In July 2016, the Colombian government enacted Law 1787, which regulates the use of medicinal cannabis and its trade in the country. With this decision and a series of subsequent resolutions, Colombia joined the more than a dozen countries that have put into practice different types of regulation to explore the advantages of this plant as an alternative pharmaceutical.
Delegates to the Our Oceans conference are gathering to discuss ocean sustainability, but there’s a big problem: their proposals will only sanitize continued resource extraction and environmental and ecological degradation.
On 23 and 24 October, Norway will host the “Our Ocean” conference: An annual international conference that was initiated in 2014 by the US Department of State outside of any UN process. The people who live with and are surrounded by the ocean, and who are most affected by the deterioration of the marine environment, are not present in the conference panels: Fishers, coastal communities and first-affected by climate change indigenous groups.
This article focusses on TNCs as global actors, the structures and mechanisms that grant them impunity for wrong doing, and the deepening and widespread popular resistance to TNC extractivism and destruction of the planet.
By the end of August 2019, African States had been hit by a total of 106 known investment treaty arbitration claims. This represents 11% of all known investor-state disputes worldwide. Between 2013 and 2018, there has been an unprecedented boom of claims against African governments. During these last six years, they received more investor claims than the previous 20 years combined. This paper exposes how the international investment regime affects African countries.
“Power inferno”, this is the title Jean Baudrillard gave to one of his essays in the aftermath of the attack on the Twin Towers, paraphrasing the title of a catastrophic film that hit the billboards years earlier: A “Tower Inferno”. A hell of power. This we might say today, as in past occasions, of the Amazon, an image of fire, destruction and resistance, that has been cyclically appearing and reappearing in the media, and that periodically unleashes indignation and helplessness, as if the Amazon were some sort of symbol of past and future apocalypse.
The call, made in an open letter, denounces attempts to ‘delegitimiz[ing] the United Nations and weaken(ing) the role of states in global decision-making.
The UN Secretary General and the World Economic Forum signed on June 13 a Strategic Partnership Agreement for the implementation of the 2030 agenda (SDG). More than 400 organisations signed the following letter demanding the end of the agreement and denouncing it for formalising the corporate capture of the UN and moving towards an increasingly privatized and less democratic global governance.
The climate crisis is a manifestation of the systemic, capitalist crisis. We demand governments tackle the climate crisis by ending corporate power, facilitated by the trade and investment regime, that has long destroyed livelihoods and communities.
This corporate impunity has led to the wholesale looting of the biosphere, authoritarian responses and worsening social, political and environmental conflicts, particularly in the Global South.
This report is based on on-going collaborative research between the Transnational Institute (TNI) and the Indonesian traditional fisher folk union, Kesatuan Nelayan Tradisional Indonesia (KNTI). For the past decade, Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) has become a popular policy tool to resolve conflicts over and in ocean space. Proponents claim that MSP can ensure a process that balances competing interests between different users of ocean space from large-scale extractive industries, to tourism companies to small-scale fishers.
Our relationship to the ocean has changed greatly over the centuries. For those who fish, it is their livelihood, while for trade the ocean is considered simply a surface across which goods can be shipped. At the beginning of the 20th century another era began, centred on the extraction of ocean resources from the seabed, and today there is talk of the “blue economy”, which promises a triple win on the ecological, social and economic fronts.
Please cast up to four votes on your favorite examples of transformation in areas of water, energy, housing and food systems. You can cast up to 4 votes, one for each of the 4 categories. We will announce the 2019 People's Choice Award in the fall of 2019.
When the Dutch government liberalised cannabis policy in 1976, they understood that the legalisation and regulation of cannabis was actually the best solution, or at least the least bad one.
