The Human Consciousness Now...Our World in the Midst of Becoming...to What? Observe, contemplate Now.
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 1 2026 (IPS) - From June 22 to 26, the United Nations (UN) commemorated its first annual Peacebuilding Week, marking the 20th anniversary of the UN Peacebuilding Commission’s inaugural session. Featuring discussions among world leaders, policymakers, civil society, and advocates, the event explored how collaboration among governments, international organizations, and the private sector can enhance the visibility and effectiveness of peacebuilding efforts worldwide.
The goals of the Peacebuilding Week are particularly critical today, as increasing geopolitical tensions fracture international cooperation and severe financing shortfalls deplete resources, hindering relief efforts for civilians trapped in conflict. Despite a historic surge in active armed conflicts worldwide recorded over the past two years, peacebuilding and relief funding suffered a severe 40 percent decline between 2024 and 2025, leaving millions of people around the globe in a state of extreme insecurity.
“Peace does not occur automatically. It is built through persistent diplomacy, collective action and political will,” said Annalena Baerbock, President of the UN General Assembly. “Wars that never happen because of peacebuilding, conflict-prevention or sustainable-development efforts rarely make headlines. Yet, like everything else, peacebuilding is only possible when properly resourced.”
On June 26, the Peacebuilding Impact Hub—part of the Peacebuilding and Peace Support Office (PBPSO) within the UN Departments of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs and Peace Operations (DPPA-DPO)—launched its inaugural Peacebuilding Overview, titled Investing in Peace When the World Pays for War. This report analyzes data gathered from governments, civil society, scholars, and UN field operations across numerous, diverse contexts.
By addressing the root causes of conflict and encouraging the implementation of digital technologies—alongside active participation from youth and the private sector—the report aims to forge new paths for peacebuilding that are resilient, inclusive, and globally supported. Aiming to identify structural gaps in data sharing that prevent vital information from being shared internationally and from being fully utilized by policymakers and the public, the report was launched alongside a side event titled Building Peace in a Changing World.
At the event, Paul Fargues, one of the report’s authors and a Political Affairs Officer for the UN Department for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (DPPA), told reporters that the world is currently at a “crossroads, where conflict is on the rise, good governance is declining, and civic space is shrinking.” He noted that this is compounded by severe budget cuts and disproportionate investment in military expenditure rather than civilian protection and prevention efforts, making humanitarian relief operations increasingly difficult.
According to the report, over the last two decades, the world has invested only one dollar in peacebuilding efforts for every 100 dollars spent on military expenditure. Fargues added that the world’s most vulnerable populations are projected to suffer the most, particularly in dire contexts where aid constitutes more than 60 percent of all external funding and acts as a vital lifeline. Additionally, the DDPA found that roughly two-thirds of the countries whose economies are most dependent on UN aid are also the ones most adversely affected by the funding cuts.
Fargues argued that some of the central obstacles in advancing peacebuilding efforts today are the persistent structural gaps in the dissemination of evidence and data, which is critically underdeveloped when compared to the development and humanitarian sectors.
“Peacebuilding has no underlying framework to create shared data practices, to generate insights at the global level to enhance evidence-based decision-making, or simply to communicate its value to broader non-technical audiences,” Fargues said. “Peacebuilders and those who support them must do a better job at measuring, proving, and communicating this. Given the incredibly challenging contexts, producing more robust data and evidence of impact is a bare minimum.”
Katherina Ahrendts, the Director-General for Global Order, United Nations and Humanitarian Assistance of the Federal Foreign Office of Germany, stated that although the case for investing in protection and prevention efforts is clear, political and financial contributions lag significantly behind. According to figures from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), for every dollar invested in preventive macroeconomic policies, up to 103 dollars could be generated in returns. DPPA also estimated that with adequate investment in prevention and protection measures, humanitarian needs could be reduced by approximately USD 3.6 billion annually.
Despite these potential gains, the economic case for peacebuilding efforts has not sufficiently influenced global investment priorities.“We are indeed at a critical moment when violent conflict is increasing while budgets are under strain and multilateralism as a whole is increasingly challenged,” said Ahrendts. “From a domestic policy standpoint, we need a much stronger business case, more compelling narratives, and better evidence. We need to showcase that peacebuilding is a smart, strategic, and cost-effective instrument that prevents much higher costs later on.”
“This means framing peacebuilding not only as a moral imperative, but as a matter of security, stability, mutual interests and sound investments. In particular, we need to make clear that peacebuilding and investment are an integral component of an effective security strategy,” she added.
Ana Escobar, the UN Representative for Peace Direct, an organization that empowers local peacebuilding efforts and supports community-driven approaches, remarked that peacebuilding must be grounded in a community-based approach and tailored to match the specific needs of vulnerable communities. Peace Direct defines meaningful impact as seeing communities become safer and more resilient long after external support has ceased.
Rather than implementing a pre-established peacebuilding agenda, Peace Direct works with local peacebuilders and community leaders to define what success looks like to them and identify the changes that they want to see. “That means asking different questions,” Escobar said. “Are communities resolving disputes without violence, and how do we measure that? Do women, youth, and marginalized groups have greater influence in decision-making? Is trust increasing between communities and institutions?”
“Peacebuilding is most effective when power, resources, and evidence flow in the same direction, towards the communities that live with conflict every day…. For local peacebuilders, prevention means that children go to school instead of joining armed groups, farmers return to their lands, markets reopen, women move safely, families remain together. Those are the returns communities measure every day,” added Escobar.
Dr. Cedric De Coning, a Senior Researcher in the Peace, Conflict and Development Research Group at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI), underscored the importance of adaptive peacebuilding. This approach calls for the continuous monitoring of data and updating of peacebuilding measures, acknowledging that a community’s dynamics are constantly shifting. Rather than framing peacebuilding as a rigid structure being “built”, Dr. De Coning argues that it is more of a continuous process that is “nurtured”.
“What adaptive peacebuilding says is that we cannot know that beforehand; it has to emerge from people affected by conflict or people in societies struggling to achieve peace themselves,” said Dr. De Coning.
“As peacebuilders, we have to accompany these societies, and we have to learn together with them constantly and adapt our understanding of what it is that we can support. But we should be careful not to measure peace as something that only makes sense for donor-funded projects…. Peace is something much broader, and we need to measure that broader social transformation: how societies are experiencing peace, how they are living the things they look at, is what we need to look at rather than measuring projects to please donors.”
IPS UN Bureau Report
PHILADELPHIA, Jul 1 2026 (IPS) - India’s new education policy asks a great deal of its teachers. The National Education Policy of 2020 and its NISHTHA (National Initiative for School Heads’ and Teachers’ Holistic Advancement) training scheme, want teachers to be more than deliverers of syllabus. They are to be empowered professionals, agents of change who shape the future of children and, the policy says, of the nation itself. It is a generous and welcome ambition.
Vani S. Kulkarni
For two decades, the dominant approach to teacher quality in India, as in much of the world, has run in the opposite direction. It judges teachers by individual performance and accountability, by what they deliver and how their classrooms score. Under that logic, a teacher’s agency quietly shrinks until it means doing well what someone else has already decided. The teacher becomes an executor of other people’s choices. This is the very habit NISHTHA hopes to break, and it will not break easily, because a system built to measure compliance tends to produce it.
The real question, then, is not whether we wish teachers to have agency because we do. It is where agency actually comes from.
I spent a year, between 2023 and 2025, looking for an answer in an unlikely place: a small, non-governmental teacher-preparation programme in Gurugram, north India called I Am A Teacher (IAAT), which has spent a decade training teachers in a humanistic tradition that cuts against the accountability grain. What I found there was a claim that sounds almost too soft to matter, until you watch what it does. Agency, in this programme’s account, does not begin with autonomy handed down from above. It begins with self-knowledge. A teacher who has examined her own assumptions, her own fears and habits of judgment, is a teacher who can finally exercise judgment of her own.
That self-knowledge expressed itself, in the teachers I met, in three widening circles.
The first was the classroom. Teachers spoke of designing their own curricula and lesson plans, and of sharing in decisions about assessment, as the very substance of their professional dignity. To be handed instructions to execute, one teacher said, is to have your voice taken away. And teacher autonomy, several insisted, is not for the teacher’s sake alone. When a teacher can read her own classroom and meet children where they are, the children begin to experience an agency of their own, becoming creative and imaginative rather than merely obedient.
The second circle was the inner life of the student. These teachers refused to see their work as the transmission of knowledge and content alone. A child’s social and emotional wellbeing, one told me, matters as much as the subject on the board. They understood it as part of their agency to steady a struggling child, inside the classroom and beyond it, on the conviction that learning and wellbeing cannot be pulled apart.
The third and widest circle was the world the school is embedded in. The most striking thing about these teachers was that their sense of agency did not stop at the classroom door. They spoke about how political and economic forces shape what gets taught and what gets funded, and about the inequality that public education is meant to counter and too often deepens. Education can never be equal, one teacher said plainly, naming the way wealth sorts children into schools and teachers into salaries. Some met that knowledge not with resignation but with initiative, volunteering in underserved areas or starting small independent learning centres of their own. That is agency in its fullest sense, a teacher who sees the system she is part of and acts to make it fairer.
A training module alone can produce none of this, and that is exactly the point. The NEP is right that teachers should be agents of change. But agency is not a permission a policy grants. It is a capacity, and capacities have to be formed, through self-reflection, mentoring, time, and the experience of being trusted to decide. These are precisely the things an accountability-driven system finds hardest to fund, because they do not show up on a dashboard, and their results appear years later, in a classroom run by someone who knows her own mind.
A teacher who has been told only what to do can comply. A teacher who has come to know herself can decide. India’s classrooms, and the children in them, need far more of the second kind. No policy can issue that teacher by order. But a country that understood where her/his agency begins could choose, at last, to help make her/his.
If NISHTHA is to be more than a circular, its success will be measured on the ground, in whether teachers actually come to exercise the agency the policy promises them. And one concrete step is within reach now. The country need not invent this formation from nothing. Small programmes such as IAAT, quietly and against the current, already practise it and have done so for years. Recognising them, learning from them, and resourcing them would cost little and teach a great deal.
Vani S. Kulkarni is a sociologist affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania, and has held research and teaching appointments at Harvard and Yale universities. Her research navigates the intricate crossroads of Global Health, Education, Race and Caste, Gender, Sociology of Trust, Development, and Democracy.
IPS UN Bureau
LONDON, Jul 1 2026 (IPS) - In May, Tunisian lawyer and journalist Sonia Dahmani was handed her second conviction of the year. Her latest sentence, a two-year jail term, came in reaction to her criticism of poor prison conditions. She previously received an 18-month sentence for calling out the government’s anti-migrant policies. Dahmani faces five more charges under a 2022 cybercrime law that criminalises the spreading of what it calls ‘false information’.
Dahmani is one of many victims of President Kais Saied, who continues to steer Tunisia in an ever more repressive direction. Saied won a free and fair election in 2019, but in 2021 he removed the prime minister and parliament, ruling by decree instead. The following year, he rewrote the constitution to give himself near-absolute power, approved in a low-turnout referendum held after key opposing voices had been jailed. When he won his second term in 2024, credible opponents had been criminalised and barred from running. It’s all a long way from the democracy that sprang into life after the 2011 Jasmine Revolution.
Growing criminalisation
Saied’s repression operates behind a facade of legality, with the criminal justice system serving as a tool of presidential control. In 2022, Saied sacked judges who disagreed with him and gave himself the power to control judicial appointments. Courts now do his bidding and jail opponents. At least nine staff of civil society organisations have received prison sentences so far this year.
Journalists Borhen Bssais and Mourad Zeghidi received three-and-a-half-year sentences on trumped-up money laundering and tax evasion charges in January. In 2025, 37 journalists, lawyers, opposition politicians and other dissidents were found guilty of terrorism and plotting to destabilise Tunisia. Following a mass trial, some were given decades-long jail terms. A November 2025 appeal court hearing that defendants weren’t allowed to attend upheld almost all convictions and increased some sentences.
The latest phase of the crackdown is targeting anti-racism campaigners. Since 2023, Saied has deployed the populist strategy of attacking Black African migrants to distract from the economic problems he’s failed to address. He’s repeatedly accused migrants of being responsible for crime and disorder, fuelling violence against them from security forces and the public.
Saied has branded organisations that stand up for migrants’ rights as traitors and foreign agents. Vilification prepares the ground for incarceration. In March, Saadia Mosbah, president of Mnemty, a Tunisian association that fights against racism, received a staggering eight-year sentence on bogus illicit enrichment and money laundering charges. Five of her colleagues were convicted alongside her.
Mnemty faces the threat of being closed down, part of an assault on associational freedoms that has seen dozens of other civil society organisations suspended. Hundreds more could face the same treatment. In 2024, courts ordered the closure of the Tunisian Council for Refugees. Last November, two of its leaders, Mustapha Djemali and Abderrazek Krimi, received two-year sentences for offences under a 1975 law on passports and travel documents.
No one appears to be beyond the state’s reach. In March, a judge ordered the pretrial detention of seven people on money laundering charges for their involvement in the first Global Sumud Flotilla, which last October attempted to take humanitarian aid to Gaza’s besieged population. Meanwhile being one of the organisations that won the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize offered no protection for the Tunisian League for Human Rights. The group was slapped with a one-month suspension in April.
For civil society organisations, suspension marks the start of a process that can lead to dissolution. Civil society organisations also face asset freezes, lawsuits and tax investigations. The combination of criminalisation, legal harassment and top-down vilification results in a pervasive chilling effect.
Judges that don’t do Saied’s bidding are also at risk. Anas Hmedi, President of the Association of Tunisian Magistrates, has been subjected to criminal proceedings since 2022, with a summons on fresh charges issued in January.
Europe says little
Tunisians continue to protest. Hundreds marched in the capital, Tunis, on 6 June to demand media freedoms and the release of political prisoners. Protesters in May also called out Saied’s failure to address the economic crisis. But they need international support.
Last October, Saber Ben Chouchane was handed a death sentence for criticising Saied on Facebook. Authorities interpreted his posts as constituting crimes of attempting to change the form of government, insulting the president and spreading false information. But this time the repression backfired. The severity of the sentence caused such an international outcry that Saied was forced to pardon and release him. This shows that international criticism can make a difference.
The European Parliament spoke up last November, passing a resolution calling for the release of political prisoners and the repeal of the false information provisions. But such gestures have limits, as shown by Saied’s dismissal of the resolution as ‘blatant interference’.
Resistance to autocratisation takes more than words, but the EU isn’t acting. It’s in a weak position towards Saied because it pays the Tunisian government to help prevent migrants crossing into Europe, and in April 2025, it classified Tunisia as a safe country of origin. This means it believes migrants can be deported there on the basis that they won’t be at risk of persecution, a claim that rings hollow for the many from civil society now in jail.
EU policies have contributed to the rising number of migrants in Tunisia, since people can make it there but no further. This makes them a ready target for Saied’s scapegoating. The EU must acknowledge its responsibility and change course. It must recognise that migrants’ rights in Tunisia aren’t being protected and that, in the current situation, only civil society can do that. In its dealings with Tunisia, it must insist that civil society freedoms are respected and people are free both to defend migrants’ rights and criticise the government’s decisions. Continuing silence will make it complicit in the consolidation of a dictatorship.
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
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 1 2026 (IPS) - The on-again, off-again US-Iran peace negotiations, which have been disparaged by Israeli leaders, have resulted in a rare rift between the US and Israel, a Middle East ally which has had America’s unwavering “iron clad” support since its creation in 1948.
The cracks were visible – all the way from Tel Aviv to Washington DC. But is this for real or just a passing family squabble?
US Vice President J.D. Vance, who has been leading the negotiations in Geneva, lambasted the Israelis last week for their very personal attack on President Donald Trump.
“Donald Trump is the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this moment in time, and he happens to be the head of state of the world’s superpower,” he said, speaking to reporters at the White House.
Vance said ” two thirds of the weapons that protected Israel were American-made and paid for by US tax dollars.”
“If I was in the cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that i have anywhere left in the entire world,” he warned.
Dr Ramzy Baroud, Palestinian author and editor of the Palestine Chronicle, told Inter Press Service “while Vice President J.D. Vance’s comments may suggest that there is some divergence between the United States and Israel, we should be cautious not to read too much into them or assume that they signal a fundamental shift in US policy”.
First, this is not the first time that criticism of Israel has emerged from a US administration, even from officials widely regarded as strong supporters of Israel, he pointed out. Similar disagreements have surfaced before without leading to any meaningful change in American policy.
Second, there have been credible reports indicating that, during the Biden administration, the appearance of tension between President Biden and Prime Minister Netanyahu was often overstated and did not reflect the reality of continued US support for the genocide in Gaza.
Despite public disagreements, American military, financial, and diplomatic backing remained largely unchanged, he said.
Similarly, recent attempts to portray a rift between President Trump and Netanyahu—whether genuine or exaggerated—have so far had little impact on US support for Israel.
In fact, only days after Vice President Vance’s remarks, the United States carried out another strike against Iran, in line with objectives long advocated by the Netanyahu government, said Dr Baroud.
At the same time, Washington is actively advancing a broader scheme in Lebanon aimed at achieving politically what Israel failed to achieve militarily: weakening the Resistance, restructuring Lebanon’s political and security landscape in Israel’s favor, all while continuing to ignore the ongoing genocide in Gaza, declared Dr Baroud..
Meanwhile, according to a Fact Sheet from the US State Department “steadfast support for Israel’s security has been a cornerstone of American foreign policy for every U.S. Administration since the presidency of Harry S. Truman”.
“Since Israel’s founding in 1948, the United States has provided Israel with over $130 billion in bilateral assistance focused on addressing new and complex security threats, bridging Israel’s capability gaps through security assistance and cooperation, increasing interoperability through joint exercises, and helping Israel maintain its Qualitative Military Edge (QME).”
This assistance has helped transform the Israel Defense Forces into one of the world’s most capable, effective militaries and turned the Israeli military industry and technology sector into one of the largest exporters of military capabilities worldwide.
Since 1983, the United States and Israel have met regularly via the Joint Political-Military Group (JPMG) to promote shared policies, address common threats and concerns, and identify new areas for security cooperation.
The 48th JPMG, held in October 2022 reaffirmed the ironclad strategic partnership between the United States and Israel, underscoring a mutual commitment to advance collaboration in support of regional security and reinforce the historic achievements of recent normalization under the Abraham Accords.
Israel is the leading global recipient of Title 22 U.S. security assistance under the Foreign Military Financing (FMF) program. This has been formalized by a 10-year (2019-2028) Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). Consistent with the MOU, the United States annually provides $3.3 billion in FMF and $500 million for cooperative programs for missile defense.
Since Elaborating further, FY 2009, the United States has provided Israel with $3.4 billion in funding for missile defense, including $1.3 billion for Iron Dome support starting in FY 2011. Through FMF, the United States provides Israel with access to some of the most advanced military equipment in the world, including the F-35 Lightning.
Israel is also eligible for Cash Flow Financing and is authorized to use its annual FMF allocation to procure defense articles, services, and training through the Foreign Military Sales (FMS) system, Direct Commercial Contract agreements – which are FMF-funded Direct Commercial Sales procurements – and through Off Shore Procurement (OSP). Via OSP the current MOU allows Israel to spend a portion of its FMF on Israeli-origin rather than U.S.-origin defense articles. This was 25 percent in FY 2019 but is set to phase-out and decrease to zero in FY 2028.
Elaborating further, Dr Baroud said It is important to note any signs of disagreement between Washington and Tel Aviv. However, political rhetoric is ultimately meaningless unless it is accompanied by tangible changes on the ground.
Israel remains the largest recipient of US military and financial assistance anywhere in the world, even as it carries out the genocide in Gaza.
As long as this fundamental equation remains unchanged, any supposed disagreements or personal feuds between the two governments amount to little more than empty words, he declared.
IPS UN Bureau Report
APEX, North Carolina / SAN FRANCISCO, California, Jun 30 2026 (IPS) - With progress stalled on many issues, this year’s June talks in Bonn—which are supposed to smooth the way towards COP 31 in Antalya at year’s end—were widely judged a failure. What happened? And what does it mean for Antalya?
“Deliberately delaying us.”
“Spreading misinformation.”
“Denying the science.”
“Lacking integrity.”
“Blocking progress.”
“Costing countless lives.”
These were just some of the charges delegates leveled at each other during the UN Climate Meetings held in Bonn this June. As delegates took up multiple issues in small “contact groups” and “informal consultations”, negotiations quickly became tetchy and irritable before descending into levels of rancor and even rudeness rarely seen before. And it was not just one issue where tempers frayed.
What went wrong? One problem is the sheer number of topics on the Bonn agenda. Over the thirty-plus years since the UN climate talks began, countries have been keen to add issues they particularly care about to the agenda
From talks on climate change research and science to topics like mitigation and funding for adaptation, the mood was often combative and confrontational. By the meeting’s end, differences were so great that in many cases delegates could not even agree to continue working on the draft outcome documents from Bonn when they arrive at COP 31 in Antalya later this year.
This means they will need to start discussions from scratch. In other cases, they failed to finish their work, but at least managed to forward the current working texts. This is hardly a great outcome, however.
In fact, Bonn may have witnessed more arguments over “mandates” (whether a particular group should be discussing certain topics) and “points of order” (whether delegates were playing within the rules) than ever before in the climate change process.
Searching for positives, some participants pointed to one success. Delegates did choose the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) to host the Climate Technology Centre (CTC).
The CTC provides technological support to developing countries. It means the Centre’s work will continue beyond 2027 and possibly all the way through to 2041. But even the glow of this minor “win” dims when one recalls that UNEP was already the host.
This agreement simply means it can carry on its work. It doesn’t create something new. When continuing to do something that’s already happening counts as a victory, you know things haven’t gone well.
Too Many TopicsWhat went wrong? One problem is the sheer number of topics on the Bonn agenda. Over the thirty-plus years since the UN climate talks began, countries have been keen to add issues they particularly care about to the agenda.
For instance, vulnerable small island nations are eager to talk about keeping global warming under 1.5oC, the threshold at which scientists fear serious “tipping points” will be reached. They also want to talk about phasing out fossil fuels—the major cause of climate change—and about wealthy countries helping them to adapt.
Meanwhile, fossil fuel exporters like Saudi Arabia are keen to talk about what wealthy western nations’ actions, including carbon taxes or a shift to renewables, are doing to their oil-based economies. They believe these “response measures” could harm them—or already are. That said, these same oil and gas-rich nations certainly do not want to talk about getting rid of fossil fuels.
A third example are the western nations, particularly those in Europe, who are making efforts to shake off their dependence on oil and gas.
They are happy to talk about renewable energy and science, but are keen to shut down talk about funding or compensating countries affected by what the Europeans consider to be their virtuous efforts to change. Bailing out oil producers for any “harm” done to their export trade is the last thing on their minds.
As the various groups have added their topics to the negotiations over the years, these divergent views have collided with ever greater force. Although there are frequent calls to simplify the process, no country is going to give up their “pet” topic, especially since that would mean more time to talk about someone else’s favorite issue. Could everyone agree to simplify and give up their preferred agenda item? Maybe. But so far, no one has blinked.
The Rule Is, There Are No Rules!Making things more difficult still are the UN climate treaty’s “rules of procedure.” These were developed in the 1990s when countries first penned the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change—the bedrock agreement on which the Kyoto Protocol and Paris Agreement were also built.
The rules of procedure offer a way out of difficult issues by allowing for countries to vote. In some cases, a two-thirds majority is required to “win” on an issue. Sometimes, the bar is even higher and a three-quarters majority is needed.
The trouble is, these rules were never formally adopted. Saudi Arabia and a number of other countries refused to agree to them. What this means is that consensus is required for everything. So, what happens when a treaty has 198 parties, all with differing views and priorities on what is possibly the most complex issue of our times? One could argue it’s a miracle anything has been agreed at all.
The COP 31 PileupWhat does this mess mean for COP 31, which is taking place in Antalya, Türkiye, in November? First, it means an agenda pileup. The annual June climate meeting in Bonn is supposed to help pave the way to the end-of-year COP. Bonn’s job is to resolve much of the low-hanging fruit—agenda items that require some sort of agreement or outcome document, but which can be taken care of relatively quickly. This then leaves the COP to finish up work on the big, meaty, difficult issues.
The problem is, Bonn resolved almost nothing. Even the low-hanging fruit seems to have soured. With so many documents unresolved and “rolled over” (or, in the jargon of the process, ‘Rule 16ed’), COP 31 will have a massive workload. It’s a logjam that seems unlikely to be cleared in Antalya.
Does this mean COP 31 will fail? Not necessarily. One silver lining that could be observed in Bonn was how well the two countries presiding over COP 31 seemed to be working together. In an unusual arrangement, the government of Türkiye is physically hosting and organizing the COP, while the government of Australia is joining as co-president tasked with handling the diplomatic negotiations.
Their collaborative spirit and air of quiet competence provided a ray of hope in Bonn. Also, there are two pre-COP events in October—one taking place in Fiji, the other in Tuvalu—that might help.
Still, the signs are not good overall.
Fixing the ProcessBonn did not occur in a vacuum. By common consent, the UN climate process has been getting steadily more complicated by the year, especially since the Paris Agreement was inked back in 2015. Bonn was just the latest example—and one of the more extreme—in how confusing and difficult it has become from an agenda perspective.
There is also a growing interest in these negotiations to reckon with. Some of the early COPs attracted only a few thousand participants, while today the numbers regularly top 50,000 and more.
The most extreme, COP 28, topped 83,000! Some argue this is making it more difficult, while others see this as a positive development, since it demonstrates to politicians that climate change remains a critical issue. Either way, this evolution adds to the organizational complexity of the process.
These recent travails and complications have led to a steady stream of think pieces, reports, and meetings aimed at streamlining, simplifying and improving the system. They contain many good ideas for shedding agenda items and other alterations.
Perhaps one day frustration will mount to a point where some of these good ideas actually happen. But with countries so divided on the substance of the talks, it is hard to imagine them agreeing on their organization, at least in the short term.
Does It Really Matter?In spite of the mess the process is in right now, we can see four reasons to remain positive and not to give up hope.
First, COP 31 is not a “make or break” COP. Sure, it needs to keep the momentum going. But there are no major outcomes needed in Antalya.
Instead, delegates and observers are looking more to COP 32 in 2027—which will review countries’ success in implementing their pledges under the Paris Agreement—and COP 33, which is tasked with completing a second “global stocktake” of progress. COP 33, in particular, will need to end with something noteworthy. Interestingly, COP 33 is also likely to take place hard-on-the-heels of the U.S. Presidential elections.
Looking further out, COP 35 in 2030 should mark another important moment in the process, with countries scheduled to submit their next set of pledges or “Nationally Determined Contributions”.
A second reason to stay positive—and no disrespect to the climate negotiations—is that we already have in place the major agreements we need to make progress.
The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement are the launch pads we need. A lot of the negotiations occurring these days in Bonn and at the COPs are relatively minor and procedural. Now, our work can and should be more about implementing what we’ve agreed.
To be clear: the COPs have an important role to play in reviewing progress and encouraging countries to do more. But the foundations are already in place, the promises made. Now, it is about doing what we have said we would.
Thirdly, the creation of “Coalitions of the Willing” in recent years show there is an appetite for promoting implementation even on issues where there is not yet consensus among all 198 member states.
Alliances designed to advance progress on critical matters such as energy, agriculture, water, oceans, and health can only help us move forward. While some, such as the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), have failed in their original goals, the potential is certainly there.
The recent alliance to transition away from fossil fuels, and another initiative on financing known as the “Vulnerability to Viability Compact”, are positive developments that could and should help us on the path to implementation.
Are we doing what is needed? Not yet. At least, not fast enough. But—and this is our fourth and final note of positivity—there is hope here. It’s worth noting that, since the Paris Agreement in 2015, the trajectory of global warming has changed. Back in 2015, the world was staring down the barrel of 4-6oC in warming by the end of this century. These numbers should cause any sensible person to quail. They are extinction-level predictions; apocalyptic in their scope, horrifying in their impact.
Today, the numbers have fallen to between about 2.1oC and 2.8oC, depending on your assumptions. These numbers are still very, very bad. They threaten breaching all sorts limits, passing many points of no return.
Even at 1.5oC warming, we are seeing unprecedented weather such as the heatwaves felt recently in Europe. Still, we have started to bend the curve. As a result of government policies, scientific breakthroughs, private sector initiatives and action from many, many stakeholders, things are slowly beginning to change.
Our friend Christiana Figueres, who played a major role in the Paris Agreement, talks often about “stubborn optimism”. We agree. This is the time to double down on climate action. With renewed energy and dogged persistence, we can keep bending the curve and change humanity’s future.
This, surely, is something participants at future COPs should be striving towards.
Prof. Felix Dodds and Chris Spence have participated in United Nations talks on climate change and other environmental negotiations since the 1990s. They co-edited Heroes of Environmental Diplomacy: Profiles in Courage (Routledge, 2022) and wrote Environmental Lobbying at the United Nations: A Guide to Protecting Our Planet (Routledge, 2025). Their next book, Political Heroes of the Environment: Profiles in Courage, is due for release in 2027.
ROME, Jun 30 2026 (IPS) - Farmers today are producing food under pressures that would have been unimaginable to previous generations. Input costs are rising and supply chains are unreliable. Water is scarcer. Weather is less predictable. And for a growing number of farmers — in Sudan, in Ukraine, in Myanmar, in Gaza — the challenge is producing food at all, in the middle of active conflict. These are not marginal conditions. They describe the reality facing hundreds of millions of people who grow the food the world depends on.
Smart farming — using data, digital tools, and precision technologies to make better decisions, use fewer inputs, and get more from every hectare — is not a luxury response to these pressures. It is increasingly a practical and necessary one. It helps farmers know when to plant, where fertilizer will generate the greatest return, how much water a crop actually needs, where pests are likely to emerge, and which risks are developing before they become crises.
Three agricultural revolutions got us here. The first gave humanity settled agriculture. The second transformed land use and productivity through new methods and early machinery. The third — the Green Revolution — combined improved seeds, fertilizers, and modern practice to feed a rapidly growing world. Each solved the defining challenge of its era … producing enough.
Smart farming — using data, digital tools, and precision technologies to make better decisions, use fewer inputs, and get more from every hectare — is not a luxury response to these pressures. It is increasingly a practical and necessary one
The fourth revolution faces a fundamentally different challenge. It is no longer simply about producing more food. It is about producing more with fewer and less reliable inputs, under greater uncertainty, on land under increasing stress, and while reducing agriculture’s environmental footprint.
The tools that drove the Green Revolution were extraordinary, but they are not infinitely scalable. Synthetic fertilizers depend on energy-intensive production and supply chains that have proven fragile. Aquifers in key agricultural regions are being drawn down faster than they recharge. The yield gains from conventional intensification are flattening. There is no endless supply of cheap water, cheap fertilizer, or cheap fuel to sustain food production the way we have for the past half-century.
Smart farming is how we meet this new challenge. It enables farmers to produce more with fewer resources, make better decisions under uncertainty, and reduce agriculture’s environmental footprint. It is not a vision for the future. It is already happening.
FAO’s own operational programmes demonstrate what is already possible. Our Desert Locust early warning system uses satellite imagery, weather data, and field intelligence to forecast outbreaks before they reach crops, giving governments time to act rather than simply respond. The SoilFER programme is turning faster, more affordable soil mapping into actionable fertilizer recommendations for farmers in Central America and sub-Saharan Africa. The Hand-in-Hand Initiative combines geospatial, market, and socioeconomic data so governments and investors can direct agricultural investment where it will have the greatest return. These are not pilots. They are operational programmes with measurable outcomes — and they include AI-driven tools that forecast pest and disease pressure, analyze crop stress, and help governments make better decisions faster than was previously possible.
My own family’s seven-generation grain farm in rural Indiana today uses GPS-guided equipment, variable-rate fertilizer applications based on soil sampling, yield mapping, and real-time weather tools to make planting and harvesting decisions. The technology works. The question is who has access to it.
That is the central challenge. The benefits of smart farming currently concentrate among producers who already have the resources, connectivity, and institutional support to adopt new tools. Smallholder farmers — who produce a third of the world’s food — are too often last in line. Women farmers and young producers face additional barriers to technology and financing, which means the whole system underperforms when they are excluded.
At FAO’s Global Conference on Smart Farming in Rome from 1 to 3 July, the commitments required are specific and clear. Governments need to modernize regulatory environments and invest in the digital infrastructure agriculture depends on. Development banks should finance data systems and precision agriculture as essential infrastructure rather than optional innovation. Private companies need business models that reach smallholders, not only large commercial farms. And organizations like FAO must ensure that technical knowledge becomes practical solutions farmers can actually us e.
The fourth agricultural revolution is already underway. What remains to be decided is whether its benefits reach the farmers who need them most — or whether the gap between what is possible and what is accessible becomes permanent.
Beth Bechdol is Deputy Director-General, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa, Jun 30 2026 (IPS) - Usually, the fiesta to celebrate St Antony at the church with the same name in Crown Mines, Johannesburg, is a lively affair. The church is usually packed with congregants from the Portuguese community, including recent migrants from Mozambique and Angola.
On Sunday, the mass was half empty, with mostly white congregants filling the few seats that were taken. The black Portuguese community – whether undocumented migrants or not – stayed away.
It was just two short days until an anti-migrant mass action planned for today (June 30) by an organisation called March and March, led by former radio personality and civic activist Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma. Who supports March and March financially is not known, but they seem to be highly resourced with immense power to mobilise. The ANC’s secretary general, Fikile Mbalula, has associated her organisation with the former President Jacob Zuma but the connections are indirect. Zuma’s uMkhonto weSizwe (MK), ActionSA and some smaller parties have endorsed the mass action – although Ngobese-Zuma’s organisation says it is an independent civic organisation.
Some parties, like the EFF, have stuck to their pan-Africanist stance.
Anti-migrant marchers make their way through Soweto during demonstrations, 29 June 2026, in Jabulani, Soweto. Credit: Alaister Russell/IPS
But foreign migrants are an easy target to blame for structural and economic issues in the country.
What is clear even in the days leading up to March and March’s campaign is that the impact of their ‘civic’ action, aimed at forcing the South African government to act against a massive diaspora of migrants from all over Africa, is one of misery and fear.
Already devastating photographs of families hurriedly preparing to leave the country have dominated the headlines.
South Africa has a long history of xenophobia, with probably the most infamous campaign ending as abruptly as it started in May 2008, when Mozambican citizen Ernesto Alfabeto Nhamuave was ‘necklaced’ in the Ramaphosa settlement on the East Rand in Gauteng.
Images of his burning body splashed across papers the following day, making the horror of the xenophobic attacks even more poignant.
At the time, I was the news editor at The Star, a major newspaper in South Africa. For about two weeks, our pages were filled with the stories about the impact of the attacks, which were often triggered by arbitrary identification – such as vaccination scars and issues of pronunciation – as well as fear, mass displacement, and the movement of thousands of foreign nationals leaving the country, all of which made for sad and distressing reading.
That year, according to Human Rights Watch, 62 people died, including 21 South Africans, 11 Mozambicans, five Zimbabweans and three Somalis, and thousands suffered injuries. About 40,000 foreign nationals left the country, and the authorities displaced a further 50,000 in camps until they closed them.
The authorities may have dismantled the camps, but they did little to bring the perpetrators to justice or to change people’s attitudes towards foreigners. In fact, if my memory serves me correctly, the official view of the 2008 xenophobic attacks was that they were due to a ‘crime’ problem, not a ‘hate’ problem.
Nhamuave’s murder case was closed, and with that, a festering sore of blame and misinformation fomented more attacks in the years to come.
And many more incidents and waves of violence followed.
Migrant myths. Credit: Collective Voices for Health Access
In 2019, I was living and working in Nigeria during another wave of xenophobia that primarily targeted the Nigerian community in South Africa. There was significant diplomatic fallout between Pretoria and Abuja, with South Africa temporarily closing its embassy after businesses like Shoprite and MTN were targeted in Nigeria.
And these are not the only two incidents.
While it is true that in South Africa 12.5 million South Africans are unemployed, most of whom are young people, and that something drastic needs to be done to stimulate the economy, bring people into the working space and improve it, a good start would be to create tolerance and understanding.
Indeed, myths like ‘they take our jobs’, ‘they contribute nothing to the economy’ and ‘they are the cause of all our crime’ continue to perpetuate.
Research shows otherwise.
Most foreign migrants are not employed in the formal sector. Administrative tax data suggests that foreigners hold less than 4% of formal jobs. In the informal economy, about 20% of the workforce consists of foreigners, creating greater competition.
Research at Wits University suggests that the unemployment rate would “fall by only six percentage points – from 43.6% to 37.6% – if all foreigners’ jobs were somehow handed to unemployed South Africans”.
This, they say, highlights that “foreigners do not dominate the labour market overall, even if some sectors and locations have higher concentrations of immigrant workers.”
Apart from that, if they swapped one-to-one, South Africans could lose jobs overall. A World Bank report found that one immigrant worker generates approximately two jobs for locals.
This xenophobic campaign, like its predecessors, will not solve the issues; instead, we will all be worse off.
Hate isn’t the solution. It deepens distrust and spreads fear.
Surely, logic and peace should prevail.
IPS UN Bureau Report