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A group of Egyptian civil society organisations have been prevented from attending the Cop27 climate summit by a covert registration process that filtered out groups critical of the Egyptian government.

“You don’t let a government tell the UN who is and who isn’t an NGO, certainly not the Egyptian government,” said Ahmad Abdallah, of the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms (ECRF), one of five leading organisations unable to register to attend the conference due to the screening.

“the UN is colluding with the Egyptian government to whitewash this regime”

Decaying oil tankers at the coasts of Yemen pose serious risks to the environment and the people depending on it, reminding us starkly how conflicts can bring serious pollution risks. New open source research by PAX reveals multiple oil spills from rusty ships that have been polluting the coastal areas around the Port of Aden. If no action is taken by the authorities to remove these ships, it is only a matter of time before a new disaster will unfold.

Current international attention is mainly focused on finding a solution for the decaying oil tanker FSO SAFER loaded with 1.1 million barrels of oil. The tanker is at risk of sinking or exploding, which would create a regional environmental catastrophe. Yet over the course of the last years, smaller incidents around oil tankers in Yemen’s ports, the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden have been mounting as well. Ranging from direct attacks on oil tankers to abandoned ships sinking and fires at port refineries, the conflict continues to create serious local pollution problems.

The war itself already poses serious environmental challenges that impact both Yemen’s population and its precious ecosystems. This ranges from structural leaking oil incidents documented by the Yemen environmentalist group Holmakhdar and the Sanaa Center, to broader environmental problems, and conflict-linked cutting and dying of millions of date palms, demonstrated by the open-source investigative group Bellingcat. The current weak state of governance and oversight around the many environmental challenges Yemen is facing continues to result in ongoing incidents that worsen the state of environment and affect the people depending on it.  Not only does this currently already lead to mounting environmental health risks and degraded ecosystems, these impacts will also worsen climate resilience for the conflict-affected country due to more extreme weather events, water shortages and rising temperatures

WWF named Qatar as the country with the largest ecological footprint, followed by its Gulf Arab neighbours Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates

Denmark and the United States made up the remaining top five, calculated by comparing the renewable resources consumed against the earth's regenerative capacity.

"We are living as if we have an extra planet at our disposal,"

No less than Morgan Stanley Smith Barney declared “peak water” the challenge of the century last December in a report upholstered with authoritative graphs showing the heating of the world and the shrinking of water resources. Words almost failed report writers as they declared, “Water may turn out to be the biggest commodity story of the 21st century, as declining supply and rising demand combine to create the proverbial perfect storm.”

McKinsey estimates that by 2050 the world will need a 140-percent increase in its water supply—which, the management consultancy adds, is obviously impossible

Mention Big Water, or a coming age of water, and most of us visualize drought, migration, and mayhem. But some parts of the U.S. are strikingly water-rich, and the water century, if it comes, has the potential to remodel the country, economically and ecologically.

“During the last month, water access has been cut off a couple of times a day, but in the last few days people did not have any water access at all, which becomes more difficult as the heat increases. People could not find any water to drink, to cook, or even to shower,

a phosphate company in Gafsa, which uses most of the region’s water

“We have been suffering from a lack of rain for years, that’s why water tanks do not have enough water anymore,”

the developed world tends to be profligate in its use of natural resources, because most western companies have in the last century experienced few limits on their ability to access raw materials in peacetime, thanks to the opening up of global trade

The failure of businesses, individuals and governments to improve their efficiency, even by relatively small amounts, has been one of the conundrums for resource economists in recent years. According to standard economic thinking, rising prices should prompt more efficiency, but this has happened at a much slower rate than should have been the case.

This obsession with perpetual economic growth (whether it's coming from consumer capitalism, nationalist industry expansion, or whatever) is a hideous destructive beast which must be slain, and quickly.

The Solar Panels also enabled the residents to run a water-pump to provide the village with water supplies, especially since it does not have running water.

Several Israeli NGO’s, and the United Nations, are trying to convince the army to void its decision that came without prior notice. The Spanish government is also using diplomatic channels in an attempt to prevent the army from removing the Solar Panels. The project was implemented with a total cost of nearly 365.000 Euros, largely funded by Seeba. Head of the village council, Ali Hreizat, told France Press that “these Solar Panels were they ray of hope to the residents”, and added, “We have been living here since 1948, and have nowhere else to go”. Hreizat added that the village was never recognized by Israel, and all of its constructions were built without construction permits, therefore, asking Israel to permit the installment of the Solar Panels would be in vain.

an application was actually filed to Israel before the project started, but the military division, in charge of construction permits, never responded.

Ethiopian media said that the country's government finished plans to establish a second main dam on the Nile, irrespective of the rising tensions with Egyptian authorities. “Members of the left-wing of Ethiopia's ruling party are accusing the us of disturbing the balance in the region by supplying Egypt with F16 jets, as well as millions of dollars in military aid, which gave Egypt the courage to pressure the rest of the Nile Basin countries,” the Somalian Sun reported according to Al-Masry Al-Youm. “There’s no need to acquire Egypt’s approval for establishing any dams in Ethiopia since Egypt previously established the High Dam without Ethiopia’s approval,” the newspaper added.

The 6,000-megawatt Renaissance Dam, which heads a 63-billion cubic meter reservoir, is expected to generate three times the electricity generated by the Aswan High Dam and hold twice the amount of water held in Lake Tana, Ethiopia’s largest lake.

Back in the 1990s, the CIA opened an environmental center, swapped satellite imagery with Russia and cleared U.S. scientists to access classified information. But when the Bush administration took power, the center was absorbed by another office and work related to the climate was broadly neglected.In 2007, a report by retired high-ranking military officers called attention to the national security implications of climate change, and the National Intelligence Council followed a year later with an assessment on the topic. But some Republicans attacked it as a diversion of resources.And when CIA Director Leon Panetta stood up the climate change center in 2009, conservative lawmakers attempted to block its funding."The CIA's resources should be focused on monitoring terrorists in caves, not polar bears on icebergs," Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., said at the time.

Retired Gen. Michael Hayden, who led the CIA from 2006 to 2009, said issues such as energy and water made Bush's daily briefings, but climate change was not a part of the agenda."I didn't have a market for it when I was director," Hayden said in a recent interview. "It was all terrorism all the time, and when it wasn't, it was all Iran."

A 2007 congressional oversight report found the administration "engaged in a systematic effort to manipulate climate change science and mislead policymakers and the public about the dangers of global warming."

I don’t think the NP:A is as much concerned with solar panels, which absorb sunlight, as they are with the “Brightsource” type of technology of using mirrors to reflect the sunlight towards a central collector that will power a generator or steam powered generator to create electricity.