The Global Eye is in partnership with SIOI – Società Italiana per l’Organizzazione Internazionale
Climate Action
(UN News) The ocean is rising faster now than at any point in recorded history. The impacts are already being felt and the threats are growing. Land is being inundated, homes are flooding, livelihoods are being lost, driving significant hardships on people in search of a more secure future. It is not just the environment that is being affected, rising sea levels also have a significant impact on human rights, economic development, health, culture, the future of many countries and basic human dignity. Everyone and pretty much everywhere are affected across developed and developing nations. The ability to act and adapt today will prove decisive for whether rising seas become a manageable challenge or a generational crisis. – Rising seas, rising stakes: What increasing sea-levels mean to humanity | UN News
PNG – Australia – Indonesia
(Serena Sasingian, Hilman Palaon – Lowy The Interpreter) Australia has enduring ties with Papua New Guinea as its largest development partner, a major source of investment and skills, and now a formal security ally. This relationship will remain central to PNG’s future. Yet if PNG is to accelerate its ambition of building a PGK 200 billion / AU$64 billion economy, creating one million jobs and improving the quality of life of its citizens, it needs to look to the broader neighbourhood as well. PNG has spent much of its history looking south. But its geography makes its northern horizon matter economically. Indonesia is the obvious place to start, offering something Australia cannot: a peer development journey. It is PNG’s closest large neighbour and part of the same regional economy. Beyond it lie some of the world’s fastest-growing markets, manufacturing capabilities, digital technologies and supply chains. – PNG wants a bigger economy – Indonesia shows how | Lowy Institute
Shanghai Cooperation Organization
(Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan – ASPI The Strategist) The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Summit, taking place on 31 August and 1 September, will be another opportunity for China and Russia to try to promote an alternative to Western-led international institutions. But the organisation, now in its 25th year, faces internal rivalries and tensions that are becoming ever more difficult to sweep under the rug. The SCO appears to be high on geopolitical symbolism and low on genuine relevance, at least on the political and security front. Despite its Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure and the Peace Mission military exercises between SCO member countries, the organisation’s security agenda has been weak with very little to show in terms of actual results. It is not a security treaty, and it has had little effect in diluting the political and military tension between its major players. – After 25 years, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization faces an uncertain future | The Strategist
Uganda
(UN News) On the shores of Nkondo, in Uganda’s Kikuube district, the day begins before sunrise. Fishers enter the lake to fish, while families around Lake Albert rely on its waters for food, income and daily survival. But, behind these daily activities lies an increasingly visible threat: plastic waste and other debris entering Lake Albert. Leaders of the local fishing community are warning that without urgent action, pollution could endanger fish stocks and, as a consequence, the lives of future generations. Like the local fishers, the UN has also warned of the decline of freshwater species due to pollution and environmental degradation in recent decades. Surface water bodies are shrinking or being completely lost in areas home to 93.1 million people, while more than a quarter are becoming increasingly cloudy because of pollution, according to a 2024 report by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and UN-Water. In celebration of World Lake Day, marked annually on 27 August, Solomon Wamara, the chairperson for fishers on Lake Albert, said the community cannot continue to view the lake as a source of livelihood while allowing it to be filled with waste. “It is a good time to highlight the threats facing this lake that is our lifeline,” he told UN News. – ‘The lake is our life’: Protecting a shared lifeline in Uganda | UN News
War in Iran
(Haley Britzky, Zachary Cohen, Mohammed Tawfeeq – CNN) Iran and the United States traded attacks for the first time in over a month overnight into Monday, in an exchange that risks reigniting the damaging conflict after weeks of relative military calm. Iran fired missiles toward US military targets in Jordan in retaliation for a strike on Iranian rocket launchers that the US said were trying to launch sea mines into the Strait of Hormuz –– the key shipping route that’s become the center of regional tensions and diplomatic efforts. Six months into the festering conflict, the two nations have been locked in battle over control of the waterway, critical to global energy supplies, with Tehran asserting its claimed right to manage it with regular strikes on vessels, and the US determined to keep traffic flowing by guiding ships and a military blockade of Iranian ports. The exchange came just days after President Donald Trump declared the strait free from mines, and is a break with Washington’s recent shift in focus to maximizing economic pressure on Iran rather than military actions. – US and Iran trade attacks, marking first major military escalation in a month | CNN Politics
