Across Zimbabwe, 7 million people in urban and rural areas are in urgent need of humanitarian assistance, compared to 5.5 million in August 2019. Since the launch of the Revised Humanitarian Appeal in August 2019, circumstances for millions of Zimbabweans have worsened. Drought and crop failure, exa...cerbated by macro-economic challenges and austerity measures, have directly affected vulnerable households in both rural and urban communities. Inflation continues to erode purchasing power and affordability of food and other essential goods is a daily challenge. The delivery of health care, clean water and sanitation, and education has been constrained and millions of people are facing challenges to access vital services.
more
This 400 page guide, created by PHI’s Center for Climate Change and Health and the American Public Health Association (APHA), with support from the California Department of Public Health helps local health departments prepare for and mitigate climate change effects—from drought and heat to flood...ing and food security—with concrete, implementable suggestions.
The guide: Provides a basic summary of climate change and climate impacts on health; Prioritizes health equity, explains the disproportionate impacts of climate change on vulnerable communities, and targets solutions first to the communities where they are most needed, including low-income, elderly and people of color communities; Connects what we know about climate impacts and climate solutions with the work of local health departments; and Offers specific examples of how local health departments can address and ameliorate the impacts of climate change in every area of public health practice.
more
Early damage assessments indicate that at least 800,000 people could be directly exposed to minor to severe damages, including communication, access, security, loss of livelihoods, infrastructure, and health services could be impacted.
You are currently intervening or wishing to intervene in a dense urban context to
respond to issues of food security and improve livelihood conditions? This handbook
is for you!
Following the evaluation of all of its sack-gardening projects, SO...LIDARITÉS
INTERNATIONAL (SI) wished to formalise its experience through this technical
handbook.
NGOs, including SI, are increasingly led to intervene in contexts of high density (whether
in camps or in slums): this handbook is thus set within this dynamic.
It provides the keys for assessing the relevance of a sack-gardening project, as well as
the tools for its implementation. Nonetheless, all methodologies and tools proposed
in this handbook shall be further contextualised in case of a replication of this project.
more
An IPCC Special Report on climate change, desertification,
land degradation, sustainable land management, food security,
and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems.
Current evidence that the climate is changing is overwhelming. Impacts of climate change and variability are being observed: more intense heat-waves, fires and floods; and increased prevalence of food- water- and vector-borne diseases. Climate chang...e will put pressure on environmental and health determinants, such as food safety, air pollution and water quantity and quality. A climate-resilient future depends fundamentally on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Limiting warming to below 2 °C requires transformational technological, institutional, political and behavioural changes: the foundations for this are laid out in the Paris Agreement of December 2015. The health sector can lead by example, shifting to environmentally friendly practices and minimizing its carbon emissions. A climate-resilient future will increasingly depend on managing and reducing climate change risks to protect health. In the near term, this can be enhanced by including climate change in national health programming and creating climate-resilient health systems.
more
Climate change, conflict, COVID-19, and gender inequality impacts food security globally. Together with the Ukraine conflict, the food crisis across the world is worsening. UN Women’s Zero Hunger Sustainable Development Goal Map shows that 49.7% o...f people are facing moderate or severe food insecurity in Guatemala, 45.6% in Honduras, and 32.7% in Ecuador. Increasing prices of energy, fertilizer, and agriculture inputs are also raising the prices of food and food production.
more
After eight years of armed conflict in the east of the country, the Russian Federation started a military offensive in Ukraine on 24 February 2022. The impact of this war has been devastating. It has so far caused 16,200 civilian casualties and destroyed key infrastructure, such as hospitals, school...s, homes, and water installations.
Since the beginning of the conflict, nearly 14 million people - a third of all Ukrainians - have been forced to leave their homes, 90% of them women, children, and elderly people. An estimated 6.2 million people are displaced within Ukraine, while more than 7 million sought safety in Poland, Romania and Moldova or passed through to other destinations in Europe. Some have returned to Ukraine. Another 13 million people are estimated to be stranded in or unable to leave affected areas within the country.
more
After five consecutive below-average rains, the humanitarian crisis in the Horn of Africa is expanding and deepening.
Combined with insecurity and macroeconomic volatility, the impact of the drought on food and nutrition security has been devasta...ting. Across Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia, an estimated 22 million people are now acutely food insecure because of the drought. The malnutrition situation is also critical. Some 5.1 million children across drought-affected areas of the three countries are acutely malnourished in 2023, with dire implications for their health, growth and survival. Concerningly, the upcoming March-May 2023 rains are also forecast to be below-average. Should these rains fail, and humanitarian assistance not be delivered at scale, food insecurity will continue to deteriorate.
Regardless of how the 2023 rains perform, extremely high humanitarian needs will persist through 2023 while a full recovery from a drought of this magnitude will take years. To address the devastating drought-induced hunger and malnutrition across the region, WFP is pursuing an integrated dual track approach; meeting immediate life-saving food and nutritional needs while simultaneously building resilience to extreme climate variability.
more
Dracunculiasis (Guinea worm disease), caused by the parasite Dracunculus medinensis, is traditionally acquired by drinking water containing copepods (water fleas) infected with D. medinensis larvae,... but in recent years also appears increasingly to be transmitted by eating fish or other aquatic animals. The worm typically emerges through the skin on a lower limb of the host 1 year after infection, causing pain and disability.
more
Cholera is an acute gastrointestinal infection caused by the bacterium Vibrio Cholerae serogroup O1 or O139, and is often linked to unsafe drinking water, lack of proper sanitation and personal hygiene. It adversely affects mostly the poor and vulne...rable populations in countries, which are already deprived of proper health facilities and conducive environmental conditions. The disease spreads through oro-fecal transmission by the ingestion of contaminated food or water or by person-to-person contact. It has a short incubation period of 2 hours to 5 days and the number of affected cases can rapidly increase across large regions. Cholera is a significant threat to global public health leading to an estimated 3-5 million cases per year worldwide, with an annual toll of 100,000 deaths. The disease was first reported in 1817 from the Ganges Delta of India and since then the ongoing 7th pandemic has emerged from Indonesia, reached Africa in 1970 and Somalia happens to be one of the early affected countries. Over the past few decades,
Somalia has witnessed the occurrence of repeated AWD/Cholera disease outbreaks that have caused high morbidity and mortality across the country.
more
Throughout the region, heavy rains that intensified in late April have resulted in excessive flooding, affecting more than half a million people; damaging infrastructure and livelihoods and caused over 370 deaths. Although the rains have also brought relief to some areas that have been affected by t...he worst drought in decades, namely; parts of Ethiopia, Puntland, Somaliland and a number of countries in southern Africa, the food security situation in these areas is not expected to significantly improve, due to the scale and intensity of the El Nino-induced drought that has already depleted coping mechanisms.
more
Respecter les regles d'hygiène est crucial aussi bien pour la santé des patients que vous recevez que pour votre propre sécurité. On oublie souvent que la prévention des maladies infectieuses grace a l'hygiène sauve davantage de vie chaque ann...ée que tous les rapports de
more
Urbanization, land use, global trade and industrialization have led to profound and negative impacts on nature, biodiversity and ecosystems across the world. The ongoing depletion of natural resources not only afects environmental conditions but also has an enormous impact on the well-being and ...n class="attribute-to-highlight medbox">security of societies.
This report provides an overview of the impacts of the natural environment on human health. It presents the ways nature and ecosystems can support and protect health and well-being, and describes how nature degradation and loss of biodiversity can threaten human health.
more
27 April 2022 Chronic land degradation: UN offers stark warnings and practical remedies in Global Land Outlook 2. GLO2 offers hundreds of examples from around the world that demonstrate the potential of land restoration.
The way land resources – soil, ...>water and biodiversity – are currently mismanaged and misused threatens the health and continued survival of many species on Earth, including our own, warns a stark new report from the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD).
It also points decision makers to hundreds of practical ways to effect local, national and regional land and ecosystem restoration.
more
The major areas of focus for the plan will be:
- Social mobilization and community empowerment (health promotion & education for disease prevention);
- Promotion of access to safe water, good sanitation and hygiene;
- Surveillance an...d laboratory confirmation of outbreaks;
- Prompt case management and infection control;
- Complementary use of oral cholera vaccine (OCV) for cholera endemic communities; and
- Coordination and stewardship between and for all actors.
- Monitoring, supervision, evaluation and operation research to ensure continued improvement in service delivery.
more
This publication, the third module of a resource manual to support the training of planners and practitioners in managing flash flood risk, deals with structural measures. It presents bioengineering techniques, physical measures for slope stabilisation and erosion control, and physical measures for ...river training. It also presents the concept of integrated flood management as a component of integrated water resource management. It emphasizes that structural measures are most effective and sustainable when implemented together with appropriate non-structural measures. The manual is aimed at junior to mid-level professionals with a civil engineering background working on flash flood risk management at the district level.
Flash floods are among the most destructive natural disasters in the Hindu Kush Himalayan region. Flash flood mitigation is generally addressed by community-based organisations, local non-governmental organisations, or district and local-level staff in government organisations. But these groups often lack adequate understanding of the processes causing flash floods and knowledge of flash flood risk management measures.
more
This paper has been commissioned by RedR to identify gaps in skills, technology, and knowledge in urban humanitarian response in order to inform RedR’s project Ready to Respond which is looking to address these gaps in two specific areas:
Water...n> supply, sanitation, and hygiene; Shelter response to earthquakes
more
Reference Guide Version 2. Revised. The Nutrition Program Design Assistant is a tool to help organizations design the nutrition component of their community-based maternal and child health, food security, or other development program. The tool focus...es on prevention and also provides guidance on recuperative approaches that are needed when there is a high prevalence of acute malnutrition
more
Section One
summarizes UNHCR’s mandate of international protecdtion and the aim and principles of emergency
response;
Section Two
deals with emergency management;
Section Three
covers the vital sectors and problem areas in refugee emergencies, including health, food, sanitation
and ...ass="attribute-to-highlight medbox">water, as well as key field activities underpinning the operations such as logistics, community
services and registration. The chapters in this section start with a summary so that readers, who
might not need the full level of detail in each of these chapters, can understand the basic principles of
the subject quickly;
Section Four
gives guidance on the support to field operations, primarily administration and staffing;
The Appendices
include a “Toolbox” which gathers, in one location, the standards, indicators and useful references
used throughout the handbook;
more