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World Bank dims outlook for global economy amid Russia war
The World Bank has sharply downgraded its outlook for the global economy, pointing to Russia’s war against Ukraine, the prospect of widespread food shortages and concerns about the potential return of “stagflation” — a toxic mix of high inflation and sluggish growth unseen for more than four decades.
The 189-country anti-poverty agency predicted Tuesday that the world economy will expand 2.9% this year. That would be down from 5.7% global growth in 2021 and from the 4.1% it had forecast for 2022 back in January.
“For many countries, recession will be hard to avoid,” said David Malpass, the World Bank’s president.
The agency doesn’t foresee a much brighter picture in 2023 and 2024: It predicts just 3% global growth for both years.
Read: Overseas aid cuts imperil SDGs: UN chief
For the United States alone, the World Bank has slashed its growth forecast to 2.5% this year from 5.7% in 2021 and from the 3.7% it had forecast in January. For the 19 European countries that share the euro currency, it downgraded the growth outlook to 2.5% this year from 5.4% last year and from the 4.2% it had expected in January.
In China, the world’s second-biggest economy after the United States, the World Bank expects growth to slow to 4.3% from 8.1% last year. China’s zero-COVID policies, involving draconian lockdowns in Shanghai and other cities, brought economic life to a standstill. The Chinese government is providing aid to ease the economic pain.
Emerging market and developing economies are collectively forecast to grow 3.4% this year, decelerating from a 6.6% pace in 2021.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has severely disrupted global trade in energy and wheat, battering a global economy that had been recovering robustly from the coronavirus pandemic. Already-high commodity prices have gone even higher as a result, threatening the availability of affordable food in poor countries.
Read: High prices, Asian markets could blunt EU ban on Russian oil
“There’s a severe risk of malnutrition and of deepening hunger and even of famine,” Malpass warned.
The World Bank expects oil prices to surge 42% this year and for non-energy commodity prices to climb nearly 18%. But it foresees oil and other commodity prices both dropping 8% in 2023. It likened the current spike in energy and food prices to the oil shocks of the 1970s.
“Additional adverse shocks,” the agency warned in its new Global Economic Prospects report, “will increase the possibility that the global economy will experience a period of stagflation reminiscent of the 1970s.’’
The prospect of stagflation poses a dilemma for the Federal Reserve and other central banks: If they continue to raise interest rates to combat inflation, they risk causing a recession. But if they try to stimulate their economies, they risk driving prices higher and making inflation an even more intractable problem.
The World Bank noted that the previous period of stagflation required rate increases so steep that they tipped the world into recession and led to a series of financial crises in the poor countries of the developing world.
US, S. Korea fly 20 fighter jets amid N. Korea tensions
The South Korean and U.S. militaries flew 20 fighter jets over waters off South Korea’s western coast Tuesday in a continued show of force as a senior U.S. official warned of a forceful response if North Korea goes ahead with its first nuclear test explosion in nearly five years.
South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said the air demonstration involved 16 South Korean planes — including F-35A stealth fighters — and four U.S. F-16 fighter jets and was aimed at demonstrating their ability to swiftly respond to North Korean provocations.
The flight came a day after the allies fired eight surface-to-surface missiles into South Korea’s eastern waters to match a weekend missile display by North Korea, which fired the same number of weapons from multiple locations Sunday in what was likely its biggest single-day testing event.
North Korea may soon up the ante as U.S. and South Korean officials say the country is all but ready to conduct another detonation at its nuclear testing ground in the northeastern town of Punggye-ri. Its last such test and sixth overall was in September 2017, when it claimed to have detonated a thermonuclear bomb designed for its intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Traveling to Seoul to discuss the standoff with South Korean and Japanese allies, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman warned of a “swift and forceful” response if the North carries out another nuclear test.
While the Biden administration has vowed to push for additional international sanctions if North Korea goes on with the nuclear test, the prospects for meaningful new punitive measures are unclear with the U.N. Security Council divided.
“Any nuclear test would be in complete violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions. There would be a swift and forceful response to such a test,” Sherman said, following a meeting with South Korea Vice Foreign Minister Cho Hyun-dong.
“We continue to urge Pyongyang to cease its destabilizing and provocative activities and choose the path of diplomacy,” she said.
Sherman and Cho are planning a trilateral meeting with Japanese Vice Foreign Minister Mori Takeo on Wednesday over the North Korean nuclear issue.
North Korea’s launches on Sunday extended a provocative streak in weapons tests this year that also included the country’s first demonstrations of ICBMs since 2017.
Read: Turkish company donates drone for Ukraine
Since taking power in 2011, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has accelerated his weapons development despite limited resources. Experts say with its next test, North Korea could claim an ability to build small bombs that could be clustered on a multiwarhead ICBM or fit on short-range missiles that could reach South Korea and Japan.
Rafael Mariano Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said Monday there are indications that one of the passages at the Punggye-ri testing ground has been reopened, possibly in preparations for a nuclear test.
Hours before Sherman’s meeting in Seoul, State Department spokesperson Ned Price told reporters in Washington that the United States remains concerned that North Korea could seek its seventh test “in the coming days.”
The Biden administration’s punitive actions over North Korea’s weapons tests in recent months have been limited to largely symbolic unilateral sanctions. Russia and China vetoed a U.S.-sponsored resolution in the Security Council that would have imposed additional sanctions on North Korea over its previous ballistic tests on May 25.
“We have called on members of the international community, certainly members of the UN Security Council’s permanent five, to be responsible stakeholders in the U.N. Security Council as a preeminent forum for addressing threats to international peace and security,” Price said.
“Unilateral actions are never going to be the most attractive or even the most effective response, and that is especially the case because we are gratified that we have close allies in the form of Japan and the ROK,” he said, referring to South Korea’s formal name, the Republic of Korea.
North Korea’s state media have yet to comment on Sunday’s launches. They came after the U.S. aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan concluded a three-day naval drill with South Korea in the Philippine Sea on Saturday, apparently their first joint drill involving a carrier since November 2017, as the countries move to upgrade their defense exercises in the face of North Korean threats.
Read: Ukraine war threatens economic devastation in developing world
North Korea has long condemned the allies’ combined military exercises as invasion rehearsals and often countered with its own missile drills, including launches in 2016 and 2017 that simulated nuclear attacks on South Korean ports and U.S. military facilities in Japan.
Following the latest North Korean launches, the United States conducted separate joint missile drills with Japan and South Korea, which they said were aimed at displaying their response capability.
Nuclear talks between Washington and Pyongyang have stalled since 2019 over disagreements in exchanging the release of crippling U.S.-led sanctions for the North’s disarmament steps. Kim has since ramped up his testing activity despite mounting economic problems and has shown no willingness to fully surrender an arsenal he sees as his strongest guarantee of survival.
His government has so far rejected the Biden administration’s offers for open-ended talks and is clearly intent on converting the dormant denuclearization negotiations into a mutual arms-reduction process, experts say.
Kim’s pressure campaign hasn’t been slowed by a COVID-19 outbreak spreading across his largely unvaccinated populace of 26 million amid a lack of public health tools. The North has so far rejected U.S. and South Korean offers for help, but there are indications that it received at least some supplies of vaccines from ally China.
South Korean activist Park Sang-hak, a North Korean defector who for years have launched anti-Pyongyang propaganda leaflets by balloon across the border, said his group on Tuesday flew 20 balloons carrying medicine, masks and vitamin pills to help North Korean civilians.
Activities held across globe for World Environment Day
"Only One Earth," the theme of this year's World Environment Day, underlines the significance of preserving biodiversity and protecting ecosystems so as to build a future in which people live in harmony with nature.
"In the universe are billions of galaxies. In our galaxy are billions of planets. But there is #OnlyOneEarth. Let's take care of it," the United Nations said on its website, highlighting ways to reverse the destruction of nature.
One day ahead of World Environment Day, which falls on June 5 annually, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Saturday urged businesses worldwide to put sustainability at the heart of their decision-making for the sake of humanity and their own bottom line.
"We are asking too much of our planet to maintain ways of life that are unsustainable," and this hurts not only Earth but also its inhabitants, the UN chief said.
Read: Balance development with environment, PM tells at event on World Environment Day
"This planet is our only home," the top UN official said, warning the planet "cannot keep up with our demands." It is of utmost importance to safeguard the "health of the planet, including its atmosphere, ecosystems and finite resources," Guterres emphasized.
Themed "work together to build a clean and beautiful world," China's national event marking the 2022 World Environment Day was held on Sunday in Shenyang, capital of northeast China's Liaoning Province.
China has achieved inspiring and remarkable outcomes in fighting climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution, Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, executive secretary of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, said on Sunday, commending China's measures on mainstreaming biodiversity, including establishing national parks and drawing up ecological redlines.
At the Thomas van der Hammen Forest Reserve in Bogota, Colombian musicians worked side by side with locals on the World Environment Day, accompanied by nature sounds compiled over three years under the "Bosque Sonoro" initiative.
Combined with a reforestation project led by the citizen collective Sembradores van der Hammen, the initiative has resumed its activities suspended during the pandemic by planting native aliso and hayuelo plant species in the reserve.
"Natural spaces in cities are very important because they give us oxygen, they give us quality of life. They can even protect us from future pandemics, if we have healthy biodiversity in green spaces with oxygen and that we can visit," musician and environmental activist Hector Buitrago told Xinhua.
Read: How Can One Person Reduce Environmental Pollution?
Pakistan, one of top 10 most climate-vulnerable countries, highly values the global efforts to combat climate change, halt and reverse biodiversity loss, reduce pollution, and restore ecosystems, the Pakistani Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Sunday.
The South Asian country is already in the midst of one of the world's most ambitious efforts to expand and restore its forests, according to the foreign ministry.
"We reaffirm our resolve in taking action on combating climate change, protecting biological diversity, and reversing ecosystem degradation," said the foreign ministry.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Sunday that India's efforts to protect the environment have been multifaceted.
"India is working on a long-term vision in collaboration with the international community on protecting the environment and established organizations like Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure, International Solar Alliance," he said in a speech marking the World Environment Day.
Ethiopia has recently embarked on an ambitious tree-planting initiative, planting over 350 million trees in a single day.
"As a nation, we are committed to environmental protection. In Ethiopia, we brought environmental protection to the level of the constitution," said Getahun Garedew, director-general of the Ethiopian Environmental Protection Authority (EEPA).
This year's edition of the annual World Environment Day celebrations is a four-day affair in Ethiopia, hosted by the EEPA and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), featuring activities ranging from awareness-raising panel discussions, exhibitions to promotion of environment-friendly initiatives.
Read: Healthy plants can protect environment, boost economies: FAO
UNEP representative to Ethiopia Margaret Oduk said the global community should rethink the current business-as-usual modality as the world is faced with "a nature emergency mode."
"We only have one planet; we only have one earth that we have to live on. So we must protect it as it is our only home," Oduk said.
UN: Climate shocks, war fuel multiple looming food crises
Two U.N. food agencies issued stark warnings Monday about multiple, looming food crises on the planet, driven by climate “shocks” like drought and worsened by the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine that have sent fuel and food prices soaring.
The glum assessment came in a report by two Rome-based food agencies: the World Food Program (WFP) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
WFP Executive Director David Beasley said besides hurting “the poorest of the poor” the global food crises threaten to overwhelm millions of families who are just getting by.
Also read: War in Ukraine adds to food price hikes, hunger in Africa
“Conditions now are much worse than during the Arab Spring in 2011 and 2007-2008 food price crisis, when 48 countries were rocked by political unrest, riots and protests,” Beasley said in a statement. He cited as “just the tip of the iceberg” food crises now in Indonesia, Pakistan, Peru and Sri Lanka.
The report calls for urgent humanitarian action to help “hunger hotspots” where acute hunger is expected to worsen over the next few months.
The U.N. agencies are also warning that war in Ukraine, which was invaded by Russia in February, has exacerbated already steadily rising food and energy prices worldwide.
“The effects are expected to be particularly acute where economic instability and spiraling prices combine with drops in food production due to climate shocks such as recurrent droughts or flooding,” the joint statement from the U.N. agencies said.
Among critical areas cited is East Africa, where the United Nations said an “unprecedented” drought is afflicting Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya. South Sudan, meanwhile, faces a fourth straight year of large-scale flooding.
The report cited other sobering climate impacts: above-average rain and a risk of localized flooding in the Sahel, a vast swath of Africa stretching south of the Sahara Desert.
It also cited a more intense hurricane season in the Caribbean and below-average rainfall in Afghanistan. That Asian country is already suffering through multiple seasons of drought, violence and political upheaval, including after the return of Taliban rule last summer.
Also read: Russia slams sanctions, seeks to blame West for food crisis
The report tagged six nations as “highest alert” hot spots facing catastrophic conditions: Ethiopia, Nigeria, South Sudan, Yemen, Afghanistan and Somalia. It said as many as 750,000 people are facing starvation and death in those countries. Of those, 400,000 are in Ethiopia's embattled Tigray region — the highest number on record in any one country since the 2011 famine in Somalia, the U.N. agencies said.
In April, according to a study by regional health officials that was seen by The Associated Press, at least 1,900 children under 5 died from malnutrition in the Tigray region. Western Tigray, which is under the control of forces from the neighboring Amhara region, was not included in that survey.
The U.N. food agencies report Monday said Congo, Haiti, the Sahel region, Sudan and Syria remain “of very high concern" and noted that Kenya was a new entry to that list.
Joining the list of hot spot countries were Sri Lanka, Benin, Cape Verde, Guinea, Ukraine and Zimbabwe, while areas that faced continuing food scarcities included Angola, Lebanon, Madagascar and Mozambique.
2 monkeypox strains in US suggest possible undetected spread
Genetic analysis of recent monkeypox cases suggests there are two distinct strains in the U.S., health officials said Friday, raising the possibility that the virus has been circulating undetected for some time.
Many of the U.S. cases were caused by the same strain as recent cases in Europe, but a few samples show a different strain, federal health officials said. Each strain had been seen in U.S. cases last year, before the recent international outbreak was identified.
Analysis from many more patients will be needed to determine how long monkeypox has been circulating in the U.S. and elsewhere, said Jennifer McQuiston of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“I think it’s certainly possible that there could have been monkeypox cases in the United States that went under the radar previously, but not to any great degree,” she told reporters Friday. However, she added, “there could be community level transmission that is happening” in parts of U.S. where the virus has not yet been identified.
The CDC said it is trying to increase its work on finding infections, and it’s likely more cases will be reported.
The findings mean the outbreak likely will be difficult to contain, said Dr. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan.
It’s not clear how long infections have been happening, and where. Some infections may have been misdiagnosed as something else.
“We don’t really have a good sense of how many cases there are out there,” Rasmussen said.
Monkeypox is endemic in parts of Africa, where people have been infected through bites from rodents or small animals. It does not usually spread easily among people.
But last month, cases began emerging in Europe and the United States. Many — but not all — of those who contracted the virus had traveled internationally, and health officials in a growing number of countries are investigating.
READ: United Arab Emirates detects first case of monkeypox
As of Friday, the U.S. had identified at least 20 cases in 11 states. Hundreds of other cases have been found in other countries, many apparently tied to sexual activity at two recent raves in Europe.
So far, many of the reported cases outside Africa have been in men who have sex with men, but health officials stress that anyone can get monkeypox. One heterosexual woman is among the U.S. cases under investigation, officials said.
The illness typically begins with flu-like symptoms and swelling of the lymph nodes, followed by a rash on the face and body.
No monkeypox deaths have been reported in the U.S. or Europe so far. But that could change if infections start occurring in more vulnerable people, like very young children or people with weakened immune systems, Rasmussen said.
She raised another concern: Even if outbreaks among people are contained, it’s possible the virus could take hold in the U.S. rodent population — either through pets or unwelcome rodents in homes.
“It’s not out of the question,” Rasmussen said.
Also on Friday, the CDC published an analysis of 17 of the first reported U.S. cases. The average age was 40, and all but one identified themselves as men who have sex with men. Fourteen had traveled internationally, to 11 different countries, according to the report.
Ex-Trump aide Navarro indicted; Meadows won’t be charged
Former Trump White House official Peter Navarro has been indicted on charges that he refused to cooperate with a congressional investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, but the Justice Department spared two other advisers, including the ex-president’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, from criminal prosecution.
The department’s decision to not prosecute Meadows and Dan Scavino, another adviser to former President Donald Trump, was revealed in a letter sent Friday by a federal prosecutor to a lawyer for the House of Representatives. The move was reported hours after the indictment of Navarro and a subsequent, fiery court appearance in which he vowed to contest the contempt of Congress charges.
The flurry of activity comes just days before the House committee leading the investigation into the riot at the Capitol holds a primetime hearing aimed at presenting the American public with evidence it has collected about how the assault unfolded. The split decisions show how the Justice Department has opted to evaluate on a case-by-case basis contempt referrals it has received from Congress rather than automatically pursue charges against each and every Trump aide who has resisted congressional subpoenas.
The committee’s leaders called the decision to not prosecute Meadows and Scavino “puzzling.” In a statement late Friday, Reps. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., and Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., said: “We hope the Department provides greater clarity on this matter. ... No one is above the law.”
Though the Justice Department has referred multiple Trump aides for potential prosecution for refusal to cooperate, Navarro is only the second to face criminal charges, following the indictment last fall of former White House adviser Steve Bannon.
READ: Kim Jong Un’s decade of rule: Purges, nukes, Trump diplomacy
Navarro, 72, was charged with one contempt count for failing to appear for a deposition before the House committee and a second charge for failing to produce documents the committee requested.
During an initial court appearance, he alleged that the Justice Department had committed “prosecutorial misconduct” and said he was told he could not contact anyone after being approached by an FBI agent at the airport Friday and put in handcuffs. He said he was arrested while trying to board a flight to Nashville, Tennessee for a television appearance.
“Who are these people? This is not America,” Navarro said. “I was a distinguished public servant for four years!”
Each charge carries a minimum sentence of a month in jail and a maximum of a year behind bars.
The Justice Department and Attorney General Merrick Garland had been facing pressure to move more quickly to decide whether to prosecute other Trump aides who have similarly defied subpoenas from the House panel.
The New York Times first reported on the decision to not charge Meadows and Scavino. A person familiar with the decision who was not authorized to discuss it publicly confirmed it to The Associated Press on Friday. The U.S. Attorney’s office in Washington, which made the decisions regarding each of the Trump aides, declined to comment Friday.
Meadows, a close Trump adviser seen by House investigators as a vital witness to key events, initially cooperated with the committee, turning over more than 2,000 text messages sent and received in the days leading up to and of the attack. But in December, Meadows informed the committee that he would not sit for a deposition. Scavino was held in contempt in April after declining to cooperate with Congress.
A lawyer for Meadows did not immediately return messages Friday night. Stan Brand, an attorney representing Scavino, said he had not yet received the letter from the U.S. attorney’s office, but he’d heard the news through a third party. “I’m grateful that the Justice Department exercised their discretion to decline prosecution,” Brand said.
The indictment against Navarro alleges that when summoned to appear before the committee for a deposition earlier this year, he refused to do so and instead told the panel that because Trump had invoked executive privilege, “my hands are tied.”
After committee staff told him they believed there were topics he could discuss without raising any executive privilege concerns, Navarro again refused, directing the committee to negotiate directly with lawyers for Trump, according to the indictment. The committee went ahead with its scheduled deposition on March 2, but Navarro did not attend.
The indictment, dated Thursday, came days after Navarro revealed in a court filing that he also had been subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury this week as part of the Justice Department’s sprawling probe into the insurrection. The subpoena to Navarro, a trade adviser to Trump, was the first known instance of prosecutors seeking testimony from someone who worked in the Trump White House as they investigate the attack.
“This was a preemptive strike by the prosecution against that lawsuit,” Navarro told Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui during his court appearance. “It simply flies in the face of good faith and due process.”
Navarro made the case in his lawsuit Tuesday that the House select committee investigating the attack is unlawful and therefore a subpoena it issued to him in February is unenforceable under law. He sued members of the committee, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and the U.S. attorney in Washington, Matthew M. Graves, whose office is now handling the criminal case against him.
In an interview with The Associated Press this week, Navarro said the goal of his lawsuit is much broader than the subpoenas themselves, part of an effort to have “the Supreme Court address a number of issues that have come with the weaponization of Congress’ investigatory powers” since Trump entered office.
Members of the select committee sought testimony from Navarro about his efforts to help Trump overturn the 2020 presidential election, including a call trying to persuade state legislators to join their efforts.
The former economics professor was one of the White House staffers who promoted Trump’s baseless claims of mass voter fraud. Trump, in turn, promoted a lengthy report Navarro released in December 2020, which Navarro falsely claimed contained evidence of the alleged misconduct and election fraud “more than sufficient” to swing victory to his former boss.
Despite the opposition from several Trump allies, the Jan. 6 panel, comprised of seven Democrats and two Republicans, has managed to interview more than 1,000 witnesses about the insurrection in the past 11 months and is now preparing for a series of public hearings to begin next week. Lawmakers on the panel hope the half-dozen hearings will be a high-profile airing of the causes and consequences of the domestic attack on the U.S. government.
Sky high: Carbon dioxide levels in air spike past milestone
The amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has shot past a key milestone -- more than 50% higher than pre-industrial times -- and is at levels not seen since millions of years ago when Earth was a hothouse ocean-inundated planet, federal scientists announced Friday.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said its long-time monitoring station at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, averaged 421 parts per million of carbon dioxide for the month of May, which is when the crucial greenhouse gas hits its yearly high. Before the industrial revolution in the late 19th century carbon dioxide levels were at 280 parts per million, scientists said, so humans have significantly changed the atmosphere. Some activists and scientists want a level of 350 parts per million. Industrial carbon dioxide emissions come from the burning of coal, oil and gas.
Levels of the gas continue to rise, when they need to be falling, scientists say. This year’s carbon dioxide level is nearly 1.9 ppm more than a year ago, a slightly bigger jump than from May 2020 to May 2021.
“The world is trying to reduce emissions, and you just don’t see it. In other words, if you’re measuring the atmosphere, you’re not seeing anything happening right now in terms of change,” said NOAA climate scientist Pieter Tans, who tracks global greenhouse gas emissions for the agency.
Outside scientists said the numbers show a severe climate change problem.
Also read: WHO for making mental health support part of climate action plans
“Watching these incremental but persistent increases in CO2 year-to-year is much like watching a train barrel down the track towards you in slow motion. It’s terrifying,” said University of Wisconsin-Madison climate scientist Andrea Dutton. “If we stay on the track with a plan to jump out of the way at the last minute, we may die of heat stroke out on the tracks before it even gets to us.”
University of Illinois climate scientist Donald Wuebbles said without cuts in carbon pollution “we will see ever more damaging levels of climate change, more heat waves, more flooding, more droughts, more large storms and higher sea levels.”
The slowdown from the pandemic did cut global carbon emissions a bit in 2020, but they rebounded last year. Both changes were small compared to how much carbon dioxide is pumped into the atmosphere each year, especially considering that carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere hundreds to a thousand years, Tans said.
The world puts about 10 billion metric tons of carbon in the air each year, much of it gets drawn down by oceans and plants. That’s why May is the peak for global carbon dioxide emissions. Plants in the northern hemisphere start sucking up more carbon dioxide in the summer as they grow.
NOAA said carbon dioxide levels are now about the same as 4.1 to 4.5 million years ago in the Pliocene era, when temperatures were 7 degrees (3.9 degrees Celsius) hotter and sea levels were 16 to 82 feet (5 to 25 meters) higher than now. South Florida, for example, was completely under water. These are conditions that human civilization has never known.
The reason it was much warmer and seas were higher millions of years ago at the same carbon dioxide level as now is that in the past the natural increase in carbon dioxide levels was far more gradual. With carbon sticking in the air hundreds of years, temperatures heated up over longer periods of time and stayed there. The Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets melted over time, raising sea levels tremendously and making Earth darker and reflecting less heat off the planet, Tans and other scientists said.
Scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography calculated levels a bit differently based on time and averaging, and put the May average at 420.8 ppm, slightly lower than NOAA’s figure.
Ukraine war threatens economic devastation in developing world
Russia's continued invasion of Ukraine is creating a perfect storm which could shatter the economies of many developing countries, according to the UN.
The UN remained "intensely focused on practical steps to save lives and reduce human suffering" inside Ukraine, but for many developing countries, the climate crisis, growing debt and economic insecurity, were now compounded by "ballooning energy costs and growing hunger" due to the war that is crippling Ukraine's food exports, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said at the Stockholm+50 conference Wednesday.
He called for quick and decisive action to ensure a steady flow of food and energy in open markets, by lifting export restrictions, allocating surpluses and reserves to vulnerable populations, and addressing food price increases to calm market volatility.
But there would be no solution, without bringing Ukraine's food production back into the global market, alongside food and fertiliser from Russia.
"Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths and UN trade and development chief Rebeca Grynspan are working on an agreement for the safe and secure export of Ukrainian-produced food through the Black Sea along with unimpeded access of Russian food and fertilisers to global markets, especially developing countries," Guterres said.
WHO for making mental health support part of climate action plans
Mental health support must be included in national responses to climate change, the World Health Organization (WHO) said Friday at the Stockholm+50 environmental summit.
Climate change poses serious risks to people's mental health and well-being, the UN agency said in a new policy brief, which concurs with a report published in February by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The IPCC study revealed that rapidly increasing climate change is a rising threat to mental health and psychosocial well-being, from emotional distress to anxiety, depression, grief, and suicidal behaviour.
"The impacts of climate change are increasingly becoming part of our daily lives, and there is very little dedicated mental health support available for people and communities dealing with climate-related hazards and long-term risk," said Dr Maria Neira, director of the WHO's Department of Environment, Climate Change and Health.
The mental health impacts of climate change are unequally distributed, with certain groups disproportionately affected depending on factors such as socioeconomic status, gender and age, according to the WHO brief.
Read: WHO believes COVID getting worse, not better in North Korea
However, the UN agency said it was clear that climate change affects many of the social determinants that already are leading to massive mental health burdens globally.
Out of 95 countries surveyed last year, only nine included mental health and psychosocial support in their national health and climate change plans.
"The impact of climate change is compounding the already extremely challenging situation for mental health and mental health services globally. Nearly one billion people are living with mental health conditions. In low and middle-income countries, three out four do not have access to needed services," said Dévora Kestel, director of the WHO's Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse.
"By ramping up mental health and psychosocial support within disaster risk reduction and climate action, countries can do more to help protect those most at risk," she added.
Read: WHO: Monkeypox won’t turn into pandemic, but many unknowns
The WHO urged the governments to integrate climate considerations with mental health programmes, merge mental health support with climate action, and build upon their global commitments.
Authorities should also develop community-based approaches to reduce vulnerabilities, and close the large funding gap that currently exists for mental health and psychosocial support, it said.
Among the pioneering countries cited in the WHO report is The Philippines, which rebuilt and improved its mental health services after super typhoon Haiyan in 2013, reportedly one of the strongest tropical cyclones ever recorded.
India also scaled up disaster risk reduction while at the same time preparing cities to respond to climate risks and address mental health and psychosocial needs.
Turkish company donates drone for Ukraine
Inspired by an act of generosity by Lithuanians, a Turkish manufacturer is donating a drone that will go to the war-torn country of Ukraine, Lithuania’s defense minister said Thursday.
Last week, Lithuanians raised 5.9 million euros in several days to buy a drone for Ukraine. Lithuanian officials had travelled to Turkey to sign a contract with the producer to acquire it.
Read: Russian missile hits western Lviv; 5 injured
But Lithuanian Defense Minister Arvydas Anusauskas wrote on Facebook that the Turkish manufacturer was so “impressed” by the Lithuanian people that it is “donating a drone Bayraktar TB2 to Lithuania.”
The Lithuanian government plans to send the drone to Ukraine later this month.
Some 1.5 million euros of the money raised by Lithuanians will be spent on drone munition, while the remaining 4.4 million would be earmarked for humanitarian and other assistance to Ukraine, Anusauskas said.