7th edition of World Urban Forum starting next Saturday in Medellin, Colombia

From next Saturday Medellin, second-largest city in Colombia and capital of Antioquia district, will hold the 7th edition of the World Urban Forum. More than 23,000 participants representing 160 countries already registered and are expected to gather for the Forum. The World Urban Forum (WUF) is convened by the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) city every two years, to examine the most pressing issues facing the world today in the area of human settlements, including rapid urbanization and its impact on cities, communities, economies, climate change and policies. It is considered the World’s Premier Conference on Cities. According to current estimations, almost two-thirds of the world's urban population live in cities where income inequality has increased since the 1980s. In many cases, this increase has been staggering. The them chosen for this edition “Urban Equity in Development - Cities for Life” will point the discussion on inequalities present in urban spaces, with cities divided by invisible borders that take the form of social, cultural and economic exclusion. Slums popping up at the border of cities in most developing countries in the world are emblematic symbols of these marginalization and the face of poverty and urban inequality continue to raise perpetuating the lack of access to basic services and political representation to the most vulnerable communities. For example  1 - Gender inequality persists, preventing women from accessing secondary education, decent employment, political representation, and reproductive health care.  2 - Youth inequalities manifest in discrimination in access to education, differentiated levels of employment and livelihood opportunities, Cities, then, being the setting for the marginalization of most of the people potentially harmed by inequality are a critical component in addressing the problem.

Urban settings can contribute from different perspectives in facing the phenomenon as their  

1) Design, 

2) Governance, and 

3) Infrastructures

have direct impact on the lives and opportunities of their inhabitants. The key points of discussion for the upcoming conference have been identified in a concept paper released by UN-HABITAT in July 2014. 

Don't forget to contribute to the Forum with your tweets using official account @WorldUrbanForum and hashtag  #WUF7

Peatland Forests in South East Asia threatened by fires and illegal logging

Land-cover maps fire detection based on satellite imagery helped to evaluate the rates and spatial distribution of peatland deforestation in Southeast Asia from 1990 to 2010. The collected data are astonishing.

The proportion of forest cover in the peatlands of Peninsular Malaysia, Sumatra, and Borneo decreased from 77% to 36%. After two decades of extensive deforestation (31000 km² ; 4.9% yr⁻¹) strongly associated with fire activity, Sumatra has been left with just 28% of its historical forested peatlands. 

Map source: http://www.aseanpeat.net/

 

 

 

If peatland deforestation is allowed to continue at current rates, the Southeast Asian peat swamp forests will disappear by around 2030. The destruction of these forests will have serious consequences for the local communities:

•  Scarsity of products and services which constitute the income of local communities

• And at global level, extinction of endemic species typical for the peat swamp forest of the region, 

•  Increase of carbon emissions.

Right to privacy and the recent Datagate scandal is changing the ways people use the net

Snowden's leaks on the use of mass surveillance programs, like PRISM, by U.S. and British governments , highlighted again the discussion on the balance between collective security and civil liberties . Some international legal instruments have been adopted to safeguard the fundamental rights to privacy and civil liberties. Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on December 10, 1948 states as follows:

 1. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks

 Also, the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) adopted by the United Nations in 1966 and entered into force on 23 March 1976 introduced the following purview in Article 17:

 1. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his honour and reputation. 
2. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

Map on the state of ratification for the ICCPR

People is becoming more cautious on sharing information on the Internet. Details such as your search history, browsing habits, your physical location and your IP address are among the details that traditional and popular search engines like Google and Bing keep a record of. Therefore, more and more users are starting to use search engines which safeguard anonymity and privacy. Among these, search engines like  Ixquick ,and DuckDuckGo are lately registering  traffic increase around 50 %.
Why are instruments like Ixquick safer?

Protection of Privacy

 

User data are not stored in the search engines servers'

Ixquick as well DuckDuckGO don't record  IP addresses of users and track cookies, therefore there is literally no data about the user like in other search engines.

No Search leakage

when you do a search and then click on a link, your search terms are sent to that site you clicked on and your personal information are shared (search leakage).For example, when you search for something private, you are sharing that private search not only with your search engine, but also with all the sites that you clicked on (for that search).
In addition, when you visit any site, your computer automatically sends information about it to that site (including your User agent and IP address). This information can often be used to identify you directly.
So when you do that private search, not only can those other sites know your search terms, but they can also know that you searched it. It is this combination of available information about you that raises privacy concerns. Using
DuckDuckGo prevents search leakage by default. Visited sites will still know that you accessed them, but they will not know what search you entered beforehand.

 Encryption (HTTPS) by default. 

Encryption prevents snooping. Searches are encrypted, so others can't "tap" the Internet connection to snoop what you're searching for. This combination of not storing data together with using strong encryption for the connections is key in protecting your Privacy.