW Associates, Inc., incorporated in 1995 by Richard Jedwab of Brooklyn, N.Y., owes nearly $200,000 in taxes for the property. DTE said its bills go to 12850 Highland, LLC. Attorney Andrew J. Munro is listed as the agent for the last organization, but had not returned a call for comment before press time.

1.3 Million Lacked Health Coverage in Michigan

1.3M Lacked Health Coverage In Mich.

Friday, September 11, 2009

LANSING, Mich. — A new report says 1.3 million people in Michigan lacked health insurance last year.

The U.S. Census Bureau said Thursday 11.7 percent of state residents weren’t covered through private companies or the government in 2008. That’s up from 10.4 percent in 2007.

Things may be even worse now, because the figures don’t include people who lost coverage as unemployment rose this year.

The Michigan League for Human Service says the report has good news and bad news for the state.

The increase of 1.3 percentage points in Michigan’s uninsured rate was third-highest in the country, behind only Alaska and New Mexico.

But Michigan’s percentage of uninsured residents was lower than the national rate of 15.4 percent.

Sustainable cities are the solution

Despite our romantic ideas about nature, it will be well-run, energy-efficient cities that ultimately save us from ourselves

David Lepeska
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 13 September 2009 13.00 BST
New York mayor Michael Bloomberg unveiled a $25m, energy-efficient office building on the Brooklyn waterfront a few months back. The Perry Avenue Building features solar panels, rainwater-fed toilets and six rooftop windmills, which will produce 10% of its energy supply. “Wind power in this city,” said the mayor, “is one of the solutions to our problem.”
That problem – devising more sustainable cities – has rightfully drawn a great deal of attention of late. In February, Barack Obama created the White House office of urban affairs and quickly set about staffing it with experienced urban planners, to complement what many have called his “green dream team” on environmental policy.
Earlier this year in Strasburg, Obama acknowledged that the US bears the brunt of the responsibility for climate change. Combined with nearly $50bn in infrastructure spending in the stimulus package, the new administration’s emphasis on building better cities is clear.
As for New York, the new Brooklyn building is part of a $250m programme to make Brooklyn’s Navy Yard a hub for green industry, just one aspect of the mayor’s broader plan to make the city more eco-friendly. When he launched PlanNYC two years ago, Bloomberg pointed out that the world’s cities were responsible for 80% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Former US president Bill Clinton and UN officials have quoted the same figure.
This bit of data would mean city dwellers emit nearly four times as much as their rural counterparts. (The UN estimates that humanity became more urban than rural in 2008. Right now, the global populations of urban and rural folk are roughly the same.) Put another way, living in a city is almost four times as polluting as living outside of one.
Thankfully, the figure turns out to be wildly inaccurate.
The carbon footprint of urban dwellers is relatively light, says a report by David Dodman in the April issue of Environment and Urbanisation. Dodman, a researcher at the International Institute for Environment and Development, examined emissions reports from cities in the Americas, Asia and Europe.
He found that New Yorkers emit a third less greenhouse gases than the average American and that Barcelonans and Londoners emit about half of their national averages. And urban Brazilians are truly green: the residents of Sao Paolo and Rio de Janeiro are responsible for only one-third the national emissions average. Dodman’s paper complements an earlier study by IIED senior fellow David Satterthwaite, who argued that cities emit about 40% of all greenhouse gases, as opposed to the oft-cited 80%.
On average, then, people who live in small towns and rural areas emit 50% more greenhouse gases than city folk. That cities may be part of the solution, however, does not mean that efforts like Bloomberg’s PlanNYC are misplaced. Precisely the opposite is true.
By 2050, some 70% of us will live in urban settings, and it will ultimately be well-managed urban environments, with smart, energy-efficient buildings, power systems, transport and planning, that will save us from ourselves. Seeking better ways to do precisely that, a constellation of designers, architects and academics gathered at a conference on “ecological urbanism” at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design earlier this year.
Mitchell Joachim, who teaches architecture and design at Columbia University and was selected by Wired magazine as one of 15 people Obama should listen to, presented his vision for a collapsible and stackable electric city car, which would hang at public recharging stations, available for shared use.
He also explained “meat tectonics”. Aiming to use meat proteins developed in a lab as building material, Joachim presented a digital rendering of an armadillo-shaped, kidney-coloured home. “It’s very ugly, we know that,” he said. “We’re not sure what a meat house is supposed to look like.”
Dorothee Imbert, associate professor in landscape architecture at Harvard, pointed to urban farming, a trend that has taken root in Detroit, New York, Milwaukee and a handful of international cities. Imbert mentioned her own student-assisted organic farms in Boston, yet acknowledged that adequate food supplies for future cities “would require rethinking of landscape in the building process”.
Pritzker-winning Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas is thinking regionally. The Harvard professor and designer of the MC Escher-esque CCTV building in Beijing talked about his Zeekracht (”sea power” in Dutch), a plan for oceanic wind farms across the North Sea that would provide energy to much of northern Europe. With its constant high winds, shallow waters and advanced renewable industries, Koolhaas believes the North Sea offers energy potential approaching that of Persian Gulf oil.
His plan, which includes production belts in a half-dozen urban centres on or near the sea, energy cooperation and clean-tech research centres, is the type of project that, ideally, will both preserve green spaces and increase urban sustainability.
Another is a recently approved high-speed rail project in California, which will link that state’s southern and northern hubs. Obama’s stimulus package contains $8bn for high-speed and urban rail projects. That amount is nowhere near enough to install networks on a European scale, but, like windmills on the Brooklyn waterfront, it’s a step in the right direction.
Henry David Thoreau moved to Walden Pond “to live deliberately“, as he put it. But shortly thereafter the American naturalist and philosopher accidentally burned over a hundred acres of pristine Massachusetts woodlands. We can no longer afford to be like Thoreau. If we want to continue to romanticise our natural world, we, as a civilisation, must also avoid it.

Protecting climate change refugees

Communities hardest hit by climate change are also the poorest. Their right to compensation and protection needs to be made law

Steve Trent
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 13 September 2009 14.00 BST

The phrase “environmental refugee” has been around since the 1970s, with the term “climate refugee” appearing more recently. Although the concept is simple to grasp, these terms have no meaning in international law.
The need to mitigate the effects of climate change has rightly held a high place on the international agenda, but it is only now that the reality of human suffering on a colossal scale, as a consequence of a changing climate, is being given the attention it deserves. I believe environmental security is a human right and, as climate change creates millions of environmental refugees, that this right must henceforth be enshrined in international law.
As early as 1990, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) suggested that the “gravest effects of climate change may be those on human migration.” Similar predictions today suggest that 200 million people could be forced from their homes by 2050 due to environmental factors arising from climate change.
Crucially, it is evident that environmental stresses affect communities and regions least able to adapt to change, typically hitting the poorest people on our planet. At the same time, many of the regions and populations that will be most affected, such as Bangladesh or small island developing states such as the Maldives and Seychelles, also have some of the lowest per capita greenhouse gas emissions. Historically, they have been responsible for a tiny fraction of the warming gases released, compared with those released by western industrialised nations. For many in the west, the effects of a changing climate remain largely an abstract concept, yet among poorer nations the climate is already devastating the lives of millions.
Meanwhile, there is a complete absence of any formal, enforceable, legal multilateral mechanism designed to address the needs of these people and assist in creating some greater equality and proportionality between those causing climate change and those most affected.
The 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees was drafted in the immediate aftermath of the second world war; its focus on those who are forced from their country of origin through fear of persecution, “for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion”. In today’s world, the 1951 convention cannot meet the needs of climate refugees, as its narrow legal definitions will not apply to most of those affected by climate change. Also, the specific desire and best option for many will be to stay within their national boundaries if the financial and technical assistance to do so were forthcoming.
Just as the overarching threat of climate change is one of global responsibility, so is the fate of climate refugees. In this context, there is a clear and compelling imperative to create a new multilateral legal mechanism – and with it a new legal definition for climate refugees – that enshrines the right to life, food, health, water, housing and other essentials. This should apply to all those who are now affected and the millions more who will be affected by the changes in our climate created largely by a distant, and still largely unresponsive, wealthy west.
Every year, climate change leaves more than 300,000 people dead, 325 million people seriously affected, and economic losses of $125bn. If anyone should be in any doubt as to the comparative costs of propping up failing economies, and of protecting millions of people from climate change, the UN has estimated that annual global spending to mitigate the worst effects of climate change amounts to about $0.5bn. Compare that with the $150bn spent by the US federal government to bail out just one failing insurance company, or the top nine US banks which gave over $32bn in bonuses alone that same year.
The recent financial crisis has shown that both political will and financial muscle can be mobilised when the wealth and way of life for the developed world is threatened. Now, in the knowledge that not just the way of life, but the actual existence of many is threatened by climate change, we must mount a similarly forceful response and create a new legal framework for climate refugees alongside the essential action to curb our carbon emissions.

The Green Revolution wasn’t green enough

Norman Borlaug saved a billion lives from starvation. But decades on, his farming methods threaten the health of the planet
Graham Harvey
For someone of my generation, growing up under postwar food rationing, the idea that food would always be plentiful and cheap seemed about as likely as a portable phone that you could carry around with you.
For many of us the dire predictions of Thomas Malthus were all too credible. Malthus had advanced the dismal theory that human populations would always grow faster than their food supply. It meant you could forget all your grand ideas about progress. Every social advance was destined to be brought to nothing by famine.
The singular achievement of the agronomist Norman Borlaug, who died at the weekend, was to take away this age-old fear, at least for those of us in the rich West.
In a crop-breeding programme that won him the Nobel Peace Prize, he developed a clutch of wheat varieties with remarkably short stems. As a young farming journalist I remember writing about one of the first to appear in Britain, a diminutive variety called Hobbit.
Compared with the taller traditional wheats, the short-strawed types shifted a higher proportion of plant sugars into the seedhead or ear of the plant, where the grains were formed. In this way they were capable of producing dramatically higher yields. But to achieve them they needed huge amounts of chemical fertiliser. Borlaug once remarked that “if the high-yielding wheat and rice varieties are the catalysts that ignited the revolution, chemical fertiliser is the fuel that powered its forward thrust”.
His Green Revolution led to a near-doubling of wheat yields in India and Pakistan during the late 1960s. Altogether more than a billion people are believed to have been saved from starvation as a result of the new varieties.
Over the past 30 years Western governments have poured subsidies into the development of so-called high-yield grain production. One early result was the notorious grain mountains of the 1970s and 1980s which, far from alleviating hunger, did much to undermine the development of food production in poor countries. Borlaug intended his methods to be used for the benefit of people across the planet. Instead they were seized on by industrial countries with the wealth to pay for expensive seeds and fertilisers. Where they were used in developing countries, this often came at the cost of a crippling debt burden.
Today Borlaug’s ideas underpin the global food system. Three quarters of the world’s cultivated land is sown to grain crops and oilseeds. Most are dependent on massive amounts of oil energy in the form of nitrate fertilisers, pesticides, diesel fuel and heavy machinery.
Though the Green Revolution has undoubtedly given the world more food, it has brought with it worrying consequences. An investigation into agriculture funded by the World Bank concluded that the benefits have been unevenly distributed. Equally disturbing, the revolution has led to widespread environmental damage that may reduce the planet’s capacity to feed future generations.
No less than 1.9 billion hectares of farmland has been degraded by modern grain-growing techniques. Growing annual grain crops such as wheat over lengthy periods inevitably leads to soil damage. The land must be ploughed and cultivated each year, and for long periods is left bare, a condition that seldom arises in nature. Stripped of vegetation cover, the soil’s organic matter starts to burn up or oxidise, releasing carbon into the atmosphere and adding to the greenhouse gas burden. The process is hastened by heavy inputs of chemical fertiliser and pesticides. With the loss of organic matter the soil’s structure is weakened so it becomes unstable and subject to erosion, either by wind or rainfall.
Around the world soils are eroding at a faster rate than at any time in history. Each year the weight of soil washing downstream in rivers is estimated at four tonnes for every man, woman and child on the planet. For all our technology, civilisation continues to depend on a few centimetres of topsoil. At this rate of loss the future for humanity is grim.
For all the high hopes of the 1960s, it is hard to see Borlaug’s system as more than a partial success. Its weakness is its reliance on a handful of annual crops that cannot be grown without massive inputs of fossil fuel. The sustainable methods called for in the World Bank report will almost certainly make greater use of perennial crops — principally grassland — to feed livestock.
One of the consequences of the grain surpluses produced by the Green Revolution is that more than half the world’s cereal crops are now fed to animals. Cattle, which as ruminants are adapted to grazing pastures, are now routinely confined to yards, or “feedlots”, and fed on grains. There is mounting evidence that beef and dairy foods produced this way are less healthy than those same foods produced from grazing animals. One unfortunate consequence of Borlaug’s breakthrough is that we are now degrading croplands on a global scale to produce meat and dairy products that are inferior to those we used to get from pasture.
While Borlaug’s revolutionary wheats run mainly on oil, the world’s grasslands — which are mostly made up of perennial species — are truly solar-powered. Once established perennial plants maintain their root systems from year to year. So they do not need the fertilisers and chemicals required for plants grown from seed each time. Unlike grains, grasslands will give us a secure and sustainable source of meat and milk. And as part of a mixed farming system, clover-rich pastures provide a non-chemical way of building up fertility on crop land.
But there is another more pressing reason for turning away from Borlaug’s grains and making more use of the world’s neglected grasslands. The shift to industrial grain production has added hugely to the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Properly managed grassland could reverse the process.
Grasslands that are grazed rotationally are able to capture large amounts of atmospheric carbon dioxide and lock it up safely in soil organic matter. Australian researchers estimate that if the world’s pasture farmers managed their grazing in this way, the amount of carbon captured could easily exceed total annual emissions. This will be the real Green Revolution. It could restore, not just our food supply, but the health of the planet.
Graham Harvey is author of The Carbon Fields: How Our Countryside Can Save Britain