Belgian company SIAT has the ambition to promote sustainable palm oil across West Africa. Yet, its Ghana plantation is rife with ongoing land conflicts and precarious labour conditions. A new EU directive on corporate due diligence gives hope that abuses in the Global South are coming to an end.

In Buenavista, every woman we talk to has some family member on the other side of the northern border. La Mixteca region in Oaxaca has some of the poorest regions in Mexico in general and migration has for decades been a strategy for families to make ends meet. As men migrate, women are often the ones passing on the knowledge as to how to grow coffee.

With the rising urgency of the Climate Crisis, green hydrogen is the shiniest newcomer in global conversations on energy production. However, with sub-Saharan African countries contributing less than 3% (0.2% for Nigeria) to global carbon emissions, the more pressing question is how the continent can harness its existing resources to sustainably meet its own energy demand for economic development and poverty reduction

Heating, driving, storing electricity: Hydrogen could replace oil, gas and coal in a completely climate-neutral way. The fact that this will probably not happen is due to a better alternative.

“During the third week of the first Covid-19 lockdown, we ran out of the little food we had. We spent two days on empty stomachs and this forced me to join a group of children from my village who were going to pan for gold along Odzi River. I have not stopped since then,” she said.

In a month, Nzambi Matee is able to turn between 10 to 20 tonnes of plastic waste into pavers of different colours, with Gjenge Makers managing to produce 1,500 every day.

“We’re not just about building houses and reducing plastic pollution. We want to change people’s awareness of plastic.”

When I used to work between Egypt and Europe, I was sometimes paid as low as 10% of what my colleagues working in the same job on the same stories in the same place were paid. I was paid differently because I carried a different passport.

“Well the truth is, everything in Caribbean life almost has an outdoor existence. So climate becomes so much a part of our life but it also drives a big part of our economy; agriculture, tourism. When you have any kind of storm event it disrupts life totally.”

According to a study in the journal Nature Food, our food system is responsible for 1/3 of global greenhouse gases, especially our agriculture and land use. The latest report of the environmental organization WWF, “Europe eats the world” shows: The EU is the world’s second-largest importer of products related to rainforest deforestation. What we eat not only heats up the planet but also destroys habitats and reduces the diversity of animal and plant species.