The United Nations Conference on Women was held nearly 15 years ago in Beijing, China. This was an extraordinary moment in the history of the international women’s movements as well as women workers around the world, with unprecedented mobilisation of feminist policymakers, activists and academics in the international political arena, both prior to the conference and subsequently. The two-part conference, referred to as Beijing Platform and the Call for Action,...

Without urgent progress which will stimulate funding for renewables, nations could be locked into high-carbon energy and transport technologies for decades, inflating another unsustainable economic bubble, say experts. Achim Steiner, the head of the U.N. environment programme, said: “Far more worrying [than formally ratifying a treaty] is that every month we delay we send a ambiguous signal into the world economy, the markets, investors and R&D.” The markets had not...

A UN Habitat publication warns that inequalities and worsening informal settlements (read slums) could lead to widespread violence and chaos in the cities and towns of the world. The newly-released report titled “Planning Sustainable Cities: Global Report on Human Settlements 2009” says that with almost 200,000 new dwellers flooding into the world cities and towns each day, there is an urgent need to check the mushrooming of such settlements. The...

The philosophy of self-aggrandisement defies social logic. Seven leading banks in the United States of America had last year incurred an aggregate loss of $82 billion; the chief executive officers of these banks nonetheless claimed and collected annual bonus to the extent of $38 billion. The economy might lie in ruins; that did not distract sharks from zooming in on their prey. Our corporate sector has shaped itself in the...

The draft agreement being discussed ahead of December’s crucial Copenhagen summit is long, confusing and contradictory.  It is a blueprint to save the world. And yet it is long, confusing and contradictory. Negotiators have released a draft version of a new global agreement on climate change, which is widely billed as the last chance to save the planet from the ravages of global warming. Running to some 200 pages, the...