World Issues of Concern to GCs

This post is going to expose some world issues of concern to global citizens. 

So first of all, let's start talking briefly about global concerns.

What are global concerns?

Global concerns are issues that have the power to affect a huge number of people in different ways. They can be directly or indirectly related to all or most of the countries in the world. Generally, those issues need a global attention of the world to be solved.

We can divide the global concerns in areas such as shown below.

• Global economy;
• Global human development;
• Global environment and natural resources;
• Peace and security;
• Global governance.

Now I would like to focus on the main issues on those areas.

• Global economy;

The first and main problem related to the global economy, as we already explained in the last post, it is the poverty and inequality. According to UNICEF around 22 thousands of children die each day due to the poverty. I did not know about this statistic and when I realise how big is this problem I started to feel sad about it. I reckon that the poverty is one of the huge problems in the world because the money is not being well divided between the countries and the people. However, as we saw in the posts before, there are a lot of NGO's that are trying to figure out how to solve it and also trying to bring money and food for the poor people around the world. According to the lecture of block 6, around 80% of the world population are living with less than $10 per day. It is also impressive if you think how much money you earn per month in comparison with those people. Moreover, another important factor that is also related to the issues is the food security. Food security aim to ensure the access to essential nutrition.

Source: http://www.personal.psu.edu/bfr3/blogs/asp/poverty.png

• Global human development;

The biggest issue of this area is related to communicable diseases and humanitarian emergences. Nowadays, the biggest disease that has led to many deaths is the Ebola, but we can also talk about the bird flu, influenza, HIV/AIDS, cholera, malaria, tuberculosis. In order to maintain and care about those diseases, the government needs to invest more money in the human health and also in the researchs in order to find a cure or at least useful treatments. According to the lecture, over 60% of the people that are living with HIV/AIDS are in Sub-Saharan Africa. It just keep showing that the poor areas of the world are suffering the worst issues.

The humanitarian emergences are related to local conflicts, epidemics, famine and natural disasters. To figure out those problems it is also necessary to do more investments in infrastructure and reseachs in order to prevent it to occur again or at least try to reduce the damage.

Source: http://media1.break.com/dnet/media/203/802/2802203/the-10-biggest-and-best-of-everything-from-2014-image-5.jpg

• Global environment and natural resources;

The most important point here is the access to safe water. The weak sanitation or even the lack of water available has led to many deaths every day around the world. The water scarcity it is also relevant to this topic. For intance, in my country, Brazil, special in my city that is São Paulo, they are fighting against the water scarcity because there were not enough rain periods to fill the dams. However, is not possible to compare this problem of my city with, for instance, a poor region in Africa. There are also some NGO's that are working in that area. For example, I read an article few years ago about an young boy that had created a NGO in order to create water wells in a special region of Africa to help the fight against the water scarcity. The depletion of fisheries it is also an important issue because it feed over 200 million people in the world. We can also point out here the oil spills that have contributed to kill billions of fishs in the world.

Source: https://meerkat21.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/dry20lakebed202.jpg

• Global governance.

One of the main issues related to it is the avoidance of human rights in same areas of the world. However, according to April Carter (2001) this is one of the most successful areas of global action. I have upload a link of a video that I found interesting about this. Whatch it below:

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTD52oqIv68