The Human Consciousness Now...Our World in the Midst of Becoming...to What? Observe, contemplate Now.
Oct 29 2026 (IPS) -
CIVICUS discusses voter suppression ahead of the USA’s 2026 midterm elections with Aklima Khondoker, an Atlanta-based civil and voting rights attorney, civil society organisation executive and founder and principal of Atabey Strategies, a consultancy firm that advises civil society organisations on democracy and electoral participation.
Aklima Khondoker
How is the Trump administration changing the way elections are run?
President Trump has called for ‘nationalising’ elections, which means centralising election control within the federal government, giving his administration more control over who can vote, who receives a mail ballot and how election officials do their jobs. Trump is using the federal government to upend how elections are run. His March 2026 executive order required federal agencies to compile citizenship lists for states and instructed the Justice Department to prioritise investigations of election officials who issue ballots to people deemed ineligible. The order also directed the Postal Service to develop new mail ballot rules, including a federal enrolment system that could determine whether a voter’s postal ballot is delivered. Meanwhile, the Justice Department has demanded state voter data. The administration says these measures protect election integrity. Yet integrity requires accurate records and fair administration free of political pressure. Using disputed data to question eligible voters and threatening officials with investigation can undermine both and risk wrongful exclusion.
This creates serious constitutional tensions. The Constitution assigns states responsibility for running elections and gives Congress, not the president, the power to change the rules by law. The Supreme Court has allowed parts of the executive order to take effect on procedural grounds, without ruling on their legality. However, it has blocked the new postal ballot rules from applying in the midterms.
Democracy depends on people being able to register, get clear information and cast a ballot that will count. Rights can be hollowed out one procedure at a time, each change defended as technical or necessary, until they survive in name only. Erosion of this kind works like a slow boil, making each new restriction feel ordinary. A safeguard is weakened here, a group pushed to the margins there. The danger is that the rest of us grow accustomed to the heat and call it normal, while power moves further from the public it’s meant to serve.
What does the Supreme Court’s ruling on postal ballot deadlines mean for the midterms?
It means states can keep counting mail ballots that arrive after election day as long as they were posted on time. The case concerned Mississippi, one of several states that allow this, which gives ballots up to five business days to arrive. The Republican National Committee and the Libertarian Party of Mississippi argued that federal law requires ballots to be received by election day. Had the Supreme Court agreed, all these grace periods could have fallen, and the practical effect would have been to discard eligible voters’ ballots because of postal delays beyond their control. That’s voter suppression in practice.
But the ruling leaves states free to set their own rules and doesn’t require any state to offer a grace period, so voters face different deadlines depending on where they live. Someone can post a ballot on time and still be caught out by postal delays or other barriers. And voting by mail matters. The pandemic showed its value by letting people vote without in-person exposure, and many voters with disabilities still depend on it.
To be clear, postal voting is safe. For over two decades, Oregon has mailed ballots to active registered voters, who can return them by mail or drop box. From 2000 to 2019, around 61 million ballots were cast there and there were only 38 criminal convictions for voter fraud. In Georgia, amid the Trump campaign’s fraud claims after the 2020 election, a Republican-led audit of a random sample of 15,118 absentee ballot envelopes found no fraudulent ballots. Years of investigations have not substantiated claims of widespread or outcome-changing mail ballot fraud.
What pressure do election officials face from federal authorities?
They face federal demands, on tight deadlines and under threat of legal action, to withhold the ballots of voters whose citizenship is questioned. In California, the Justice Department gave officials 48 hours to review a list of voters on a password-protected drive, without disclosing how many people were on it. It demanded that ballots not yet sent to these voters be withheld until their citizenship was confirmed and that returned ballots be set aside if officials couldn’t verify it. It threatened emergency legal action if they didn’t comply.
The task involves far more than a database search. Officials must check whether records are accurate, coordinate across state and county offices and protect eligible voters’ ballots, all as the election approaches. California has 23.16 million registered voters. Los Angeles County alone had about 5.89 million in its June primary, in which over 80 per cent of ballots were cast by mail. Days after the vote, the county still had around 355,000 mail ballots to process. That’s the ordinary work. The 48-hour deadline lands on top of it.
Election workers also pay a personal price. After the 2020 election, some were falsely accused of fraud, treated as political enemies and subjected to racist threats.
Which voters are most likely to be shut out?
Those asked to spend the most time, money or effort proving they belong at the ballot box are the most likely to be excluded, including Black voters and those from other communities of colour, Native voters, people with disabilities, naturalised citizens caught in record mismatches and people with felony convictions. Exclusion doesn’t always arrive with a sign saying ‘you can’t vote’. It can come as an inaccessible polling place, an address that doesn’t match the one on an ID, a database error or a confusing deadline.
This kind of exclusion has a long history. The 15th Amendment to the Constitution promised Black men the vote. But after Reconstruction, the period following the Civil War, southern states used discriminatory laws, grandfather clauses, literacy tests, poll taxes, intimidation and violence to push newly enfranchised Black voters out of political life. While today’s barriers are not a replay of the Jim Crow era, that history shows how administrative rules can produce profoundly unequal consequences.
Eligible citizens whose records are incomplete or outdated, including naturalised citizens, risk being wrongly flagged as ineligible. If their citizenship can’t be confirmed quickly, their ballot may be withheld while they face a rushed demand to prove they belong. That can cost them their vote, and it can deter other eligible voters from taking part. The danger is real enough that on 9 October, a federal judge struck down as unlawful a Justice Department policy of cross-checking voter rolls against federal records, citing the risk that outdated federal records could mark eligible citizens as ineligible.
In 2024, an estimated four million Americans were barred from voting because of a felony conviction. Around 40 per cent had served their full sentences but still could not vote. This is ‘civil death’. People who live in a community, raise families and work alongside their neighbours have no say in the decisions that govern their lives.
Accessibility also determines whether voters with disabilities can participate independently and safely. In a national study of the 2020 election, 18 per cent of voters with disabilities who voted in person reported difficulty, compared with five per cent of those who voted by mail.
The representatives voters choose make decisions on the cost of living, education, healthcare and the future of democracy itself. When the people most affected by those decisions face the hardest path to the ballot, their interests become easier to ignore.
How is civil society protecting voting rights ahead of the midterms?
Civil society groups make a constitutional right reachable. They translate changing rules into clear guidance, connect voters with legal help, monitor the process, document problems and challenge unlawful barriers. Most voters will never read a court filing or an election observation report, but they may call a hotline because their name is not on the rolls, ask a volunteer what to do when a ballot is challenged or rely on a trained observer to document what happened at a polling place.
The Election Protection coalition brings together over 300 local, state-level and national organisations, and its trained volunteers help voters by phone or text. Observers witness and document the process so public confidence rests on evidence, not rumour.
Around the world, civil society groups are often among the first to document exclusion and defend civic space when governments restrict it. Contexts differ, but the lesson travels: participation does not protect itself. It takes organised people, acting together, to make sure that voters are heard.
What safeguards are needed to protect votes?
Safeguards begin with adequately funded election offices, clear rules announced well in advance, accessible ways to vote, and fair notice and time to fix registration problems. The right to vote means little if a voter can’t reach the polling place, understand the instructions, correct a registration error or get help without fear. Voter roll maintenance, which federal law requires to be uniform and non-discriminatory, should protect eligible voters from wrongful removal instead of leaving them scrambling to prove they belong.
Vote counting must also be transparent, with documented ballot handling, open audits and clear public explanations of the process. Voters, election workers and those who help people vote must be protected from intimidation and threats. The Voting Rights Act, the landmark law against racial discrimination in voting, must be strengthened and fully enforced. Its protections must cover every stage at which someone can be denied the vote or an equal voice, including registering, casting a ballot and having it counted. They must also guarantee language access and assistance for voters who need them. These safeguards are how we stop a slow erosion of rights from becoming a democratic rupture.
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.
GET IN TOUCH
Website
Aklima Khondoker/LinkedIn
Aklima Khondoker/Twitter
SEE ALSO
Democracy: an enduring aspiration CIVICUS | State of Civil Society Report 2026
US democracy under siege CIVICUS Lens 20.May.2026
USA: ‘The challenges have never been greater, but civil society’s capacity to respond has never been higher’ CIVICUS Lens | Interview with Lauren Prather 05.May.2026
URBANA, Illinois, US, Oct 28 2026 (IPS) - Recently, countries around the world, including the United States of America, celebrated the United Nations 2026 World Food Day. This year’s theme, “Innovate Today. Nourish Tomorrow,” highlighted how efforts to foster innovation and forward-thinking solutions can help to ensure that everyone in our world has access to sufficient, diverse, safe, and nutritious foods while safeguarding the planet for future generations.
But realizing this vision and developing forward-thinking solutions to help nourish 9 billion people including the 645 million people who still face hunger, requires recognizing and investing in research on emerging agricultural challenges, specifically those that remain overlooked and underestimated.
Many of the currently grown agricultural crop varieties cannot withstand flooding and crop and yield losses of up to 100 percent have been reported both nationally and globally. Crops and yield losses arising because of flooding translate into economic losses and ultimately food insecurity
Arguably, flooding is one of the emerging yet underestimated and underappreciated threats to important agricultural crops, including rice and corn, and to food security, which has increased in frequency and intensity in recent years because of climate change.
Globally, between 2008 and 2018, according to a Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations report, flooding was ranked as the second driving factor resulting on crop production losses.
Flooding deprives soil and plant roots of oxygen, a necessary ingredient for all plant-sustaining life processes, including water uptake, respiration, and photosynthesis. Consequently, plants’ cellular, physiological, metabolic, and biochemical processes are disrupted, impacted, and impaired. Without oxygen, plants’ growth and development is impacted, and if flooding persists for days, they suffocate and die.
Sadly, many of the currently grown agricultural crop varieties cannot withstand flooding and crop and yield losses of up to 100 percent have been reported both nationally and globally. Crops and yield losses arising because of flooding translate into economic losses and ultimately food insecurity.
Alarmingly, flooding also negatively impacts soil biology, chemistry, functioning, quality, and microbial communities while disrupting the many beneficial relationships plants form with microbes, relationships that help plants deal with other stressors and promote growth and resilience.
Concerningly, flooding is a complex, sequential plant stressor, and its negative impacts on crops persist even after floodwaters recede. After floodwater subsides, agricultural crops enter the second phase of flooding stress, referred to as the post-flooding stress phase.
During the post-flooding stress phase, plants face additional stresses, including reoxygenation and dehydration, impaired root function, and nutritional deficiencies due to altered nutrient uptake. At the same time, plants are vulnerable to pathogens, diseases, and pests, threats that can collectively lead to agricultural crop losses.
The good news, however, is that science, research, and scientific discoveries can provide the forward-thinking solutions needed to safeguard our food systems against emerging threats.
But for research to provide these solutions, researchers working to address these questions must be funded.
Take the case of flooding. With funding and investments, researchers can pursue multiple research pathways to understand flooding while also pursuing bold and innovative ideas with the goal of developing and advancing science-based solutions to mitigate the negative and detrimental impacts flooding has on agricultural crops and soils that underpin plant and ecosystem health.
First, scientists can build a comprehensive understanding of flooding, including discovering the many strategies plants use to resist and recover from flooding and post-flooding stress.
Second, researchers can pursue both short- and long-term field-based experiments that incorporate thousands of crop varieties, including wild varieties, across different soil types to establish a more comprehensive understanding of flooding and post-flooding impacts on plant and soil health, biology, chemistry, and microbes, as well as the legacy and cascading effects of flooding.
Concurrently, this research can identify microbial taxa, communities, functions, and traits that improve flooding tolerance. Additionally, researchers can work to determine whether the current management practices that have been put in place to protect soil health and help plants resist biotic and abiotic threats, including regenerative practices, are keeping pace with intensifying flooding events.
Third and most importantly, with funding, scientists from multiple disciplines, including plant biology, entomology, engineering, agronomy, microbial ecology, predictive modelling, breeding, and soil health biology, can collaborate to design innovative solutions and accelerate the discovery of new solutions to flooding.
Ultimately, mitigating threats like flooding that could derail and undermine progress toward building climate-resilient crops and improving soil health and biology requires a comprehensive understanding of flooding and its impact on soil health, biology, and plants.
With sufficient funding and investment, scientists, in collaboration with stakeholders, can develop transformative solutions to address flooding and fulfill 2026 World Food Day theme “Innovate today. Nourish tomorrow.” Time is of the essence.
Esther Ngumbi, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Entomology at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign.
GENEVA, Oct 28 2026 (IPS) - Governments today face an extraordinarily difficult set of tasks: cutting emissions, protecting nature, reducing pollution, creating jobs, strengthening economies, and improving people’s health, all while public finances remain under pressure.
Sheila Aggarwal-Khan
For much of my career, I have worked at the intersection of industry, the economy, and the environment. One lesson has become increasingly clear to me over the decades: the greatest gains come when chemical safety is built into economic and industrial decisions from the outset, rather than addressed only after harm has occurred. The global construction sector makes this particularly clear; chemicals and materials selected today can remain in buildings for decades. Safer choices at the design stage can prevent risks that otherwise become costly and difficult to manage decades later.
At the first International Conference of the Global Framework on Chemicals, taking place in Geneva this November, this lesson will come to the fore as governments, industry, workers, scientists, and civil society, including NGOs, consider how to accelerate implementation across the full life cycle of chemicals and products through sectors where change can happen at scale.
This matters because managing chemicals one substance at a time – while essential in some cases – cannot be the full strategy.
Agriculture offers a clear example. Under the Framework, stakeholders have committed to take effective measures by 2035 to phase out highly hazardous pesticides where risks remain unmanaged, and where safer and affordable alternatives are available. A new Global Alliance on Highly Hazardous Pesticides aims to turn that commitment into coordinated action, while projects supported by the Global Framework on Chemicals Fund are already helping farmers in East and West Africa move towards safer approaches.
Textiles offer another example. Argentina is testing a digital product information system that allows chemical information to move with products through the value chain. That kind of transparency can help businesses identify hazardous inputs, exposure risks, the liability that can come with that, and then choose safer alternatives and determine whether fabrics can be safely used, reused or recycled.
Exposure risks cannot be separated from the economic systems in which chemicals are used. This is also why chemicals policy cannot be driven by single ministries. Agriculture, environment, industry, health, labour, trade, and fiscal policies all influence which chemicals are used, how products are made, traded, and whether safer alternatives can compete.
The objective is not more bureaucracy. It is greater coherence in which multiple, often competing objectives across sectors, can be discussed together to find solutions that work.
Governments have a particularly important role to play in creating the conditions in which better solutions can compete and scale. Clear regulation can give businesses confidence to invest in safer alternatives. Better information can move through supply chains. Industrial and fiscal policies can support cleaner production, while chemical safety and the safety of the sectors in which chemicals are used—from agriculture, to construction, to electronics, and textiles-can be considered alongside circularity, competitiveness, jobs, and health from the outset.
The economic case for doing so is strong. The global chemicals market was valued at roughly US$5 trillion in 2017 and projected to double by 2030. A 2023 study estimated that lead exposure alone was associated with trillions of dollars in global economic losses in 2019.
Countries building industries today also have an opportunity to avoid the costly legacies inherited by economies that industrialized first as they can leapfrog to clean, prosperous economies without having to go through an era comprising pollution, health and environment impacts, and clean up. Strong institutions, modern chemicals legislation, safer technologies, and green and sustainable chemistry can help countries build competitive industries without locking in the same liabilities.
Finance, of course, is the engine of implementation. Incentivizing industries towards safer chemicals, safer products and production practices, strengthening national chemicals management systems, and scaling safer alternatives all require investment. The way in which public finances can leverage private investment, the type of fiscal policy that incentivizes these investments, and the right enabling regulatory environment, can make this journey viable. Unlocking domestic resources in this way, coupled with funding from financing mechanisms such as the Global Environment Facility and the Global Framework on Chemicals Fund and private investment all have a role.
The challenge is therefore bigger than only managing a longer and longer list of harmful chemicals. It is to make chemical and product safety part of how whole sectors grow, innovate, and compete.
If we can get that right, safer chemistry can become part of how stronger economies are built, with safety built in from the start for people and planet.
Sheila Aggarwal-Khan is Director of the UNEP Industry & Economy Division
IPS UN Bureau
OSLO, Norway, Oct 28 2026 (IPS) - A global boycott of Antarctic krill products is gathering support. As a Norwegian, I want my country – the world’s largest krill-fishing nation – to change course when it comes to protecting Antarctica.
Scientists, explorers and ocean advocates are urging consumers to stop buying supplements and pet food containing Antarctic krill and to avoid farmed fish raised on feed containing it. This follows earlier moves by retailers – from Holland & Barrett in Britain to dm-drogerie markt in Germany and supermarket giants Woolworths and Coles in Australia – to remove krill supplements from their shelves.
I hope my government is listening. This boycott is highlighting a little-known industry and putting pressure on governments that support it. From 19 October, the 27 members of CCAMLR – the international commission responsible for conserving Antarctic marine life – will gather in Hobart, Australia, to negotiate fishing rules and marine protection for the last pristine place on our planet. Norway’s choices will matter far beyond our borders.
Liv Arnesen
Antarctica taught me what it means to live on nature’s terms. Its vastness felt almost timeless. But as I have returned as a guide and lecturer, and paddled through its waters, my sense of its permanence has given way to concern. Human activity is changing this remote place. What once seemed beyond our reach is increasingly exposed to our appetite for resources.
Among those is krill: small, shrimp-like animals that sustain whales, penguins, seals and seabirds. Yet we harvest krill for supplements, pet food and aquaculture feed while climate change alters the conditions on which the ecosystem depends.
This month, scientists reported that the chinstrap penguin population on Zavodovski Island has declined by almost two-thirds since 2011, as warming waters are changing the availability of krill, their main food source. This raises an urgent question: how can we justify expanding industrial fishing when the ecosystem it depends on is changing so profoundly?
As the largest Antarctic krill-fishing nation, Norway cannot continue to claim leadership in ocean protection while treating the needs of Antarctic wildlife as secondary to commercial expansion.
For two consecutive seasons, the krill fleet has reached the 620,000-tonne catch threshold months before the season’s end, forcing an early closure. This is not evidence that governance is working. That total catch figure masks how heavily the fishing became concentrated in feeding grounds for whales, penguins and seals after regional limitations expired in 2024.
Krill may be abundant across a vast ocean, but wildlife needs its food where it can reach it. A penguin feeding chicks must return repeatedly to its colony. Krill hundreds of kilometres away cannot replace food removed from nearby waters. Fisheries management must account for those local needs.
CCAMLR decisions require consensus among all 27 members. Norway cannot secure an agreement alone, but the Norwegian government must use its influence to push for stronger protection. It must support a moratorium on Antarctic krill fishing until binding, science-based rules protect vital wildlife feeding grounds. Fishing should resume only when up-to-date evidence shows it will not harm the ecosystem.
Protected areas need effective restrictions that safeguard habitats and wildlife in the long term. Norway must support all the proposed marine protected areas – around the Antarctic Peninsula, East Antarctica and the Weddell Sea – and work to secure their adoption. These areas must provide meaningful, lasting protection, without making it conditional on permission to catch even more krill elsewhere. China and Russia must stop blocking their adoption.
The Norwegian krill industry says it supports marine protection and better fisheries management. That commitment should include accepting a moratorium. But we should also ask: why do Norwegian companies continue taking this food source from Antarctica at all? Algae-based sources of the omega-3s used in supplements already exist. A moratorium is the immediate priority. In the longer term, governments and businesses should invest in alternatives, and plan a phase-out of commercial krill fishing.
Norway’s krill industry is closely tied to one of the country’s wealthiest billionaires. Our government must explain whose interests it is defending: private businesses or one of Earth’s last great wildernesses?
I have carried Norway’s flag across Antarctica. I want our delegation to carry a clear commitment to its protection into Hobart: support a moratorium on commercial krill fishing, secure meaningful protected areas and reject higher catches.
The world is watching. Norway should give it a reason to believe that protection can still prevail over profit.
Liv Arnesen is Norwegian polar explorer, educator and ambassador for Our Antarctica
IPS UN Bureau
VICTORIA, Seychelles, Oct 28 2026 (IPS) - On 21 September 1976, less than three months after independence, Seychelles took its seat in the General Assembly of the United Nations. We became the 145th member of the Organisation. For a young nation of scattered islands in the Indian Ocean, with a small population and no army to speak of, it was far more than a ceremony. It was a promise that, in the family of nations, size would not decide whose voice was heard.
Fifty years later, I still believe in that promise. But I also know that it has never been kept automatically. It has to be renewed by every generation of leaders, and it now faces one of its hardest tests.
On 24 October, the United Nations marked its 81st anniversary. In his final United Nations Day message as Secretary-General, António Guterres reminded the world that the UN is not only an organisation but an idea: that humanity’s future depends on our ability to work together to advance peace, development and human rights.
Those words land at a sobering moment. Wars continue in several regions, often with civilians paying the highest price. The climate crisis is accelerating faster than our responses to it. Inequality is widening within and between nations. New technologies are advancing more quickly than our ability to govern them. And the UN itself is under severe financial strain, while its Security Council is too often paralysed by the very powers entrusted with keeping the peace.
It is in this climate that the Security Council is now deliberating, through its private straw polls, on who should become the tenth Secretary-General when Mr Guterres’s term ends on 31 December. For small island states, it matters more than most people realise.
Why should a small island care so deeply about who leads the United Nations? Because for nations like ours, multilateralism is not a matter of preference. It is a matter of survival.
We will never be the largest economies or the strongest military powers. Our protection has always been the rule of law, the strength of partnership and a seat at the table where every nation, large or small, has one vote. When the rules hold, a nation of just over 100,000 people can stand beside a nation of a billion and be heard. When the rules weaken, the small are the first to be pushed aside.
The UN has given small states some of their greatest achievements. The Law of the Sea gave island nations sovereign rights over vast ocean territories. The Paris Agreement set the aim of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees, a line that small islands fought hard to draw. And in January this year, the High Seas Treaty entered into force, bringing nearly two thirds of the world’s ocean, for too long a lawless frontier, under a framework for conservation and shared benefit. None of these would have been possible without the patient, often frustrating, work of multilateral diplomacy.
Yet I will not pretend the system is working as it should. A Security Council designed for the world of 1945 does not reflect the world of 2026. Africa, home to more than a quarter of the UN’s members, still has no permanent seat. Climate finance promised to vulnerable nations arrives slowly, in complicated forms, and often as loans that deepen debt.
The answer to an imperfect system of cooperation, however, is better cooperation, not less.
So what should the world, and especially its smaller nations, ask of the next Secretary-General?
First, courage. The Secretary-General has no army and a limited budget. The office’s greatest power is moral authority: the willingness to speak plainly to the powerful, to name injustice and to stand with those who have no other platform.
Second, the ability to build bridges. In a world divided between rival blocs, the UN’s leader must be trusted in Washington and Beijing, in Moscow and Brussels, but also in Victoria, Suva and Port Louis. Small states, which cannot afford permanent enemies, understand this better than most.
Third, a commitment to put the climate and the ocean at the centre of global security. For island nations, rising seas, coral collapse and extreme storms are not distant environmental issues. They are threats to our existence. In October, the International Union for Conservation of Nature warned that 96 percent of the world’s shallow-water coral reef ecosystems face an extremely high risk of collapse by 2075. Here in Seychelles, October storms have reminded us how fragile our coastlines and communities are. The next Secretary-General must treat the health of the ocean as the foundation of peace, food security and prosperity, and must ensure that the High Seas Treaty moves quickly from text to action as its first Conference of the Parties approaches.
Fourth, reform that people can feel. That means more than reorganising departments in New York. It must mean a fairer Security Council, a financial architecture that rewards resilience instead of punishing vulnerability, and a UN that delivers on the ground, where families, farmers and fishers live.
There is also a question of history. In 81 years, the United Nations has never been led by a woman. Without favouring any candidate, I believe it is time for the Organisation to show, at its highest level, the equality it rightly asks of its members.
Fifty years ago, Seychelles came to the United Nations as one of its smallest members, full of hope. We came because we believed that the ocean which surrounds us connects us to the world rather than isolating us from it. That belief has not changed.
The next Secretary-General will inherit a divided world and a weary institution. But they will also inherit the most important idea humanity has ever agreed upon: that our future is shared, and that no nation, however small, should face it alone.
Dialogue over division. Cooperation over confrontation. Solidarity over fear. Those words deserve to be more than a message for one day in October. They should be the test of the next ten years.
James Alix Michel is a former President of Seychelles, a Blue Economy pioneer and a champion of ocean protection.
IPS UN Bureau
KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 28 2026 (IPS) - Forty-year-old Farwiza Farhan’s eyes light up instantly when she talks about the Leuser Ecosystem – a national strategic area encompassing a national park, a wildlife reserve, protected forests and other land uses.
“It’s rare to have such a large landscape remain intact despite continuous encroachment by developers, which is shrinking the habitat of the tiger, the elephant, the rhino and the orangutan,” she says. At 2.7 million hectares, Leuser remains a rare stronghold for wildlife in a country where many forests have been decimated. “Leuser still stands, and the wildlife thrives there,” she says with a certain pride. “This is why the landscape is so incredibly special,” she says.
Farhan, a Sumatran forest conservator who heads Forest, Nature & Empowerment Aceh (HAkA), spoke to IPS on the sidelines of the Global Tipping Points Conference 2026, held at Sunway University, Kuala Lumpur, from October 12 to15. HAkA works to protect and restore the Leuser through conservation campaigns and meaningful community participation.
“If we don’t pay heed, we will push these animals closer to extinction,” she warned. “There are fewer than 250 tigers and maybe just 100 rhinos left.”
Corporations are shrinking wildlife habitats, says Farhan, pointing to large-scale gold mining and palm oil plantations, some spanning up to 10,000 hectares. “They’re located next to one another and compete for more space than anyone could ever,” she explained.
But wildlife is not the only thing losing space. According to Farhan, 500,000 people live within the ecosystem, and five million live outside it. Their lives are closely tied to the forest, which they use sparingly – consuming what they grow, unlike mining companies and corporations that extract resources on a large scale.
“Many concessions are located near towns and transport routes, making it easier to move commodities. But when forests are cleared, downstream communities bear the consequences, while upstream communities lose access to their land. Palm oil companies often take over land outside protected areas and push the communities living there further away,” said Farhan.
The costs of forest destruction, however, extend beyond the loss of wildlife. Women in communities that depend on the forest often bear a disproportionate burden.
“They are not scared of big multinational companies; they are truly militant in the way they respond to corporations they know will take away their land and forests. They feel the companies will slowly destroy their lives, so they might as well die fighting to stop them from bulldozing their village,” she said.
Farhan saw how women responded when disaster struck last year.
“Disasters force people to relocate, and that’s when women face immediate security concerns. In crowded camps, they may lack safe access to water and sanitation, and their privacy is often compromised. Yet they continue to shoulder the bulk of care work — looking after children and the elderly — while often losing their livelihoods and income.”
She says she has “massive respect and appreciation” for these women.
Sadly, these same women, who have a deep connection with the forest, are often excluded from policy-making forums where their voices matter most, she said.
Orangutan and infant. Credit: Anton Leddin/Wikimedia
She witnessed their knowledge and role in decision-making during Aceh’s catastrophic floods and landslides last November, triggered by torrential rains. “They understood local realities and were the first to mobilise and respond,” she pointed out.
And while many people see women huddled together as gossiping, Farhan playfully calls it “stakeholder mapping”.
“They know who’s doing what, which community members have betrayed them by taking bribes from corporations, and they know exactly what to do when that happens. Elderly women are the best: they have wisdom and respect, and they’ve seen it all before. They are the ones who hold the fort for their communities. Sometimes, an elderly woman will approach a young man engaged in illegal logging and ask, ‘Whose son are you?’ The question carries enormous weight.”
Working with communities has humbled Farhan.
“Our education taught us to speak in certain way, but not to listen. I think we need to invest more time in really listening to communities. We feel that because we are educated, we are there to educate, but in reality, the local people know and understand their problems and have the solutions.”
Spending a day alone in a village was all it took for her to realise how out of her depth she was. “Being left alone in the forest made me realise how quickly I could get lost without appropriate tools.”
Although her ancestry is Acehnese, she is uncomfortable identifying herself as indigenous because she and her family have not experienced the discrimination and lack of opportunities faced by indigenous communities.
“I can’t say that I shared those experiences directly,” she says, acknowledging that her education has given her privileges others have not had. “Identity-wise, I’m confused.”
Yet, she says, she understands their struggle and stands with them. However, she would not use that ‘Indigeneity’ card to gain access to funding and opportunities meant to expand opportunities for Indigenous peoples, as it is “unfair to the people who are actually going through the struggles and working hard to get the opportunities.”
A marine biologist by qualification, she also enrolled in a PhD programme in anthropology, which she later gave up. “I built the organisation while I was doing my PhD, but it died in the process,” she admits. “The work to protect forests was a lot more interesting,” she says with a smile.
But forests were not always her focus. By her own admission, her initial motivation was to protect the ocean because of her love for the underwater world.
Her degree in marine biology helped her understand ocean ecosystems better. She returned to the place where she had first fallen in love with the ocean, only to find it destroyed.
“In 2007, in a remote part of Aceh, Pulau Weh, I saw for the first time how El Niño had devastated an entire coral reef. I felt powerless,” she recalls. Realising how little she could do as an individual, she turned her attention to the forests. “Maybe protecting forests would be easier,” she thought.
But that was easier said than done. When she was hired to work for the government’s forest agency and the Leuser Ecosystem Management Authority, she accepted the offer without asking about the salary or her job description.
“I just wanted to work in conservation. I thought I’d be running around under the canopy of trees, going on patrol and watching wildlife. It turned out to be anything but that. I was stuck behind a desk with a computer in front!”
The job turned out to be in public relations. She was the spokesperson but rarely got the opportunity to speak.
“It was a very confusing place; I got sent to meetings to speak about forest allocations, spatial planning, environmental impact assessments…things I did not learn at university, things I was not equipped to deal with.”
Fate had other plans. All these experiences helped her understand power imbalances and conflicting interests. She also saw firsthand how people tasked with protecting forests could end up destroying them.
She stayed on until the government agency was shut down after its efforts to stop powerful interests from destroying forests met with opposition. She then joined her “stubborn and persistent” colleagues to help find HAkA.
She recalls countless half cups of coffee at cafés, bought because they could barely afford more, as they used the cafés’ Wi-Fi to brainstorm.
“We were not going to give up on protecting the Leuser ecosystem,” she said.
In 2011, Farhan and her organisation were among the environmental campaigners who challenged the government in court over its decision to grant concession to a palm oil company, in Aceh’s Rawa Tripa peat swamp forest (also in Leuser), despite a two-year nationwide moratorium on new concessions having been imposed three months earlier.
PT Kallista Alam, the company, pursued a series of appeals all the way up to the Supreme Court. In 2013, the apex court rejected the appeal and ruled in favour of the community. Yet it took until 2015 for the company’s USD 26.5 million fine to be upheld, and a decade for the company to pay the fine for the environmental damage caused by using fire to clear ten square kilometres of land.
“The company has paid part of the fine to the Ministry of Finance but not to the community,” said Farhan, a campaigner who witnessed the fire.
But she added many actors contributed to the victory, including people who trained judges and attorneys to better understand what it meant to quantify environmental loss in economic terms.
“Judges don’t come from biology or ecology backgrounds,” she said, explaining that judges in Indonesia undergo environmental training to understand that burning forests and replacing them with monoculture plantations is not reforestation.
Farhan’s work is far from over. As long as the extractive economy persists, the threats will remain. If it isn’t palm oil plantations, it will be gold mining or attempts to redraw boundaries.
Her organisation challenges these threats through legal action, spatial planning and, at times, by helping the government evaluate permits across districts and landscapes.
“There are times when government decisions need to be criticised and challenged, and we do that,” she said.
IPS UN Bureau Report
NEW YORK, Oct 27 2026 (IPS) - The selection of the next Secretary-General of the United Nations has reached a critical juncture. It raises fundamental questions about fairness, transparency, regional balance, and the democratic legitimacy of the world’s most universal organization.
Ambassador Anwarul K. Chowdhury
Ambassador Nusseibeh is an experienced diplomat with an established record of service to the United Nations. However, the timing of this candidature raises legitimate questions about the integrity and credibility of the selection process.
Two Women Lead a Historic Selection Process
Six rounds of Security Council straw polls have already taken place. Two distinguished and competent women from the Latin American and the Caribbean regional group of the United Nations, Rebeca Grynspan of Costa Rica and Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett of Guyana, have emerged as the two topmost leading candidates, with the former receiving at the last straw poll the Charter-required minimum nine votes of the 15-member Council.
It is a not only a historic first but a pioneering opening in the selection of the first woman as the Secretary-General of the United Nations, thereby fulfilling a Charter obligation (Article 8) and at least a decade-long global aspiration to set right the aberration of a lineup of men only at the leadership of the UN.
The two topmost candidates have campaigned diligently, presented their visions, engaged with Member States as well as civil society and endured the rigours and uncertainties of successive straw polls. Their perseverance deserves our sincere respect and recognition.
Yet their candidatures face opposition from two permanent members of the Security Council.
The Veto Must Not Override the Will of 191 Member States
This brings us to a fundamental question: Why should the preferences of two veto-wielding countries outweigh the collective interests of the remaining 191 UN Member States?
The United Nations belongs to all its members. Its leadership should reflect that universal ownership.
The veto, inherited from the geopolitical circumstances of 1945, continues to cast a long shadow over the Organization. When the preferences of a few determine the choices available to the many, the principle of sovereign equality becomes increasingly difficult to reconcile with institutional practice.
The overwhelming majority of Member States should not be held hostage to the veto preferences of two powerful permanent members. Grynspan and Rodrigues-Birkett have even received three positive encouragement, thereby majority of the five veto-wielding members.
The General Assembly Must Assert Its Charter Authority
There is also a constitutional dimension which deserves renewed attention.
Article 97 of the UN Charter clearly stipulates that the Secretary-General shall be appointed by the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council.
The General Assembly’s authority to appoint is explicit. It should never be reduced to a ceremonial rubber-stamping of the Council’s decisions negotiated behind closed doors.
If the Assembly finds a recommendation unacceptable, it has the authority to reject it. That constitutional responsibility should be exercised with independence, conviction, and without fear or favour.
The General Assembly represents the universal membership. Its voice, its authority must count.
Regional Balance and the Case for Latin America and the Caribbean
Regional representational balance is another essential consideration.
An established, though informal, understanding has guided the geographical rotation of the Secretary-Generalship. Asia was represented immediately before the current Secretary-General, António Guterres, who is the fourth head of the UN from West Europe, by Ban Ki-moon of the Republic of Korea.
Latin America and the Caribbean have produced only one Secretary-General, Javier Pérez de Cuéllar of Peru, who served from 1982 to 1991, 35 years ago from now.
The region’s expectation that its turn has arrived therefore rests on a compelling historical foundation.
Its candidates have invested considerable effort in the selection process. They have faced scrutiny, uncertainty, and political resistance. They weathered the storm with dignity.
To bypass them now, primarily because two permanent members remain dissatisfied, would raise troubling questions about the value of the entire process.
Late Candidatures and the Credibility of the Process
Late candidatures are permissible under existing practices. Nevertheless, entering the contest after six straw polls, including the decisive color-coded exercise identifying permanent-member opposition, inevitably raises concerns about procedural fairness.
It resembles arriving at harvest time to enjoy the fruit without having planted or nurtured the tree.
Various political calculations, sometimes rather arbitrary, surrounding the Secretary-General’s appointment have surfaced and featured often. They should not become a substitute for a transparent and credible selection process.
The next Secretary-General must possess integrity, independence, and courage. Gender equality and regional balance in representation should strengthen, rather than diminish, the search for these qualities.
The selection now before Member States is an opportunity to demonstrate that the United Nations remains faithful to its founding principles.
Eighty-One Years, Nine Men, Not One Woman
Above all, let me reiterate that one historic injustice and unacceptable reality demand correction.
In its eighty-one years of existence, the United Nations has not yet elected a woman Secretary-General — eight decades plus, nine men, and not one woman.
What an embarrassment – what a shame!
How can an institution that speaks of equality at every podium continues to model inequality at its pinnacle?
The credibility of the UN’s advocacy depends on its own reflection in the mirror.
This is an extraordinary contradiction for an Organization committed to gender equality and women’s empowerment.
The appointment of a woman as the tenth Secretary-General is long overdue.
The current two leading women candidates should not withdraw because of the threat of veto and pressurized by these two P5 members.
Their candidatures remain alive and valid before the General Assembly till it takes the final decision.
The veto must not become the voice of the United Nations.
The General Assembly must assert its rightful authority, as empowered by Article 97.
Ambassador Anwarul K. Chowdhury, former Under-Secretary-General and High Representative of the United Nations, Initiator of the UNSCR 1325 on Women and Peace and Security as the President of the UN Security Council in March 2000 underscoring women’s equality of participation; President/Chairman of the UNICEF Executive Board on two occasions; Founder of the Global Movement for The Cultural of Peace (GMCoP) and a well-known analyst of the UN system’s work.
IPS UN Bureau