Climate change is an immediate, grave, and growing threat to development, making the battle to overcome poverty ever harder and more expensive. International climate finance is vital in the global effort to combat climate change. The lives and livelihoods of poor women and men at increased risk of floods, hunger, droughts, and disease depend on it. But most rich countries are failing in their obligations and commitments to support developing countries to cope with a more hostile climate they did least to cause. They are also increasing the risk of climate change by failing to slash their emissions far or fast enough.
Topic:
Climate Change, Development, Diplomacy, Poverty, and Fragile/Failed State
The right of citizens to hold public officials to account is at the heart of democratic governance. When citizen oversight is absent and the power to allocate public resources lies in the hands of a few decision makers, it is all too easy for resources to be diverted from their intended use and abused for private gain. Such corruption denies people the health care, education, and other public services to which they are entitled, and which would otherwise give them the means to work their way out of poverty.
Topic:
Corruption, Democratization, Development, Education, Health, Poverty, and Governance
Women have long played a crucial role in India's agricultural production, and the trend that sees men shifting to non-farm activities further increases their responsibility. The situation of women cultivators is one of tremendous vulnerability: without land titles, they are not recognised as farmers, and thus are not able to access credits and government benefits. This policy brief outlines avenues to address the gap between the reality for many rural women and their entitlements.
Topic:
Agriculture, Development, Gender Issues, and Human Rights
The world was rightly appalled by the use of chemical weapons in Damascus on 21 August 2013. If the recent diplomatic initiatives by the USA and Russia mean that these weapons are never again used, it would be a great achievement. But it won't be enough.
Topic:
Foreign Policy, Crime, Human Rights, International Law, and Weapons of Mass Destruction
Described by the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Margaret Chan, as 'the most powerful concept that public health has to offer', Universal health coverage (UHC) has risen to the top of the global health agenda. At its core, UHC is about the right to health. Everyone – whether rich or poor – should get the health care they need without suffering financial hardship. For Oxfam, UHC means that everyone has the same financial protection and access to the same range of high quality health services, regardless of their employment status or ability to pay.
Care is a crucial dimension of well-being. People need care throughout their lives in order to survive. Care has long been considered to be the 'natural' responsibility of women, as a result of which the costs of providing care fall disproportionately on women. These costs include forgone opportunities in education, employment and earnings, political participation, and leisure time.
Topic:
Development, Gender Issues, Human Rights, Human Welfare, Humanitarian Aid, Poverty, and Social Stratification
Since 2000, nearly 800 large-scale land deals covering 33m hectares globally – an area four times the size of Portugal – have been recorded. This land has shifted from smallholder production, local community use, or the provision of important ecosystem services, to commercial use, driven in part by the rising demand for large-scale crops like sugar.
Topic:
Agriculture, Development, Economics, International Political Economy, International Trade and Finance, and Markets
By signing the Arms Trade Treaty on September 25, Secretary John Kerry took an important step toward a safer and more secure world. The Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) is the first-ever multilateral treaty on the global trade in conventional arms. It is a common sense agreement that establishes standards for the $40 billion legal international weapons trade and seeks to reduce the illicit arms trade.
Topic:
Conflict Resolution, Arms Control and Proliferation, Poverty, and Treaties and Agreements
The past decade has witnessed a resurgence of interest in investing in agriculture. In 2003, heads of state from across Africa committed to allocate at least 10 per cent of their national budgets on an annual basis to agriculture and, through their commitment to the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP), to reduce poverty through agriculture-led growth.1 More recently, at the 2009 G8 Summit in L'Aquila, Italy, world leaders responded to the global spike in food prices by pledging to provide $22bn over three years to promote food security in developing countries.
Topic:
Security, Agriculture, Demographics, Development, Poverty, and Food
This briefing paper explores how the failure to tackle climate change threatens all aspects of food security – availability, access, utilisation, and stability. The changing climate is already jeopardising gains in the fight against hunger, and it looks set to worsen. It threatens the production and distribution of food. It threatens people's ability to access food by undermining livelihoods and destabilising prices, and it damages diets by harming human health and putting at risk the quality of food produced. Finally, the paper sets out how these impacts can be averted, through urgent action to avoid dangerous climate change, address our broken food system, and strengthen its resilience.
Topic:
Security, Agriculture, Climate Change, Development, Environment, Poverty, and Food