The World Has Better HIV Tools Than Ever. So Why Is Ending AIDS Getting Harder? 05/09/2026 Maayan Hoffman Magda Robalo and Marina Vergueiro “We have better tools now. We can, if we work together and work better, we can conquer AIDS.” For Dr. Magda Robalo, a public health physician and former Minister of Health of Guinea-Bissau, the science behind the HIV response has advanced dramatically, but the social and political environment surrounding the disease may be moving in the opposite direction. Speaking on the latest episode of Global Health Matters, Robalo joined Brazilian activist, filmmaker and poet Marina Vergueiro to reflect on four decades of HIV and AIDS, and on the barriers that remain as the global health community considers what it will take to finally end the epidemic. Vergueiro, who has lived with HIV since 2012, described how treatment has transformed her own life. When she was first diagnosed, she took five pills, including one that required refrigeration. Today, she takes just one. But she warned that medical progress has not been matched by equivalent progress in reducing stigma. “I feel like the more we advance on science and technology for HIV treatment and prevention, the more we go back in time regarding stigma,” Vergueiro said. She also argued that mental health must become a much more central part of HIV care, particularly because depression, shame and isolation can affect whether people seek testing or remain on treatment. “If we don’t look for the mental health crisis together in the same perspective as HIV and AIDS, if we don’t put them together, we are not going to go anywhere,” she said. Robalo similarly called for a more people-centered approach, arguing that health systems must look beyond HIV itself as people living with the virus age and face other health conditions. At the same time, she warned that funding cuts, punitive laws, gender inequality and shifting political priorities could undermine decades of progress. “We had this dream of ending AIDS by 2030, but at the pace we are going, and of course, with other complex issues around the ecosystem, funding, etc., it is becoming more difficult, even though technology is on our side,” Robalo said. For both speakers, finishing the job will require not only better medicines, but renewed political commitment, stronger health systems and a response that treats people living with HIV as whole human beings. Watch the full episode: Watch or listen to more episodes on Health Policy Watch >> Image Credits: Global Health Matters Podcast. Why Disease Elimination Demands More Than Control 05/09/2026 Health Policy Watch Dr Jamal Ahmed and Dr Stephen Vreden “When you aim to deliver zero, and that is the goal of eradication, what it means is every person, every community, every village is equally important.” That is how Dr. Jamal Ahmed, WHO Director for Polio Eradication, explains why eliminating a disease requires a fundamentally different level of ambition than simply controlling it. Speaking on the latest episode of Global Health Matters, Ahmed joined Dr. Stephen Vreden, Chair of Suriname’s Committee for Prevention of Reestablishment of Malaria, to discuss what it takes to drive a disease burden to zero and how countries can prevent it from returning once elimination has been achieved. Suriname offers one of global health’s more striking recent examples. At the beginning of this century, the country had the highest malaria burden in the Americas. In June 2025, WHO certified it malaria-free, making it the first country in the Amazon region to reach that milestone. Vreden said one decisive change came when Suriname stopped thinking only about malaria control and explicitly made elimination the goal. The country also created a network of people within remote gold-mining communities who were trained to diagnose and treat malaria and distribute insecticide-treated bed nets. “I can easily say that without this network, Suriname would have never been able to eliminate malaria, because these people, they diagnose and treat malaria in places where you are not,” Vreden said. Ahmed said the same principle applies to polio eradication, where community leaders, religious figures, grandparents and local influencers remain critical to reaching children in areas affected by insecurity, migration and mistrust. But both experts warned that reaching zero does not mean the work is finished. “Reaching elimination, being certified for malaria, it certainly doesn’t mean that you can sit back and relax, because you need to prevent reintroduction,” Vreden said. For Ahmed, the remaining fight against polio likewise depends on sustained political commitment, surveillance, rapid response and global solidarity. “Zero doesn’t mean zero locally; it means zero globally, everywhere, across the whole world,” he said. Watch the full episode: Watch and read about more episodes on Health Policy Watch >> Image Credits: Global Health Matters Podcast. BREAKING: Germany Declines to Nominate Candidate for Upcoming WHO Director-General Election 04/09/2026 Felix Sassmannshausen The German government will not put forward a candidate for the upcoming WHO Director-General election (Federal Chancellery in Berlin). Germany has declined to put forward a candidate for the election of the next WHO Director-General. With Spain also reportedly ruling out a bid, the global field of candidates has only four official nominees just a few weeks before the deadline. Germany will not nominate a candidate for the post of WHO Director-General, Health Policy Watch has learned from the Federal Foreign Office. The Foreign Office declined to comment on the reasons behind the decision, as did the Federal Ministry of Health (BMG), which leads on the issue. “As a matter of principle, we do not comment on personnel matters,” a BMG spokesperson stated in response to an enquiry. Previously, the former Head of the Federal Chancellery, Helge Braun, had been discussed as a likely nominee in Berlin. Former Health Minister Karl Lauterbach and health diplomat Paul Zubeil had also been mentioned as possible candidates. The move comes as a surprise, given that Germany has become the largest state contributor to the WHO following the withdrawal of the United States. Leading German health policymakers had called for the Federal Republic to play a stronger role on the global stage. Spain likely to pass on a candidacy Maria Neira posted her WHO leadership vision on LinkedIn. Signals are also emerging from Madrid that further thin out the potential field of candidates. According to informed sources, Spain is also ruling out a candidacy. Earlier, speculation over a Spanish candidacy for Maria Neira, the former WHO Director for Environment, Climate Change and Health, arose after she called for a strong candidate in a LinkedIn post. She wrote that the WHO does not need a mere “personality to manage,” but a “scientifically fearless” leader brave enough to say “what the evidence demands.” To date, Paris has also remained silent, even though France could theoretically field three high-profile candidates. Sania Nishtar, CEO of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, has also not yet commented on her possible candidacy. Former WHO Chief Scientist Jeremy Farrar and PAHO Director Jarbas Barbosa have confirmed they have no intention to run in the WHO Director-General election after being mentioned as possible candidates. Field taking shape, German positioning remains open The field is slowly taking shape ahead of the 24 September deadline, with four listed “prospective candidates” on the WHO website. Alongside Belgian candidate Hans Kluge, the official candidates so far are the two EMRO candidates, Hanan Balkhy (Saudi Arabia) and Hanan Al-Kuwari (Qatar), and Indonesian Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin. It remains unclear for now which of the nominees the Federal Republic of Germany will support in the upcoming election. Both the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Health declined to comment further. German global health policymaker and Member of Parliament (MP) Sascha van Beek emphasised that Germany should not automatically back a European or established candidate. “I have always advocated looking more closely for leaders from the ‘engine room’. At the same time, I believe that, after the past few years, the WHO could also benefit from an outside perspective,” he said, referring to Sadikin, the Indonesian Health Minister and former banker. The decision not to nominate a candidate comes after the German government recently announced plans to further cut funding to global health under its tightly constrained draft budget proposal for 2027. While mandatory assessed contributions to the WHO will rise slightly, flexible budgets for pandemic preparedness are planned to be cut by 15.3%. How Germany will use its leverage in the upcoming elections remains to be seen in the coming months. See related story: Want to Become the Next WHO Director-General? Get in Line Image Credits: Wolfgang Weiser via Pexels, Felix Sassmannshausen/HPW. Controversy Over Merger Between UN Women and UNFPA Continues 04/09/2026 Kerry Cullinan United Nations (UN) Secretary-General António Guterres. Women’s organisations are anxious that Secretary-General António Guterres will push the controversial proposed merger of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) and UN Women at the UN General Assembly later this month. Guterres proposed the merger as part of his UN80 initiative, aimed at streamlining and cutting costs as the global body tries to recover from the United States’ funding withdrawal. Briefing the UN General Assembly on the merger on Thursday, Guterres said that the proposal had undergone a strategic assessment, and the two bodies’ executive directors had also presented detailed analysis to their respective boards. “We will carefully consider the next steps, taking into account the results obtained by the boards,” he told the Assembly. However, the Feminist Cross-Coalition UN80 Working Group, made up of key women’s organisations opposed to the merger, raised the possibility that Guterres may push the merger without considering alternatives as he has already pronounced that it is “the best way”. They also assert that the merger “lacks the confidence” of the two entities’ boards. Merger is ‘technically sound’ The UN merger assessment team’s report in April found that the two organisations had distinct and complementary mandates, and there was not that much overlap in their implementation work. However, the team concluded that “a merger is a technically sound proposal that has the potential to generate a stronger gender equality and SRHR entity at the heart of the UN, but only if undertaken under specific conditions”. These conditions include preserving the mandates of the two entities, and implementing the merger “with disciplined attention to political, legal, funding and operational safeguards”. The team suggests that a merger could generate annual savings of approximately $32-38 million “once integration is fully implemented”, and these “would need to be channelled back into a combined entity “. UN Women’s mandate encompasses the full spectrum of gender equality and the empowerment and rights of women and girls, including “normative support, UN-system coordination and operational activities”. UNFPA contributes to gender equality through its specific mandate areas, including sexual and reproductive health and rights, population and development, and gender-based violence. In 2024, UNFPA total expenses were approximately $1.53 billion, compared to $669 million for UN Women. Alternative report, civil society scepticism However, a report commissioned by the executive boards of UNFPA and UN Women found that significant savings could be achieved if the two organisations worked together more closely without merging. The report also warns that the merger will bring transition costs and operational disruption. Meanwhile, over 1,400 feminist organisations and individuals from over 146 countries sent a letter to Gueterres last month urging him to withdraw the merger proposal. “Both the merger assessment and civil society’s evidence have reached the same conclusion: the proposed merger poses significant risks, and could deepen the very challenges it is intended to address,” according to the letter. “These include risks to donor confidence and resource mobilization, operational continuity in humanitarian and development settings, and most importantly, the erosion of hard-won mandates for both agencies.” The latter adds that no documents in favour of the merger “explain why these challenges are best answered by building one larger, more exposed target rather than protecting two mandates whose distinctiveness has, until now, been treated as a strength”. It also questions whether there would be significant cost-savings. “A decision of this magnitude must be grounded in evidence, not assumptions,” the letter argues. “There has been no serious consideration of alternatives, including a comparison based on clear benchmarks and indicators of the merger proposal against non-structural reforms. Most importantly, no evidence has been presented that demonstrates that a proposed merger would accelerate progress towards gender equality and the realisation of the human rights of women and girls in all their diversity.” ‘Withdraw merger proposal’ The signatories call on Guterres to withdraw the merger proposal and consider “non-structural alternatives to ensure the UN delivers for gender equality and the human rights of women and girls”. However, Guterres told the briefing on Thursday: “The principle is simple: Where we perform essentially the same function, we should ask whether we truly need separate systems, separate platforms, and separate infrastructure — and we should act accordingly.” But the feminist coalition is not convinced: “This merger would fold two specialised institutions, with distinct expertise, relationships, and track records, into one smaller, more easily pressured entity — right at the moment when the issues they cover demand more capacity, not less. That’s not a bureaucratic risk. It’s a risk to whether women and girls can actually access the services and protections they depend on.” Image Credits: UN Photo. Indonesian Wildfires Cause Air Pollution Levels to Rise to Hazardous Levels in Southeast Asia 04/09/2026 Disha Shetty Forest fires are currently raging in Indonesia, affecting air quality across Southeast Asia. Millions of people in Southeast Asia are currently exposed to hazardous levels of air pollution as the large-scale haze caused by Indonesian wildfires crosses boundaries, leading to cancelled outdoor activities and school closures. Indonesia alone has recorded 50,000 cases of respiratory infections linked to land and forest fires between July and August this year, according to data from its health ministry. Fires have been particularly intense across parts of Borneo, including West Kalimantan, generating substantial smoke emissions that have been transported to neighbouring countries, including Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines. “Indonesia has experienced a particularly intense start to its seasonal fires, with the number of fires and their emissions increasing rapidly since late July. This is unfolding against the backdrop of strong El Niño conditions, which can influence rainfall and intensify conditions across the region,” said Mark Parrington, Senior Scientist at Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS). European Union’s CAMS is closely tracking fire emissions from Indonesia and the transport of smoke across the region. Also read: El Niño Forecast to Be Strongest on Record, Threatening Extreme Weather Through 2027 Increased fire activity since July 2026 Indonesia recorded its highest August monthly total estimated emissions since at least 2003, contributing to the highest monthly fire emissions for Asia. The fire activity in Indonesia has increased since July this year, coinciding with the country’s dry season, which typically runs from late July to late October. Strong El Niño conditions, which tend to bring extreme weather events globally, have further intensified fire activity. Indonesia has recorded its highest August total estimated fire emissions in the past 24 years, resulting in large-scale transboundary haze. “Particularly notable is the scale of the transboundary haze, which is already significantly impacting air quality across Southeast Asia and could persist for several weeks if the fire emissions continue to increase, as would be expected through September into October. These fires demonstrate that wildfires are not a localised challenge – their impacts can extend hundreds of miles from the source,” Parrington said. The wildfire emissions significantly increase concentrations of fine particulate matter (PM2.5), one of the pollutants most harmful to human health, among many other toxic and harmful pollutants. Globally, wildfire emissions increased in August 2026, with smoke from fires in North America and Eurasia being transported as far as the Northern Hemisphere, including the Arctic. Image Credits: Fire Emissions Watch application, Copernicus, Copernicus/X. US Proposal to Eliminate PAHO Funding Raises Alarm Over Health Security in Americas 03/09/2026 Sophia Samantaroy PAHO headquarters in Washington, DC, in 2026. The US administration has called the organization “corrupt” as it proposes to eliminate funding. A group of senior national security and health officials contend that cutting funding to the regional health organization will cripple the Western hemisphere’s ability to defend itself against disease threats. The oldest multilateral health organization in the world, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), is fighting many of the same health threats it did at its founding in Washington, DC, some 120 years ago: vector-borne diseases such as dengue and Zika, new and emerging diseases like New World Screwworm, and recurring outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases like measles. But the organization now faces an unprecedented challenge: the potential loss of United States funding. Amid ongoing outbreaks across the Americas, the US President’s Fiscal Year 2027 budget request to Congress proposes eliminating funding to PAHO, calling it and the World Health Organization (WHO) “corrupt organizations” that show “no independence from inappropriate political influence”, part of a raft of international organisations it describes as promoting “dangerous ideologies” and “taking advantage of American generosity”. The US is the largest single contributor to PAHO and accounts for half of all member state contributions to the organization. The US already owes nearly $135 million in member fees since 2024. After slashing aid to global health programmes, US President Donald Trump and his administration have set their sights on PAHO, threatening to eliminate its funding and terminate a 124-year history of US cooperation with the organisation it helped found. Former national and health security officials, though, were quick to back PAHO as the “first line of defense” against diseases in the Western Hemisphere. “Destroying the institution – PAHO – that has protected us all is the worst idea circulating in Washington right now,” said Andrew Natsios, a Republican politician and humanitarian official under multiple administrations, in a statement to Health Policy Watch. “It is delusional to think we can stop disease at our borders. We can only manage these health crises through regional cooperation.” In response to unpaid US dues, PAHO, the WHO’s regional arm with 35 member states across the Americas, has adopted a 17% reduction in its upcoming budget. It has also established a cost-saving “Shared Services Hub”– an effort to consolidate and streamline core administrative functions from Washington headquarters to lower-cost locations, the organization said in a statement to Health Policy Watch. Across the organization, total positions are projected to drop from 1,042 during the 2024–2025 budget cycle to approximately 869 positions across 2026–2027. With USAID shuttered and the future of CDC regional offices unclear, PAHO remains one of the only presences in the region that could coordinate 35 member states across the Americas on issues of health security. Leading US national security officials decry defunding The Friends of PAHO, a bipartisan coalition of national and health security officials, voiced its deep support for the organization founded by the US some 124 years ago. Trump’s submitted budget mirrors last year’s turmoil in global health funding – deep slashes to programs that support maternal and child health, malaria and tuberculosis control, HIV/AIDS control, and neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). Congress may still appropriate funds, as advocated for by an open letter signed by the dozens of national security and health officials who served across Republican and Democratic administrations. “PAHO has an unmatched record of protecting health,” the more than 100 signatories write in the letter, which include former Army surgeon generals, Department of Defense officials, Health and Human Services secretaries, former members of Congress, White House officials, and ambassadors. They represent a new bipartisan coalition, the Friends of PAHO. “For 124 years, it has been one of the most effective health and disease prevention organizations operating anywhere in the world,” the letter states. “At a time when infectious disease threats continue to cross borders, we urge policymakers in Washington to reassert America’s commitment to health security in the Western Hemisphere and recognize PAHO’s essential role in safeguarding the American homeland.” PAHO targeted for decades-old scandal Cuban Mais Medicos doctors arrive in 2020 Martinique as part of a medical delegation to assist with COVID-19-related programs. The Trump Administration initially singled out PAHO in 2025 in a move to withhold funding from key international organizations. The concerns came after the Trump Administration alleged PAHO was mediating a forced labor scheme among Cuban doctors, as part of a Brazilian program Mais Medicos. The scheme, which took place over a decade ago, resulted in US sanctions against Cuba for forced labor of its doctors. The Brazilian health officials involved were also subject to sanctions. In the past year, however, the administration has dredged the issue to the forefront of its qualms with PAHO and succeeded in withholding $4.9 billion in previously appropriated foreign assistance through a controversial “pocket rescission” in September 2025, including $45 million earmarked for PAHO. Representative Carlos Gimenez (FL-28), who issued the call to action against PAHO’s immunity in August 2025, did not respond to a request for comment. However, it is not clear why the decade-old scandal has resurfaced as an issue for withholding contributions to PAHO. See related story: Pan American Health Organization Targeted in New Round of US Funding Cuts US owes over $135 million in assessed contributions PAHO has made a net -17% adjustment to its budget for the upcoming two years from $820 million in 2024-2025 to $762 million in 2026-2027. The US has not yet formally withdrawn from PAHO: it remains a member and continues to owe assessed contributions like several other countries. In fact, PAHO is the only multilateral health organization the US is a member of following last year’s withdrawal from the World Health Organization and other related organizations. US payments to PAHO have been delayed now for nearly two years, leaving the organization under increased pressure. Beyond funding, the US supports PAHO through staffing experts and providing technical advice in Washington. In a statement, PAHO said it has not been officially informed of a decision to eliminate funding to the organization. There have been several instances in which US Congress has ignored proposed funding cuts from the Office of Budget and Management (OMB), instead opting to support global aid across party lines. Indeed, several high-ranking Republican members of Congress and former officials have spoken out against a US withdrawal from global aid, and the ways the Administration has attempted to rescind funding. US Senator Susan Collins, Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, called the rescissions move “a clear violation of the law” and said that she “cannot support the cuts that are so deep and so damaging in global health programs,” in a Senate hearing with OMB chief Russel Vought. Natsios, whose career as a Republican politician and public servant spans five decades, echoed this sentiment, saying that “diseases, both human and animal, don’t need passports to travel across borders. The health crises of Latin America will become the health crises of the US and our crises will eventually travel to our southern neighbors. PAHO, for more than eight decades, has been the first line of defense against these crises.” For now, PAHO continues to coordinate responses to the devastating earthquakes in Colombia and Venezuela, surveil measles and dengue outbreaks, and monitor potential avian flu cases despite the budget cuts. A sudden break in a 120-year partnership The front page of a Washington-based newspaper documenting a meeting of delegates from the Americas to disucss public health. PAHO was founded in Washington, DC, in 1902 under President Theodore Roosevelt, making it the oldest such organization. The dire health consequences of the Spanish-American War in Cuba and the deadly yellow fever epidemics that struck American workers building the Panama Canal spurred Roosevelt to convene what was then called the International Sanitary Bureau in Washington, DC. The close ties between the US and PAHO predate those of any other health multilateral. “Until the late 1950s, the organization’s earliest directors were US health specialists,” said Katherine Bliss, director at CSIS Global Health Policy Center and an expert on Latin America. She notes that included former military doctors and leaders within the US Public Health Service. “PAHO was founded on US soil, by US leadership, and built on the conviction that American leadership in this hemisphere produces results,” the open letter calling to protect PAHO’s funding states. “For 124 years, the US has not only successfully engaged with PAHO but has been the moving force behind PAHO’s work that serves American interests and reflects American values.” “In this context, sustaining US leadership in PAHO is an America First strategy in practice,” it adds. Some 120 years later, spillovers in the Amazon Rainforest and ongoing dengue outbreaks mean that the original mission of PAHO is still as pertinent in protecting the US and the Western Hemisphere’s health security as it was last century. “Its founding purpose was unambiguously practical: protect American commerce and public health by controlling infectious disease in the hemisphere,” Friends of PAHO said. PAHO initially operated independently from the United Nations system with a mission of prompt data transmission and response coordination of sanitary conditions of seaports, maritime quarantines, and the control of infectious diseases–especially yellow fever. Then in 1949, PAHO became the independent regional arm of the World Health Organization, continuing to track, respond to, and even eradicate the most insidious diseases in the Americas. Victories despite ongoing outbreaks and emerging public health concerns Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) administering vaccines in Venezuela during an outbreak 2017-2019. PAHO’s elimination of polio, malaria, and smallpox in the region are all seen as major victories. Despite this, new and re-emerging threats continue to threaten the health of the Americas, Friends of PAHO warn. In particular, H5N1 avian influenza, dengue, chikungunya, and leishmaniasis are now circulating in the US. And an insect that carries a devastating disease afflicting cattle and other livestock, the New World Screwworm, has been identified in the US for the first time in six decades. Other concerns in the region include dengue, which the US has recently seen a surge of locally acquired cases in Florida, the loss of measles elimination status in several countries, and the looming threat of a supercharged El Niño season. “Our struggle with nature is both inherent and mandatory,” explained Stewart Simonson, a senior advisor at Global Health Strategies and a former WHO official, in reference to disease spillovers. “This requires multilateral action,” he said. Simonson, who also also served as a US Health and Human Services official during the Bush Administration coordinating public health emergency management following 9/11, pointed to the example of a measles outbreak in Caracas, Venezuela, in the late 2010s under then dictator Nicolás Maduro. “The outbreak was going nowhere but North,” Simonson said. It was only through PAHO-mediated response and a US-funded vaccination campaign that involved mobilizing over 20,000 vaccinators per month that the outbreak was suppressed – with PAHO serving as the intermediary between the US and Venezuela. In 2025 alone, PAHO’s regional surveillance system analyzed 2.1 million disease threat data points, detecting 157 public health events across the Americas, the organization said. Advancing economic and national security The USDA H5N1 dashboard. The virus is just one of many PAHO tracks and coordinates reposnse to across the Western Hemisphere. The issue of health security is largely a bipartisan one. Signatories of the open letter supporting PAHO point to how its programs protect American “troops and diplomats stationed throughout the hemisphere,” and Americans studying abroad and travelling. “It keeps American markets open for business,” it states. “A US withdrawal from PAHO would not leave a vacuum; it would leave an opening that strategic competitors are prepared to fill.” While the US has historically had strong bilateral relationships with countries in the region on health issues, these relationships depended on regional offices staffed by USAID, CDC, PEPFAR, and even the US Navy to promote cooperation across borders. Yet, “there are no longer USAID missions, and the future of the CDC country and regional offices is unclear,” Bliss pointed out. Without these key US presences in the region, PAHO is the only organization still able to bring countries together on health security issues. “If the US were to leave PAHO, it would be important to consider how difficult it would be to engage at a regional level on health and what it would take to put an alternative platform for communication and cooperation in place,” Bliss said. Despite the financial pressures, PAHO remains confident it can continue performing its core operations throughout the Americas. When asked about diversifying funding, the organization pointed to strengthened partnerships with Canada, Spain, the EU, the US CDC, the World Bank, and philanthropic groups, among others. In a statement, PAHO did note it “continues to encourage all Member States with outstanding contributions to fulfill their commitments.” “The world is uniquely dangerous biologically right now. It is not the time to disengage from PAHO,” Simonson said. Image Credits: S. Samantaroy, The White House, Friends of PAHO, Voice of America (VOA), PAHO/WHO, PAHO/WHO, WHO/PAHO, USDA. Ebola Outbreak ‘Still Evolving’ as Deaths Pass 3,000 03/09/2026 Stefan Anderson Cases and deaths continue to pile up at record speed as local and continental authorities race to get the ongoing DRC Ebola outbreak under control. More than 3,000 people have died in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Ebola Bundibugyo outbreak out of 6,250 confirmed cases, the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) said Thursday, as the virus kills nearly half of those it infects and outpaces efforts to contain it. “The numbers are telling the story,” Dr Wesam Mankula, lead of the Continental Incident Management Support Team, told reporters at Africa CDC’s weekly briefing. “This outbreak is still evolving.” At 16 weeks, the epidemic has spread over an area larger than the United Kingdom, France, and more than 35 African states. It is already the second largest Ebola outbreak in DRC’s history, and is on track to be the largest on record, with 6.5 times the caseload that the 2014 West Africa epidemic had at the same stage. Africa CDC reports that 89% of listed contacts are being followed up, but Mankula acknowledged the number of contacts actually being identified per case falls well short of the target. Each confirmed patient should generate a list of 40 to 60 people they may have exposed, but most lists are far shorter, meaning the vast majority of potential contacts are never traced. Adjusted for that shortfall, the effective contact tracing rate drops to just 19%, Mankula said. Reported cases and deaths at the 16-week mark compared with previous Ebola outbreaks. The current epidemic dwarfs all others in recorded history, sitting at 6.5× more cases and 5.0× more deaths than the next-highest comparator at the same point. Without adequate tracing, many patients are never identified until it is too late. That tracing shortfall continues to play out in affected provinces, with more than 60% of deaths in the past seven days occurring in the community, with people dying before they could be reached and referred to treatment. “This is highlighting the importance of pushing more community health workers, senior experts from the surveillance focusing on case investigation, to improve contact listing and contact tracing,” Mankula said. “Hopefully, with pushing more community health workers, we can see improvement in the community tracing.” Weekly confirmed cases peaked at 537 during the week of 10 August and have since dipped to 464 and 479, a 12% decline Mankula called a “plateau phase,” though he cautioned a similar plateau in June was followed by a surge. Four health zones have gone more than 42 days without new infections, the established international benchmark for interrupted transmission, and five more are in a control phase. But 51 health zones still have active transmission, and each infected person is still passing the virus to more than one other on average, meaning the outbreak continues to grow. “It’s very still very early to say we brought this outbreak under control,” Mankula said. The epidemic migrates into a warzone Nearly half of those infected by the Bundibugyo strain have died. Chart shows cumulative cases and deaths from May 15 to 1 September, the latest data available. Cases in Ituri province, the epicentre with more than 5,100 infections, fell 12% over the most recent three-week window. But as the outbreak appears to settle in Ituri, caseloads are accelerating elsewhere, Africa CDC officials said. North Kivu, where armed groups including M23 have displaced millions in an ongoing civil war, saw cases more than double and deaths rise 98% in the same period, with the highest case fatality rate of any affected province at 67.7%. Further north, in the remote and densely forested provinces of Haut-Uélé and Bas-Uélé bordering South Sudan and the Central African Republic, cases are surging too. Haut-Uélé cases nearly tripled in the most recent three-week window, and Bas-Uélé, the sixth province to be affected, is now reporting cases for the first time. The conflict has made some health zones inaccessible to international and government responders, as communities and armed groups refuse entry. Mankula said responders urgently need negotiated humanitarian corridors in order “to do their function, moving from one place to another, support active case search, contact identification, contact isolation, infection prevention control measures, expanding Ebola treatment centres in those affected zones.” Health workers in the crossfire Violence Against Ebola Responders Mounts in DRC as Red Cross Condemns Attacks Forty-seven healthcare workers have died from the virus out of 163 infected, according to Africa CDC briefing data presented Wednesday, up from the 43 deaths reported last week. Beyond the virus, workers face direct violence: the Red Cross has documented 11 violent incidents in the first 100 days of the outbreak, with volunteers attacked and ambulances set on fire by communities fuelled by mistrust and misinformation. Eight health workers have been killed in attacks as of 22 August, according to the UN’s senior Ebola coordinator. Health workers risking infection and violent assault have also faced months of delayed or missing pay, triggering repeated strikes since July. Asked about the delays, Prof Yap Boum, Africa CDC’s field manager in DRC, said the government had begun registering and paying workers in Bunya and Rampara. “It’s been a while since you have not heard about those strikes because the government have done two things,” Boum said. “One is to ensure that they can register the staff that are working, but also starting to pay them… at least all those that were working in treatment centre.” Boum said he expected payments to be completed by next week. Payment disputes have been a persistent obstacle to the response, and aid agencies have warned that sustained, timely compensation for frontline workers is essential to maintaining the workforce needed to contain the outbreak. Vaccines and therapeutics in the pipeline DRC Minister of Health Dr Roger Kamba (centre) receives the first consignment of the Ervebo vaccine at N’djili International Airport in Kinshasa on 21 August. No licensed vaccine or treatment exists for the Bundibugyo strain of the virus, leaving health workers and communities without the protection that helped bring previous Zaire Ebola outbreaks under control. Authorities are fast-tracking several candidates through clinical trials to try to close that gap, Africa CDC said. The Ervebo vaccine, effective against Zaire, is being deployed to frontline workers under compassionate use despite unproven efficacy against Bundibugyo. More than 1,100 healthcare workers have received it so far, and a solidarity trial is expected to begin in DRC within a week, Africa CDC reported. “The vaccine Ervebo is effective for the Zaire strain, but its efficacy against the recent strain, the Bundibugyo, has not been demonstrated yet,” said Prof Placid Mbala, Africa CDC’s Director of Research. “But we believe that we may see some cross-protection… this is why we are using the Ervebo vaccine mostly to also evaluate the impact of this vaccine during this outbreak, and also to conduct a kind of vaccine effectiveness and efficacy study in the field.” Phase one trials for vaccine candidates from Shaddock and Moderna are underway in the UK and Canada respectively, and Egypt’s Mina Pharma has received $16.5 million from CEPI to advance its own candidate. Two therapeutic trials are also progressing, Mbala said. A post-exposure prophylaxis trial, which is testing whether drugs given to contacts of confirmed cases can prevent them from developing the disease, has recruited 216 of a 400-person target. If effective, they would become a vital tool in slowing transmission by protecting people before they can be infected. A separate trial testing remdesivir and monoclonal antibodies in confirmed patients has enrolled 334 of 500. About 35 participants have so far reached the 28-day mark at which initial analysis can begin, with the first readouts expected by mid-September. “But I think with the first 100 participants, we won’t be able to see the efficacy of these different drugs,” Mbala said. The trial’s safety monitoring board will then determine whether to continue recruitment toward the full 500 or add further therapeutics. “It’s an adaptive protocol,” Mbala added. “We may add more therapeutics when they can be available.” Image Credits: MSF, DRC Health Ministry. El Niño Forecast to Be Strongest on Record, Threatening Extreme Weather Through 2027 03/09/2026 Disha Shetty The odds of El Niño persisting until February 2027 are near certain, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Countries around the world face higher risks of extreme weather events like floods, droughts and extreme heat as the ongoing El Niño intensifies and extends, with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) now assessing it will become the strongest in history. In its latest update, WMO assessed with 100% certainty that El Niño — the result of warming ocean temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific that affect weather extremes globally – will persist through February 2027, instead of the earlier projection of November 2026. “El Niño is being supersized before our eyes. The science leaves no room for doubt: the planet is in uncharted waters, and those waters are heating up,” said United Nations Secretary General António Guterres. “Sea surface temperatures are rising, temperatures keep climbing, and the world is in the danger zone of extreme weather.” This is also the first time that a WMO El Niño and La Niña update has been so unequivocal, reflecting the strong agreement within WMO’s extensive network. WMO’s update comes on the heels of devastating floods in Nepal that killed over 1,000 people. While El Niño is not linked to climate change, combined with the extreme weather events that climate change is already bringing, El Niño stands to compound the damage. “The race now is between rising risks and our commitment to take climate action and protect people,” Guterres said. “We must win that race.” Also read: Nepal’s Flood: Chilling Example of Climate Devastation Facing Developing Countries 2026 could surpass 2024 as the hottest year on record Celeste Saulo, WMO Secretary-General While both El Niño and La Niña occur naturally, the intensity of these phenomena can bring staggering devastation. “El Niño in Spanish means boy child – but it has the potential to deliver a massive blow to communities and economies across the world. We are already seeing disruption and devastation from droughts and floods, and we expect these impacts to increase as El Niño intensifies,” said WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo. She explained that the El Niño in the year 2023-24 resulted in 2024 being the hottest on record. The current El Niño could do something similar for the year 2026, Saulo said. “This exceptional El Niño demands exceptional preparation and response. Never before in the 50-year history of the World Meteorological Organization have we launched such a major mobilization with National Meteorological and Hydrological Services who are on the frontline of delivering the forecasts and services to save lives and livelihoods,” Saulo said. Exceptional ocean heat in the tropical Pacific Above-average temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean cause El Niño. Sea surface temperatures across the central-eastern equatorial Pacific, the region at the heart of El Niño, are already well above average – one of the tell-tale signs of El Niño – and are continuing to rise. The widely used Niño 3.4 index, which measures sea surface temperature anomalies in the central-eastern equatorial Pacific, has strengthened markedly from an average of +1.5 °C above normal during May-July 2026 and +2.0 °C above normal in July. Weekly values subsequently increased further between late July and mid-August, ranging from approximately +2.2 °C to +2.6 °C above average, indicating continued intensification. Even more exceptional warmth is present below the ocean surface. In some areas, subsurface ocean temperatures were more than 8°C above average during July and early August. Altogether, the surface and subsurface ocean conditions provide strong support for continued El Niño conditions and the potential for further strengthening during the coming months, the Update says. Different impacts in different places A very strong El Niño event increases the likelihood of major changes in rainfall, temperatures and atmospheric circulation across many regions of the world. However, the strength of an El Niño event alone does not determine how severe its impacts will be in any individual country or region. Its effects vary according to location and season and can be modified by other climate drivers, including conditions in the Indian and Atlantic Oceans. WMO said while extreme weather events are a certainty, it doesn’t have to mean destruction if countries prepare in advance and invest in early warning systems. “WMO is committed to working closely with partners across the United Nations and humanitarian system to provide the climate intelligence and insights needed to support disaster management and climate-sensitive sectors like agriculture, health, energy and water resources,” Saulo said. “We have no time to lose.” Image Credits: WMO, WMO. Who Should Lead the Global Fund? Let the Candidates Make Their Case 03/09/2026 Jirair Ratevosian The Global Fund’s board is searching for a replacement for current executive director Peter Sands (right), but concerns have been raised that its process has lacked transparency. Over the past week, the race for the next World Health Organisation (WHO) Director-General has started to take shape. Governments have publicly put forward prospective candidates, WHO is already listing them on a website, and some candidates are beginning to make their case publicly. Dr Hans Kluge has even released a manifesto laying out how he would lead the organization. And this is happening many months before the decision. WHO nominations do not even close until 24 September. The official candidate list will be published after the nomination period closes, followed by the first candidate web forum on 18 November, Executive Board consideration in January, another candidate forum in March, and finally the World Health Assembly vote in May of 2027. It is a long process, but it gives people time to hear the ideas, debate them and understand what each candidate actually wants to do with WHO. Meanwhile, The Global Fund, also in search of a new leader, has taken a very different approach. Rather than having candidates make their interest known publicly, the process will produce a pre-vetted shortlist of “four or five candidates” that is expected to reach its board in late September, just a month before it votes on 28-30 October. That one-month timetable leaves little room for the broader global health community to hear directly from the candidates or assess competing visions for the institution at a particularly consequential moment. Concerns about transparency Concerns about the transparency of the selection process were raised earlier this year by Sascha van Beek, a German parliamentarian, who questioned whether the process was sufficiently open and accountable. I too argued that The Global Fund is too important to treat this as just another executive search. The stakes are difficult to overstate. Since its creation in 2002, the Global Fund partnership has helped save 70 million lives and reduce the combined death rate from AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria by 63%. In 2024 alone, 25.6 million people were receiving antiretroviral therapy in countries where it invests, 7.4 million people were treated for tuberculosis and 162 million insecticide-treated mosquito nets were distributed. With nearly $70 billion disbursed across more than 100 countries, the choice of its next leader will shape disease programs and health systems around the world. Yet in July 2026, the Global Fund confirmed that the executive director selection process would continue as planned and on its existing timetable. As we wait for the Fund to announce the candidates, there is still an opportunity to open the process further. Doing so would not require reopening the search or delaying the board’s decision. Public candidate forum One way to do that is to hold a public candidate forum in October, with both in-person and virtual participation. It should be moderated by someone who understands the Fund and the different constituencies that make up its partnership. A forum would give more stakeholders with a vested interest in the Fund a substantive role before the board makes its decision. A forum would also force candidates to address the questions the Fund will face over the next decade. How should it approach new forms of financing? What role should artificial intelligence play? How should it support greater country ownership in the era of the Accra Reset? And what reforms will be needed as the global health landscape changes? The Global Fund can reasonably argue that its process already includes opportunities for engagement. Once the final shortlist is submitted in late September, candidates will attend a board retreat and then meet with board constituencies before the vote on 28-30 October. The board itself is unusually representative, with 20 voting seats divided equally between donor and implementer constituencies. Governments, civil society, communities affected by the three diseases, the private sector and foundations all have a formal role. That structure remains one of the Fund’s greatest strengths. But board engagement should not be the limit of the process. Board members are responsible for selecting the executive director, and that authority should remain with them. This is a public-interest decision, and greater openness can strengthen confidence in the Fund while building broader buy-in among donors, implementers, civil society and the communities it serves. The Global Fund’s own description of the job reinforces that point. The executive director is not simply managing the Secretariat. The person will be responsible for leading the institution through a period of major political and financial change. There is also an important precedent. Following concerns about the selection of its Director-General, WHO substantially revised its process ahead of the 2017 election. It introduced a code of conduct and candidate forums, with parts of the process made available to the public. WHO made the deliberate choice to create more space for candidates to explain how they would lead the organization and for member states and the wider community to hear from them before the election. The Fund describes itself not simply as an organization governed by a Board, but as a “worldwide partnership” of governments, communities, civil society, technical agencies and the private sector. A public candidate forum would be a simple way to put that principle into practice. Dr Jirair Ratevosian is a Research Scholar at the Duke Global Health Institute. He previously served on the board of the Global Fund. Past positions include acting chief of staff for PEPFAR, corporate social responsibility director for Gilead Sciences, and legislative director to US Congresswoman Barbara Lee. He holds a doctoral degree from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, an MPH from Boston University, and a BSc from the University of California, Los Angeles. Image Credits: Global Fund , Milken Institue. World Has No Realistic Path to Meet 1.5ºC Warming Target, UN Declares 02/09/2026 Stefan Anderson The world has missed its 1.5ºC target. The fight now turns to how far temperatures rise beyond it — and what can still be done to bring them back down. The world has failed to meet the Paris Agreement target of limiting global warming to 1.5ºC, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) declared on Wednesday. In a sprawling 141-page report, UNEP found there is no realistic pathway to prevent warming from exceeding the threshold. “The most stringent emission reduction pathways that were available around the time of the Paris Agreement are no longer feasible,” it states. The finding is the first by a UN agency to treat the 1.5ºC target as no longer within reach – and the math doesn’t give its authors much choice. To stay under 1.5ºC, total emissions from 2026 onward cannot exceed 130 billion tonnes of CO2. With current emissions at roughly 40 billion tonnes per year and still rising, that restriction will be breached in just three years. “Despite decades of scientific warnings, despite the growing scientific evidence, the resulting climate commitments have not produced sufficiently rapid emission reductions,” said Debra Roberts, a lead author and former co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group II. “Exceeding 1.5ºC is now unavoidable.” The report identifies just one pathway that would keep the world within its remaining carbon budget: global CO₂ emissions would have to fall steadily from 2025 to zero by 2031. Under current policies, the world is headed for 2.6C by century’s end. “All of our pathways forward are overshoot pathways,” Roberts added. “We are clearly entering uncharted territory.” With limiting the peak and length of the overshoot the last remaining option, UNEP is blunt: “This is by no means an acceptable or preferred pathway. It is simply the best remaining option.” ‘No good options’ above 1.5ºC UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen addresses reporters ahead of the report’s launch. While scientific projections have long assessed that remaining beneath this threshold would be impossible on current emissions trajectories, the change in language by UNEP is an historic break in climate diplomacy from the hope of Paris to the ongoing deadlock over the phase-out of fossil fuels set to continue in November at COP31. UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen, launching the findings at the end of a summer that saw Arctic temperatures soar to 32ºC, wildfires scorch Europe and the Americas, and sea-level rise threaten hundreds of millions of coastal residents, said the evidence demands immediate action. “Across the globe, extreme heat waves are already proving that climate change impacts will strike faster, hit harder, and last longer, costing more lives and causing deeper disruption,” Andersen said. “Obviously, we have climate procrastinated.” Crossing the 1.5ºC mark would bring an “intensification of extreme weather,” loss of small island states, and growing risks to human health, food and water security. “There are no good outcomes if we remain above 1.5ºC,” she said. With human-induced warming already nearing 1.4C and rising at around a quarter degree per decade, the World Meteorological Organization forecasts a three-in-four chance the 2026–2030 five-year mean will breach the Paris target. At current levels, roughly every five years of delay adds at least a tenth of a degree of global warming to the maximum level we will experience. “The future will bring many unknowns, but we do know that decisions taken now and in the next few years will determine if we have a chance of returning to 1.5ºC or below,” Andersen said. The report is the first in a series of major assessments in the run-up to the UN climate summit, COP31, in Antalya, Turkey, in November, where governments will again confront a deadlock over how quickly to phase out fossil fuels. For some observers, the report’s relative silence on the fuels driving the crisis – mentioned in passing just once in nearly 150 pages – is all the more striking as COP31 approaches. “Although UNEP does a good job of describing the hole we’ve dug ourselves into, it does a poor job of showing us that there is a way out,” said Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics, noting that the report only makes only a single passive reference to phasing out fossil fuels. “Ultimately the report’s neglect of some fundamentally important mitigation analysis risks turning it into a call to apathy rather than a call to arms,” Hare said. Fire, water, ice The planet’s frozen water is rapidly disappearing, threatening sea levels, freshwater supplies and climate stability. The report lands as the latest warning of the upheaval climate change is causing globally, and how much worse it might get. New threats to human health are already emerging. Rising temperatures are shifting vector-borne diseases to higher latitudes, increasing pathogen spillover risk, the report found. Food production could fall by 14% by 2050 under a high-emissions scenario, putting tens to hundreds of millions, concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Central America, at risk of malnutrition. Heat-related deaths during a 2025 European heatwave tripled, an increase attributed to global warming. Deadly heat seasons once expected every 100 years now arrive every 10 to 20 years. More than five billion people are projected to experience at least a month of extreme heat every year by 2050. Critical environmental systems that regulate the climate – storing carbon in forests, soils and frozen ground, or reflecting sunlight back into space – are also at risk of irreversible damage. Parts of the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet may already have crossed thresholds for irreversible ice loss. More than 40% of total global glacier loss since the 1970s has occurred in just the last decade, with global peak glacier extinction possible as early as 2041. More than 80% of tropical coral reefs bleached between 2023 and 2025, with warm-water corals now facing heat stress on a near-annual basis and “a low possibility” of surviving this century under any scenario. Essential carbon sinks like rainforests are facing die-off scenarios, with nearly 40% of the Amazon’s surface area at risk of disappearing by 2100. As damage mounts, returning to 1.5ºC – a major effort calculated in decades in a best-case scenario – does not constitute a rewind, the report stresses. Even if temperatures eventually fall, sea levels will continue rising, species driven to extinction will not return, and carbon released from thawing permafrost cannot simply be recovered. Ecosystems that collapse during overshoot cannot easily reassemble as temperatures fall. “The loss of biodiversity will weaken natural systems on which our lives and livelihoods depend, and will impact our ability to withdraw carbon from the atmosphere,” said Roberts. “Returning to 1.5ºC doesn’t mean we return to the same world we left,” Roberts added. ‘Collapse of habitability’ on low-lying islands Small developing island states are very vulnerable to the effects of climate change and rely on universal diplomatic processes to ensure they hold equal weight to major global powers. For small island developing states, the stakes are ones of life and death. The five to 10 centimetres of sea-level rise expected by 2050 is projected to double flooding across the Indian Ocean and tropical Pacific, supercharging storm surges, turning freshwater salty, and pushing floods deeper inland than at any point in history. For these nations, “the collapse of habitability has already begun,” the report warns. “This report is a fork-in-the-road moment for the planet. It is hard to overstate the depth of emotion for those of us living on the frontline after having fought so hard to put the 1.5 degree limit at the heart of the Paris Agreement,” said Palau President Surangel Whipps Jr. “It is a further glimpse into a perilous future that has already arrived.” “We need to see an urgent and unprecedented increase in political will and investment in a climate-safe future,” Whipps added. “Nobody can read this report and conclude otherwise.” For these low-lying nations, the threat is already here. But the consequences of remaining above 1.5ºC for an extended period will ultimately reach far beyond their shores. UNEP warns prolonged warming raises the risk of triggering irreversible tipping points in global systems, including the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, the Amazon rainforest and the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, a vital system of ocean currents that helps regulate temperatures across the Atlantic and Europe. Such changes could, the report warns, “reshape the world forever.” “Exceedance of 1.5°C should not be interpreted as safe or acceptable,” it states. Even if a return to below 1.5°C is secured — an outcome the report describes as “deeply uncertain” — “many nations and communities will face irreversible losses and permanently changed conditions.” The 1.8ºC ceiling Under UNEP’s most optimistic scenario – full implementation of all national climate plans plus all net-zero pledges – peak warming still reaches approximately 1.8C. Getting there requires roughly halving global emissions by 2035. “We’re really looking at 1.8ºC as being the kind of maximum, because the feasibility of the responses then becomes really, really questionable,” Roberts said. “You get a cascading effect from all the irreversible changes.” Wildfires weaken forest carbon stocks, drought reduces hydropower, heat degrades solar panel efficiency, and rising temperatures drive methane emissions from wetlands, eroding the systems the world would depend on to reverse warming. A decade of warming at the current rate, the report finds, could take 50 years to reverse even under optimistic assumptions. The lead for reducing emissions should fall on countries with “greater historical responsibility for climate change and capability to address it should act the hardest and fastest,” the report states. That tension – and the point advanced in the report that many advanced economies will need to go beyond net-zero to achieve net-negative emissions – is likely to resurface at COP31 in Antalya, Turkey, later this year, as oil-producing and high-income states fight calls to phase out fossil fuels. “This summer’s scorching heat, raging wildfires and deadly floods are a warning of what lies ahead,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said. “We must make the overshoot above 1.5 degrees as small and short as possible. That demands an overshoot of ambition.” Image Credits: Chris LeBoutiller, USGS, Unsplash/Ernests Vaga. Posts navigation Older posts
Why Disease Elimination Demands More Than Control 05/09/2026 Health Policy Watch Dr Jamal Ahmed and Dr Stephen Vreden “When you aim to deliver zero, and that is the goal of eradication, what it means is every person, every community, every village is equally important.” That is how Dr. Jamal Ahmed, WHO Director for Polio Eradication, explains why eliminating a disease requires a fundamentally different level of ambition than simply controlling it. Speaking on the latest episode of Global Health Matters, Ahmed joined Dr. Stephen Vreden, Chair of Suriname’s Committee for Prevention of Reestablishment of Malaria, to discuss what it takes to drive a disease burden to zero and how countries can prevent it from returning once elimination has been achieved. Suriname offers one of global health’s more striking recent examples. At the beginning of this century, the country had the highest malaria burden in the Americas. In June 2025, WHO certified it malaria-free, making it the first country in the Amazon region to reach that milestone. Vreden said one decisive change came when Suriname stopped thinking only about malaria control and explicitly made elimination the goal. The country also created a network of people within remote gold-mining communities who were trained to diagnose and treat malaria and distribute insecticide-treated bed nets. “I can easily say that without this network, Suriname would have never been able to eliminate malaria, because these people, they diagnose and treat malaria in places where you are not,” Vreden said. Ahmed said the same principle applies to polio eradication, where community leaders, religious figures, grandparents and local influencers remain critical to reaching children in areas affected by insecurity, migration and mistrust. But both experts warned that reaching zero does not mean the work is finished. “Reaching elimination, being certified for malaria, it certainly doesn’t mean that you can sit back and relax, because you need to prevent reintroduction,” Vreden said. For Ahmed, the remaining fight against polio likewise depends on sustained political commitment, surveillance, rapid response and global solidarity. “Zero doesn’t mean zero locally; it means zero globally, everywhere, across the whole world,” he said. Watch the full episode: Watch and read about more episodes on Health Policy Watch >> Image Credits: Global Health Matters Podcast. BREAKING: Germany Declines to Nominate Candidate for Upcoming WHO Director-General Election 04/09/2026 Felix Sassmannshausen The German government will not put forward a candidate for the upcoming WHO Director-General election (Federal Chancellery in Berlin). Germany has declined to put forward a candidate for the election of the next WHO Director-General. With Spain also reportedly ruling out a bid, the global field of candidates has only four official nominees just a few weeks before the deadline. Germany will not nominate a candidate for the post of WHO Director-General, Health Policy Watch has learned from the Federal Foreign Office. The Foreign Office declined to comment on the reasons behind the decision, as did the Federal Ministry of Health (BMG), which leads on the issue. “As a matter of principle, we do not comment on personnel matters,” a BMG spokesperson stated in response to an enquiry. Previously, the former Head of the Federal Chancellery, Helge Braun, had been discussed as a likely nominee in Berlin. Former Health Minister Karl Lauterbach and health diplomat Paul Zubeil had also been mentioned as possible candidates. The move comes as a surprise, given that Germany has become the largest state contributor to the WHO following the withdrawal of the United States. Leading German health policymakers had called for the Federal Republic to play a stronger role on the global stage. Spain likely to pass on a candidacy Maria Neira posted her WHO leadership vision on LinkedIn. Signals are also emerging from Madrid that further thin out the potential field of candidates. According to informed sources, Spain is also ruling out a candidacy. Earlier, speculation over a Spanish candidacy for Maria Neira, the former WHO Director for Environment, Climate Change and Health, arose after she called for a strong candidate in a LinkedIn post. She wrote that the WHO does not need a mere “personality to manage,” but a “scientifically fearless” leader brave enough to say “what the evidence demands.” To date, Paris has also remained silent, even though France could theoretically field three high-profile candidates. Sania Nishtar, CEO of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, has also not yet commented on her possible candidacy. Former WHO Chief Scientist Jeremy Farrar and PAHO Director Jarbas Barbosa have confirmed they have no intention to run in the WHO Director-General election after being mentioned as possible candidates. Field taking shape, German positioning remains open The field is slowly taking shape ahead of the 24 September deadline, with four listed “prospective candidates” on the WHO website. Alongside Belgian candidate Hans Kluge, the official candidates so far are the two EMRO candidates, Hanan Balkhy (Saudi Arabia) and Hanan Al-Kuwari (Qatar), and Indonesian Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin. It remains unclear for now which of the nominees the Federal Republic of Germany will support in the upcoming election. Both the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Health declined to comment further. German global health policymaker and Member of Parliament (MP) Sascha van Beek emphasised that Germany should not automatically back a European or established candidate. “I have always advocated looking more closely for leaders from the ‘engine room’. At the same time, I believe that, after the past few years, the WHO could also benefit from an outside perspective,” he said, referring to Sadikin, the Indonesian Health Minister and former banker. The decision not to nominate a candidate comes after the German government recently announced plans to further cut funding to global health under its tightly constrained draft budget proposal for 2027. While mandatory assessed contributions to the WHO will rise slightly, flexible budgets for pandemic preparedness are planned to be cut by 15.3%. How Germany will use its leverage in the upcoming elections remains to be seen in the coming months. See related story: Want to Become the Next WHO Director-General? Get in Line Image Credits: Wolfgang Weiser via Pexels, Felix Sassmannshausen/HPW. Controversy Over Merger Between UN Women and UNFPA Continues 04/09/2026 Kerry Cullinan United Nations (UN) Secretary-General António Guterres. Women’s organisations are anxious that Secretary-General António Guterres will push the controversial proposed merger of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) and UN Women at the UN General Assembly later this month. Guterres proposed the merger as part of his UN80 initiative, aimed at streamlining and cutting costs as the global body tries to recover from the United States’ funding withdrawal. Briefing the UN General Assembly on the merger on Thursday, Guterres said that the proposal had undergone a strategic assessment, and the two bodies’ executive directors had also presented detailed analysis to their respective boards. “We will carefully consider the next steps, taking into account the results obtained by the boards,” he told the Assembly. However, the Feminist Cross-Coalition UN80 Working Group, made up of key women’s organisations opposed to the merger, raised the possibility that Guterres may push the merger without considering alternatives as he has already pronounced that it is “the best way”. They also assert that the merger “lacks the confidence” of the two entities’ boards. Merger is ‘technically sound’ The UN merger assessment team’s report in April found that the two organisations had distinct and complementary mandates, and there was not that much overlap in their implementation work. However, the team concluded that “a merger is a technically sound proposal that has the potential to generate a stronger gender equality and SRHR entity at the heart of the UN, but only if undertaken under specific conditions”. These conditions include preserving the mandates of the two entities, and implementing the merger “with disciplined attention to political, legal, funding and operational safeguards”. The team suggests that a merger could generate annual savings of approximately $32-38 million “once integration is fully implemented”, and these “would need to be channelled back into a combined entity “. UN Women’s mandate encompasses the full spectrum of gender equality and the empowerment and rights of women and girls, including “normative support, UN-system coordination and operational activities”. UNFPA contributes to gender equality through its specific mandate areas, including sexual and reproductive health and rights, population and development, and gender-based violence. In 2024, UNFPA total expenses were approximately $1.53 billion, compared to $669 million for UN Women. Alternative report, civil society scepticism However, a report commissioned by the executive boards of UNFPA and UN Women found that significant savings could be achieved if the two organisations worked together more closely without merging. The report also warns that the merger will bring transition costs and operational disruption. Meanwhile, over 1,400 feminist organisations and individuals from over 146 countries sent a letter to Gueterres last month urging him to withdraw the merger proposal. “Both the merger assessment and civil society’s evidence have reached the same conclusion: the proposed merger poses significant risks, and could deepen the very challenges it is intended to address,” according to the letter. “These include risks to donor confidence and resource mobilization, operational continuity in humanitarian and development settings, and most importantly, the erosion of hard-won mandates for both agencies.” The latter adds that no documents in favour of the merger “explain why these challenges are best answered by building one larger, more exposed target rather than protecting two mandates whose distinctiveness has, until now, been treated as a strength”. It also questions whether there would be significant cost-savings. “A decision of this magnitude must be grounded in evidence, not assumptions,” the letter argues. “There has been no serious consideration of alternatives, including a comparison based on clear benchmarks and indicators of the merger proposal against non-structural reforms. Most importantly, no evidence has been presented that demonstrates that a proposed merger would accelerate progress towards gender equality and the realisation of the human rights of women and girls in all their diversity.” ‘Withdraw merger proposal’ The signatories call on Guterres to withdraw the merger proposal and consider “non-structural alternatives to ensure the UN delivers for gender equality and the human rights of women and girls”. However, Guterres told the briefing on Thursday: “The principle is simple: Where we perform essentially the same function, we should ask whether we truly need separate systems, separate platforms, and separate infrastructure — and we should act accordingly.” But the feminist coalition is not convinced: “This merger would fold two specialised institutions, with distinct expertise, relationships, and track records, into one smaller, more easily pressured entity — right at the moment when the issues they cover demand more capacity, not less. That’s not a bureaucratic risk. It’s a risk to whether women and girls can actually access the services and protections they depend on.” Image Credits: UN Photo. Indonesian Wildfires Cause Air Pollution Levels to Rise to Hazardous Levels in Southeast Asia 04/09/2026 Disha Shetty Forest fires are currently raging in Indonesia, affecting air quality across Southeast Asia. Millions of people in Southeast Asia are currently exposed to hazardous levels of air pollution as the large-scale haze caused by Indonesian wildfires crosses boundaries, leading to cancelled outdoor activities and school closures. Indonesia alone has recorded 50,000 cases of respiratory infections linked to land and forest fires between July and August this year, according to data from its health ministry. Fires have been particularly intense across parts of Borneo, including West Kalimantan, generating substantial smoke emissions that have been transported to neighbouring countries, including Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines. “Indonesia has experienced a particularly intense start to its seasonal fires, with the number of fires and their emissions increasing rapidly since late July. This is unfolding against the backdrop of strong El Niño conditions, which can influence rainfall and intensify conditions across the region,” said Mark Parrington, Senior Scientist at Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS). European Union’s CAMS is closely tracking fire emissions from Indonesia and the transport of smoke across the region. Also read: El Niño Forecast to Be Strongest on Record, Threatening Extreme Weather Through 2027 Increased fire activity since July 2026 Indonesia recorded its highest August monthly total estimated emissions since at least 2003, contributing to the highest monthly fire emissions for Asia. The fire activity in Indonesia has increased since July this year, coinciding with the country’s dry season, which typically runs from late July to late October. Strong El Niño conditions, which tend to bring extreme weather events globally, have further intensified fire activity. Indonesia has recorded its highest August total estimated fire emissions in the past 24 years, resulting in large-scale transboundary haze. “Particularly notable is the scale of the transboundary haze, which is already significantly impacting air quality across Southeast Asia and could persist for several weeks if the fire emissions continue to increase, as would be expected through September into October. These fires demonstrate that wildfires are not a localised challenge – their impacts can extend hundreds of miles from the source,” Parrington said. The wildfire emissions significantly increase concentrations of fine particulate matter (PM2.5), one of the pollutants most harmful to human health, among many other toxic and harmful pollutants. Globally, wildfire emissions increased in August 2026, with smoke from fires in North America and Eurasia being transported as far as the Northern Hemisphere, including the Arctic. Image Credits: Fire Emissions Watch application, Copernicus, Copernicus/X. US Proposal to Eliminate PAHO Funding Raises Alarm Over Health Security in Americas 03/09/2026 Sophia Samantaroy PAHO headquarters in Washington, DC, in 2026. The US administration has called the organization “corrupt” as it proposes to eliminate funding. A group of senior national security and health officials contend that cutting funding to the regional health organization will cripple the Western hemisphere’s ability to defend itself against disease threats. The oldest multilateral health organization in the world, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), is fighting many of the same health threats it did at its founding in Washington, DC, some 120 years ago: vector-borne diseases such as dengue and Zika, new and emerging diseases like New World Screwworm, and recurring outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases like measles. But the organization now faces an unprecedented challenge: the potential loss of United States funding. Amid ongoing outbreaks across the Americas, the US President’s Fiscal Year 2027 budget request to Congress proposes eliminating funding to PAHO, calling it and the World Health Organization (WHO) “corrupt organizations” that show “no independence from inappropriate political influence”, part of a raft of international organisations it describes as promoting “dangerous ideologies” and “taking advantage of American generosity”. The US is the largest single contributor to PAHO and accounts for half of all member state contributions to the organization. The US already owes nearly $135 million in member fees since 2024. After slashing aid to global health programmes, US President Donald Trump and his administration have set their sights on PAHO, threatening to eliminate its funding and terminate a 124-year history of US cooperation with the organisation it helped found. Former national and health security officials, though, were quick to back PAHO as the “first line of defense” against diseases in the Western Hemisphere. “Destroying the institution – PAHO – that has protected us all is the worst idea circulating in Washington right now,” said Andrew Natsios, a Republican politician and humanitarian official under multiple administrations, in a statement to Health Policy Watch. “It is delusional to think we can stop disease at our borders. We can only manage these health crises through regional cooperation.” In response to unpaid US dues, PAHO, the WHO’s regional arm with 35 member states across the Americas, has adopted a 17% reduction in its upcoming budget. It has also established a cost-saving “Shared Services Hub”– an effort to consolidate and streamline core administrative functions from Washington headquarters to lower-cost locations, the organization said in a statement to Health Policy Watch. Across the organization, total positions are projected to drop from 1,042 during the 2024–2025 budget cycle to approximately 869 positions across 2026–2027. With USAID shuttered and the future of CDC regional offices unclear, PAHO remains one of the only presences in the region that could coordinate 35 member states across the Americas on issues of health security. Leading US national security officials decry defunding The Friends of PAHO, a bipartisan coalition of national and health security officials, voiced its deep support for the organization founded by the US some 124 years ago. Trump’s submitted budget mirrors last year’s turmoil in global health funding – deep slashes to programs that support maternal and child health, malaria and tuberculosis control, HIV/AIDS control, and neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). Congress may still appropriate funds, as advocated for by an open letter signed by the dozens of national security and health officials who served across Republican and Democratic administrations. “PAHO has an unmatched record of protecting health,” the more than 100 signatories write in the letter, which include former Army surgeon generals, Department of Defense officials, Health and Human Services secretaries, former members of Congress, White House officials, and ambassadors. They represent a new bipartisan coalition, the Friends of PAHO. “For 124 years, it has been one of the most effective health and disease prevention organizations operating anywhere in the world,” the letter states. “At a time when infectious disease threats continue to cross borders, we urge policymakers in Washington to reassert America’s commitment to health security in the Western Hemisphere and recognize PAHO’s essential role in safeguarding the American homeland.” PAHO targeted for decades-old scandal Cuban Mais Medicos doctors arrive in 2020 Martinique as part of a medical delegation to assist with COVID-19-related programs. The Trump Administration initially singled out PAHO in 2025 in a move to withhold funding from key international organizations. The concerns came after the Trump Administration alleged PAHO was mediating a forced labor scheme among Cuban doctors, as part of a Brazilian program Mais Medicos. The scheme, which took place over a decade ago, resulted in US sanctions against Cuba for forced labor of its doctors. The Brazilian health officials involved were also subject to sanctions. In the past year, however, the administration has dredged the issue to the forefront of its qualms with PAHO and succeeded in withholding $4.9 billion in previously appropriated foreign assistance through a controversial “pocket rescission” in September 2025, including $45 million earmarked for PAHO. Representative Carlos Gimenez (FL-28), who issued the call to action against PAHO’s immunity in August 2025, did not respond to a request for comment. However, it is not clear why the decade-old scandal has resurfaced as an issue for withholding contributions to PAHO. See related story: Pan American Health Organization Targeted in New Round of US Funding Cuts US owes over $135 million in assessed contributions PAHO has made a net -17% adjustment to its budget for the upcoming two years from $820 million in 2024-2025 to $762 million in 2026-2027. The US has not yet formally withdrawn from PAHO: it remains a member and continues to owe assessed contributions like several other countries. In fact, PAHO is the only multilateral health organization the US is a member of following last year’s withdrawal from the World Health Organization and other related organizations. US payments to PAHO have been delayed now for nearly two years, leaving the organization under increased pressure. Beyond funding, the US supports PAHO through staffing experts and providing technical advice in Washington. In a statement, PAHO said it has not been officially informed of a decision to eliminate funding to the organization. There have been several instances in which US Congress has ignored proposed funding cuts from the Office of Budget and Management (OMB), instead opting to support global aid across party lines. Indeed, several high-ranking Republican members of Congress and former officials have spoken out against a US withdrawal from global aid, and the ways the Administration has attempted to rescind funding. US Senator Susan Collins, Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, called the rescissions move “a clear violation of the law” and said that she “cannot support the cuts that are so deep and so damaging in global health programs,” in a Senate hearing with OMB chief Russel Vought. Natsios, whose career as a Republican politician and public servant spans five decades, echoed this sentiment, saying that “diseases, both human and animal, don’t need passports to travel across borders. The health crises of Latin America will become the health crises of the US and our crises will eventually travel to our southern neighbors. PAHO, for more than eight decades, has been the first line of defense against these crises.” For now, PAHO continues to coordinate responses to the devastating earthquakes in Colombia and Venezuela, surveil measles and dengue outbreaks, and monitor potential avian flu cases despite the budget cuts. A sudden break in a 120-year partnership The front page of a Washington-based newspaper documenting a meeting of delegates from the Americas to disucss public health. PAHO was founded in Washington, DC, in 1902 under President Theodore Roosevelt, making it the oldest such organization. The dire health consequences of the Spanish-American War in Cuba and the deadly yellow fever epidemics that struck American workers building the Panama Canal spurred Roosevelt to convene what was then called the International Sanitary Bureau in Washington, DC. The close ties between the US and PAHO predate those of any other health multilateral. “Until the late 1950s, the organization’s earliest directors were US health specialists,” said Katherine Bliss, director at CSIS Global Health Policy Center and an expert on Latin America. She notes that included former military doctors and leaders within the US Public Health Service. “PAHO was founded on US soil, by US leadership, and built on the conviction that American leadership in this hemisphere produces results,” the open letter calling to protect PAHO’s funding states. “For 124 years, the US has not only successfully engaged with PAHO but has been the moving force behind PAHO’s work that serves American interests and reflects American values.” “In this context, sustaining US leadership in PAHO is an America First strategy in practice,” it adds. Some 120 years later, spillovers in the Amazon Rainforest and ongoing dengue outbreaks mean that the original mission of PAHO is still as pertinent in protecting the US and the Western Hemisphere’s health security as it was last century. “Its founding purpose was unambiguously practical: protect American commerce and public health by controlling infectious disease in the hemisphere,” Friends of PAHO said. PAHO initially operated independently from the United Nations system with a mission of prompt data transmission and response coordination of sanitary conditions of seaports, maritime quarantines, and the control of infectious diseases–especially yellow fever. Then in 1949, PAHO became the independent regional arm of the World Health Organization, continuing to track, respond to, and even eradicate the most insidious diseases in the Americas. Victories despite ongoing outbreaks and emerging public health concerns Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) administering vaccines in Venezuela during an outbreak 2017-2019. PAHO’s elimination of polio, malaria, and smallpox in the region are all seen as major victories. Despite this, new and re-emerging threats continue to threaten the health of the Americas, Friends of PAHO warn. In particular, H5N1 avian influenza, dengue, chikungunya, and leishmaniasis are now circulating in the US. And an insect that carries a devastating disease afflicting cattle and other livestock, the New World Screwworm, has been identified in the US for the first time in six decades. Other concerns in the region include dengue, which the US has recently seen a surge of locally acquired cases in Florida, the loss of measles elimination status in several countries, and the looming threat of a supercharged El Niño season. “Our struggle with nature is both inherent and mandatory,” explained Stewart Simonson, a senior advisor at Global Health Strategies and a former WHO official, in reference to disease spillovers. “This requires multilateral action,” he said. Simonson, who also also served as a US Health and Human Services official during the Bush Administration coordinating public health emergency management following 9/11, pointed to the example of a measles outbreak in Caracas, Venezuela, in the late 2010s under then dictator Nicolás Maduro. “The outbreak was going nowhere but North,” Simonson said. It was only through PAHO-mediated response and a US-funded vaccination campaign that involved mobilizing over 20,000 vaccinators per month that the outbreak was suppressed – with PAHO serving as the intermediary between the US and Venezuela. In 2025 alone, PAHO’s regional surveillance system analyzed 2.1 million disease threat data points, detecting 157 public health events across the Americas, the organization said. Advancing economic and national security The USDA H5N1 dashboard. The virus is just one of many PAHO tracks and coordinates reposnse to across the Western Hemisphere. The issue of health security is largely a bipartisan one. Signatories of the open letter supporting PAHO point to how its programs protect American “troops and diplomats stationed throughout the hemisphere,” and Americans studying abroad and travelling. “It keeps American markets open for business,” it states. “A US withdrawal from PAHO would not leave a vacuum; it would leave an opening that strategic competitors are prepared to fill.” While the US has historically had strong bilateral relationships with countries in the region on health issues, these relationships depended on regional offices staffed by USAID, CDC, PEPFAR, and even the US Navy to promote cooperation across borders. Yet, “there are no longer USAID missions, and the future of the CDC country and regional offices is unclear,” Bliss pointed out. Without these key US presences in the region, PAHO is the only organization still able to bring countries together on health security issues. “If the US were to leave PAHO, it would be important to consider how difficult it would be to engage at a regional level on health and what it would take to put an alternative platform for communication and cooperation in place,” Bliss said. Despite the financial pressures, PAHO remains confident it can continue performing its core operations throughout the Americas. When asked about diversifying funding, the organization pointed to strengthened partnerships with Canada, Spain, the EU, the US CDC, the World Bank, and philanthropic groups, among others. In a statement, PAHO did note it “continues to encourage all Member States with outstanding contributions to fulfill their commitments.” “The world is uniquely dangerous biologically right now. It is not the time to disengage from PAHO,” Simonson said. Image Credits: S. Samantaroy, The White House, Friends of PAHO, Voice of America (VOA), PAHO/WHO, PAHO/WHO, WHO/PAHO, USDA. Ebola Outbreak ‘Still Evolving’ as Deaths Pass 3,000 03/09/2026 Stefan Anderson Cases and deaths continue to pile up at record speed as local and continental authorities race to get the ongoing DRC Ebola outbreak under control. More than 3,000 people have died in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Ebola Bundibugyo outbreak out of 6,250 confirmed cases, the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) said Thursday, as the virus kills nearly half of those it infects and outpaces efforts to contain it. “The numbers are telling the story,” Dr Wesam Mankula, lead of the Continental Incident Management Support Team, told reporters at Africa CDC’s weekly briefing. “This outbreak is still evolving.” At 16 weeks, the epidemic has spread over an area larger than the United Kingdom, France, and more than 35 African states. It is already the second largest Ebola outbreak in DRC’s history, and is on track to be the largest on record, with 6.5 times the caseload that the 2014 West Africa epidemic had at the same stage. Africa CDC reports that 89% of listed contacts are being followed up, but Mankula acknowledged the number of contacts actually being identified per case falls well short of the target. Each confirmed patient should generate a list of 40 to 60 people they may have exposed, but most lists are far shorter, meaning the vast majority of potential contacts are never traced. Adjusted for that shortfall, the effective contact tracing rate drops to just 19%, Mankula said. Reported cases and deaths at the 16-week mark compared with previous Ebola outbreaks. The current epidemic dwarfs all others in recorded history, sitting at 6.5× more cases and 5.0× more deaths than the next-highest comparator at the same point. Without adequate tracing, many patients are never identified until it is too late. That tracing shortfall continues to play out in affected provinces, with more than 60% of deaths in the past seven days occurring in the community, with people dying before they could be reached and referred to treatment. “This is highlighting the importance of pushing more community health workers, senior experts from the surveillance focusing on case investigation, to improve contact listing and contact tracing,” Mankula said. “Hopefully, with pushing more community health workers, we can see improvement in the community tracing.” Weekly confirmed cases peaked at 537 during the week of 10 August and have since dipped to 464 and 479, a 12% decline Mankula called a “plateau phase,” though he cautioned a similar plateau in June was followed by a surge. Four health zones have gone more than 42 days without new infections, the established international benchmark for interrupted transmission, and five more are in a control phase. But 51 health zones still have active transmission, and each infected person is still passing the virus to more than one other on average, meaning the outbreak continues to grow. “It’s very still very early to say we brought this outbreak under control,” Mankula said. The epidemic migrates into a warzone Nearly half of those infected by the Bundibugyo strain have died. Chart shows cumulative cases and deaths from May 15 to 1 September, the latest data available. Cases in Ituri province, the epicentre with more than 5,100 infections, fell 12% over the most recent three-week window. But as the outbreak appears to settle in Ituri, caseloads are accelerating elsewhere, Africa CDC officials said. North Kivu, where armed groups including M23 have displaced millions in an ongoing civil war, saw cases more than double and deaths rise 98% in the same period, with the highest case fatality rate of any affected province at 67.7%. Further north, in the remote and densely forested provinces of Haut-Uélé and Bas-Uélé bordering South Sudan and the Central African Republic, cases are surging too. Haut-Uélé cases nearly tripled in the most recent three-week window, and Bas-Uélé, the sixth province to be affected, is now reporting cases for the first time. The conflict has made some health zones inaccessible to international and government responders, as communities and armed groups refuse entry. Mankula said responders urgently need negotiated humanitarian corridors in order “to do their function, moving from one place to another, support active case search, contact identification, contact isolation, infection prevention control measures, expanding Ebola treatment centres in those affected zones.” Health workers in the crossfire Violence Against Ebola Responders Mounts in DRC as Red Cross Condemns Attacks Forty-seven healthcare workers have died from the virus out of 163 infected, according to Africa CDC briefing data presented Wednesday, up from the 43 deaths reported last week. Beyond the virus, workers face direct violence: the Red Cross has documented 11 violent incidents in the first 100 days of the outbreak, with volunteers attacked and ambulances set on fire by communities fuelled by mistrust and misinformation. Eight health workers have been killed in attacks as of 22 August, according to the UN’s senior Ebola coordinator. Health workers risking infection and violent assault have also faced months of delayed or missing pay, triggering repeated strikes since July. Asked about the delays, Prof Yap Boum, Africa CDC’s field manager in DRC, said the government had begun registering and paying workers in Bunya and Rampara. “It’s been a while since you have not heard about those strikes because the government have done two things,” Boum said. “One is to ensure that they can register the staff that are working, but also starting to pay them… at least all those that were working in treatment centre.” Boum said he expected payments to be completed by next week. Payment disputes have been a persistent obstacle to the response, and aid agencies have warned that sustained, timely compensation for frontline workers is essential to maintaining the workforce needed to contain the outbreak. Vaccines and therapeutics in the pipeline DRC Minister of Health Dr Roger Kamba (centre) receives the first consignment of the Ervebo vaccine at N’djili International Airport in Kinshasa on 21 August. No licensed vaccine or treatment exists for the Bundibugyo strain of the virus, leaving health workers and communities without the protection that helped bring previous Zaire Ebola outbreaks under control. Authorities are fast-tracking several candidates through clinical trials to try to close that gap, Africa CDC said. The Ervebo vaccine, effective against Zaire, is being deployed to frontline workers under compassionate use despite unproven efficacy against Bundibugyo. More than 1,100 healthcare workers have received it so far, and a solidarity trial is expected to begin in DRC within a week, Africa CDC reported. “The vaccine Ervebo is effective for the Zaire strain, but its efficacy against the recent strain, the Bundibugyo, has not been demonstrated yet,” said Prof Placid Mbala, Africa CDC’s Director of Research. “But we believe that we may see some cross-protection… this is why we are using the Ervebo vaccine mostly to also evaluate the impact of this vaccine during this outbreak, and also to conduct a kind of vaccine effectiveness and efficacy study in the field.” Phase one trials for vaccine candidates from Shaddock and Moderna are underway in the UK and Canada respectively, and Egypt’s Mina Pharma has received $16.5 million from CEPI to advance its own candidate. Two therapeutic trials are also progressing, Mbala said. A post-exposure prophylaxis trial, which is testing whether drugs given to contacts of confirmed cases can prevent them from developing the disease, has recruited 216 of a 400-person target. If effective, they would become a vital tool in slowing transmission by protecting people before they can be infected. A separate trial testing remdesivir and monoclonal antibodies in confirmed patients has enrolled 334 of 500. About 35 participants have so far reached the 28-day mark at which initial analysis can begin, with the first readouts expected by mid-September. “But I think with the first 100 participants, we won’t be able to see the efficacy of these different drugs,” Mbala said. The trial’s safety monitoring board will then determine whether to continue recruitment toward the full 500 or add further therapeutics. “It’s an adaptive protocol,” Mbala added. “We may add more therapeutics when they can be available.” Image Credits: MSF, DRC Health Ministry. El Niño Forecast to Be Strongest on Record, Threatening Extreme Weather Through 2027 03/09/2026 Disha Shetty The odds of El Niño persisting until February 2027 are near certain, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Countries around the world face higher risks of extreme weather events like floods, droughts and extreme heat as the ongoing El Niño intensifies and extends, with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) now assessing it will become the strongest in history. In its latest update, WMO assessed with 100% certainty that El Niño — the result of warming ocean temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific that affect weather extremes globally – will persist through February 2027, instead of the earlier projection of November 2026. “El Niño is being supersized before our eyes. The science leaves no room for doubt: the planet is in uncharted waters, and those waters are heating up,” said United Nations Secretary General António Guterres. “Sea surface temperatures are rising, temperatures keep climbing, and the world is in the danger zone of extreme weather.” This is also the first time that a WMO El Niño and La Niña update has been so unequivocal, reflecting the strong agreement within WMO’s extensive network. WMO’s update comes on the heels of devastating floods in Nepal that killed over 1,000 people. While El Niño is not linked to climate change, combined with the extreme weather events that climate change is already bringing, El Niño stands to compound the damage. “The race now is between rising risks and our commitment to take climate action and protect people,” Guterres said. “We must win that race.” Also read: Nepal’s Flood: Chilling Example of Climate Devastation Facing Developing Countries 2026 could surpass 2024 as the hottest year on record Celeste Saulo, WMO Secretary-General While both El Niño and La Niña occur naturally, the intensity of these phenomena can bring staggering devastation. “El Niño in Spanish means boy child – but it has the potential to deliver a massive blow to communities and economies across the world. We are already seeing disruption and devastation from droughts and floods, and we expect these impacts to increase as El Niño intensifies,” said WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo. She explained that the El Niño in the year 2023-24 resulted in 2024 being the hottest on record. The current El Niño could do something similar for the year 2026, Saulo said. “This exceptional El Niño demands exceptional preparation and response. Never before in the 50-year history of the World Meteorological Organization have we launched such a major mobilization with National Meteorological and Hydrological Services who are on the frontline of delivering the forecasts and services to save lives and livelihoods,” Saulo said. Exceptional ocean heat in the tropical Pacific Above-average temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean cause El Niño. Sea surface temperatures across the central-eastern equatorial Pacific, the region at the heart of El Niño, are already well above average – one of the tell-tale signs of El Niño – and are continuing to rise. The widely used Niño 3.4 index, which measures sea surface temperature anomalies in the central-eastern equatorial Pacific, has strengthened markedly from an average of +1.5 °C above normal during May-July 2026 and +2.0 °C above normal in July. Weekly values subsequently increased further between late July and mid-August, ranging from approximately +2.2 °C to +2.6 °C above average, indicating continued intensification. Even more exceptional warmth is present below the ocean surface. In some areas, subsurface ocean temperatures were more than 8°C above average during July and early August. Altogether, the surface and subsurface ocean conditions provide strong support for continued El Niño conditions and the potential for further strengthening during the coming months, the Update says. Different impacts in different places A very strong El Niño event increases the likelihood of major changes in rainfall, temperatures and atmospheric circulation across many regions of the world. However, the strength of an El Niño event alone does not determine how severe its impacts will be in any individual country or region. Its effects vary according to location and season and can be modified by other climate drivers, including conditions in the Indian and Atlantic Oceans. WMO said while extreme weather events are a certainty, it doesn’t have to mean destruction if countries prepare in advance and invest in early warning systems. “WMO is committed to working closely with partners across the United Nations and humanitarian system to provide the climate intelligence and insights needed to support disaster management and climate-sensitive sectors like agriculture, health, energy and water resources,” Saulo said. “We have no time to lose.” Image Credits: WMO, WMO. Who Should Lead the Global Fund? Let the Candidates Make Their Case 03/09/2026 Jirair Ratevosian The Global Fund’s board is searching for a replacement for current executive director Peter Sands (right), but concerns have been raised that its process has lacked transparency. Over the past week, the race for the next World Health Organisation (WHO) Director-General has started to take shape. Governments have publicly put forward prospective candidates, WHO is already listing them on a website, and some candidates are beginning to make their case publicly. Dr Hans Kluge has even released a manifesto laying out how he would lead the organization. And this is happening many months before the decision. WHO nominations do not even close until 24 September. The official candidate list will be published after the nomination period closes, followed by the first candidate web forum on 18 November, Executive Board consideration in January, another candidate forum in March, and finally the World Health Assembly vote in May of 2027. It is a long process, but it gives people time to hear the ideas, debate them and understand what each candidate actually wants to do with WHO. Meanwhile, The Global Fund, also in search of a new leader, has taken a very different approach. Rather than having candidates make their interest known publicly, the process will produce a pre-vetted shortlist of “four or five candidates” that is expected to reach its board in late September, just a month before it votes on 28-30 October. That one-month timetable leaves little room for the broader global health community to hear directly from the candidates or assess competing visions for the institution at a particularly consequential moment. Concerns about transparency Concerns about the transparency of the selection process were raised earlier this year by Sascha van Beek, a German parliamentarian, who questioned whether the process was sufficiently open and accountable. I too argued that The Global Fund is too important to treat this as just another executive search. The stakes are difficult to overstate. Since its creation in 2002, the Global Fund partnership has helped save 70 million lives and reduce the combined death rate from AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria by 63%. In 2024 alone, 25.6 million people were receiving antiretroviral therapy in countries where it invests, 7.4 million people were treated for tuberculosis and 162 million insecticide-treated mosquito nets were distributed. With nearly $70 billion disbursed across more than 100 countries, the choice of its next leader will shape disease programs and health systems around the world. Yet in July 2026, the Global Fund confirmed that the executive director selection process would continue as planned and on its existing timetable. As we wait for the Fund to announce the candidates, there is still an opportunity to open the process further. Doing so would not require reopening the search or delaying the board’s decision. Public candidate forum One way to do that is to hold a public candidate forum in October, with both in-person and virtual participation. It should be moderated by someone who understands the Fund and the different constituencies that make up its partnership. A forum would give more stakeholders with a vested interest in the Fund a substantive role before the board makes its decision. A forum would also force candidates to address the questions the Fund will face over the next decade. How should it approach new forms of financing? What role should artificial intelligence play? How should it support greater country ownership in the era of the Accra Reset? And what reforms will be needed as the global health landscape changes? The Global Fund can reasonably argue that its process already includes opportunities for engagement. Once the final shortlist is submitted in late September, candidates will attend a board retreat and then meet with board constituencies before the vote on 28-30 October. The board itself is unusually representative, with 20 voting seats divided equally between donor and implementer constituencies. Governments, civil society, communities affected by the three diseases, the private sector and foundations all have a formal role. That structure remains one of the Fund’s greatest strengths. But board engagement should not be the limit of the process. Board members are responsible for selecting the executive director, and that authority should remain with them. This is a public-interest decision, and greater openness can strengthen confidence in the Fund while building broader buy-in among donors, implementers, civil society and the communities it serves. The Global Fund’s own description of the job reinforces that point. The executive director is not simply managing the Secretariat. The person will be responsible for leading the institution through a period of major political and financial change. There is also an important precedent. Following concerns about the selection of its Director-General, WHO substantially revised its process ahead of the 2017 election. It introduced a code of conduct and candidate forums, with parts of the process made available to the public. WHO made the deliberate choice to create more space for candidates to explain how they would lead the organization and for member states and the wider community to hear from them before the election. The Fund describes itself not simply as an organization governed by a Board, but as a “worldwide partnership” of governments, communities, civil society, technical agencies and the private sector. A public candidate forum would be a simple way to put that principle into practice. Dr Jirair Ratevosian is a Research Scholar at the Duke Global Health Institute. He previously served on the board of the Global Fund. Past positions include acting chief of staff for PEPFAR, corporate social responsibility director for Gilead Sciences, and legislative director to US Congresswoman Barbara Lee. He holds a doctoral degree from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, an MPH from Boston University, and a BSc from the University of California, Los Angeles. Image Credits: Global Fund , Milken Institue. World Has No Realistic Path to Meet 1.5ºC Warming Target, UN Declares 02/09/2026 Stefan Anderson The world has missed its 1.5ºC target. The fight now turns to how far temperatures rise beyond it — and what can still be done to bring them back down. The world has failed to meet the Paris Agreement target of limiting global warming to 1.5ºC, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) declared on Wednesday. In a sprawling 141-page report, UNEP found there is no realistic pathway to prevent warming from exceeding the threshold. “The most stringent emission reduction pathways that were available around the time of the Paris Agreement are no longer feasible,” it states. The finding is the first by a UN agency to treat the 1.5ºC target as no longer within reach – and the math doesn’t give its authors much choice. To stay under 1.5ºC, total emissions from 2026 onward cannot exceed 130 billion tonnes of CO2. With current emissions at roughly 40 billion tonnes per year and still rising, that restriction will be breached in just three years. “Despite decades of scientific warnings, despite the growing scientific evidence, the resulting climate commitments have not produced sufficiently rapid emission reductions,” said Debra Roberts, a lead author and former co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group II. “Exceeding 1.5ºC is now unavoidable.” The report identifies just one pathway that would keep the world within its remaining carbon budget: global CO₂ emissions would have to fall steadily from 2025 to zero by 2031. Under current policies, the world is headed for 2.6C by century’s end. “All of our pathways forward are overshoot pathways,” Roberts added. “We are clearly entering uncharted territory.” With limiting the peak and length of the overshoot the last remaining option, UNEP is blunt: “This is by no means an acceptable or preferred pathway. It is simply the best remaining option.” ‘No good options’ above 1.5ºC UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen addresses reporters ahead of the report’s launch. While scientific projections have long assessed that remaining beneath this threshold would be impossible on current emissions trajectories, the change in language by UNEP is an historic break in climate diplomacy from the hope of Paris to the ongoing deadlock over the phase-out of fossil fuels set to continue in November at COP31. UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen, launching the findings at the end of a summer that saw Arctic temperatures soar to 32ºC, wildfires scorch Europe and the Americas, and sea-level rise threaten hundreds of millions of coastal residents, said the evidence demands immediate action. “Across the globe, extreme heat waves are already proving that climate change impacts will strike faster, hit harder, and last longer, costing more lives and causing deeper disruption,” Andersen said. “Obviously, we have climate procrastinated.” Crossing the 1.5ºC mark would bring an “intensification of extreme weather,” loss of small island states, and growing risks to human health, food and water security. “There are no good outcomes if we remain above 1.5ºC,” she said. With human-induced warming already nearing 1.4C and rising at around a quarter degree per decade, the World Meteorological Organization forecasts a three-in-four chance the 2026–2030 five-year mean will breach the Paris target. At current levels, roughly every five years of delay adds at least a tenth of a degree of global warming to the maximum level we will experience. “The future will bring many unknowns, but we do know that decisions taken now and in the next few years will determine if we have a chance of returning to 1.5ºC or below,” Andersen said. The report is the first in a series of major assessments in the run-up to the UN climate summit, COP31, in Antalya, Turkey, in November, where governments will again confront a deadlock over how quickly to phase out fossil fuels. For some observers, the report’s relative silence on the fuels driving the crisis – mentioned in passing just once in nearly 150 pages – is all the more striking as COP31 approaches. “Although UNEP does a good job of describing the hole we’ve dug ourselves into, it does a poor job of showing us that there is a way out,” said Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics, noting that the report only makes only a single passive reference to phasing out fossil fuels. “Ultimately the report’s neglect of some fundamentally important mitigation analysis risks turning it into a call to apathy rather than a call to arms,” Hare said. Fire, water, ice The planet’s frozen water is rapidly disappearing, threatening sea levels, freshwater supplies and climate stability. The report lands as the latest warning of the upheaval climate change is causing globally, and how much worse it might get. New threats to human health are already emerging. Rising temperatures are shifting vector-borne diseases to higher latitudes, increasing pathogen spillover risk, the report found. Food production could fall by 14% by 2050 under a high-emissions scenario, putting tens to hundreds of millions, concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Central America, at risk of malnutrition. Heat-related deaths during a 2025 European heatwave tripled, an increase attributed to global warming. Deadly heat seasons once expected every 100 years now arrive every 10 to 20 years. More than five billion people are projected to experience at least a month of extreme heat every year by 2050. Critical environmental systems that regulate the climate – storing carbon in forests, soils and frozen ground, or reflecting sunlight back into space – are also at risk of irreversible damage. Parts of the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet may already have crossed thresholds for irreversible ice loss. More than 40% of total global glacier loss since the 1970s has occurred in just the last decade, with global peak glacier extinction possible as early as 2041. More than 80% of tropical coral reefs bleached between 2023 and 2025, with warm-water corals now facing heat stress on a near-annual basis and “a low possibility” of surviving this century under any scenario. Essential carbon sinks like rainforests are facing die-off scenarios, with nearly 40% of the Amazon’s surface area at risk of disappearing by 2100. As damage mounts, returning to 1.5ºC – a major effort calculated in decades in a best-case scenario – does not constitute a rewind, the report stresses. Even if temperatures eventually fall, sea levels will continue rising, species driven to extinction will not return, and carbon released from thawing permafrost cannot simply be recovered. Ecosystems that collapse during overshoot cannot easily reassemble as temperatures fall. “The loss of biodiversity will weaken natural systems on which our lives and livelihoods depend, and will impact our ability to withdraw carbon from the atmosphere,” said Roberts. “Returning to 1.5ºC doesn’t mean we return to the same world we left,” Roberts added. ‘Collapse of habitability’ on low-lying islands Small developing island states are very vulnerable to the effects of climate change and rely on universal diplomatic processes to ensure they hold equal weight to major global powers. For small island developing states, the stakes are ones of life and death. The five to 10 centimetres of sea-level rise expected by 2050 is projected to double flooding across the Indian Ocean and tropical Pacific, supercharging storm surges, turning freshwater salty, and pushing floods deeper inland than at any point in history. For these nations, “the collapse of habitability has already begun,” the report warns. “This report is a fork-in-the-road moment for the planet. It is hard to overstate the depth of emotion for those of us living on the frontline after having fought so hard to put the 1.5 degree limit at the heart of the Paris Agreement,” said Palau President Surangel Whipps Jr. “It is a further glimpse into a perilous future that has already arrived.” “We need to see an urgent and unprecedented increase in political will and investment in a climate-safe future,” Whipps added. “Nobody can read this report and conclude otherwise.” For these low-lying nations, the threat is already here. But the consequences of remaining above 1.5ºC for an extended period will ultimately reach far beyond their shores. UNEP warns prolonged warming raises the risk of triggering irreversible tipping points in global systems, including the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, the Amazon rainforest and the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, a vital system of ocean currents that helps regulate temperatures across the Atlantic and Europe. Such changes could, the report warns, “reshape the world forever.” “Exceedance of 1.5°C should not be interpreted as safe or acceptable,” it states. Even if a return to below 1.5°C is secured — an outcome the report describes as “deeply uncertain” — “many nations and communities will face irreversible losses and permanently changed conditions.” The 1.8ºC ceiling Under UNEP’s most optimistic scenario – full implementation of all national climate plans plus all net-zero pledges – peak warming still reaches approximately 1.8C. Getting there requires roughly halving global emissions by 2035. “We’re really looking at 1.8ºC as being the kind of maximum, because the feasibility of the responses then becomes really, really questionable,” Roberts said. “You get a cascading effect from all the irreversible changes.” Wildfires weaken forest carbon stocks, drought reduces hydropower, heat degrades solar panel efficiency, and rising temperatures drive methane emissions from wetlands, eroding the systems the world would depend on to reverse warming. A decade of warming at the current rate, the report finds, could take 50 years to reverse even under optimistic assumptions. The lead for reducing emissions should fall on countries with “greater historical responsibility for climate change and capability to address it should act the hardest and fastest,” the report states. That tension – and the point advanced in the report that many advanced economies will need to go beyond net-zero to achieve net-negative emissions – is likely to resurface at COP31 in Antalya, Turkey, later this year, as oil-producing and high-income states fight calls to phase out fossil fuels. “This summer’s scorching heat, raging wildfires and deadly floods are a warning of what lies ahead,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said. “We must make the overshoot above 1.5 degrees as small and short as possible. That demands an overshoot of ambition.” Image Credits: Chris LeBoutiller, USGS, Unsplash/Ernests Vaga. Posts navigation Older posts
BREAKING: Germany Declines to Nominate Candidate for Upcoming WHO Director-General Election 04/09/2026 Felix Sassmannshausen The German government will not put forward a candidate for the upcoming WHO Director-General election (Federal Chancellery in Berlin). Germany has declined to put forward a candidate for the election of the next WHO Director-General. With Spain also reportedly ruling out a bid, the global field of candidates has only four official nominees just a few weeks before the deadline. Germany will not nominate a candidate for the post of WHO Director-General, Health Policy Watch has learned from the Federal Foreign Office. The Foreign Office declined to comment on the reasons behind the decision, as did the Federal Ministry of Health (BMG), which leads on the issue. “As a matter of principle, we do not comment on personnel matters,” a BMG spokesperson stated in response to an enquiry. Previously, the former Head of the Federal Chancellery, Helge Braun, had been discussed as a likely nominee in Berlin. Former Health Minister Karl Lauterbach and health diplomat Paul Zubeil had also been mentioned as possible candidates. The move comes as a surprise, given that Germany has become the largest state contributor to the WHO following the withdrawal of the United States. Leading German health policymakers had called for the Federal Republic to play a stronger role on the global stage. Spain likely to pass on a candidacy Maria Neira posted her WHO leadership vision on LinkedIn. Signals are also emerging from Madrid that further thin out the potential field of candidates. According to informed sources, Spain is also ruling out a candidacy. Earlier, speculation over a Spanish candidacy for Maria Neira, the former WHO Director for Environment, Climate Change and Health, arose after she called for a strong candidate in a LinkedIn post. She wrote that the WHO does not need a mere “personality to manage,” but a “scientifically fearless” leader brave enough to say “what the evidence demands.” To date, Paris has also remained silent, even though France could theoretically field three high-profile candidates. Sania Nishtar, CEO of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, has also not yet commented on her possible candidacy. Former WHO Chief Scientist Jeremy Farrar and PAHO Director Jarbas Barbosa have confirmed they have no intention to run in the WHO Director-General election after being mentioned as possible candidates. Field taking shape, German positioning remains open The field is slowly taking shape ahead of the 24 September deadline, with four listed “prospective candidates” on the WHO website. Alongside Belgian candidate Hans Kluge, the official candidates so far are the two EMRO candidates, Hanan Balkhy (Saudi Arabia) and Hanan Al-Kuwari (Qatar), and Indonesian Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin. It remains unclear for now which of the nominees the Federal Republic of Germany will support in the upcoming election. Both the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Health declined to comment further. German global health policymaker and Member of Parliament (MP) Sascha van Beek emphasised that Germany should not automatically back a European or established candidate. “I have always advocated looking more closely for leaders from the ‘engine room’. At the same time, I believe that, after the past few years, the WHO could also benefit from an outside perspective,” he said, referring to Sadikin, the Indonesian Health Minister and former banker. The decision not to nominate a candidate comes after the German government recently announced plans to further cut funding to global health under its tightly constrained draft budget proposal for 2027. While mandatory assessed contributions to the WHO will rise slightly, flexible budgets for pandemic preparedness are planned to be cut by 15.3%. How Germany will use its leverage in the upcoming elections remains to be seen in the coming months. See related story: Want to Become the Next WHO Director-General? Get in Line Image Credits: Wolfgang Weiser via Pexels, Felix Sassmannshausen/HPW. Controversy Over Merger Between UN Women and UNFPA Continues 04/09/2026 Kerry Cullinan United Nations (UN) Secretary-General António Guterres. Women’s organisations are anxious that Secretary-General António Guterres will push the controversial proposed merger of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) and UN Women at the UN General Assembly later this month. Guterres proposed the merger as part of his UN80 initiative, aimed at streamlining and cutting costs as the global body tries to recover from the United States’ funding withdrawal. Briefing the UN General Assembly on the merger on Thursday, Guterres said that the proposal had undergone a strategic assessment, and the two bodies’ executive directors had also presented detailed analysis to their respective boards. “We will carefully consider the next steps, taking into account the results obtained by the boards,” he told the Assembly. However, the Feminist Cross-Coalition UN80 Working Group, made up of key women’s organisations opposed to the merger, raised the possibility that Guterres may push the merger without considering alternatives as he has already pronounced that it is “the best way”. They also assert that the merger “lacks the confidence” of the two entities’ boards. Merger is ‘technically sound’ The UN merger assessment team’s report in April found that the two organisations had distinct and complementary mandates, and there was not that much overlap in their implementation work. However, the team concluded that “a merger is a technically sound proposal that has the potential to generate a stronger gender equality and SRHR entity at the heart of the UN, but only if undertaken under specific conditions”. These conditions include preserving the mandates of the two entities, and implementing the merger “with disciplined attention to political, legal, funding and operational safeguards”. The team suggests that a merger could generate annual savings of approximately $32-38 million “once integration is fully implemented”, and these “would need to be channelled back into a combined entity “. UN Women’s mandate encompasses the full spectrum of gender equality and the empowerment and rights of women and girls, including “normative support, UN-system coordination and operational activities”. UNFPA contributes to gender equality through its specific mandate areas, including sexual and reproductive health and rights, population and development, and gender-based violence. In 2024, UNFPA total expenses were approximately $1.53 billion, compared to $669 million for UN Women. Alternative report, civil society scepticism However, a report commissioned by the executive boards of UNFPA and UN Women found that significant savings could be achieved if the two organisations worked together more closely without merging. The report also warns that the merger will bring transition costs and operational disruption. Meanwhile, over 1,400 feminist organisations and individuals from over 146 countries sent a letter to Gueterres last month urging him to withdraw the merger proposal. “Both the merger assessment and civil society’s evidence have reached the same conclusion: the proposed merger poses significant risks, and could deepen the very challenges it is intended to address,” according to the letter. “These include risks to donor confidence and resource mobilization, operational continuity in humanitarian and development settings, and most importantly, the erosion of hard-won mandates for both agencies.” The latter adds that no documents in favour of the merger “explain why these challenges are best answered by building one larger, more exposed target rather than protecting two mandates whose distinctiveness has, until now, been treated as a strength”. It also questions whether there would be significant cost-savings. “A decision of this magnitude must be grounded in evidence, not assumptions,” the letter argues. “There has been no serious consideration of alternatives, including a comparison based on clear benchmarks and indicators of the merger proposal against non-structural reforms. Most importantly, no evidence has been presented that demonstrates that a proposed merger would accelerate progress towards gender equality and the realisation of the human rights of women and girls in all their diversity.” ‘Withdraw merger proposal’ The signatories call on Guterres to withdraw the merger proposal and consider “non-structural alternatives to ensure the UN delivers for gender equality and the human rights of women and girls”. However, Guterres told the briefing on Thursday: “The principle is simple: Where we perform essentially the same function, we should ask whether we truly need separate systems, separate platforms, and separate infrastructure — and we should act accordingly.” But the feminist coalition is not convinced: “This merger would fold two specialised institutions, with distinct expertise, relationships, and track records, into one smaller, more easily pressured entity — right at the moment when the issues they cover demand more capacity, not less. That’s not a bureaucratic risk. It’s a risk to whether women and girls can actually access the services and protections they depend on.” Image Credits: UN Photo. Indonesian Wildfires Cause Air Pollution Levels to Rise to Hazardous Levels in Southeast Asia 04/09/2026 Disha Shetty Forest fires are currently raging in Indonesia, affecting air quality across Southeast Asia. Millions of people in Southeast Asia are currently exposed to hazardous levels of air pollution as the large-scale haze caused by Indonesian wildfires crosses boundaries, leading to cancelled outdoor activities and school closures. Indonesia alone has recorded 50,000 cases of respiratory infections linked to land and forest fires between July and August this year, according to data from its health ministry. Fires have been particularly intense across parts of Borneo, including West Kalimantan, generating substantial smoke emissions that have been transported to neighbouring countries, including Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines. “Indonesia has experienced a particularly intense start to its seasonal fires, with the number of fires and their emissions increasing rapidly since late July. This is unfolding against the backdrop of strong El Niño conditions, which can influence rainfall and intensify conditions across the region,” said Mark Parrington, Senior Scientist at Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS). European Union’s CAMS is closely tracking fire emissions from Indonesia and the transport of smoke across the region. Also read: El Niño Forecast to Be Strongest on Record, Threatening Extreme Weather Through 2027 Increased fire activity since July 2026 Indonesia recorded its highest August monthly total estimated emissions since at least 2003, contributing to the highest monthly fire emissions for Asia. The fire activity in Indonesia has increased since July this year, coinciding with the country’s dry season, which typically runs from late July to late October. Strong El Niño conditions, which tend to bring extreme weather events globally, have further intensified fire activity. Indonesia has recorded its highest August total estimated fire emissions in the past 24 years, resulting in large-scale transboundary haze. “Particularly notable is the scale of the transboundary haze, which is already significantly impacting air quality across Southeast Asia and could persist for several weeks if the fire emissions continue to increase, as would be expected through September into October. These fires demonstrate that wildfires are not a localised challenge – their impacts can extend hundreds of miles from the source,” Parrington said. The wildfire emissions significantly increase concentrations of fine particulate matter (PM2.5), one of the pollutants most harmful to human health, among many other toxic and harmful pollutants. Globally, wildfire emissions increased in August 2026, with smoke from fires in North America and Eurasia being transported as far as the Northern Hemisphere, including the Arctic. Image Credits: Fire Emissions Watch application, Copernicus, Copernicus/X. US Proposal to Eliminate PAHO Funding Raises Alarm Over Health Security in Americas 03/09/2026 Sophia Samantaroy PAHO headquarters in Washington, DC, in 2026. The US administration has called the organization “corrupt” as it proposes to eliminate funding. A group of senior national security and health officials contend that cutting funding to the regional health organization will cripple the Western hemisphere’s ability to defend itself against disease threats. The oldest multilateral health organization in the world, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), is fighting many of the same health threats it did at its founding in Washington, DC, some 120 years ago: vector-borne diseases such as dengue and Zika, new and emerging diseases like New World Screwworm, and recurring outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases like measles. But the organization now faces an unprecedented challenge: the potential loss of United States funding. Amid ongoing outbreaks across the Americas, the US President’s Fiscal Year 2027 budget request to Congress proposes eliminating funding to PAHO, calling it and the World Health Organization (WHO) “corrupt organizations” that show “no independence from inappropriate political influence”, part of a raft of international organisations it describes as promoting “dangerous ideologies” and “taking advantage of American generosity”. The US is the largest single contributor to PAHO and accounts for half of all member state contributions to the organization. The US already owes nearly $135 million in member fees since 2024. After slashing aid to global health programmes, US President Donald Trump and his administration have set their sights on PAHO, threatening to eliminate its funding and terminate a 124-year history of US cooperation with the organisation it helped found. Former national and health security officials, though, were quick to back PAHO as the “first line of defense” against diseases in the Western Hemisphere. “Destroying the institution – PAHO – that has protected us all is the worst idea circulating in Washington right now,” said Andrew Natsios, a Republican politician and humanitarian official under multiple administrations, in a statement to Health Policy Watch. “It is delusional to think we can stop disease at our borders. We can only manage these health crises through regional cooperation.” In response to unpaid US dues, PAHO, the WHO’s regional arm with 35 member states across the Americas, has adopted a 17% reduction in its upcoming budget. It has also established a cost-saving “Shared Services Hub”– an effort to consolidate and streamline core administrative functions from Washington headquarters to lower-cost locations, the organization said in a statement to Health Policy Watch. Across the organization, total positions are projected to drop from 1,042 during the 2024–2025 budget cycle to approximately 869 positions across 2026–2027. With USAID shuttered and the future of CDC regional offices unclear, PAHO remains one of the only presences in the region that could coordinate 35 member states across the Americas on issues of health security. Leading US national security officials decry defunding The Friends of PAHO, a bipartisan coalition of national and health security officials, voiced its deep support for the organization founded by the US some 124 years ago. Trump’s submitted budget mirrors last year’s turmoil in global health funding – deep slashes to programs that support maternal and child health, malaria and tuberculosis control, HIV/AIDS control, and neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). Congress may still appropriate funds, as advocated for by an open letter signed by the dozens of national security and health officials who served across Republican and Democratic administrations. “PAHO has an unmatched record of protecting health,” the more than 100 signatories write in the letter, which include former Army surgeon generals, Department of Defense officials, Health and Human Services secretaries, former members of Congress, White House officials, and ambassadors. They represent a new bipartisan coalition, the Friends of PAHO. “For 124 years, it has been one of the most effective health and disease prevention organizations operating anywhere in the world,” the letter states. “At a time when infectious disease threats continue to cross borders, we urge policymakers in Washington to reassert America’s commitment to health security in the Western Hemisphere and recognize PAHO’s essential role in safeguarding the American homeland.” PAHO targeted for decades-old scandal Cuban Mais Medicos doctors arrive in 2020 Martinique as part of a medical delegation to assist with COVID-19-related programs. The Trump Administration initially singled out PAHO in 2025 in a move to withhold funding from key international organizations. The concerns came after the Trump Administration alleged PAHO was mediating a forced labor scheme among Cuban doctors, as part of a Brazilian program Mais Medicos. The scheme, which took place over a decade ago, resulted in US sanctions against Cuba for forced labor of its doctors. The Brazilian health officials involved were also subject to sanctions. In the past year, however, the administration has dredged the issue to the forefront of its qualms with PAHO and succeeded in withholding $4.9 billion in previously appropriated foreign assistance through a controversial “pocket rescission” in September 2025, including $45 million earmarked for PAHO. Representative Carlos Gimenez (FL-28), who issued the call to action against PAHO’s immunity in August 2025, did not respond to a request for comment. However, it is not clear why the decade-old scandal has resurfaced as an issue for withholding contributions to PAHO. See related story: Pan American Health Organization Targeted in New Round of US Funding Cuts US owes over $135 million in assessed contributions PAHO has made a net -17% adjustment to its budget for the upcoming two years from $820 million in 2024-2025 to $762 million in 2026-2027. The US has not yet formally withdrawn from PAHO: it remains a member and continues to owe assessed contributions like several other countries. In fact, PAHO is the only multilateral health organization the US is a member of following last year’s withdrawal from the World Health Organization and other related organizations. US payments to PAHO have been delayed now for nearly two years, leaving the organization under increased pressure. Beyond funding, the US supports PAHO through staffing experts and providing technical advice in Washington. In a statement, PAHO said it has not been officially informed of a decision to eliminate funding to the organization. There have been several instances in which US Congress has ignored proposed funding cuts from the Office of Budget and Management (OMB), instead opting to support global aid across party lines. Indeed, several high-ranking Republican members of Congress and former officials have spoken out against a US withdrawal from global aid, and the ways the Administration has attempted to rescind funding. US Senator Susan Collins, Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, called the rescissions move “a clear violation of the law” and said that she “cannot support the cuts that are so deep and so damaging in global health programs,” in a Senate hearing with OMB chief Russel Vought. Natsios, whose career as a Republican politician and public servant spans five decades, echoed this sentiment, saying that “diseases, both human and animal, don’t need passports to travel across borders. The health crises of Latin America will become the health crises of the US and our crises will eventually travel to our southern neighbors. PAHO, for more than eight decades, has been the first line of defense against these crises.” For now, PAHO continues to coordinate responses to the devastating earthquakes in Colombia and Venezuela, surveil measles and dengue outbreaks, and monitor potential avian flu cases despite the budget cuts. A sudden break in a 120-year partnership The front page of a Washington-based newspaper documenting a meeting of delegates from the Americas to disucss public health. PAHO was founded in Washington, DC, in 1902 under President Theodore Roosevelt, making it the oldest such organization. The dire health consequences of the Spanish-American War in Cuba and the deadly yellow fever epidemics that struck American workers building the Panama Canal spurred Roosevelt to convene what was then called the International Sanitary Bureau in Washington, DC. The close ties between the US and PAHO predate those of any other health multilateral. “Until the late 1950s, the organization’s earliest directors were US health specialists,” said Katherine Bliss, director at CSIS Global Health Policy Center and an expert on Latin America. She notes that included former military doctors and leaders within the US Public Health Service. “PAHO was founded on US soil, by US leadership, and built on the conviction that American leadership in this hemisphere produces results,” the open letter calling to protect PAHO’s funding states. “For 124 years, the US has not only successfully engaged with PAHO but has been the moving force behind PAHO’s work that serves American interests and reflects American values.” “In this context, sustaining US leadership in PAHO is an America First strategy in practice,” it adds. Some 120 years later, spillovers in the Amazon Rainforest and ongoing dengue outbreaks mean that the original mission of PAHO is still as pertinent in protecting the US and the Western Hemisphere’s health security as it was last century. “Its founding purpose was unambiguously practical: protect American commerce and public health by controlling infectious disease in the hemisphere,” Friends of PAHO said. PAHO initially operated independently from the United Nations system with a mission of prompt data transmission and response coordination of sanitary conditions of seaports, maritime quarantines, and the control of infectious diseases–especially yellow fever. Then in 1949, PAHO became the independent regional arm of the World Health Organization, continuing to track, respond to, and even eradicate the most insidious diseases in the Americas. Victories despite ongoing outbreaks and emerging public health concerns Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) administering vaccines in Venezuela during an outbreak 2017-2019. PAHO’s elimination of polio, malaria, and smallpox in the region are all seen as major victories. Despite this, new and re-emerging threats continue to threaten the health of the Americas, Friends of PAHO warn. In particular, H5N1 avian influenza, dengue, chikungunya, and leishmaniasis are now circulating in the US. And an insect that carries a devastating disease afflicting cattle and other livestock, the New World Screwworm, has been identified in the US for the first time in six decades. Other concerns in the region include dengue, which the US has recently seen a surge of locally acquired cases in Florida, the loss of measles elimination status in several countries, and the looming threat of a supercharged El Niño season. “Our struggle with nature is both inherent and mandatory,” explained Stewart Simonson, a senior advisor at Global Health Strategies and a former WHO official, in reference to disease spillovers. “This requires multilateral action,” he said. Simonson, who also also served as a US Health and Human Services official during the Bush Administration coordinating public health emergency management following 9/11, pointed to the example of a measles outbreak in Caracas, Venezuela, in the late 2010s under then dictator Nicolás Maduro. “The outbreak was going nowhere but North,” Simonson said. It was only through PAHO-mediated response and a US-funded vaccination campaign that involved mobilizing over 20,000 vaccinators per month that the outbreak was suppressed – with PAHO serving as the intermediary between the US and Venezuela. In 2025 alone, PAHO’s regional surveillance system analyzed 2.1 million disease threat data points, detecting 157 public health events across the Americas, the organization said. Advancing economic and national security The USDA H5N1 dashboard. The virus is just one of many PAHO tracks and coordinates reposnse to across the Western Hemisphere. The issue of health security is largely a bipartisan one. Signatories of the open letter supporting PAHO point to how its programs protect American “troops and diplomats stationed throughout the hemisphere,” and Americans studying abroad and travelling. “It keeps American markets open for business,” it states. “A US withdrawal from PAHO would not leave a vacuum; it would leave an opening that strategic competitors are prepared to fill.” While the US has historically had strong bilateral relationships with countries in the region on health issues, these relationships depended on regional offices staffed by USAID, CDC, PEPFAR, and even the US Navy to promote cooperation across borders. Yet, “there are no longer USAID missions, and the future of the CDC country and regional offices is unclear,” Bliss pointed out. Without these key US presences in the region, PAHO is the only organization still able to bring countries together on health security issues. “If the US were to leave PAHO, it would be important to consider how difficult it would be to engage at a regional level on health and what it would take to put an alternative platform for communication and cooperation in place,” Bliss said. Despite the financial pressures, PAHO remains confident it can continue performing its core operations throughout the Americas. When asked about diversifying funding, the organization pointed to strengthened partnerships with Canada, Spain, the EU, the US CDC, the World Bank, and philanthropic groups, among others. In a statement, PAHO did note it “continues to encourage all Member States with outstanding contributions to fulfill their commitments.” “The world is uniquely dangerous biologically right now. It is not the time to disengage from PAHO,” Simonson said. Image Credits: S. Samantaroy, The White House, Friends of PAHO, Voice of America (VOA), PAHO/WHO, PAHO/WHO, WHO/PAHO, USDA. Ebola Outbreak ‘Still Evolving’ as Deaths Pass 3,000 03/09/2026 Stefan Anderson Cases and deaths continue to pile up at record speed as local and continental authorities race to get the ongoing DRC Ebola outbreak under control. More than 3,000 people have died in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Ebola Bundibugyo outbreak out of 6,250 confirmed cases, the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) said Thursday, as the virus kills nearly half of those it infects and outpaces efforts to contain it. “The numbers are telling the story,” Dr Wesam Mankula, lead of the Continental Incident Management Support Team, told reporters at Africa CDC’s weekly briefing. “This outbreak is still evolving.” At 16 weeks, the epidemic has spread over an area larger than the United Kingdom, France, and more than 35 African states. It is already the second largest Ebola outbreak in DRC’s history, and is on track to be the largest on record, with 6.5 times the caseload that the 2014 West Africa epidemic had at the same stage. Africa CDC reports that 89% of listed contacts are being followed up, but Mankula acknowledged the number of contacts actually being identified per case falls well short of the target. Each confirmed patient should generate a list of 40 to 60 people they may have exposed, but most lists are far shorter, meaning the vast majority of potential contacts are never traced. Adjusted for that shortfall, the effective contact tracing rate drops to just 19%, Mankula said. Reported cases and deaths at the 16-week mark compared with previous Ebola outbreaks. The current epidemic dwarfs all others in recorded history, sitting at 6.5× more cases and 5.0× more deaths than the next-highest comparator at the same point. Without adequate tracing, many patients are never identified until it is too late. That tracing shortfall continues to play out in affected provinces, with more than 60% of deaths in the past seven days occurring in the community, with people dying before they could be reached and referred to treatment. “This is highlighting the importance of pushing more community health workers, senior experts from the surveillance focusing on case investigation, to improve contact listing and contact tracing,” Mankula said. “Hopefully, with pushing more community health workers, we can see improvement in the community tracing.” Weekly confirmed cases peaked at 537 during the week of 10 August and have since dipped to 464 and 479, a 12% decline Mankula called a “plateau phase,” though he cautioned a similar plateau in June was followed by a surge. Four health zones have gone more than 42 days without new infections, the established international benchmark for interrupted transmission, and five more are in a control phase. But 51 health zones still have active transmission, and each infected person is still passing the virus to more than one other on average, meaning the outbreak continues to grow. “It’s very still very early to say we brought this outbreak under control,” Mankula said. The epidemic migrates into a warzone Nearly half of those infected by the Bundibugyo strain have died. Chart shows cumulative cases and deaths from May 15 to 1 September, the latest data available. Cases in Ituri province, the epicentre with more than 5,100 infections, fell 12% over the most recent three-week window. But as the outbreak appears to settle in Ituri, caseloads are accelerating elsewhere, Africa CDC officials said. North Kivu, where armed groups including M23 have displaced millions in an ongoing civil war, saw cases more than double and deaths rise 98% in the same period, with the highest case fatality rate of any affected province at 67.7%. Further north, in the remote and densely forested provinces of Haut-Uélé and Bas-Uélé bordering South Sudan and the Central African Republic, cases are surging too. Haut-Uélé cases nearly tripled in the most recent three-week window, and Bas-Uélé, the sixth province to be affected, is now reporting cases for the first time. The conflict has made some health zones inaccessible to international and government responders, as communities and armed groups refuse entry. Mankula said responders urgently need negotiated humanitarian corridors in order “to do their function, moving from one place to another, support active case search, contact identification, contact isolation, infection prevention control measures, expanding Ebola treatment centres in those affected zones.” Health workers in the crossfire Violence Against Ebola Responders Mounts in DRC as Red Cross Condemns Attacks Forty-seven healthcare workers have died from the virus out of 163 infected, according to Africa CDC briefing data presented Wednesday, up from the 43 deaths reported last week. Beyond the virus, workers face direct violence: the Red Cross has documented 11 violent incidents in the first 100 days of the outbreak, with volunteers attacked and ambulances set on fire by communities fuelled by mistrust and misinformation. Eight health workers have been killed in attacks as of 22 August, according to the UN’s senior Ebola coordinator. Health workers risking infection and violent assault have also faced months of delayed or missing pay, triggering repeated strikes since July. Asked about the delays, Prof Yap Boum, Africa CDC’s field manager in DRC, said the government had begun registering and paying workers in Bunya and Rampara. “It’s been a while since you have not heard about those strikes because the government have done two things,” Boum said. “One is to ensure that they can register the staff that are working, but also starting to pay them… at least all those that were working in treatment centre.” Boum said he expected payments to be completed by next week. Payment disputes have been a persistent obstacle to the response, and aid agencies have warned that sustained, timely compensation for frontline workers is essential to maintaining the workforce needed to contain the outbreak. Vaccines and therapeutics in the pipeline DRC Minister of Health Dr Roger Kamba (centre) receives the first consignment of the Ervebo vaccine at N’djili International Airport in Kinshasa on 21 August. No licensed vaccine or treatment exists for the Bundibugyo strain of the virus, leaving health workers and communities without the protection that helped bring previous Zaire Ebola outbreaks under control. Authorities are fast-tracking several candidates through clinical trials to try to close that gap, Africa CDC said. The Ervebo vaccine, effective against Zaire, is being deployed to frontline workers under compassionate use despite unproven efficacy against Bundibugyo. More than 1,100 healthcare workers have received it so far, and a solidarity trial is expected to begin in DRC within a week, Africa CDC reported. “The vaccine Ervebo is effective for the Zaire strain, but its efficacy against the recent strain, the Bundibugyo, has not been demonstrated yet,” said Prof Placid Mbala, Africa CDC’s Director of Research. “But we believe that we may see some cross-protection… this is why we are using the Ervebo vaccine mostly to also evaluate the impact of this vaccine during this outbreak, and also to conduct a kind of vaccine effectiveness and efficacy study in the field.” Phase one trials for vaccine candidates from Shaddock and Moderna are underway in the UK and Canada respectively, and Egypt’s Mina Pharma has received $16.5 million from CEPI to advance its own candidate. Two therapeutic trials are also progressing, Mbala said. A post-exposure prophylaxis trial, which is testing whether drugs given to contacts of confirmed cases can prevent them from developing the disease, has recruited 216 of a 400-person target. If effective, they would become a vital tool in slowing transmission by protecting people before they can be infected. A separate trial testing remdesivir and monoclonal antibodies in confirmed patients has enrolled 334 of 500. About 35 participants have so far reached the 28-day mark at which initial analysis can begin, with the first readouts expected by mid-September. “But I think with the first 100 participants, we won’t be able to see the efficacy of these different drugs,” Mbala said. The trial’s safety monitoring board will then determine whether to continue recruitment toward the full 500 or add further therapeutics. “It’s an adaptive protocol,” Mbala added. “We may add more therapeutics when they can be available.” Image Credits: MSF, DRC Health Ministry. El Niño Forecast to Be Strongest on Record, Threatening Extreme Weather Through 2027 03/09/2026 Disha Shetty The odds of El Niño persisting until February 2027 are near certain, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Countries around the world face higher risks of extreme weather events like floods, droughts and extreme heat as the ongoing El Niño intensifies and extends, with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) now assessing it will become the strongest in history. In its latest update, WMO assessed with 100% certainty that El Niño — the result of warming ocean temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific that affect weather extremes globally – will persist through February 2027, instead of the earlier projection of November 2026. “El Niño is being supersized before our eyes. The science leaves no room for doubt: the planet is in uncharted waters, and those waters are heating up,” said United Nations Secretary General António Guterres. “Sea surface temperatures are rising, temperatures keep climbing, and the world is in the danger zone of extreme weather.” This is also the first time that a WMO El Niño and La Niña update has been so unequivocal, reflecting the strong agreement within WMO’s extensive network. WMO’s update comes on the heels of devastating floods in Nepal that killed over 1,000 people. While El Niño is not linked to climate change, combined with the extreme weather events that climate change is already bringing, El Niño stands to compound the damage. “The race now is between rising risks and our commitment to take climate action and protect people,” Guterres said. “We must win that race.” Also read: Nepal’s Flood: Chilling Example of Climate Devastation Facing Developing Countries 2026 could surpass 2024 as the hottest year on record Celeste Saulo, WMO Secretary-General While both El Niño and La Niña occur naturally, the intensity of these phenomena can bring staggering devastation. “El Niño in Spanish means boy child – but it has the potential to deliver a massive blow to communities and economies across the world. We are already seeing disruption and devastation from droughts and floods, and we expect these impacts to increase as El Niño intensifies,” said WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo. She explained that the El Niño in the year 2023-24 resulted in 2024 being the hottest on record. The current El Niño could do something similar for the year 2026, Saulo said. “This exceptional El Niño demands exceptional preparation and response. Never before in the 50-year history of the World Meteorological Organization have we launched such a major mobilization with National Meteorological and Hydrological Services who are on the frontline of delivering the forecasts and services to save lives and livelihoods,” Saulo said. Exceptional ocean heat in the tropical Pacific Above-average temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean cause El Niño. Sea surface temperatures across the central-eastern equatorial Pacific, the region at the heart of El Niño, are already well above average – one of the tell-tale signs of El Niño – and are continuing to rise. The widely used Niño 3.4 index, which measures sea surface temperature anomalies in the central-eastern equatorial Pacific, has strengthened markedly from an average of +1.5 °C above normal during May-July 2026 and +2.0 °C above normal in July. Weekly values subsequently increased further between late July and mid-August, ranging from approximately +2.2 °C to +2.6 °C above average, indicating continued intensification. Even more exceptional warmth is present below the ocean surface. In some areas, subsurface ocean temperatures were more than 8°C above average during July and early August. Altogether, the surface and subsurface ocean conditions provide strong support for continued El Niño conditions and the potential for further strengthening during the coming months, the Update says. Different impacts in different places A very strong El Niño event increases the likelihood of major changes in rainfall, temperatures and atmospheric circulation across many regions of the world. However, the strength of an El Niño event alone does not determine how severe its impacts will be in any individual country or region. Its effects vary according to location and season and can be modified by other climate drivers, including conditions in the Indian and Atlantic Oceans. WMO said while extreme weather events are a certainty, it doesn’t have to mean destruction if countries prepare in advance and invest in early warning systems. “WMO is committed to working closely with partners across the United Nations and humanitarian system to provide the climate intelligence and insights needed to support disaster management and climate-sensitive sectors like agriculture, health, energy and water resources,” Saulo said. “We have no time to lose.” Image Credits: WMO, WMO. Who Should Lead the Global Fund? Let the Candidates Make Their Case 03/09/2026 Jirair Ratevosian The Global Fund’s board is searching for a replacement for current executive director Peter Sands (right), but concerns have been raised that its process has lacked transparency. Over the past week, the race for the next World Health Organisation (WHO) Director-General has started to take shape. Governments have publicly put forward prospective candidates, WHO is already listing them on a website, and some candidates are beginning to make their case publicly. Dr Hans Kluge has even released a manifesto laying out how he would lead the organization. And this is happening many months before the decision. WHO nominations do not even close until 24 September. The official candidate list will be published after the nomination period closes, followed by the first candidate web forum on 18 November, Executive Board consideration in January, another candidate forum in March, and finally the World Health Assembly vote in May of 2027. It is a long process, but it gives people time to hear the ideas, debate them and understand what each candidate actually wants to do with WHO. Meanwhile, The Global Fund, also in search of a new leader, has taken a very different approach. Rather than having candidates make their interest known publicly, the process will produce a pre-vetted shortlist of “four or five candidates” that is expected to reach its board in late September, just a month before it votes on 28-30 October. That one-month timetable leaves little room for the broader global health community to hear directly from the candidates or assess competing visions for the institution at a particularly consequential moment. Concerns about transparency Concerns about the transparency of the selection process were raised earlier this year by Sascha van Beek, a German parliamentarian, who questioned whether the process was sufficiently open and accountable. I too argued that The Global Fund is too important to treat this as just another executive search. The stakes are difficult to overstate. Since its creation in 2002, the Global Fund partnership has helped save 70 million lives and reduce the combined death rate from AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria by 63%. In 2024 alone, 25.6 million people were receiving antiretroviral therapy in countries where it invests, 7.4 million people were treated for tuberculosis and 162 million insecticide-treated mosquito nets were distributed. With nearly $70 billion disbursed across more than 100 countries, the choice of its next leader will shape disease programs and health systems around the world. Yet in July 2026, the Global Fund confirmed that the executive director selection process would continue as planned and on its existing timetable. As we wait for the Fund to announce the candidates, there is still an opportunity to open the process further. Doing so would not require reopening the search or delaying the board’s decision. Public candidate forum One way to do that is to hold a public candidate forum in October, with both in-person and virtual participation. It should be moderated by someone who understands the Fund and the different constituencies that make up its partnership. A forum would give more stakeholders with a vested interest in the Fund a substantive role before the board makes its decision. A forum would also force candidates to address the questions the Fund will face over the next decade. How should it approach new forms of financing? What role should artificial intelligence play? How should it support greater country ownership in the era of the Accra Reset? And what reforms will be needed as the global health landscape changes? The Global Fund can reasonably argue that its process already includes opportunities for engagement. Once the final shortlist is submitted in late September, candidates will attend a board retreat and then meet with board constituencies before the vote on 28-30 October. The board itself is unusually representative, with 20 voting seats divided equally between donor and implementer constituencies. Governments, civil society, communities affected by the three diseases, the private sector and foundations all have a formal role. That structure remains one of the Fund’s greatest strengths. But board engagement should not be the limit of the process. Board members are responsible for selecting the executive director, and that authority should remain with them. This is a public-interest decision, and greater openness can strengthen confidence in the Fund while building broader buy-in among donors, implementers, civil society and the communities it serves. The Global Fund’s own description of the job reinforces that point. The executive director is not simply managing the Secretariat. The person will be responsible for leading the institution through a period of major political and financial change. There is also an important precedent. Following concerns about the selection of its Director-General, WHO substantially revised its process ahead of the 2017 election. It introduced a code of conduct and candidate forums, with parts of the process made available to the public. WHO made the deliberate choice to create more space for candidates to explain how they would lead the organization and for member states and the wider community to hear from them before the election. The Fund describes itself not simply as an organization governed by a Board, but as a “worldwide partnership” of governments, communities, civil society, technical agencies and the private sector. A public candidate forum would be a simple way to put that principle into practice. Dr Jirair Ratevosian is a Research Scholar at the Duke Global Health Institute. He previously served on the board of the Global Fund. Past positions include acting chief of staff for PEPFAR, corporate social responsibility director for Gilead Sciences, and legislative director to US Congresswoman Barbara Lee. He holds a doctoral degree from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, an MPH from Boston University, and a BSc from the University of California, Los Angeles. Image Credits: Global Fund , Milken Institue. World Has No Realistic Path to Meet 1.5ºC Warming Target, UN Declares 02/09/2026 Stefan Anderson The world has missed its 1.5ºC target. The fight now turns to how far temperatures rise beyond it — and what can still be done to bring them back down. The world has failed to meet the Paris Agreement target of limiting global warming to 1.5ºC, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) declared on Wednesday. In a sprawling 141-page report, UNEP found there is no realistic pathway to prevent warming from exceeding the threshold. “The most stringent emission reduction pathways that were available around the time of the Paris Agreement are no longer feasible,” it states. The finding is the first by a UN agency to treat the 1.5ºC target as no longer within reach – and the math doesn’t give its authors much choice. To stay under 1.5ºC, total emissions from 2026 onward cannot exceed 130 billion tonnes of CO2. With current emissions at roughly 40 billion tonnes per year and still rising, that restriction will be breached in just three years. “Despite decades of scientific warnings, despite the growing scientific evidence, the resulting climate commitments have not produced sufficiently rapid emission reductions,” said Debra Roberts, a lead author and former co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group II. “Exceeding 1.5ºC is now unavoidable.” The report identifies just one pathway that would keep the world within its remaining carbon budget: global CO₂ emissions would have to fall steadily from 2025 to zero by 2031. Under current policies, the world is headed for 2.6C by century’s end. “All of our pathways forward are overshoot pathways,” Roberts added. “We are clearly entering uncharted territory.” With limiting the peak and length of the overshoot the last remaining option, UNEP is blunt: “This is by no means an acceptable or preferred pathway. It is simply the best remaining option.” ‘No good options’ above 1.5ºC UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen addresses reporters ahead of the report’s launch. While scientific projections have long assessed that remaining beneath this threshold would be impossible on current emissions trajectories, the change in language by UNEP is an historic break in climate diplomacy from the hope of Paris to the ongoing deadlock over the phase-out of fossil fuels set to continue in November at COP31. UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen, launching the findings at the end of a summer that saw Arctic temperatures soar to 32ºC, wildfires scorch Europe and the Americas, and sea-level rise threaten hundreds of millions of coastal residents, said the evidence demands immediate action. “Across the globe, extreme heat waves are already proving that climate change impacts will strike faster, hit harder, and last longer, costing more lives and causing deeper disruption,” Andersen said. “Obviously, we have climate procrastinated.” Crossing the 1.5ºC mark would bring an “intensification of extreme weather,” loss of small island states, and growing risks to human health, food and water security. “There are no good outcomes if we remain above 1.5ºC,” she said. With human-induced warming already nearing 1.4C and rising at around a quarter degree per decade, the World Meteorological Organization forecasts a three-in-four chance the 2026–2030 five-year mean will breach the Paris target. At current levels, roughly every five years of delay adds at least a tenth of a degree of global warming to the maximum level we will experience. “The future will bring many unknowns, but we do know that decisions taken now and in the next few years will determine if we have a chance of returning to 1.5ºC or below,” Andersen said. The report is the first in a series of major assessments in the run-up to the UN climate summit, COP31, in Antalya, Turkey, in November, where governments will again confront a deadlock over how quickly to phase out fossil fuels. For some observers, the report’s relative silence on the fuels driving the crisis – mentioned in passing just once in nearly 150 pages – is all the more striking as COP31 approaches. “Although UNEP does a good job of describing the hole we’ve dug ourselves into, it does a poor job of showing us that there is a way out,” said Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics, noting that the report only makes only a single passive reference to phasing out fossil fuels. “Ultimately the report’s neglect of some fundamentally important mitigation analysis risks turning it into a call to apathy rather than a call to arms,” Hare said. Fire, water, ice The planet’s frozen water is rapidly disappearing, threatening sea levels, freshwater supplies and climate stability. The report lands as the latest warning of the upheaval climate change is causing globally, and how much worse it might get. New threats to human health are already emerging. Rising temperatures are shifting vector-borne diseases to higher latitudes, increasing pathogen spillover risk, the report found. Food production could fall by 14% by 2050 under a high-emissions scenario, putting tens to hundreds of millions, concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Central America, at risk of malnutrition. Heat-related deaths during a 2025 European heatwave tripled, an increase attributed to global warming. Deadly heat seasons once expected every 100 years now arrive every 10 to 20 years. More than five billion people are projected to experience at least a month of extreme heat every year by 2050. Critical environmental systems that regulate the climate – storing carbon in forests, soils and frozen ground, or reflecting sunlight back into space – are also at risk of irreversible damage. Parts of the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet may already have crossed thresholds for irreversible ice loss. More than 40% of total global glacier loss since the 1970s has occurred in just the last decade, with global peak glacier extinction possible as early as 2041. More than 80% of tropical coral reefs bleached between 2023 and 2025, with warm-water corals now facing heat stress on a near-annual basis and “a low possibility” of surviving this century under any scenario. Essential carbon sinks like rainforests are facing die-off scenarios, with nearly 40% of the Amazon’s surface area at risk of disappearing by 2100. As damage mounts, returning to 1.5ºC – a major effort calculated in decades in a best-case scenario – does not constitute a rewind, the report stresses. Even if temperatures eventually fall, sea levels will continue rising, species driven to extinction will not return, and carbon released from thawing permafrost cannot simply be recovered. Ecosystems that collapse during overshoot cannot easily reassemble as temperatures fall. “The loss of biodiversity will weaken natural systems on which our lives and livelihoods depend, and will impact our ability to withdraw carbon from the atmosphere,” said Roberts. “Returning to 1.5ºC doesn’t mean we return to the same world we left,” Roberts added. ‘Collapse of habitability’ on low-lying islands Small developing island states are very vulnerable to the effects of climate change and rely on universal diplomatic processes to ensure they hold equal weight to major global powers. For small island developing states, the stakes are ones of life and death. The five to 10 centimetres of sea-level rise expected by 2050 is projected to double flooding across the Indian Ocean and tropical Pacific, supercharging storm surges, turning freshwater salty, and pushing floods deeper inland than at any point in history. For these nations, “the collapse of habitability has already begun,” the report warns. “This report is a fork-in-the-road moment for the planet. It is hard to overstate the depth of emotion for those of us living on the frontline after having fought so hard to put the 1.5 degree limit at the heart of the Paris Agreement,” said Palau President Surangel Whipps Jr. “It is a further glimpse into a perilous future that has already arrived.” “We need to see an urgent and unprecedented increase in political will and investment in a climate-safe future,” Whipps added. “Nobody can read this report and conclude otherwise.” For these low-lying nations, the threat is already here. But the consequences of remaining above 1.5ºC for an extended period will ultimately reach far beyond their shores. UNEP warns prolonged warming raises the risk of triggering irreversible tipping points in global systems, including the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, the Amazon rainforest and the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, a vital system of ocean currents that helps regulate temperatures across the Atlantic and Europe. Such changes could, the report warns, “reshape the world forever.” “Exceedance of 1.5°C should not be interpreted as safe or acceptable,” it states. Even if a return to below 1.5°C is secured — an outcome the report describes as “deeply uncertain” — “many nations and communities will face irreversible losses and permanently changed conditions.” The 1.8ºC ceiling Under UNEP’s most optimistic scenario – full implementation of all national climate plans plus all net-zero pledges – peak warming still reaches approximately 1.8C. Getting there requires roughly halving global emissions by 2035. “We’re really looking at 1.8ºC as being the kind of maximum, because the feasibility of the responses then becomes really, really questionable,” Roberts said. “You get a cascading effect from all the irreversible changes.” Wildfires weaken forest carbon stocks, drought reduces hydropower, heat degrades solar panel efficiency, and rising temperatures drive methane emissions from wetlands, eroding the systems the world would depend on to reverse warming. A decade of warming at the current rate, the report finds, could take 50 years to reverse even under optimistic assumptions. The lead for reducing emissions should fall on countries with “greater historical responsibility for climate change and capability to address it should act the hardest and fastest,” the report states. That tension – and the point advanced in the report that many advanced economies will need to go beyond net-zero to achieve net-negative emissions – is likely to resurface at COP31 in Antalya, Turkey, later this year, as oil-producing and high-income states fight calls to phase out fossil fuels. “This summer’s scorching heat, raging wildfires and deadly floods are a warning of what lies ahead,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said. “We must make the overshoot above 1.5 degrees as small and short as possible. That demands an overshoot of ambition.” Image Credits: Chris LeBoutiller, USGS, Unsplash/Ernests Vaga. Posts navigation Older posts
Controversy Over Merger Between UN Women and UNFPA Continues 04/09/2026 Kerry Cullinan United Nations (UN) Secretary-General António Guterres. Women’s organisations are anxious that Secretary-General António Guterres will push the controversial proposed merger of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) and UN Women at the UN General Assembly later this month. Guterres proposed the merger as part of his UN80 initiative, aimed at streamlining and cutting costs as the global body tries to recover from the United States’ funding withdrawal. Briefing the UN General Assembly on the merger on Thursday, Guterres said that the proposal had undergone a strategic assessment, and the two bodies’ executive directors had also presented detailed analysis to their respective boards. “We will carefully consider the next steps, taking into account the results obtained by the boards,” he told the Assembly. However, the Feminist Cross-Coalition UN80 Working Group, made up of key women’s organisations opposed to the merger, raised the possibility that Guterres may push the merger without considering alternatives as he has already pronounced that it is “the best way”. They also assert that the merger “lacks the confidence” of the two entities’ boards. Merger is ‘technically sound’ The UN merger assessment team’s report in April found that the two organisations had distinct and complementary mandates, and there was not that much overlap in their implementation work. However, the team concluded that “a merger is a technically sound proposal that has the potential to generate a stronger gender equality and SRHR entity at the heart of the UN, but only if undertaken under specific conditions”. These conditions include preserving the mandates of the two entities, and implementing the merger “with disciplined attention to political, legal, funding and operational safeguards”. The team suggests that a merger could generate annual savings of approximately $32-38 million “once integration is fully implemented”, and these “would need to be channelled back into a combined entity “. UN Women’s mandate encompasses the full spectrum of gender equality and the empowerment and rights of women and girls, including “normative support, UN-system coordination and operational activities”. UNFPA contributes to gender equality through its specific mandate areas, including sexual and reproductive health and rights, population and development, and gender-based violence. In 2024, UNFPA total expenses were approximately $1.53 billion, compared to $669 million for UN Women. Alternative report, civil society scepticism However, a report commissioned by the executive boards of UNFPA and UN Women found that significant savings could be achieved if the two organisations worked together more closely without merging. The report also warns that the merger will bring transition costs and operational disruption. Meanwhile, over 1,400 feminist organisations and individuals from over 146 countries sent a letter to Gueterres last month urging him to withdraw the merger proposal. “Both the merger assessment and civil society’s evidence have reached the same conclusion: the proposed merger poses significant risks, and could deepen the very challenges it is intended to address,” according to the letter. “These include risks to donor confidence and resource mobilization, operational continuity in humanitarian and development settings, and most importantly, the erosion of hard-won mandates for both agencies.” The latter adds that no documents in favour of the merger “explain why these challenges are best answered by building one larger, more exposed target rather than protecting two mandates whose distinctiveness has, until now, been treated as a strength”. It also questions whether there would be significant cost-savings. “A decision of this magnitude must be grounded in evidence, not assumptions,” the letter argues. “There has been no serious consideration of alternatives, including a comparison based on clear benchmarks and indicators of the merger proposal against non-structural reforms. Most importantly, no evidence has been presented that demonstrates that a proposed merger would accelerate progress towards gender equality and the realisation of the human rights of women and girls in all their diversity.” ‘Withdraw merger proposal’ The signatories call on Guterres to withdraw the merger proposal and consider “non-structural alternatives to ensure the UN delivers for gender equality and the human rights of women and girls”. However, Guterres told the briefing on Thursday: “The principle is simple: Where we perform essentially the same function, we should ask whether we truly need separate systems, separate platforms, and separate infrastructure — and we should act accordingly.” But the feminist coalition is not convinced: “This merger would fold two specialised institutions, with distinct expertise, relationships, and track records, into one smaller, more easily pressured entity — right at the moment when the issues they cover demand more capacity, not less. That’s not a bureaucratic risk. It’s a risk to whether women and girls can actually access the services and protections they depend on.” Image Credits: UN Photo. Indonesian Wildfires Cause Air Pollution Levels to Rise to Hazardous Levels in Southeast Asia 04/09/2026 Disha Shetty Forest fires are currently raging in Indonesia, affecting air quality across Southeast Asia. Millions of people in Southeast Asia are currently exposed to hazardous levels of air pollution as the large-scale haze caused by Indonesian wildfires crosses boundaries, leading to cancelled outdoor activities and school closures. Indonesia alone has recorded 50,000 cases of respiratory infections linked to land and forest fires between July and August this year, according to data from its health ministry. Fires have been particularly intense across parts of Borneo, including West Kalimantan, generating substantial smoke emissions that have been transported to neighbouring countries, including Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines. “Indonesia has experienced a particularly intense start to its seasonal fires, with the number of fires and their emissions increasing rapidly since late July. This is unfolding against the backdrop of strong El Niño conditions, which can influence rainfall and intensify conditions across the region,” said Mark Parrington, Senior Scientist at Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS). European Union’s CAMS is closely tracking fire emissions from Indonesia and the transport of smoke across the region. Also read: El Niño Forecast to Be Strongest on Record, Threatening Extreme Weather Through 2027 Increased fire activity since July 2026 Indonesia recorded its highest August monthly total estimated emissions since at least 2003, contributing to the highest monthly fire emissions for Asia. The fire activity in Indonesia has increased since July this year, coinciding with the country’s dry season, which typically runs from late July to late October. Strong El Niño conditions, which tend to bring extreme weather events globally, have further intensified fire activity. Indonesia has recorded its highest August total estimated fire emissions in the past 24 years, resulting in large-scale transboundary haze. “Particularly notable is the scale of the transboundary haze, which is already significantly impacting air quality across Southeast Asia and could persist for several weeks if the fire emissions continue to increase, as would be expected through September into October. These fires demonstrate that wildfires are not a localised challenge – their impacts can extend hundreds of miles from the source,” Parrington said. The wildfire emissions significantly increase concentrations of fine particulate matter (PM2.5), one of the pollutants most harmful to human health, among many other toxic and harmful pollutants. Globally, wildfire emissions increased in August 2026, with smoke from fires in North America and Eurasia being transported as far as the Northern Hemisphere, including the Arctic. Image Credits: Fire Emissions Watch application, Copernicus, Copernicus/X. US Proposal to Eliminate PAHO Funding Raises Alarm Over Health Security in Americas 03/09/2026 Sophia Samantaroy PAHO headquarters in Washington, DC, in 2026. The US administration has called the organization “corrupt” as it proposes to eliminate funding. A group of senior national security and health officials contend that cutting funding to the regional health organization will cripple the Western hemisphere’s ability to defend itself against disease threats. The oldest multilateral health organization in the world, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), is fighting many of the same health threats it did at its founding in Washington, DC, some 120 years ago: vector-borne diseases such as dengue and Zika, new and emerging diseases like New World Screwworm, and recurring outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases like measles. But the organization now faces an unprecedented challenge: the potential loss of United States funding. Amid ongoing outbreaks across the Americas, the US President’s Fiscal Year 2027 budget request to Congress proposes eliminating funding to PAHO, calling it and the World Health Organization (WHO) “corrupt organizations” that show “no independence from inappropriate political influence”, part of a raft of international organisations it describes as promoting “dangerous ideologies” and “taking advantage of American generosity”. The US is the largest single contributor to PAHO and accounts for half of all member state contributions to the organization. The US already owes nearly $135 million in member fees since 2024. After slashing aid to global health programmes, US President Donald Trump and his administration have set their sights on PAHO, threatening to eliminate its funding and terminate a 124-year history of US cooperation with the organisation it helped found. Former national and health security officials, though, were quick to back PAHO as the “first line of defense” against diseases in the Western Hemisphere. “Destroying the institution – PAHO – that has protected us all is the worst idea circulating in Washington right now,” said Andrew Natsios, a Republican politician and humanitarian official under multiple administrations, in a statement to Health Policy Watch. “It is delusional to think we can stop disease at our borders. We can only manage these health crises through regional cooperation.” In response to unpaid US dues, PAHO, the WHO’s regional arm with 35 member states across the Americas, has adopted a 17% reduction in its upcoming budget. It has also established a cost-saving “Shared Services Hub”– an effort to consolidate and streamline core administrative functions from Washington headquarters to lower-cost locations, the organization said in a statement to Health Policy Watch. Across the organization, total positions are projected to drop from 1,042 during the 2024–2025 budget cycle to approximately 869 positions across 2026–2027. With USAID shuttered and the future of CDC regional offices unclear, PAHO remains one of the only presences in the region that could coordinate 35 member states across the Americas on issues of health security. Leading US national security officials decry defunding The Friends of PAHO, a bipartisan coalition of national and health security officials, voiced its deep support for the organization founded by the US some 124 years ago. Trump’s submitted budget mirrors last year’s turmoil in global health funding – deep slashes to programs that support maternal and child health, malaria and tuberculosis control, HIV/AIDS control, and neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). Congress may still appropriate funds, as advocated for by an open letter signed by the dozens of national security and health officials who served across Republican and Democratic administrations. “PAHO has an unmatched record of protecting health,” the more than 100 signatories write in the letter, which include former Army surgeon generals, Department of Defense officials, Health and Human Services secretaries, former members of Congress, White House officials, and ambassadors. They represent a new bipartisan coalition, the Friends of PAHO. “For 124 years, it has been one of the most effective health and disease prevention organizations operating anywhere in the world,” the letter states. “At a time when infectious disease threats continue to cross borders, we urge policymakers in Washington to reassert America’s commitment to health security in the Western Hemisphere and recognize PAHO’s essential role in safeguarding the American homeland.” PAHO targeted for decades-old scandal Cuban Mais Medicos doctors arrive in 2020 Martinique as part of a medical delegation to assist with COVID-19-related programs. The Trump Administration initially singled out PAHO in 2025 in a move to withhold funding from key international organizations. The concerns came after the Trump Administration alleged PAHO was mediating a forced labor scheme among Cuban doctors, as part of a Brazilian program Mais Medicos. The scheme, which took place over a decade ago, resulted in US sanctions against Cuba for forced labor of its doctors. The Brazilian health officials involved were also subject to sanctions. In the past year, however, the administration has dredged the issue to the forefront of its qualms with PAHO and succeeded in withholding $4.9 billion in previously appropriated foreign assistance through a controversial “pocket rescission” in September 2025, including $45 million earmarked for PAHO. Representative Carlos Gimenez (FL-28), who issued the call to action against PAHO’s immunity in August 2025, did not respond to a request for comment. However, it is not clear why the decade-old scandal has resurfaced as an issue for withholding contributions to PAHO. See related story: Pan American Health Organization Targeted in New Round of US Funding Cuts US owes over $135 million in assessed contributions PAHO has made a net -17% adjustment to its budget for the upcoming two years from $820 million in 2024-2025 to $762 million in 2026-2027. The US has not yet formally withdrawn from PAHO: it remains a member and continues to owe assessed contributions like several other countries. In fact, PAHO is the only multilateral health organization the US is a member of following last year’s withdrawal from the World Health Organization and other related organizations. US payments to PAHO have been delayed now for nearly two years, leaving the organization under increased pressure. Beyond funding, the US supports PAHO through staffing experts and providing technical advice in Washington. In a statement, PAHO said it has not been officially informed of a decision to eliminate funding to the organization. There have been several instances in which US Congress has ignored proposed funding cuts from the Office of Budget and Management (OMB), instead opting to support global aid across party lines. Indeed, several high-ranking Republican members of Congress and former officials have spoken out against a US withdrawal from global aid, and the ways the Administration has attempted to rescind funding. US Senator Susan Collins, Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, called the rescissions move “a clear violation of the law” and said that she “cannot support the cuts that are so deep and so damaging in global health programs,” in a Senate hearing with OMB chief Russel Vought. Natsios, whose career as a Republican politician and public servant spans five decades, echoed this sentiment, saying that “diseases, both human and animal, don’t need passports to travel across borders. The health crises of Latin America will become the health crises of the US and our crises will eventually travel to our southern neighbors. PAHO, for more than eight decades, has been the first line of defense against these crises.” For now, PAHO continues to coordinate responses to the devastating earthquakes in Colombia and Venezuela, surveil measles and dengue outbreaks, and monitor potential avian flu cases despite the budget cuts. A sudden break in a 120-year partnership The front page of a Washington-based newspaper documenting a meeting of delegates from the Americas to disucss public health. PAHO was founded in Washington, DC, in 1902 under President Theodore Roosevelt, making it the oldest such organization. The dire health consequences of the Spanish-American War in Cuba and the deadly yellow fever epidemics that struck American workers building the Panama Canal spurred Roosevelt to convene what was then called the International Sanitary Bureau in Washington, DC. The close ties between the US and PAHO predate those of any other health multilateral. “Until the late 1950s, the organization’s earliest directors were US health specialists,” said Katherine Bliss, director at CSIS Global Health Policy Center and an expert on Latin America. She notes that included former military doctors and leaders within the US Public Health Service. “PAHO was founded on US soil, by US leadership, and built on the conviction that American leadership in this hemisphere produces results,” the open letter calling to protect PAHO’s funding states. “For 124 years, the US has not only successfully engaged with PAHO but has been the moving force behind PAHO’s work that serves American interests and reflects American values.” “In this context, sustaining US leadership in PAHO is an America First strategy in practice,” it adds. Some 120 years later, spillovers in the Amazon Rainforest and ongoing dengue outbreaks mean that the original mission of PAHO is still as pertinent in protecting the US and the Western Hemisphere’s health security as it was last century. “Its founding purpose was unambiguously practical: protect American commerce and public health by controlling infectious disease in the hemisphere,” Friends of PAHO said. PAHO initially operated independently from the United Nations system with a mission of prompt data transmission and response coordination of sanitary conditions of seaports, maritime quarantines, and the control of infectious diseases–especially yellow fever. Then in 1949, PAHO became the independent regional arm of the World Health Organization, continuing to track, respond to, and even eradicate the most insidious diseases in the Americas. Victories despite ongoing outbreaks and emerging public health concerns Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) administering vaccines in Venezuela during an outbreak 2017-2019. PAHO’s elimination of polio, malaria, and smallpox in the region are all seen as major victories. Despite this, new and re-emerging threats continue to threaten the health of the Americas, Friends of PAHO warn. In particular, H5N1 avian influenza, dengue, chikungunya, and leishmaniasis are now circulating in the US. And an insect that carries a devastating disease afflicting cattle and other livestock, the New World Screwworm, has been identified in the US for the first time in six decades. Other concerns in the region include dengue, which the US has recently seen a surge of locally acquired cases in Florida, the loss of measles elimination status in several countries, and the looming threat of a supercharged El Niño season. “Our struggle with nature is both inherent and mandatory,” explained Stewart Simonson, a senior advisor at Global Health Strategies and a former WHO official, in reference to disease spillovers. “This requires multilateral action,” he said. Simonson, who also also served as a US Health and Human Services official during the Bush Administration coordinating public health emergency management following 9/11, pointed to the example of a measles outbreak in Caracas, Venezuela, in the late 2010s under then dictator Nicolás Maduro. “The outbreak was going nowhere but North,” Simonson said. It was only through PAHO-mediated response and a US-funded vaccination campaign that involved mobilizing over 20,000 vaccinators per month that the outbreak was suppressed – with PAHO serving as the intermediary between the US and Venezuela. In 2025 alone, PAHO’s regional surveillance system analyzed 2.1 million disease threat data points, detecting 157 public health events across the Americas, the organization said. Advancing economic and national security The USDA H5N1 dashboard. The virus is just one of many PAHO tracks and coordinates reposnse to across the Western Hemisphere. The issue of health security is largely a bipartisan one. Signatories of the open letter supporting PAHO point to how its programs protect American “troops and diplomats stationed throughout the hemisphere,” and Americans studying abroad and travelling. “It keeps American markets open for business,” it states. “A US withdrawal from PAHO would not leave a vacuum; it would leave an opening that strategic competitors are prepared to fill.” While the US has historically had strong bilateral relationships with countries in the region on health issues, these relationships depended on regional offices staffed by USAID, CDC, PEPFAR, and even the US Navy to promote cooperation across borders. Yet, “there are no longer USAID missions, and the future of the CDC country and regional offices is unclear,” Bliss pointed out. Without these key US presences in the region, PAHO is the only organization still able to bring countries together on health security issues. “If the US were to leave PAHO, it would be important to consider how difficult it would be to engage at a regional level on health and what it would take to put an alternative platform for communication and cooperation in place,” Bliss said. Despite the financial pressures, PAHO remains confident it can continue performing its core operations throughout the Americas. When asked about diversifying funding, the organization pointed to strengthened partnerships with Canada, Spain, the EU, the US CDC, the World Bank, and philanthropic groups, among others. In a statement, PAHO did note it “continues to encourage all Member States with outstanding contributions to fulfill their commitments.” “The world is uniquely dangerous biologically right now. It is not the time to disengage from PAHO,” Simonson said. Image Credits: S. Samantaroy, The White House, Friends of PAHO, Voice of America (VOA), PAHO/WHO, PAHO/WHO, WHO/PAHO, USDA. Ebola Outbreak ‘Still Evolving’ as Deaths Pass 3,000 03/09/2026 Stefan Anderson Cases and deaths continue to pile up at record speed as local and continental authorities race to get the ongoing DRC Ebola outbreak under control. More than 3,000 people have died in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Ebola Bundibugyo outbreak out of 6,250 confirmed cases, the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) said Thursday, as the virus kills nearly half of those it infects and outpaces efforts to contain it. “The numbers are telling the story,” Dr Wesam Mankula, lead of the Continental Incident Management Support Team, told reporters at Africa CDC’s weekly briefing. “This outbreak is still evolving.” At 16 weeks, the epidemic has spread over an area larger than the United Kingdom, France, and more than 35 African states. It is already the second largest Ebola outbreak in DRC’s history, and is on track to be the largest on record, with 6.5 times the caseload that the 2014 West Africa epidemic had at the same stage. Africa CDC reports that 89% of listed contacts are being followed up, but Mankula acknowledged the number of contacts actually being identified per case falls well short of the target. Each confirmed patient should generate a list of 40 to 60 people they may have exposed, but most lists are far shorter, meaning the vast majority of potential contacts are never traced. Adjusted for that shortfall, the effective contact tracing rate drops to just 19%, Mankula said. Reported cases and deaths at the 16-week mark compared with previous Ebola outbreaks. The current epidemic dwarfs all others in recorded history, sitting at 6.5× more cases and 5.0× more deaths than the next-highest comparator at the same point. Without adequate tracing, many patients are never identified until it is too late. That tracing shortfall continues to play out in affected provinces, with more than 60% of deaths in the past seven days occurring in the community, with people dying before they could be reached and referred to treatment. “This is highlighting the importance of pushing more community health workers, senior experts from the surveillance focusing on case investigation, to improve contact listing and contact tracing,” Mankula said. “Hopefully, with pushing more community health workers, we can see improvement in the community tracing.” Weekly confirmed cases peaked at 537 during the week of 10 August and have since dipped to 464 and 479, a 12% decline Mankula called a “plateau phase,” though he cautioned a similar plateau in June was followed by a surge. Four health zones have gone more than 42 days without new infections, the established international benchmark for interrupted transmission, and five more are in a control phase. But 51 health zones still have active transmission, and each infected person is still passing the virus to more than one other on average, meaning the outbreak continues to grow. “It’s very still very early to say we brought this outbreak under control,” Mankula said. The epidemic migrates into a warzone Nearly half of those infected by the Bundibugyo strain have died. Chart shows cumulative cases and deaths from May 15 to 1 September, the latest data available. Cases in Ituri province, the epicentre with more than 5,100 infections, fell 12% over the most recent three-week window. But as the outbreak appears to settle in Ituri, caseloads are accelerating elsewhere, Africa CDC officials said. North Kivu, where armed groups including M23 have displaced millions in an ongoing civil war, saw cases more than double and deaths rise 98% in the same period, with the highest case fatality rate of any affected province at 67.7%. Further north, in the remote and densely forested provinces of Haut-Uélé and Bas-Uélé bordering South Sudan and the Central African Republic, cases are surging too. Haut-Uélé cases nearly tripled in the most recent three-week window, and Bas-Uélé, the sixth province to be affected, is now reporting cases for the first time. The conflict has made some health zones inaccessible to international and government responders, as communities and armed groups refuse entry. Mankula said responders urgently need negotiated humanitarian corridors in order “to do their function, moving from one place to another, support active case search, contact identification, contact isolation, infection prevention control measures, expanding Ebola treatment centres in those affected zones.” Health workers in the crossfire Violence Against Ebola Responders Mounts in DRC as Red Cross Condemns Attacks Forty-seven healthcare workers have died from the virus out of 163 infected, according to Africa CDC briefing data presented Wednesday, up from the 43 deaths reported last week. Beyond the virus, workers face direct violence: the Red Cross has documented 11 violent incidents in the first 100 days of the outbreak, with volunteers attacked and ambulances set on fire by communities fuelled by mistrust and misinformation. Eight health workers have been killed in attacks as of 22 August, according to the UN’s senior Ebola coordinator. Health workers risking infection and violent assault have also faced months of delayed or missing pay, triggering repeated strikes since July. Asked about the delays, Prof Yap Boum, Africa CDC’s field manager in DRC, said the government had begun registering and paying workers in Bunya and Rampara. “It’s been a while since you have not heard about those strikes because the government have done two things,” Boum said. “One is to ensure that they can register the staff that are working, but also starting to pay them… at least all those that were working in treatment centre.” Boum said he expected payments to be completed by next week. Payment disputes have been a persistent obstacle to the response, and aid agencies have warned that sustained, timely compensation for frontline workers is essential to maintaining the workforce needed to contain the outbreak. Vaccines and therapeutics in the pipeline DRC Minister of Health Dr Roger Kamba (centre) receives the first consignment of the Ervebo vaccine at N’djili International Airport in Kinshasa on 21 August. No licensed vaccine or treatment exists for the Bundibugyo strain of the virus, leaving health workers and communities without the protection that helped bring previous Zaire Ebola outbreaks under control. Authorities are fast-tracking several candidates through clinical trials to try to close that gap, Africa CDC said. The Ervebo vaccine, effective against Zaire, is being deployed to frontline workers under compassionate use despite unproven efficacy against Bundibugyo. More than 1,100 healthcare workers have received it so far, and a solidarity trial is expected to begin in DRC within a week, Africa CDC reported. “The vaccine Ervebo is effective for the Zaire strain, but its efficacy against the recent strain, the Bundibugyo, has not been demonstrated yet,” said Prof Placid Mbala, Africa CDC’s Director of Research. “But we believe that we may see some cross-protection… this is why we are using the Ervebo vaccine mostly to also evaluate the impact of this vaccine during this outbreak, and also to conduct a kind of vaccine effectiveness and efficacy study in the field.” Phase one trials for vaccine candidates from Shaddock and Moderna are underway in the UK and Canada respectively, and Egypt’s Mina Pharma has received $16.5 million from CEPI to advance its own candidate. Two therapeutic trials are also progressing, Mbala said. A post-exposure prophylaxis trial, which is testing whether drugs given to contacts of confirmed cases can prevent them from developing the disease, has recruited 216 of a 400-person target. If effective, they would become a vital tool in slowing transmission by protecting people before they can be infected. A separate trial testing remdesivir and monoclonal antibodies in confirmed patients has enrolled 334 of 500. About 35 participants have so far reached the 28-day mark at which initial analysis can begin, with the first readouts expected by mid-September. “But I think with the first 100 participants, we won’t be able to see the efficacy of these different drugs,” Mbala said. The trial’s safety monitoring board will then determine whether to continue recruitment toward the full 500 or add further therapeutics. “It’s an adaptive protocol,” Mbala added. “We may add more therapeutics when they can be available.” Image Credits: MSF, DRC Health Ministry. El Niño Forecast to Be Strongest on Record, Threatening Extreme Weather Through 2027 03/09/2026 Disha Shetty The odds of El Niño persisting until February 2027 are near certain, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Countries around the world face higher risks of extreme weather events like floods, droughts and extreme heat as the ongoing El Niño intensifies and extends, with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) now assessing it will become the strongest in history. In its latest update, WMO assessed with 100% certainty that El Niño — the result of warming ocean temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific that affect weather extremes globally – will persist through February 2027, instead of the earlier projection of November 2026. “El Niño is being supersized before our eyes. The science leaves no room for doubt: the planet is in uncharted waters, and those waters are heating up,” said United Nations Secretary General António Guterres. “Sea surface temperatures are rising, temperatures keep climbing, and the world is in the danger zone of extreme weather.” This is also the first time that a WMO El Niño and La Niña update has been so unequivocal, reflecting the strong agreement within WMO’s extensive network. WMO’s update comes on the heels of devastating floods in Nepal that killed over 1,000 people. While El Niño is not linked to climate change, combined with the extreme weather events that climate change is already bringing, El Niño stands to compound the damage. “The race now is between rising risks and our commitment to take climate action and protect people,” Guterres said. “We must win that race.” Also read: Nepal’s Flood: Chilling Example of Climate Devastation Facing Developing Countries 2026 could surpass 2024 as the hottest year on record Celeste Saulo, WMO Secretary-General While both El Niño and La Niña occur naturally, the intensity of these phenomena can bring staggering devastation. “El Niño in Spanish means boy child – but it has the potential to deliver a massive blow to communities and economies across the world. We are already seeing disruption and devastation from droughts and floods, and we expect these impacts to increase as El Niño intensifies,” said WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo. She explained that the El Niño in the year 2023-24 resulted in 2024 being the hottest on record. The current El Niño could do something similar for the year 2026, Saulo said. “This exceptional El Niño demands exceptional preparation and response. Never before in the 50-year history of the World Meteorological Organization have we launched such a major mobilization with National Meteorological and Hydrological Services who are on the frontline of delivering the forecasts and services to save lives and livelihoods,” Saulo said. Exceptional ocean heat in the tropical Pacific Above-average temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean cause El Niño. Sea surface temperatures across the central-eastern equatorial Pacific, the region at the heart of El Niño, are already well above average – one of the tell-tale signs of El Niño – and are continuing to rise. The widely used Niño 3.4 index, which measures sea surface temperature anomalies in the central-eastern equatorial Pacific, has strengthened markedly from an average of +1.5 °C above normal during May-July 2026 and +2.0 °C above normal in July. Weekly values subsequently increased further between late July and mid-August, ranging from approximately +2.2 °C to +2.6 °C above average, indicating continued intensification. Even more exceptional warmth is present below the ocean surface. In some areas, subsurface ocean temperatures were more than 8°C above average during July and early August. Altogether, the surface and subsurface ocean conditions provide strong support for continued El Niño conditions and the potential for further strengthening during the coming months, the Update says. Different impacts in different places A very strong El Niño event increases the likelihood of major changes in rainfall, temperatures and atmospheric circulation across many regions of the world. However, the strength of an El Niño event alone does not determine how severe its impacts will be in any individual country or region. Its effects vary according to location and season and can be modified by other climate drivers, including conditions in the Indian and Atlantic Oceans. WMO said while extreme weather events are a certainty, it doesn’t have to mean destruction if countries prepare in advance and invest in early warning systems. “WMO is committed to working closely with partners across the United Nations and humanitarian system to provide the climate intelligence and insights needed to support disaster management and climate-sensitive sectors like agriculture, health, energy and water resources,” Saulo said. “We have no time to lose.” Image Credits: WMO, WMO. Who Should Lead the Global Fund? Let the Candidates Make Their Case 03/09/2026 Jirair Ratevosian The Global Fund’s board is searching for a replacement for current executive director Peter Sands (right), but concerns have been raised that its process has lacked transparency. Over the past week, the race for the next World Health Organisation (WHO) Director-General has started to take shape. Governments have publicly put forward prospective candidates, WHO is already listing them on a website, and some candidates are beginning to make their case publicly. Dr Hans Kluge has even released a manifesto laying out how he would lead the organization. And this is happening many months before the decision. WHO nominations do not even close until 24 September. The official candidate list will be published after the nomination period closes, followed by the first candidate web forum on 18 November, Executive Board consideration in January, another candidate forum in March, and finally the World Health Assembly vote in May of 2027. It is a long process, but it gives people time to hear the ideas, debate them and understand what each candidate actually wants to do with WHO. Meanwhile, The Global Fund, also in search of a new leader, has taken a very different approach. Rather than having candidates make their interest known publicly, the process will produce a pre-vetted shortlist of “four or five candidates” that is expected to reach its board in late September, just a month before it votes on 28-30 October. That one-month timetable leaves little room for the broader global health community to hear directly from the candidates or assess competing visions for the institution at a particularly consequential moment. Concerns about transparency Concerns about the transparency of the selection process were raised earlier this year by Sascha van Beek, a German parliamentarian, who questioned whether the process was sufficiently open and accountable. I too argued that The Global Fund is too important to treat this as just another executive search. The stakes are difficult to overstate. Since its creation in 2002, the Global Fund partnership has helped save 70 million lives and reduce the combined death rate from AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria by 63%. In 2024 alone, 25.6 million people were receiving antiretroviral therapy in countries where it invests, 7.4 million people were treated for tuberculosis and 162 million insecticide-treated mosquito nets were distributed. With nearly $70 billion disbursed across more than 100 countries, the choice of its next leader will shape disease programs and health systems around the world. Yet in July 2026, the Global Fund confirmed that the executive director selection process would continue as planned and on its existing timetable. As we wait for the Fund to announce the candidates, there is still an opportunity to open the process further. Doing so would not require reopening the search or delaying the board’s decision. Public candidate forum One way to do that is to hold a public candidate forum in October, with both in-person and virtual participation. It should be moderated by someone who understands the Fund and the different constituencies that make up its partnership. A forum would give more stakeholders with a vested interest in the Fund a substantive role before the board makes its decision. A forum would also force candidates to address the questions the Fund will face over the next decade. How should it approach new forms of financing? What role should artificial intelligence play? How should it support greater country ownership in the era of the Accra Reset? And what reforms will be needed as the global health landscape changes? The Global Fund can reasonably argue that its process already includes opportunities for engagement. Once the final shortlist is submitted in late September, candidates will attend a board retreat and then meet with board constituencies before the vote on 28-30 October. The board itself is unusually representative, with 20 voting seats divided equally between donor and implementer constituencies. Governments, civil society, communities affected by the three diseases, the private sector and foundations all have a formal role. That structure remains one of the Fund’s greatest strengths. But board engagement should not be the limit of the process. Board members are responsible for selecting the executive director, and that authority should remain with them. This is a public-interest decision, and greater openness can strengthen confidence in the Fund while building broader buy-in among donors, implementers, civil society and the communities it serves. The Global Fund’s own description of the job reinforces that point. The executive director is not simply managing the Secretariat. The person will be responsible for leading the institution through a period of major political and financial change. There is also an important precedent. Following concerns about the selection of its Director-General, WHO substantially revised its process ahead of the 2017 election. It introduced a code of conduct and candidate forums, with parts of the process made available to the public. WHO made the deliberate choice to create more space for candidates to explain how they would lead the organization and for member states and the wider community to hear from them before the election. The Fund describes itself not simply as an organization governed by a Board, but as a “worldwide partnership” of governments, communities, civil society, technical agencies and the private sector. A public candidate forum would be a simple way to put that principle into practice. Dr Jirair Ratevosian is a Research Scholar at the Duke Global Health Institute. He previously served on the board of the Global Fund. Past positions include acting chief of staff for PEPFAR, corporate social responsibility director for Gilead Sciences, and legislative director to US Congresswoman Barbara Lee. He holds a doctoral degree from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, an MPH from Boston University, and a BSc from the University of California, Los Angeles. Image Credits: Global Fund , Milken Institue. World Has No Realistic Path to Meet 1.5ºC Warming Target, UN Declares 02/09/2026 Stefan Anderson The world has missed its 1.5ºC target. The fight now turns to how far temperatures rise beyond it — and what can still be done to bring them back down. The world has failed to meet the Paris Agreement target of limiting global warming to 1.5ºC, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) declared on Wednesday. In a sprawling 141-page report, UNEP found there is no realistic pathway to prevent warming from exceeding the threshold. “The most stringent emission reduction pathways that were available around the time of the Paris Agreement are no longer feasible,” it states. The finding is the first by a UN agency to treat the 1.5ºC target as no longer within reach – and the math doesn’t give its authors much choice. To stay under 1.5ºC, total emissions from 2026 onward cannot exceed 130 billion tonnes of CO2. With current emissions at roughly 40 billion tonnes per year and still rising, that restriction will be breached in just three years. “Despite decades of scientific warnings, despite the growing scientific evidence, the resulting climate commitments have not produced sufficiently rapid emission reductions,” said Debra Roberts, a lead author and former co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group II. “Exceeding 1.5ºC is now unavoidable.” The report identifies just one pathway that would keep the world within its remaining carbon budget: global CO₂ emissions would have to fall steadily from 2025 to zero by 2031. Under current policies, the world is headed for 2.6C by century’s end. “All of our pathways forward are overshoot pathways,” Roberts added. “We are clearly entering uncharted territory.” With limiting the peak and length of the overshoot the last remaining option, UNEP is blunt: “This is by no means an acceptable or preferred pathway. It is simply the best remaining option.” ‘No good options’ above 1.5ºC UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen addresses reporters ahead of the report’s launch. While scientific projections have long assessed that remaining beneath this threshold would be impossible on current emissions trajectories, the change in language by UNEP is an historic break in climate diplomacy from the hope of Paris to the ongoing deadlock over the phase-out of fossil fuels set to continue in November at COP31. UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen, launching the findings at the end of a summer that saw Arctic temperatures soar to 32ºC, wildfires scorch Europe and the Americas, and sea-level rise threaten hundreds of millions of coastal residents, said the evidence demands immediate action. “Across the globe, extreme heat waves are already proving that climate change impacts will strike faster, hit harder, and last longer, costing more lives and causing deeper disruption,” Andersen said. “Obviously, we have climate procrastinated.” Crossing the 1.5ºC mark would bring an “intensification of extreme weather,” loss of small island states, and growing risks to human health, food and water security. “There are no good outcomes if we remain above 1.5ºC,” she said. With human-induced warming already nearing 1.4C and rising at around a quarter degree per decade, the World Meteorological Organization forecasts a three-in-four chance the 2026–2030 five-year mean will breach the Paris target. At current levels, roughly every five years of delay adds at least a tenth of a degree of global warming to the maximum level we will experience. “The future will bring many unknowns, but we do know that decisions taken now and in the next few years will determine if we have a chance of returning to 1.5ºC or below,” Andersen said. The report is the first in a series of major assessments in the run-up to the UN climate summit, COP31, in Antalya, Turkey, in November, where governments will again confront a deadlock over how quickly to phase out fossil fuels. For some observers, the report’s relative silence on the fuels driving the crisis – mentioned in passing just once in nearly 150 pages – is all the more striking as COP31 approaches. “Although UNEP does a good job of describing the hole we’ve dug ourselves into, it does a poor job of showing us that there is a way out,” said Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics, noting that the report only makes only a single passive reference to phasing out fossil fuels. “Ultimately the report’s neglect of some fundamentally important mitigation analysis risks turning it into a call to apathy rather than a call to arms,” Hare said. Fire, water, ice The planet’s frozen water is rapidly disappearing, threatening sea levels, freshwater supplies and climate stability. The report lands as the latest warning of the upheaval climate change is causing globally, and how much worse it might get. New threats to human health are already emerging. Rising temperatures are shifting vector-borne diseases to higher latitudes, increasing pathogen spillover risk, the report found. Food production could fall by 14% by 2050 under a high-emissions scenario, putting tens to hundreds of millions, concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Central America, at risk of malnutrition. Heat-related deaths during a 2025 European heatwave tripled, an increase attributed to global warming. Deadly heat seasons once expected every 100 years now arrive every 10 to 20 years. More than five billion people are projected to experience at least a month of extreme heat every year by 2050. Critical environmental systems that regulate the climate – storing carbon in forests, soils and frozen ground, or reflecting sunlight back into space – are also at risk of irreversible damage. Parts of the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet may already have crossed thresholds for irreversible ice loss. More than 40% of total global glacier loss since the 1970s has occurred in just the last decade, with global peak glacier extinction possible as early as 2041. More than 80% of tropical coral reefs bleached between 2023 and 2025, with warm-water corals now facing heat stress on a near-annual basis and “a low possibility” of surviving this century under any scenario. Essential carbon sinks like rainforests are facing die-off scenarios, with nearly 40% of the Amazon’s surface area at risk of disappearing by 2100. As damage mounts, returning to 1.5ºC – a major effort calculated in decades in a best-case scenario – does not constitute a rewind, the report stresses. Even if temperatures eventually fall, sea levels will continue rising, species driven to extinction will not return, and carbon released from thawing permafrost cannot simply be recovered. Ecosystems that collapse during overshoot cannot easily reassemble as temperatures fall. “The loss of biodiversity will weaken natural systems on which our lives and livelihoods depend, and will impact our ability to withdraw carbon from the atmosphere,” said Roberts. “Returning to 1.5ºC doesn’t mean we return to the same world we left,” Roberts added. ‘Collapse of habitability’ on low-lying islands Small developing island states are very vulnerable to the effects of climate change and rely on universal diplomatic processes to ensure they hold equal weight to major global powers. For small island developing states, the stakes are ones of life and death. The five to 10 centimetres of sea-level rise expected by 2050 is projected to double flooding across the Indian Ocean and tropical Pacific, supercharging storm surges, turning freshwater salty, and pushing floods deeper inland than at any point in history. For these nations, “the collapse of habitability has already begun,” the report warns. “This report is a fork-in-the-road moment for the planet. It is hard to overstate the depth of emotion for those of us living on the frontline after having fought so hard to put the 1.5 degree limit at the heart of the Paris Agreement,” said Palau President Surangel Whipps Jr. “It is a further glimpse into a perilous future that has already arrived.” “We need to see an urgent and unprecedented increase in political will and investment in a climate-safe future,” Whipps added. “Nobody can read this report and conclude otherwise.” For these low-lying nations, the threat is already here. But the consequences of remaining above 1.5ºC for an extended period will ultimately reach far beyond their shores. UNEP warns prolonged warming raises the risk of triggering irreversible tipping points in global systems, including the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, the Amazon rainforest and the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, a vital system of ocean currents that helps regulate temperatures across the Atlantic and Europe. Such changes could, the report warns, “reshape the world forever.” “Exceedance of 1.5°C should not be interpreted as safe or acceptable,” it states. Even if a return to below 1.5°C is secured — an outcome the report describes as “deeply uncertain” — “many nations and communities will face irreversible losses and permanently changed conditions.” The 1.8ºC ceiling Under UNEP’s most optimistic scenario – full implementation of all national climate plans plus all net-zero pledges – peak warming still reaches approximately 1.8C. Getting there requires roughly halving global emissions by 2035. “We’re really looking at 1.8ºC as being the kind of maximum, because the feasibility of the responses then becomes really, really questionable,” Roberts said. “You get a cascading effect from all the irreversible changes.” Wildfires weaken forest carbon stocks, drought reduces hydropower, heat degrades solar panel efficiency, and rising temperatures drive methane emissions from wetlands, eroding the systems the world would depend on to reverse warming. A decade of warming at the current rate, the report finds, could take 50 years to reverse even under optimistic assumptions. The lead for reducing emissions should fall on countries with “greater historical responsibility for climate change and capability to address it should act the hardest and fastest,” the report states. That tension – and the point advanced in the report that many advanced economies will need to go beyond net-zero to achieve net-negative emissions – is likely to resurface at COP31 in Antalya, Turkey, later this year, as oil-producing and high-income states fight calls to phase out fossil fuels. “This summer’s scorching heat, raging wildfires and deadly floods are a warning of what lies ahead,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said. “We must make the overshoot above 1.5 degrees as small and short as possible. That demands an overshoot of ambition.” Image Credits: Chris LeBoutiller, USGS, Unsplash/Ernests Vaga. Posts navigation Older posts
Indonesian Wildfires Cause Air Pollution Levels to Rise to Hazardous Levels in Southeast Asia 04/09/2026 Disha Shetty Forest fires are currently raging in Indonesia, affecting air quality across Southeast Asia. Millions of people in Southeast Asia are currently exposed to hazardous levels of air pollution as the large-scale haze caused by Indonesian wildfires crosses boundaries, leading to cancelled outdoor activities and school closures. Indonesia alone has recorded 50,000 cases of respiratory infections linked to land and forest fires between July and August this year, according to data from its health ministry. Fires have been particularly intense across parts of Borneo, including West Kalimantan, generating substantial smoke emissions that have been transported to neighbouring countries, including Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines. “Indonesia has experienced a particularly intense start to its seasonal fires, with the number of fires and their emissions increasing rapidly since late July. This is unfolding against the backdrop of strong El Niño conditions, which can influence rainfall and intensify conditions across the region,” said Mark Parrington, Senior Scientist at Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS). European Union’s CAMS is closely tracking fire emissions from Indonesia and the transport of smoke across the region. Also read: El Niño Forecast to Be Strongest on Record, Threatening Extreme Weather Through 2027 Increased fire activity since July 2026 Indonesia recorded its highest August monthly total estimated emissions since at least 2003, contributing to the highest monthly fire emissions for Asia. The fire activity in Indonesia has increased since July this year, coinciding with the country’s dry season, which typically runs from late July to late October. Strong El Niño conditions, which tend to bring extreme weather events globally, have further intensified fire activity. Indonesia has recorded its highest August total estimated fire emissions in the past 24 years, resulting in large-scale transboundary haze. “Particularly notable is the scale of the transboundary haze, which is already significantly impacting air quality across Southeast Asia and could persist for several weeks if the fire emissions continue to increase, as would be expected through September into October. These fires demonstrate that wildfires are not a localised challenge – their impacts can extend hundreds of miles from the source,” Parrington said. The wildfire emissions significantly increase concentrations of fine particulate matter (PM2.5), one of the pollutants most harmful to human health, among many other toxic and harmful pollutants. Globally, wildfire emissions increased in August 2026, with smoke from fires in North America and Eurasia being transported as far as the Northern Hemisphere, including the Arctic. Image Credits: Fire Emissions Watch application, Copernicus, Copernicus/X. US Proposal to Eliminate PAHO Funding Raises Alarm Over Health Security in Americas 03/09/2026 Sophia Samantaroy PAHO headquarters in Washington, DC, in 2026. The US administration has called the organization “corrupt” as it proposes to eliminate funding. A group of senior national security and health officials contend that cutting funding to the regional health organization will cripple the Western hemisphere’s ability to defend itself against disease threats. The oldest multilateral health organization in the world, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), is fighting many of the same health threats it did at its founding in Washington, DC, some 120 years ago: vector-borne diseases such as dengue and Zika, new and emerging diseases like New World Screwworm, and recurring outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases like measles. But the organization now faces an unprecedented challenge: the potential loss of United States funding. Amid ongoing outbreaks across the Americas, the US President’s Fiscal Year 2027 budget request to Congress proposes eliminating funding to PAHO, calling it and the World Health Organization (WHO) “corrupt organizations” that show “no independence from inappropriate political influence”, part of a raft of international organisations it describes as promoting “dangerous ideologies” and “taking advantage of American generosity”. The US is the largest single contributor to PAHO and accounts for half of all member state contributions to the organization. The US already owes nearly $135 million in member fees since 2024. After slashing aid to global health programmes, US President Donald Trump and his administration have set their sights on PAHO, threatening to eliminate its funding and terminate a 124-year history of US cooperation with the organisation it helped found. Former national and health security officials, though, were quick to back PAHO as the “first line of defense” against diseases in the Western Hemisphere. “Destroying the institution – PAHO – that has protected us all is the worst idea circulating in Washington right now,” said Andrew Natsios, a Republican politician and humanitarian official under multiple administrations, in a statement to Health Policy Watch. “It is delusional to think we can stop disease at our borders. We can only manage these health crises through regional cooperation.” In response to unpaid US dues, PAHO, the WHO’s regional arm with 35 member states across the Americas, has adopted a 17% reduction in its upcoming budget. It has also established a cost-saving “Shared Services Hub”– an effort to consolidate and streamline core administrative functions from Washington headquarters to lower-cost locations, the organization said in a statement to Health Policy Watch. Across the organization, total positions are projected to drop from 1,042 during the 2024–2025 budget cycle to approximately 869 positions across 2026–2027. With USAID shuttered and the future of CDC regional offices unclear, PAHO remains one of the only presences in the region that could coordinate 35 member states across the Americas on issues of health security. Leading US national security officials decry defunding The Friends of PAHO, a bipartisan coalition of national and health security officials, voiced its deep support for the organization founded by the US some 124 years ago. Trump’s submitted budget mirrors last year’s turmoil in global health funding – deep slashes to programs that support maternal and child health, malaria and tuberculosis control, HIV/AIDS control, and neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). Congress may still appropriate funds, as advocated for by an open letter signed by the dozens of national security and health officials who served across Republican and Democratic administrations. “PAHO has an unmatched record of protecting health,” the more than 100 signatories write in the letter, which include former Army surgeon generals, Department of Defense officials, Health and Human Services secretaries, former members of Congress, White House officials, and ambassadors. They represent a new bipartisan coalition, the Friends of PAHO. “For 124 years, it has been one of the most effective health and disease prevention organizations operating anywhere in the world,” the letter states. “At a time when infectious disease threats continue to cross borders, we urge policymakers in Washington to reassert America’s commitment to health security in the Western Hemisphere and recognize PAHO’s essential role in safeguarding the American homeland.” PAHO targeted for decades-old scandal Cuban Mais Medicos doctors arrive in 2020 Martinique as part of a medical delegation to assist with COVID-19-related programs. The Trump Administration initially singled out PAHO in 2025 in a move to withhold funding from key international organizations. The concerns came after the Trump Administration alleged PAHO was mediating a forced labor scheme among Cuban doctors, as part of a Brazilian program Mais Medicos. The scheme, which took place over a decade ago, resulted in US sanctions against Cuba for forced labor of its doctors. The Brazilian health officials involved were also subject to sanctions. In the past year, however, the administration has dredged the issue to the forefront of its qualms with PAHO and succeeded in withholding $4.9 billion in previously appropriated foreign assistance through a controversial “pocket rescission” in September 2025, including $45 million earmarked for PAHO. Representative Carlos Gimenez (FL-28), who issued the call to action against PAHO’s immunity in August 2025, did not respond to a request for comment. However, it is not clear why the decade-old scandal has resurfaced as an issue for withholding contributions to PAHO. See related story: Pan American Health Organization Targeted in New Round of US Funding Cuts US owes over $135 million in assessed contributions PAHO has made a net -17% adjustment to its budget for the upcoming two years from $820 million in 2024-2025 to $762 million in 2026-2027. The US has not yet formally withdrawn from PAHO: it remains a member and continues to owe assessed contributions like several other countries. In fact, PAHO is the only multilateral health organization the US is a member of following last year’s withdrawal from the World Health Organization and other related organizations. US payments to PAHO have been delayed now for nearly two years, leaving the organization under increased pressure. Beyond funding, the US supports PAHO through staffing experts and providing technical advice in Washington. In a statement, PAHO said it has not been officially informed of a decision to eliminate funding to the organization. There have been several instances in which US Congress has ignored proposed funding cuts from the Office of Budget and Management (OMB), instead opting to support global aid across party lines. Indeed, several high-ranking Republican members of Congress and former officials have spoken out against a US withdrawal from global aid, and the ways the Administration has attempted to rescind funding. US Senator Susan Collins, Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, called the rescissions move “a clear violation of the law” and said that she “cannot support the cuts that are so deep and so damaging in global health programs,” in a Senate hearing with OMB chief Russel Vought. Natsios, whose career as a Republican politician and public servant spans five decades, echoed this sentiment, saying that “diseases, both human and animal, don’t need passports to travel across borders. The health crises of Latin America will become the health crises of the US and our crises will eventually travel to our southern neighbors. PAHO, for more than eight decades, has been the first line of defense against these crises.” For now, PAHO continues to coordinate responses to the devastating earthquakes in Colombia and Venezuela, surveil measles and dengue outbreaks, and monitor potential avian flu cases despite the budget cuts. A sudden break in a 120-year partnership The front page of a Washington-based newspaper documenting a meeting of delegates from the Americas to disucss public health. PAHO was founded in Washington, DC, in 1902 under President Theodore Roosevelt, making it the oldest such organization. The dire health consequences of the Spanish-American War in Cuba and the deadly yellow fever epidemics that struck American workers building the Panama Canal spurred Roosevelt to convene what was then called the International Sanitary Bureau in Washington, DC. The close ties between the US and PAHO predate those of any other health multilateral. “Until the late 1950s, the organization’s earliest directors were US health specialists,” said Katherine Bliss, director at CSIS Global Health Policy Center and an expert on Latin America. She notes that included former military doctors and leaders within the US Public Health Service. “PAHO was founded on US soil, by US leadership, and built on the conviction that American leadership in this hemisphere produces results,” the open letter calling to protect PAHO’s funding states. “For 124 years, the US has not only successfully engaged with PAHO but has been the moving force behind PAHO’s work that serves American interests and reflects American values.” “In this context, sustaining US leadership in PAHO is an America First strategy in practice,” it adds. Some 120 years later, spillovers in the Amazon Rainforest and ongoing dengue outbreaks mean that the original mission of PAHO is still as pertinent in protecting the US and the Western Hemisphere’s health security as it was last century. “Its founding purpose was unambiguously practical: protect American commerce and public health by controlling infectious disease in the hemisphere,” Friends of PAHO said. PAHO initially operated independently from the United Nations system with a mission of prompt data transmission and response coordination of sanitary conditions of seaports, maritime quarantines, and the control of infectious diseases–especially yellow fever. Then in 1949, PAHO became the independent regional arm of the World Health Organization, continuing to track, respond to, and even eradicate the most insidious diseases in the Americas. Victories despite ongoing outbreaks and emerging public health concerns Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) administering vaccines in Venezuela during an outbreak 2017-2019. PAHO’s elimination of polio, malaria, and smallpox in the region are all seen as major victories. Despite this, new and re-emerging threats continue to threaten the health of the Americas, Friends of PAHO warn. In particular, H5N1 avian influenza, dengue, chikungunya, and leishmaniasis are now circulating in the US. And an insect that carries a devastating disease afflicting cattle and other livestock, the New World Screwworm, has been identified in the US for the first time in six decades. Other concerns in the region include dengue, which the US has recently seen a surge of locally acquired cases in Florida, the loss of measles elimination status in several countries, and the looming threat of a supercharged El Niño season. “Our struggle with nature is both inherent and mandatory,” explained Stewart Simonson, a senior advisor at Global Health Strategies and a former WHO official, in reference to disease spillovers. “This requires multilateral action,” he said. Simonson, who also also served as a US Health and Human Services official during the Bush Administration coordinating public health emergency management following 9/11, pointed to the example of a measles outbreak in Caracas, Venezuela, in the late 2010s under then dictator Nicolás Maduro. “The outbreak was going nowhere but North,” Simonson said. It was only through PAHO-mediated response and a US-funded vaccination campaign that involved mobilizing over 20,000 vaccinators per month that the outbreak was suppressed – with PAHO serving as the intermediary between the US and Venezuela. In 2025 alone, PAHO’s regional surveillance system analyzed 2.1 million disease threat data points, detecting 157 public health events across the Americas, the organization said. Advancing economic and national security The USDA H5N1 dashboard. The virus is just one of many PAHO tracks and coordinates reposnse to across the Western Hemisphere. The issue of health security is largely a bipartisan one. Signatories of the open letter supporting PAHO point to how its programs protect American “troops and diplomats stationed throughout the hemisphere,” and Americans studying abroad and travelling. “It keeps American markets open for business,” it states. “A US withdrawal from PAHO would not leave a vacuum; it would leave an opening that strategic competitors are prepared to fill.” While the US has historically had strong bilateral relationships with countries in the region on health issues, these relationships depended on regional offices staffed by USAID, CDC, PEPFAR, and even the US Navy to promote cooperation across borders. Yet, “there are no longer USAID missions, and the future of the CDC country and regional offices is unclear,” Bliss pointed out. Without these key US presences in the region, PAHO is the only organization still able to bring countries together on health security issues. “If the US were to leave PAHO, it would be important to consider how difficult it would be to engage at a regional level on health and what it would take to put an alternative platform for communication and cooperation in place,” Bliss said. Despite the financial pressures, PAHO remains confident it can continue performing its core operations throughout the Americas. When asked about diversifying funding, the organization pointed to strengthened partnerships with Canada, Spain, the EU, the US CDC, the World Bank, and philanthropic groups, among others. In a statement, PAHO did note it “continues to encourage all Member States with outstanding contributions to fulfill their commitments.” “The world is uniquely dangerous biologically right now. It is not the time to disengage from PAHO,” Simonson said. Image Credits: S. Samantaroy, The White House, Friends of PAHO, Voice of America (VOA), PAHO/WHO, PAHO/WHO, WHO/PAHO, USDA. Ebola Outbreak ‘Still Evolving’ as Deaths Pass 3,000 03/09/2026 Stefan Anderson Cases and deaths continue to pile up at record speed as local and continental authorities race to get the ongoing DRC Ebola outbreak under control. More than 3,000 people have died in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Ebola Bundibugyo outbreak out of 6,250 confirmed cases, the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) said Thursday, as the virus kills nearly half of those it infects and outpaces efforts to contain it. “The numbers are telling the story,” Dr Wesam Mankula, lead of the Continental Incident Management Support Team, told reporters at Africa CDC’s weekly briefing. “This outbreak is still evolving.” At 16 weeks, the epidemic has spread over an area larger than the United Kingdom, France, and more than 35 African states. It is already the second largest Ebola outbreak in DRC’s history, and is on track to be the largest on record, with 6.5 times the caseload that the 2014 West Africa epidemic had at the same stage. Africa CDC reports that 89% of listed contacts are being followed up, but Mankula acknowledged the number of contacts actually being identified per case falls well short of the target. Each confirmed patient should generate a list of 40 to 60 people they may have exposed, but most lists are far shorter, meaning the vast majority of potential contacts are never traced. Adjusted for that shortfall, the effective contact tracing rate drops to just 19%, Mankula said. Reported cases and deaths at the 16-week mark compared with previous Ebola outbreaks. The current epidemic dwarfs all others in recorded history, sitting at 6.5× more cases and 5.0× more deaths than the next-highest comparator at the same point. Without adequate tracing, many patients are never identified until it is too late. That tracing shortfall continues to play out in affected provinces, with more than 60% of deaths in the past seven days occurring in the community, with people dying before they could be reached and referred to treatment. “This is highlighting the importance of pushing more community health workers, senior experts from the surveillance focusing on case investigation, to improve contact listing and contact tracing,” Mankula said. “Hopefully, with pushing more community health workers, we can see improvement in the community tracing.” Weekly confirmed cases peaked at 537 during the week of 10 August and have since dipped to 464 and 479, a 12% decline Mankula called a “plateau phase,” though he cautioned a similar plateau in June was followed by a surge. Four health zones have gone more than 42 days without new infections, the established international benchmark for interrupted transmission, and five more are in a control phase. But 51 health zones still have active transmission, and each infected person is still passing the virus to more than one other on average, meaning the outbreak continues to grow. “It’s very still very early to say we brought this outbreak under control,” Mankula said. The epidemic migrates into a warzone Nearly half of those infected by the Bundibugyo strain have died. Chart shows cumulative cases and deaths from May 15 to 1 September, the latest data available. Cases in Ituri province, the epicentre with more than 5,100 infections, fell 12% over the most recent three-week window. But as the outbreak appears to settle in Ituri, caseloads are accelerating elsewhere, Africa CDC officials said. North Kivu, where armed groups including M23 have displaced millions in an ongoing civil war, saw cases more than double and deaths rise 98% in the same period, with the highest case fatality rate of any affected province at 67.7%. Further north, in the remote and densely forested provinces of Haut-Uélé and Bas-Uélé bordering South Sudan and the Central African Republic, cases are surging too. Haut-Uélé cases nearly tripled in the most recent three-week window, and Bas-Uélé, the sixth province to be affected, is now reporting cases for the first time. The conflict has made some health zones inaccessible to international and government responders, as communities and armed groups refuse entry. Mankula said responders urgently need negotiated humanitarian corridors in order “to do their function, moving from one place to another, support active case search, contact identification, contact isolation, infection prevention control measures, expanding Ebola treatment centres in those affected zones.” Health workers in the crossfire Violence Against Ebola Responders Mounts in DRC as Red Cross Condemns Attacks Forty-seven healthcare workers have died from the virus out of 163 infected, according to Africa CDC briefing data presented Wednesday, up from the 43 deaths reported last week. Beyond the virus, workers face direct violence: the Red Cross has documented 11 violent incidents in the first 100 days of the outbreak, with volunteers attacked and ambulances set on fire by communities fuelled by mistrust and misinformation. Eight health workers have been killed in attacks as of 22 August, according to the UN’s senior Ebola coordinator. Health workers risking infection and violent assault have also faced months of delayed or missing pay, triggering repeated strikes since July. Asked about the delays, Prof Yap Boum, Africa CDC’s field manager in DRC, said the government had begun registering and paying workers in Bunya and Rampara. “It’s been a while since you have not heard about those strikes because the government have done two things,” Boum said. “One is to ensure that they can register the staff that are working, but also starting to pay them… at least all those that were working in treatment centre.” Boum said he expected payments to be completed by next week. Payment disputes have been a persistent obstacle to the response, and aid agencies have warned that sustained, timely compensation for frontline workers is essential to maintaining the workforce needed to contain the outbreak. Vaccines and therapeutics in the pipeline DRC Minister of Health Dr Roger Kamba (centre) receives the first consignment of the Ervebo vaccine at N’djili International Airport in Kinshasa on 21 August. No licensed vaccine or treatment exists for the Bundibugyo strain of the virus, leaving health workers and communities without the protection that helped bring previous Zaire Ebola outbreaks under control. Authorities are fast-tracking several candidates through clinical trials to try to close that gap, Africa CDC said. The Ervebo vaccine, effective against Zaire, is being deployed to frontline workers under compassionate use despite unproven efficacy against Bundibugyo. More than 1,100 healthcare workers have received it so far, and a solidarity trial is expected to begin in DRC within a week, Africa CDC reported. “The vaccine Ervebo is effective for the Zaire strain, but its efficacy against the recent strain, the Bundibugyo, has not been demonstrated yet,” said Prof Placid Mbala, Africa CDC’s Director of Research. “But we believe that we may see some cross-protection… this is why we are using the Ervebo vaccine mostly to also evaluate the impact of this vaccine during this outbreak, and also to conduct a kind of vaccine effectiveness and efficacy study in the field.” Phase one trials for vaccine candidates from Shaddock and Moderna are underway in the UK and Canada respectively, and Egypt’s Mina Pharma has received $16.5 million from CEPI to advance its own candidate. Two therapeutic trials are also progressing, Mbala said. A post-exposure prophylaxis trial, which is testing whether drugs given to contacts of confirmed cases can prevent them from developing the disease, has recruited 216 of a 400-person target. If effective, they would become a vital tool in slowing transmission by protecting people before they can be infected. A separate trial testing remdesivir and monoclonal antibodies in confirmed patients has enrolled 334 of 500. About 35 participants have so far reached the 28-day mark at which initial analysis can begin, with the first readouts expected by mid-September. “But I think with the first 100 participants, we won’t be able to see the efficacy of these different drugs,” Mbala said. The trial’s safety monitoring board will then determine whether to continue recruitment toward the full 500 or add further therapeutics. “It’s an adaptive protocol,” Mbala added. “We may add more therapeutics when they can be available.” Image Credits: MSF, DRC Health Ministry. El Niño Forecast to Be Strongest on Record, Threatening Extreme Weather Through 2027 03/09/2026 Disha Shetty The odds of El Niño persisting until February 2027 are near certain, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Countries around the world face higher risks of extreme weather events like floods, droughts and extreme heat as the ongoing El Niño intensifies and extends, with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) now assessing it will become the strongest in history. In its latest update, WMO assessed with 100% certainty that El Niño — the result of warming ocean temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific that affect weather extremes globally – will persist through February 2027, instead of the earlier projection of November 2026. “El Niño is being supersized before our eyes. The science leaves no room for doubt: the planet is in uncharted waters, and those waters are heating up,” said United Nations Secretary General António Guterres. “Sea surface temperatures are rising, temperatures keep climbing, and the world is in the danger zone of extreme weather.” This is also the first time that a WMO El Niño and La Niña update has been so unequivocal, reflecting the strong agreement within WMO’s extensive network. WMO’s update comes on the heels of devastating floods in Nepal that killed over 1,000 people. While El Niño is not linked to climate change, combined with the extreme weather events that climate change is already bringing, El Niño stands to compound the damage. “The race now is between rising risks and our commitment to take climate action and protect people,” Guterres said. “We must win that race.” Also read: Nepal’s Flood: Chilling Example of Climate Devastation Facing Developing Countries 2026 could surpass 2024 as the hottest year on record Celeste Saulo, WMO Secretary-General While both El Niño and La Niña occur naturally, the intensity of these phenomena can bring staggering devastation. “El Niño in Spanish means boy child – but it has the potential to deliver a massive blow to communities and economies across the world. We are already seeing disruption and devastation from droughts and floods, and we expect these impacts to increase as El Niño intensifies,” said WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo. She explained that the El Niño in the year 2023-24 resulted in 2024 being the hottest on record. The current El Niño could do something similar for the year 2026, Saulo said. “This exceptional El Niño demands exceptional preparation and response. Never before in the 50-year history of the World Meteorological Organization have we launched such a major mobilization with National Meteorological and Hydrological Services who are on the frontline of delivering the forecasts and services to save lives and livelihoods,” Saulo said. Exceptional ocean heat in the tropical Pacific Above-average temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean cause El Niño. Sea surface temperatures across the central-eastern equatorial Pacific, the region at the heart of El Niño, are already well above average – one of the tell-tale signs of El Niño – and are continuing to rise. The widely used Niño 3.4 index, which measures sea surface temperature anomalies in the central-eastern equatorial Pacific, has strengthened markedly from an average of +1.5 °C above normal during May-July 2026 and +2.0 °C above normal in July. Weekly values subsequently increased further between late July and mid-August, ranging from approximately +2.2 °C to +2.6 °C above average, indicating continued intensification. Even more exceptional warmth is present below the ocean surface. In some areas, subsurface ocean temperatures were more than 8°C above average during July and early August. Altogether, the surface and subsurface ocean conditions provide strong support for continued El Niño conditions and the potential for further strengthening during the coming months, the Update says. Different impacts in different places A very strong El Niño event increases the likelihood of major changes in rainfall, temperatures and atmospheric circulation across many regions of the world. However, the strength of an El Niño event alone does not determine how severe its impacts will be in any individual country or region. Its effects vary according to location and season and can be modified by other climate drivers, including conditions in the Indian and Atlantic Oceans. WMO said while extreme weather events are a certainty, it doesn’t have to mean destruction if countries prepare in advance and invest in early warning systems. “WMO is committed to working closely with partners across the United Nations and humanitarian system to provide the climate intelligence and insights needed to support disaster management and climate-sensitive sectors like agriculture, health, energy and water resources,” Saulo said. “We have no time to lose.” Image Credits: WMO, WMO. Who Should Lead the Global Fund? Let the Candidates Make Their Case 03/09/2026 Jirair Ratevosian The Global Fund’s board is searching for a replacement for current executive director Peter Sands (right), but concerns have been raised that its process has lacked transparency. Over the past week, the race for the next World Health Organisation (WHO) Director-General has started to take shape. Governments have publicly put forward prospective candidates, WHO is already listing them on a website, and some candidates are beginning to make their case publicly. Dr Hans Kluge has even released a manifesto laying out how he would lead the organization. And this is happening many months before the decision. WHO nominations do not even close until 24 September. The official candidate list will be published after the nomination period closes, followed by the first candidate web forum on 18 November, Executive Board consideration in January, another candidate forum in March, and finally the World Health Assembly vote in May of 2027. It is a long process, but it gives people time to hear the ideas, debate them and understand what each candidate actually wants to do with WHO. Meanwhile, The Global Fund, also in search of a new leader, has taken a very different approach. Rather than having candidates make their interest known publicly, the process will produce a pre-vetted shortlist of “four or five candidates” that is expected to reach its board in late September, just a month before it votes on 28-30 October. That one-month timetable leaves little room for the broader global health community to hear directly from the candidates or assess competing visions for the institution at a particularly consequential moment. Concerns about transparency Concerns about the transparency of the selection process were raised earlier this year by Sascha van Beek, a German parliamentarian, who questioned whether the process was sufficiently open and accountable. I too argued that The Global Fund is too important to treat this as just another executive search. The stakes are difficult to overstate. Since its creation in 2002, the Global Fund partnership has helped save 70 million lives and reduce the combined death rate from AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria by 63%. In 2024 alone, 25.6 million people were receiving antiretroviral therapy in countries where it invests, 7.4 million people were treated for tuberculosis and 162 million insecticide-treated mosquito nets were distributed. With nearly $70 billion disbursed across more than 100 countries, the choice of its next leader will shape disease programs and health systems around the world. Yet in July 2026, the Global Fund confirmed that the executive director selection process would continue as planned and on its existing timetable. As we wait for the Fund to announce the candidates, there is still an opportunity to open the process further. Doing so would not require reopening the search or delaying the board’s decision. Public candidate forum One way to do that is to hold a public candidate forum in October, with both in-person and virtual participation. It should be moderated by someone who understands the Fund and the different constituencies that make up its partnership. A forum would give more stakeholders with a vested interest in the Fund a substantive role before the board makes its decision. A forum would also force candidates to address the questions the Fund will face over the next decade. How should it approach new forms of financing? What role should artificial intelligence play? How should it support greater country ownership in the era of the Accra Reset? And what reforms will be needed as the global health landscape changes? The Global Fund can reasonably argue that its process already includes opportunities for engagement. Once the final shortlist is submitted in late September, candidates will attend a board retreat and then meet with board constituencies before the vote on 28-30 October. The board itself is unusually representative, with 20 voting seats divided equally between donor and implementer constituencies. Governments, civil society, communities affected by the three diseases, the private sector and foundations all have a formal role. That structure remains one of the Fund’s greatest strengths. But board engagement should not be the limit of the process. Board members are responsible for selecting the executive director, and that authority should remain with them. This is a public-interest decision, and greater openness can strengthen confidence in the Fund while building broader buy-in among donors, implementers, civil society and the communities it serves. The Global Fund’s own description of the job reinforces that point. The executive director is not simply managing the Secretariat. The person will be responsible for leading the institution through a period of major political and financial change. There is also an important precedent. Following concerns about the selection of its Director-General, WHO substantially revised its process ahead of the 2017 election. It introduced a code of conduct and candidate forums, with parts of the process made available to the public. WHO made the deliberate choice to create more space for candidates to explain how they would lead the organization and for member states and the wider community to hear from them before the election. The Fund describes itself not simply as an organization governed by a Board, but as a “worldwide partnership” of governments, communities, civil society, technical agencies and the private sector. A public candidate forum would be a simple way to put that principle into practice. Dr Jirair Ratevosian is a Research Scholar at the Duke Global Health Institute. He previously served on the board of the Global Fund. Past positions include acting chief of staff for PEPFAR, corporate social responsibility director for Gilead Sciences, and legislative director to US Congresswoman Barbara Lee. He holds a doctoral degree from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, an MPH from Boston University, and a BSc from the University of California, Los Angeles. Image Credits: Global Fund , Milken Institue. World Has No Realistic Path to Meet 1.5ºC Warming Target, UN Declares 02/09/2026 Stefan Anderson The world has missed its 1.5ºC target. The fight now turns to how far temperatures rise beyond it — and what can still be done to bring them back down. The world has failed to meet the Paris Agreement target of limiting global warming to 1.5ºC, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) declared on Wednesday. In a sprawling 141-page report, UNEP found there is no realistic pathway to prevent warming from exceeding the threshold. “The most stringent emission reduction pathways that were available around the time of the Paris Agreement are no longer feasible,” it states. The finding is the first by a UN agency to treat the 1.5ºC target as no longer within reach – and the math doesn’t give its authors much choice. To stay under 1.5ºC, total emissions from 2026 onward cannot exceed 130 billion tonnes of CO2. With current emissions at roughly 40 billion tonnes per year and still rising, that restriction will be breached in just three years. “Despite decades of scientific warnings, despite the growing scientific evidence, the resulting climate commitments have not produced sufficiently rapid emission reductions,” said Debra Roberts, a lead author and former co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group II. “Exceeding 1.5ºC is now unavoidable.” The report identifies just one pathway that would keep the world within its remaining carbon budget: global CO₂ emissions would have to fall steadily from 2025 to zero by 2031. Under current policies, the world is headed for 2.6C by century’s end. “All of our pathways forward are overshoot pathways,” Roberts added. “We are clearly entering uncharted territory.” With limiting the peak and length of the overshoot the last remaining option, UNEP is blunt: “This is by no means an acceptable or preferred pathway. It is simply the best remaining option.” ‘No good options’ above 1.5ºC UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen addresses reporters ahead of the report’s launch. While scientific projections have long assessed that remaining beneath this threshold would be impossible on current emissions trajectories, the change in language by UNEP is an historic break in climate diplomacy from the hope of Paris to the ongoing deadlock over the phase-out of fossil fuels set to continue in November at COP31. UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen, launching the findings at the end of a summer that saw Arctic temperatures soar to 32ºC, wildfires scorch Europe and the Americas, and sea-level rise threaten hundreds of millions of coastal residents, said the evidence demands immediate action. “Across the globe, extreme heat waves are already proving that climate change impacts will strike faster, hit harder, and last longer, costing more lives and causing deeper disruption,” Andersen said. “Obviously, we have climate procrastinated.” Crossing the 1.5ºC mark would bring an “intensification of extreme weather,” loss of small island states, and growing risks to human health, food and water security. “There are no good outcomes if we remain above 1.5ºC,” she said. With human-induced warming already nearing 1.4C and rising at around a quarter degree per decade, the World Meteorological Organization forecasts a three-in-four chance the 2026–2030 five-year mean will breach the Paris target. At current levels, roughly every five years of delay adds at least a tenth of a degree of global warming to the maximum level we will experience. “The future will bring many unknowns, but we do know that decisions taken now and in the next few years will determine if we have a chance of returning to 1.5ºC or below,” Andersen said. The report is the first in a series of major assessments in the run-up to the UN climate summit, COP31, in Antalya, Turkey, in November, where governments will again confront a deadlock over how quickly to phase out fossil fuels. For some observers, the report’s relative silence on the fuels driving the crisis – mentioned in passing just once in nearly 150 pages – is all the more striking as COP31 approaches. “Although UNEP does a good job of describing the hole we’ve dug ourselves into, it does a poor job of showing us that there is a way out,” said Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics, noting that the report only makes only a single passive reference to phasing out fossil fuels. “Ultimately the report’s neglect of some fundamentally important mitigation analysis risks turning it into a call to apathy rather than a call to arms,” Hare said. Fire, water, ice The planet’s frozen water is rapidly disappearing, threatening sea levels, freshwater supplies and climate stability. The report lands as the latest warning of the upheaval climate change is causing globally, and how much worse it might get. New threats to human health are already emerging. Rising temperatures are shifting vector-borne diseases to higher latitudes, increasing pathogen spillover risk, the report found. Food production could fall by 14% by 2050 under a high-emissions scenario, putting tens to hundreds of millions, concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Central America, at risk of malnutrition. Heat-related deaths during a 2025 European heatwave tripled, an increase attributed to global warming. Deadly heat seasons once expected every 100 years now arrive every 10 to 20 years. More than five billion people are projected to experience at least a month of extreme heat every year by 2050. Critical environmental systems that regulate the climate – storing carbon in forests, soils and frozen ground, or reflecting sunlight back into space – are also at risk of irreversible damage. Parts of the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet may already have crossed thresholds for irreversible ice loss. More than 40% of total global glacier loss since the 1970s has occurred in just the last decade, with global peak glacier extinction possible as early as 2041. More than 80% of tropical coral reefs bleached between 2023 and 2025, with warm-water corals now facing heat stress on a near-annual basis and “a low possibility” of surviving this century under any scenario. Essential carbon sinks like rainforests are facing die-off scenarios, with nearly 40% of the Amazon’s surface area at risk of disappearing by 2100. As damage mounts, returning to 1.5ºC – a major effort calculated in decades in a best-case scenario – does not constitute a rewind, the report stresses. Even if temperatures eventually fall, sea levels will continue rising, species driven to extinction will not return, and carbon released from thawing permafrost cannot simply be recovered. Ecosystems that collapse during overshoot cannot easily reassemble as temperatures fall. “The loss of biodiversity will weaken natural systems on which our lives and livelihoods depend, and will impact our ability to withdraw carbon from the atmosphere,” said Roberts. “Returning to 1.5ºC doesn’t mean we return to the same world we left,” Roberts added. ‘Collapse of habitability’ on low-lying islands Small developing island states are very vulnerable to the effects of climate change and rely on universal diplomatic processes to ensure they hold equal weight to major global powers. For small island developing states, the stakes are ones of life and death. The five to 10 centimetres of sea-level rise expected by 2050 is projected to double flooding across the Indian Ocean and tropical Pacific, supercharging storm surges, turning freshwater salty, and pushing floods deeper inland than at any point in history. For these nations, “the collapse of habitability has already begun,” the report warns. “This report is a fork-in-the-road moment for the planet. It is hard to overstate the depth of emotion for those of us living on the frontline after having fought so hard to put the 1.5 degree limit at the heart of the Paris Agreement,” said Palau President Surangel Whipps Jr. “It is a further glimpse into a perilous future that has already arrived.” “We need to see an urgent and unprecedented increase in political will and investment in a climate-safe future,” Whipps added. “Nobody can read this report and conclude otherwise.” For these low-lying nations, the threat is already here. But the consequences of remaining above 1.5ºC for an extended period will ultimately reach far beyond their shores. UNEP warns prolonged warming raises the risk of triggering irreversible tipping points in global systems, including the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, the Amazon rainforest and the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, a vital system of ocean currents that helps regulate temperatures across the Atlantic and Europe. Such changes could, the report warns, “reshape the world forever.” “Exceedance of 1.5°C should not be interpreted as safe or acceptable,” it states. Even if a return to below 1.5°C is secured — an outcome the report describes as “deeply uncertain” — “many nations and communities will face irreversible losses and permanently changed conditions.” The 1.8ºC ceiling Under UNEP’s most optimistic scenario – full implementation of all national climate plans plus all net-zero pledges – peak warming still reaches approximately 1.8C. Getting there requires roughly halving global emissions by 2035. “We’re really looking at 1.8ºC as being the kind of maximum, because the feasibility of the responses then becomes really, really questionable,” Roberts said. “You get a cascading effect from all the irreversible changes.” Wildfires weaken forest carbon stocks, drought reduces hydropower, heat degrades solar panel efficiency, and rising temperatures drive methane emissions from wetlands, eroding the systems the world would depend on to reverse warming. A decade of warming at the current rate, the report finds, could take 50 years to reverse even under optimistic assumptions. The lead for reducing emissions should fall on countries with “greater historical responsibility for climate change and capability to address it should act the hardest and fastest,” the report states. That tension – and the point advanced in the report that many advanced economies will need to go beyond net-zero to achieve net-negative emissions – is likely to resurface at COP31 in Antalya, Turkey, later this year, as oil-producing and high-income states fight calls to phase out fossil fuels. “This summer’s scorching heat, raging wildfires and deadly floods are a warning of what lies ahead,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said. “We must make the overshoot above 1.5 degrees as small and short as possible. That demands an overshoot of ambition.” Image Credits: Chris LeBoutiller, USGS, Unsplash/Ernests Vaga. Posts navigation Older posts
US Proposal to Eliminate PAHO Funding Raises Alarm Over Health Security in Americas 03/09/2026 Sophia Samantaroy PAHO headquarters in Washington, DC, in 2026. The US administration has called the organization “corrupt” as it proposes to eliminate funding. A group of senior national security and health officials contend that cutting funding to the regional health organization will cripple the Western hemisphere’s ability to defend itself against disease threats. The oldest multilateral health organization in the world, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), is fighting many of the same health threats it did at its founding in Washington, DC, some 120 years ago: vector-borne diseases such as dengue and Zika, new and emerging diseases like New World Screwworm, and recurring outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases like measles. But the organization now faces an unprecedented challenge: the potential loss of United States funding. Amid ongoing outbreaks across the Americas, the US President’s Fiscal Year 2027 budget request to Congress proposes eliminating funding to PAHO, calling it and the World Health Organization (WHO) “corrupt organizations” that show “no independence from inappropriate political influence”, part of a raft of international organisations it describes as promoting “dangerous ideologies” and “taking advantage of American generosity”. The US is the largest single contributor to PAHO and accounts for half of all member state contributions to the organization. The US already owes nearly $135 million in member fees since 2024. After slashing aid to global health programmes, US President Donald Trump and his administration have set their sights on PAHO, threatening to eliminate its funding and terminate a 124-year history of US cooperation with the organisation it helped found. Former national and health security officials, though, were quick to back PAHO as the “first line of defense” against diseases in the Western Hemisphere. “Destroying the institution – PAHO – that has protected us all is the worst idea circulating in Washington right now,” said Andrew Natsios, a Republican politician and humanitarian official under multiple administrations, in a statement to Health Policy Watch. “It is delusional to think we can stop disease at our borders. We can only manage these health crises through regional cooperation.” In response to unpaid US dues, PAHO, the WHO’s regional arm with 35 member states across the Americas, has adopted a 17% reduction in its upcoming budget. It has also established a cost-saving “Shared Services Hub”– an effort to consolidate and streamline core administrative functions from Washington headquarters to lower-cost locations, the organization said in a statement to Health Policy Watch. Across the organization, total positions are projected to drop from 1,042 during the 2024–2025 budget cycle to approximately 869 positions across 2026–2027. With USAID shuttered and the future of CDC regional offices unclear, PAHO remains one of the only presences in the region that could coordinate 35 member states across the Americas on issues of health security. Leading US national security officials decry defunding The Friends of PAHO, a bipartisan coalition of national and health security officials, voiced its deep support for the organization founded by the US some 124 years ago. Trump’s submitted budget mirrors last year’s turmoil in global health funding – deep slashes to programs that support maternal and child health, malaria and tuberculosis control, HIV/AIDS control, and neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). Congress may still appropriate funds, as advocated for by an open letter signed by the dozens of national security and health officials who served across Republican and Democratic administrations. “PAHO has an unmatched record of protecting health,” the more than 100 signatories write in the letter, which include former Army surgeon generals, Department of Defense officials, Health and Human Services secretaries, former members of Congress, White House officials, and ambassadors. They represent a new bipartisan coalition, the Friends of PAHO. “For 124 years, it has been one of the most effective health and disease prevention organizations operating anywhere in the world,” the letter states. “At a time when infectious disease threats continue to cross borders, we urge policymakers in Washington to reassert America’s commitment to health security in the Western Hemisphere and recognize PAHO’s essential role in safeguarding the American homeland.” PAHO targeted for decades-old scandal Cuban Mais Medicos doctors arrive in 2020 Martinique as part of a medical delegation to assist with COVID-19-related programs. The Trump Administration initially singled out PAHO in 2025 in a move to withhold funding from key international organizations. The concerns came after the Trump Administration alleged PAHO was mediating a forced labor scheme among Cuban doctors, as part of a Brazilian program Mais Medicos. The scheme, which took place over a decade ago, resulted in US sanctions against Cuba for forced labor of its doctors. The Brazilian health officials involved were also subject to sanctions. In the past year, however, the administration has dredged the issue to the forefront of its qualms with PAHO and succeeded in withholding $4.9 billion in previously appropriated foreign assistance through a controversial “pocket rescission” in September 2025, including $45 million earmarked for PAHO. Representative Carlos Gimenez (FL-28), who issued the call to action against PAHO’s immunity in August 2025, did not respond to a request for comment. However, it is not clear why the decade-old scandal has resurfaced as an issue for withholding contributions to PAHO. See related story: Pan American Health Organization Targeted in New Round of US Funding Cuts US owes over $135 million in assessed contributions PAHO has made a net -17% adjustment to its budget for the upcoming two years from $820 million in 2024-2025 to $762 million in 2026-2027. The US has not yet formally withdrawn from PAHO: it remains a member and continues to owe assessed contributions like several other countries. In fact, PAHO is the only multilateral health organization the US is a member of following last year’s withdrawal from the World Health Organization and other related organizations. US payments to PAHO have been delayed now for nearly two years, leaving the organization under increased pressure. Beyond funding, the US supports PAHO through staffing experts and providing technical advice in Washington. In a statement, PAHO said it has not been officially informed of a decision to eliminate funding to the organization. There have been several instances in which US Congress has ignored proposed funding cuts from the Office of Budget and Management (OMB), instead opting to support global aid across party lines. Indeed, several high-ranking Republican members of Congress and former officials have spoken out against a US withdrawal from global aid, and the ways the Administration has attempted to rescind funding. US Senator Susan Collins, Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, called the rescissions move “a clear violation of the law” and said that she “cannot support the cuts that are so deep and so damaging in global health programs,” in a Senate hearing with OMB chief Russel Vought. Natsios, whose career as a Republican politician and public servant spans five decades, echoed this sentiment, saying that “diseases, both human and animal, don’t need passports to travel across borders. The health crises of Latin America will become the health crises of the US and our crises will eventually travel to our southern neighbors. PAHO, for more than eight decades, has been the first line of defense against these crises.” For now, PAHO continues to coordinate responses to the devastating earthquakes in Colombia and Venezuela, surveil measles and dengue outbreaks, and monitor potential avian flu cases despite the budget cuts. A sudden break in a 120-year partnership The front page of a Washington-based newspaper documenting a meeting of delegates from the Americas to disucss public health. PAHO was founded in Washington, DC, in 1902 under President Theodore Roosevelt, making it the oldest such organization. The dire health consequences of the Spanish-American War in Cuba and the deadly yellow fever epidemics that struck American workers building the Panama Canal spurred Roosevelt to convene what was then called the International Sanitary Bureau in Washington, DC. The close ties between the US and PAHO predate those of any other health multilateral. “Until the late 1950s, the organization’s earliest directors were US health specialists,” said Katherine Bliss, director at CSIS Global Health Policy Center and an expert on Latin America. She notes that included former military doctors and leaders within the US Public Health Service. “PAHO was founded on US soil, by US leadership, and built on the conviction that American leadership in this hemisphere produces results,” the open letter calling to protect PAHO’s funding states. “For 124 years, the US has not only successfully engaged with PAHO but has been the moving force behind PAHO’s work that serves American interests and reflects American values.” “In this context, sustaining US leadership in PAHO is an America First strategy in practice,” it adds. Some 120 years later, spillovers in the Amazon Rainforest and ongoing dengue outbreaks mean that the original mission of PAHO is still as pertinent in protecting the US and the Western Hemisphere’s health security as it was last century. “Its founding purpose was unambiguously practical: protect American commerce and public health by controlling infectious disease in the hemisphere,” Friends of PAHO said. PAHO initially operated independently from the United Nations system with a mission of prompt data transmission and response coordination of sanitary conditions of seaports, maritime quarantines, and the control of infectious diseases–especially yellow fever. Then in 1949, PAHO became the independent regional arm of the World Health Organization, continuing to track, respond to, and even eradicate the most insidious diseases in the Americas. Victories despite ongoing outbreaks and emerging public health concerns Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) administering vaccines in Venezuela during an outbreak 2017-2019. PAHO’s elimination of polio, malaria, and smallpox in the region are all seen as major victories. Despite this, new and re-emerging threats continue to threaten the health of the Americas, Friends of PAHO warn. In particular, H5N1 avian influenza, dengue, chikungunya, and leishmaniasis are now circulating in the US. And an insect that carries a devastating disease afflicting cattle and other livestock, the New World Screwworm, has been identified in the US for the first time in six decades. Other concerns in the region include dengue, which the US has recently seen a surge of locally acquired cases in Florida, the loss of measles elimination status in several countries, and the looming threat of a supercharged El Niño season. “Our struggle with nature is both inherent and mandatory,” explained Stewart Simonson, a senior advisor at Global Health Strategies and a former WHO official, in reference to disease spillovers. “This requires multilateral action,” he said. Simonson, who also also served as a US Health and Human Services official during the Bush Administration coordinating public health emergency management following 9/11, pointed to the example of a measles outbreak in Caracas, Venezuela, in the late 2010s under then dictator Nicolás Maduro. “The outbreak was going nowhere but North,” Simonson said. It was only through PAHO-mediated response and a US-funded vaccination campaign that involved mobilizing over 20,000 vaccinators per month that the outbreak was suppressed – with PAHO serving as the intermediary between the US and Venezuela. In 2025 alone, PAHO’s regional surveillance system analyzed 2.1 million disease threat data points, detecting 157 public health events across the Americas, the organization said. Advancing economic and national security The USDA H5N1 dashboard. The virus is just one of many PAHO tracks and coordinates reposnse to across the Western Hemisphere. The issue of health security is largely a bipartisan one. Signatories of the open letter supporting PAHO point to how its programs protect American “troops and diplomats stationed throughout the hemisphere,” and Americans studying abroad and travelling. “It keeps American markets open for business,” it states. “A US withdrawal from PAHO would not leave a vacuum; it would leave an opening that strategic competitors are prepared to fill.” While the US has historically had strong bilateral relationships with countries in the region on health issues, these relationships depended on regional offices staffed by USAID, CDC, PEPFAR, and even the US Navy to promote cooperation across borders. Yet, “there are no longer USAID missions, and the future of the CDC country and regional offices is unclear,” Bliss pointed out. Without these key US presences in the region, PAHO is the only organization still able to bring countries together on health security issues. “If the US were to leave PAHO, it would be important to consider how difficult it would be to engage at a regional level on health and what it would take to put an alternative platform for communication and cooperation in place,” Bliss said. Despite the financial pressures, PAHO remains confident it can continue performing its core operations throughout the Americas. When asked about diversifying funding, the organization pointed to strengthened partnerships with Canada, Spain, the EU, the US CDC, the World Bank, and philanthropic groups, among others. In a statement, PAHO did note it “continues to encourage all Member States with outstanding contributions to fulfill their commitments.” “The world is uniquely dangerous biologically right now. It is not the time to disengage from PAHO,” Simonson said. Image Credits: S. Samantaroy, The White House, Friends of PAHO, Voice of America (VOA), PAHO/WHO, PAHO/WHO, WHO/PAHO, USDA. Ebola Outbreak ‘Still Evolving’ as Deaths Pass 3,000 03/09/2026 Stefan Anderson Cases and deaths continue to pile up at record speed as local and continental authorities race to get the ongoing DRC Ebola outbreak under control. More than 3,000 people have died in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Ebola Bundibugyo outbreak out of 6,250 confirmed cases, the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) said Thursday, as the virus kills nearly half of those it infects and outpaces efforts to contain it. “The numbers are telling the story,” Dr Wesam Mankula, lead of the Continental Incident Management Support Team, told reporters at Africa CDC’s weekly briefing. “This outbreak is still evolving.” At 16 weeks, the epidemic has spread over an area larger than the United Kingdom, France, and more than 35 African states. It is already the second largest Ebola outbreak in DRC’s history, and is on track to be the largest on record, with 6.5 times the caseload that the 2014 West Africa epidemic had at the same stage. Africa CDC reports that 89% of listed contacts are being followed up, but Mankula acknowledged the number of contacts actually being identified per case falls well short of the target. Each confirmed patient should generate a list of 40 to 60 people they may have exposed, but most lists are far shorter, meaning the vast majority of potential contacts are never traced. Adjusted for that shortfall, the effective contact tracing rate drops to just 19%, Mankula said. Reported cases and deaths at the 16-week mark compared with previous Ebola outbreaks. The current epidemic dwarfs all others in recorded history, sitting at 6.5× more cases and 5.0× more deaths than the next-highest comparator at the same point. Without adequate tracing, many patients are never identified until it is too late. That tracing shortfall continues to play out in affected provinces, with more than 60% of deaths in the past seven days occurring in the community, with people dying before they could be reached and referred to treatment. “This is highlighting the importance of pushing more community health workers, senior experts from the surveillance focusing on case investigation, to improve contact listing and contact tracing,” Mankula said. “Hopefully, with pushing more community health workers, we can see improvement in the community tracing.” Weekly confirmed cases peaked at 537 during the week of 10 August and have since dipped to 464 and 479, a 12% decline Mankula called a “plateau phase,” though he cautioned a similar plateau in June was followed by a surge. Four health zones have gone more than 42 days without new infections, the established international benchmark for interrupted transmission, and five more are in a control phase. But 51 health zones still have active transmission, and each infected person is still passing the virus to more than one other on average, meaning the outbreak continues to grow. “It’s very still very early to say we brought this outbreak under control,” Mankula said. The epidemic migrates into a warzone Nearly half of those infected by the Bundibugyo strain have died. Chart shows cumulative cases and deaths from May 15 to 1 September, the latest data available. Cases in Ituri province, the epicentre with more than 5,100 infections, fell 12% over the most recent three-week window. But as the outbreak appears to settle in Ituri, caseloads are accelerating elsewhere, Africa CDC officials said. North Kivu, where armed groups including M23 have displaced millions in an ongoing civil war, saw cases more than double and deaths rise 98% in the same period, with the highest case fatality rate of any affected province at 67.7%. Further north, in the remote and densely forested provinces of Haut-Uélé and Bas-Uélé bordering South Sudan and the Central African Republic, cases are surging too. Haut-Uélé cases nearly tripled in the most recent three-week window, and Bas-Uélé, the sixth province to be affected, is now reporting cases for the first time. The conflict has made some health zones inaccessible to international and government responders, as communities and armed groups refuse entry. Mankula said responders urgently need negotiated humanitarian corridors in order “to do their function, moving from one place to another, support active case search, contact identification, contact isolation, infection prevention control measures, expanding Ebola treatment centres in those affected zones.” Health workers in the crossfire Violence Against Ebola Responders Mounts in DRC as Red Cross Condemns Attacks Forty-seven healthcare workers have died from the virus out of 163 infected, according to Africa CDC briefing data presented Wednesday, up from the 43 deaths reported last week. Beyond the virus, workers face direct violence: the Red Cross has documented 11 violent incidents in the first 100 days of the outbreak, with volunteers attacked and ambulances set on fire by communities fuelled by mistrust and misinformation. Eight health workers have been killed in attacks as of 22 August, according to the UN’s senior Ebola coordinator. Health workers risking infection and violent assault have also faced months of delayed or missing pay, triggering repeated strikes since July. Asked about the delays, Prof Yap Boum, Africa CDC’s field manager in DRC, said the government had begun registering and paying workers in Bunya and Rampara. “It’s been a while since you have not heard about those strikes because the government have done two things,” Boum said. “One is to ensure that they can register the staff that are working, but also starting to pay them… at least all those that were working in treatment centre.” Boum said he expected payments to be completed by next week. Payment disputes have been a persistent obstacle to the response, and aid agencies have warned that sustained, timely compensation for frontline workers is essential to maintaining the workforce needed to contain the outbreak. Vaccines and therapeutics in the pipeline DRC Minister of Health Dr Roger Kamba (centre) receives the first consignment of the Ervebo vaccine at N’djili International Airport in Kinshasa on 21 August. No licensed vaccine or treatment exists for the Bundibugyo strain of the virus, leaving health workers and communities without the protection that helped bring previous Zaire Ebola outbreaks under control. Authorities are fast-tracking several candidates through clinical trials to try to close that gap, Africa CDC said. The Ervebo vaccine, effective against Zaire, is being deployed to frontline workers under compassionate use despite unproven efficacy against Bundibugyo. More than 1,100 healthcare workers have received it so far, and a solidarity trial is expected to begin in DRC within a week, Africa CDC reported. “The vaccine Ervebo is effective for the Zaire strain, but its efficacy against the recent strain, the Bundibugyo, has not been demonstrated yet,” said Prof Placid Mbala, Africa CDC’s Director of Research. “But we believe that we may see some cross-protection… this is why we are using the Ervebo vaccine mostly to also evaluate the impact of this vaccine during this outbreak, and also to conduct a kind of vaccine effectiveness and efficacy study in the field.” Phase one trials for vaccine candidates from Shaddock and Moderna are underway in the UK and Canada respectively, and Egypt’s Mina Pharma has received $16.5 million from CEPI to advance its own candidate. Two therapeutic trials are also progressing, Mbala said. A post-exposure prophylaxis trial, which is testing whether drugs given to contacts of confirmed cases can prevent them from developing the disease, has recruited 216 of a 400-person target. If effective, they would become a vital tool in slowing transmission by protecting people before they can be infected. A separate trial testing remdesivir and monoclonal antibodies in confirmed patients has enrolled 334 of 500. About 35 participants have so far reached the 28-day mark at which initial analysis can begin, with the first readouts expected by mid-September. “But I think with the first 100 participants, we won’t be able to see the efficacy of these different drugs,” Mbala said. The trial’s safety monitoring board will then determine whether to continue recruitment toward the full 500 or add further therapeutics. “It’s an adaptive protocol,” Mbala added. “We may add more therapeutics when they can be available.” Image Credits: MSF, DRC Health Ministry. El Niño Forecast to Be Strongest on Record, Threatening Extreme Weather Through 2027 03/09/2026 Disha Shetty The odds of El Niño persisting until February 2027 are near certain, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Countries around the world face higher risks of extreme weather events like floods, droughts and extreme heat as the ongoing El Niño intensifies and extends, with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) now assessing it will become the strongest in history. In its latest update, WMO assessed with 100% certainty that El Niño — the result of warming ocean temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific that affect weather extremes globally – will persist through February 2027, instead of the earlier projection of November 2026. “El Niño is being supersized before our eyes. The science leaves no room for doubt: the planet is in uncharted waters, and those waters are heating up,” said United Nations Secretary General António Guterres. “Sea surface temperatures are rising, temperatures keep climbing, and the world is in the danger zone of extreme weather.” This is also the first time that a WMO El Niño and La Niña update has been so unequivocal, reflecting the strong agreement within WMO’s extensive network. WMO’s update comes on the heels of devastating floods in Nepal that killed over 1,000 people. While El Niño is not linked to climate change, combined with the extreme weather events that climate change is already bringing, El Niño stands to compound the damage. “The race now is between rising risks and our commitment to take climate action and protect people,” Guterres said. “We must win that race.” Also read: Nepal’s Flood: Chilling Example of Climate Devastation Facing Developing Countries 2026 could surpass 2024 as the hottest year on record Celeste Saulo, WMO Secretary-General While both El Niño and La Niña occur naturally, the intensity of these phenomena can bring staggering devastation. “El Niño in Spanish means boy child – but it has the potential to deliver a massive blow to communities and economies across the world. We are already seeing disruption and devastation from droughts and floods, and we expect these impacts to increase as El Niño intensifies,” said WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo. She explained that the El Niño in the year 2023-24 resulted in 2024 being the hottest on record. The current El Niño could do something similar for the year 2026, Saulo said. “This exceptional El Niño demands exceptional preparation and response. Never before in the 50-year history of the World Meteorological Organization have we launched such a major mobilization with National Meteorological and Hydrological Services who are on the frontline of delivering the forecasts and services to save lives and livelihoods,” Saulo said. Exceptional ocean heat in the tropical Pacific Above-average temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean cause El Niño. Sea surface temperatures across the central-eastern equatorial Pacific, the region at the heart of El Niño, are already well above average – one of the tell-tale signs of El Niño – and are continuing to rise. The widely used Niño 3.4 index, which measures sea surface temperature anomalies in the central-eastern equatorial Pacific, has strengthened markedly from an average of +1.5 °C above normal during May-July 2026 and +2.0 °C above normal in July. Weekly values subsequently increased further between late July and mid-August, ranging from approximately +2.2 °C to +2.6 °C above average, indicating continued intensification. Even more exceptional warmth is present below the ocean surface. In some areas, subsurface ocean temperatures were more than 8°C above average during July and early August. Altogether, the surface and subsurface ocean conditions provide strong support for continued El Niño conditions and the potential for further strengthening during the coming months, the Update says. Different impacts in different places A very strong El Niño event increases the likelihood of major changes in rainfall, temperatures and atmospheric circulation across many regions of the world. However, the strength of an El Niño event alone does not determine how severe its impacts will be in any individual country or region. Its effects vary according to location and season and can be modified by other climate drivers, including conditions in the Indian and Atlantic Oceans. WMO said while extreme weather events are a certainty, it doesn’t have to mean destruction if countries prepare in advance and invest in early warning systems. “WMO is committed to working closely with partners across the United Nations and humanitarian system to provide the climate intelligence and insights needed to support disaster management and climate-sensitive sectors like agriculture, health, energy and water resources,” Saulo said. “We have no time to lose.” Image Credits: WMO, WMO. Who Should Lead the Global Fund? Let the Candidates Make Their Case 03/09/2026 Jirair Ratevosian The Global Fund’s board is searching for a replacement for current executive director Peter Sands (right), but concerns have been raised that its process has lacked transparency. Over the past week, the race for the next World Health Organisation (WHO) Director-General has started to take shape. Governments have publicly put forward prospective candidates, WHO is already listing them on a website, and some candidates are beginning to make their case publicly. Dr Hans Kluge has even released a manifesto laying out how he would lead the organization. And this is happening many months before the decision. WHO nominations do not even close until 24 September. The official candidate list will be published after the nomination period closes, followed by the first candidate web forum on 18 November, Executive Board consideration in January, another candidate forum in March, and finally the World Health Assembly vote in May of 2027. It is a long process, but it gives people time to hear the ideas, debate them and understand what each candidate actually wants to do with WHO. Meanwhile, The Global Fund, also in search of a new leader, has taken a very different approach. Rather than having candidates make their interest known publicly, the process will produce a pre-vetted shortlist of “four or five candidates” that is expected to reach its board in late September, just a month before it votes on 28-30 October. That one-month timetable leaves little room for the broader global health community to hear directly from the candidates or assess competing visions for the institution at a particularly consequential moment. Concerns about transparency Concerns about the transparency of the selection process were raised earlier this year by Sascha van Beek, a German parliamentarian, who questioned whether the process was sufficiently open and accountable. I too argued that The Global Fund is too important to treat this as just another executive search. The stakes are difficult to overstate. Since its creation in 2002, the Global Fund partnership has helped save 70 million lives and reduce the combined death rate from AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria by 63%. In 2024 alone, 25.6 million people were receiving antiretroviral therapy in countries where it invests, 7.4 million people were treated for tuberculosis and 162 million insecticide-treated mosquito nets were distributed. With nearly $70 billion disbursed across more than 100 countries, the choice of its next leader will shape disease programs and health systems around the world. Yet in July 2026, the Global Fund confirmed that the executive director selection process would continue as planned and on its existing timetable. As we wait for the Fund to announce the candidates, there is still an opportunity to open the process further. Doing so would not require reopening the search or delaying the board’s decision. Public candidate forum One way to do that is to hold a public candidate forum in October, with both in-person and virtual participation. It should be moderated by someone who understands the Fund and the different constituencies that make up its partnership. A forum would give more stakeholders with a vested interest in the Fund a substantive role before the board makes its decision. A forum would also force candidates to address the questions the Fund will face over the next decade. How should it approach new forms of financing? What role should artificial intelligence play? How should it support greater country ownership in the era of the Accra Reset? And what reforms will be needed as the global health landscape changes? The Global Fund can reasonably argue that its process already includes opportunities for engagement. Once the final shortlist is submitted in late September, candidates will attend a board retreat and then meet with board constituencies before the vote on 28-30 October. The board itself is unusually representative, with 20 voting seats divided equally between donor and implementer constituencies. Governments, civil society, communities affected by the three diseases, the private sector and foundations all have a formal role. That structure remains one of the Fund’s greatest strengths. But board engagement should not be the limit of the process. Board members are responsible for selecting the executive director, and that authority should remain with them. This is a public-interest decision, and greater openness can strengthen confidence in the Fund while building broader buy-in among donors, implementers, civil society and the communities it serves. The Global Fund’s own description of the job reinforces that point. The executive director is not simply managing the Secretariat. The person will be responsible for leading the institution through a period of major political and financial change. There is also an important precedent. Following concerns about the selection of its Director-General, WHO substantially revised its process ahead of the 2017 election. It introduced a code of conduct and candidate forums, with parts of the process made available to the public. WHO made the deliberate choice to create more space for candidates to explain how they would lead the organization and for member states and the wider community to hear from them before the election. The Fund describes itself not simply as an organization governed by a Board, but as a “worldwide partnership” of governments, communities, civil society, technical agencies and the private sector. A public candidate forum would be a simple way to put that principle into practice. Dr Jirair Ratevosian is a Research Scholar at the Duke Global Health Institute. He previously served on the board of the Global Fund. Past positions include acting chief of staff for PEPFAR, corporate social responsibility director for Gilead Sciences, and legislative director to US Congresswoman Barbara Lee. He holds a doctoral degree from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, an MPH from Boston University, and a BSc from the University of California, Los Angeles. Image Credits: Global Fund , Milken Institue. World Has No Realistic Path to Meet 1.5ºC Warming Target, UN Declares 02/09/2026 Stefan Anderson The world has missed its 1.5ºC target. The fight now turns to how far temperatures rise beyond it — and what can still be done to bring them back down. The world has failed to meet the Paris Agreement target of limiting global warming to 1.5ºC, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) declared on Wednesday. In a sprawling 141-page report, UNEP found there is no realistic pathway to prevent warming from exceeding the threshold. “The most stringent emission reduction pathways that were available around the time of the Paris Agreement are no longer feasible,” it states. The finding is the first by a UN agency to treat the 1.5ºC target as no longer within reach – and the math doesn’t give its authors much choice. To stay under 1.5ºC, total emissions from 2026 onward cannot exceed 130 billion tonnes of CO2. With current emissions at roughly 40 billion tonnes per year and still rising, that restriction will be breached in just three years. “Despite decades of scientific warnings, despite the growing scientific evidence, the resulting climate commitments have not produced sufficiently rapid emission reductions,” said Debra Roberts, a lead author and former co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group II. “Exceeding 1.5ºC is now unavoidable.” The report identifies just one pathway that would keep the world within its remaining carbon budget: global CO₂ emissions would have to fall steadily from 2025 to zero by 2031. Under current policies, the world is headed for 2.6C by century’s end. “All of our pathways forward are overshoot pathways,” Roberts added. “We are clearly entering uncharted territory.” With limiting the peak and length of the overshoot the last remaining option, UNEP is blunt: “This is by no means an acceptable or preferred pathway. It is simply the best remaining option.” ‘No good options’ above 1.5ºC UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen addresses reporters ahead of the report’s launch. While scientific projections have long assessed that remaining beneath this threshold would be impossible on current emissions trajectories, the change in language by UNEP is an historic break in climate diplomacy from the hope of Paris to the ongoing deadlock over the phase-out of fossil fuels set to continue in November at COP31. UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen, launching the findings at the end of a summer that saw Arctic temperatures soar to 32ºC, wildfires scorch Europe and the Americas, and sea-level rise threaten hundreds of millions of coastal residents, said the evidence demands immediate action. “Across the globe, extreme heat waves are already proving that climate change impacts will strike faster, hit harder, and last longer, costing more lives and causing deeper disruption,” Andersen said. “Obviously, we have climate procrastinated.” Crossing the 1.5ºC mark would bring an “intensification of extreme weather,” loss of small island states, and growing risks to human health, food and water security. “There are no good outcomes if we remain above 1.5ºC,” she said. With human-induced warming already nearing 1.4C and rising at around a quarter degree per decade, the World Meteorological Organization forecasts a three-in-four chance the 2026–2030 five-year mean will breach the Paris target. At current levels, roughly every five years of delay adds at least a tenth of a degree of global warming to the maximum level we will experience. “The future will bring many unknowns, but we do know that decisions taken now and in the next few years will determine if we have a chance of returning to 1.5ºC or below,” Andersen said. The report is the first in a series of major assessments in the run-up to the UN climate summit, COP31, in Antalya, Turkey, in November, where governments will again confront a deadlock over how quickly to phase out fossil fuels. For some observers, the report’s relative silence on the fuels driving the crisis – mentioned in passing just once in nearly 150 pages – is all the more striking as COP31 approaches. “Although UNEP does a good job of describing the hole we’ve dug ourselves into, it does a poor job of showing us that there is a way out,” said Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics, noting that the report only makes only a single passive reference to phasing out fossil fuels. “Ultimately the report’s neglect of some fundamentally important mitigation analysis risks turning it into a call to apathy rather than a call to arms,” Hare said. Fire, water, ice The planet’s frozen water is rapidly disappearing, threatening sea levels, freshwater supplies and climate stability. The report lands as the latest warning of the upheaval climate change is causing globally, and how much worse it might get. New threats to human health are already emerging. Rising temperatures are shifting vector-borne diseases to higher latitudes, increasing pathogen spillover risk, the report found. Food production could fall by 14% by 2050 under a high-emissions scenario, putting tens to hundreds of millions, concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Central America, at risk of malnutrition. Heat-related deaths during a 2025 European heatwave tripled, an increase attributed to global warming. Deadly heat seasons once expected every 100 years now arrive every 10 to 20 years. More than five billion people are projected to experience at least a month of extreme heat every year by 2050. Critical environmental systems that regulate the climate – storing carbon in forests, soils and frozen ground, or reflecting sunlight back into space – are also at risk of irreversible damage. Parts of the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet may already have crossed thresholds for irreversible ice loss. More than 40% of total global glacier loss since the 1970s has occurred in just the last decade, with global peak glacier extinction possible as early as 2041. More than 80% of tropical coral reefs bleached between 2023 and 2025, with warm-water corals now facing heat stress on a near-annual basis and “a low possibility” of surviving this century under any scenario. Essential carbon sinks like rainforests are facing die-off scenarios, with nearly 40% of the Amazon’s surface area at risk of disappearing by 2100. As damage mounts, returning to 1.5ºC – a major effort calculated in decades in a best-case scenario – does not constitute a rewind, the report stresses. Even if temperatures eventually fall, sea levels will continue rising, species driven to extinction will not return, and carbon released from thawing permafrost cannot simply be recovered. Ecosystems that collapse during overshoot cannot easily reassemble as temperatures fall. “The loss of biodiversity will weaken natural systems on which our lives and livelihoods depend, and will impact our ability to withdraw carbon from the atmosphere,” said Roberts. “Returning to 1.5ºC doesn’t mean we return to the same world we left,” Roberts added. ‘Collapse of habitability’ on low-lying islands Small developing island states are very vulnerable to the effects of climate change and rely on universal diplomatic processes to ensure they hold equal weight to major global powers. For small island developing states, the stakes are ones of life and death. The five to 10 centimetres of sea-level rise expected by 2050 is projected to double flooding across the Indian Ocean and tropical Pacific, supercharging storm surges, turning freshwater salty, and pushing floods deeper inland than at any point in history. For these nations, “the collapse of habitability has already begun,” the report warns. “This report is a fork-in-the-road moment for the planet. It is hard to overstate the depth of emotion for those of us living on the frontline after having fought so hard to put the 1.5 degree limit at the heart of the Paris Agreement,” said Palau President Surangel Whipps Jr. “It is a further glimpse into a perilous future that has already arrived.” “We need to see an urgent and unprecedented increase in political will and investment in a climate-safe future,” Whipps added. “Nobody can read this report and conclude otherwise.” For these low-lying nations, the threat is already here. But the consequences of remaining above 1.5ºC for an extended period will ultimately reach far beyond their shores. UNEP warns prolonged warming raises the risk of triggering irreversible tipping points in global systems, including the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, the Amazon rainforest and the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, a vital system of ocean currents that helps regulate temperatures across the Atlantic and Europe. Such changes could, the report warns, “reshape the world forever.” “Exceedance of 1.5°C should not be interpreted as safe or acceptable,” it states. Even if a return to below 1.5°C is secured — an outcome the report describes as “deeply uncertain” — “many nations and communities will face irreversible losses and permanently changed conditions.” The 1.8ºC ceiling Under UNEP’s most optimistic scenario – full implementation of all national climate plans plus all net-zero pledges – peak warming still reaches approximately 1.8C. Getting there requires roughly halving global emissions by 2035. “We’re really looking at 1.8ºC as being the kind of maximum, because the feasibility of the responses then becomes really, really questionable,” Roberts said. “You get a cascading effect from all the irreversible changes.” Wildfires weaken forest carbon stocks, drought reduces hydropower, heat degrades solar panel efficiency, and rising temperatures drive methane emissions from wetlands, eroding the systems the world would depend on to reverse warming. A decade of warming at the current rate, the report finds, could take 50 years to reverse even under optimistic assumptions. The lead for reducing emissions should fall on countries with “greater historical responsibility for climate change and capability to address it should act the hardest and fastest,” the report states. That tension – and the point advanced in the report that many advanced economies will need to go beyond net-zero to achieve net-negative emissions – is likely to resurface at COP31 in Antalya, Turkey, later this year, as oil-producing and high-income states fight calls to phase out fossil fuels. “This summer’s scorching heat, raging wildfires and deadly floods are a warning of what lies ahead,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said. “We must make the overshoot above 1.5 degrees as small and short as possible. That demands an overshoot of ambition.” Image Credits: Chris LeBoutiller, USGS, Unsplash/Ernests Vaga. Posts navigation Older posts
Ebola Outbreak ‘Still Evolving’ as Deaths Pass 3,000 03/09/2026 Stefan Anderson Cases and deaths continue to pile up at record speed as local and continental authorities race to get the ongoing DRC Ebola outbreak under control. More than 3,000 people have died in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Ebola Bundibugyo outbreak out of 6,250 confirmed cases, the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) said Thursday, as the virus kills nearly half of those it infects and outpaces efforts to contain it. “The numbers are telling the story,” Dr Wesam Mankula, lead of the Continental Incident Management Support Team, told reporters at Africa CDC’s weekly briefing. “This outbreak is still evolving.” At 16 weeks, the epidemic has spread over an area larger than the United Kingdom, France, and more than 35 African states. It is already the second largest Ebola outbreak in DRC’s history, and is on track to be the largest on record, with 6.5 times the caseload that the 2014 West Africa epidemic had at the same stage. Africa CDC reports that 89% of listed contacts are being followed up, but Mankula acknowledged the number of contacts actually being identified per case falls well short of the target. Each confirmed patient should generate a list of 40 to 60 people they may have exposed, but most lists are far shorter, meaning the vast majority of potential contacts are never traced. Adjusted for that shortfall, the effective contact tracing rate drops to just 19%, Mankula said. Reported cases and deaths at the 16-week mark compared with previous Ebola outbreaks. The current epidemic dwarfs all others in recorded history, sitting at 6.5× more cases and 5.0× more deaths than the next-highest comparator at the same point. Without adequate tracing, many patients are never identified until it is too late. That tracing shortfall continues to play out in affected provinces, with more than 60% of deaths in the past seven days occurring in the community, with people dying before they could be reached and referred to treatment. “This is highlighting the importance of pushing more community health workers, senior experts from the surveillance focusing on case investigation, to improve contact listing and contact tracing,” Mankula said. “Hopefully, with pushing more community health workers, we can see improvement in the community tracing.” Weekly confirmed cases peaked at 537 during the week of 10 August and have since dipped to 464 and 479, a 12% decline Mankula called a “plateau phase,” though he cautioned a similar plateau in June was followed by a surge. Four health zones have gone more than 42 days without new infections, the established international benchmark for interrupted transmission, and five more are in a control phase. But 51 health zones still have active transmission, and each infected person is still passing the virus to more than one other on average, meaning the outbreak continues to grow. “It’s very still very early to say we brought this outbreak under control,” Mankula said. The epidemic migrates into a warzone Nearly half of those infected by the Bundibugyo strain have died. Chart shows cumulative cases and deaths from May 15 to 1 September, the latest data available. Cases in Ituri province, the epicentre with more than 5,100 infections, fell 12% over the most recent three-week window. But as the outbreak appears to settle in Ituri, caseloads are accelerating elsewhere, Africa CDC officials said. North Kivu, where armed groups including M23 have displaced millions in an ongoing civil war, saw cases more than double and deaths rise 98% in the same period, with the highest case fatality rate of any affected province at 67.7%. Further north, in the remote and densely forested provinces of Haut-Uélé and Bas-Uélé bordering South Sudan and the Central African Republic, cases are surging too. Haut-Uélé cases nearly tripled in the most recent three-week window, and Bas-Uélé, the sixth province to be affected, is now reporting cases for the first time. The conflict has made some health zones inaccessible to international and government responders, as communities and armed groups refuse entry. Mankula said responders urgently need negotiated humanitarian corridors in order “to do their function, moving from one place to another, support active case search, contact identification, contact isolation, infection prevention control measures, expanding Ebola treatment centres in those affected zones.” Health workers in the crossfire Violence Against Ebola Responders Mounts in DRC as Red Cross Condemns Attacks Forty-seven healthcare workers have died from the virus out of 163 infected, according to Africa CDC briefing data presented Wednesday, up from the 43 deaths reported last week. Beyond the virus, workers face direct violence: the Red Cross has documented 11 violent incidents in the first 100 days of the outbreak, with volunteers attacked and ambulances set on fire by communities fuelled by mistrust and misinformation. Eight health workers have been killed in attacks as of 22 August, according to the UN’s senior Ebola coordinator. Health workers risking infection and violent assault have also faced months of delayed or missing pay, triggering repeated strikes since July. Asked about the delays, Prof Yap Boum, Africa CDC’s field manager in DRC, said the government had begun registering and paying workers in Bunya and Rampara. “It’s been a while since you have not heard about those strikes because the government have done two things,” Boum said. “One is to ensure that they can register the staff that are working, but also starting to pay them… at least all those that were working in treatment centre.” Boum said he expected payments to be completed by next week. Payment disputes have been a persistent obstacle to the response, and aid agencies have warned that sustained, timely compensation for frontline workers is essential to maintaining the workforce needed to contain the outbreak. Vaccines and therapeutics in the pipeline DRC Minister of Health Dr Roger Kamba (centre) receives the first consignment of the Ervebo vaccine at N’djili International Airport in Kinshasa on 21 August. No licensed vaccine or treatment exists for the Bundibugyo strain of the virus, leaving health workers and communities without the protection that helped bring previous Zaire Ebola outbreaks under control. Authorities are fast-tracking several candidates through clinical trials to try to close that gap, Africa CDC said. The Ervebo vaccine, effective against Zaire, is being deployed to frontline workers under compassionate use despite unproven efficacy against Bundibugyo. More than 1,100 healthcare workers have received it so far, and a solidarity trial is expected to begin in DRC within a week, Africa CDC reported. “The vaccine Ervebo is effective for the Zaire strain, but its efficacy against the recent strain, the Bundibugyo, has not been demonstrated yet,” said Prof Placid Mbala, Africa CDC’s Director of Research. “But we believe that we may see some cross-protection… this is why we are using the Ervebo vaccine mostly to also evaluate the impact of this vaccine during this outbreak, and also to conduct a kind of vaccine effectiveness and efficacy study in the field.” Phase one trials for vaccine candidates from Shaddock and Moderna are underway in the UK and Canada respectively, and Egypt’s Mina Pharma has received $16.5 million from CEPI to advance its own candidate. Two therapeutic trials are also progressing, Mbala said. A post-exposure prophylaxis trial, which is testing whether drugs given to contacts of confirmed cases can prevent them from developing the disease, has recruited 216 of a 400-person target. If effective, they would become a vital tool in slowing transmission by protecting people before they can be infected. A separate trial testing remdesivir and monoclonal antibodies in confirmed patients has enrolled 334 of 500. About 35 participants have so far reached the 28-day mark at which initial analysis can begin, with the first readouts expected by mid-September. “But I think with the first 100 participants, we won’t be able to see the efficacy of these different drugs,” Mbala said. The trial’s safety monitoring board will then determine whether to continue recruitment toward the full 500 or add further therapeutics. “It’s an adaptive protocol,” Mbala added. “We may add more therapeutics when they can be available.” Image Credits: MSF, DRC Health Ministry. El Niño Forecast to Be Strongest on Record, Threatening Extreme Weather Through 2027 03/09/2026 Disha Shetty The odds of El Niño persisting until February 2027 are near certain, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Countries around the world face higher risks of extreme weather events like floods, droughts and extreme heat as the ongoing El Niño intensifies and extends, with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) now assessing it will become the strongest in history. In its latest update, WMO assessed with 100% certainty that El Niño — the result of warming ocean temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific that affect weather extremes globally – will persist through February 2027, instead of the earlier projection of November 2026. “El Niño is being supersized before our eyes. The science leaves no room for doubt: the planet is in uncharted waters, and those waters are heating up,” said United Nations Secretary General António Guterres. “Sea surface temperatures are rising, temperatures keep climbing, and the world is in the danger zone of extreme weather.” This is also the first time that a WMO El Niño and La Niña update has been so unequivocal, reflecting the strong agreement within WMO’s extensive network. WMO’s update comes on the heels of devastating floods in Nepal that killed over 1,000 people. While El Niño is not linked to climate change, combined with the extreme weather events that climate change is already bringing, El Niño stands to compound the damage. “The race now is between rising risks and our commitment to take climate action and protect people,” Guterres said. “We must win that race.” Also read: Nepal’s Flood: Chilling Example of Climate Devastation Facing Developing Countries 2026 could surpass 2024 as the hottest year on record Celeste Saulo, WMO Secretary-General While both El Niño and La Niña occur naturally, the intensity of these phenomena can bring staggering devastation. “El Niño in Spanish means boy child – but it has the potential to deliver a massive blow to communities and economies across the world. We are already seeing disruption and devastation from droughts and floods, and we expect these impacts to increase as El Niño intensifies,” said WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo. She explained that the El Niño in the year 2023-24 resulted in 2024 being the hottest on record. The current El Niño could do something similar for the year 2026, Saulo said. “This exceptional El Niño demands exceptional preparation and response. Never before in the 50-year history of the World Meteorological Organization have we launched such a major mobilization with National Meteorological and Hydrological Services who are on the frontline of delivering the forecasts and services to save lives and livelihoods,” Saulo said. Exceptional ocean heat in the tropical Pacific Above-average temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean cause El Niño. Sea surface temperatures across the central-eastern equatorial Pacific, the region at the heart of El Niño, are already well above average – one of the tell-tale signs of El Niño – and are continuing to rise. The widely used Niño 3.4 index, which measures sea surface temperature anomalies in the central-eastern equatorial Pacific, has strengthened markedly from an average of +1.5 °C above normal during May-July 2026 and +2.0 °C above normal in July. Weekly values subsequently increased further between late July and mid-August, ranging from approximately +2.2 °C to +2.6 °C above average, indicating continued intensification. Even more exceptional warmth is present below the ocean surface. In some areas, subsurface ocean temperatures were more than 8°C above average during July and early August. Altogether, the surface and subsurface ocean conditions provide strong support for continued El Niño conditions and the potential for further strengthening during the coming months, the Update says. Different impacts in different places A very strong El Niño event increases the likelihood of major changes in rainfall, temperatures and atmospheric circulation across many regions of the world. However, the strength of an El Niño event alone does not determine how severe its impacts will be in any individual country or region. Its effects vary according to location and season and can be modified by other climate drivers, including conditions in the Indian and Atlantic Oceans. WMO said while extreme weather events are a certainty, it doesn’t have to mean destruction if countries prepare in advance and invest in early warning systems. “WMO is committed to working closely with partners across the United Nations and humanitarian system to provide the climate intelligence and insights needed to support disaster management and climate-sensitive sectors like agriculture, health, energy and water resources,” Saulo said. “We have no time to lose.” Image Credits: WMO, WMO. Who Should Lead the Global Fund? Let the Candidates Make Their Case 03/09/2026 Jirair Ratevosian The Global Fund’s board is searching for a replacement for current executive director Peter Sands (right), but concerns have been raised that its process has lacked transparency. Over the past week, the race for the next World Health Organisation (WHO) Director-General has started to take shape. Governments have publicly put forward prospective candidates, WHO is already listing them on a website, and some candidates are beginning to make their case publicly. Dr Hans Kluge has even released a manifesto laying out how he would lead the organization. And this is happening many months before the decision. WHO nominations do not even close until 24 September. The official candidate list will be published after the nomination period closes, followed by the first candidate web forum on 18 November, Executive Board consideration in January, another candidate forum in March, and finally the World Health Assembly vote in May of 2027. It is a long process, but it gives people time to hear the ideas, debate them and understand what each candidate actually wants to do with WHO. Meanwhile, The Global Fund, also in search of a new leader, has taken a very different approach. Rather than having candidates make their interest known publicly, the process will produce a pre-vetted shortlist of “four or five candidates” that is expected to reach its board in late September, just a month before it votes on 28-30 October. That one-month timetable leaves little room for the broader global health community to hear directly from the candidates or assess competing visions for the institution at a particularly consequential moment. Concerns about transparency Concerns about the transparency of the selection process were raised earlier this year by Sascha van Beek, a German parliamentarian, who questioned whether the process was sufficiently open and accountable. I too argued that The Global Fund is too important to treat this as just another executive search. The stakes are difficult to overstate. Since its creation in 2002, the Global Fund partnership has helped save 70 million lives and reduce the combined death rate from AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria by 63%. In 2024 alone, 25.6 million people were receiving antiretroviral therapy in countries where it invests, 7.4 million people were treated for tuberculosis and 162 million insecticide-treated mosquito nets were distributed. With nearly $70 billion disbursed across more than 100 countries, the choice of its next leader will shape disease programs and health systems around the world. Yet in July 2026, the Global Fund confirmed that the executive director selection process would continue as planned and on its existing timetable. As we wait for the Fund to announce the candidates, there is still an opportunity to open the process further. Doing so would not require reopening the search or delaying the board’s decision. Public candidate forum One way to do that is to hold a public candidate forum in October, with both in-person and virtual participation. It should be moderated by someone who understands the Fund and the different constituencies that make up its partnership. A forum would give more stakeholders with a vested interest in the Fund a substantive role before the board makes its decision. A forum would also force candidates to address the questions the Fund will face over the next decade. How should it approach new forms of financing? What role should artificial intelligence play? How should it support greater country ownership in the era of the Accra Reset? And what reforms will be needed as the global health landscape changes? The Global Fund can reasonably argue that its process already includes opportunities for engagement. Once the final shortlist is submitted in late September, candidates will attend a board retreat and then meet with board constituencies before the vote on 28-30 October. The board itself is unusually representative, with 20 voting seats divided equally between donor and implementer constituencies. Governments, civil society, communities affected by the three diseases, the private sector and foundations all have a formal role. That structure remains one of the Fund’s greatest strengths. But board engagement should not be the limit of the process. Board members are responsible for selecting the executive director, and that authority should remain with them. This is a public-interest decision, and greater openness can strengthen confidence in the Fund while building broader buy-in among donors, implementers, civil society and the communities it serves. The Global Fund’s own description of the job reinforces that point. The executive director is not simply managing the Secretariat. The person will be responsible for leading the institution through a period of major political and financial change. There is also an important precedent. Following concerns about the selection of its Director-General, WHO substantially revised its process ahead of the 2017 election. It introduced a code of conduct and candidate forums, with parts of the process made available to the public. WHO made the deliberate choice to create more space for candidates to explain how they would lead the organization and for member states and the wider community to hear from them before the election. The Fund describes itself not simply as an organization governed by a Board, but as a “worldwide partnership” of governments, communities, civil society, technical agencies and the private sector. A public candidate forum would be a simple way to put that principle into practice. Dr Jirair Ratevosian is a Research Scholar at the Duke Global Health Institute. He previously served on the board of the Global Fund. Past positions include acting chief of staff for PEPFAR, corporate social responsibility director for Gilead Sciences, and legislative director to US Congresswoman Barbara Lee. He holds a doctoral degree from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, an MPH from Boston University, and a BSc from the University of California, Los Angeles. Image Credits: Global Fund , Milken Institue. World Has No Realistic Path to Meet 1.5ºC Warming Target, UN Declares 02/09/2026 Stefan Anderson The world has missed its 1.5ºC target. The fight now turns to how far temperatures rise beyond it — and what can still be done to bring them back down. The world has failed to meet the Paris Agreement target of limiting global warming to 1.5ºC, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) declared on Wednesday. In a sprawling 141-page report, UNEP found there is no realistic pathway to prevent warming from exceeding the threshold. “The most stringent emission reduction pathways that were available around the time of the Paris Agreement are no longer feasible,” it states. The finding is the first by a UN agency to treat the 1.5ºC target as no longer within reach – and the math doesn’t give its authors much choice. To stay under 1.5ºC, total emissions from 2026 onward cannot exceed 130 billion tonnes of CO2. With current emissions at roughly 40 billion tonnes per year and still rising, that restriction will be breached in just three years. “Despite decades of scientific warnings, despite the growing scientific evidence, the resulting climate commitments have not produced sufficiently rapid emission reductions,” said Debra Roberts, a lead author and former co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group II. “Exceeding 1.5ºC is now unavoidable.” The report identifies just one pathway that would keep the world within its remaining carbon budget: global CO₂ emissions would have to fall steadily from 2025 to zero by 2031. Under current policies, the world is headed for 2.6C by century’s end. “All of our pathways forward are overshoot pathways,” Roberts added. “We are clearly entering uncharted territory.” With limiting the peak and length of the overshoot the last remaining option, UNEP is blunt: “This is by no means an acceptable or preferred pathway. It is simply the best remaining option.” ‘No good options’ above 1.5ºC UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen addresses reporters ahead of the report’s launch. While scientific projections have long assessed that remaining beneath this threshold would be impossible on current emissions trajectories, the change in language by UNEP is an historic break in climate diplomacy from the hope of Paris to the ongoing deadlock over the phase-out of fossil fuels set to continue in November at COP31. UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen, launching the findings at the end of a summer that saw Arctic temperatures soar to 32ºC, wildfires scorch Europe and the Americas, and sea-level rise threaten hundreds of millions of coastal residents, said the evidence demands immediate action. “Across the globe, extreme heat waves are already proving that climate change impacts will strike faster, hit harder, and last longer, costing more lives and causing deeper disruption,” Andersen said. “Obviously, we have climate procrastinated.” Crossing the 1.5ºC mark would bring an “intensification of extreme weather,” loss of small island states, and growing risks to human health, food and water security. “There are no good outcomes if we remain above 1.5ºC,” she said. With human-induced warming already nearing 1.4C and rising at around a quarter degree per decade, the World Meteorological Organization forecasts a three-in-four chance the 2026–2030 five-year mean will breach the Paris target. At current levels, roughly every five years of delay adds at least a tenth of a degree of global warming to the maximum level we will experience. “The future will bring many unknowns, but we do know that decisions taken now and in the next few years will determine if we have a chance of returning to 1.5ºC or below,” Andersen said. The report is the first in a series of major assessments in the run-up to the UN climate summit, COP31, in Antalya, Turkey, in November, where governments will again confront a deadlock over how quickly to phase out fossil fuels. For some observers, the report’s relative silence on the fuels driving the crisis – mentioned in passing just once in nearly 150 pages – is all the more striking as COP31 approaches. “Although UNEP does a good job of describing the hole we’ve dug ourselves into, it does a poor job of showing us that there is a way out,” said Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics, noting that the report only makes only a single passive reference to phasing out fossil fuels. “Ultimately the report’s neglect of some fundamentally important mitigation analysis risks turning it into a call to apathy rather than a call to arms,” Hare said. Fire, water, ice The planet’s frozen water is rapidly disappearing, threatening sea levels, freshwater supplies and climate stability. The report lands as the latest warning of the upheaval climate change is causing globally, and how much worse it might get. New threats to human health are already emerging. Rising temperatures are shifting vector-borne diseases to higher latitudes, increasing pathogen spillover risk, the report found. Food production could fall by 14% by 2050 under a high-emissions scenario, putting tens to hundreds of millions, concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Central America, at risk of malnutrition. Heat-related deaths during a 2025 European heatwave tripled, an increase attributed to global warming. Deadly heat seasons once expected every 100 years now arrive every 10 to 20 years. More than five billion people are projected to experience at least a month of extreme heat every year by 2050. Critical environmental systems that regulate the climate – storing carbon in forests, soils and frozen ground, or reflecting sunlight back into space – are also at risk of irreversible damage. Parts of the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet may already have crossed thresholds for irreversible ice loss. More than 40% of total global glacier loss since the 1970s has occurred in just the last decade, with global peak glacier extinction possible as early as 2041. More than 80% of tropical coral reefs bleached between 2023 and 2025, with warm-water corals now facing heat stress on a near-annual basis and “a low possibility” of surviving this century under any scenario. Essential carbon sinks like rainforests are facing die-off scenarios, with nearly 40% of the Amazon’s surface area at risk of disappearing by 2100. As damage mounts, returning to 1.5ºC – a major effort calculated in decades in a best-case scenario – does not constitute a rewind, the report stresses. Even if temperatures eventually fall, sea levels will continue rising, species driven to extinction will not return, and carbon released from thawing permafrost cannot simply be recovered. Ecosystems that collapse during overshoot cannot easily reassemble as temperatures fall. “The loss of biodiversity will weaken natural systems on which our lives and livelihoods depend, and will impact our ability to withdraw carbon from the atmosphere,” said Roberts. “Returning to 1.5ºC doesn’t mean we return to the same world we left,” Roberts added. ‘Collapse of habitability’ on low-lying islands Small developing island states are very vulnerable to the effects of climate change and rely on universal diplomatic processes to ensure they hold equal weight to major global powers. For small island developing states, the stakes are ones of life and death. The five to 10 centimetres of sea-level rise expected by 2050 is projected to double flooding across the Indian Ocean and tropical Pacific, supercharging storm surges, turning freshwater salty, and pushing floods deeper inland than at any point in history. For these nations, “the collapse of habitability has already begun,” the report warns. “This report is a fork-in-the-road moment for the planet. It is hard to overstate the depth of emotion for those of us living on the frontline after having fought so hard to put the 1.5 degree limit at the heart of the Paris Agreement,” said Palau President Surangel Whipps Jr. “It is a further glimpse into a perilous future that has already arrived.” “We need to see an urgent and unprecedented increase in political will and investment in a climate-safe future,” Whipps added. “Nobody can read this report and conclude otherwise.” For these low-lying nations, the threat is already here. But the consequences of remaining above 1.5ºC for an extended period will ultimately reach far beyond their shores. UNEP warns prolonged warming raises the risk of triggering irreversible tipping points in global systems, including the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, the Amazon rainforest and the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, a vital system of ocean currents that helps regulate temperatures across the Atlantic and Europe. Such changes could, the report warns, “reshape the world forever.” “Exceedance of 1.5°C should not be interpreted as safe or acceptable,” it states. Even if a return to below 1.5°C is secured — an outcome the report describes as “deeply uncertain” — “many nations and communities will face irreversible losses and permanently changed conditions.” The 1.8ºC ceiling Under UNEP’s most optimistic scenario – full implementation of all national climate plans plus all net-zero pledges – peak warming still reaches approximately 1.8C. Getting there requires roughly halving global emissions by 2035. “We’re really looking at 1.8ºC as being the kind of maximum, because the feasibility of the responses then becomes really, really questionable,” Roberts said. “You get a cascading effect from all the irreversible changes.” Wildfires weaken forest carbon stocks, drought reduces hydropower, heat degrades solar panel efficiency, and rising temperatures drive methane emissions from wetlands, eroding the systems the world would depend on to reverse warming. A decade of warming at the current rate, the report finds, could take 50 years to reverse even under optimistic assumptions. The lead for reducing emissions should fall on countries with “greater historical responsibility for climate change and capability to address it should act the hardest and fastest,” the report states. That tension – and the point advanced in the report that many advanced economies will need to go beyond net-zero to achieve net-negative emissions – is likely to resurface at COP31 in Antalya, Turkey, later this year, as oil-producing and high-income states fight calls to phase out fossil fuels. “This summer’s scorching heat, raging wildfires and deadly floods are a warning of what lies ahead,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said. “We must make the overshoot above 1.5 degrees as small and short as possible. That demands an overshoot of ambition.” Image Credits: Chris LeBoutiller, USGS, Unsplash/Ernests Vaga. Posts navigation Older posts
El Niño Forecast to Be Strongest on Record, Threatening Extreme Weather Through 2027 03/09/2026 Disha Shetty The odds of El Niño persisting until February 2027 are near certain, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Countries around the world face higher risks of extreme weather events like floods, droughts and extreme heat as the ongoing El Niño intensifies and extends, with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) now assessing it will become the strongest in history. In its latest update, WMO assessed with 100% certainty that El Niño — the result of warming ocean temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific that affect weather extremes globally – will persist through February 2027, instead of the earlier projection of November 2026. “El Niño is being supersized before our eyes. The science leaves no room for doubt: the planet is in uncharted waters, and those waters are heating up,” said United Nations Secretary General António Guterres. “Sea surface temperatures are rising, temperatures keep climbing, and the world is in the danger zone of extreme weather.” This is also the first time that a WMO El Niño and La Niña update has been so unequivocal, reflecting the strong agreement within WMO’s extensive network. WMO’s update comes on the heels of devastating floods in Nepal that killed over 1,000 people. While El Niño is not linked to climate change, combined with the extreme weather events that climate change is already bringing, El Niño stands to compound the damage. “The race now is between rising risks and our commitment to take climate action and protect people,” Guterres said. “We must win that race.” Also read: Nepal’s Flood: Chilling Example of Climate Devastation Facing Developing Countries 2026 could surpass 2024 as the hottest year on record Celeste Saulo, WMO Secretary-General While both El Niño and La Niña occur naturally, the intensity of these phenomena can bring staggering devastation. “El Niño in Spanish means boy child – but it has the potential to deliver a massive blow to communities and economies across the world. We are already seeing disruption and devastation from droughts and floods, and we expect these impacts to increase as El Niño intensifies,” said WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo. She explained that the El Niño in the year 2023-24 resulted in 2024 being the hottest on record. The current El Niño could do something similar for the year 2026, Saulo said. “This exceptional El Niño demands exceptional preparation and response. Never before in the 50-year history of the World Meteorological Organization have we launched such a major mobilization with National Meteorological and Hydrological Services who are on the frontline of delivering the forecasts and services to save lives and livelihoods,” Saulo said. Exceptional ocean heat in the tropical Pacific Above-average temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean cause El Niño. Sea surface temperatures across the central-eastern equatorial Pacific, the region at the heart of El Niño, are already well above average – one of the tell-tale signs of El Niño – and are continuing to rise. The widely used Niño 3.4 index, which measures sea surface temperature anomalies in the central-eastern equatorial Pacific, has strengthened markedly from an average of +1.5 °C above normal during May-July 2026 and +2.0 °C above normal in July. Weekly values subsequently increased further between late July and mid-August, ranging from approximately +2.2 °C to +2.6 °C above average, indicating continued intensification. Even more exceptional warmth is present below the ocean surface. In some areas, subsurface ocean temperatures were more than 8°C above average during July and early August. Altogether, the surface and subsurface ocean conditions provide strong support for continued El Niño conditions and the potential for further strengthening during the coming months, the Update says. Different impacts in different places A very strong El Niño event increases the likelihood of major changes in rainfall, temperatures and atmospheric circulation across many regions of the world. However, the strength of an El Niño event alone does not determine how severe its impacts will be in any individual country or region. Its effects vary according to location and season and can be modified by other climate drivers, including conditions in the Indian and Atlantic Oceans. WMO said while extreme weather events are a certainty, it doesn’t have to mean destruction if countries prepare in advance and invest in early warning systems. “WMO is committed to working closely with partners across the United Nations and humanitarian system to provide the climate intelligence and insights needed to support disaster management and climate-sensitive sectors like agriculture, health, energy and water resources,” Saulo said. “We have no time to lose.” Image Credits: WMO, WMO. Who Should Lead the Global Fund? Let the Candidates Make Their Case 03/09/2026 Jirair Ratevosian The Global Fund’s board is searching for a replacement for current executive director Peter Sands (right), but concerns have been raised that its process has lacked transparency. Over the past week, the race for the next World Health Organisation (WHO) Director-General has started to take shape. Governments have publicly put forward prospective candidates, WHO is already listing them on a website, and some candidates are beginning to make their case publicly. Dr Hans Kluge has even released a manifesto laying out how he would lead the organization. And this is happening many months before the decision. WHO nominations do not even close until 24 September. The official candidate list will be published after the nomination period closes, followed by the first candidate web forum on 18 November, Executive Board consideration in January, another candidate forum in March, and finally the World Health Assembly vote in May of 2027. It is a long process, but it gives people time to hear the ideas, debate them and understand what each candidate actually wants to do with WHO. Meanwhile, The Global Fund, also in search of a new leader, has taken a very different approach. Rather than having candidates make their interest known publicly, the process will produce a pre-vetted shortlist of “four or five candidates” that is expected to reach its board in late September, just a month before it votes on 28-30 October. That one-month timetable leaves little room for the broader global health community to hear directly from the candidates or assess competing visions for the institution at a particularly consequential moment. Concerns about transparency Concerns about the transparency of the selection process were raised earlier this year by Sascha van Beek, a German parliamentarian, who questioned whether the process was sufficiently open and accountable. I too argued that The Global Fund is too important to treat this as just another executive search. The stakes are difficult to overstate. Since its creation in 2002, the Global Fund partnership has helped save 70 million lives and reduce the combined death rate from AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria by 63%. In 2024 alone, 25.6 million people were receiving antiretroviral therapy in countries where it invests, 7.4 million people were treated for tuberculosis and 162 million insecticide-treated mosquito nets were distributed. With nearly $70 billion disbursed across more than 100 countries, the choice of its next leader will shape disease programs and health systems around the world. Yet in July 2026, the Global Fund confirmed that the executive director selection process would continue as planned and on its existing timetable. As we wait for the Fund to announce the candidates, there is still an opportunity to open the process further. Doing so would not require reopening the search or delaying the board’s decision. Public candidate forum One way to do that is to hold a public candidate forum in October, with both in-person and virtual participation. It should be moderated by someone who understands the Fund and the different constituencies that make up its partnership. A forum would give more stakeholders with a vested interest in the Fund a substantive role before the board makes its decision. A forum would also force candidates to address the questions the Fund will face over the next decade. How should it approach new forms of financing? What role should artificial intelligence play? How should it support greater country ownership in the era of the Accra Reset? And what reforms will be needed as the global health landscape changes? The Global Fund can reasonably argue that its process already includes opportunities for engagement. Once the final shortlist is submitted in late September, candidates will attend a board retreat and then meet with board constituencies before the vote on 28-30 October. The board itself is unusually representative, with 20 voting seats divided equally between donor and implementer constituencies. Governments, civil society, communities affected by the three diseases, the private sector and foundations all have a formal role. That structure remains one of the Fund’s greatest strengths. But board engagement should not be the limit of the process. Board members are responsible for selecting the executive director, and that authority should remain with them. This is a public-interest decision, and greater openness can strengthen confidence in the Fund while building broader buy-in among donors, implementers, civil society and the communities it serves. The Global Fund’s own description of the job reinforces that point. The executive director is not simply managing the Secretariat. The person will be responsible for leading the institution through a period of major political and financial change. There is also an important precedent. Following concerns about the selection of its Director-General, WHO substantially revised its process ahead of the 2017 election. It introduced a code of conduct and candidate forums, with parts of the process made available to the public. WHO made the deliberate choice to create more space for candidates to explain how they would lead the organization and for member states and the wider community to hear from them before the election. The Fund describes itself not simply as an organization governed by a Board, but as a “worldwide partnership” of governments, communities, civil society, technical agencies and the private sector. A public candidate forum would be a simple way to put that principle into practice. Dr Jirair Ratevosian is a Research Scholar at the Duke Global Health Institute. He previously served on the board of the Global Fund. Past positions include acting chief of staff for PEPFAR, corporate social responsibility director for Gilead Sciences, and legislative director to US Congresswoman Barbara Lee. He holds a doctoral degree from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, an MPH from Boston University, and a BSc from the University of California, Los Angeles. Image Credits: Global Fund , Milken Institue. World Has No Realistic Path to Meet 1.5ºC Warming Target, UN Declares 02/09/2026 Stefan Anderson The world has missed its 1.5ºC target. The fight now turns to how far temperatures rise beyond it — and what can still be done to bring them back down. The world has failed to meet the Paris Agreement target of limiting global warming to 1.5ºC, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) declared on Wednesday. In a sprawling 141-page report, UNEP found there is no realistic pathway to prevent warming from exceeding the threshold. “The most stringent emission reduction pathways that were available around the time of the Paris Agreement are no longer feasible,” it states. The finding is the first by a UN agency to treat the 1.5ºC target as no longer within reach – and the math doesn’t give its authors much choice. To stay under 1.5ºC, total emissions from 2026 onward cannot exceed 130 billion tonnes of CO2. With current emissions at roughly 40 billion tonnes per year and still rising, that restriction will be breached in just three years. “Despite decades of scientific warnings, despite the growing scientific evidence, the resulting climate commitments have not produced sufficiently rapid emission reductions,” said Debra Roberts, a lead author and former co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group II. “Exceeding 1.5ºC is now unavoidable.” The report identifies just one pathway that would keep the world within its remaining carbon budget: global CO₂ emissions would have to fall steadily from 2025 to zero by 2031. Under current policies, the world is headed for 2.6C by century’s end. “All of our pathways forward are overshoot pathways,” Roberts added. “We are clearly entering uncharted territory.” With limiting the peak and length of the overshoot the last remaining option, UNEP is blunt: “This is by no means an acceptable or preferred pathway. It is simply the best remaining option.” ‘No good options’ above 1.5ºC UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen addresses reporters ahead of the report’s launch. While scientific projections have long assessed that remaining beneath this threshold would be impossible on current emissions trajectories, the change in language by UNEP is an historic break in climate diplomacy from the hope of Paris to the ongoing deadlock over the phase-out of fossil fuels set to continue in November at COP31. UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen, launching the findings at the end of a summer that saw Arctic temperatures soar to 32ºC, wildfires scorch Europe and the Americas, and sea-level rise threaten hundreds of millions of coastal residents, said the evidence demands immediate action. “Across the globe, extreme heat waves are already proving that climate change impacts will strike faster, hit harder, and last longer, costing more lives and causing deeper disruption,” Andersen said. “Obviously, we have climate procrastinated.” Crossing the 1.5ºC mark would bring an “intensification of extreme weather,” loss of small island states, and growing risks to human health, food and water security. “There are no good outcomes if we remain above 1.5ºC,” she said. With human-induced warming already nearing 1.4C and rising at around a quarter degree per decade, the World Meteorological Organization forecasts a three-in-four chance the 2026–2030 five-year mean will breach the Paris target. At current levels, roughly every five years of delay adds at least a tenth of a degree of global warming to the maximum level we will experience. “The future will bring many unknowns, but we do know that decisions taken now and in the next few years will determine if we have a chance of returning to 1.5ºC or below,” Andersen said. The report is the first in a series of major assessments in the run-up to the UN climate summit, COP31, in Antalya, Turkey, in November, where governments will again confront a deadlock over how quickly to phase out fossil fuels. For some observers, the report’s relative silence on the fuels driving the crisis – mentioned in passing just once in nearly 150 pages – is all the more striking as COP31 approaches. “Although UNEP does a good job of describing the hole we’ve dug ourselves into, it does a poor job of showing us that there is a way out,” said Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics, noting that the report only makes only a single passive reference to phasing out fossil fuels. “Ultimately the report’s neglect of some fundamentally important mitigation analysis risks turning it into a call to apathy rather than a call to arms,” Hare said. Fire, water, ice The planet’s frozen water is rapidly disappearing, threatening sea levels, freshwater supplies and climate stability. The report lands as the latest warning of the upheaval climate change is causing globally, and how much worse it might get. New threats to human health are already emerging. Rising temperatures are shifting vector-borne diseases to higher latitudes, increasing pathogen spillover risk, the report found. Food production could fall by 14% by 2050 under a high-emissions scenario, putting tens to hundreds of millions, concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Central America, at risk of malnutrition. Heat-related deaths during a 2025 European heatwave tripled, an increase attributed to global warming. Deadly heat seasons once expected every 100 years now arrive every 10 to 20 years. More than five billion people are projected to experience at least a month of extreme heat every year by 2050. Critical environmental systems that regulate the climate – storing carbon in forests, soils and frozen ground, or reflecting sunlight back into space – are also at risk of irreversible damage. Parts of the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet may already have crossed thresholds for irreversible ice loss. More than 40% of total global glacier loss since the 1970s has occurred in just the last decade, with global peak glacier extinction possible as early as 2041. More than 80% of tropical coral reefs bleached between 2023 and 2025, with warm-water corals now facing heat stress on a near-annual basis and “a low possibility” of surviving this century under any scenario. Essential carbon sinks like rainforests are facing die-off scenarios, with nearly 40% of the Amazon’s surface area at risk of disappearing by 2100. As damage mounts, returning to 1.5ºC – a major effort calculated in decades in a best-case scenario – does not constitute a rewind, the report stresses. Even if temperatures eventually fall, sea levels will continue rising, species driven to extinction will not return, and carbon released from thawing permafrost cannot simply be recovered. Ecosystems that collapse during overshoot cannot easily reassemble as temperatures fall. “The loss of biodiversity will weaken natural systems on which our lives and livelihoods depend, and will impact our ability to withdraw carbon from the atmosphere,” said Roberts. “Returning to 1.5ºC doesn’t mean we return to the same world we left,” Roberts added. ‘Collapse of habitability’ on low-lying islands Small developing island states are very vulnerable to the effects of climate change and rely on universal diplomatic processes to ensure they hold equal weight to major global powers. For small island developing states, the stakes are ones of life and death. The five to 10 centimetres of sea-level rise expected by 2050 is projected to double flooding across the Indian Ocean and tropical Pacific, supercharging storm surges, turning freshwater salty, and pushing floods deeper inland than at any point in history. For these nations, “the collapse of habitability has already begun,” the report warns. “This report is a fork-in-the-road moment for the planet. It is hard to overstate the depth of emotion for those of us living on the frontline after having fought so hard to put the 1.5 degree limit at the heart of the Paris Agreement,” said Palau President Surangel Whipps Jr. “It is a further glimpse into a perilous future that has already arrived.” “We need to see an urgent and unprecedented increase in political will and investment in a climate-safe future,” Whipps added. “Nobody can read this report and conclude otherwise.” For these low-lying nations, the threat is already here. But the consequences of remaining above 1.5ºC for an extended period will ultimately reach far beyond their shores. UNEP warns prolonged warming raises the risk of triggering irreversible tipping points in global systems, including the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, the Amazon rainforest and the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, a vital system of ocean currents that helps regulate temperatures across the Atlantic and Europe. Such changes could, the report warns, “reshape the world forever.” “Exceedance of 1.5°C should not be interpreted as safe or acceptable,” it states. Even if a return to below 1.5°C is secured — an outcome the report describes as “deeply uncertain” — “many nations and communities will face irreversible losses and permanently changed conditions.” The 1.8ºC ceiling Under UNEP’s most optimistic scenario – full implementation of all national climate plans plus all net-zero pledges – peak warming still reaches approximately 1.8C. Getting there requires roughly halving global emissions by 2035. “We’re really looking at 1.8ºC as being the kind of maximum, because the feasibility of the responses then becomes really, really questionable,” Roberts said. “You get a cascading effect from all the irreversible changes.” Wildfires weaken forest carbon stocks, drought reduces hydropower, heat degrades solar panel efficiency, and rising temperatures drive methane emissions from wetlands, eroding the systems the world would depend on to reverse warming. A decade of warming at the current rate, the report finds, could take 50 years to reverse even under optimistic assumptions. The lead for reducing emissions should fall on countries with “greater historical responsibility for climate change and capability to address it should act the hardest and fastest,” the report states. That tension – and the point advanced in the report that many advanced economies will need to go beyond net-zero to achieve net-negative emissions – is likely to resurface at COP31 in Antalya, Turkey, later this year, as oil-producing and high-income states fight calls to phase out fossil fuels. “This summer’s scorching heat, raging wildfires and deadly floods are a warning of what lies ahead,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said. “We must make the overshoot above 1.5 degrees as small and short as possible. That demands an overshoot of ambition.” Image Credits: Chris LeBoutiller, USGS, Unsplash/Ernests Vaga. Posts navigation Older posts
Who Should Lead the Global Fund? Let the Candidates Make Their Case 03/09/2026 Jirair Ratevosian The Global Fund’s board is searching for a replacement for current executive director Peter Sands (right), but concerns have been raised that its process has lacked transparency. Over the past week, the race for the next World Health Organisation (WHO) Director-General has started to take shape. Governments have publicly put forward prospective candidates, WHO is already listing them on a website, and some candidates are beginning to make their case publicly. Dr Hans Kluge has even released a manifesto laying out how he would lead the organization. And this is happening many months before the decision. WHO nominations do not even close until 24 September. The official candidate list will be published after the nomination period closes, followed by the first candidate web forum on 18 November, Executive Board consideration in January, another candidate forum in March, and finally the World Health Assembly vote in May of 2027. It is a long process, but it gives people time to hear the ideas, debate them and understand what each candidate actually wants to do with WHO. Meanwhile, The Global Fund, also in search of a new leader, has taken a very different approach. Rather than having candidates make their interest known publicly, the process will produce a pre-vetted shortlist of “four or five candidates” that is expected to reach its board in late September, just a month before it votes on 28-30 October. That one-month timetable leaves little room for the broader global health community to hear directly from the candidates or assess competing visions for the institution at a particularly consequential moment. Concerns about transparency Concerns about the transparency of the selection process were raised earlier this year by Sascha van Beek, a German parliamentarian, who questioned whether the process was sufficiently open and accountable. I too argued that The Global Fund is too important to treat this as just another executive search. The stakes are difficult to overstate. Since its creation in 2002, the Global Fund partnership has helped save 70 million lives and reduce the combined death rate from AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria by 63%. In 2024 alone, 25.6 million people were receiving antiretroviral therapy in countries where it invests, 7.4 million people were treated for tuberculosis and 162 million insecticide-treated mosquito nets were distributed. With nearly $70 billion disbursed across more than 100 countries, the choice of its next leader will shape disease programs and health systems around the world. Yet in July 2026, the Global Fund confirmed that the executive director selection process would continue as planned and on its existing timetable. As we wait for the Fund to announce the candidates, there is still an opportunity to open the process further. Doing so would not require reopening the search or delaying the board’s decision. Public candidate forum One way to do that is to hold a public candidate forum in October, with both in-person and virtual participation. It should be moderated by someone who understands the Fund and the different constituencies that make up its partnership. A forum would give more stakeholders with a vested interest in the Fund a substantive role before the board makes its decision. A forum would also force candidates to address the questions the Fund will face over the next decade. How should it approach new forms of financing? What role should artificial intelligence play? How should it support greater country ownership in the era of the Accra Reset? And what reforms will be needed as the global health landscape changes? The Global Fund can reasonably argue that its process already includes opportunities for engagement. Once the final shortlist is submitted in late September, candidates will attend a board retreat and then meet with board constituencies before the vote on 28-30 October. The board itself is unusually representative, with 20 voting seats divided equally between donor and implementer constituencies. Governments, civil society, communities affected by the three diseases, the private sector and foundations all have a formal role. That structure remains one of the Fund’s greatest strengths. But board engagement should not be the limit of the process. Board members are responsible for selecting the executive director, and that authority should remain with them. This is a public-interest decision, and greater openness can strengthen confidence in the Fund while building broader buy-in among donors, implementers, civil society and the communities it serves. The Global Fund’s own description of the job reinforces that point. The executive director is not simply managing the Secretariat. The person will be responsible for leading the institution through a period of major political and financial change. There is also an important precedent. Following concerns about the selection of its Director-General, WHO substantially revised its process ahead of the 2017 election. It introduced a code of conduct and candidate forums, with parts of the process made available to the public. WHO made the deliberate choice to create more space for candidates to explain how they would lead the organization and for member states and the wider community to hear from them before the election. The Fund describes itself not simply as an organization governed by a Board, but as a “worldwide partnership” of governments, communities, civil society, technical agencies and the private sector. A public candidate forum would be a simple way to put that principle into practice. Dr Jirair Ratevosian is a Research Scholar at the Duke Global Health Institute. He previously served on the board of the Global Fund. Past positions include acting chief of staff for PEPFAR, corporate social responsibility director for Gilead Sciences, and legislative director to US Congresswoman Barbara Lee. He holds a doctoral degree from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, an MPH from Boston University, and a BSc from the University of California, Los Angeles. Image Credits: Global Fund , Milken Institue. World Has No Realistic Path to Meet 1.5ºC Warming Target, UN Declares 02/09/2026 Stefan Anderson The world has missed its 1.5ºC target. The fight now turns to how far temperatures rise beyond it — and what can still be done to bring them back down. The world has failed to meet the Paris Agreement target of limiting global warming to 1.5ºC, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) declared on Wednesday. In a sprawling 141-page report, UNEP found there is no realistic pathway to prevent warming from exceeding the threshold. “The most stringent emission reduction pathways that were available around the time of the Paris Agreement are no longer feasible,” it states. The finding is the first by a UN agency to treat the 1.5ºC target as no longer within reach – and the math doesn’t give its authors much choice. To stay under 1.5ºC, total emissions from 2026 onward cannot exceed 130 billion tonnes of CO2. With current emissions at roughly 40 billion tonnes per year and still rising, that restriction will be breached in just three years. “Despite decades of scientific warnings, despite the growing scientific evidence, the resulting climate commitments have not produced sufficiently rapid emission reductions,” said Debra Roberts, a lead author and former co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group II. “Exceeding 1.5ºC is now unavoidable.” The report identifies just one pathway that would keep the world within its remaining carbon budget: global CO₂ emissions would have to fall steadily from 2025 to zero by 2031. Under current policies, the world is headed for 2.6C by century’s end. “All of our pathways forward are overshoot pathways,” Roberts added. “We are clearly entering uncharted territory.” With limiting the peak and length of the overshoot the last remaining option, UNEP is blunt: “This is by no means an acceptable or preferred pathway. It is simply the best remaining option.” ‘No good options’ above 1.5ºC UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen addresses reporters ahead of the report’s launch. While scientific projections have long assessed that remaining beneath this threshold would be impossible on current emissions trajectories, the change in language by UNEP is an historic break in climate diplomacy from the hope of Paris to the ongoing deadlock over the phase-out of fossil fuels set to continue in November at COP31. UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen, launching the findings at the end of a summer that saw Arctic temperatures soar to 32ºC, wildfires scorch Europe and the Americas, and sea-level rise threaten hundreds of millions of coastal residents, said the evidence demands immediate action. “Across the globe, extreme heat waves are already proving that climate change impacts will strike faster, hit harder, and last longer, costing more lives and causing deeper disruption,” Andersen said. “Obviously, we have climate procrastinated.” Crossing the 1.5ºC mark would bring an “intensification of extreme weather,” loss of small island states, and growing risks to human health, food and water security. “There are no good outcomes if we remain above 1.5ºC,” she said. With human-induced warming already nearing 1.4C and rising at around a quarter degree per decade, the World Meteorological Organization forecasts a three-in-four chance the 2026–2030 five-year mean will breach the Paris target. At current levels, roughly every five years of delay adds at least a tenth of a degree of global warming to the maximum level we will experience. “The future will bring many unknowns, but we do know that decisions taken now and in the next few years will determine if we have a chance of returning to 1.5ºC or below,” Andersen said. The report is the first in a series of major assessments in the run-up to the UN climate summit, COP31, in Antalya, Turkey, in November, where governments will again confront a deadlock over how quickly to phase out fossil fuels. For some observers, the report’s relative silence on the fuels driving the crisis – mentioned in passing just once in nearly 150 pages – is all the more striking as COP31 approaches. “Although UNEP does a good job of describing the hole we’ve dug ourselves into, it does a poor job of showing us that there is a way out,” said Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics, noting that the report only makes only a single passive reference to phasing out fossil fuels. “Ultimately the report’s neglect of some fundamentally important mitigation analysis risks turning it into a call to apathy rather than a call to arms,” Hare said. Fire, water, ice The planet’s frozen water is rapidly disappearing, threatening sea levels, freshwater supplies and climate stability. The report lands as the latest warning of the upheaval climate change is causing globally, and how much worse it might get. New threats to human health are already emerging. Rising temperatures are shifting vector-borne diseases to higher latitudes, increasing pathogen spillover risk, the report found. Food production could fall by 14% by 2050 under a high-emissions scenario, putting tens to hundreds of millions, concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Central America, at risk of malnutrition. Heat-related deaths during a 2025 European heatwave tripled, an increase attributed to global warming. Deadly heat seasons once expected every 100 years now arrive every 10 to 20 years. More than five billion people are projected to experience at least a month of extreme heat every year by 2050. Critical environmental systems that regulate the climate – storing carbon in forests, soils and frozen ground, or reflecting sunlight back into space – are also at risk of irreversible damage. Parts of the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet may already have crossed thresholds for irreversible ice loss. More than 40% of total global glacier loss since the 1970s has occurred in just the last decade, with global peak glacier extinction possible as early as 2041. More than 80% of tropical coral reefs bleached between 2023 and 2025, with warm-water corals now facing heat stress on a near-annual basis and “a low possibility” of surviving this century under any scenario. Essential carbon sinks like rainforests are facing die-off scenarios, with nearly 40% of the Amazon’s surface area at risk of disappearing by 2100. As damage mounts, returning to 1.5ºC – a major effort calculated in decades in a best-case scenario – does not constitute a rewind, the report stresses. Even if temperatures eventually fall, sea levels will continue rising, species driven to extinction will not return, and carbon released from thawing permafrost cannot simply be recovered. Ecosystems that collapse during overshoot cannot easily reassemble as temperatures fall. “The loss of biodiversity will weaken natural systems on which our lives and livelihoods depend, and will impact our ability to withdraw carbon from the atmosphere,” said Roberts. “Returning to 1.5ºC doesn’t mean we return to the same world we left,” Roberts added. ‘Collapse of habitability’ on low-lying islands Small developing island states are very vulnerable to the effects of climate change and rely on universal diplomatic processes to ensure they hold equal weight to major global powers. For small island developing states, the stakes are ones of life and death. The five to 10 centimetres of sea-level rise expected by 2050 is projected to double flooding across the Indian Ocean and tropical Pacific, supercharging storm surges, turning freshwater salty, and pushing floods deeper inland than at any point in history. For these nations, “the collapse of habitability has already begun,” the report warns. “This report is a fork-in-the-road moment for the planet. It is hard to overstate the depth of emotion for those of us living on the frontline after having fought so hard to put the 1.5 degree limit at the heart of the Paris Agreement,” said Palau President Surangel Whipps Jr. “It is a further glimpse into a perilous future that has already arrived.” “We need to see an urgent and unprecedented increase in political will and investment in a climate-safe future,” Whipps added. “Nobody can read this report and conclude otherwise.” For these low-lying nations, the threat is already here. But the consequences of remaining above 1.5ºC for an extended period will ultimately reach far beyond their shores. UNEP warns prolonged warming raises the risk of triggering irreversible tipping points in global systems, including the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, the Amazon rainforest and the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, a vital system of ocean currents that helps regulate temperatures across the Atlantic and Europe. Such changes could, the report warns, “reshape the world forever.” “Exceedance of 1.5°C should not be interpreted as safe or acceptable,” it states. Even if a return to below 1.5°C is secured — an outcome the report describes as “deeply uncertain” — “many nations and communities will face irreversible losses and permanently changed conditions.” The 1.8ºC ceiling Under UNEP’s most optimistic scenario – full implementation of all national climate plans plus all net-zero pledges – peak warming still reaches approximately 1.8C. Getting there requires roughly halving global emissions by 2035. “We’re really looking at 1.8ºC as being the kind of maximum, because the feasibility of the responses then becomes really, really questionable,” Roberts said. “You get a cascading effect from all the irreversible changes.” Wildfires weaken forest carbon stocks, drought reduces hydropower, heat degrades solar panel efficiency, and rising temperatures drive methane emissions from wetlands, eroding the systems the world would depend on to reverse warming. A decade of warming at the current rate, the report finds, could take 50 years to reverse even under optimistic assumptions. The lead for reducing emissions should fall on countries with “greater historical responsibility for climate change and capability to address it should act the hardest and fastest,” the report states. That tension – and the point advanced in the report that many advanced economies will need to go beyond net-zero to achieve net-negative emissions – is likely to resurface at COP31 in Antalya, Turkey, later this year, as oil-producing and high-income states fight calls to phase out fossil fuels. “This summer’s scorching heat, raging wildfires and deadly floods are a warning of what lies ahead,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said. “We must make the overshoot above 1.5 degrees as small and short as possible. That demands an overshoot of ambition.” Image Credits: Chris LeBoutiller, USGS, Unsplash/Ernests Vaga. Posts navigation Older posts
World Has No Realistic Path to Meet 1.5ºC Warming Target, UN Declares 02/09/2026 Stefan Anderson The world has missed its 1.5ºC target. The fight now turns to how far temperatures rise beyond it — and what can still be done to bring them back down. The world has failed to meet the Paris Agreement target of limiting global warming to 1.5ºC, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) declared on Wednesday. In a sprawling 141-page report, UNEP found there is no realistic pathway to prevent warming from exceeding the threshold. “The most stringent emission reduction pathways that were available around the time of the Paris Agreement are no longer feasible,” it states. The finding is the first by a UN agency to treat the 1.5ºC target as no longer within reach – and the math doesn’t give its authors much choice. To stay under 1.5ºC, total emissions from 2026 onward cannot exceed 130 billion tonnes of CO2. With current emissions at roughly 40 billion tonnes per year and still rising, that restriction will be breached in just three years. “Despite decades of scientific warnings, despite the growing scientific evidence, the resulting climate commitments have not produced sufficiently rapid emission reductions,” said Debra Roberts, a lead author and former co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group II. “Exceeding 1.5ºC is now unavoidable.” The report identifies just one pathway that would keep the world within its remaining carbon budget: global CO₂ emissions would have to fall steadily from 2025 to zero by 2031. Under current policies, the world is headed for 2.6C by century’s end. “All of our pathways forward are overshoot pathways,” Roberts added. “We are clearly entering uncharted territory.” With limiting the peak and length of the overshoot the last remaining option, UNEP is blunt: “This is by no means an acceptable or preferred pathway. It is simply the best remaining option.” ‘No good options’ above 1.5ºC UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen addresses reporters ahead of the report’s launch. While scientific projections have long assessed that remaining beneath this threshold would be impossible on current emissions trajectories, the change in language by UNEP is an historic break in climate diplomacy from the hope of Paris to the ongoing deadlock over the phase-out of fossil fuels set to continue in November at COP31. UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen, launching the findings at the end of a summer that saw Arctic temperatures soar to 32ºC, wildfires scorch Europe and the Americas, and sea-level rise threaten hundreds of millions of coastal residents, said the evidence demands immediate action. “Across the globe, extreme heat waves are already proving that climate change impacts will strike faster, hit harder, and last longer, costing more lives and causing deeper disruption,” Andersen said. “Obviously, we have climate procrastinated.” Crossing the 1.5ºC mark would bring an “intensification of extreme weather,” loss of small island states, and growing risks to human health, food and water security. “There are no good outcomes if we remain above 1.5ºC,” she said. With human-induced warming already nearing 1.4C and rising at around a quarter degree per decade, the World Meteorological Organization forecasts a three-in-four chance the 2026–2030 five-year mean will breach the Paris target. At current levels, roughly every five years of delay adds at least a tenth of a degree of global warming to the maximum level we will experience. “The future will bring many unknowns, but we do know that decisions taken now and in the next few years will determine if we have a chance of returning to 1.5ºC or below,” Andersen said. The report is the first in a series of major assessments in the run-up to the UN climate summit, COP31, in Antalya, Turkey, in November, where governments will again confront a deadlock over how quickly to phase out fossil fuels. For some observers, the report’s relative silence on the fuels driving the crisis – mentioned in passing just once in nearly 150 pages – is all the more striking as COP31 approaches. “Although UNEP does a good job of describing the hole we’ve dug ourselves into, it does a poor job of showing us that there is a way out,” said Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics, noting that the report only makes only a single passive reference to phasing out fossil fuels. “Ultimately the report’s neglect of some fundamentally important mitigation analysis risks turning it into a call to apathy rather than a call to arms,” Hare said. Fire, water, ice The planet’s frozen water is rapidly disappearing, threatening sea levels, freshwater supplies and climate stability. The report lands as the latest warning of the upheaval climate change is causing globally, and how much worse it might get. New threats to human health are already emerging. Rising temperatures are shifting vector-borne diseases to higher latitudes, increasing pathogen spillover risk, the report found. Food production could fall by 14% by 2050 under a high-emissions scenario, putting tens to hundreds of millions, concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Central America, at risk of malnutrition. Heat-related deaths during a 2025 European heatwave tripled, an increase attributed to global warming. Deadly heat seasons once expected every 100 years now arrive every 10 to 20 years. More than five billion people are projected to experience at least a month of extreme heat every year by 2050. Critical environmental systems that regulate the climate – storing carbon in forests, soils and frozen ground, or reflecting sunlight back into space – are also at risk of irreversible damage. Parts of the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet may already have crossed thresholds for irreversible ice loss. More than 40% of total global glacier loss since the 1970s has occurred in just the last decade, with global peak glacier extinction possible as early as 2041. More than 80% of tropical coral reefs bleached between 2023 and 2025, with warm-water corals now facing heat stress on a near-annual basis and “a low possibility” of surviving this century under any scenario. Essential carbon sinks like rainforests are facing die-off scenarios, with nearly 40% of the Amazon’s surface area at risk of disappearing by 2100. As damage mounts, returning to 1.5ºC – a major effort calculated in decades in a best-case scenario – does not constitute a rewind, the report stresses. Even if temperatures eventually fall, sea levels will continue rising, species driven to extinction will not return, and carbon released from thawing permafrost cannot simply be recovered. Ecosystems that collapse during overshoot cannot easily reassemble as temperatures fall. “The loss of biodiversity will weaken natural systems on which our lives and livelihoods depend, and will impact our ability to withdraw carbon from the atmosphere,” said Roberts. “Returning to 1.5ºC doesn’t mean we return to the same world we left,” Roberts added. ‘Collapse of habitability’ on low-lying islands Small developing island states are very vulnerable to the effects of climate change and rely on universal diplomatic processes to ensure they hold equal weight to major global powers. For small island developing states, the stakes are ones of life and death. The five to 10 centimetres of sea-level rise expected by 2050 is projected to double flooding across the Indian Ocean and tropical Pacific, supercharging storm surges, turning freshwater salty, and pushing floods deeper inland than at any point in history. For these nations, “the collapse of habitability has already begun,” the report warns. “This report is a fork-in-the-road moment for the planet. It is hard to overstate the depth of emotion for those of us living on the frontline after having fought so hard to put the 1.5 degree limit at the heart of the Paris Agreement,” said Palau President Surangel Whipps Jr. “It is a further glimpse into a perilous future that has already arrived.” “We need to see an urgent and unprecedented increase in political will and investment in a climate-safe future,” Whipps added. “Nobody can read this report and conclude otherwise.” For these low-lying nations, the threat is already here. But the consequences of remaining above 1.5ºC for an extended period will ultimately reach far beyond their shores. UNEP warns prolonged warming raises the risk of triggering irreversible tipping points in global systems, including the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, the Amazon rainforest and the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, a vital system of ocean currents that helps regulate temperatures across the Atlantic and Europe. Such changes could, the report warns, “reshape the world forever.” “Exceedance of 1.5°C should not be interpreted as safe or acceptable,” it states. Even if a return to below 1.5°C is secured — an outcome the report describes as “deeply uncertain” — “many nations and communities will face irreversible losses and permanently changed conditions.” The 1.8ºC ceiling Under UNEP’s most optimistic scenario – full implementation of all national climate plans plus all net-zero pledges – peak warming still reaches approximately 1.8C. Getting there requires roughly halving global emissions by 2035. “We’re really looking at 1.8ºC as being the kind of maximum, because the feasibility of the responses then becomes really, really questionable,” Roberts said. “You get a cascading effect from all the irreversible changes.” Wildfires weaken forest carbon stocks, drought reduces hydropower, heat degrades solar panel efficiency, and rising temperatures drive methane emissions from wetlands, eroding the systems the world would depend on to reverse warming. A decade of warming at the current rate, the report finds, could take 50 years to reverse even under optimistic assumptions. The lead for reducing emissions should fall on countries with “greater historical responsibility for climate change and capability to address it should act the hardest and fastest,” the report states. That tension – and the point advanced in the report that many advanced economies will need to go beyond net-zero to achieve net-negative emissions – is likely to resurface at COP31 in Antalya, Turkey, later this year, as oil-producing and high-income states fight calls to phase out fossil fuels. “This summer’s scorching heat, raging wildfires and deadly floods are a warning of what lies ahead,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said. “We must make the overshoot above 1.5 degrees as small and short as possible. That demands an overshoot of ambition.” Image Credits: Chris LeBoutiller, USGS, Unsplash/Ernests Vaga. Posts navigation Older posts