As President-elect Joseph Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris are sworn into office in the United States Wednesday, there are a number of immediate policy changes that affect the global community and Africans in particular. Biden vowed to reverse the U.S. withdrawal from the World Health Organization (WHO), a decision…
Three African nations are among those awarded grants from a new fund designed to deliver sustainable cooling to some of the hottest places. The US$580,000 comes from the UK-based Ashden organization, which has focused on climate innovation for the last 20 years. In partnership with the Kigali Cooling Efficiency Program…
Access to water has long been recognized as a basic human right, but the ways in which women and girls bear the brunt of water scarcity is often overlooked by those who seek to address the issue. Now, climate change and coronavirus are combining forces to wreak havoc on African…
President Danny Faure of Seychelles underscored the challenges facing island nations as climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic took center stage at the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday. Faure’s pre-recorded speech was among six such talks scheduled for African leaders, in a format that replaced in-person meetings for the…
Malaria hits hard on the African continent, home to 93 percent of the world’s 228 million cases in 2018 and 94 percent of its fatalities. What scientists at the universities of Leeds and Lincoln in the UK want to know is how Africans might be affected in the climate change…
Some of the greatest luminaries in the arts and sciences – from Nobel prize-winning astrophysicists, to singer Madonna to the economist Muhammad Yunus – have published a joint statement insisting that the world cannot go “back to normal” and must consider the COVID-19 crisis an urgent call for new pathways…
Scientists from Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo and Tanzania, working alongside dozens of global colleagues, warn that the earth’s tropical forests are losing their ability to serve as “carbon sinks” and remove global emissions from the atmosphere. Their study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, looked at data from 300,000…
For many African nations, the economic challenges remain enormous. Zimbabwe, for example, saw its extreme poverty rate increase by 5 percent in 2019, leaving a third of the nation – some 5.7 million people, according to World Bank – to deal with sharp inflation and shortages, all from the most…
Laureen is the editor of Africa Times
Climate change and related environmental challenges are implicated in gender-based violence and discrimination, notably in sub-Saharan Africa’s fishing and timber industries, according to a new study from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Conflict over scarce resources can give rise to practices such as ‘sex-for-fish’ in parts of…
Madagascar, caught in the throes of yet another environmental disaster, was named Tuesday as the country with the most underreported humanitarian crisis – part of an effort by the CARE International NGO to call attention to climate impacts in places that aren’t getting as much attention as industrial nations are….
UNOCHA, the United Nations humanitarian agency, has released US$10 million to support an emergency response to the desert locust outbreak in East Africa – the worst Kenya has seen since 1950, and the worst for parts of the Horn of Africa in 25 years. The impacts in affected Red Sea…
People living in the European Union have an average income that’s 11 times higher than that of sub-Saharan Africa, and the disparity grows to 16 times higher when compared with North Americans. That’s according to the new World Social Report, presented Tuesday by United Nations Chief Economist Elliot Harris and…
President Uhuru Kenyatta rang the bell to begin trading at the London Stock Exchange (LSE) on Monday, as part of the launch of Kenya’s first green bond in conjunction with his visit to the UK-Africa Investment Summit 2020. The US$40 million bond by Acorn Holdings, a property development firm based…
Ioane Teitiota of the Pacific Island nation of Kiribati lost his individual case, but the landmark ruling on the rights of climate refugees from the United Nations Human Rights Committee means he may have changed the future for people seeking to escape the extreme impacts of a warming world. That…
With the new year, the World Health Organization has released a list of its top priorities for 2020. They include a number of concerns with special resonance on the African continent, including the need to understand that the climate crisis is a health crisis, and the need to address the…