Today's program includes reports from the United Nations Global Humanitarian Overview for 2021 and from the World Meteorological Organization. The UN report addresses
the greatest humanitarian challenge since the Second World War as the global recession aided by the Covid 19 pandemic devolves into a depression. Over the past year, the number of people at risk of starvation has doubled and for the first time in over two decades levels of extreme poverty have risen. Nearly 40 percent more people around the world will need assistance and protection in 2021. While talk of Covid-19 fills the news, the root causes of this unprecedented humanitarian crisis are wars, conflict and violence. The World Meteorological Organization report shows that while CO2 emisions decreased a little during the pandemic lockdowns, the concentration of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere remain at record levels and are still rising. Global temperatures in 2020 have risen 1.2 degrees celsius over pre-industrial times, indicating how far the world's nations are from implementing the measures in the 2015 Paris Accords. And finally, both reports refer to the people most vulnerable to the economic depression and to the effects of climate change: migrants, those people forced from their homes due to wars, fighting and environmental crises, drought, flooding etc. We refer to the migrants arriving in the Canary Islands and to the EU's attempts at creating a policy on migration.
