Their speeches did not grab international headlines like that delivered by U.S. President Barack Obama, nor did other delegates walk out as they spoke, as was the case for Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

But Caribbean Community (CARICOM) leaders are nonetheless hoping that their united front on the environment at the just concluded United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) will spur the international community to take them and other Small Island Developing States (SIDS) much more seriously.

“The islands of our planet are at war against climate change, warming temperatures and rising seas,” St. Vincent and the Grenadines Prime Minister Dr. Ralph Gonsalves told delegates. “This war is not a future event, it is a present-day and ongoing battle… the survival of our islands is at stake.”

Caribbean countries are hoping that by the time the international community gathers in the Pacific in 2014 for the Third International Conference for the Sustainable Development of SIDS, there will be progress on a number of recommendations that, for instance, emerged from the Rio+20 conference held in Brazil earlier this year.

“The failure to date to reach a legally binding outcome on climate change is cause of grave concern,” said Dominica’s U.N. Ambassador Vince Henderson. “While the debate continues, the challenges to our islands are becoming greater.”

Figures released by the Belize-based Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre (CCCCC) show that over the last decade, damage from intense climatic conditions has cost the region in excess of half a trillion dollars.

“In real terms, the threats posed to the Caribbean region’s development prospects are severe and it is now accepted that adaptation will require a sizable and sustained investment of resources,” Jamaica’s ...

As drought becomes increasingly common, farmers worldwide are struggling to maintain crop yields. In the United States, farmers are experiencing the most severe drought in more than a half-century. As a result, global corn, wheat, and soybean prices rose in July and August, and remain high.

But the severe dry spell parching croplands across the US is only the latest in a global cycle of increasingly frequent and damaging droughts. In Africa’s Sahel region, millions of people are facing hunger for the third time since 2005. Lack of rain in the region and volatile global food prices have made a bad situation worse. Indeed, it is the world’s poor – particularly those in rural areas – that suffer the most from these combined factors.

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This does not bode well for our future. By 2050, global food production will have to increase by 60% to meet demand from a growing world population with changing consumption habits. To ensure food security for all, we will have to increase not just food production, but also availability, especially for those living in developing countries. That means breaking down barriers and inequalities, building capacity, and disseminating knowledge. In Africa, smallholder farmers – who provide 80% of the sub-Saharan region’s food – need infrastructure for agricultural development, including irrigation and roads, as well as better market organization and access to technology.

The International Fund for Agricultural Development sees enormous potential in Africa’s ...

Unlike the flattening or even declining rates of HIV infection among nearly all other communities, the epidemic among gay men globally is rapidly expanding.

But according to new research, the reason for this fast expansion is biological, not behavioral, thus countering some of the core priorities of traditional AIDS funding.

“The trajectory of HIV epidemics among MSM” – men who have sex with men – “is expanding virtually everywhere we look, in low-, middle- and high-income countries, and across all regions,” Chris Beyrer, a professor of international health, told a panel discussion here on Thursday.

“Much of this comes down to a fundamental biological reality: it’s not about gender but about the gut.”

Beyrer, who contributed to a recent groundbreaking special issue of The Lancet, the British medical journal, on HIV in MSM, says that researchers have found that the HIV virus is far more efficiently transmitted through the gut, hence leading to a far higher transmission probability in anal sex, for either a man or a woman – around 18 times more likely than through vaginal transmission.

Further, because gay men can switch sexual roles in a way that is impossible among heterosexual couples – acting as both the acquisition and transmission partner – the efficiency of transmission among MSM networks appears to be far higher than previously understood.

In a hypothetical MSM group in which men did not alternate their sexual roles, Beyrer reports that HIV incidence could be reduced by up to 55 percent.

“The network-level effects are really trumping the individual level,” he says. “So, people who have modest individual-level risks but who are having sex in ...

As hurricane season gets under way and Tropical Storm Isaac bears down on the Caribbean and maybe on to Florida, biologists are paying particular attention to this fall’s shorebird migration.

Researchers at the Center for Conservation Biology (CCB) in Williamsburg, Va., have documented incredible feats of endurance by migrating Whimbrels (large shorebirds with long, down-curved bills) flying through storms, only to fall foul to the guns of unregulated hunting on islands, such as Guadeloupe and Martinique, as well as Barbados, French Guiana, Suriname and Guyana.

100 MPH Through Hurricanes

Using satellite transmitters attached to the birds, researchers tracked one Whimbrel – named Hope – through a large tropical storm in 2011. She took 27 hours averaging just nine miles per hour to fly nonstop through the storm to get to the center. Then she flew at an average of almost 100 mph for 1.5 hours out the back end, using the power of the storm to “slingshot” her towards land.

“Our research is documenting some of the truly amazing dynamics of bird migrations. In addition to the simply staggering distances these birds travel – often thousands of miles at a time, nonstop – we are also observing what could be described as jaw dropping physical feats involving storms,” said Fletcher Smith, lead biologist on the tracking project. 

He added, “These herculean efforts leave the birds exhausted and in need of a safe haven to rest and refuel. Unfortunately there are few of these locations in the Lesser Antilles, [small islands in the Caribbean north of Venezuela].

Some locals gather at recreational shooting swamps in the Caribbean to slaughter with impunity ...

Most corals thrive only in shallow waters, where there is enough light for them to grow. But the rapid rise in sea level, due to the melting of polar ice, is making these conditions increasingly scarce.

Measurements from tropical seas around the world reveal that the rise in sea level (3.3 mm/year) is happening at a faster rate than many corals have grown in the past 10,000 years, according to new research released at the 12th International Coral Reef Symposium (ICRS).

“The Caribbean once had 60 percent coral cover, and that has now collapsed to 10 percent,” said Jeremy Jackson, professor emeritus at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California, in a special address to the symposium, held Jul. 9-13 in Cairns, Australia. “Corals are critical and endangered ecosystems.”

Sea-level rise is just one threat to corals, which have been decimated by overfishing, pollution, and bleaching from warmer sea temperatures due to climate change, Jackson added.

A colorful piece of coral is made up of thousands of tiny animals called polyps, which create cup-like limestone skeletons around themselves using calcium from seawater. Coral gets its beautiful colors from micro algae that live symbiotically with it.

Reefs form as generation after generation of coral polyps live, build and die, creating a habitat for themselves and about 30 percent of all the species living in the oceans.

When corals are stressed by overly warm sea temperatures or pollution, they begin to look white or bleached due to the death of the algae. They become vulnerable to disease and die if the bleaching lasts long enough.

Eventually, weakened or dead coral is broken into rubble by waves and storms.

Jamaica may be the Caribbean country where reefs have deteriorated most. While it once possessed a great ...

In an informal settlement of 10,000 people on the outskirts of Papua New Guinea’s capital, Port Moresby, Tembari Children’s Care – a new grassroots initiative – is providing protection, food and education to orphans and abandoned children who would otherwise join the high numbers of child laborers in this Melanesian country.

Hayward Sagembo and his wife, Penny, who live in Nine Mile Settlement, became deeply concerned by the numbers of children neglected and orphaned due to their parents dying of AIDS or other causes.

“So we decided to start an organization that would help some of them,” Sagembo told IPS. “Tembari Children’s Care started underneath our house in 2003 and we managed it there for eight years.”

With the contribution of two shipping containers by the Papua New Guinean Digicel Foundation, which have been converted into classrooms, and donations of food and materials by local businesses, the center is able to provide the most vulnerable children with daily meals, school fees and some clothes.  Elementary to pre-school education is provided to 120 young children and day care to 280 who are homeless.

“Most of the children are malnourished and since they have been in our care their health has really improved,” Sagembo continued. “Through our early education program, they have gained confidence and gone on to schools where they have won prizes.”

But he emphasized there were many more children in need.

“Sixty percent of children in the settlement are vulnerable and TCC is the only children’s center at Nine Mile.  We are able to help 3-4 out of 10 children.  If our center did not exist, these children would be living on the streets without shelter and resorting to child labor to survive,” he said.

According to the International Labor Organization (ILO), the Asia Pacific region, which is the most child ...

Of all the challenges that present themselves as obstacles to peace in the Caribbean, none equals the growing threat of homophobia. Flagged on the slates of religion as a barbaric, sodomy and sinful way of living that transgresses the natural role and aim of sexual activity and does not possess values common with morality; homophobia is now fulfilling the ideological role that heterodoxy served in the Middle Ages from which to understand the Caribbean.

If studies concerning the rising incidences of crime are correct, then the Caribbean can easily be portrayed as the most homophobic place on earth. As ministers of religion seek to preserve traditional family values and politicians engage more homophobic music in their campaigns and civilians and even children point fingers to the sky shaped in the form of guns, the tune for equal rights and inclusion also transcend. In the interim, the music of popular Jamaican dancehall icon Buju Banton, the "batty boy" (a Jamaican epithet for homosexual) must die, blares in nightclubs, homes and social gatherings throughout the Caribbean. 

Whether by drowning, stoning or stabbing, he must die.

Yes! “Mister Fagoty” is being burnt in the Caribbean and he grimaces in agony. Homosexuals and lesbians are not just detriments but notorious criminals in Caribbean society.

Beneath an apparent ...

Over the past few years, former president Bharrat Jagdo has led several initiatives resulting in the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) country gaining much recognition for its ecosystem management, biodiversity conservation and climate change efforts.

But in spite of these efforts, officials here say Guyana, population 750,000, "is very vulnerable to the impacts of climate change".

"We continue to be affected by extreme weather patterns and events, in particular, intense rainfall leading to floods, both on the coast and in the hinterland areas," Prime Minister Samuel Hinds told IPS.

Approximately 90 percent of the population and most economic activities are located in a narrow strip along the coast, near or below sea level, Hinds explained. As a result, the majority of the population is vulnerable to coastal inundation caused by sea-level rise, or floods.

In 2005, Guyana suffered a major flood, with three weeks of continual heavy rains wreaking economic havoc, the equivalent of 67 percent of the country's gross domestic product (GDP).

Jagdeo has been championing the cause of developing countries in the fight against climate change. He has also brought to the forefront the role that the country's forests have been playing, and can continue to play, in addressing climate change.

It was under his leadership that Guyana's low carbon development strategy, which is commonly known as the LCDS and has received widespread national support and international acclaim, was developed in 2009.

Under the programme, the country receives payment for forests' ecosystem services. The funds are used to set economic activities on an environmentally friendly, low-carbon trajectory for growth and development.

In November 2010, Guyana and Norway established a partnership - the second biggest interim REDD+ agreement in the world - through which Norway committed to ...

As Cuba prepares to embark on a new round of exploratory offshore drilling, U.S. officials are slightly more enlightened about the island nation's plans in the event of a catastrophic oil spill on the scale of last year's Deepwater Horizon explosion.

Several Caribbean countries — including the United States and Cuba — met last week in the Bahamas to talk about response plans. U.S. officials got an opportunity to see the Cuban disaster-response plans; Cuba already has participated in a mock response drill in Trinidad with the Spanish oil company that's doing the first round of drilling. That company, Repsol, also agreed to allow U.S. inspectors from the Interior Department to look at the rig that will be doing the drilling.

Sarah Stephens, the executive director of the Center for Democracy in the Americas, said she was encouraged that Cuban and American officials had met, along with other nations that have an interest in regional oil production.

"There should be a lot more direct conversation and collaboration between the U.S. and Cuba and others about the rig, because it's inevitable," she said.

U.S. officials say their priority is mitigating any potential threat to the United States and its territorial waters from oil drilling in Cuban waters. They say they've done nothing to facilitate oil drilling in Cuban waters, and that their main goal is to be prepared for the possibility of a spill and how they'd respond to it.

"The United States will continue to engage multilaterally to advance regional collaboration and to ensure responsible stewardship of the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea," the State Department said in a statement issued before the meeting in the Bahamas.

Although U.S. officials say they're not actively working to keep Cubans from drilling in their own waters, the Cuba embargo that's been in place since the 1960s may have slowed things ...

Fifty years ago this week, on September 4, 1961, the U.S. Congress passed the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 which prohibited all aid to Cuba and authorized the President to declare a “total embargo upon all trade” with that Caribbean island nation.

Advocates heralded this bold move as a sure measure to “create the conditions” necessary for Fidel Castro to be removed from power “within one year.”

The American conceit was that, denied aid and trade with the United States, the Castro government would face an internal uprising, and that his days in power were numbered.

Fast forward half a century, and both Castro and the embargo remain.

The embargo, in many ways, represents the worse of the U.S., since it makes America seem like a petty, vindictive and irrational nation. And in both political and economic terms, the embargo has been a complete failure of U.S. foreign policy.

The embargo, rather than weakening Castro, emboldened him. For decades he has been able to position himself as a champion against impossible odds. The Cuban nation has rallied around him, as much from their national pride as for their affection for this “David” who has stood firm against “Goliath.”

Around the world, enemies of the United States have been able to point to the embargo as proof of America’s vindictive nature, of its willingness to deliberately enact a policy to punish innocents and impoverish an entire nation. Castro has been welcomed by other Third World dictators as both an inspiring figure of resistance against American “imperialism,” and as an avuncular counsel on how to remain in power indefinitely.

As a foreign policy instrument, the embargo has also failed. It has not done anything to make the Cuban people more free, and it has denied Americans of the right to travel freely as they see best. For American business interests, billions of dollars have been ...