COP 27, Human Rights, and the Environmental Impact of Climate Change in the Eastern Mediterranean with Mazin Qumsiyeh

<p>SWANA Region Radio collective member David Lloyd interviews Palestinian environmental scientist and human rights activist, <strong>Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh</strong> from Bethlehem University. As we go on air, COP-27, the annual meeting of heads of state and their climate specialists, NGOs, and, of course, representatives of the major oil and gas corporations, gathers in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. Most observers anticipate yet another collective effort by the major industrial states to defer action on the increasingly critical and undeniable need to roll back carbon and methane emissions immediately. The UN’s latest IPCC climate report, as UN Secretary Guterres warned, shows that “Global and national climate commitments are falling pitifully short” and that countries’ strongest climate pledges put the Earth on a path to warm by a dangerous 2.4 degrees Celsius (4.3 degrees Fahrenheit) by the<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/10/27/emissions-climate-change-temperature-rise/" target="_blank"><u> end of the century</u></a>. But the excuses offered by the war in Ukraine and the related food and fuel shortages, by global inflation, and by economic recession will almost certainly lead to further inaction at this latest round of delay and sabotage by governments and their paymasters, the polluting corporations for whom the current crises have spelt a bonanza of windfall profits.</p> <p>Meanwhile, hosting the conference will be a propaganda and diplomatic coup for Egypt’s dictatorial President Sisi and his brutal and repressive regime, which currently holds at least <a href="https://humanrightsfirst.org/library/prison-atlas-details-egyptian-cases-prisoners-and-judges/" target="_blank"><u>65,000 political prisoners</u></a> subject to torture and miserable conditions in Egypt’s jails, including blogger and human rights activists <strong>Alaa Abd El-Fattah</strong>, whose case we have been following here on SWANA Region Radio.This week, more than a dozen <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/20