By Waldo Mendiluza
Correspondent for the Latin Press in France
In its famous preamble, the multilateral entity, founded in 1945 and activated in 1946, proclaims: “As wars are born in the minds of the people, the bastions of peace must be built in the minds of the people,” a vision more relevant than ever in the face of existential challenges for humanity.
There is consensus in the international community that education is a powerful weapon to address challenges such as conflict, climate change or inequalities.
However, around 250 million children are out of school, after six million more were registered last year, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) warned in September.
As part of the Millennium Development Goals Summit celebrations at UN headquarters in New York, the multilateral organization and its statistics institute released data highlighting the urgency of action to improve access to classrooms on a global scale.
In this context, they pointed out that if countries were on track to achieve the fourth of the 2030 Agenda goals, an education goal, almost 60 million more children, adolescents and young people would now be attending classes.
In addition, six million additional minors would have access to the preschool level and at least one million 700,000 additional teachers would have received training.
The situation couldn’t be more worrying: there is an annual financial gap estimated at $100 billion to help countries achieve their goal by 2030: “To ensure inclusive, equitable and quality education and learning opportunities throughout To promote life for all.”
In this sense, the organization emphasized the need for one new child to enter school every two seconds and 1,400,000 children to be enrolled in early childhood education.
“Statistics show that the number of children out of school is increasing. States must urgently mobilize if they do not want to sell the future of millions of them,” warned the Director General of UNESCO, Audrey Azoulay, who estimated that education is in a state of emergency, despite the significant efforts made in the sector in recent decades.
Lack of teachers
Another major challenge in education is the global shortage of teachers and the situation of these professionals: an estimated 44 million teachers are missing to achieve the goal of providing primary and secondary education for all before 2030.
Azoulay drew attention to a major professional crisis on October 5th on the occasion of World Teachers’ Day.
“In some regions of the world there is a shortage of candidates, in others there is a very high fluctuation rate in the first few years of employment. In both cases the answer is the same: we need to better value, train and support teachers,” he said in his message.
UNESCO recommended measures to make the profession more attractive, including investing in initial teacher training and continuous development programs, implementing mentoring initiatives and ensuring that teachers receive competitive salaries and benefits.
He also advocated streamlining administrative tasks and documentation to allow teachers to focus more on teaching, promote a healthy work-life balance, and provide easier access to mental health services and management counseling for stress and emotional difficulties.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
The ethical use of artificial intelligence (AI) continued to be on the agenda this year of the organization with 194 member states, a number that was reached in July with the reintegration of the United States, a country that it excluded in October 2017 by decision of the then State had given up by President Donald Trump.
After adopting the first ethical framework for AI with shared values and principles for its use and development at the end of 2021, the Paris-based company called on governments in September to ensure the human approach in schools by regulating Generative AI, a Branch that allows generating original content from existing data such as texts, images, music and others using commands.
In this sense, he saw it as a tremendous opportunity for development, but also argued that it could cause harm and prejudice.
For the Director General of UNESCO, generative AI cannot be integrated into education without public engagement and without the necessary safeguards and regulations, with a human-centered approach and a minimum age limit of 13 years for use.
The multilateral organization used its call to warn about the new tool’s impact on exacerbating digital data gaps.
PROTECTING BIODIVERSITY
Contributing to the global fight to protect biodiversity, UNESCO published the first assessment of the status and trends of species in World Heritage sites at the end of August.
Experts such as Guy Debonnet and Tales Carvalho Resende shared with Prensa Latina the concerns that motivated the study on World Heritage natural sites.
They make up less than one percent of the Earth’s surface but are home to more than a fifth of the mapped biodiversity, including about 75,000 plants and 30,000 mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles.
Climate change and human activity are threatening these 1,157 protected areas, described by experts and UNESCO World Heritage Director Lazare Eloundou Assomo as the last line of defense for biodiversity and many endangered species.
According to research, of the more than 100,000 species mapped in World Heritage sites, at least 20,000 fall into the “endangered” category.
The list includes 66 percent of hard corals at risk of extinction, followed by birds (48), mammals (44), sharks and rays (35), marine fish (34), terrestrial invertebrates (32) and freshwater fish (23). reptiles (22), amphibians (19), trees (16) and plants (four).
Debonnet mentioned challenges to biodiversity conservation such as rising temperatures and changes in climate patterns and human activity, although these are not the only ones.
These are sites that are bastions for biodiversity protection and are also threatened by conflict, particularly in Africa, illegal fishing, the use of pesticides, deforestation, infrastructure projects and invasive species, he argued.
The expert mentioned cases of places such as the tropical rainforests of Sumatra (Indonesia), which have been attacked by deforestation, and the Everglades National Park (USA), which are threatened by agricultural expansion, pesticides and invasive species.
For his part, Carvalho Resende called on the international community to invest more resources in natural heritage sites where much of the planet’s biodiversity is concentrated.
According to the specialist, one of the authors of the study, research by UNESCO and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) confirmed the importance of such protected areas, which are home to species such as the vaquita, the smallest in the world , with only a dozen surviving individuals in Baja California (Mexico).
JOURNALISTS
During the year, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization emphasized the urgency of ensuring the dissemination of truthful information, the responsible use of social networks and the protection of journalists.
On November 2, the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes Against Journalists, UNESCO condemned the attacks on press workers and called for concrete measures to prevent and combat them.
“Right now the risks to them are higher than ever, and this is most dramatically evident in the Middle East, where UNESCO recently decried the deadliest week for journalists in any recent conflict,” he stressed.
Particular mention was made of the holding of elections next year in which more than 2.6 billion people will go to the polls, elections threatened by spreading phenomena ranging from the spread of fake news to polarization and hate speech .
Industry experts not only deal with risks in war and conflict scenarios. In this regard, the organization warned that between January 2019 and June 2022, 759 individual attacks, including five murders, were documented in connection with 89 elections in 70 countries. .
work/wmr