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	Financial inequalities; defining our age by Diana Mitlin International Institute for Environment and Development   Ten years ago the world was rocked by financial crisis. Governments and international institutions spent huge sums propping up banks that had been engaged in risky, and often ethically dubious, lending and investment practices. The UK government alone spent £187bn supporting its banking sector.   A decade on from the crash, commentators are reviewing the economy and concluding that the financial crisis is reportedly over.   But it is clear that the crisis is not over for the hundreds of millions who do not have access to finance, or who have access on terms that increase their household insecurity.   IIED has spent three decades working with grassroots groups that provide access to finance to those who need it most: the world''s lowest-income people. We believe that community-based savings groups demonstrate the possibilities that come from a rethink of financial services.   Community organisations working in towns and cities of the global South have long recognised the critical role of finance. Residents need cash because there are few opportunities for subsistence agriculture and limited free access to ground water and fuelwood. Needs are particularly acute for the one billion living in informal settlements in towns and cities of the global South.   Community organisations have reconfigured financial services so that they reduce vulnerabilities and improve livelihood security. Their innovative processes are all built on savings groups, led by women seeking to meet their needs and those of their families.   Savings, accumulated from thousands of households organised into small neighbourhood groups, enable community-managed loan funds to be established. Collective management of lending provides an additional layer between formal finance systems and informal livelihoods, helping to protect capital and households.   Households that fail to satisfy the requirements of a commercial lender can come together to set up savings accounts. These savings can then protect households from irregular incomes and associated vulnerabilities.   Establishing a credit history and financial capital enables individuals and groups to take out loans, which enable them to improve their homes, livelihoods and neighbourhoods.   Community managers know the struggles of individual households and are able to discriminate between ''free-riders'' and those with a health crisis or other emergency. This helps to protect their own financial capital.   Some of these movements are benefiting significant numbers of people. In Sri Lanka, for example, the Women''s Co-op has 80,000 members, and has integrated savings, lending and insurance to create new development opportunities.   But the primary contribution is not scale, rather it is the innovative reconfiguring of norms and values, rules and regulations, so that finance reduces – not exacerbates – the vulnerability faced by low-income families.   Three decades of innovation by federations of women-led savings groups have resulted in a diversity of models that can address local needs with their own unique institutionalised financial management practices.   In Kenya, the Akiba Mashinani Trust (AMT) is working with an urban social movement, Muungano wa Wanavijiji, to address the needs of its members despite low income and tenure insecurity.   Group lending is enabling informal entrepreneurs to access essential loans. New approaches to housing delivery are enabling squatters and tenants to access services and secure homes, meaning that AMT and Muungano''s financial innovations are couched within a broader community effort to upgrade urban informal settlements and markets.   In India, the National Slum Dwellers Federation and Mahila Milan (a network of women''s savings collectives) have worked with an NGO, SPARC, to leverage government subsidies. This alliance has used development assistance to capitalise locally managed funds. Over 30 years, through subsidies and loans, more than 180,000 households have been supported to improve their living conditions. A further 75,000 households have obtained tenure security.   As significantly, this alliance has secured capital that enables community organisations to continue their work even though development assistance is increasingly difficult to obtain and government finance rarely covers the cost of local participation.   Many of these groups have worked with local authorities. A recently published study of City Development Funds in 263 cities, across five Asian countries, shows the potential for urban transformation.   And in Thailand, government finance to support grassroots savings groups has enabled community financial initiations to grow, and now 850,000 savers have access to loans and subsidy finance for neighbourhood upgrading and housing improvements.   Thousands of savings groups are networked into city and national federations, and in a global network called SDI. These savings groups do not collect money; they collect people. And they collect people because they understand that governments will only start to make substantive shifts in policies and programmes when millions are mobilised. For 21 years, SDI has been building a global social movement from daily savings contributions.   The dozens, hundreds or thousands of savings groups that make up each federation share some characteristics with microfinance, delivering small, low-cost loans with little delay, and accepting group-based collateral. But they focus on developing financial services that work for those with the lowest incomes.   Federation savings groups also take collective action — dealing with evictions and related land-tenure issues, basic services and shelter challenges. Their local funds provide the architecture to organise communities and leverage investment from the social capital and savings practices.   Grassroots organisations of shack and slum dwellers know that they cannot transform cities on their own. They have links with local authorities and national governments. There are opportunities for external donors to work with organisations of the urban poor. External funders cannot fund hundreds of small projects – but they can fund the local or national funds that can.   To date, neither global financiers nor development agencies have shown much interest in reconfiguring financial systems to reduce rather than exacerbate urban poverty. I believe that they are missing an opportunity both to increase the capital available and improve the efficacy with which such capital is used.   Most of all, it means that the lowest income households continue to be left behind by business-as-usual approaches to development.   The financial crisis made us ask the question: is the global financial system fit for purpose?   The next question is: when will the global financial system recognise the value of the innovations taking place in informal settlements across the global South?   * Diana Mitlin is principal researcher in IIED''s Human Settlements research group. Visit the related web page
	When Climate sets the Agenda by UNCCD, Inter Press Service   Sept. 2017   Pressures on global land resources are now greater than ever, as a rapidly increasing population coupled with rising levels of consumption is placing ever-larger demands on the world’s land-based natural capital, warns a new United Nations report.   Consumption of the earth’s natural reserves has doubled in the last 30 years, with a third of the planet’s land now severely degraded, adds the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) new report, launched on 12 September in Ordos, China during the Convention’s 13th summit (6-16 September 2017).   “Each year, we lose 15 billion trees and 24 billion tonnes of fertile soil,” the UNCCD’s report The Global Land Outlook (GLO) says, adding that a significant proportion of managed and natural ecosystems are degrading and at further risk from climate change and biodiversity loss.   In basic terms, there is increasing competition between the demand for goods and services that benefit people, like food, water, and energy, and the need to protect other ecosystem services that regulate and support all life on Earth, according to new publication.   At the same time, terrestrial biodiversity underpins all of these services and underwrites the full enjoyment of a wide range of human rights, such as the rights to a healthy life, nutritious food, clean water, and cultural identity, adds the report. And a significant proportion of managed and natural ecosystems are degrading and at further risk from climate change and biodiversity loss.   The report provides some key facts: from 1998 to 2013, approximately 20 per cent of the Earth’s vegetated land surface showed persistent declining trends in productivity, apparent in 20 per cent of cropland, 16 per cent of forest land, 19 per cent of grassland, and 27 per cent of rangeland.   These trends are “especially alarming” in the face of the increased demand for land-intensive crops and livestock.”   Land degradation contributes to climate change and increases the vulnerability of millions of people, especially the poor, women, and children, says UNCCD, adding that current management practises in the land-use sector are responsible for about 25 per cent of the world’s greenhouses gases, while land degradation is both a cause and a result of poverty.   “Over 1.3 billion people, mostly in the developing countries, are trapped on degrading agricultural land, exposed to climate stress, and therefore excluded from wider infrastructure and economic development.”   Land degradation also triggers competition for scarce resources, which can lead to migration and insecurity while exacerbating access and income inequalities, the report warns.   “Soil erosion, desertification, and water scarcity all contribute to societal stress and breakdown. In this regard, land degradation can be considered a ‘threat amplifier’, especially when it slowly reduces people’s ability to use the land for food production and water storage or undermines other vital ecosystem services. “   Meanwhile, higher temperatures, changing rainfall patterns, and increased water scarcity due to climate change will alter the suitability of vast regions for food production and human habitation, according to the report.   “The mass extinction of flora and fauna, including the loss of crop wild relatives and keystone species that hold ecosystems together, further jeopardises resilience and adaptive capacity, particularly for the rural poor who depend most on the land for their basic needs and livelihoods.”   Our food system, UNCCD warns, has put the focus on short-term production and profit rather than long-term environmental sustainability.   The modern agricultural system has resulted in huge increases in productivity, holding off the risk of famine in many parts of the world but, at the same time, is based on monocultures, genetically modified crops, and the intensive use of fertilisers and pesticides that undermine long-term sustainability, it adds.   And here are some of the consequences: food production accounts for 70 per cent of all freshwater withdrawals and 80 per cent of deforestation, while soil, the basis for global food security, is being contaminated, degraded, and eroded in many areas, resulting in long-term declines in productivity.   In parallel, small-scale farmers, the backbone of rural livelihoods and food production for millennia, are under immense strain from land degradation, insecure tenure, and a globalised food system that favours concentrated, large-scale, and highly mechanised agribusiness.   This widening gulf between production and consumption, and ensuing levels of food loss/waste, further accelerates the rate of land use change, land degradation and deforestation, warns the UN Convention.   Speaking at the launch of the report, UNCCD Executive Secretary Monique Barbut said, “Land degradation and drought are global challenges and intimately linked to most, if not all aspects of human security and well-being – food security, employment and migration, in particular.”   “As the ready supply of healthy and productive land dries up and the population grows, competition is intensifying, for land within countries and globally. As the competition increases, there are winners and losers.   According the Convention, land is an essential building block of civilisation yet its contribution to our quality of life is perceived and valued in starkly different and often incompatible ways.   A minority has grown rich from the unsustainable use and large-scale exploitation of land resources with related conflicts intensifying in many countries, UNCCD states.   “Our ability to manage trade-offs at a landscape scale will ultimately decide the future of land resources – soil, water, and biodiversity – and determine success or failure in delivering poverty reduction, food and water security, and climate change mitigation and adaptation.”   Monique Barbut said that the GLO report suggests, “It is in all our interests to step back and rethink how we are managing the pressures and the competition.”   “The Outlook presents a vision for transforming the way in which we use and manage land because we are all decision-makers and our choices can make a difference – even small steps matter,” she further added.   UN Development Programme Administrator Achim Steiner stated, “Over 250 million people are directly affected by desertification, and about one billion people in over one hundred countries are at risk.”   They include many of the world’s poorest and most marginalised people, he said, adding that achieving land degradation neutrality can provide a healthy and productive life for all on Earth, including water and food security.   * The Report: http://global-land-outlook.squarespace.com/the-outlook/#the-bokk   Sept. 2017   When officials and experts from around the world started the first environmental summit hosted by China, they were already aware that climate and weather-related disasters were seriously beginning to set the international agenda – now unprecedented floods in South Asia, the strongest ever hurricanes Harvey and Irma, and catastrophic droughts striking the Horn of Africa, are among the most impacting recent events.   China is the venue for the 13th summit of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), which is focusing this September on ways to mitigate and prevent the steadily advancing desertification and land degradation worldwide.   Officials and experts from 196 countries attending the UNCCD 13th session are expected to agree on a 12-year strategy to contain runaway land degradation that is threatening global food and water security. Countries are also expected to announce their targets for land restoration and to agree on actions to strengthen the resilience of communities to droughts.   Globally, as many as 169 countries are affected by desertification, with China accounting for the largest population and area impacted, UNCCD warns. China has announced it has set a target to reduce by 50 per cent all of its desertified areas.   Desertification is a silent, invisible crisis that is destabilising communities on a global scale, according to UNCCD.   “As the effects of climate change undermine livelihoods, inter-ethnic clashes are breaking out within and across states and fragile states are turning to militarisation to control the situation.”   “If we are to restore peace, security and international stability in a context where changing weather events are threatening the livelihoods of more and more people, survival options are declining and state capacities are overburdened, then more should be done to combat desertification, reverse land degradation and mitigate the effects of drought. Otherwise, many small-scale farmers and poor, land-dependent communities face two choices: fight or flight.“   The most impacted continent by climate change and weather induced disasters – Africa, which contributes only 4 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions – is now experiencing a scenario in its Eastern region of consecutive climate shocks causing back-to-back droughts that have left at least 8.5 million people in Ethiopia in dire need of food aid.   At the same time, severe drought has deepened in Somalia with the risk of famine looming on about half the population.   The death of livestock in the impacted areas has caused a breakdown in pastoral livelihoods, contributing to soaring hunger levels and alarming increases in malnutrition rates.   This is just a quick summary of the dramatic situation facing these two East African countries, which are home to a combined population of 113 million people (101.5 million in Ethiopia and 11.5 million in Somalia), and which are in need of additional urgent resources to prevent any further deterioration.   The situation has rapidly deteriorated, and the heads of the three Rome-based United Nations food agencies, at the conclusion of a four-day visit to the affected areas, called for greater investment in long-term activities that strengthen people’s resilience to drought and the impacts of climate shocks.   “This drought has been going on for a long time and we have lost much of our livestock… If we didn’t get food assistance, we would be in big trouble – but this is still not enough to feed us all,” Hajiji Abdi, a community elder, last week told José Graziano da Silva, director general of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Gilbert Houngbo, president of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), and David Beasley, executive director of the World Food Programme (WFP).   The three UN food agencies chiefs made their plea after they visited projects that treat dwindling herds to limit further livestock deaths and met drought-affected people receiving food rations.   “It is essential to invest in preparedness and provide farmers and rural communities with knowledge and tools to safeguard themselves and their livelihoods. We’ve witnessed here that saving livelihoods means saving lives – it is people’s best defense against drought,” said Graziano da Silva.   “A drought does not need to become an emergency,” said Houngbo, president of IFAD. “We know what works.” In the Somali region, where there is investment in irrigation systems, water points, rural financial institutions, health and veterinary services and other long-term development projects, the communities can better sustain themselves and their livestock through this devastating drought. “This is what we need to build on,” he added.   “We have seen clearly here that working together the three UN food agencies can achieve much more than alone,” said Beasley, head of WFP.   In Ethiopia, it is estimated that 9.5 million are hungry. There, drought has dented crop and pasture output in southern regions. In the specific case of Somalia, the United Nations reports that 3.3 million people - one third of its estimated 11 million inhabitants are now on a ‘hunger knife-edge.’   In Somalia more than six million people are affected, of whom only about three million have been reached with food rations.   Africa is prey to a steady process of advancing droughts and desertification, posing one of the most pressing challenges facing the 54 African countries, home to more than 1.2 billion people.   It is estimated that as much as two-thirds of Africa is already desert or dry lands. This land is vital for agriculture and food production.   According to the United Nations, droughts kill more people than any other single weather-related catastrophe, and conflicts among communities over water scarcity are gathering pace.   Over 1 billion people today have no access to water, and demand will increase by 30 per cent by 2030. UNCCD estimates that some 135 million people may be displaced by 2045 as a result of desertification.   Drought is among the most devastating of natural hazards – crippling food production, depleting pastures, disrupting markets, and, at its most extreme, causing widespread human and animal deaths, according to the FAO.   In recent years, droughts have resulted in some of the most high-profile humanitarian disasters – including the recent crises in the Horn of Africa (2011) and the Sahel (2012) regions, which threatened the lives and livelihoods of millions of people.   * Access the UNCCD Summit site via the link below. Visit the related web page
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