NEW YORK, New York, January 22, 2009 (ENS) – Senior United Nations officials today began to assess humanitarian needs in Gaza, getting a first-hand look a the destruction inflicted on the area’s 1.5 million residents and their environment during three weeks of Israeli military operations.

“The mission was struck by the scale and urgency of the needs of the people of Gaza, and the heavy and multi-faceted impact that this conflict has had on the civilian population,” according to a joint statement issued by John Holmes, under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs and Robert Serry, UN special coordinator for the Middle East peace process.

The UN Security Council is calling for the temporary ceasefire in Gaza declared by both sides on January 18 to become a durable truce with guarantees to prevent arms smuggling and to ensure that all border crossings are permanently reopened. But shelling from both sides continues intermittantly, according to local media reports.

Israel launched the 22 day offensive on December 27 with the stated aim of ending years of rocket fire from Hamas at southern Israeli towns. The fighting claimed over 1,300 lives in Gaza, 412 of them children, and wounded more than 5,450, 1,855 of them children, as well as causing widespread destruction and suffering.

A damaged warehouse on the grounds of the UN Relief and Works Agency for the Palestine Refugees in the Near East. (Photo by Eskinder Debebe courtesy UN)

At least 13 Israelis also died in the conflict.

The bombing and shelling caused extensive damage to civilian facilities throughout the Gaza Strip, and supplies of basic food and fuel, and the provision of electricity, water and sanitation services remain critical.

“We saw a lot of shocking destruction,” Holmes said in an interview with UN Radio, describing the scene at several sites in Gaza, including the still-smoldering ruins of the UN compound that was hit last week by Israeli forces.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has demanded a complete investigation by Israel into all attacks against UN facilities in Gaza, and that those responsible be held accountable for their actions.

“Questions of compensation will arise because there was obviously very significant damage,” said Holmes, to “UN installations, work and UN staff.”

During their mission, Holmes and Serry will meet with Israeli authorities to underscore that country’s role in facilitating humanitarian assistance for the people of Gaza, including the need for full, timely, and unrestricted access for all goods and humanitarian actors.

Gaza mother and child amidst destruction (Photo courtesy UNICEF)

They also are meeting with Palestinian Authority leaders to work out the best way to scale up humanitarian assistance in Gaza. Once the assessment is completed, the UN will launch a Flash Humanitarian Appeal for Gaza in early February.

“Children form the majority of the population of Gaza,” said UNICEF Executive Director Ann Veneman, a former U.S. secretary of agriculture. “No human being can watch this without being moved. No parent can witness this and not see their own child. This is tragic. This is unacceptable.”

The UN World Food Programme today began emergency distributions of vitamin A-fortified date bars and high-energy biscuits to thousands of displaced people in Gaza City. The distributions also include ready-to-eat meals for hospitals and milk for children. They are part of WFP’s recently launched Operation Lifeline Gaza.

WFP emphasized that all crossing points into Gaza must re-opened for the agency to be able to move 600 tons of food every day into the Gaza Strip as planned. To date, WFP shipments have been crossing only through Kerem Shalom, at the southern tip of the Gaza Strip, including shipments from Egypt.

The environmental destruction wrought by the Gaza conflict is widespread, according to Friends of the Earth Middle East.

From its three offices in Amman, Jordan; Bethlehem and Tel Aviv, Israel, the nonprofit organization is appealing to the UN Environmental Programme to send a team from its Post-Conflict Assessment Unit to Gaza and Israel.

Palestinian rescue workers carry a wounded prisoner past a fire in the central security headquarters and prison, the Saraya, in Gaza City after it was hit in an Israeli missile strike. December 28, 2008. (Photo by Amir Farshad Ebrahimi)

The UNEP mission would undertake an independent assessment of the environmental impacts and make recommendations for reconstruction efforts.

The conflict has had “dangerous repercussions for the Gaza Strip’s already dilapidated water supply network and sewage,” the group said.

UN reports indicate that more than 500,000 Palestinians in Gaza remain without safe drinking water. Sewage collection systems and treatment facilities have ceased functioning, resulting in sewage in the streets.

The raw sewage overflow could reach surrounding communities and the Mediterranean Sea. “Sewage contamination will lead to long-term consequences for both Palestinians and Israelis including the outbreak of infectious diseases and the loss of important groundwater sources through pollution,” warns Friends of the Earth Middle East.

The group’s Palestinian Director Nader Al Khateeb and Israeli Director Gidon Bromberg said that documenting the consequences of war on the shared environment of Israel and Palestine highlights the loss to both nations and must be followed up by actions that will help avoid another round of violence and destruction.

“Reconstruction efforts, beyond urgent humanitarian assistance, should focus on working with communities on both sides of the border, Bromberg said. “The reconstruction effort should involve grassroots peace-building efforts so that the ceasefire has a better chance of survival and that infrastructure rebuilt will not again be destroyed by the next round of violence.”

From its headquarters in Switzerland, the International Union for Conservation of Nature said the environmental crisis unfolding in Gaza must be addressed without delay.

The Gaza Strip, one of the world’s most densely populated areas, is under tremendous environmental stress, and the current conflict is making a dire situation tragic, both for human beings and for nature, said the IUCN.

“What we are seeing in Gaza today is first and foremost a human tragedy,” said IUCN President Ashok Khosla. “The world is focusing, and rightfully so, on addressing the most pressing humanitarian needs of the Palestinian population. But we cannot ignore the longer term impacts of the conflict on the environment and on the civilian infrastructures, which are so essential for the well-being of the Palestinian population.”

“IUCN is an organization dedicated to the conservation of biodiversity, which means life, all life,” said IUCN Director General Julia Marton-Lefèvre. “Gaza needs peace to address the many environmental problems threatening its future.”

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GENEVA, Switzerland, April 30, 2008 (ENS) – The United Nations aims to have a comprehensive plan to tackle the global food crisis in place by the beginning of June, “around which the institutions and leaders around the world can coalesce,” a top UN official said at a news conference here today.

Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs John Holmes said that although the breadth and complexity of the issue must be recognized, there is no need to panic.

“I think it is clear we can fix these problems. The solutions can be found; the solutions are there,” he said. “They are very difficult, some of them, in the short term, but they can be done.”

John Holmes is UN Under-Secretary-General
for Humanitarian Affairs. (Photo
courtesty UN)

Holmes is one of two coordinators, along with UN System Influenza Coordinator David Nabarro, of a new high-powered task force that was announced yesterday by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to organize responses to the global rise in food prices.

The formation of this task force resulted from a two-day meeting of the UN Chief Executive Board, consisting of 27 heads of UN agencies, funds and programs chaired by the secretary-general in the Swiss city of Bern.

The task force is chaired by the secretary-general and consists of the heads of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Food Programme, the Food and Agriculture Organization, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, the World Trade Organization, and other organizations which will be invited to join.

The UN Chief Executive Board called on the international community to urgently provide $755 million in emergency funds needed for the UN to feed millions of hungry people worldwide, as the first of a series of concrete measures to be taken.

“We see mounting hunger and increasing evidence of malnutrition which has severely strained the capacities of humanitarian agencies to meet humanitarian needs, especially as promised funding has not yet materialized,” Ban told a news conference in Bern on Tuesday.

He warned that “without full funding of these emergency requirements, we risk again the spectre of widespread hunger, malnutrition and social unrest on an unprecedented scale.”

Protests and riots have broken out in some countries over the rising cost of basic foods, such as rice, wheat and corn.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon
(center) addresses press conference
in Bern. Sharing the stage from right:
Josette Sheeran, executive director
World Food Programme; Jacques
Diouf, executive director Food and
Agriculture Organization; Robert
Zellick, president World Bank; and
Pascal Lamy, director-general of the
World Trade Organization. April 29,
2008. (Photo by Mark
Garten courtesy UN)

In 2007, the food price index calculated by the Food and Agriculture Organization rose by nearly 40 percent, compared with nine percent the year before, and in the first months of 2008 prices jumped again. Nearly every agricultural commodity is part of this rising price trend.

Ban blamed escalating energy prices, lack of investment in agriculture, increasing demand, trade distortion subsidies and recurrent bad weather for the surge in prices.

The food crisis “threatens to undo all our good work,” Ban said later Tuesday in a lecture delivered in Geneva. “If not managed properly, it could touch off a cascade of related crises affecting trade, economic growth, social progress and even political security around the world,” he said.

But the UN chief said the situation is manageable. “I am confident that we can deal with the global food crisis. We have the resources. We have the knowledge. We know what to do. We should therefore consider this not only as a problem but also as an opportunity,” he said.

To address the crisis, Ban called on world leaders to attend the UN High-Level Conference on Food Security, to be held in Rome from June 3 to 5.

In addition to the immediate priority of feeding the hungry, Ban emphasized the need to “ensure food for tomorrow,” by giving small farmers the support they need to assure their next harvest.

UN agencies are already taking concrete measures to address the crisis. The Food and Agriculture Organization has proposed an emergency initiative to provide low-income countries with the seeds and inputs to boost production and is calling for $1.7 billion in funding.

In addition, the International Fund for Agricultural Development is making available an additional $200 million to poor farmers in the most affected countries to boost food production.

On the role of biofuel production in the current crisis, Holmes said, “It is something that needs a new look in present circumstances without wanting to fall in any sense into knee-jerk reactions of saying all biofuels are bad or good. We need to look at it in a careful, sophisticated and differentiated way, between different regions of the world and between different products.”

Holmes said the crisis is not affecting every country in the same way.

“For many countries and population groups it is inconvenient, a problem for their daily budget and their purses, but it is not a matter of life and death,” he said. “In some places and for some groups, particularly those living on less than a dollar a day, that quickly could become a matter of life and death, or certainly of increased suffering and malnutrition.”

In Washington, DC, a scientist with the International Food Policy Research Institute, IFPRI, says biofuels are a factor in rising food prices.

Joachim von Braun said in a new policy paper that developed countries should eliminate domestic biofuel subsidies and open their markets to biofuel exporters like Brazil.

“Biofuel subsidies in the United States and ethanol and biodiesel subsidies in Europe have proven to be misguided policies that have distorted world food markets,” writes von Braun. “Subsidies on biofuel crops also act as an implicit tax on staple foods, on which the poor depend the most.”

IFPRI is one of 15 centers supported by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, an alliance of 64 governments, private foundations, and international and regional organizations.

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NEW YORK, New York, March 23, 2008 (ENS) – A lack of political will remains the greatest obstacle to efforts to reduce the number of people without access to basic sanitation and clean, running water, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Saturday in a message to mark World Water Day. This year, World Water Day coincides with the International Year of Sanitation.

Ban called on the international community to take firmer and faster steps to tackle the problem and said the flow of positive results would extend far beyond better access to clean water.

“Every dollar invested in water and sanitation yields an estimate seven dollars worth of productive activity,” said Ban. “And that comes on top of the immeasurable gains in cutting poverty, improving health and raising living standards.”

The secretary-general called it “unconscionable” that a child dies on average every 20 seconds because of sub-standard sanitation conditions that are preventable – a situation endured by an estimated 2.6 billion people worldwide, or more than a third of the global population.

A girl carries water home in the
village of Bayt Misheyeh,
Lebanon. (Photo courtesy UNICEF)

“Poor sanitation combines with a lack of safe drinking water and inadequate hygiene to contribute to the terrible global death toll,” Ban mourned. “Those who survive face diminished chances of living a healthy and productive existence. Children, especially girls, are forced to stay out of school, while hygiene-related diseases keep adults from engaging in productive work.”

Over 60 percent of Africans lack access to a proper toilet, according to the United Nations World Health Organization and UN Children’s Fund in a joint message for World Water Day, whose 2008 theme is Sanitation Matters.

“Sanitation is a cornerstone of public health,” said Margaret Chan, WHO Director-General. “Improved sanitation contributes enormously to human health and wellbeing, especially for girls and women.”

Of the 2.6 billion people without toilets in their homes, nearly 1 billion of them are children.

“The absence of adequate sanitation has a serious impact on health and social development, especially for children,” said Ann Veneman, UNICEF executive director.

“Good sanitation doesn’t mean expensive sanitation,” said UNICEF’s Chief of Water and Environmental Sanitation, Clarissa Brocklehurst. “It can be a very simple pit latrine, a well-sealed hole in the ground. That’s just as good as a flush toilet.”

Boys walk toward a latrine provided
by UNICEF in the village of
Kobelema, Liberia. (Photo
courtesy UNICEF)

Halving the proportion of people without access to basic sanitation is one of the eight Millennium Development Goals devised at a global leaders’ summit in 2000, but the world is far behind the pace to achieve that by the target date of 2015, Ban said.

“Experts predict that by 2015, 2.1 billion people will still lack basic sanitation,” he said. “At the present rate, sub-Saharan Africa will not reach the target until 2076.”

Population growth, widespread poverty and insufficient investment are among the key obstacles, but the secretary-general noted that “the biggest culprit” is the lack of political will.

Events were held around the world this weekend to highlight World Water Day. At UN Headquarters in Geneva the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council, WSSCC, staged a public toilet queue demonstration to raise awareness about the sanitation crisis around the globe.

Guest of honor, Prince Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands who chairs the UN Secretary-General’s Advisory Board on Water and Sanitation, joined the queue and expressed once more his support of breaking the silence and taboo around the global sanitation crisis.

On March 14, the WSSCC launched the Global Sanitation Fund, the first global financing mechanism to increase expenditure on sanitation and hygiene.

WSSCC Executive Director Jon Lane stresses that the Global Sanitation Fund is demand driven and people centered.

Lack of sanitation is a daily problem for residents of communities like this. (Photo courtesy Water and Sanitation Health)

“The Global Sanitation Fund will not embark on the construction of kilometers of sewerage pipes and other huge construction projects, since top-down investments in the sanitation sector don’t reach the poorest people,” said Lane. “The Global Sanitation Fund will support programs that have been developed through decision-making processes involving local communities and will concentrate on hygiene education, raising awareness and creating demand.”

Pollution generated by sewage, much of which ends up in coastal waters, leads an economic loss of $16 billion annually and is estimated to cause four million lost “man-years” yearly in terms of human ill-health, said Achim Steiner, executive director of the UN Environment Programme in a message for the Day.

“In many developed countries, part of the answer over the past half century has been found in ever more sophisticated, multi-million dollar water treatment works,” he said.

But as projects such as one at the Shimo la Tewa jail in Mombasa, a city on the Kenyan coast, highlight that there are less costly solutions to the problem that are beneficial for other reasons, Steiner observed.

In this project, inmates work with nature to neutralize human wastes by using wetland-filtered water, called “black wastewater,” for irrigation and fish farming, providing a source of protein which can be consumed or sold to local markets.

Additionally, this wastewater – containing high concentrations of human waste – will also be used to produced biogas, which can be serve as fuel for cooking, heating and lighting. This could slash the costs of the 4,000 person prison and curb emissions.

The scheme in Mombasa, which is also expected to help wildlife such as birds and marine organisms, has a price tag of $25 per person served, which is significantly less than projects in developed countries, Steiner said. “It is hoped that the lessons learn can be applied to other parts of the world so that the multiple challenges of sanitation and pollution can, in part, be viewed through a nature-based lens.”

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NEW YORK, New York, March 17, 2008 (ENS) – The international community needs to start creating strategies for using water more efficiently and sharing it more fairly, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said today, warning that unless action is taken soon, the conflicts and problems caused by water shortages around the world will multiply.

In an opinion column published today in “The Hindu” newspaper of Chennai, India, ahead of observances this week to mark World Water Day, Ban called for partnerships between governments, civil society groups, businesses and individuals to better use and conserve water.

“We are at the early stages of this awakening,” he wrote. “But there are some encouraging signs, especially in the private sector. Corporations have long been viewed as culprits. The smokestacks from power plants pollute our air; the effluents from industry spoil our rivers. But this is changing – more and more today, businesses are working to become part of the solution, rather than the problem.”

Thirsty child is satisfied. (Photo
courtesy World Water Day)

Ban cited the gathering earlier this month in New York of the UN Global Compact, the world’s largest voluntary corporate citizenship initiative, on the subject of water.

Participants engaged in the sharing of best and emerging pratices of water-related direct operations, supply chain management, watershed protection, transparency, public policy, community engagement, and collective action.

These areas constitute the major elements of The CEO Water Mandate, launched by the UN Secretary-General in July 2007 to engage companies on the emerging crisis in fresh water availability and sanitation. To date the chief executives of 20 companies have endorsed The CEO Water Mandate.

Ban stressed that it is important to move “beyond the mere use of water to stewardship,” given how scarce fresh water is becoming in so many regions of the world, both rich and poor.

Many of the conflicts around the world erupt or are worsened by water shortages, he said.

“International Alert has identified 46 countries, home to 2.7 billion people, where climate change and water-related crises create a high risk of violent conflict. A further 56 countries, representing another 1.2 billion people, are at high risk of political instability.”

“That’s more than half the world,” Ban observed.

The secretary-general said population growth and climate change will worsen the situation, observing that already one child dies every 20 seconds from a disease associated with a lack of clean water.

Helping people living “in the most abysmal standards of hygiene and sanitation” would not only reduce the death toll, Ban said, but would also assist in protecting the environment, alleviating poverty and fostering economic development.

“Water is a classic common property resource,” he said. “No one really owns the problem. Therefore, no one really owns the solution.”

On Friday, the UN released figures showing that more than 100 million Europeans still lack access to safe drinking water, resulting in the deaths from diarrhea of nearly 40 children across the region every day.

More than 170,000 cases of water-related diseases – including over 120,000 cases of viral hepatitis A – were reported in 2006.

A dry streambed in Bulgaria (Photo
courtesy World Meteorological Organization)

In Eastern Europe, some 16 percent of the population does not have access to drinking water in their homes, while in rural areas, more than half of all people do not have a reliable supply of safe water and adequate sanitation.

A new and independent Compliance Committee has been created to promote the prevention, control and reduction of water-related diseases and to increase the number of Europeans who have access to adequate sanitation.

The committee aims to ensure compliance with the London Protocol on Water and Health to the Convention on the Protection and Use of Transboundary Watercourses and International Lakes, which seeks to increase access to safe water.

The new committee, which was established by the UN Economic Commission for Europe and the Regional Office for Europe of the UN World Health Organization, is made up of nine experts, including scientists and environmental lawyers.

World Water Day 2008 will be celebrated by the UN on Thursday. HRH the Prince of Orange will attend the celebrations in Geneva. In 2008, the day will highlight issues on sanitation in accordance with the International Year of Sanitation 2008.

In the United States many water and sanitation events are planned. World Walk for Water will be held in New York, Los Angeles and Seattle. In New York, join International Medical Corps, UNICEF, WaterAid, Project Concern International, Starbucks and Ethos Water at Riverside Park for a series of speakers from participating organizations and a one mile walk.

For a complete list of World Water Day events worldwide, visit: www.worldwaterday.org

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