Nergui Manalsuren interviews Catarina de Albuquerque, the U.N. Independent Expert on human rights, water and sanitation

UNITED NATIONS, Aug 28 2009 (IPS) – Some 1.6 million people die each year due to water and sanitation related diseases, millions of girls do not go to school because of lack of toilets, and prison detainees are denied access to adequate sanitation in some countries as a form of punishment, clear violations of the rights to health, education, and many other human rights.

Catarina de Albuquerque Credit: UN Photo

Yet the crisis is one of the least addressed by the …

Julio Godoy

BONN, Feb 23 2011 (IPS) – Imagine a green wall 15 kilometres wide, and up to 8,000 kilometres long a living green wall of trees and bushes, full of birds and other animals. Imagine it just south of the Sahara, from Djibouti in the Horn of Africa in the east, all the way across the continent to Dakar, Senegal, in the west.
The building of this pan-African Great Green African Wall (GGW) was just approved by an international summit taking place this week in the former German capital Bonn, a side event of the joint conference of the committees on Science and Technology and for the Review of the Implementation of the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD).

The GGW, as conceived by the 11 countries located along the southern border of the Sahara, and …

Suvendrini Kakuchi

TOKYO, Mar 17 2011 (IPS) – For the past three days Hiroko Oogusa, 62 following orders from the local authorities has remained in her tightly shuttered home located 40 kilometres from the badly damaged Daiichi nuclear power plant in Fukushima.

Four reactors of Daiichi nuclear power plant in Fukushima. Credit: Japan Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport

The local town council officials who drove past my hou…

The phosphate processing plant of Gabes, seen here with phosphogypsum debris in the foreground. Credit: Justin Hyatt/IPS

GABÈS. Tunisia, Jun 7 2013 (IPS) – The story of Gabès and the local phosphate industry follows a plot that is all too familiar: an underdeveloped town located in an industrial region boasts one major lucrative industry with high output and export values, but the local population and surroundings experience alarming levels of illness and environmental blight.

But locals are no longer remaining as silent as they once were, holding a festival to mark World Environment Day on Jun. 5 and taking other actions such as protesting and using anti-pollutio…

Medialunas with coffee and milk, a classic breakfast in Argentina, in a typical Buenos Aires café. From now on, these small croissants will have to be free of trans fats. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

BUENOS AIRES, Jan 3 2015 (IPS) – After adopting a new law banning trans fats in industrially processed foods, Argentina is starting out the new year with an improved public health outlook. The challenge now is for the food industry to incorporate the new rules, in an adaptation process that started four years ago.

“This is an important step for making progress in the prevention of cerebrovascular and cardiac diseases because it has been proven that these fats are har…

Martin Khor is Executive Director of the South Centre, a think tank for developing countries, based in Geneva.

The tension between monopoly for patent holders (usually the big drug companies) and access to medicines for all has become acute and there are social movements around the world, both in developing and developed countries, that are figh…

Shloka Nath is Executive Director, India Climate Collaborative

MUMBAI, India, Mar 23 2020 (IPS) – Over the past few years, worsening air quality in India—and in north India specifically—has awakened policy makers and civil society to take urgent action.

There have been some efforts to address air quality, specifically the (NCAP), which was launched in January 2019 with the aim of improving air quality standards by 20-30 percent over the next five years. While this has been a positive step, we not only need a more ambitious agenda, but also a strong compliance framework that ensures accountability to the targets we have set.

With growing congestion in cities�…