Desmond Doshane, 19, is one of 1.6 million newly registered South African voters. He will be casting a ballot for the first time in elections due in the first half of 2009, and told IRIN what this means to him.

"Our leaders, like Mandela, went through difficult times to enable young people like me to cast their vote. I am not sure who I am going to vote for now, but I would like a president who will make sure some of my concerns are addressed.

"As a resident from [the Johannesburg township of] Alexandra, I hope that the next president of the country can be able to create jobs for us young people. There is a lot of criminal activity in Alex and I want the police to do more in making this township safe for us. The police are not doing enough to protect us; the women are afraid of being raped if they walk at night.

"I want a president who can unite everyone. I was not happy with the xenophobia attacks that took place here [in May] - we saw people being burnt alive. That was bad. What kind of society burns people?

"If the government had made sure that we all live together as one, we could have avoided the useless killing and displacement of foreigners - some have lived with us for many years.

"I also want the next president to build houses. We also want [subsidised] RDP houses under the government's Reconstruction and Development Programme. I live in a shack and I want a house where, if it rains, the water does not come in.

"I have been watching the US elections and I think the new US president is cool. I hope he can inspire some people in our country that you can do good things for your country.

"Sadly, we do not have young people involved in politics, but I hope someday we will have our own 'Obama' that will get everyone interested in politics."

IRIN  

Greenpeace Africa opened its first office in Johannesburg today, announcing a long-term commitment to building a strong presence in Africa dedicated to tackling the most urgent environmental problems facing the continent - climate change, deforestation and overfishing.
A second office will be opened on 24 November in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo and a third in Dakar, Senegal, next year. These areas are central to tackling climate change, deforestation and overfishing.

"While the environmental threats facing Africans are urgent and critical, Africa is in a position to leapfrog dirty development and become a leader in helping to avert catastrophic climate change and protect the natural environment. We are here to help make that happen," said Amadou Kanoute, Executive Director of Greenpeace Africa.

The launch comes just weeks ahead of the United Nations climate change talks in Poznan, Poland (1-13 December) where agreements will be made to set the world on a path to cut greenhouse gas emissions and prevent human induced climate change.
While Africa contributes very little to global warming, the region will be one of the hardest hit by its effects. Over 180 million people in sub-Saharan Africa could die as a result of climate change by the end of the century. Unpredictable rainfall, lower crop yields and dwindling resources are causing mass migration, increased tension and conflict.

"South Africa needs to take a strong stand at the UN climate talks for a deal that includes substantial funding from the industrialised world for developing countries to adapt to and mitigate the devastating effects of climate change. The South African government should also support Central African countries by backing moves to create a funding mechanism that makes protecting tropical forests and the climate more economical than logging," continued Kanoute.

Tropical forest destruction accounts for about 20 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Climate change: South Africa, the 14th highest carbon emitter in the world, must commit to measurable actions to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, including ending its dependence on coal, without resorting to expansions in nuclear power. The country, as with Africa as a whole, is in a position to harness abundant renewable energy sources - solar, wind and biomass - and take a lead in an African energy revolution. An energy revolution that would not only help reduce climate changes but would bring electricity to rural areas, which is crucial for rural development, provide jobs and economic growth.

Protecting the rainforest: Industrial logging threatens the Congo Basin rainforest and the 40 million people who depend on it for their livelihoods. It plays a vital role in regulating the global climate and is the fourth largest forest carbon reservoir in the world.  Yet if logging is allowed to continue at the projected rate, the DRC risks losing 40 percent of its forest within 40 years. Greenpeace is calling for the adoption of an international financing mechanism, Forests for Climate, that makes the Congo Basin rainforest and others like it, more economically valuable intact than as timber.

Defending the oceans: Off the coast of West Africa marine life is being carried away by foreign trawlers: devastating local communities and depriving them of critical nutrition; causing poverty and food insecurity to increase. Illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing must stop. Greenpeace will work for sustainable fishing and fish processing operations, managed and financed by Africans, as well as increased monitoring and control. The area needs a network of well enforced marine reserves. 

"Tackling environmental problems in Africa is vital to ensuring a future for its children and the world as a whole. While it is most likely to be one of the hardest and quickest hit by the effects of climate change, some of which can already be seen, Africa is also a major part of the solution. Through harnessing its renewable energy potential and protecing its tropical forests Africa can lead the way in environmental development," said Gerd Leipold, Executive Director, Greenpeace International.

Greenpeace  

A pledge by the Southern African Development Community (SADC) to complement UN peacekeeping forces in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) with SADC soldiers does not take account of the regional body's limited military capacity, a military analyst told IRIN.

After an extraordinary heads-of-state summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, on 9 November, called to address Zimbabwe's political impasse and DRC's rapidly deteriorating humanitarian crisis, SADC Executive Secretary-General Tomaz Salomoa told reporters that "SADC should immediately provide assistance to the armed forces of DRC", because "The security situation in DRC is affecting peace and stability in the SADC and Great Lakes region."

A SADC team of military experts was to deploy "immediately" to the region.

Henri Boshoff, military analyst at the South African-based think-tank, Institute for Security Studies, told IRIN that stopping the fighting between the Congolese army and rebel leader Laurent Nkunda required the deployment of "a credible military force", or that MONUC "changed its posture" and aggressively implemented its Chapter 7 (of the UN Charter) mandate, which allows for peace enforcement.

He said SADC did not have the military capacity as yet for robust action, and it was difficult to see where the troops would come from at such short notice.

South Africa's overstretched military already has peacekeeping troops in the DRC, and the use of Angolan, Namibian and Zimbabwean soldiers would "bring with it the baggage" of the 1998-2003 conflict, in which the three countries supported the Kinshasa government against Rwandan- and Ugandan-backed rebels.

Baggage

SADC's intervention, at the urging of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, saved the DRC's late President Laurent Desire Kabila from defeat, but bogged down Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe in a drawn-out war that cost an estimated three million civilian lives.

Nkunda, a Tutsi from the Kivu region of eastern DRC, joined the armed groups opposed to Kabila, who had turned against the Rwandan and Ugandan governments that had helped put him in power.

At the end of the war in 2003 he and his troops were integrated into the new national army, but rebelled after accusing the government of supporting Hutu militia responsible for attacks against the Tutsi minority in North and South Kivu provinces.

Nkunda is alleged to still enjoy the backing of Rwandan President Paul Kagame; his National Congress for the Defence of the People is regarded as a better fighting force than the Congolese army, and they have battled their way towards the North Kivu provincial capital of Goma.

The fighting, despite the presence of the UN peacekeeping mission, MONUC, has killed several hundred civilians and combatants, displaced more than 250,000 people - many for the second or third time in the last few years - and created an increasingly desperate humanitarian situation.

Boshoff said part of the reason why MONUC - trying to operate in a huge region - could not more aggressively implement its mandate was a matter of "interpretation" by some of the governments that had contributed to the 17,000-strong force on how their soldiers should be deployed.

He commented that a European Union Battle Group, a self-sufficient military force with a minimum of 1,500 soldiers, could be deployed in the region in seven days, but member countries of the EU were divided on the issue. The EU has the military priority of Afghanistan, and there is an unwillingness to get involved in a "protracted war" in the eastern Congo.

IRIN  

Singer decried hunger, violence and poverty

The sudden death of South African singer and human rights activist Miriam Makeba, 76, has claimed the voice of one of FAO’s most dedicated advocates, FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf said today.

“For nearly a decade, FAO Goodwill Ambassador Miriam Makeba was a strong supporter of FAO’s fight to reduce hunger and improve the livelihoods of the world’s poorest people,” FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf said on learning of Makeba’s death.

“Mama Africa spoke out against the violence, inequality and disease that kept many people, especially women and children, living in conditions of extreme poverty. We will miss her energy and her respectful concern for the world’s most vulnerable,” Diouf said.

Makeba had been an FAO Goodwill Ambassador since 1999. Over the years, she had participated in a long list of events and concerts organized by FAO, including performances to raise funds for FAO TeleFood projects in South Africa, Jamaica and Spain.

Makeba was active in FAO’s communications campaigns against hunger, both in interviews with the international news media and through public service announcements.

In April 2001, Makeba visited FAO post-emergency projects in Mozambique, increasing the visibility and impact of FAO’s activities in Africa.

On her last official mission on behalf of FAO, in March 2008, Makeba travelled to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to visit FAO emergency projects designed to help survivors of violence and HIV positive women and men feed their families and revive their livelihoods through farming.

FAO  

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is on the brink of slipping back into the kind of devastating international war that raged from 1998 to 2003, according to one of the architects of the Great Lakes peace accords.

Jan van Eck, a former member of parliament in South Africa's African National Congress government, and a negotiator for 12 years in the troubled central African region, told IRIN: "The only solution people are trying is the use of military force. There is no military solution to this [the eastern DRC] whatsoever."

A year ago, he predicted another major conflict in eastern Congo, despite the comprehensive peace accords signed in 2003, arising from Rwanda's failure to grant full political rights to returning Hutus, some of whom had fled in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide.

"It is clear that unless a new strategy is formulated - one that will focus on addressing the real root causes of the conflict - the region will move irrevocably towards a major new crisis," Van Eck said in his November 2007 article: Ignoring the ethnic cancer in the Congo precludes the true peace.

"In such an event, not only the eastern DRC will be drawn in, but also its eastern neighbours, Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi, since the present ethnically based conflict in eastern DRC has its origins in these countries," he wrote.

Rwanda's 100-day genocide, in which 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered, is recognised as the 20th century's most efficient killing spree, eclipsing even the pace of Nazi Germany's extermination camps.

Van Eck said it had created "a sense of guilt" among the 140 signatories to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the convention adopted in the wake of the Second World War by the UN General Assembly in December 1948 and brought into effect in 1951, which compels signatories to act against genocide.

Former US President Bill Clinton's administration - smarting from the deaths of 17 US Army Rangers in 1993 in the Somali capital, Mogadishu - evaded the convention's obligations, referring to genocide as the "G-word", and speaking of "acts of genocide".

This sense of guilt, Van Eck told IRIN, has largely protected Rwanda's President Paul Kagame from international criticism, but unless Kagame permitted the formation of a "Hutu party that is not anti-Tutsi", instability in the eastern Congo would be an ever-present feature.

"Although in some circles it may be seen as politically incorrect to acknowledge this, it remains a critically important fact that too many people are trying to ignore," Van Eck said.

A recent breakaway by members of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), comprised of Hutus involved in the genocide and who fled Rwanda in the aftermath of the genocide as well as those opposed to Kagame's government, was denied any political space in Rwanda, which was contributing to the vicious cycle of conflict in the region. 

"Unless Rwanda liberalises its internal political situation, and allows freedom of political and ethnic expression, it will remain under threat from politicised Hutus, most of whom are either in the DRC or in the diaspora," Van Eck said.

Africa's Second World War? 

The factors that fomented the 1998 war, which became known as "Africa's First World War" because it involved regional armies from Angola, Burundi, Namibia, Rwanda, Uganda and Zimbabwe, were still present today, Van Eck said.

In the past eight weeks, the conflict between the Congolese army and Laurent Nkunda's National Congress for the Defence of the People, a rebel group operating in eastern DRC despite the presence of the UN peacekeeping mission, MONUC, has killed several hundred civilians and combatants, displaced more than 250,000 people - many for the second or third time in the last few years - and created an increasingly desperate humanitarian situation.

Since 2003, Rwanda has made repeated threats to invade eastern Congo to seek out the "genocidaires". It did so in 1996 - resulting in the deposing of Congolese despot Mobutu Sese Seko - and again in 1998, when Rwanda turned against its previous ally, Laurent Desire Kabila, igniting the 1998-2003 conflict.

Ileka Atoki, DRC's ambassador to the UN, recently claimed that the DRC had proof that Rwandan forces were in the DRC, which Rwanda has vehemently denied.

Nkunda's rebel group is recognised as a far superior military force to the ragtag Congolese army, which stands accused of fighting alongside the Hutu militia that the Kinshasa government has pledged to disarm.

Henri Boshoff, a military analyst at the Institute for Security Studies, a South Africa-based think tank, said in a security update on 31 October that the latest fighting was another episode in the DRC's "Somalification"; a reference to Somalia's uninterrupted internecine violence since the fall of President Siad Barre in 1991.

The current situation, Boshoff said, was the result of numerous factors, such as the non-completion of the disarmament process, the absence of a strong Congolese army, and because the peacekeeping force had "no clear guidelines as to the implementation of the mandate, rules of engagement and the use of force by MONUC."

MONUC's commander, Lt-Gen Vicente Diaz de Villegas, recently resigned after seven weeks in the job, citing "personal reasons", but Boshoff suggested the reason for his resignation could be MONUC's "ambiguity about the use of force", which has hampered its effectiveness.

Boshoff recommended that to avoid a Rwanda-genocide scenario playing out in eastern Congo, "the fighting must be stopped, and at the same time a mediation process between Rwanda and the DRC must be started as a matter of urgency."

Peace Efforts

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon took part in a UN-sponsored African Union emergency summit in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, on 7 November, which was also attended by DRC President Joseph Kabila and Rwandan President Paul Kagame. As the summit opened, fresh fighting erupted near Goma.

The Southern African Development Community (SADC) will also discuss the DRC, a member country of the regional body, during an extraordinary summit in Johannesburg on 9 November, called to try and break Zimbabwe's political impasse.
"The only way to stop the fighting is for MONUC to implement its mandate to protect civilians against imminent threats of violence. If MONUC cannot implement its mandate because of lack of capacity, the deployment of an intervention force within the next few days is needed," Boshoff said.

However, neither SADC nor the African Union (AU) possessed the military capability; "the only power with the capacity to project force in such a short time is a European Union Battle Group," Boshoff commented.

According to reports on 6 November, a 1,000-member South African force deployed near Goma in North Kivu Province as part of MONUC has been ordered to engage Nkunda's forces should they approach Goma. Nkunda's forces are about 10km from Goma.

"If armed groups, whoever they might be, want to enter Goma, the rules of engagement of the United Nations and Chapter 7 [of the UN Charter] are sufficiently clear, that in this instance the instructions to be given are to shoot," Alain le Roy, head of MONUC, told reporters at a briefing in Goma.

IRIN  

A new study estimates that more than 330,000 HIV-positive South Africans lost their lives between 2000 and 2005 as a direct result of government delays in rolling out a treatment programme.

The report by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health was published in November in the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes (JAIDS).

The researchers attributed the deaths to government policies that blocked the distribution of life-prolonging antiretroviral (ARV) drugs long after neighbouring countries had launched such programmes.

Using data from UNAIDS and the World Health Organisation to estimate how many people would have benefitted from ARVs, the authors compared the number of people who actually received the drugs either for treatment or for the prevention of mother-to-child HIV transmission (PMTCT).

Compared with what neighbouring Botswana and Namibia, with similarly severe epidemics and resource constraints, managed to achieve in rolling out treatment over the five-year period, they concluded that South Africa fell far short of what was "reasonably feasible".

Botswana and Namibia were rolling out PMTCT and ARV treatment programmes at a time when former President Thabo Mbeki was still questioning the link between HIV and AIDS, and his health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, was describing ARVs as "poisons".

The authors pointed out that the South African government declined the offer of free nevirapine from pharmaceutical manufacturer Boehringer Ingelheim in 2000 and delayed the disbursement of a 2002 grant from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria to fund treatment in KwaZulu-Natal Province.

Botswana's national PMTCT programme had been underway for four years when South Africa finally launched its PMTCT programme in 2003, after a protracted legal battle with the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), a local lobby group.

A 2001 High Court decision ordering the state to roll out nevirapine was upheld by South Africa's Constitutional Court, which ruled that by restricting the availability of the drug to just 18 pilot sites, the government was violating the constitutional rights of women and their babies. The study authors estimated that the delay resulted in 35,000 babies being born with HIV.

By 2005, South Africa had achieved 30 percent coverage of PMTCT services, compared to 70 percent in both Botswana and Namibia; its ARV treatment rollout had only been underway for a year and had reached 23 percent of those in need of the drugs, compared to 85 percent in Botswana and 71 percent in Namibia.

The authors of the Harvard study suggested that South Africa could have started its ARV programme four years earlier and scaled up coverage as the drugs became cheaper to achieve 50 percent coverage by 2005.

Using UNAIDS estimates of the number of deaths resulting from AIDS in South Africa, they projected that the availability of ARV therapy could have added 2.2 million years to the lives of HIV-positive people over the five-year period. They calculated that a further 1.6 million years were lost due to delays in implementing a PMTCT programme.

Should leaders be held accountable?

South Africa has the highest HIV caseload in the world: of approximately 5.5 million people living with the virus, 350,000 are accessing ARV treatment via the public health sector, while a further 524,000 are still in need of the drugs, according to the TAC.

"Access to appropriate public health practice is often determined by a small number of political leaders," the authors of the Harvard study concluded. "In the case of South Africa, many lives were lost because of a failure to accept the use of ARVs to prevent and treat HIV/AIDS in a timely manner."

Commenting on Friday in The Times, a local newspaper, Zachie Achmat, former chairperson of the TAC, called on South African President Kgalema Motlanthe and the government to hold Mbeki and Tshabalala-Msimang liable for the deaths of thousands of HIV-positive people.

"They should be called to address an independent judicial board so that justice can prevail for those who lost loved ones at their hands," he said. "They must be held accountable."

Dr Francois Venter, president of the Southern African HIV Clinicians Society, noted that Mbeki and Tshabalala-Msimang were not alone in bearing responsibility for deaths resulting from the delay in rolling out treatment.

"I think the Cabinet as a whole needs to account, our leaders need to understand the implications of their decisions; they are very culpable," he told IRIN/PlusNews.

"But everybody should have been out at the forefront challenging this: the churches, the trade unions, civil society," he said. "If it wasn't for a few brave activists and people living with HIV, there would have been a lot more people dead."

Neither Mbeki nor Tshabalala-Msimang, who is now the minister in the Presidency, have responded to the study's findings.

PlusNews   

The South African government should aim for free universal education, backed up by teacher training so as to make a significant impact on the quality of schooling, said the country's largest public service union.

Jon Lewis, spokesman for the South African Democratic Teachers' Union (SADTU) said the plan by the ruling African National Congress (ANC) to extend free education to 60 percent of schools in 2009 should be applauded, but it was not without glitches.

"The process of identifying and assessing poor schools which would benefit from the plan is quite problematic," Lewis said. Schools were often found to be either poorer or richer than the assessment process had classified them, and he recommended that the country "rather go for free universal education."

The ANC announced the decision to extend the "No Fee" school model from the poorest 40 percent to 60 percent of schools at its conference in Polokwane, Limpopo Province, in December 2007.

Lewis said the government should also concentrate its efforts on trying to improve the quality of education by capping the maximum number of students in a class at 30, because "We have anecdotal evidence that classrooms in rural schools often have 60 students."

According to government's most recent statistics, in 2006 there were more than 380,000 educators for more than 12 million learners, giving an average of around 32 learners per class.
 
One of the biggest stumbling blocks to improving school education has been the introduction of two new curricula in 15 years. "Teachers had started to get familiar with the first curriculum, introduced 12 years ago, when yet another was introduced six years ago. At one stage schools were struggling with two curricula and things got very complicated," said Lewis.

Training teachers and familiarising educators with the new curriculum and assessment process should be intensified. "Many of our teachers were trained 10 to 20 years ago and are not familiar with the new curriculum," said Lewis. Few workshops to help teachers with these areas had been held, and "Often the quality of training provided has been poor."

Downside to free education

There was also a downside to plans to provide free education, which could impact on a school's ability to raise financial resources. In many cases the income to be provided by the state to compensate for the loss of school-fee revenue would be lower, said Salim Vally, a senior education researcher at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.

"While taking away fees might make it easier for children to access, whether they will receive a meaningful education is questionable," he commented.

Auxiliary support

Vally said auxiliary support in the form of free school books and uniforms should be part of extending free education. A significant number of South African children, many of whom have been orphaned by the HI-virus, received free school books, clothes and a daily meal because of the impoverished existence they endured at home.

"The call for free education has been made by civil society for years, and the ANC's decision to provide free education must be applauded. But this step must be supported, as fees are just a fraction of the cost of going to school," said Vally.

"The cost of transport, school feeding programmes and administering education at local and provincial level is significant. While the money is there to pay for these programmes, the capacity to deliver, thus far, has been lacking and there are no signs that this has changed dramatically in recent months."

Poorly serviced schools

Schools also struggle with poor service delivery and equipment. Nearly 15 years after the advent of democracy in South Africa, thousands of schools across the country still have no sanitation, water, electricity, science laboratories or sports facilities, despite the education department having an annual budget allocation larger than any other government department.

Education Minister Naledi Pandor recently told parliament that just over 26,000 government schools in South Africa lacked at least one of a number of basic infrastructural needs, such as running water and electricity.
 
Pandor, whose statistics were compiled from research conducted in 2007 by the National Education Infrastructure Management System, revealed that 1,097 schools had no sanitation facilities, 2,568 had no piped water and 7,418 were without science laboratories. A majority of the schools worst hit by poor service delivery were in the Eastern Cape Province, an ANC heartland.

The education minister maintained that a significant number of schools lacking in basic services were earmarked for infrastructural upgrades during the 2009 school year. She said the department of water affairs and forestry planned to supply sanitation to 935 of these schools and 900 would receive running water.

IRIN 

People in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, prefer to commute in three-wheeled autorickshaws, taxis and buses that run on compressed natural gas (CNG), in their bid to slow down global warming.

CNG produces a lower level of greenhouse gases and is an environmentally cleaner alternative to petrol. Dhaka's residents are among the most vulnerable to global warming and don't want to become "climate terrorists".

The city is among more than 3,000 identified by the UN-Habitat's State of the World's Cities 2008/09 as facing the prospect of sea level rise and surge-induced flooding. The report warns policymakers, planners and the world at large that few coastal cities will be spared the effects of global warming.

Asia accounts for more than half the most vulnerable cities, followed by Latin America and the Caribbean (27 percent) and Africa (15 percent); two-thirds of the cities are in Europe, and almost one-fifth of all cities in North America are in Low Elevation Coastal Zones (LECZ).

During the 1900s, sea levels rose by an estimated 17cm; global mean projections for sea level rise between 1990 and 2080 range from 22cm to 34cm, according to the UN-Habitat researchers.

The report points out that by 2070, urban populations in river delta cities, such as Dhaka, Kolkata (India), Yangon (Myanmar), and Hai Phong (on the coast near Hanoi in Vietnam), which already experience a high risk of flooding, will join the group of populations most exposed to this danger. Port cities in Bangladesh, China, Thailand, Vietnam, and India will have joined the ranks of cities whose assets are most at risk.

African coastal cities that could be severely be affected by rising sea levels include Abidjan (Cote d'Ivoire), Accra (Ghana), Alexandria (Egypt), Algiers (Algeria), Cape Town (South Africa), Casablanca (Morocco), Dakar (Senegal), Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), Djibouti (Djibouti), Durban (South Africa), Freetown (Sierra Leone), Lagos (Nigeria), Libreville (Gabon), Lome (Togo), Luanda (Angola), Maputo (Mozambique), Mombasa (Kenya), Port Louis (Mauritius), and Tunis (Tunisia).

Dhaka is wedged between huge rivers like the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, with hundreds of tributaries swollen with increasing glacial melt from the Himalayan ranges as a result of soaring global temperatures.

"The elevation in Dhaka ranges between two and 13 metres above sea level, which means that even a slight rise in sea level is likely to engulf large parts of the city. Moreover, high urban growth rates and high urban densities have already made Dhaka more susceptible to human-induced environmental disasters," said the UN-Habitat report.
"The sheer number of people living in the city means that the negative consequences of climate change are likely to be felt by a large number of people, especially the urban poor who live in flood-prone and water-logged areas."

A total 634 million people in the world live in LECZ that lie at or below 10 metres above sea level, according to a recent report,Planet Prepare, by World Vision, a Christian relief, development and advocacy organisation. Although LECZ constitute only two percent of the earth's landmass, they contain 10 percent of its population and have a higher rate of urbanisation than the rest of the world.

Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the UN, notes his concern about the prospect of large-scale devastation in his foreword to the UN-Habitat report, saying: "Cities embody some of society's most pressing challenges, from pollution and disease to unemployment and lack of adequate shelter. But cities are also venues where rapid, dramatic change is not just possible but expected."

Dhaka is preparing for flood protection. The government, prompted by frequent flooding in the 1980s, has already completed embankments, reinforced concrete walls and pumping stations in the most densely populated part of the city.

The UN report cautioned that Dhaka's solutions should also take into consideration unresolved development problems, such as the growing slum population, which has doubled in the last decade and shows no signs of abating.

The World Vision report pointed out that other urban centres not physically challenged by global warming would also face tremendous challenges, with the possible influx of "environmental refugees" from affected cities.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has urged global greenhouse gas emission reductions of 50 percent to 85 percent by 2050, based on 2000 emissions, to avoid a 2°Celsius increase in global mean temperature.

Such an increase is expected to destroy 30 percent to 40 percent of all known species, generate bigger, fiercer and more frequent heat waves and droughts, and more intense weather events like floods and cyclones.

The IPCC and activists have called on the global community to focus on preventing global warming from crossing the perilous 2°C threshold, which requires keeping atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations below 350ppm (parts per million).

"The problem is, they [concentrations] already stand at 385ppm (2008), rising by 2ppm annually," said the World Vision report. "Since there are no rewind buttons for running down emitted greenhouse gas stocks, implicational reasoning suggests immediate and stringent emissions cuts."

Eminent scientists, such as James E. Hansen, who heads NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, are warning that even the 2-degree threshold may likely not be safe enough to avoid "global disaster".

IRIN