A leading figure in Brazil’s environment movement, Erwin Kräutler, is one of the four winners of the Right Livelihood Award 2010, known as the ‘Alternative Nobel Prize’. The 71-year-old Catholic Bishop of Xingu in the Amazon region is honoured for “a lifetime of work for the human and environmental rights of indigenous peoples and for his tireless efforts to save the Amazon forest from destruction”, the prize committee in Stockholm said.
Two events have prompted a field mission in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) as part of the project “Relational Peace Advocacy Network” (RPAN) of OCIPE in June 2010.
First, the CEPAS, our partner in the Congo in the triangulation Brussels – Kinshasa and Washington, organized two workshops on social responsibility of extracting companies; and second, a team of three researchers collected the information necessary for academic research on practices of mining companies in Katanga.
Social investments in MDG achievement must include job and livelihood generation as financing MDG will increasingly depend on public and private investments and not on official development handouts.
With the country’s unemployment rate reaching 8 percent last April, among the highest in Southeast Asia, around 3.1 million of an estimated labor force of 38.5 million were classified as unemployed in April. In January, the unemployment rate stood at 7.3 percent, with 2.8 million of an estimated 38.8 million jobless.
Today, the predation and violence against indigenous and traditional peoples of the Amazonia continues with the outrageous activity of construction of infrastructures and transport facilities, especially with large projects as the IIRSA (Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America).
The IIRSA emerged at a meeting of Latin American Heads of State held in Brasilia in 2000. They agreed to create a process of political, social and economic development of transport infrastructure, energy and communication across the continent, creating new export routes to reduce transport costs and thus achieve greater competitiveness in world markets. The estimated cost in 2009 was US $ 74,500 million, financed by several regional and international institutions as the Inter-American Development Bank, the European Investment Bank and the World Bank.
Lack of political will and exaggerated expectations could explain the failure to achieve a fair, binding and ambitious agreement at the Copenhagen Conference.
As Archbishop Desmond Tutu began the concluding prayer at the ecumenical service on Sunday December the 13th, Copenhagen Cathedral bells started to ring, 350 times. Simultaneously, hundreds of Churches in Denmark joined the Cathedral bells – also ringing 350 times. 350 is a symbolic number for environment campaigners: 350 parts per million is deemed the safe upper limit for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, so as to avoid runaway climate change.
Frank Turner participated in the conference in the European Parliament about the Encyclical “Caritas in Veritate” jointly organized by the European Popular Group and the Commission of the Bishops of European Union (COMECE).
Taking up a point that has been raised indirectly today, but not discussed directly, I want to add a preliminary note about ‘Catholic Social Teaching’ (henceforth ‘CST’) as a genre: about documents such as Caritas in Veritate, and how we best read them. Such documents have a key role in the Church – and have some inherent limitations, just as to choose any mode of writing is to accept certain opportunities and certain limitations. In particular, an encyclical is neither a work of political analysis, nor a work of theology as such: it is precisely teaching.
The European Court of Auditors recently published a series of reports analysing different schemes of aid and development cooperation, and demonstrating the need for modifications affecting the EU’s future commitments.
Such tragedies as that of the Haitian earthquake tend to stimulate massively generous impulses, but longer-term questioning about how efficient is the international response. Coincidentally the European Court of Auditors has recently released three reports that focus on different dimensions of the European commitment to aid and development.
The Gulf of Mexico oil spill may transpire to be one of the biggest man-made disasters of all time, but in a strange twist of irony, the destruction off the US coast and surrounding environment by the gushing riser oil pipe could relight the cause for alternative energy and a cleaner environment.
It seems morbid to consider anything as bad as 70,000 barrels of crude oil pumping into one of the world’s richest oceans as having a silver-lining, but in some instances it takes a thumping blow from a heavy object – in this case an oil slick the size of Delaware, and growing – for the masses to champion alternative, cleaner means. And that doesn’t just mean within the US, but across the entire world.
Eko is one of the directors and editors of the “Albasian Haj”. A documentary film about the reflection of the scholastics (Indonesian Province) on the traditional systems of multi-cropping that sustains the upland soils and people’s forests, locally known as “hutan rakyat”.
Last 22-25 June 2010, nearly a thousand scientists gathered at the Taipei International Conference Center to discuss the current understanding about the factors that induce such extreme events. Recent findings from the work of around 4,000 scholars were presented at the Western Pacific Geophysics Meeting (http://www.agu.org/meetings/wp10/) in Taipei in the desire to understand and help with more appropriate adaptation and mitigation strategies.
