The disaster in Beirut calls up converging crises
Lebanon was already on the brink. It's not the only case.
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Beirut. Photo by Alev Takil on Unsplash
The Worldwise View
Even before the terrifying blast that rocked Beirut on Tuesday this week, Lebanon was struggling with two crises colliding.
The coronavirus pandemic added fuel to a smouldering economic downturn, bringing the country—and its health system—on the brink of collapse.
Many people had lost jobs and couldn’t afford basic necessities like washing powder. In mid-July the country registered record-high infections.
In fact, it’s not the only place where Covid-19 and other crises have been on a collision course.
Since the virus emerged, the talk in humanitarian circles—and occasionally in the news—has been about the prospect of pandemic waves hitting vulnerability hotspots in low-income countries.
There were concerns that the human cost could far exceed predictions for the Global North—either directly as a result of the disease, or from secondary impacts such as food shortages, lost jobs and lack of safety nets. We are now seeing signs of this—which I called a lack of resilience in this recent post—unfolding in the Global South.
Seven of the ten most vulnerable countries for infectious disease identified by research in 2016 were in conflict zones. We knew months ago that many other, different challenges could make spread of the virus devastating—from crowded conditions in slums and refugee camps to places affected by conflict to poor health systems and environmental conditions including flooding.
On that note of environmental conditions: I wouldn’t be surprised if in the case of Beirut, climate change gets added to the list of converging crises.
The region is in the grip of an intense heatwave, with record-high temperatures in Baghdad and Damascus. That doesn’t mix well with tons of explosives likely stored in poor conditions.
Just to be clear, there’s no evidence that a rise in temperatures linked to climate change is involved, and this is not something that’s been discussed in the case so far. That may change, but so far a tweet by environmental journalist Peter Schwartzstein is the only mention of it that I’ve seen—and it links to a story he wrote last year looking at this type of scenario.
“Having worked intensively on this article I can tell you that climate change IS increasingly a factor”, Schwartzstein wrote in response to a comment on that tweet.
We’ll have to wait and see if climate change enters the debate over what led to this week’s tragic events in Beirut.
In the meantime, read on for a selection of stories about more cases where the pandemic is converging with other crises.
#1—MIGRATION & DISPLACEMENT
In its August edition, the Economist writes about the plight of migrants in the age of Covid-19, calling for countries to allow people to move across borders—even though it concedes that existing curbs on migration are probably here to stay.
"Yet when the coronavirus is vanquished, migration will still be what it was before: a powerful tool that can lift up the poor, rejuvenate rich countries and spread new ideas around the world. A pandemic is no reason to abandon it."
If only that were how countries see it.
Refugees and asylum seekers are still in desperate conditions in Greece. In what Oxfam has called a blatant attack on this vulnerable group, in July the country’s government tightened its policy on asylum procedures, reducing migrants' access to health services or legal aid.
But it’s in Africa, home to nine out of 10 of the worst displacement crises, that the number of displaced people runs in the millions. As food prices increase due to the pandemic, many refugees in Africa are using transactional sex to survive, according to the UN.
#2—FOOD SECURITY
Yemen is at the centre of repeated warnings about hunger. The UN estimates that the number of malnourished children could grow to 2.4 million by the end of the year (Al Jazeera + Middle East Monitor).
A plague of locusts advancing and destroying crops across East Africa, the Middle East and Asia is also raising food security fears. It began shortly before the new coronavirus emerged, I wrote about it in early July, and it’s far from over. In Africa the locusts may now be heading for the Sahel, one of the world's most vulnerable regions already battling hunger, global warming and poor environmental conditions.
Locusts may become a worry for Latin America too: according to this Bloomberg report, a swarm might be on the verge of blowing into Brazil from Argentina.
The region is already bracing for converging crises. As winter and the hurricane season begin in the Caribbean and Central America, the World Food Programme is warning that a ‘food pandemic’ induced by Covid-19 is threatening instability in a region that accounts for almost a third of the world’s infections.
Latin America is where peace deteriorated the most last year, according to the latest Global Peace Index.
Climate and migration crises are part of the region’s story too: this piece in NYT magazine, based on a model of how climate change drives migration across state borders, focuses on Central America.
#3—EBOLA & OTHER DISEASES
When the WHO declared in late June that the 10th Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo was over, the announcement came with cautions to remain vigilant for new cases (WHO + New Humanitarian + Nature).
Sure enough, a new outbreak of the disease in a different part of the country emerged less than three weeks later. The numbers soon surpassed those of a 2018 outbreak in the same region, raising fears the outbreak could spill over to neighbouring countries.
The DRC’s Ebola epidemics are colliding with Covid-19, and with a recent outbreak of measles.
If you’ve read WorldWise for a while, you’ll have seen plenty other mentions of a resurgence in deadly diseases as one of the worrisome fallouts from the pandemic (here’s one example). Those concerns have only intensified.
The New York Times reported this week that HIV, TB and malaria are making a comeback as resources get diverted to fight Covid-19, reversing years of progress. Other reports have focused specifically on how the pandemic is colliding with HIV (NPR Goats & Soda + AP). And signs of a sharp drop in child vaccinations globally extend those concerns far beyond these three diseases.
A final note from the week’s soundtrack
This has to be about Lebanon—going back to the 2018 critically acclaimed film Capernaüm ("Chaos"), by Nadine Labaki, which tells the story of Zain El Hajj, a 12-year-old living in the slums of Beirut. Like in Labaki’s first feature Caramel, the beautiful soundtrack is composed by her partner, Khaled Mouzanar.
Worldwise is written by Anita Makri.
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