AFP

Nearly naked and covered with a black, foul-smelling muck, Shafiq Masih struggles out of a sewer he has just cleaned by hand in an upmarket district of Lahore, Pakistan’s second biggest city.  

Every day the 44-year-old descends into the city’s sewers, braving toxic gases emitted by excrement, pollutants and other waste, to manually unblock the drains of the city.

“When someone goes down, they have to sacrifice all self-respect,” he told AFP.

“People go to the toilet, flush the toilet, and all the dirt gets dumped on us.”

Like the vast majority of sanitation workers in Pakistan, Shafiq is a Christian, and doing a job that comes with strong social stigma — one considered impure by many Muslims.

Even in death there is no dignity.

In 2017 Muslim doctors sparked outrage and protests in Umerkot when they refused to treat a Christian sewage worker overcome by toxic gases, saying they could not touch his soiled body because they had to remain pure during Ramadan.

– Caste discrimination –

Most Christians in Pakistan are descendants of lower-caste Hindus who converted during the British colonial era in the hope of escaping a system that frequently forced them into a life of toil almost from birth.

They make up less than two percent of the population, but occupy more than 80 percent of jobs involving refuse collection, sewage work and street sweeping, according to figures cited regularly by the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC).

The remainder are filled mostly by Hindus, another tiny community in the Muslim-majority nation.

Even though the caste system doesn’t officially exist in Pakistan, it persists in these occupations, experts say. 

The word “chuhra”, traditionally used to describe those working in the sanitation industry — and considered extremely derogatory — is now synonymous with being a Christian.

Institutionalised discrimination is also rampant: some job adverts from public bodies have specified menial cleaning jobs are reserved for “non-Muslims”, with the Centre for Law and Justice, a local NGO, identifying nearly 300 such announcements over the past decade.

The NCHR has recently launched a campaign to protest against this practice.

– Immense risks –

Like much of Pakistan, the drains in Lahore — a city of 11 million — are routinely unclogged with a long bamboo stick. If this doesn’t work, someone has to go in.

For doing this, and after 22 years of service, Shafiq receives just 44,000 rupees ($240) a month — still, almost double the salary of street sweepers and garbage collectors.

But the associated risks are immense with infections including tuberculosis and hepatitis common, as well as skin and eye diseases.

Accidents also happen frequently.

At least ten people have died since 2019 in Pakistani sewers, according to the Centre for Law and Justice (CLJ), a local NGO which says the figures are probably far higher than reported.

In October in Sargodha, two Christian sewage workers died rescuing a third who had been forced by his Muslim supervisors to enter a sewer he knew to be full of poisonous gas.

Their families filed a complaint of criminal negligence — a first in Pakistan — but agreed to an out-of-court settlement.

“When you go to work, you are never sure you will get home,” said Shahbaz Masih, 32, who was once overcome by fumes in the sewer before being revived in hospital.

– State exploitation –

Industry insiders say companies responsible for the city contracts take advantage of worker illiteracy and disorganisation to pay them monthly salaries of under 10,000 rupees (50 euros) — less than half the legal minimum.

“The state is directly responsible for this exploitation,” says Mary James Gill, a Pakistani lawyer and politician who heads the CLJ and received the 2021 Human Rights Award from France for her “Sweepers are Superheroes” campaign.

“From their recruitment to their death, we have clear and undeniable evidence that they are discriminated against by society and the state.”

Gill says there is a vicious circle, with poverty preventing many Christians from providing an education for their children, who have no choice but to turn to the same occupation.

Shafiq knows that he is not about to be promoted and leave the sewers.

Still, every day he “thanks God for another day to live”.

Negotiations to finalise a key UN report on how to stave off climate catastrophe wrapped up on Sunday more than two days late following a tussle over how to describe financial needs, participants told AFP.

Two-weeks of virtual talks were contentious from the start, as nearly 200 nations grapple with hard choices about how to rapidly purge carbon pollution from their economies and become carbon neutral by mid-century.

The latest report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), due to be published on Monday, will detail how societies and industries must be reimagined to cut greenhouse gas emissions and avoid the worst impacts of a heating planet. 

But with sweeping changes needed — and huge investments on the line — the political stakes are high. 

“Everybody has something to lose and everybody has something to gain,” another participant monitoring the process said.

Nations were tasked with thrashing out line-by-line a high-level “summary for policymakers” that distils the thousands of pages of the IPCC’s underlying assessment.

As talks resumed Sunday, only 50 percent of the text had been approved, and by late evening all the sticking points had been cleared. 

“A final reading and checkup will take place Monday morning,” tweeted Belgian scientist Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, a delegate from Belgium.

A source close to the talks told AFP earlier that delays were down to the references to finance.

The United States baulked at data showing how much developing countries require to slash greenhouse gas emissions to meet the temperature goals of the Paris Agreement, whereas China wants the figures prominently included, he said.

While these detailed estimates will likely remain in the main IPCC report, the US and other wealthy nations wanted it dropped from the all-important summary for policymakers.  

Some studies have said that developing nations need to spend trillions per year, many times more than current levels of investment.

“These figures are very policy relevant. The report says it is possible to limit warming to 1.5C and cut emissions in half by 2030,” the source said. 

“But you can’t say that without saying how much money you need to implement those solutions.” 

The closed-door negotiations on how to cast the IPCC’s findings stumbled over how, and how quickly, the fossil fuels that drive global warming must be drawn down.

They also stalled over how big a role should be given to technologies that capture CO2 as it is emitted or extract it from the air.

Nikki Reisch, of the Center for International Environmental Law, said “political pressure” was trying to “mask the undeniable reality” that warming will reach catastrophic levels if the shift away from fossil fuels is not accelerated immediately.

Negotiations to finalise a key UN report on how to stave off climate catastrophe, already two days into overtime, remained stymied Sunday on the issue of financial needs, participants told AFP.

The two-week virtual talks have been contentious from the start, as nearly 200 nations grapple with hard choices about how to rapidly purge carbon pollution from their economies and become carbon neutral by mid-century.

The latest report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), due to be published on Monday, will detail how societies and industries must be reimagined to cut greenhouse gas emissions and avoid the worst impacts of a heating planet. 

But with sweeping changes needed — and huge investments on the line — the political stakes are high. 

“Everybody has something to lose and everybody has something to gain,” another participant monitoring the process said.

Nations are tasked with thrashing out line-by-line a high-level “summary for policymakers” that distils the thousands of pages of the IPCC’s underlying assessment.

“We’re at 90 percent of approving the Summary,” which is about 40 pages long, one person tracking the talks said. “What is holding things up is the finance.”

The United States is balking at data showing how much developing countries require to slash greenhouse gas emissions to meet the temperature goals of the Paris Agreement, whereas China wants the figures prominently included, one source said.

While these detailed estimates would remain in the main IPCC report, the US and other wealthy nations want it dropped from the all-important summary for policymakers. 

Some studies have said that developing nations need to spend trillions per year, many times more than current levels of investment.

“These figures are very policy relevant. The report says it is possible to limit warming to 1.5C and cut emissions in half by 2030,” the source said. 

“But you can’t say that without saying how much money you need to implement those solutions.” 

Negotiations on how to cast the IPCC’s findings have stumbled over how, and how quickly, the fossil fuels that drive global warming must be drawn down.

Talks have also stalled over how big a role should be given to technologies that capture CO2 as it is emitted or extract it from the air.

Nikki Reisch, of the Center for International Environmental Law, said “political pressure” was trying to “mask the undeniable reality” that warming will reach “catastrophic levels” if the shift away from fossil fuels is not accelerated immediately.

The death toll from torrential downpours that triggered flash floods and landslides in Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro state rose to 16 Sunday, with three people still missing, authorities said.

Three days of heavy rain have battered a broad swathe of the southeastern state’s Atlantic coast, the latest in a series of deadly storms in Brazil that experts say are being made worse by climate change. 

Emergency workers pulled two more bodies early Sunday from the mud and wreckage left by a landslide in the Monsuaba neighborhood of Angra dos Reis, a seaside town 160 kilometers (100 miles) southwest of Rio de Janeiro city, officials said.

In all, four children and four adults were killed there, the city government said. Emergency workers are still searching for three people reported missing in Monsuaba.

Another landslide in the picturesque colonial town of Paraty killed a mother and six of her children, aged two to 17.

A seventh child was rescued alive and taken to the hospital, where he was in stable condition, the mayor’s office said.

In the Rio suburb of Mesquita, a 38-year-old man was electrocuted trying to help another person escape the flooding, officials and media reports said.

President Jair Bolsonaro said on Facebook the federal government had sent military aircraft to help the rescue effort and dispatched national disaster response secretary Alexandre Lucas to the state of 17.5 million people.

The new storms come six weeks after flash floods and landslides killed 233 people in the scenic city of Petropolis, the Brazilian empire’s 19th-century summer capital, also in Rio state.

A loosely federated network of scientists in more than two dozen countries plan acts of civil disobedience starting this week to highlight the climate crisis, members of Scientist Rebellion told AFP.

Their non-violent actions are timed to the release Monday of a landmark report from the UN’s climate science advisory panel laying out options for slashing carbon pollution and controversial schemes for extracting CO2 from the air, they said in interviews.

Scientist Rebellion targets universities, research institutes and major scientific journals, prodding them and their staff to speak out more forcefully on what they describe as the existential threat of global warming.

“Scientists are particularly powerful messengers, and we have a responsibility to show leadership,” said Charlie Gardner, a conservation scientist at the University of Kent specialised in tropical biodiversity.

“We are failing in that responsibility. If we say it’s an emergency, we have to act like it is.”

Starting Monday, the group hopes to see “high levels of disobedience” with more than 1,000 scientists worldwide taking part in direct non-violent action against government and academic institutions.

The world has seen a crescendo of deadly extreme weather amplified by rising temperatures — heatwaves, wildfires, flooding, storms engorged by rising seas — and a torrent of recent climate science projects worse to come. 

Much of that research is distilled in periodic reports from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC). 

Scientist Rebellion was founded in 2020 by two physics PhD students at St Andrews College in Scotland, inspired in part by the more broadly based Extinction Rebellion.

The group’s first significant action with more than 100 scientists, in March 2021, targeted the British Royal Society and science publishing behemoth Springer Nature.        

“We basically pasted enlarged copies of their journal articles calling for rapid transformative change onto their offices,” said Kyle Topher, an environmental scientist from Australia and full-time activist for the group.

– ‘It is survival’ –

Last year’s COP26 climate summit in Glasgow saw a score of their members arrested. 

“As far as we know this was the first mass arrest of scientists anywhere in the world since Carl Sagan protested nuclear weapons testing in the 1980s,” said Gardner.

They also made headlines by leaking an early draft of Monday’s IPCC report, which warned that carbon dioxide emissions need to peak within three years if the world is to keep the Paris Agreement targets for global warming in reach. 

“As scientists, we tend to be risk averse — we don’t want to risk our jobs, our reputations, and our time,” said Rose Abramoff, a soil scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Knoxville, Tennessee and a Scientist Rebellion member.

“But it is no longer sufficient to do our research and expect others to read it and understand the severity and urgency of the climate crisis.”

The aim of the group is to “make this crisis impossible to ignore”, she added.

Many of its members are in the Global South, where climate change protests up to now have been more muted, even if the impacts are more keenly felt.

“I am not sure this is our last chance, but time is definitely running out,” said Jordan Cruz, an environmental engineer in Ecuador who studies the devastating impact of mining industries on human communities in the Andes.

“I am terrified,” he said by email. “But it’s the kind of fear that motivates action. It is survival.”

More information about Scientist Rebellion can be found here: https://scientistrebellion.com/take-action/

Morocco’s village of Inzerki is proud to claim it has the world’s oldest and largest collective beehive, but instead of buzzing with springtime activity, the colonies have collapsed amid crippling drought.

Beekeeper Brahim Chatoui says he has lost almost a third of his hives in just two months — and he is not alone.

“At this time of year, this area would normally be buzzing with bees,” said Chatoui, sweating under a blazing springtime sun. “Today, they’re dying at a terrifying rate.”

The North African kingdom has seen a dramatic spike in mass die-offs of the critical pollinators, a phenomenon called “colony collapse disorder”.

Worldwide, experts say such sudden mass deaths of bees are often linked to the destruction of nature and the rampant use of pesticides.

But authorities in Morocco say these collapses are caused by the worst drought to hit the country in 40 years, which has decimated the plants on which bees rely for food.

– ‘Unprecedented’ spike –

The crisis is so acute that the government released 130 million dirhams ($13 million), to support beekeepers and investigate the cause of the bee deaths.

Morocco’s National Food Safety Office, which carried out the investigation, ruled out disease as a reason.

Instead, it blamed the “unprecedented” spike in hive collapses on an intense drought driven by climate change.

Inzerki’s unique collective beehive sits on a sunny hillside in the heart of the Arganeraie Biosphere Reserve, a UNESCO-protected 2.5-million-hectare region, some 415 kilometres (260 miles) southwest of the capital Rabat.

The complex is striking: A five-storeyed structure of wooden struts and dry mud stretch along a hillside, each compartment home to a cylindrical wicker hive, covered with a mix of earth and cow dung. 

Experts say it is the oldest traditional, collective beehive in the world, dating back to 1850, but today it is under threat amid a changing climate.

“This year we hope for rain, because I have lost 40 hives so far,” Chataoui said.

Bee expert Antonin Adam, who has studied the insects in southwestern Morocco, also blamed the collapse on the drought.

But he added the problem may have been exacerbated by “the bees’ vulnerability to diseases, nomadic pastoral practices, intensive agriculture and the country’s desire to increase its honey production”.

That desire is clearly visible in agriculture ministry figures.

Honey output has risen by 69 percent in a decade, from 4.7 tonnes in 2009 to almost eight tonnes in 2019, generating revenues of over 100 million euros.

But it is not only Inzerki’s apiary that is in trouble.

Mohamed Choudani, of the UAM beekeepers union, said the crisis was hitting bee populations across the country.

Last summer, Morocco’s 36,000 beekeepers were managing some 910,000 hives, up by 60 percent since 2009, according to official figures.

But Choudani said that since last August, 100,000 colonies had been lost in the central region of Beni Mellal-Khenifra alone.

Bees and other pollinators are vital for the reproduction of more than three-quarters of food crops and flowering plants.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) say bees play an “essential role… in keeping people and the planet healthy”, with the UN saying they “serve as sentinels for emergent environmental risks, signalling the health of local ecosystems”.

– ‘Exceptional legacy’ –

For the villagers of Inzerki, the collapse of hives is an ecological and economic disaster — but also a crisis for their unique heritage.

Chatoui, the beekeeper, said many Inzerki residents can’t afford to revive the hives they have lost.

“Some families have decided just to give up on beekeeping completely,” he said.

The hives at Inzerki are in trouble. Parts of the structure, recently listed as a national heritage site, are sagging.

Geographer Hassan Benalayat says the neglect is due to several factors on top of climate change, including the arrival of modern agriculture and a general exodus from the countryside.

Around 80 families in the village once kept bees. Today there are less than 20.

“It’s urgent to keep this exceptional legacy alive,” Benalayat said.

Chatoui and other villagers have set up an association to restore the structure, as well as planting herbs for the bees that are better able to tolerate hot and arid conditions.

“The situation is critical, but that doesn’t mean I’m giving up,” Chatoui said.

“The aim isn’t to produce honey, but to protect the hives and make sure the bees survive until better days.”