The Human Consciousness Now...Our World in the Midst of Becoming...to What? Observe, contemplate Now.
LONDON, Aug 31 2026 (IPS) - On 24 August, police sealed off access to Zambia’s courts, closed the day before the deadline for petitions to challenge the results of the 13 August presidential election. The judiciary’s top official cited security reasons, but the timing left little doubt that authorities meant to block the defeated candidate’s legal challenge.
Official results gave the incumbent, Hakainde Hichilema, 60.49 per cent of the vote, comfortably ahead of challenger Brian Mundubile’s 37.87 per cent. Some results from the concurrent National Assembly vote remain pending, but Hichilema’s United Party for National Development (UPND) has also won a commanding majority over Mundubile’s National Reconciliation Party for Unity and Prosperity, part of the opposition’s Tonse Alliance.
Mundubile rejected the presidential election result and vowed to contest it in court, but an election night police raid forced him into hiding. Officers killed former minister Mutotwe Kafwaya and arrested 11 other opposition figures, blaming an exchange of gunfire and accusing Mundubile’s party of possessing weapons and planning an insurgency.
Hichilema came to power in 2021 by comfortably defeating President Edgar Lungu, whose crackdown on civic freedoms led to a polarised and violent campaign. Hichilema promised democratic renewal, pledging to strengthen human rights and the rule of law. However, after some initial positive changes, he’s overseen a slide back to the kind of practices he once campaigned against.
Pre-election crackdown
Hichilema’s margin of victory suggests he’d likely have won anyway, but the ruling party stacked the odds further in its favour while penalising the opposition. European Union observers described an ‘uneven playing field’, with misuse of state resources in favour of the UPND, voter inducements including cash handouts, heavy pro-government bias in state media, self-censorship driven by restrictive laws and police restrictions on campaign events. They also flagged a heavy and intimidating military presence at counting locations, weak security in vote tabulation and counting and a six-hour suspension of counting on election night, after which local officials appeared to be taking instructions from Electoral Commission headquarters before announcing results.
Civil society had already raised concerns about the make-up of the Electoral Commission, believing some of its members were UPND supporters, and judicial independence, after Hichilema appointed numerous new judges from UPND stronghold regions.
In December, parliament approved a law changing the electoral system. It expanded the number of constituencies and introduced a more proportional system with reserved seats for women, young people and people with disabilities. Civil society’s objections centred on the lack of consultation and the speed of these major constitutional changes, which raised suspicions they were intended to benefit the UPND.
As the vote got closer, authorities blatantly targeted opposition politicians, including by using the draconian Public Order Act. Last October, police arrested 12 people, including an opposition member of parliament, when they took part in a meeting Mundubile was expected to attend at a private home, charging them with conduct likely to cause a breach of the peace and participation in an unlawful assembly. In February, police arrested 16 Tonse Alliance members on the same unlawful assembly charge.
Opposition politicians also faced arrest for what would once have counted as the normal cut and thrust of political debate. One of the weapons authorities used was the 2025 Cyber Security Act, which expanded their power to criminalise online commentary and criticism.
In January, police arrested opposition member of parliament Miles Sampa after he alleged by-election fraud. In February, they arrested National Democratic Congress leader Mambwe Zimba over a Facebook post depicting Hichilema in a coffin. In March, they arrested Socialist Party leader Fred M’membe over radio comments about Hichilema and the political controversy over funeral plans for Lungu, who died in 2025. All three spent time in detention before being released on bail.
The crackdown even reached an event that should have showcased Zambia for the right reasons. In April, just days before RightsCon, the world’s largest gathering on digital rights, was due to open in the capital, Lusaka, the government effectively cancelled it. They postponed it at too short notice for rescheduling. Over 2,600 people had planned to attend and some were already on their way. Authorities cited unspecified concerns about some speakers’ clearances and demanded more information on discussion topics. The government evidently didn’t want debate about issues it deemed controversial, including its human rights record. Zambian officials were also reportedly pressured by China, a key investor, over the planned participation of Taiwanese civil society representatives.
Time to restore freedoms
Zambians remain proud of their democracy, which has seen three peaceful handovers since multiparty elections returned in 1991. Hichilema should get democracy back on track by restoring all the freedoms that have been compromised. That starts with reversing regressive laws typically rushed through parliament with little consultation, including the Cyber Crimes Act and others that restrict online speech. The government must also commit to respecting media freedoms and letting the political opposition play its proper democratic role.
The government should replace the colonial-era Public Order Act. Hichilema vetoed its proposed replacement, the Public Gatherings Bill, passed by parliament in May. Civil society had raised concerns about the bill’s broad granting of discretionary powers to law enforcement officers and imposition of criminal sanctions. Zambia needs a law that allows peaceful protests and doesn’t criminalise organisers and participants. Civil society has also raised concerns about an NGO Bill that would grant the government extensive powers to regulate, suspend and dissolve civil society organisations. This bill must advance no further.
Three decades of peaceful transitions made Zambia a regional democratic beacon. Keeping it one requires a government that respects dissent, and a civil society free enough to make sure it does.
Andrew Firmin is CIVICUS Editor-in-Chief, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.
For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org
DAR ES SALAAM, Aug 31 2026 (IPS) - When the rains fail across Tanzania’s northern Maasai Steppe, herders drive their cattle farther in search of pasture and water.
Boreholes run low. Cattle lose weight, milk yields fall and families begin selling cows, often their main source of livelihood. If the dry spell persists, herds can die, leaving families facing hunger.
What is happening on the Maasai Steppe is part of a wider debate over how the world’s rangelands should be restored. At the UN desertification summit in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, governments backed a $1.2 billion programme to restore rangelands, alongside measures to repair degraded land and prepare for drought.
For African pastoralists, the question is whether that money will reach them before the next drought.
Governments, meanwhile, failed to seal a global drought agreement, pushing the dispute into another round of negotiations in Egypt in 2028.
The consequences are particularly serious in Africa, where millions depend on livestock for food and income. Restoring pasture could help pastoralists survive dry years, but it will not solve the problem if grazing routes disappear, drought warnings arrive too late or funds fail to reach the people managing the land.
“The $1.2 billion Rangelands Flagship Initiative is an important recognition that rangelands are not wastelands or marginal areas,” said Ephraim Mtengeti, Professor of Range Sciences at Sokoine University of Agriculture.
“They are productive ecosystems that support millions of people, livestock, biodiversity and important ecological functions. For Africa, where pastoralism remains central to rural livelihoods, giving these landscapes greater financial and political attention is long overdue.”
The 45 projects sit within a wider $1.3 billion programme covering land restoration and drought measures in 23 countries. About $644.5 million is new finance, while another $216 million had already been confirmed.
The pledge is substantial, but it is small compared with the scale of the funding gap. The UN Convention to Combat Desertification estimates that about $355 billion a year will be needed until 2030 to meet global land-restoration commitments. Current investment is about $77 billion.
That leaves a shortfall of roughly $278 billion a year.
Private finance accounts for only about 6% of restoration investment. Governments and development agencies are therefore looking to blended finance, using public money to make projects that might otherwise appear too risky more attractive to private investors.
Many of the benefits of restoring rangelands, however, are difficult to turn into financial returns.
Peter Bakker, president and chief executive of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, said companies were willing to invest but needed projects that could make money.
“Business does not lack appetite for resilient supply chains, secure water and productive soil – it lacks bankable projects, credible data and a fair share of the early risk,” he said.
Mtengeti agreed that private investment was needed but warned against judging restoration solely by the returns it could generate.
“The financing gap is enormous, so it is understandable that COP17 is looking towards private capital and blended finance,” he said.
“But investors will naturally look for financial returns, whereas many of the most important benefits of rangeland restoration — water security, biodiversity, carbon storage, food security and social stability — are public goods.”
Rangelands as Economic Infrastructure
Rangelands cover about 54% of the Earth’s land surface and support roughly 2 billion people, including 500 million pastoralists. They provide pasture for livestock while storing carbon, supporting biodiversity and helping regulate water.
Restoration could generate $4 to $6 for every dollar invested, rising to as much as $36 when wider public benefits are included.
Restoring rangelands in Africa cannot simply mean fencing off land or imposing farming models designed for settled communities.
Pastoralism depends on mobility. Herders move livestock as pasture and water shift, sometimes crossing national borders.
“Rangelands cannot be restored effectively by treating them like a conventional agricultural field,” Mtengeti said.
“These are dynamic ecosystems, and pastoral mobility is one of the mechanisms through which livestock production adapts to variable rainfall and pasture availability.”
The pressure on grazing land is also increasing. Farms, roads, conservation areas and settlements are taking up more dryland, leaving less room for herders. During drought, the pressure becomes acute as people and livestock crowd around the few remaining sources of grass and water.
“Drought does not respect political boundaries,” Mtengeti said. “Pastoral systems in East Africa are interconnected, and livestock movements often respond to ecological conditions rather than national borders.”
Who Gets the Money?
COP17 also highlighted a shift towards larger, landscape-wide projects rather than small, isolated conservation schemes.
They include Kenya’s TWENDE programme, locally led adaptation financing across Africa, the $35 million Herding for Health initiative and a $100 million African Development Bank programme covering the Zambezi River Basin.
Scale alone, however, will not guarantee better results. Money can still go astray when land rights are disputed, local authorities are weak or communities struggle to gain access to funds.
“Communities should not be treated merely as beneficiaries of projects designed somewhere else,” Mtengeti said.
“They have knowledge of their landscapes, their grazing patterns and how ecosystems respond to climatic variability. That knowledge must inform the design and implementation of restoration programmes.”
Access to international finance presents another obstacle.
“If international finance remains locked behind complicated procedures that local organisations cannot access, then some of the people most exposed to drought will continue to receive the least support,” Mtengeti said.
The Drought Gap
The failure to agree on a global drought agreement was one of COP17’s biggest setbacks. The issue had already been left unresolved at COP16. Governments remained divided over whether such an agreement should be legally binding, leaving the decision until 2028.
“The postponement of a global drought instrument is disappointing because drought is no longer an occasional shock that communities can simply recover from,” Mtengeti said.
“In many dryland areas, repeated droughts are eroding livestock assets, weakening household incomes and undermining the ecological foundation on which pastoral livelihoods depend.”
Governments do not have to wait for a global agreement. More than 70 countries now have national drought plans, compared with only three in 2013.
COP17 also launched the Drought Resilience Investment Facility, which aims to raise up to $400 million from public and private sources.
Finance will also have to be matched by preparedness. Early-warning systems, reliable data, functioning institutions and water infrastructure are crucial, as is acting before drought develops into a humanitarian emergency.
“Countries should not wait for a global instrument before strengthening their own drought preparedness and investing in anticipatory action,” Mtengeti said.
The deadlock over drought came despite progress elsewhere at the summit.
Joao Campari, global food and agriculture leader at WWF, said the summit had given greater prominence to rangelands, grasslands and nature-positive farming.
“Yet hope alone will not protect nature, limit climate change or put food on the table. COP17 has laid strong foundations, but the focus must now shift to implementation on the ground and supporting local communities to deliver lasting benefits for all,” he said.
Where Will the Money Come From?
Closing the funding gap will also require governments to change policies that continue to undermine land resilience.
The UNCCD estimates that about $2.4 trillion in public finance supports environmentally harmful subsidies. Redirecting even part of that money could dwarf many of the commitments announced in Ulaanbaatar.
Governments must also protect grazing corridors, strengthen community land rights and ensure that the people managing the land receive a meaningful share of investment.
“Healthy rangelands are economic infrastructure,” Mtengeti said.
“They support livestock production, food security, employment, water systems and biodiversity. When these landscapes degrade, the costs are eventually borne by households and governments through livestock losses, food insecurity, humanitarian assistance and environmental damage.”
For pastoralists, the outcome of COP17 points to a basic reality: rangelands cannot be treated as empty land waiting for a more profitable use. They are part of the economic infrastructure on which food supplies, livelihoods and climate resilience depend.
Mtengeti said the summit had moved rangelands higher up the international agenda but that the commitments would need to be followed by action in pastoral areas.
“COP17 should therefore be seen as a step forward, but not as a solution,” he said. “The financing commitments are encouraging, and the greater attention to rangelands is important. But Africa’s dryland communities need action that is predictable, locally grounded and delivered before drought becomes a crisis.”
When governments meet again in Egypt in 2028, the value of the Mongolian pledges will be judged by what has happened in the drylands: whether pasture has recovered, livestock can move safely, communities have gained access to finance and drought losses are falling.
For pastoralists, the pledges will ultimately be measured during the next drought, when they need pasture, water and support to keep their herds alive.
IPS UN Bureau Report
DHAKA, Bangladesh, Aug 31 2026 (IPS) - Bangladesh’s riverine and coastal chars have always been landscapes of movement, but climate change is making that movement more violent, frequent, and unequal. The shifting islands of the Jamuna, Brahmaputra, Padma, and other rivers now reveal how climate stress multiplies deprivation, weakens citizenship, and forces char dwellers to absorb the costs of a crisis they did little to create.
After years of researching and writing about Bangladesh’s chars, I see them not as marginal landscapes, but as frontline climate geographies. They show how river erosion becomes repeated displacement, flooding brings livelihood collapse, and administrative neglect heightens vulnerability. Char people rebuild, migrate, and diversify under extreme uncertainty, but their resilience should not be romanticized. It is being stretched by intensifying hazards and institutions still designed for fixed land, fixed addresses, and orderly poverty. This is why the issue should be framed not simply as adaptation to hazards, but as a question of rights. The central problem is not that char dwellers fail to cope with a moving river; it is that institutions repeatedly ask them to cope without secure recognition, services, or protection.
Mohammad Zaman
Chars are marginal because state planning treats them as temporary spaces for poor and landless people. Some estimates suggest that chars cover roughly 8% of Bangladesh’s land area and are home to 15 to 20 million people. For char communities, migration is not a rupture in char life; it is a recurring way of organizing and rebuilding, often annually. But climate change is turning mobility from strategy into necessity. For many char dwellers, migration may begin as seasonal labour, become repeated relocation, and finally harden into permanent detachment from land, kinship, and legal security.
In 2024, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre’s Bangladesh country profile, monsoon floods triggered 1.3 million movements, while its disaster displacement risk reporting records more than 21 million disaster displacements in Bangladesh between 2008 and 2024. Among char people, climate change is felt through household decisions made under pressure: whether to rebuild on the same island, move to another char, keep children in school, or migrate to Dhaka for work. These choices are rational and strategic, but the field of options is narrowing under climate stress, vulnerability, and social exclusion.
Migration from char areas also reflects intelligence and aspiration: young people leave for wages, education, electricity, phones, clinics, and futures beyond subsistence and uncertainty. The tragedy is that climate-stressed households often move without skills, savings, documents, safe housing, or labour protection. The river follows them into the garment line, the rickshaw garage, the brick kiln, the domestic workplace, and the rented slum room.
How should these heightened risks from flooding and displacement be addressed? Adaptation is necessary, but it is not enough. Raised plinths, early warnings, flood-resistant crops and community preparedness may save lives, yet adaptation without land rights, education, healthcare, social protection and safe migration routes becomes a way of managing dispossession. Climate change deepens vulnerability because it strikes people who already lack secure tenure, dependable services and political recognition.
In Bangladesh, climate policy should stop treating char dwellers as humanitarian exceptions and start treating them as political subjects. Public services must be redesigned for moving landscapes through boat schools, mobile clinics, digital civil registration, portable social protection, and weather-responsive transport. Land administration must recognize erosion and accretion, while migration should be planned as adaptation through skills training, safe housing, labour rights, and social insurance. Gender must be central to this agenda. Women and girls often carry these risks most directly, through interrupted schooling, unsafe travel for work or services, increased care burdens during floods, and reduced voice in decisions about land, migration, and relief. Policies that imagine the household as a single male-headed unit misread both vulnerability and agency.
The politics of the char is the politics of who counts in a warming world. Fixed maps assume that citizenship has a stable address and that development follows roads. Char life challenges those assumptions. It shows that climate vulnerability is produced not only by hazards, but by institutions unable or unwilling to recognize lives shaped by unstable land.
Bangladesh can praise char people for endurance, or it can confront the uncomfortable truth: the river will keep moving; that is its nature. But if the rights of char people move more slowly than the river, the failure is political. Their future will not be secured by teaching them to adapt endlessly to disappearance, but by ensuring that no citizen has to prove belonging on land that may not be there tomorrow.
The experience of Bangladesh’s char dwellers shows that climate change is not only an environmental crisis, but also a crisis of rights, recognition, and governance. River erosion, floods, and displacement become devastating because they intersect with insecure land tenure, weak services, gendered risks, and limited political voice. A just response must therefore go beyond short-term adaptation and treat char communities as full citizens whose mobility, livelihoods, and claims to belonging deserve protection in a warming and increasingly unstable world.
Dr. Mohammad Zaman has lived and conducted extensive field research in the Kazipur-Sirajganj chars and has written widely on char land tenure, livelihoods, and social organization. He is the lead editor, with Mustafa Alam as co-editor, of Living on the Edge: Char Dwellers in Bangladesh (Springer, 2021). He can be reached at mqzaman.bc@gmail.com.
IPS UN Bureau
TOKYO / ASTANA, Aug 31 2026 (IPS) - Across the vast steppe of northeastern Kazakhstan, the scars of the Cold War remain visible. At the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site, the Soviet Union conducted 456 nuclear tests between 1949 and 1989, exposing nearby communities to radiation and leaving health and environmental consequences that have endured across generations.
Semipalatinsk Former Nuclear Weapon Test site. Credit: Katsuhiro Asagiri
At a time when nuclear weapons are being reasserted rather than marginalized, Kazakhstan’s choice raises a basic question: Must national security ultimately depend on possessing them?
A Nuclear Test Site Closed by Public Pressure
In 1989, the Kazakh poet Olzhas Suleimenov helped launch the Nevada-Semipalatinsk anti-nuclear movement, linking the Soviet site with Nevada and highlighting the human costs of nuclear testing on both sides of the Cold War. Hundreds of thousands joined protests demanding an end to the tests.
Against that backdrop, then-President Nursultan Nazarbayev signed the decree closing Semipalatinsk on Aug. 29, 1991.
Kazakh civil movement activists gathered to demand a nuclear test ban at the Semipalatinsk test site in August 1989. Credit: armscontrol.org
Official portrait of Kassym-Jomart Tokayev. Credit: President of the Republic of Kazakhstan
From Nuclear Victim to Disarmament Advocate
Kazakhstan then sought to turn the experience of Semipalatinsk into a broader disarmament agenda.
It ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty and helped establish the Central Asian Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone with Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. In 2009, at Kazakhstan’s initiative, the U.N. General Assembly designated Aug. 29 as the International Day against Nuclear Tests.
Kazakhstan also hosts facilities in the global system for detecting nuclear explosions, while the International Atomic Energy Agency operates a Low Enriched Uranium Bank in Oskemen to reduce incentives for countries to develop their own enrichment capabilities.
Looking Beyond Warhead Numbers
LEU Bank Storage Facility. Credit: Katsuhiro Asagiri
Around Semipalatinsk, concerns about health and environmental damage persist decades after testing ended. That experience has shaped Kazakhstan’s role in the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, or TPNW, where it has stressed victim assistance and environmental remediation as well as prohibition.
Together with Kiribati, another country deeply affected by nuclear testing, Kazakhstan has supported efforts to create an international funding mechanism for those purposes.
The principle goes beyond preventing future use: the international community also bears responsibilities for harm already inflicted. Semipalatinsk, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Marshall Islands and Kiribati are separated by geography and history but connected by the human cost of the nuclear age.
Kazakhstan and the Role of Civil Society
Credit: Katsuhiro Asagiri, Multimedia Director of INPS Japan
Since independence, Kazakhstan has worked with civil society organizations, humanitarian institutions, researchers, survivors, medical experts, young people and faith-based groups to keep the human consequences of nuclear weapons in international debate.
Among them is Soka Gakkai International (SGI), which has long advocated nuclear abolition as a question of human survival and dignity.
At the first Meeting of States Parties to the TPNW in Vienna in 2022, Kazakhstan and Kiribati joined the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and SGI in organizing a side event on victim assistance and environmental remediation.
In 2023, Kazakhstan’s diplomatic mission, SGI and the Center for International Security and Policy (CISP) organized another Vienna event on the consequences of nuclear testing at Semipalatinsk, including testimony from younger generations living with its legacy. Later that year in Astana, Kazakhstan’s Foreign Ministry and CISP brought together SGI, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), the International Committee of the Red Cross and others for a conference marking the International Day against Nuclear Tests.
Mr. Hirotsugu Terasaki, Chief Executive Director of SGI Peace Center. Credit: Katsuhiro Asagiri, Multimedia Director of INPS Japan
“Many people in Kazakhstan share the same strong desire for nuclear disarmament because they know firsthand the reality of nuclear suffering,” Terasaki told INPS Japan, drawing a parallel with the aspirations of people in Japan shaped by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
His observation points to a broader dimension of Kazakhstan’s engagement with civil society: cooperation built not only around diplomatic objectives, but also around shared historical experience, humanitarian concerns and a determination to prevent future generations from enduring similar suffering.
These initiatives reflect a broader pattern: states negotiate treaties and security arrangements, while civil society brings survivors’ testimony, medical evidence, environmental damage and intergenerational responsibility into the discussion. For Kazakhstan, whose closure of Semipalatinsk was shaped by a popular anti-nuclear movement, such cooperation is part of the foundation of its disarmament diplomacy.
A Group photo of participants of the regional conference on the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons and nuclear-free-zone in Central Asia held on August 29, 2023. Credit: Jibek Joly TV Channel
A Nuclear Connection With Japan
Kazakhstan’s relationship with Japan is also shaped by a shared history of nuclear suffering.
Kazakhstan-Japan
Japan also co-sponsored the U.N. resolution establishing Aug. 29 as the International Day against Nuclear Tests and has worked with Kazakhstan to promote the entry into force of the CTBT.
A World Moving in the Opposite Direction
The international environment surrounding the 35th anniversary is bleak.
More than 10,000 nuclear warheads remain worldwide, and major nuclear powers continue to modernize their arsenals. With New START gone, the United States and Russia no longer operate under a comprehensive, legally binding framework limiting their strategic nuclear forces.
The NPT Review Conference ended in May without a final document, the third consecutive review cycle to end without substantive consensus. The CTBT, opened for signature three decades ago and supported by nearly the entire international community, has still not entered into force.
Memory Is Not Enough
Writing in The Astana Times ahead of the anniversary, Dr. Dauren Aben of the Kazakhstan Institute for Strategic Studies described the lesson of Semipalatinsk in simple terms: not merely to remember, but to “remember and act.”
Dauren Abenuly Aben. Credit: KazISS
In 1991, Kazakhstan could preserve the nuclear arsenal it inherited as a symbol of national power, or give it up. It chose the second.
That decision did not eliminate nuclear weapons or guarantee irreversible disarmament. Today, the world may instead be entering a new era of nuclear competition.
But one fact remains: a state that had the opportunity to become a nuclear power chose not to do so.
Over the next 35 years, Kazakhstan connected that choice to nuclear-weapon-free zones, the global test ban, the TPNW, victim assistance and environmental remediation. Its cooperation with SGI and a broad range of civil society organizations forms part of that history.
A view of the Headquarters of the United Nations in New York as seen from the north of the UN site. Credit: UN Photo/Yutaka Nagata
Even so, the question posed by the treaty increasingly resembles the question posed by Kazakhstan’s experience:
Does possessing nuclear weapons make nations safer?
Or does genuine security ultimately require a world in which nuclear weapons no longer exist?
Across the former Semipalatinsk testing grounds, traces of the explosions remain — reminders of what humanity has already done with nuclear weapons.
But 35 years ago, Kazakhstan gave the site another meaning: evidence that a country could move from building and testing nuclear weapons toward a deliberate decision to reject them.
The question now is whether the rest of the world still has the political will to make the same choice.
This article is brought to you by INPS Japan and Soka Gakkai International, in consultative status with UN ECOSOC.
IPS UN Bureau
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 28 2026 (IPS) - Following 42 consecutive days without a new confirmed case, The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO) have announced the end of the Ebola outbreak in Uganda.
The outbreak began in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Uganda in May and was caused by a rare strain of the Ebola virus known as the Bundibugyo species. There are no approved vaccines or therapeutics against the Bundibugyo strain, though several are currently being trialed in the DRC, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The virus is highly contagious and can still be transmitted after an infected person has died.
Uganda’s last patient, whose infection was imported, was discharged from care on 16 July 2026, and no new cases have been reported since.
“Uganda has shown that Ebola can be stopped when leadership acts decisively, communities are trusted and public health systems reach people quickly,” said H.E. Dr Jean Kaseya, Director-General of Africa CDC.
“The outbreak is the fastest-growing Ebola epidemic on record. It is growing faster and wider than the response to contain it. But it can be stopped,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres during a press stakeout on August 27. Guterres referenced the recently-appointed UN Senior Ebola Coordinator, Julien Harneis, who is working with regional partners to strengthen community engagement, surveillance, treatment, safe burials and measures to contain the virus. The UN is also reinforcing preparedness and coordination with South Sudan and the Central African Republic to prevent further cross-border transmission.
Additionally, to address the challenge of limited health infrastructure and laboratory services, the WHO, with funding support from the African Development Bank (AfDB), has handed over a Truck-Mounted Mobile Biosafety Level 3 Laboratory to the Government of Uganda in efforts to strengthen Uganda’s public health response capacity and support post-outbreak preparedness.
The mobile laboratory will support rapid, field-based diagnostic testing during outbreaks, reducing the time required to transport samples to centralized testing facilities and accelerating public health decision-making. The laboratory is expected to improve access to testing in hard-to-reach areas and at outbreak epicenters, where timely diagnosis is critical to containing disease transmission.
Contrary to Uganda, in the DRC, the devastation of the Ebola outbreak continues to what has now become the country’s deadliest public health crisis. As of August 25th, 5,713 cases have been confirmed, claiming 2,744 lives. About 500 new cases are being reported every week, with women and children being severely affected.
Emmanuel Kalinde, Child Protection Manager in Ituri, said the crisis had upended children’s lives, leaving many to grieve loved ones while facing conflict and displacement. He stressed that sustained support was essential to help them heal and regain hope.
The WHO continues to advise against travel and trade restrictions related to Ebola outbreaks. However, despite potential risks, they do not recommend suspending flights, closing borders, or denying entry to travellers from affected countries.
IPS UN Bureau Report
Aug 28 2026 (IPS) -
CIVICUS discusses Sweden’s new migration laws with John Stauffer, legal director and deputy executive director of Civil Rights Defenders, a Swedish civil society organisation that acts as a civil rights watchdog at home and supports human rights defenders in repressive contexts worldwide.
John Stauffer
What are the main changes to Sweden’s immigration laws?
The biggest change is that permanent residence will no longer be available for people with asylum status. Under the new rules, they will only be granted temporary residence permits.
This is being paired with a new law on ‘good behaviour’ for some categories of migrants, which lets the authorities refuse or revoke a permit over conduct that is not necessarily criminal, such as unpaid debts or undeclared work. And it does not only apply to new applications. Permits already granted can be reviewed too.
Citizenship has been tightened along the same lines. Habitual residence requirements have risen from five to eight years and applicants now have to provide proof of income and pass a knowledge test, including a language test. In relation to citizenship, the requirements on ‘good behaviour’ have become stricter.
Then there is the law on information sharing between government authorities, known as the snitch law. It obliges officials who handle benefits, debt enforcement, pensions, prisons and probation, taxes and unemployment services to report undocumented migrants to the police.
All this arrives at the same time as the European Union (EU) Migration Pact, which Sweden has implemented through national legislation. It came into force on 12 June and has tightened the conditions further. It is a package of 10 laws that harmonises how asylum claims are handled across the EU, with faster procedures for people considered unlikely to qualify for protection. In implementing the pact, Sweden has gone further than necessary to limit the rights of asylum seekers, for example on access to legal representation in proceedings. An expressed goal of the government is to have the most restrictive asylum laws possible under EU law.
Who is most affected by these laws?
Asylum seekers, people without citizenship and undocumented migrants are those most hit by these laws, but their reach is wider than it looks.
Under the snitch law, healthcare staff and teachers are not obliged to report undocumented migrants, but they may end up doing so indirectly. If you give birth in a hospital, the hospital must notify the tax authority that a child has been born, and the tax authority is then obliged to pass that on to the police. We already see that undocumented migrants avoid contact with healthcare providers, which severely impacts their right to health.
Then there are young people who have lived in Sweden their whole lives, with parents who came, for example, as asylum seekers. They will be assessed under the new regime once they turn 18 and, if they are seen not to have grounds for a residence permit of their own, they may be sent to a country where they have never lived.
Ultimately, the broader effect of these laws is to erode trust. Asylum seekers and, more broadly, people with a migrant background lose confidence in government authorities. That confidence has always been a cornerstone of our democracy, and one we have been proud of. Once that trust goes, it is not just the government that loses out. It is Swedish society as a whole.
What does this mean for freedoms of assembly and expression?
The good behaviour law means we are no longer all equal before the law. Something a Swedish citizen can say or do without any legal consequence can cost a residence permit holder their right to stay.
What makes this worse is that nobody knows exactly where the line falls. Legal scholars have described these laws as very broad, vague and difficult to apply in practice, so people have no way of telling in advance what might be used against them.
That uncertainty produces a chilling effect on people’s willingness to use their rights. Permit holders who are not citizens are withdrawing from public debate. They stop voicing their views and stay away from protests, because they fear that joining a pro-Palestine march or a climate protest, for example, might cost them their permit. We are, in fact, creating a two-tier system where the lives of non-citizens will be characterised by uncertainty and limited access to rights, while citizens enjoy full rights.
What’s driving these changes?
Sweden used to have comparatively liberal migration laws, but since large numbers of asylum seekers arrived in Europe in 2015, immigration laws have become more and more restrictive. This has intensified particularly since the current centre-right government came to power four years ago with the support of a far-right party, and with the stated goal of reducing the number of asylum seekers and making more migrants leave Sweden, voluntarily or by force. Agreements with repressive regimes to receive their citizens, repatriation grants and measures that will make the lives of migrants in Sweden more uncertain are means to achieve these goals.
The government has been building a narrative that connects migration to rising rates of violent crime. Using that as a justification, it has tried to build strong support for stricter migration policies and at the same time has pushed more repressive policies to combat crime, including greater possibilities to revoke residence permits for migrants who have committed crimes, including less serious crimes.
As we approach the September election, it remains to be seen whether people truly support this model. The largest opposition party, the Social Democrats, have, however, supported many of the new immigration policies. What a left-wing government would mean for asylum seekers is still to be seen. Other countries, particularly France and Germany, are also watching to see how it plays out, and some may adopt similar measures if they see results they regard as positive.
What can civil society do?
Civil Rights Defenders works to influence national legislation and the public debate, to shift how migration is understood and give a more nuanced picture of it. We currently do not have the capacity to generally support asylum seekers and migrants through legal advice, but other organisations do. However, we engage in strategic litigation, taking cases to oversight bodies, courts and the European Court of Human Rights to shape how these laws are implemented.
But our resources are limited, and they are about to be stretched much further. One consequence of the way Sweden is implementing the EU Migration Pact is that the legal support asylum seekers are entitled to through the public scheme has been cut back drastically. The people who lose that support will turn to us and other organisations for support, and Swedish civil society doesn’t currently have the capacity to meet their needs.
CIVICUS interviews a wide range of civil society activists, experts and leaders to gather diverse perspectives on civil society action and current issues for publication on its CIVICUS Lens platform. The views expressed in interviews are the interviewees’ and do not necessarily reflect those of CIVICUS. Publication does not imply endorsement of interviewees or the organisations they represent.
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SEE ALSO
Europe: a race to the bottom on migrants’ rights CIVICUS Lens 21.Aug.2026
Migration: Cruelty as policy CIVICUS | 2026 State of Civil Society Report
Italy: ‘White supremacist concepts are entering mainstream political discourse on migration’ CIVICUS Lens | Interview with Eleonora Celoria 22.Mar.2026
OTTAWA, Canada, Aug 28 2026 (IPS) - This week is World Water Week, the annual conference of governments, business, and civil society on building a water-secure future as global population, climate disruptions, and water demand increase. In Washington, it’s also Water Resources Development Act season, when every two years the US Congress reauthorizes the legilslation that funds US drinking water, wastewater systems, and flood risk management projects.
Water security ought to be something everyone can agree on, and there are long traditions of bipartisanship in past WRDA reauthorizations, and of diversity and inclusiveness in World Water Week conferences. But these days, water is increasingly a trigger for division, from the public outcry over data center water usage to anti-abortion activists introducing legislation to designate the abortion medication mifepristone as a water pollutant and get the US Environmental Protection Agency to regulate it, which is another way to restrict access to it.
For the record, mifepristone is no threat to waterways. Research overwhelmingly confirms its safety and efficacy, and a Food and Drug Administration assessment found its environmental accumulation in water was less than one part per billion. The lone study alleging mifepristone is a water pollutant is junk science. It used a debunked testing method and was published in a journal run by anti-abortion activists, and then cited by other anti-abortion activists.
While the mifepristone water scare is clearly disinformation, it’s so pointedly backwards that it points up an important truth: it isn’t abortion medication that threatens water security; on the contrary, it’s attacks on it and on family planning in general that pose a real threat.
There are several reasons for this. If family planning access is curtailed or cut off and birthrates rise, so will water demand and water stress. It will be worse in places with faster population growth, and worse globally for women and girls, who are the ones who have to collect the water in 80% of households experiencing shortages. Over 2 billion people lack safely managed drinking water. Women and girls suffer disproportionately from water shortages, yet they are generally excluded from decision making bodies or leadership positions that would give them a say in managing water.
In general, research shows that where gender disparities are high, women have more babies, population grows faster, and water scarcity gets worse. But the reverse is also true: where there is investment in and access to comprehensive family planning, and where women and girls are more empowered and included in decision making about managing water resources, over time birth rates decline, water stress eases, and water resiliency grows.
It ought to be obvious that population trends, changing demographics, and urbanization influence demand for water, food, energy, and land. Yet they are strangely absent from discourse on managing environment resources, including water governance. Ditto for gender inequality, which has a strong bearing on population growth.
The UN warns of “living beyond our hydrological means” amid water crisis and reaching “global water bankruptcy,” where water degradation has largely become irreversible. Population and gender issues are not controlling factors in this per se, as their impacts depend on patterns of production and consumption, technology, inequality and governanceThe same number of people can have radically different environmental footprints depending on where and how they live.
But population trends and gender equity are still important variables in how we use water and other resources that planners should not ignore. As human numbers and consumption levels rise, our ecological footprint, including water consumption, has become overwhelming and unsustainable.
This year, the Earth as a whole reached “overshoot day” – the day past which we’re consuming more in a given year than the Earth’s resources can regenerate — on July 30. The U.S. reached it March 14.
Climate change is intensifying drought, altering precipitation and snowpack, putting pressure on groundwater and surface water. For xample, fast regional population growth and development have stressed the Colorado River, which supplies roughly 40 million people and now faces severe and persistent shortages. In other water-stressed regions of the US, agriculture is the biggest consumer of shrinking water resources. The Ogallala Aquifer, for example, is getting depleted faster than it can naturally recharge.
Population dynamics are part of this complex picture. Water resources are embedded in an intricate web of human and ecological interaction. Water governance needs to take a broad, holistic view to understand the nexus of biodiversity, food production, and human needs and health as part of the same interconnected system of planetary health. Within that, managing water requires considering how population trends, human behavior, gender equity, technology, and human-caused climate change influence water systems.
The last thing policymakers should be doing is demonizing family planning as some kind of threat to the water supply. Reproductive health services are an intrinsic matter of human right, but they have critical environmental co-benefits, too, including easing population pressures on overtaxed water resources.
Managing water is not just about pipes and pumps; it’s about complex interactions between humans and ecosystems, managing them so they respect ecological limits as well as human rights and equity, which ultimately are all part of the same complex web. Water connects everything. Policymaking should too.
Céline Delacroix is adjunct professor at the University of Ottawa’s School of Health Sciences, a Senior Fellow with the Population Institute, and Director of the FP/Earth Project.
IPS UN Bureau