The Katowice UN Climate Change Conference will take place in Katowice from the 3rd till the 14th of December 2018. 

70 years ago, the UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We work with our partners around the world towards making democracy and human rights, dignity and freedom a reality for all. The triad of Human Rights - Democracy- Ecological Sustainability is the basis for our work.

A new report exposing how public private partnerships (PPPs) across the globe have drained the public purse, and failed to deliver in the public interest, was launched at the Annual Meetings of the World Bank in Bali. The report entitled “History RePPPeated: How public private partnerships are failing” compiles no less than 10 case studies, showing how and why each PPP project failed to provide value-for-money, transparency and/or humane infrastructure projects.

The 14th Conference of the Parties (COP 14) to the Convention on Biological Diversity will take place in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, from the 17th to the 29th of November 2018. The Heinrich Böll Foundation stands in solidarity with Egyptian civil society and will therefore not take part in this year’s COP in Sharm El-Sheikh.

By forcing laboratory-made genes on an entire population or species, cutting-edge gene-drive technologies have the power to transform entire ecosystems in one fell swoop. But where leading industrial agriculture firms see dollar signs, farmers in the regions where gene drives could be unleashed see a mortal threat to their livelihoods.

US Congress and the Trump administration are still wrangling over how to deal with Saudi Arabia in response to the brutal killing of Jamal Khashoggi. Europe should take a principled stance.

The Hungarian Government has identified its new target:  Index.hu, the country’s biggest independent news website, is now under the indirect control of government-friendly investors. Their journalists, in the meantime, have promised that they won’t give up without a fight.

After first targeting refugees, the Hungarian Government has now turned its focus back to one of its old “enemies”. Just a few months before the upcoming municipal elections in spring 2019, homeless people have recently become a more intensely-targeted group than ever before.

We spoke with three election experts – Dr. David Barker at American University, Dr. Danny Hayes at George Washington University, and Dr. Candice Nelson at American University – to get their perspective on what to expect in November.

All Soil Atlas graphs are published under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-SA 3.0). You can download them here as PNG files.