The Week with IPS 7/14/2017

2017/7/14	Click here for the online version of this IPS newsletter
	The Arab Youth Bulge and the Parliamentarians IPS World Desk More than ever before, the Arab region now registers an unprecedented youth population growth while facing huge challenges such as extremely high unemployment rates --more than half of all regional jobless population--, and inadequate education and health provision, in particular among young ... MORE > >
	Reforming the International Financial System Jomo Kwame Sundaram When we fail to act on lessons from a crisis, we risk exposing ourselves to another one. The 1997-1998 East Asian crises provided major lessons for international financial reform. Two decades later, we appear not to have done much about them. The way the West first responded to the 2008 global ... MORE > >
	2 Billion People Don’t Have Access To Clean Water, Opens up Fissures of Inequality Roshni Majumdar More than two billion people lack access to clean and safe drinking water, according to a new report released by the World Health Organisation (WHO). Although significant progress to ensure access to drinking water has been achieved, there is still a long way to go to ensure its quality—deemed ... MORE > >
	We Have to Reclaim the Public Policy Space for SDGs Jens Martens At the High-Level Political Forum which currently takes place at the United Nations in New York several events, for instance a SDG Business Forum, are devoted to the critical role of business and public-private partnerships (PPPs) in implementing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable ... MORE > >
	Communities Step Up to Help Save Jamaica’s Forests Desmond Brown According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 31.1 percent or about 337,000 hectares of Jamaica is forested. Of this, 26.1 percent or 88,000 is classified as primary forest, the most biodiverse and carbon-dense form of forest. But between 1990 and 2010, Jamaica lost an ... MORE > >
	Nuclear Ban Approved, Now What? Tharanga Yakupitiyage More than seven decades after the deployment of deadly atomic bombs in Japan, the UN has passed a historic treaty banning nuclear weapons around the world. Though it has sparked hope for a future without nuclear weapons, uncertainty in the success of the treaty still lingers. More than 122 ... MORE > >
	Argentina Plans Billions of Dollars in Railway Projects Daniel Gutman Development in Argentina in the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century was closely tied to that of the railway. The eighth largest country in the world, Argentina’s economy grew through exporting agricultural and livestock products, and the railways were key to ... MORE > >
	For India’s Urban Marginalized, Reproductive Healthcare Still a Distant Dream Stella Paul In a semi-lit room of a southern Chennai neighborhood, a group of women sit in a circle around a table surrounded by large cardboard boxes of "Nirodh" – India’s most popular condom. Clad in colorful saris, wearing toe rings and red dots on their foreheads, they look like ordinary housewives. ... MORE > >
	Three-Zone Biosecurity Offers New Hope to Indonesian Farmers Kanis Dursin Poultry farmer Bambang Sutrisno Setiawan had long heard about biosecurity but never gave serious thought to it, even when the highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1 forced him to cull thousands of his layer chickens in 2003 and 2009. Eighteen years into the business, however, Bambang, who is ... MORE > >
	Mexico’s Methane Emissions Threaten the Environment Emilio Godoy Mexico is in transition towards commercial exploitation of its shale gas, which is being included in two auctions of 24 hydrocarbon blocks, at a time when the country is having difficulty preventing and reducing industrial methane emissions. Increasing atmospheric release of methane, which is ... MORE > >
	New Neocon Mantra: Iran, like Soviet Union, on Verge of Collapse Jim Lobe Iran hawks suddenly have a new mantra: the Islamic Republic is the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, and the Trump administration should work to hasten the regime’s impending collapse. It’s not clear why this comparison has surfaced so abruptly. Its proponents don’t cite any tangible or concrete ... MORE > >
	Climate Change-Poverty-Migration: The New, Inhuman ‘Bermuda Triangle’ Baher Kamal World organisations, experts and scientists have been repeating it to satiety: climate change poses a major risk to the poorest rural populations in developing countries, dangerously threatening their lives and livelihoods and thus forcing them to migrate. Also that the billions of dollars ... MORE > >