Month: September 2021

A new report released Wednesday by the United Nations indicates extreme weather events have increased fivefold over the past 50 years, while the number of fatalities related to those events has dropped.

Officials from the U.N.’s weather and climate agency, the World Meteorological Organization, introduced the report during a briefing from the agency’s headquarters in Geneva. The report shows weather-related disasters have occurred on average at a rate of one per day over the past five decades, killing 115 people and causing $202 million in losses daily.

Mami Mizutori, U.N. special representative for disaster risk reduction, told reporters she found the report “quite alarming.” She noted that this past July was the hottest July on record, marked by heat waves and floods around the world. The study shows that more people are suffering due to this increased frequency and intensity of weather events.

Mizutori said 31 million people were displaced by natural disasters last year, almost surpassing the number displaced by conflicts. She said on average, 26 million people per year are pushed into poverty by extreme weather events. Now, the COVID-19 pandemic is compounding the problem.

The U.N. disaster risk specialist said, “We live in this, what we call, the multihazard world, and it demonstrates that we really need to invest more in disaster risk reduction and prevention.”

WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said the good news in the report is that during that same period, fatalities related to these disasters dropped by nearly three times, due to early warning systems and improved disaster management.

But the study also shows that more than 91% of the deaths that do occur happen in developing or low-income countries, as many do not have the same warning and management systems in place.

The WMO officials said the economic losses associated with these disasters will worsen without serious climate change mitigation. Taalas said if the right measures are put in place, the trend could be stopped in the next 40 years. WMO called on the G-20 group of world economic powers to keep their promise to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Source: Voice of America

BENI, DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO – Four civilians were killed and dozens were taken hostage Wednesday in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo when suspected Islamist militants ambushed a convoy and set fire to the vehicles, the government said.

Congo’s army has freed more than 50 of the hostages in Ituri province and operations are underway to recover the remaining captives from the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), a Ugandan Islamist group, the communications ministry said on Twitter.

The ministry did not say how many people were still being held hostage. A local lawmaker said earlier that about 80 people were believed to be missing after the attack on a convoy of about 100 vehicles that was traveling with army protection on the road between the cities of Beni and Butembo.

Attacks by the armed groups operating in eastern Congo’s borderlands with Rwanda and Uganda have continued unabated despite the government’s imposition of martial law in Ituri and North Kivu province at the beginning of May.

The installation of army generals as provincial governors was meant to quell a surge in violence that the military largely attributes to the ADF.

But the number of civilians killed in such attacks has increased, according to the Kivu Security Tracker. Survivors of Wednesday’s attack recalled a hail of gunfire as the convoy passed near the village of Ofaye.

“Bullets started flying in every direction,” one of the survivors, Malanda Dague, told Reuters. “Some vehicles were hit and then burned.”

Jean-Paul Ngahangondi, a member of parliament in North Kivu province, where the convoy started, criticized what he said was the army’s slow response, a frequent complaint of local people.

“The army just waits for the rebels to kill the population and only then pursues them without any positive results,” he said.

Eastern Congo has been plagued by violence since regional wars around the turn of the century. Islamic State has claimed dozens of killings blamed on the ADF, although U.N. experts say they have not found conclusive evidence that IS has control over ADF operations.

Source: Voice of America

HARARE, ZIMBABWE – Zimbabwe resumed in-classroom teaching this week, but thousands of teachers are protesting salaries that are below the poverty level and a lack of personal protective equipment against COVID-19.

Zimbabwe’s Amalgamated Rural Teachers Union says it will only call off the strike when the government addresses the concerns.

“And there is negligence on the part of the authorit(ies) to make sure that there is enough safety to guarantee our teachers and learners from the pandemic,” said Robson Chere, secretary general of the teachers union. “They should have been providing adequate water supply, enough PPEs. Arcturus Primary School, which is down here, hasn’t even water. It’s messy. It’s a disaster. We are sitting on a time bomb for both learners and teachers.”

Authorities did not allow VOA into Arcturus Primary School, which is about 40 kilometers east of Harare.

Some students around Harare have been going to school since Monday to try to learn among themselves, as there are no teachers.

The teachers union warns that classrooms may turn into COVID-19 superspreaders. But Taungana Ndoro, director of communications and advocacy at Zimbabwe’s Education Ministry, says the government has been working to ensure classrooms are safe.

“We have been putting in new infrastructure to ensure that we decongest the existing infrastructure to ensure that there is social and physical distancing for the prevention and management of COVID-19,” Ndoro said.

“We have also made sure that our schools have adequate supplies of sanitizers and water. So, it is looking good. We have got single-seated desks now, instead of two- or three-seated desks. This is to encourage social distancing. We do not have bunk beds anymore in our boarding schools. We have got single beds and spacing of at least one-and-half to two meters. So, it is encouraging.”

UNICEF Zimbabwe has been helping students and the government during the COVID-19 lockdown.

“The two-key approaches were, one: How we can support the loss of learning as a result of school closure. The second one was: How to keep the school safe and ready for children to return to school,” said Niki Abrishamian, UNICEF Zimbabwe’s education manager. “We managed to produce more than 1,600 radio lessons as part of alternative learning approaches. We had to look at how to take learning to the children, especially when they were at home and did not have access to schooling.”

Zimbabwe’s teachers hope such organizations can assist the government and supply the resources they require — adequate PPEs against COVID-19 and salaries that allow them to live above the poverty line.

Zimbabwe currently has 124,773 confirmed coronavirus infections and 4,419 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University, which is tracking the global outbreak.

Source: Voice of America