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Thinking about how to discuss Syria with your students? Here are 4 key ideas that can help kids go beyond the latest headlines:

1. Syria's cultural significance. For thousands of years, Syria has been a place where human beings lived, loved - and created art. Bordering the Mediterranean Sea, located between Lebanon and Turkey, and a bit bigger than the American state of Pennsylvania, the independent country of Syria was established in late 1945 (after a few decades of French rule, which ended 400 years of Ottoman rule). Syria contains ancient artifacts of global significance, including 6 UNESCO World Heritage Sites that used to attract tourists from all over the world. In 2011, a series of factors ignited a sprawling civil war in Syria. Watch this video to find out more about Syria and how the war began:

2. What is a refugee? About 60 million people around the globe have been forced to leave their homes and seek refuge in other countries to escape war, violence, and persecution. Here's what it means to be a refugee. In the past 6 years, almost 500,000 Syrians have died - and millions more men, women, and children have fled into the unknown because of the ongoing conflict in Syria. In this short film, a young Syrian named Mohammed Alsaleh describes what happened after he fled violence and imprisonment by the Assad regime. Mohammed now lives in Canada, where he counsels newly arrived refugee families. Watch this video to hear his story:

3. How leaders are responding. Countries respond to international crises in different ways, and future history books will record how world leaders responded to this ongoing crisis and other matters of global significance in 2017. Watch this video to see how countries are responding to Syria now:

4. What do you think? As a student, do you feel moved to take action about the news regarding Syria and the global refugee crisis? Why or why not? Here's one way that an individual responded. As a young leader, do you agree with how your country has responded to the conflict in Syria, and to the needs of refugees? Why or why not? What would you do if you were in charge of your country's response?

To learn more about the news in Syria from a variety of media perspectives, check out The Week's ongoing coverage. To learn something new every week, sign up for the free TED-Ed Newsletter here >>

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Thinking about how to discuss Syria with your students? Here are 4 key ideas that can help kids go beyond the latest headlines: 1. Syria's cultural significance. For thousands of years, Syria has been a place where human beings lived, loved - and created art.

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What Is Deforestation For Kids: Information And Facts

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What is deforestation? Information & facts about deforestation for kids. Why are areas of rainforest being lost each year & what is being done to stop it?

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Why is a finite world a problem? I can think of many answers:

1. A finite world is a problem because we and all of the other creatures living in this world share the same piece of "real estate." If humans use increasingly more resources, other species necessarily use less. Even "renewable" resources are shared with other species. If humans use more, other species must use less. Solar panels covering the desert floor interfere with normal wildlife; the use of plants for biofuels means less area is available for planting food and for vegetation preferred by desirable insects, such as bees.

2. A finite world is governed by cycles. We like to project in straight lines or as constant percentage increases, but the real world doesn't follow such patterns. Each day has 24 hours. Water moves in waves. Humans are born, mature, and die. A resource is extracted from an area, and the area suddenly becomes much poorer once the income from those exports is removed. Once a country becomes poorer, fighting is likely to break out. A recent example of this is Egypt's loss of oil exports, about the time of the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011 (Figure 1). The fighting has not yet stopped.

The interconnectedness of resources with the way economies work, and the problems that occur when those resources are not present, make the future much less predictable than most models would suggest.

for these fuels and metals, unless technology somehow acts to hold costs down. If extraction costs rise, anything made using these fuels and metals becomes 3. A finite world means that we eventually run short of easy-to-extract resources of many types, including fossil fuels, uranium, and metals. This doesn't mean that we will "run out" of these resources. Instead, it means that the extraction process will become more expensive more expensive, assuming businesses selling these products are able to recover their costs. (If they don't, they go out of business, quickly!) Figure 2 shows that a recent turning point toward higher costs came in 2002, for both energy products and base metals.

4. A finite world means that globalization will prove to be a major problem, because it added proportionately far more humans to world demand than it added undeveloped resources to world supply. China was added to the World Trade Organization in December 2001. Its use of fuels of all types skyrocketed quickly soon afterward (Figure 3, below). As noted in Item 3 above, the turning point for prices of fuels and metals was in 2002. In my view, this was not a coincidence-it was connected with rising demand from China, as well as the fact that we had extracted a considerable share of the cheap to extract fuels earlier.

5. In a finite world, wages don't rise as much as fuel and metal extraction costs rise, because the extra extraction costs add no real benefit to society-they simply remove resources that could have been put to work elsewhere in the economy. We are, in effect, becoming less and less efficient at producing energy products and metals. This happens because we are producing fuels that are located in harder to reach places and that have more pollutants mixed in. Metal ores have similar problems-they are deeper and of lower concentration. All of the extra human effort and extra resource expenditure does not produce more end product. Instead, we are left with less human effort and less resources to invest in the rest of the economy. As a result, total production of goods and services for the economy tends to stagnate.

In such an economy, workers find that their inflation-adjusted wages tend to lag. (This happens because the total economy produces less, so each worker's share of what is produced is less.) Companies producing energy and metal products are also likely to find it harder to make a profit, because with lagging wages, consumers cannot afford to buy very much product at the higher prices. In fact, there is likely to be the danger of an abrupt drop in production, because prices remain too low to justify the high cost of additional investment.
6. When workers can afford less and less (see Item 5 above), we end up with multiple problems:
a. If workers can afford less, they cut back in discretionary spending. This tends to slow or eventually stop economic growth. Lack of economic growth eventually affects stock market prices, since stock prices assume that sale of their products will continue to grow indefinitely.

b. If workers can afford less, one item that is increasingly out of reach is a more expensive home. As result, housing prices tend to stagnate or fall with stagnating wages and rising fuel and metals prices. The government can somewhat fix the problem through low interest rates and more commercial sales-that is why the problem is mostly gone now.

c. If workers find their wages lagging, and some are laid off, they increasingly fall back on government services. This leaves governments with a need to pay out more in benefits, without being able to collect sufficient taxes. Thus, governments ultimately end up with financial problems, if extraction costs for fuels and metals rise faster than can be offset by innovation, as they have been since 2002.

7. A finite world means that the need for debt keeps increasing, at the same time the ability to repay debt starts to fall. Workers find that goods, such as cars, are increasingly out of their ability to pay for them, because car prices are affected by the rising cost of metals and fuels. As a result, debt levels need to rise to buy these cars. Governments find that they need more debt to pay for all of the services promised to increasingly impoverished workers. Even energy companies find a need for more debt. For example, according to today's Wall Street Journal,

Last year, 80 big energy companies in North America spent a combined $50.6 billion more than they brought in from their operations, according to data from S&P Capital IQ. That deficit was twice as high as in 2011, and four times as high as in 2010.

At the same time that the need for debt is increasing, the ability to pay it back is falling. Discretionary income of workers is lagging, because of today's high prices of fuels and metals. Governments find it difficult to raise taxes. Fuel and metal companies find it hard to raise prices enough to finance operations out of cash flow. Ultimately, (which may not be too in the future) this situation has to come to an unhappy end.

Governments can cover up this problem for a while, with super low interest rates. But if interest rates ever rise again, the increase in interest rates is likely to lead to huge debt defaults, and major financial failures internationally. This happens because higher interest rates lead to a need for higher taxes, and because higher interest rates mean purchases such as homes, cars, and new factories become less affordable. Rising interest rates also mean that the selling price of existing bonds falls, potentially creating financial problems for banks and insurance companies.

8. The fact that the world is finite means that economic growth will need to slow and eventually stop. We are already seeing slower economic growth in the parts of the world that have seen a drop in oil consumption (European Union, the United States, and Japan), even as the rest of the world has seen rising oil consumption.

Countries that have had particularly steep drops in oil consumption, such as Greece (Figure 6 below), have had particularly steep drops in their economic growth, while countries with rapid increases in oil and other energy consumption, such as China shown in Figure 2 above, have shown rapid economic growth.

The reason why we are already reaching difficulties with oil consumption is because for oil, we are reaching limits of a finite world. We have already pulled out most of the easy to extract oil, and what is left is more expensive and slow to extract. World oil production is not rising very fast in total, and the price needs to be high to cover the high cost of extraction. Someone has to be left out. The countries that use a large proportion of oil in their energy mix (like Greece, with its tourist trade) find that the products they produce are too expensive in a world marketplace. Countries that use mostly coal (which is cheaper), such as China, have a huge cost advantage in a cost-competitive world.

9. The fact that the world is finite has been omitted from virtually every model predicting the future. This means that economic models are virtually all wrong. The models generally predict that economic growth will continue indefinitely, but this is not really possible in a finite world. The models don't even consider the fact that economic growth will scale back in mature economies.

Even climate change models include far too much future fossil fuel use, in both their standard runs and in their "peak oil" scenarios. This is convenient for regulators. Oil limits are scary because they indicate a possible near-term problem. If a climate change model indicates a need to cut back on future fossil fuel use, these models give the regulator a more distant problem to talk about instead.

10. Even the most basic economic relationships tend to be mis-estimated in a finite world. It is common for economists to look at relationships that worked in the past, and assume that similar relationships will work now. For example, researchers like to look at how much debt an economy can afford relative to GDP, or how much debt a business can afford. The problem is that the amount of debt an economy or a business can afford shrinks dramatically, as the economic growth rates shrinks, unless the interest rate is extremely low.

As another example, economists believe that higher prices will lead to substitutes or a reduction in demand. Unfortunately, they have never stopped to consider that the reduction in demand for an energy product might have a serious adverse impact on the economy-for example, it could mean many fewer jobs are available. Fewer jobs mean less demand (or affordability), but is that what is really desired?

Economists also seem to believe that prices for oil products will keep rising, until they eventually reach the price level of substitutes. If people are poorer, this is not necessarily the case, as discussed above.

11. Besides energy products and metals, there are many other limits that are a problem in a finite world. There is already an inadequate supply of fresh water in many parts of the world. This problem can be solved with desalination, but doing so is expensive and takes resources away from other uses.

Arable land in a finite world is subject to limits. Soil is subject to erosion and degrades in quality if it is mistreated. Food is dependent on oil, water, arable land, and soil quality, so it quickly reaches limits if any of these inputs are disturbed. Pollinating insects, such as bees, are also important.

Probably the biggest problem in a finite world is the problem of too high population. Before fossil fuel use was added, the world could feed only 1 billion people. It is not clear that even that many could be fed today, without fossil fuels. The world's population now exceeds 7 billion.
Where We Are Now in a Finite World
At this point, the problem of hitting limits in a finite world has morphed into primarily a financial problem. Governments are particularly affected. They find that they need to borrow increasing amounts of money to provide promised services to their citizens. Debt is a huge problem, both for governments and for individual citizens. Interest rates need to stay very low, in order for the current system to "stick together."

Governments are either unaware of the true nature of their problems, or are doing everything they can to hide the true situation from their constituents. Governments rely on economists for advice on what to do next. Economists' models do a very poor job of representing today's world, so they provide little useful guidance.

The primary way of dealing with limits seems to be "solutions" dictated by concern over climate change. These solutions are of questionable benefit when it comes to the real limits of a finite world, but they do make it look like politicians are doing something useful. They also provide a continuing revenue stream to academic institutions and "green" businesses.

The public has been placated by all kinds of misleading stories about how oil from shale will be the solution. Quantitative Easing (used by governments to lower interest rates) has temporarily allowed stock markets to soar, and allowed interest rates to stay quite low. So superficially, everything looks great. The question is how long all of this will last. Will interest rates rise, and undo the happy situation? Or will a different financial problem (for example, a debt problem in Europe or Japan) bring the house of cards down? Or will the ultimate problem be a decline in oil supply, perhaps caused by oil and gas companies reaching debt limits?

2014 will be an interesting year. Let's all keep our fingers crossed as to how things will work out. It is surreal how close we can be to limits, without major media catching on to what the problem really is.

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Why is a finite world a problem? I can think of many answers: 1. A finite world is a problem because we and all of the other creatures living in this world share the same piece of "real estate." If humans use increasingly more resources, other species necessarily use less.

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By: Kelly-Rose Bradford - Updated: 23 Feb 2021 | *Discuss

The wind the tides, geothermal heat (from the disintegration of the radioactive atoms in the Earth's core) and the sun are just some of the Earth's amazing natural resources that we can use to power our lives - but the Earth doesn't just provide us with fuel for electricity and heat - there's a myriad of other resources on offer all around us.

What are Natural Resources?

Air, water and soil

Biological resources - plants and animals

Raw materials (like minerals)

Space and land

Wind, geothermal, tidal and solar energy

Natural resources are often classified into renewable, flow, and non-renewable resources.

What are Renewable Sources?

Renewable resources are usually living and therefore can renew themselves assuming they are not killed off or over harvested. Good examples of renewable sources are trees (forests and woodlands) crops, and livestock like fish. Water and soil are also renewable sources, but they are classed as non-living.

What are Flow Resources?

The tides, solar power and the wind can be classed as flow renewable resources. They are all renewable but they do not need regeneration or re-growth.

What are Non-Renewable Resources?

Non-renewable resources are those which cannot be replaced once they are used up or harvested. This includes fossil-fuels, coal and petroleum.

How Can We Use the Earth's Natural Resources at Home?

There are many ways we can help to protect the environment by using the Earth's natural resources in our homes - and even better, many of them can be turned into fun, educational and interesting activities for the whole family!

Why Not Try:

Drying your washing outside on a washing line or a clothes rack instead of using a tumble dryer (Natural Resource: the wind).

Growing your own fruit and vegetables or buying locally produced food (to cut down on pollution caused by transporting goods from areas) (Natural Resource: air, water, soil, crops).

Fitting solar panels to your home to provide solar water heating or solar electricity. (Natural Resource: the sun)

Using water butts in your garden - a great way of saving and re-using water. By installing a butt to collect rain water (which you can then use for watering your plants and lawn) it is estimated you can save up to 5,000 litres of water a year! (Natural Resource: rainwater)

Use a Composter

Composting is often referred to as nature's way of recycling - and it is a great way of protecting 'the earth' literally! By weight, it is estimated that kitchen and garden waste makes up about 30% of a household's rubbish. By collecting all your garden waste, vegetable and fruit peelings, egg shells and used tea bags and coffee granules you can improve the quality of your soil and provide a rich and nutrient environment for growing vegetables and encouraging wildlife in your garden. (Natural Resource: biological resources)

Reusable Bags

Friends of the Earth estimate that 17 billion plastic bags are given away by supermarkets every year - the equivalent to over 290 bags for every person in the UK! These bags are generally used once and then thrown away, ultimately polluting the environment. According to the Environment Agency, if everyone in the UK stopped using plastic bags we'd would save enough plastic to tie around the earth 103 times! Cotton is a natural resource. Using an organic cotton bag from a sustainable cotton plant will go a long way in avoiding waste, pollution and environmental damage. (Natural Resource: biological resources).

Resources for Children:

Science Museum comprehensive information on saving the planet and utilising the earth's resources.

Friends of the Earth resources and information about protecting the environment.

The natural resources of the Earth can provide us with everything we need to live a sustainable, environmentally and eco friendly existence - it's up to us to educate ourselves about them and utilise them.

What to Read Next...

Teach the kids how they can be ecofreindly at home by Recycling, Saving Water, and by Making a Wildlife Corner in Your Garden.

This website is for sale ECO FRIENDLY KIDS IS FOR SALE:[more info].

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By: Kelly-Rose Bradford - Updated: 23 Feb 2021 | *Discuss The wind the tides, geothermal heat (from the disintegration of the radioactive atoms in the Earth's core) and the sun are just some of the Earth's amazing natural resources that we can use to power our lives - but the Earth doesn't just provide us with fuel for electricity and heat - there's a myriad of other resources on offer all around us.

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The world's population is now well over seven billion and growing. We have reached a stage where the amount of resources needed to sustain our population exceeds what is available, argues Professor John Guillebaud from University College London.
Many years ago, as a second year medical student, I attended a lecture on human population by my tutor at Cambridge, Colin Bertram. He argued as a biologist that relentless population increase by any species is always ultimately unsustainable; numbers increase to the limits of the carrying capacity of their environment and when they overshoot this, their numbers always collapse. If we allow unremitting population growth to continue we humans cannot escape the same fate; however cleverly we might adapt to all the different environments on earth, we only have one finite planet to live on and 70 per cent of it is salt water, and half of the remainder is desert, mountain, icecap or fast-disappearing forest.

Dr Bertram's lecture startled me and established the direction of my medical career. I felt some guilt that doctors had inadvertently caused the population problem through vastly better death control while birth rates remained high. I decided that, as an about-to-be doctor, I should try to restore balance, and what more appropriate medical specialty could there be than family planning? So I arranged higher training in gynaecology (specialising in hormonal and intrauterine contraception) and also in surgery (hence my career total of 5000 vasectomies and ongoing research into a new male pill).

On a finite planet sustainability is not an option, it's just a matter of how it is achieved. Will the imbalance be corrected by literally billions of deaths or by fewer births?

None of us in those days was worried specifically about climate change. As we've just been reminded by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that environmental problem is terrifying enough, especially given the risk of runaway positive feedbacks, caused, for example, by methane release from permafrost. Even so, that is far from being the only life-threatening global problem. The UK government's chief scientist and the last president of the Royal Society have highlighted the imminence of a 'perfect storm': water, food and fossil fuel scarcity. Reliable reports on the planet's health such as The United Nations' Global Environment Outlook have found water, land, plants, animals and fish stocks are all 'in inexorable decline'. Already by 2002 it was calculated that 97 per cent of all vertebrate flesh on land was human flesh plus that of our food animals (cows, pigs, sheep etc), leaving just three per cent for all wild vertebrate species on land. Not to mention the obliteration of wild life in the oceans through acidification, pollution and massive over-fishing.

Regarding human numbers there is some good news: the total fertility rate or average family size of the world has halved since 1950, when it was over five, to about 2.5 (where 2.1 would be replacement level). The bad news is that despite this, the 58 highest fertility countries are projected to triple their numbers by 2100. In a majority of all countries there is also persistent population momentumcreated by 'bulges' of young people born in high fertility years.

Therefore, the UN warns bluntly that world population, now well over seven billion 'has reached a stage where the amount of resources needed to sustain it exceeds what is available'. The annual population increase of over 80 million equates to a city for 1.5 million people having to be built, somewhere, every week-with, inevitably, ever more greenhouse gas emissions and the continuing destruction of forests and wetlands, with their multiple habitats for the web of life on which all species depend.

This is not exactly a bundle of laughs, yet it is solidly evidence-based, as any impartial scientific observer will attest. Those who are not so impartial routinely prefer to 'shoot the messenger' or behave like an ostrich.

The Worldwide Fund for Nature calculates that by 2050, humankind will need 100 per cent more of the planet's total biocapacity (forestry, fisheries, croplands) than there is. What are the prospects of finding another planet for humans to plunder by 2050? On a finite planet sustainability is not an option, it's just a matter of how it is achieved. Will the imbalance be corrected by literally billions of deaths or by fewer births? How strange, given the evidence, that population growth and contraception remain largely taboo.

Those who consume way beyond their share, the rich over-consumers in every country, must certainly massively reduce their environmental footprints, but the 'number of feet' is also relevant. Often statements like this are assumed to refer to the poor, but our organisation, Population Matters, stresses that affluent parents must also seriously consider having one less child than they may have planned. The guideline is just two for replacement.
Listen: Apocalyptic concerns over world population not new
All this is hardly rocket science: indeed you could hardly have a better example of Ockham's razor. Surely, continuing business as usual involves far more unrealistically optimistic assumptions than the precautionary approach. The precautionary approach requires proper resourcing of voluntary family planning services, which still receive a derisory less than one per cent of world aid for reproductive health, and the removal through education and the media of the many barriers that continue to stop millions of women from having the choice to access methods of contraception. This is not an alternative to the other crucial precautionary measure: reducing the size of humanity's mean environmental footprint. Both are vital; they are two sides of the same coin.

When the camel collapses with a broken back, the last straw did not really do it. It was the fault of all the straws. To achieve environmental sustainability, everyone must be involved.

When a field of common land is right at the point of being over-grazed, Garret Hardin called it 'the tragedy of the commons'. This is because each herdsman continues to find it advantageous, personally and for his family, to put yet one more cow on the land, and another and another-even if the later new arrivals are thinner and less productive than before-right up to the point that the grazing limit is finally exceeded and all the cows die and all the families suffer. Fishermen behave similarly when there is a nearly over-exploited fishery. Given any resource that is held in common, the private gain of the individual is thus at the shared cost of the whole group, progressively and ultimately catastrophically.

Hardin said the way to avoid these tragedies was ' mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon', meaning everyone agreeing to be regulated by peer-pressure, along with agreed fiscal incentives and disincentives. So in the fishery example, each fisherman takes an agreed smaller quota, which is sustainable. However, not every relevant thing that happens in the environmental commons can be so regulated. The multiple decisions made by each individual about cycling or walking rather than going by car, switching off air conditioners or choosing to have a small family are difficult to influence. When push comes to shove-especially when we see so much continuing gluttony in energy use by large corporations-all of us can feel wonder what the point of helping the environment is when it seems like nobody else does

Overpopulation is a growing concern and threatens the world's capacity to sustain humanity.

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This [series episode segment] has image, and transcript

Which brings me to my own project, the Eco Time Capsule. Generally, time capsules record a particular time and place for posterity, and are buried without any future date for unearthing in mind. The time capsules we buried in 1994 were different. The concept came to me through that well-known saying: 'We have not inherited the earth from our grandparents, we have borrowed it from our grandchildren.' I reflected on how angry our grandchildren are likely to be if we continue to wreck their loan to us. With 25 years as the usually accepted average duration of a generation, our grandchildren would be people living 50 years ahead. So this project was addressed to the people of 2044.

The time capsules contained environmentally-relevant items and were buried with letters of apology at significant sites around the world: in the Kew Gardens in London and Ness Gardens near Liverpool, in Mexico, Pietermaritzburg in South Africa, the Seychelles and at Mount Annan near Sydney.

Children were-and still are-central to this project, since they are the prime stakeholders for a decent, sustainable future. In 1994 more than 1,000 entered two competitions, one for the best brief letter or poem addressed to the finder in 2044; the other for the most striking and original ideas for appropriate artefacts to go in the capsules. My own choices for sustainability symbols were a bicycle pump and a packet of contraceptive pills.

We felt it was essential to apologise. However, more important and empowering was the pledge to do everything possible to save the planet by individual and united action. The goal is that the finders of the capsules in the year 2044 will wonder why we apologised.
John Guillebaud is Emeritus Professor of Family Planning and Reproductive Health at University College London. Ockham's Razor is a soap box for all things scientific, with short talks about research, industry and policy from people with something thoughtful to say about science.

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There are not enough resources to support the world's population

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The world's population is now well over seven billion and growing. We have reached a stage where the amount of resources needed to sustain our population exceeds what is available, argues Professor John Guillebaud from University College London. Many years ago, as a second year medical student, I attended a lecture on human population by my tutor at Cambridge, Colin Bertram.

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Explore National Geographic. A world leader in geography, cartography and exploration.

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As a longtime champion of girls' rights, I've spoken many times about the importance of giving more girls around the world the education they deserve.

And one of the first questions I almost always hear is some variation of "What about the boys?" How, they ask, do we ensure boys' needs aren't ignored or diminished when we make special efforts to educate girls? In order to bring about better outcomes for girls, don't we need to change the minds of boys and men first?

I now have a standard answer. I've just spent a lot of time detailing the structural and systematic exclusion of a largely marginalised and often vulnerable population. So why are you still only interested in the empowered group?

I'll admit that my response is a bit flippant, designed for effect and for shifting the challenge of their question back on them. Further, it doesn't fully address all the very real and difficult issues bound up in the question "What about the boys?"

During adolescence, the world of girls typically shrinks

But my ultimate answer is that girls' empowerment initiatives must keep their eyes, first and foremost, on girls. In many societies, the obstacles keeping girls out of school or from realising their full potential are far greater than those faced by boys, and they require a higher level of effort and investment.

Direct economic, social and health investment in girls doesn't just help girls and women; the evidence is overwhelming and conclusive that, as the wellbeing of girls and women improves, boys and men are better off, too.

During adolescence, the world of girls typically shrinks, while that of the boys expands. In order to engage girls socially and prepare them economically requires a higher level of effort and investment that prepares them to face the social, health and violence risks, as well as the economic challenges, that they uniquely face.

As boys and men see more educated girls in their midst, I believe they will be more likely to abandon their archaic perceptions of women as inferior and mere sexual objects with no meaningful role to play outside the home. Only as we create, so to speak, "facts on the ground" - that is to say, real and tangible change - will we have any chance of moving attitudes and perceptions in a positive direction.

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School girls play with coloured powder outside a school in Allahabad on March 25, 2013. Photograph: SANJAY KANOJIA/AFP/Getty Images

That doesn't mean we shouldn't make any effort to give boys a quality education and all the other building blocks of personal development. Indeed, approximately 27 million (or 47%) of the 58 million primary school-aged children out of school today around the globe are boys.

The obstacles keeping them out of school are: conflict and fragility, poverty, geography, disability, ethnic or religious discrimination and, quite simply, lack of local capacity to educate them. The international community has to continue to address those challenges if we are to achieve the goal of education for all.

But, in a world of finite resources, we have to spend more on educating girls and building their skills, especially in adolescence, when girls are faced with far greater social, health and economic risks. We have to account first for that imbalance. When we focus resources directly on girls' empowerment, beginning with the poorest girls, boys and the rest of society benefit. Whereas "trickle down" doesn't work, "trickle up and out" often does.

We have to prioritise which girls we should focus on most. Knowing, even among girls, there are distinct and critical differences based on economic status, health and disability, ethnicity, religion and geography, girls' education efforts must focus on the most marginalised, not just the middle and upper classes.

Many girls I knew in my community were subjected to FGM and were forced into early marriages

We have to be conscious and supportive of the girls who need the most and who often are invisible within their communities and to the managers of empowerment programmes. For all these reasons, they require a much more targeted approach.

First-hand experience: my sisters faced challenges I never did

How did I, a young male, born and raised in a fairly conservative country, get so interested and passionate about girls' empowerment? That's another common question I am often asked, directly or otherwise. In short, it grew out of two sources: my own personal story and the story of my country.

I was raised in Sierra Leone by a single mother, alongside two sisters in what is one of the worst places in the world to be a girl. My mother separated from my father when I was young and has since then worked as a primary school teacher. She is educated. But the pay for a teacher like her was paltry. Aware of the circumstances for women in Sierra Leone, she had to work hard and use all her energy and ingenuity to make ends meet. To supplement her low pay, she sold everything - bread, cake, palm oil, whatever she could create with her own hands.

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Access to education has always been the frontline of the civil rights battle in the US. In a famous image from 1942, 15 year old Dorothy Counts is taunted as she walks towards the previously all-white Harding High School in Charlotte, North Carolina. Photograph: Bettmann/CORBIS

She was a teacher with a little bit of education herself, and despite many challenges, including at one point, fleeing the country for our lives, as refugees, she understood the power of learning. That makes me one of the lucky ones. Without my mother's understanding of the value of education, I would not have received the education I did and would not be where I am today. It's one small example of how educating a woman has multiple ripple effects for her family and the community around her.

But I was lucky not just to have an enlightened mother. I was fortunate also to be a boy. My two sisters faced challenges I never did: threats of sexual violence, men coming into contact with them and, even when the girls were fairly young, asking them to marry them. As we got older, there were signals from many directions suggesting that their lives seemed to matter less, even though I was always convinced they were smarter than me. In retrospect, I can now see what happened: society spent so much time telling them, and girls like them, that there were higher expectations for me only because I was a boy.

Our society not only treats girls badly, it blames them for their plight

In Sierra Leone, about 90% of girls are subjected to female genital mutilation (or FGM), one of the highest rates in the world. Only 36% of women in Sierra Leone are literate, compared with 52% of men. Furthermore, 18% of girls are married by the age of 15, and 44% by the age of 18. It's illegal but, with little enforcement of those laws, widespread.

Two out of 10 women aged 20 to 49 report having their first sexual intercourse before they are 15 years old, rising to seven out of 10 by 18. Over their lifetime, if present patterns continue, 75 % of all adolescent girls in Sierra Leone will be a single mother at some point and that figure in Liberia is over 90%. Much of the single motherhood arises from having babies before marriage, unstable marriages, and the absence of male social and economic support.

We have to be supportive of the girls who need the most and who often are invisible within their communities

Fitting into that pattern, many girls I knew in my community who dropped out of school were subjected to FGM and were forced into early marriages. As these girls reached puberty, their social space narrowed as boys' expanded. It didn't matter that so many of the girls were smart and showed lots of potential, more than a lot of the boys. It also didn't seem to matter that the children of uneducated or poorly educated women were most likely to be caught in a continuous downward spiral of poverty, ill health and other challenges.

The more I saw this pattern, the more I sensed something was not right. Our society not only treated girls badly, it then blamed them for their plight, saying they weren't smart or hard-working enough to learn. And when they were sexually abused, it was somehow their fault. That, at least, was how many men, and the boys these men influenced, saw it.

In my mid-teens, I befriended a small group of other boys who talked about education, and who all knew that improving the odds for girls to get schooling was important - not only to those girls but to us, too.

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Oprah Winfrey with some of the students at her Leadership Academy for Girls at Henley-On-Klip in South Africa. Photograph: Denis Farrell/AP

When we were between 15 and 18, we started a campaign, through the Children's Forum Network, that helped change the laws to deal with child marriage, codify sexual violence laws in the country and ensure compulsory primary education for girls. I was the first child to testify about this to the national Truth Commission, and I collected similar testimonies from others. One of our recommendations was to pass the Child Rights Act, which was finally enacted in 2007.

We were motivated by justice and human rights. We were raising our voices and created a platform to talk about girls' rights. We still took a lot of flak from friends and some relatives, who didn't understand what we were doing and accused us of being too influenced by the west or of lacking a grasp of reality.

I wish I could say that, over the last decade since we fought for girls' rights in Sierra Leone, we dramatically transformed how men there view educating and empowering girls. The truth is that, while there has been some change, it has been much less than we would have hoped. It's still a work in progress.

And that is not limited to Sierra Leone. There are far too many places around the world where it is difficult to be a girl. My own personal story is emblematic of what is happening elsewhere. Approximately 15 million girls worldwide are forced into marriage every year and in 27 countries there are large districts where at least 15% of girls are married before age 15.

According to the International Center for Research on Women, one-third of girls in the developing world are married before the age of 18, and one in nine are married before the age of 15. Unesco data shows that "nearly 1% of the world's adult population is still not literate; two-thirds of them are women". Those empirical numbers confirm what I've seen anecdotally from my experiences across the continent and what I've read about.

Engaging boys: ending poverty helps us all

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Boys discuss child marriage during children's parliament session at school. Photograph: Plan International

I have personally designed and implemented programmes in several African nations aimed at encouraging boys to understand the value of girls' education, so I'm certainly not against spending some of the valuable girls' education resources on boys.

In Ethiopia, I helped to lead an innovative initiative, supported by Girl Hub, called Yegna (which means "ours" in Amharic) aimed at inspiring girls to believe in themselves and to change boys' and society's minds about the value of girls in society.

We created clubs, radio dramas, talk shows and a documentary on the topic. Those are useful and can work when paired with a more targeted, girl-centric programmatic approach. We worked with local groups and, in some cases, religious institutions to get their help spreading the gospel, if you will, of girls' education.

The medium of engagement matters. I worked with a group of boys in Ethiopia who told me they cared about equality issues but would feel emasculated if they were seen as promoting girls' issues. Creating the right platforms and the right messages reinforces incentives for all and aims to make it cool to be part of male gender clubs. In Liberia, we came up with the idea of being G-Positive (a play on gangsta, but standing really for gender).

In Ethiopia, we created clubs for boys and girls with T-shirts that identified them publicly and proudly as part of a growing group dedicated to promoting girls. Delivering messages through mass media alone doesn't work. They must be reinforced with small social groups, which make it easier for boys, who essentially become positive deviants, to have their behaviour approved by their peers.

These approaches also have to answer the question: what's in it for the boys? They have to show that ending poverty benefits us all and eases the burden men may feel they have to provide solely for their families. As Plan International has pointed out, educating girls has enormous economic, health and social benefits across a society, which shows up in decreased under-five mortality, greater agricultural productivity, improved nutrition, increases in per-capita income and GDP growth, lower fertility rates, and much more.

There are civil society benefits to educating girls, as well. Investing in girls can diminish the pipeline of boys who might end up in groups such as Boko Haram, the Taliban or al-Shabaab. In response to these groups' efforts to, in part, keep girls out of school by terrorising them, many people call for focusing primarily on boys, the recruits for these extremist movements.

But the answer to this difficult challenge is to double down on efforts to keep girls in school, to defy them, as Malala Yousafzai and other courageous girls have done. We know that when the parents - especially mothers - of young boys who are vulnerable to recruitment are educated, they will be much less likely to allow their sons to go to Boko Haram or the Taliban. That's why valiant efforts today to keep schools safe from violence are so critical to the future.

I believe girls' education is the global civil rights issue of our time. Girls' education and empowerment initiatives must also appeal to boys' and men's sense of justice, because even as those boys and men have bought into and perpetuate cultures that devalue girls and women, they do care about injustice. We need to show them that it's more fashionable and even masculine to join the fight against injustice and do something about it. We need to show them that it's about our sisters, mothers and daughters. We have to make it personal.

The best way to level the playing field is not to use finite resources meant for gender equality on boys and men, but to empower girls and women directly. For everyone's good, we need to get them in school, learning, growing and, ultimately, transforming their communities.

This piece is part of child rights organisation Plan International's 2015 State of the World's Girls Report Unfinished Business of Girls' Rights. The organisation has been publishing the annual series since 2007 with the objective of marking progress and analysing the barriers that still stand in the way of gender equality. The reports are part of Plan International's Because I am a Girl global campaign dedicated to girls' rights.

An advocate for global education, a girl champion and former refugee from Sierra Leone, Chernor Bah is an associate at the Population Council, leading a collaborative initiative to provide solutions to young women affected by the Ebola outbreak.

Join our community of development professionals and humanitarians. Follow@GuardianGDP on Twitter.

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adolescent girls - global development professionals network

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'Girls' education is the global civil rights issue of our time'

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As a longtime champion of girls' rights, I've spoken many times about the importance of giving more girls around the world the education they deserve. And one of the first questions I almost always hear is some variation of "What about the boys?"

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Occasionally stories break through that give a graphic sense of the enormous educational struggle faced by children, particularly girls, in many parts of the world.

For example, the shooting in the head of Malala Yousafzai - an advocate for girls' education - in 2012; the Taliban murder of 132 schoolchildren in an attack on a school in Peshawar, Pakistan, in 2014; and the abduction by Boko Haram of some 200 Nigerian schoolgirls in the same year.

Behind the headlines, the outlook, in terms of educational opportunities for children in some of the poorest parts of the world, appears to be worsening, in spite of international efforts to reverse the trend.

Norway's capital, Oslo, played host this week to an education and development conference, led by the Norwegian Prime Minister, Erna Solberg.

On the agenda was the issue of what to do about the education of children, particularly girls, worldwide.

'Civil rights struggle'

Malala, now a Nobel Peace Prize winner for her campaigning on education, attended, as did former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

Malala, writing in the Daily Telegraph, quoted a figure of 60 million girls worldwide being denied an education.

In the Guardian newspaper, Mr Brown described the challenge as nothing less than "the civil rights struggle of our time".

New figures from Unesco appear to back up that argument, revealing that the global number of children and young adolescents not enrolled in school has been rising in recent years.

In the school year ending in 2013, some 124 million children between the ages of six and 15 either dropped out of school or did not enrol in the first place.

That was up on the figure of 122 million in 2011.

The majority of those children who have never enrolled are girls, so that means some 62 million girls are out of school worldwide.

Poverty, coercion and war

The global number of out-of-school children of primary school age is also rising. It now stands at 59 million.

Of those, 30 million live in sub-Saharan Africa and 10 million in South and West Asia.

Girls' primary school completion rates are below 50% in most poor countries, according to Unesco.

Other statistics pertaining to the situation of girls - and the impact on their life chances - are just as troubling.

According to Unicef, every year 15 million girls are forced or coerced into marriage, and one in every three girls in the developing world is married by the age of 18.

Many of those who have studied the issue believe that women and girls face particular obstacles that keep them out of education, including violence, early pregnancy, discrimination, and the costs of going to school.

Wars, big and small, are also taking their toll.

Some 30 million children are believed to have been displaced worldwide as a result of the growing conflict and chaos in different parts of the globe.

The Syrian effect

Figures are hard to pinpoint but according to the UNHCR, the number of refugees has risen to 59 million in 2014, an increase of more than eight million in just one year.

That was largely due to the conflict in Syria, which saw an average of 42,500 people become refugees every day last year.

The majority of Syrian children lack basic necessities and are unable to go to school.

As of December 2013, of the 4.8 million school-age Syrian children, some two million inside the country were out of school, as were half a million Syrian refugee children in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey.

It is hard to believe that as recently as 2000, Syria had achieved universal primary enrolment.

According to Unesco, Syria is not the only country with a large number of out-of-school children and adolescents.

Huge illiteracy rates

At least one million children were denied the right to education in each of the following countries: India, Indonesia, Kenya, Niger, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Sudan, Sudan and the United Republic of Tanzania.

To pick out just one country in that list - Pakistan - there has been some progress in literacy rates but the situation for young girls, particularly in rural communities, remains a huge challenge.

The paragraphs below in the latest Unesco report sum up the scale of the challenge worldwide.

"Despite [some] gains [in literacy rates], 781 million adults still could not read or write - two-thirds of them (496 million) were women. In more than a dozen countries, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, fewer than half of all adults had basic literacy skills," says the report.

It goes on: "Among youths, 126 million were illiterate, of which 77 million were female. Even though the size of the global illiterate population is shrinking, the female proportion has remained virtually steady at 63% to 64%."

Study after study appears to suggest that education helps girls increase their potential wages with each extra year, and the financial independence gained helps them take control of their lives.

The participants at the conference in Oslo recognised the scale of the challenge.

But it is not obvious that just agreeing on aims and goals is enough to bring about much change.

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Occasionally stories break through that give a graphic sense of the enormous educational struggle faced by children, particularly girls, in many parts of the world.

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A polar bear walks along a rocky shore, looking for food. The bear would usually be on the sea ice hunting for seals, pouncing when the seal comes up to breathe. But the ice has started to melt earlier and re-form later than it has in the past. Without the sea ice, the polar bear must scavenge for other, less nutritious food.

These changes in polar sea ice are a result of climate change. But this isn't just affecting polar bears-climate change affects everyone.

What is climate change?

Weather changes day to day-sometimes it rains, other days it's hot. Climate is the pattern of the weather conditions over a long period of time for a large area. And climate can be affected by Earth's atmosphere.

Our Earth is surrounded by an atmosphere made up of gases. When sunlight enters our atmosphere, some of the sun's heat is trapped by the gas, and some bounces back out into space. By trapping that heat, our atmosphere keeps Earth warm enough to live on. Without it, our planet would be very cold, like Mars.

Earth's climate has always naturally cycled through change, caused by how much of the sun's energy was absorbed by the atmosphere. In fact over the past 650,000 years, the Earth has gone through seven ice ages and warming periods.

What's different now?

But during the past few hundred years, oil, gas, and coal have powered homes, cars, and factories. These energy sources release a gas called carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere. This gas traps heat that would otherwise escape Earth's atmosphere. That increases Earth's temperature, which contributes to the planet's warming.

That's why many scientists agree that the Earth is now warming because of human activity. How do they know? Through careful study, they know that the climate is warming about 10 times faster than the average previous warming times. They've also ruled out the natural factors that caused warming in the past.

The Earth's average temperature has increased about 1.5°F in the past hundred years. It doesn't sound like much, but scientists think that the temperature increase has caused melting glaciers, drought, and coral reef die-off. (Coral can't survive in water that's too warm.) They expect the climate will warm another .5°F to 8.6°F by the year 2100.

What could happen?

Climate change affects more than temperature. Warmer water changes the patterns of ocean currents, affecting global weather patterns.

Some places will receive more rainfall, which could lead to flooding, while other places will get less, which might mean drought. Tropical storms could be stronger, and a continuing rise in sea level due to melting polar ice might push people out of their homes.

Hundreds of plant and animal species have already experienced changes because of climate change. The American pika, for example, is a small mammal that lives in cool mountainous areas in western North America-in fact, it can die when exposed to temperatures warmer than 78˚F. So as the mountain climate heats up, the pika climbs the slopes in search of cooler habitat. But what happens when temperatures at the top become too warm for the pika?

Other species will benefit from a warmer world-but in some cases that would be bad news for humans. Because disease-carrying mosquitoes thrive in warm, wet weather, more people could contract illnesses such as malaria as the Earth warms.

What can we do about it?

You can do a lot! It's simple to make a difference to keep the Earth healthy. Try some of these tips to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide you add to the atmosphere.

Instead of traveling in a car, use public transportation, walk, or ride your bike when you can. Biking or walking 10 miles each day instead of riding in a car can save up to 1.9 tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere every year.

Reduce and reuse things as much as possible. Factories emit lots of carbon dioxide when making new products. (Buying products that are made with recycled glass and plastic also emits carbon dioxide, though less so.) Fix your appliances and clothes instead of buying new products. Good thing holey jeans are back in style!

Wash your clothes in cold water, and hang them to dry.

Electronics use energy even when they're turned off, so unplug them when you're not using them. It could save your family about $200 a year on its energy bill.

Eat less meat and dairy. Farm animals, er, emit another heat-trapping gas, methane. And some studies have found that livestock account for about half of the world's heat-trapping gas emissions.

Buy locally grown and in-season foods and products to reduce emissions from transporting products.

Wear a warm sweater at home in the winter instead of turning up the heat, and open your windows instead of blasting the air conditioning in the summer.

Talk to your parents and the other adults that you know about climate change. Send a letter or drawing to your mayor, Senate or House representative, or even to the president. These leaders can vote to regulate and reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

Your everyday actions affect people, plants, and animals all over the world-including polar bears! So be cool by doing your best to keep Earth well ... cool!

Climate: The average pattern of weather conditions over a long period of time. Climate isn't weather-weather changes daily.

Global warming: The increate in Earth's average temperature over a long period of time

Carbon dioxide: A gas released by the burning of coal, natural gas, oil, and wood that traps heat in the atmosphere

Carbon footprint: The amount of carbon dioxide one human releases into the environment in a year

Fossil fuels: Coal, oil, and natural gas, which come from the breakdown of ancient plants and animals over millions of years

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What is climate change? What could happen? Get all the facts you need to know.

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As the world seeks to slow the pace of climate change, preserve wildlife, and support more than eight billion people, trees inevitably hold a major part of the answer. Yet the mass destruction of trees-deforestation-continues, sacrificing the long-term benefits of standing trees for short-term gain of fuel, and materials for manufacturing and construction.

We need trees for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that they absorb the carbon dioxide we exhale and the heat-trapping greenhouse gases that human activities emit. As those gases enter the atmosphere, global warming increases, a trend scientists now prefer to call climate change.

There is also the imminent danger of disease caused by deforestation. An estimated 60 percent of emerging infectious diseases come from animals, and a major cause of viruses' jump from wildlife to humans is habitat loss, often through deforestation.

But we can still save our forests. Aggressive efforts to rewild and reforest are already showing success. Tropical tree cover alone can provide 23 percent of the climate mitigation needed to meet goals set in the Paris Agreement in 2015, according to one estimate.

Causes of deforestation

Forests still cover about 30 percent of the world's land area, but they are disappearing at an alarming rate. Since 1990, the world has lost more than 420 million hectares or about a billion acres of forest, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations-mainly in Africa and South America. About 17 percent of the Amazonian rainforest has been destroyed over the past 50 years, and losses recently have been on the rise. The organization Amazon Conservation reports that destruction rose by 21 percent in 2020, a loss the size of Israel.

Farming, grazing of livestock, mining, and drilling combined account for more than half of all deforestation. Forestry practices, wildfires and, in small part, urbanization account for the rest. In Malaysia and Indonesia, forests are cut down to make way for producing palm oil, which can be found in everything from shampoo to saltine crackers. In the Amazon, cattle ranching and farms-particularly soy plantations-are key culprits.

Logging operations, which provide the world's wood and paper products, also fell countless trees each year. Loggers, some of them acting illegally, also build roads to access more and more remote forests-which leads to further deforestation. Forests are also cut as a result of growing urban sprawl as land is developed for homes.

Not all deforestation is intentional. Some is caused by a combination of human and natural factors like wildfires and overgrazing, which may prevent the growth of young trees.

Why it matters

There are some 250 million people who live in forest and savannah areas and depend on them for subsistence and income-many of them among the world's rural poor.

Eighty percent of Earth's land animals and plants live in forests, and deforestation threatens species including the orangutan, Sumatran tiger, and many species of birds. Removing trees deprives the forest of portions of its canopy, which blocks the sun's rays during the day and retains heat at night. That disruption leads to more extreme temperature swings that can be harmful to plants and animals.

With wild habitats destroyed and human life ever expanding, the line between animal and human areas blurs, opening the door to zoonotic diseases. In 2014, for example, the Ebola virus killed over 11,000 people in West Africa after fruit bats transmitted the disease to a toddler who was playing near trees where bats were roosting.

(How deforestation is leading to more infectious diseases in humans.)

Some scientists believe there could be as many as 1.7 million currently "undiscovered" viruses in mammals and birds, of which up to 827,000 could have the ability to infect people, according to a 2018 study.

Deforestation's effects reach far beyond the people and animals where trees are cut. The South American rainforest, for example, influences regional and perhaps even global water cycles, and it's key to the water supply in Brazilian cities and neighboring countries. The Amazon actually helps furnish water to some of the soy farmers and beef ranchers who are clearing the forest. The loss of clean water and biodiversity from all forests could have many other effects we can't foresee, touching even your morning cup of coffee.

In terms of climate change, cutting trees both adds carbon dioxide to the air and removes the ability to absorb existing carbon dioxide. If tropical deforestation were a country, according to the World Resources Institute, it would rank third in carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions, behind China and the U.S.

What can be done

The numbers are grim, but many conservationists see reasons for hope. A movement is under way to preserve existing forest ecosystems and restore lost tree cover by first reforesting (replanting trees) and ultimately rewilding (a more comprehensive mission to restore entire ecosystems).

(Which nation could be the first to be rewilded?)

Organizations and activists are working to fight illegal mining and logging-National Geographic Explorer Topher White, for example, has come up with a way to use recycled cell phones to monitor for chainsaws. In Tanzania, the residents of Kokota have planted more than 2 million trees on their small island over a decade, aiming to repair previous damage. And in Brazil, conservationists are rallying in the face of ominous signals that the government may roll back forest protections.

(Which tree planting projects should you support?)

Stopping deforestation before it reaches a critical point will play a key role in avoiding the next zoonotic pandemic. A November 2022 study showed that when bats struggle to find suitable habitat, they travel closer to human communities where diseases are more likely to spillover. Inversely, when bats' native habitats were left intact, they stayed away from humans. This research is the first to show how we can predict and avoid spillovers through monitoring and maintaining wildlife habitats.

For consumers, it makes sense to examine the products and meats you buy, looking for sustainably produced sources when you can. Nonprofit groups such as the Forest Stewardship Council and the Rainforest Alliance certify products they consider sustainable, while the World Wildlife Fund has a palm oil scorecard for consumer brands.

Editor's note: This story was originally published on February 2019. It has been updated.

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Deforestation and Its Effect on the Planet

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Large scale destruction of trees-deforestation-affects ecosystems, climate, and even increases risk for zoonotic diseases spreading to humans.

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Newsela | Opinion: Kids don't need a cellphone; they need a digital diet

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More parents want their children to have less access to electronic media, which has been associated with obesity, shorter attention spans and depression.

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Explore National Geographic. A world leader in geography, cartography and exploration.

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Climate is the long-term pattern of weather in a particular area. Weather can change from hour to hour, day to day, month to month or even from year to year. For periods of 30 years or more, however, distinct weather patterns occur. A desert might experience a rainy week, but over the long term, the region receives very little rainfall. It has a dry climate.

Global warming is often linked to the burning of fossil fuels-coal, oil, and natural gas-by industries and cars. Warming is also linked to the destruction of tropical forests. Such human activity has increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by more than 20 percent in the past 100 years.

The climate has changed many times during Earth's history, but the changes have occurred slowly, over thousands of years. Only in the past several centuries have human activities begun to influence climate-and scientists are still struggling to understand what the consequences will be.

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Climate is the long-term pattern of weather in a particular area. Weather can change from hour to hour, day to day, month to month or even from year to year. For periods of 30 years or more, however, distinct weather patterns occur.

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Homelessness: Causes, Types and Facts | Crisis UK

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Find out the causes, effects, and types of homelessness - and what we’re doing to end it for good.

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Newsela | Would you eat food made with "trash?"

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Companies are making new things to eat using food that is usually thrown away even though it is still good.

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Newsela | Opinion: Kids don't need a cellphone; they need a digital diet

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More parents want their children to have less access to electronic media, which has been associated with obesity, shorter attention spans and depression.

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Newsela | Teen suicide rates rising, study says social media use could be a factor

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Newsela | Worsening climate change poses health risks for poor and elderly, group says

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Newsela | World's nations adopt plan "toward a pollution-free planet"

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The third United Nations Environment Assembly outlined a path to a pollution-free planet.

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As our sun gets older, it's losing mass, and so its gravitational pull becomes weaker. As a result, the orbits of all the planets in our solar system are expanding, not unlike "the waistband of a couch potato in midlife," according to a new NASA press statement.

A team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Maryland and the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center has shown that the aging sun is behaving according to Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity. The key to testing his theory? The planet Mercury.

In 2015, NASA's MESSENGER probe crashed into Mercury (intentionally; this is just how NASA wraps things up a lot of the time) ending its planetary exploration mission. But the seven years' worth of data it gathered while still active provided the researchers with everything they needed to estimate the relevant parameters for both general relativity and the sun's own life cycle. A paper describing the research was published in the scientific journal .

"Mercury is the perfect test object for these experiments because it is so sensitive to the gravitational effect and activity of the sun," lead author Antonio Genova, an MIT researcher working at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said in the press statement.

Einstein's famous theory accounts for the fact that the gravitational fields of huge objects-like the sun-warp the space-time continuum around them, according to . Because Mercury is the planet in our solar system closest to the sun, its orbit is the tightest.

"We're addressing long-standing and very important questions both in fundamental physics and solar science by using a planetary-science approach," Goddard geophysicist Erwan Mazarico said in the NASA statement. "By coming at these problems from a different perspective, we can gain more confidence in the numbers, and we can learn more about the interplay between the sun and the planets."

That warping effect Einstein predicted slowly but steadily affects Mercury's orbit. In a few billion years, it might crash into the Earth, according to Space.com. The accuracy with which the researchers found general relativity has predicted Mercury's path has reaffirmed that Einstein was right. This may seem like a foregone conclusion to the average non-physicist who isn't really in a position to question Einstein, but it's important to remember that almost anything in science is open to questioning.

"The study demonstrates how making measurements of planetary orbit changes throughout the solar system opens the possibility of future discoveries about the nature of the sun and planets, and indeed, about the basic workings of the universe," co-author Maria Zuber, vice president for research at MIT, said in the NASA statement.

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The sun is losing mass-and its grip on our solar system

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As our sun gets older, it's losing mass, and so its gravitational pull becomes weaker. As a result, the orbits of all the planets in our solar system are expanding, not unlike "the waistband of a couch potato in midlife," according to a new NASA press statement.

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Dear children of today and of tomorrow,

Thirty years ago, against the backdrop of a changing world order - the fall of the Berlin Wall, the decline of apartheid, the birth of the world wide web - the world united in defence of children and childhood. While most of the world's parents at the time had grown up under dictatorships or failing governments, they hoped for better lives, greater opportunities and more rights for their children. So, when leaders came together in 1989 in a moment of rare global unity to make a historic commitment to the world's children to protect and fulfil their rights, there was a real sense of hope for the next generation.

So how much progress have we made? In the three decades following the adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, in spite of an exploding global population, we have reduced the number of children missing out on primary school by almost 40 per cent. The number of stunted children under 5 years of age dropped by over 100 million. Three decades ago, polio paralyzed or killed almost 1,000 children every day. Today, 99 per cent of those cases have been eliminated. Many of the interventions behind this progress - such as vaccines, oral rehydration salts and better nutrition - have been practical and cost-effective. The rise of digital and mobile technology and other innovations have made it easier and more efficient to deliver critical services in hard-to reach communities and to expand opportunities.

Yet poverty, inequality, discrimination and distance continue to deny millions of children their rights every year, as 15,000 children under 5 still die every day, mostly from treatable diseases and other preventable causes. We are facing an alarming rise in overweight children, but also girls suffering from anaemia. The stubborn challenges of open defecation and child marriage continue to threaten children's health and futures. Whilst the numbers of children in school are higher than ever, the challenge of achieving quality education is not being met. Being in school is not the same as learning; more than 60 per cent of primary school children in developing countries still fail to achieve minimum proficiency in learning and half the world's teens face violence in and around school, so it doesn't feel like a place of safety. Conflicts continue to deny children the protection, health and futures they deserve. The list of ongoing child rights challenges is long.

And your generation, the children of today, are facing a new set of challenges and global shifts that were unimaginable to your parents. Our climate is changing beyond recognition. Inequality is deepening. Technology is transforming how we perceive the world. And more families are migrating than ever before. Childhood has changed, and we need to change our approaches along with it.

So, as we look back on 30 years of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, we should also look ahead, to the next 30 years. We must listen to you - today's children and young people - about the issues of greatest concern to you now and begin working with you on twenty-first century solutions to twenty-first century problems.

With that in mind, here are eight reasons why I'm worried for your future, and eight reasons why I think there is hope:

In the meantime, it is vital that we search for solutions that can ameliorate the worst effects of air pollution on child health. Mongolia's capital city Ulaanbaatar has among the most polluted air in the world during winter. The biggest source of pollution comes from coal-burning used by 60 per cent of Ulaanbaatar's population. UNICEF innovation experts together with the community, government, academia and the private sector have begun to design and implement energy efficiency solutions for traditional homes to reduce coal consumption and improve air quality, including by designing "the 21st Century Ger".

And we are finding ways to recycle and reuse plastics in innovative ways as well, reducing toxic waste and putting rubbish to good use. Conceptos Plasticos, a Colombian social enterprise, has developed a technique to make bricks out of non-PVC plastics that are cheaper, lighter and more durable than conventional bricks - and is using them to build classrooms. Africa's first recycled plastic classroom was built earlier this year in Côte d'Ivoire, in just a few weeks. It cost 30 per cent less than traditional classrooms. This innovative approach of transforming plastic waste into construction bricks has the potential to turn a plastic waste management challenge into an opportunity, by addressing the right to an education with the construction of schools, empowering these communities and cleaning up the environment at the same time.

Why there is hope:

Some states have demonstrated effective policies to keep refugees learning. When large numbers of children escaping the war in the Syrian Arab Republic arrived in Lebanon, the government faced the challenge of accommodating hundreds of thousands of children in a public-school system already under strain. With the support of international partners, they turned that challenge into an opportunity and integrated refugee children into schools while strengthening the education system for Lebanese students at the same time.

And digital innovations can help us do more. UNICEF is collaborating with Microsoft and the University of Cambridge to develop a 'learning passport' - a digital platform that will facilitate learning opportunities for children and young people within and across borders. The learning passport is being tested and piloted in countries hosting refugees, migrants and internally displaced persons. A digitally inclusive world should allow young people, no matter their situation, to get access to education. Scaling up solutions like the digital learning passport could help millions of displaced children gain the skills they need to thrive.

Why I'm worried:

If we believed everything we read about teenagers today, and the images portrayed in television and film, we could be forgiven for thinking they are a wild, antisocial bunch. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. The evidence actually shows that teens today smoke less, drink less, get into less trouble and generally take fewer risks than previous generations. You might even call them Generation Sensible.

Yet there is one area of risk for adolescents showing an extremely worrisome trend in the wrong direction - one that reminds us of the invisible vulnerability that young people still carry inside of them. Mental health disorders among under 18s have been rising steadily over the past 30 years and depression is now among the leading causes of disability in the young. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 62,000 adolescents died in 2016 because of self-harm, which is now the third leading cause of death for adolescents aged 15 -19.

This is not just a rich country problem - WHO estimates that more than 90 per cent of adolescent suicides in 2016 were in low or middle-income countries. And while young people with severe mental disorders in lower-income countries often miss out on treatment and support, there is no country in the world that can claim to have conquered this challenge. To quote the WHO's mental health expert Shekhar Saxena, "when it comes to mental health, all countries are developing countries." With most low-income and middle-income countries spending less than 1 per cent of their total health budget on mental health, and high-income countries just 4-5 per cent, it is clear that it needs greater priority around the world.

UNICEF works with children who have suffered unthinkable traumas, gender discrimination, extreme poverty, sexual violence, disability and chronic illness, living through conflict and other experiences that place them at high risk of mental distress. The cost is not only personal, it is societal - the World Economic Forum consistently ranks mental health as having one of the greatest economic burdens of any non-communicable health issue. Despite this overwhelming evidence of a looming crisis and the alarming trends in rising self-harm and suicide rates, adolescent mental health and well-being have often been overlooked in global health programming.

With half of lifetime mental health disorders starting before age 14, age-appropriate mental health promotion, prevention and therapeutic treatment and rehabilitation must be prioritized. Early detection and treatment are key to preventing episodes of mental distress reaching a crisis point and precious young lives being damaged and lost. But all too often, what stands in the way of young people seeking help at an early stage is the ongoing stigma and taboo that prevents communities talking openly about mental health problems. Fortunately, this taboo is beginning to fall, and young people, once again, are leading the way - founding non-governmental organizations, developing apps, raising awareness, and being vocal about their own struggles with mental illness and their efforts to address their condition, in hope that others feel empowered to do the same.

Why I'm worried:

Migration has been part of the human experience throughout history. For thousands of years, children and families have left their place of birth to settle in new communities in search of educational or employment opportunities. Today is no different. We live in a mobile world in which at least 30 million children have moved across borders.

For many, migration is propelled by a drive for a better life. But for too many children, migration is not a positive choice but an urgent necessity - they simply do not have the opportunity to build a safe, healthy and prosperous life in the place they are born. When migration is driven by desperation, it can lead to children migrating without the legal permissions they need, becoming so-called 'irregular migrants'. They often take perilous journeys across deserts, oceans and armed borders, encountering violence, abuse and exploitation on the way.

And one of the greatest migrations the world has ever seen is happening not across borders, but within borders, with millions migrating internally from rural to urban areas. In 1989, when the Convention on the Rights of the Child was adopted, the majority of the world's children lived in rural areas. Today the majority live in cities, and the urbanization rate is set to grow. Though urban residents on average enjoy better access to services and opportunities, inequalities can be so large that many of the most disadvantaged children in urban areas fare worse than children in rural areas. For example, the poorest urban children in 1 in 4 countries are more likely to die before their fifth birthday than the poorest children in rural areas. And the poorest urban children in 1 in 6 countries are less likely to complete primary school than rural children.

Why there is hope:

No child should feel forced to migrate from their home, yet until the root causes are addressed, the situation is unlikely to change. That means tackling community and gang violence, strengthening protection systems so children can be safe in their communities, improving access to quality education and job opportunities, and making sure young people have the chance to gain the skills they need to build better - and safer - futures for themselves and their home countries.

UNICEF estimates that tens of thousands of children do migrate without legal permission, some with family and some alone, making them extremely vulnerable. It is essential that child migrants - legal or otherwise - have their rights upheld. Wherever they are, and whatever their story, migrant children are children first and foremost. Governments can protect child migrants by prioritizing the best interests of children in the application of immigration laws, and wherever possible, they must keep families together and use proven alternatives to detention, such as foster families or group homes - many governments are testing such approaches successfully.

The so-called urban advantage breaks down when we look beyond averages and control for wealth, so social policies and programmes designed to support child survival and development must pay greater attention to the poorest and most marginalized urban children. Modern cities generally offer better access to clean water, health and social services, and educational opportunities. Thus, if city governments can work to create inclusive access and equality of opportunity for the children in their cities, urban life could indeed provide a boost for child survival and development.

Why there is hope:

Registering children at birth is the first step in securing their recognition before the law, safeguarding their rights, and ensuring that any violation of these rights does not go unnoticed. The United Nations has set a goal that every human being on the planet will have a legal identity by 2030. UNICEF is supporting governments to work towards this goal, starting with registering all births.

For some children denied an official identity because of disagreements over their legal status, the only real solution is a political one. UNICEF urges Member States to fulfil their responsibilities to protect everyone under the age of 18 in line with the Convention on the Rights of the Child. This includes children who are born to nationals from other states, who may be migrants, refugees or foreign fighters - because children are children first and foremost.

In other circumstances, technology and innovative partnerships promise a way forward. In the Plurinational State of Bolivia, for example, TIGO - a nationwide telecommunications company - the Electoral High Tribunal and UNICEF worked to increase birth registration in hospitals and health centres, resulting in registration at birth increasing by more than 500 per cent between 2015 and 2018. In Rwanda, the automatic registering of children at birth in hospitals led to birth registration increasing from 67 per cent in 2017 to 80.2 per cent in 2018. We must urgently scale up programmes like this to reach more children. This means dramatically expanding digital access to the most remote and vulnerable communities, so registration systems can happen in real-time.

Debates about the benefits and dangers of social media for children are becoming familiar, and more action to protect children from bullying and exposure to harmful content is certainly needed. Parent and children are also becoming aware of the risk of sharing too much personal information on social media. But the truth is, the data contained within social media profiles created by children are just the tip of the data iceberg. Less well understood but at least as important, is the enormous accumulation of data being collected about children. As children go about their daily online lives, browsing social media, using search engines, e-commerce and government platforms, playing games, downloading apps and using mobile geolocation services, a digital footprint composed of thousands of pieces of data is accumulating around them. Some of the data may even have been gathered before birth and certainly before children are able to knowingly consent to its collection and use.

While social media platforms appear to be serious in their attempts to combat misinformation and work with news organizations to clearly label trusted sources, we cannot rely on the supply side for solutions. Children have a right to an education that prepares them for the world they will live in, and today, this includes much improved digital and media literacy, critical thinking and weighing up evidence. The Director of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development is including questions about distinguishing what is true from what is not true in the next round of the influential international PISA tests, seeing critical judgment as a global competency, and similar initiatives could help to mainstream education and training in digital literacy skills that could be among the most important for the next generation. Moreover, we must work hard to build meaningful connections between young people and institutions, rebuilding trust, if we are to preserve democratic societies in the future.

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8 reasons why I'm worried, and hopeful, about the next generation - by UNICEF's Executive Director Henrietta Fore

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Right to Education : Situation around the world - Humanium

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Situation of children’s right to education worldwide Today, education remains an inaccessible right for millions of children around the world. More than 72 million children of primary education age are not in school and 759 million adults are illiterate and do not have the awareness necessary to improve both their living conditions and those of […]

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Not only is it fun and educational for kids but it empowers them too. They are literally helping to save the lives of kids around the world suffering from severe acute malnutrition. When kids put their minds to helping other kids, they can change the world.

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The Girl and the Cloud | The Kid Should See This

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When Anna gets her very own snow cloud as a Christmas gift, it's the perfect surprise. They grow to be the best of friends, and have lots of fun. But when the summer season comes, something changes. The cloud becomes unhappy in the warmer weather, and Anna must dedicate herself to finding a solution that can help her friend...

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Talks by brilliant kids and teens | TED Talks

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Talks from scientists, musicians, innovators, activists -- all under the age of 20. Watch these amazing wunderkinds.

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Interesting ideas

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What action could you take?