By Farhana Haque Rahman ROME, Dec 16 2019 (IPS) – By any measure, this has been a devastating year: fires across the Amazon, the Arctic and beyond; floods and drought in Africa; rising temperatures, carbon emissions and sea levels; accelerating…
Tag: Opinion
2019: A Year in Review
By IPS World Desk Dec 16 2019 (IPS) – 2019 will be remembered as the year the climate crisis shook us all. Hopefully, it will also be remembered for the fightback manifested in the spread of mass protests and civic…
A fair Brexit
by Philippe van Parijs on 16th December 2019 @pvpbrussels For the free-market Tory right, Brexit is a means towards a beggar-my-neighbour buccaneering adventure—not ‘future relations’ to which the EU27 can agree.
15 Children’s Books Celebrating the Power of Food and Agriculture
Danielle Nierenberg If you browse the food shelves at a bookstore or local library, you’ll probably find an important selection of cookbooks, memoirs, and journalistic investigations into our food system. Maybe you’ll recognize the names of the authors. One thing…
UN to resolve the Rohingya humanitarian crisis
By Askiah Adam The Rohingya refugees have, for decades now, been fleeing their homeland, the Rakhine province in Myanmar. Mostly through Yangon’s inaction, elements of the military and members of the majority Buddhist population were left to run rampage amongst…
Reversing the Death of Venice
by Carlo Ratti VENICE – Some of the worst floodings in Venice’s history has submerged some of the historic city’s renowned cultural sites, including St. Mark’s Basilica on Piazza San Marco. This is only the sixth time the basilica has…
Natural-Born Climate Commitments
by Sally Jewell WASHINGTON, DC – When world leaders gather at the 25th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP25) in Madrid from December 2-13, they will discuss concrete steps for meeting and increasing national emissions-reduction targets. But equally important, COP25…
Why We Strike Again
by Greta Thunberg, Luisa Neubauer, Angela Valenzuela MADRID – For more than a year, children and young people from around the world have been striking for the climate. We launched a movement that defied all expectations, with millions of people…
Eminent eco-poet from Madrid Zhivka Baltadzhieva speaks
BY Poet Siti Ruqaiyah Hashim SRH: Tell me more about your childhood background, schooling and university education. Pregunta: I grew up in great solitude. My grandparents, the men, were not very talkative. They had been very leftist, very revolutionary, my…
The Brexit Election: Not all outcomes are equally bad
by Brendan Donnelly Director, The Federal Trust 27th November 2019 – Jeremy Corbyn has rarely in recent decades feared political controversy. On issues such as Ireland, the Middle East, NATO, income redistribution and renationalisation, he has advocated with candour and…
Five lessons for journalism in the age of rage
by Karin Pettersson on 25th November 2019 @AB_Karin For Karin Pettersson, journalism has never been more challenging—and never more important. The news-media industry has long lamented about how the digital revolution has broken its business models. Today, a majority of…
Green Steel
By Charlotte KingReprint Beijing, China, Nov 21 2019 (IPS) – How Indonesian craftsmanship is undergoing a revival at the world’s first ‘bamboo university’.
The coup that ousted Bolivia’s Morales
By Chandra Muzaffar Any human being who values justice and freedom would condemn the coup that ousted the Bolivian president Evo Morales on the 10th of November 2019.
The aspirations and ambiguities of de-colonial politics
By SherAli Tareen The Background Noise Imran Khan’s ascension as Prime Minister of Pakistan in August 2018 preceded and instigated an avalanche of alarming prognoses issued by a range of motley characters. Their convergence made for an interesting union of…
Resisting the seductions of populism
by Daphne Halikiopoulou on 19th November 2019 References to ‘the people’ are misleading. Populism is no democratic corrective.
The UK election should be about ideas, not polls
by Lea Ypi on 13th November 2019 With the UK facing one of the most important elections in decades, the focus should be on the clear programmatic differences between the main parties, rather than weekly polling outcomes. If I were…
The German impasse
by Adam Tooze on 12th November 2019 Adam Tooze dissects how the macroeconomic policy discourse is disabling necessary German, and European, steps forward. The autumn of 2019 is a moment of anniversaries. The 30th anniversary of German unification has garnered…
Is there a place for ethics in Smart Cities?
By Dr Jaspal Kaur Sadhu Singh It is difficult to win a debate on ethics when you are pitted against a crowd of tech-acolytes. I was taking the position that a more vital consideration in developing cities are ethical ones…
Int’l tax emergency: Critical time for poor nations to speak up!
by José Antonio Ocampo on 6th November 2019 An OECD proposal to reduce transnational tax evasion contains flaws which developing countries must challenge before it is set in stone.
Europe’s Green Deal is turning red
by Delara Burkhardt on 4th November 2019 @delarabur The European Green Deal does not just aim at combating the climate crisis. It’s also an opportunity for social change.
Budapest’s new mayor and the redemocratisation of Hungary
by Stephen Pogány on 31st October 2019 Local elections in Hungary have placed a question-mark over the durability of the ‘illiberal democracy’ of Viktor Orbán.
‘One In, One Out’ is a danger to workers’ health and safety
by Per Hilmersson on 24th October 2019 The new European Commission’s ‘One In, One Out’ approach to ‘burdensome’ legislation would stymie progress towards safer, healthier workplaces.
The Manchester revolution
by Paul Mason on 23rd October 2019 @paulmasonnews Paul Mason reimagines the Manchester of his birth in a postcapitalist age—and raises the challenge of getting there. Imagine this: a child is born in a city where 40 per cent of…
Fourth industrial rev and (unwarranted) pessimism over jobs
– Jayant Menon 23 September 2019 If the industrial revolution leads to greater efforts to reskill and reshape the workforce to better adapt to change, then this is exactly what is required, and there is no overdoing it.
It happens only in India
Sudhirendar Sharma Mention of a railway journey invites memories of the good, and not-so-good travel experiences over time. More than the destination, it is the sheer experience of being on the train journey that replays through awful encounters, amusing anecdotes,…
Financing the green transition
By Bertrand Badré and Antoine Sire Paris – Four years after world leaders signed the Paris climate agreement and adopted the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda with its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the global environmental crisis shows every sign of…
Climate leadership from developing countries
by Lee White, Tanguy Gahouma Libreville – When Gabon ratified the 2015 Paris climate agreement, its real work was just beginning. The main challenge was to find ways to conserve the country’s natu ral environment and address the growing climate…
European economic democracy: A path out of the crisis
by Lorena Lombardozzi and Neil Warner on 21st October 2019 @floretta_voice A genuinely social Europe must have economic democracy rather than rely only on market mechanisms.
Brexit reveals Jeremy Corbyn to be the true moderate
By Jonathan Cook If there is an upside to Brexit, it is this: it has made it increasingly hard to present Jeremy Corbyn, contrary to everything the corporate media has been telling us for the past four years, as anything…
Can Europe help the Balkans keep its young emigrants?
by Alida Vračić on 16th October 2019 High emigration rates are doing massive damage to the prospects of the western Balkans—would a stronger EU perspective reverse this outflow?