Group items tagged

South Sudan, which is facing mass hunger on a scale unimaginable in almost every other part of the world. In February, the United Nations estimated that 100,000 South Sudanese were starving, and that 5 million more — 42 percent of the country’s population — have such limited access to proper food that they don’t know where their next meal is coming from. More recent figures are not available yet, but aid agencies fear the situation could be much worse now.

South Sudan, the world’s newest country and one that came into existence largely because of enormous assistance from the US.

historic famine is also threatening Nigeria, Somalia, and Yemen.

20 million people in those four countries are at risk of dying due to a lack of food.

The UN has already officially declared a full-fledged famine in parts of South Sudan and warned that the other three countries will suffer mass death from food and water shortages if “prompt and sustained humanitarian intervention” doesn’t happen soon.

Washington, which has been slow to act, seems to finally be taking steps to help fight the famine. The Trump administration proposed massive funding cuts to America’s humanitarian food aid, but Congress rejected those cuts and instead allocated close to $1 billion in new funding.

“It’s entirely a man-made construct right now, and that means we have it within our power to stop that,” he said. “Wars are hard to stop; famines are not.

intensive care unit of an International Medical Corps hospita

The building is a simple temporary structure made of cinderblocks and plywood.

Although children under 5 years old are the most vulnerable to malnutrition and the infections it can cause in small bodies, they are also incredibly resilient and almost always bounce back if fed high-calorie foods and given proper medicine.

The problem is that huge numbers of South Sudanese children aren’t getting that type of food. Many, in fact, aren’t getting food of any kind.

The crisis in the 1980s pales in comparison to the famine happening today. Because it isn’t just happening in one country; it’s happening in four.

Nigeria

Boko Haram

forced from their homes to escape the group’s campaign of suicide bombings

including huge numbers of farmers

With the agricultural systems of hard-hit areas in near collapse because of the fighting, the UN estimates that at least 4.8 million people are in need of urgent food assistance.

The problem is that the government of Somalia doesn’t control huge swaths of the country.

Islamist militant group al-Shabaab.

The Arab world’s poorest country, Yemen has suffered from food shortages for years, but a war between the Saudi-backed government in exile and the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels who control much of the north of the country has brought food shipments into Yemen to a grinding halt.

With US assistance, Saudi warplanes have destroyed bridges, roads, factories, farms, food trucks, animals, water infrastructure, and agricultural banks across the north, while imposing a blockade on the territory. For a country heavily dependent on foreign food aid, that means starving the people.

whatever food makes it in is so expensive that many people cannot afford to buy it. T

This is a gigantic failure of international diplomacy,”

After decades of civil war and neglect, the country finally gained its independence from the North in 2011, in large part due to the active assistance of the Obama administration and many of Washington’s key allies

Juba

There are just 200 kilometers of paved roads in a country the size of France, making it difficult for farmers to sell their crops and buy new seeds. Food shortages have haunted rural communities for some time, and cattle raiding — where armed men steal entire herds from nearby villages and towns — is a regular occurrence.

Even if a South Sudanese family owned cattle and had planted crops, all of that would soon disappear when war came to their doorstep. Plants would die because farmers fled and never returned. Animals would be stolen or left to starve or die from dehydration.

Javier Zarracina/Vox

Food shortages and acute hunger may have been almost inevitable for a country that had had trouble feeding itself even in the relative moments of calm before the current storm.

That storm erupted in 2013, when the country’s president, Salva Kiir, and his vice president, Riek Machar, went to war. Kiir accused Machar of a coup attempt, which Machar denied. In reality, the split was caused by a toxic mixture of decades of deep resentment over tribal differences heightened during the previous civil war, and a fear that the country’s oil resources would not be fairly divided.

Kiir, who is from the dominant Dinka tribe, controlled the country’s armed forces. Machar, from the minority Nuer group, controlled a loose network of tribal militias. Both sides have been accused of war crimes, and more than 50,000 are estimated to have died in the fighting.

government troops have been conducting “counterinsurgency” efforts in areas where the people are Nuer or from other tribes considered supportive of the rebels.

most of the world sees it as the collective punishment of civilians.

Without civilians, those fighters won’t have a place to stay, receive food, receive popular support,” Jonathan Pedneault of Human Rights Watch told me. “So the aim by targeting civilians is meant to cut the grass under the feet of those fighters.”

That includes chasing people away from the very thing their lives depend on — food.

Chol and Nuer escaped into the enormous marshes that flank the White Nile river, which provide places to hide from troops who are unable to access the area by truck or car.

But that safety can come at a huge cost: There is nothing to eat there, so people who survive attacks by gunmen end up perishing slowly from hunger.

is only accessible by traditional dugout canoes

Water lily roots are the only thing people in the marshes have to eat.

lacks enough food to feed all the refugees. Instead, she and her family are still trying to survive based on what they can scavenge in the marshes.

up lilies like weeds and ripped off their small, stumpy roots.

Western aid agencies are operating in the nearby village of Ganyiel.

he rebel-held town is a market place where stalls sell tea and some dried fish from the local rivers.

UN helicopters. Here, international aid agencies have some of their most crucial, and remote, outposts. It seems like only a matter of time until food shipments start arriving in Thoahnom Payam, just 30 minutes away by canoe.

Leer

things are much worse

occupied by government troops, is destroyed and abandoned.

The main street of shops and stalls has been razed to the ground, with sheets of steel scattered about in the grass and rusting vehicles lining the side of the main dirt road.

A few miles down that road is rebel-held land

A few hundred people — originally residents of Leer and the surrounding villages — had crept out of hiding as news spread of a food drop by an aid plane.

All of these people had left family members in the marshes, waiting anxiously for them to bring back the food. These thin, tired people were the strongest and most capable of making the journey.

She had six children starving in the marshes, waiting for her to return with food.

waiting to be given seeds and tools to plant them with. The ICRC handed out hoes and axes as well as maize seeds to grow some crops in rebel-held land outside the swamps. If they planted before the rains came, then they could harvest in August. Many of the people sitting near me will die long before the crops are ready to eat.

Before the war, he said, the region was capable of feeding itself.

There were a lot of cattle and livestock in this area,” he told me, standing next to a crowd of people sitting in line on the ground. “They were farmers, there was commerce, there was a market here where I am standing right now. All of this is gone now.”

Government soldiers had burned down the small market when they had taken the area earlier in the conflict. Now villagers who once bought and sold food here are being kept alive with charitable handouts. The town wasn’t always starving. It got that way because of war.

For those fleeing war, hunger can seem like an affordable price to pay for safety

It would take truly horrific violence for South Sudanese parents to flee into the marshes given the very real — and in some ways likely — chances of watching their children starve to death there. But that kind of horrific violence, unfortunately, is part of daily life in many parts of the country.

Most of them had the deep horizontal scars of the Nuer tribe markings across their foreheads.

“I don’t know why the government is doing this,” he added. “We are their people.”

the most fortunate of South Sudan’s starving people are the ones who have reached camps run by the United Nations, where Western aid agencies are providing food, shelter, and medical facilities

The organizations are keeping hundreds of thousands of people alive; the problem is that millions more live in remote areas of this vast country that the aid groups simply can’t get to. The aid workers themselves are also increasingly at risk.

South Sudan is heavily dependent on foreign aid, but it has quickly become the most dangerous place in the world for humanitarian workers. More than 80 aid workers — mostly South Sudanese — have been killed since the conflict began. Female foreign aid workers were gang-raped by rampaging government soldiers who stormed a hotel in Juba during last July’s violence in the capital.

three South Sudanese employees of the UN’s World Food Program were violently murdered in the western city of Wau. The WFP said they were trying to get to the warehouse during an outbreak of violence but were killed along the way. Two died of machete wounds, and another was shot.

Looting is a huge problem

Every time we have to pull out of an area, entire stocks of food and supplies are taken.”

Charities have been forced by the government to leave areas where their help is needed. In Leer, access has been granted again by the government, but it’s patchy. There used to be compounds and warehouses for some aid agencies there, but they were all burned down during the fighting.

International aid agencies in South Sudan are in a tough position. Caught between an increasingly belligerent and threatening government and the more than 5 million people on the brink of starvation, they are trying to keep people alive without openly condemning the government for their part in starving them in the first place. If they do, they risk being kicked out of the country.

On February 20, just days after the UN officially declared that South Sudan was in the midst of a famine, the government in Juba shocked the world by announcing a hike in visa prices for aid workers — from $100 to $10,000. That hasn’t been implemented, but it’s a stark reminder to aid agencies that their relationship with the government is increasingly shaky.

Journalists are also struggling to gain access to the country as the government hopes to control the image of the hunger crisis and steer the rhetoric away from it being war-driven.

Once inside, intimidation is rife. In nearly 10 years of reporting from conflict zones, I have never worked in an environment where government intimidation is so strong.

The government shut Al Jazeera English’s bureau in Juba on May 2 after objecting to a story where a reporter interviewed Machar’s rebels, and an American NPR reporter was detained for several days after being arrested at his hotel in the capital by security forces.

For South Sudanese journalists, it’s even worse: They’ve faced a violent campaign against them since the beginning of the war. In August 2015, President Kiir said publicly, “The freedom of press does not mean that you work against your country. And if anybody among them does not know this country has killed people, we will demonstrate it one day on them.” Three days later, a reporter working for the independent New Nation paper was shot dead in the street.

The government of South Sudan will not realistically be able to stop the news of its famine, nor the fact that it was entirely man-made, from being reported. But we’re rapidly approaching the point of no return: Without an immediate and sustained effort to end the violence ravaging South Sudan and the other three nations, the world will for the first time in living memory be faced with four simultaneous famines.

The worst humanitarian disaster since World War II will have been one that was caused by, and therefore could have been prevented by, humans.

Must the whole world “start paying the Iranians a premium for every bushel of wheat,” he asks, “because their Iranian ancestors were the ones that domesticated it?”

“If you ask for one crop that can save the world and address climate change, nutrition, all these things—the answer is quinoa. There’s no doubt about it.”

“When we’re talking about people who die every day because they don’t have enough to eat, then I think that sharing is a must.”

While the U.S. Department of Agriculture and a handful of governments around the world hold small, freely shared collections, most varities of quinoa are off-limits. Who is to blame? It’s not the usual suspect— some multinational corporation with a full portfolio of patents and evil intentions. This time, the germplasm is being withheld by the Andean nations themselves.

Jellen pictured quinoa granola bars “in every Walmart in America.” But there was no way to meet this demand as long as the Andean nations refused to facilitate production outside their borders while lacking the infrastructure to supply additional demand themselves.

she has finally adapted the plant well enough to be able to provide farmers with seed later this year.

“Quinoa has been in a nursery kind of environment,” he explains. “Now it’s about to go out into the urban jungle, so to speak. It’s about to land in Times Square, and it’s going to have to fend for itself.”

“To think we can take a couple of Chilean quinoa strains and grow them in Iowa—it just doesn’t work that way,” Jellen tells me. “There’s always a disease right around the corner, and the big game in plant breeding is to be one step ahead of that.”

which is why Jellen favors the “free and fair” exchange of germplasm. He will gladly share his genetic material with any interested parties—Americans, Moroccans, Bolivians. “I’d give that seed to Monsanto if they wanted to use it.”

For decades, Bolivia did share its quinoa germplasm.

To make a hybrid, one plant is used to fertilize another. In the case of corn, which naturally cross-pollinates with its neighbors, this is easy. But where corn is promiscuous, quinoa is practically abstinent, what plant breeders call a “selfer”: the female part of the plant is fertilized almost exclusively by the male part of the same plant. In order for the two plants to be mated, then, the “female” must first be emasculated by the removal of its male reproductive organs. Because quinoa flowers are tiny and numerous, this is extremely difficult work.

hybrid quinoa,

Farmers in Bolivia were furious. The researchers had found the cytoplasm in plants they were growing in Colorado, but their seed had originated on the Altiplano.

“all the countries of the world not to recognize this patent because the male sterile plant, the knowledge and maintenance of its genetic diversity, is the property of the indigenous peoples of the Andes.” Read: quinoa belongs to us.

If the cytoplasm identified by Ward and Johnson allowed the efficient creation of hybrids, wouldn’t that serve as an incentive for seed companies to invest in improving quinoa? And wouldn’t the primary beneficiaries of that investment be the quinoa farmers themselves?

This thinking reflects the modern mind-set of American plant breeding. Until the 1980s, improving crops was a mostly public endeavor; in the United States, it was underwritten by tax-payers. But as public involvement with agriculture waned and intellectual-property rights began to generate much greater profits for seed companies, plant breeding became largely privatized. Today it is ownership, in the form of patents and licensing agreements, that makes the wheels of progress turn.

hey see intellectual-property rights as reasonable arrangements that allow those in the plant-breeding industry to recoup the often enormous sums they invest in research and development.

General Mills has declined to support the crop’s development until there’s sufficient supply for a cereal line.

Maughan has approached his former employers at Monsanto, making personal appeals for research support, but they are not interested. Even with its star on the rise, quinoa is still too small to be a good investment.

For instance, they have identified crucial genes that make possible quinoa’s extraordinary tolerance of salt. If that mechanism could be engineered into corn, it could revolutionize food production around the world. The same goes for quinoa’s ability to withstand drought. These innovations could be invaluable to global food security. They could also be stupendously profitable— and almost certainly patentable.

cytoplasm had proved of no commercial value.

No one I spoke with in Bolivia denied that poor communities around the world could benefit from quinoa. But once the germplasm is shared, there’s no way to ensure that it won’t be made into something that’s patented.

he Bolivians needed to own quinoa so that somebody else couldn’t.

Even state ownership, meant to protect a crop like quinoa from corporate predation, tends to work against the larger goal of promoting genetic diversity. Take Bolivia’s genetic-conservation program. In a shift mandated by the 2009 constitution, the government nationalized the quinoa gene bank, which had been overseen by PROINPA for more than ten years. Government supporters argue that a public entity is more likely to be a democratic custodian of those resources than is a private organization—especially one that accepts foreign funding. But researchers in Bolivia and around the world question the government’s ability to safe-guard the seeds.

“Quinoa doesn’t belong to the Bolivian government or to corporations,” he told me. “Any food, any seeds, they are very sacred—they are for serving humanity. And if you don’t have their diversity stored in other places, you are in trouble. Be

systems approach, where the interactions between different sectors are modelled as global and regional flows, ignoring day-to day realities, local priorities and needs; • A decision-making tool based on these interactions, which provides an economic valuation of these resources and a market mechanism to efficiently allocate them.

It treats the trade-offs between human needs for water, energy and food as a perfect equilibrium model, in which resource allocation can be decided.

This can encourage the commodification of resources, downplaying environmental externalities, such as biodiversity and climate change, as well as poverty alleviation needs.

The villagers affected by the Rasi Salai Dam are now experiencing water scarcity after losing these wetlands.

Originally, the government claimed that the dam would provide water for 5,500 hectares of land

look

This example highlights how elements of the nexus, whether food, water or energy security, take on different meanings at different levels of analysis, from the global to the local.

optimisation;

A different framing of the nexus is required: one which recognises that global priorities may not reflect local concerns; and that resource allocations are political decisions, which need to be decided through more open and transparent decision making. The nexus must become more inclusive, so that its interrelationships can be grounded in local realities and human needs.

Xingu,

itself a major tributary of the Amazon.

shorts

kids wearing only

ears of the youngest among them were pierced with conical wooden plugs

Kayapo pierce their infants’ earlobes

ifts for our hosts: fishhooks, tobacco, 22 pounds of high-quality beads made in the Czech Republic.

Barbara Zimmerman, the director of the Kayapo Project for the International Conservation Fund of Canada and the United States–based Environmental Defense Fund,

chief, Pukatire,

wearing glasses, shorts, and flip-flops.

English he’d picked up on a trip to North America

dispute about logging.

Fissioning,” as anthropologists call it, is often the way Kayapo resolve disagreements or relieve the strain on resources in a particular area.

a generator in a government-built nurses’ station; a solar panel array enclosed in a barbed wire fence; satellite dishes mounted on truncated palm trees. A few families have TVs in their thatch houses and enjoy watching videos of their own ceremonies, along with Brazilian soap operas. Pukatire showed us to a two-room schoolhouse built a few years ago by the Brazilian government—a pistachio-colored concrete structure with a tile roof and shutters and the luxe marvel of a flush toilet fed by well water.

ngobe, or men’s house

shelling nuts and cooking fish wrapped in leaves and buried in coals.

crops of manioc, bananas, and sweet potatoes. A tortoise hunter

loudly singing in the Kayapo custom to announce his successful quest for the land turtles that are a vital part of the village diet.

soccer ball

swallows; o

kingbird

evening baths,

caimans

persecution and disease that have ravaged nearly every indigenous tribe in North and South America.

In 1900, 11 years after the founding of the Brazilian Republic, the Kayapo population was about 4,000. As miners, loggers, rubber tappers, and ranchers poured into the Brazilian frontier, missionary organizations and government agencies launched efforts to “pacify” aboriginal tribes, wooing them with trade goods such as cloth, metal pots, machetes, and axes. Contact often had the unintended effect of introducing measles and other diseases to people who had no natural immunity. By the late 1970s, following the construction of the Trans-Amazon Highway, the population had dwindled to about 1,300.

1980s and ’90s the Kayapo rallied, led by a legendary generation of chiefs

Ropni and Mekaron-Ti

organized protests with military precision, began to apply pressure

even kill people caught trespassing on their land.

ar parties evicted illegal ranchers and gold miners, sometimes offering them the choice of leaving Indian land in two hours or being killed on the spot. Warriors took control of strategic river crossings and patrolled borders; they seized hostages; they sent captured trespassers back to town without their clothes.

the chiefs of that era learned Portuguese

enlist the help of conservation organizations and celebrities such as the rock star Sting,

1988 the Kayapo helped get indigenous rights written into the new Brazilian Constitution, and eventually they secured legal recognition of their territory.

Kararaô Dam

Xingu River, which would have flooded parts of their land.

the Altamira Gathering.

Kayapo leaders made a brilliant translation of the Kayapo warrior tradition to the tradition of the 20th-century media spectacle,”

e Kayapo population is now rapidly growing.

shotguns and motorized aluminum boats to Facebook pages, they have shown a canny ability to adopt technologies and practices of the cash-based society at their borders without compromising the essence of their culture.

hey have embraced video cameras to record their ceremonies and dances and to log interactions with government officials.

based on the logo of the Bank of Brazil.

1980s and in the 1990s sold mahogany logging concessions—alliances they came to regret and now have largely ended.

Kayapo learned to organize and to put aside their sometimes fractious relations to cultivate unity of purpose among themselves

the richest and most powerful of around 240 indigenous tribes remaining in Brazil. Their ceremonies, their kinship systems, their Gê language, and their knowledge of the forest and conception of the continuum between humans and the natural world are intact. What may be the most crucial of all, they have their land. “The Kayapo aren’t entering the 21st century as a defeated people. They aren’t degrading themselves,” Zimmerman told me. “They haven’t lost a sense of who they are.”

400 Kayapo chiefs avowed their opposition to a raft of decrees, ordinances, and proposed laws and constitutional amendments that would gut their ability to control their land and prevent them, and any other indigenous group, from adding to their territory.

a campaign to enable mining, logging, and agricultural interests to circumvent indigenous rights, now inconveniently guaranteed by the Brazilian Constitution. A

. The Kararaô project is back under a new name: the Belo Monte hydroelectric complex.

n Kayapo villages the division of labor falls along traditional lines. The men hunt and fish; the women cook, garden, and gather fruits and nuts.)

two aluminum skiffs powered by Rabeta motors

a bow and arrows over his shoulder

Okêt a shotgun.

It was as obvious to Meikâre as the meat department of a Stop & Shop would be to me. He and Okêt darted ahead. Fifteen minutes later a shot rang out, then two more.

plugged the escape holes of a mole cricket nest in a sandbank and then had dug up and captured a batch of mole crickets, which they used to bait fishhooks and catch piranha.

peacock bass and piabanha.

Bic lighters a

freshly whittled skewers.

flashlight.

he only things we need from the white culture are flip-flops, flashlights, and glasses,”

his children had died of malaria not long after the founding of Kendjam.

Portuguese from missionaries

the program of pacification by the Indian Protection Service, a forerunner of the National Indian Foundation, or FUNAI,

“Before contact we were clubbing each other to death, and everybody lived in fear,” he said. “Without a doubt things are much better today because people aren’t hitting each other over the head with war clubs.”

construction finally began in 2011 on the $14 billion Belo Monte.

he complex of canals, reservoirs, dikes, and two dams is located some 300 miles north of Kendjam

on the Xingu

Its supporters defend it as a way of delivering needed electricity, while environmentalists have condemned it as a social, environmental, and financial disaster.

the region’s indigenous people were not adequately consulted, Brazil’s federal Public Prosecutor’s Office filed a series of lawsuits to stop the complex, essentially pitting one branch of the government against another. The cases went to the country’s Supreme Court, but judgments have been deferred, and construction of Belo Monte has been allowed to proceed.

nflux of an estimated 100,000 workers and migrants. The dams will flood an area the size of Chicago. Official estimates project that 20,000 people will be displaced; independent estimates suggest the number may be twice as high. The dams will generate methane from inundated vegetation in quantities that rival the greenhouse gas emissions of coal-fired power plants. The diversion of some 80 percent of the water along a 62-mile stretch of the Xingu will dry up areas that depend on seasonal floodwaters and are home to endangered species.

ho still wear the lip disk

carried a wooden war club,

woman approached, held his hand, and began to sob. In a different culture bodyguards might have hustled her away, but Ropni seemed unfazed and in fact began sobbing as well. The anguished weeping was not the result of some fresh catastrophe but a form of ritual Kayapo mourning for departed mutual friends.

“I don’t like Kayapo imitating white culture. I don’t like gold miners. I don’t like loggers. I don’t like the dam!”

the chiefs of the eastern part of the territory had been accepting money from Eletrobras. Boxes of brand-new 25-horsepower boat motors were stacked on the porch of the Protected Forest Association headquarters.

money that activists said was an attempt to dampen indigenous opposition to Belo Monte.

he consortium building the dam was investing in wells, clinics, and roads in the area and was paying a dozen villages nearby an allowance of 30,000 reais a month (roughly $15,000) for food and supplies, which Schwartzman describes as “hush money.”

specially in villages close to towns on the Brazilian frontier.

pollution from clear-cutting and cattle ranching had wrecked the fishing grounds, and it was not uncommon to see Kayapo shopping in supermarkets for soap and frozen chicken.

In the old days men were men,” Ropni said. “They were raised to be warriors; they weren’t afraid to die. They weren’t afraid to back up their words with action. They met guns with bows and arrows. A lot of Indians died, but a lot of whites died too. That’s what formed me: the warrior tradition. I have never been afraid to say what I believed. I have never felt humiliated in front of the whites. They need to respect us, but we need to respect them too. I still think that warrior tradition survives. The Kayapo will fight again if threatened, but I have counseled my people not to go looking for fights.”

FUNAI paperwork authorizing various matters they had discussed. Mekaron-Ti, who was fluent in the Western world as well as the forest world, signed his name quickly like someone who had written a thousand letters. But Ropni held the pen awkwardly. It was striking to see him struggle with the letters of his name, knowing what esoteric expertise was otherwise in his hands, how deftly he could fasten a palm nut belt, or insert a lip plate, or whittle a stingray tail into an arrowhead, or underscore the oratory that had helped secure a future for his people. In the Xingu Valley there had hardly ever been a more able pair of hands. But in the realm that required penmanship, the great chief was like a child.

painted faces carrying water in old soda bottles,

chopped off seedpods of the wild inga fruit.

In the past some anthropologists have fetishized cultural purity, fretting over the introduction of modern technology. But cultures evolve opportunistically like species—the Plains Indians of North America picked up their iconic horses from the Spanish—and strong traditional cultures will privilege themselves, making the accommodations they think will ensure their futures. We can question whether a man dressed in a parrot feather headdress and penis sheath is more valuable than one in a Batman T-shirt and gym shorts. But who can be blind to their knowledge of forest plants and animals or to the preeminent values of clean water, untainted air, and the genetic and cultural treasure of diversity itself?

now turning to those first inhabitants to save ecosystems recognized as critical to the health of the planet—to defend essential tracts of undeveloped land from the developed world’s insatiable appetites.

The maternal mortality ratio has declined by 45 percent worldwide, and the proportion of the global population using an improved drinking water source rose from 76 percent to 91 percent

Those still left out, however, are increasingly concentrated in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, and all across the globe, women and young people face the highest odds of living in poverty

While hunger has fallen in most areas, projections indicate that the prevalence of undernourishment in the Middle East will rise by 32 percent between 2014 and 2016 due to war, civil unrest, and increasing numbers of refugees.

Progress in maternal health is sharply divided along rural-urban lines

marginalized and easily forgotten amidst promising overall trends. “Millions of people are being left behind, especially the poorest and those disadvantaged because of their sex, age, disability, ethnicity, or geographic location,”

We need to tackle root causes and do more to integrate the economic, social, and environmental dimensions of sustainable development,

“employment opportunities have diminished in both developing and developed regions

he employment-to-population ratio, which measures what percentage of the working population is employed, has declined around the world since 1990 with the biggest drops in East and South Asia.

rapid urbanization is taxing already-inadequate infrastructure. The proportion of the urban population living in slums in developing regions fell from 39 percent in 2000 to 30 percent in 2014, surpassing the MDG target. However, the total number of urban residents living in slums continues to grow as a result of accelerating urbanization and population growth

Population growth and increased consumption have also stressed the environment, presenting challenges that overshadow progress on the seventh MDG

While ozone-depleting substances have nearly been eliminated since 1990 and the ozone layer is expected to recover by midcentury, carbon dioxide emissions have risen by more than 50 percent in the past 25 years

Between 1998 and 2011, the number of countries experiencing water stress increased from 36 to 41. Water scarcity currently affects more than 40 percent of the world population, a statistic that is only projected to increase.

For the global poor whose livelihoods are directly tied to natural resources and suffer the most from environmental degradation, climate change hinders development in other sectors. That’s why environmental change is a much bigger focus in the Sustainable Development Goals, set to be adopted later this year.