11 February 2021 - NPWJ News Digest on Environmental Justice & Human Rights

Articles

Trump’s Policies Resulted In The Unnecessary Deaths Of Hundreds Of Thousands Of Americans: Lancet Report
Forbes, 11 Feb 2021

Decades of policy failures that the Trump Administration exacerbated resulted in more than 450,000 unnecessary American deaths in 2018, with tens of thousands of additional deaths in other years also attributable to President Donald Trump's actions, according to a report published Thursday from a commission of health experts convened by the British medical journal The Lancet.

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UN talks ‘honestly’ about the environment and avoids ‘scaremongering’
UN News, 10 Feb 2021

The challenge of tackling climate change is one that the UN needs to talk about “honestly, without scaremongering” and by focusing on scientific fact, according to Inger Andersen, the Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).

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India dam disaster: The trigger event and warnings for the future
Aljazeera, 10 Feb 2021

“We are the last generation that can prevent irreparable damage to our planet,” were the opening remarks of the United Nations General Assembly’s former President María Fernanda Espinosa Garcés at the 2019 Climate and Sustainable Development meeting. Citing the conclusion of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, she added: “Eleven years is all we have ahead of us to change our direction.”

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Cooling La Niña is on the wane, but temperatures set to rise: UN weather agency
UN News, 09 Feb 2021

Temperatures in almost all parts of the world will likely rise between now and April despite the cooling influence of the latest La Niña weather phenomenon, which has passed its peak, UN climate experts said on Tuesday. “Impacts on temperatures, precipitation and storm patterns continue”, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said in a statement.

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As nature declines, so does human quality of life, study finds
Mongabay, 09 Feb 2021

Researchers working with the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) reviewed more than 2,000 studies to determine how environmental decline is affecting human well-being. The study found “unambiguous declines” in quality of life related to half of the IPBES categories of nature’s contributions to humanity. Where the results were mixed, negative impacts were often felt more acutely by low-income people and poorer countries.

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