At least 14 Caribbean countries will be absent from the upcoming Summit of the Americas as a protest measure against the exclusion of the representatives of Venezuela and Cuba, which the host country US has decided in accordance with the proposal of a group of US Congressmen. This was declared by the Ambassador of Antigua and Barbuda to the United States and to the Organization of American States (OAS), Sir Ronald Sanders.
“If Cuba is not invited to the Summit of the Americas, 14 Caribbean states won’t go,” said Sanders. “Same as if Guaidó is continued to be recognized, a number of Caribbean states won’t go.”
Bats will have a large contribution to virus transmission between species in the future, a modelling study finds.Credit: Pratik Chorge/Hindustan Times via Getty
Over the next 50 years, climate change could drive more than 15,000 new cases of mammals transmitting viruses to other mammals, according to a study published in Nature1. It’s one of the first to predict how global warming will shift wildlife habitats and increase encounters between species capable of swapping pathogens, and to quantify how many times viruses are expected to jump between species.
Despite substantial attention within the fields of public and planetary health on developing an economic system that benefits both people’s health and the environment, heterodox economic schools of thought have received little attention within these fields. Ecological economics is a school of thought with particular relevance to public and planetary health. In this article, we discuss implications of key ecological economics ideas for public and planetary health, especially those related to critiques of gross domestic product as a measure of progress and economic growth as the dominant goal for economic and policy decision making. We suggest that ecological economics aligns well with public health goals, including concern for equality and redistribution. Ecological economics offers an opportunity to make the transition to an economic system that is designed to promote human and planetary health from the outset, rather than one where social and environmental externalities must be constantly corrected after the fact. Important ideas from ecological economics include the use of a multidimensional framework to evaluate economic and social performance, the prioritisation of wellbeing and environmental goals in decision making, policy design and evaluation that take complex relationships into account, and the role of provisioning systems (the physical and social systems that link resource use and social outcomes). We discuss possible interventions at the national scale that could promote public health and that align with the prioritisation of social and ecological objectives, including universal basic income or services and sovereign money creation. Overall, we lay the foundations for additional integration of ecological economics principles and pluralist economic thinking into public and planetary health scholarship and practice.
Summary Background Human impacts on earth-system processes are overshooting several planetary boundaries, driving a crisis of ecological breakdown. This crisis is being caused in large part by global resource extraction, which has increased dramatically over the past half century. We propose a novel method for quantifying national responsibility for ecological breakdown by assessing nations’ cumulative material use in excess of equitable and sustainable boundaries.
On April 19, 2022, 117 fresh forest fire incidents were reported in Uttarakhand by the forest department. The fire season which began this year on February 15 has affected more than 1020 hectares of forest land including 725 hectares of reserved forest area. In just over a week from April 18 to April 25, there were 362 major forest fire reports from across India. More than half of them were reported from one mountainous state of Uttrakhand. But why is this happening? India had recorded its warmest March in 122 years and the mountain regions of India have been particularly affected by these heatwaves of 2022. Like the plains, according to IMD, the average temperature during the initial summer months has been at least 5-7 degrees above normal in hilly regions of the country. High-altitude places such as Badrinath and Kedarnath have been left with very little snow this year compared to a thick blanket of snow in the previous years. The Ladakh which has a minimum elevation of 2,550 meters is witnessing a heatwave. Drass a town in Ladakh is at an elevation of over 3,000 meters and is one of the coldest places in the country. It recorded 22.6 degrees Celsius in the month of April when the temperatures should not cross about 15 degrees celsius. In Himachal Pradesh, Una recorded 42.5 degrees Celsius, a departure of seven degrees Celsius from the normal, while Solan recorded 35.5 degrees Celsius, a departure of six degrees Celsius from the normal, according to IMD. This is unusual because the mountainous states in India are not prone to heatwaves. Himachal Pradesh for example has recorded 21 days of heatwaves since March 2022, which is only second after Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. The hot weather is attributed to the lack of rainfall due to the absence of active western disturbances over north India and any central system over the country’s southern parts. According to experts, The hot winds blowing in from Pakistan could also have been the reasons behind the unusually high temperatures in many Himalayan areas. IMD has also warned about the increase in temperature and the potential for more heatwaves in the mountain regions of the country. While heatwaves are increasing, what is even more worrying is that the number of extremely cold days in the Himalayas is decreasing putting extreme stress on glaciers and other water reserves of the region.
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Journal of People 
