The World Today: October 2009: October 2009

With around a quarter of the world’s states and 53 members, the African Union should pack a very real punch. But they have never negotiated together, until now. The Copenhagen climate talks will hear Africa’s voice loud and clear. An important development for climate issues and the continent.

The latest scientific surveys of the Arctic Ocean show that local sea ice is continuing to retreat, confirming the worst fears of environmentalists and delegates to the Copenhagen summit on global warming. But what of hopes that climate change in the region may have a silver lining by opening-up new commercial sea routes that would stretch along the northern coasts of Canada and Russia, linking east and west?

Few may ask where the fish comes from that lands on their plate at lunchtime. But the European Union is about to do just that to try to put an end to illegal fishing and manage stocks in the oceans.

The Lisbon Treaty, the successor to the European Union’s rejected constitutional treaty, is set to come into force at the end of this year if Irish voters accept it in a second referendum early this month. Leading European politicians see it as the blueprint for an effective European government, fulfilling an ambition born when the Berlin Wall fell twenty years ago.But is Lisbon a treaty too far for the people of Europe? And are new divisions undoing the dream of a continent at peace with itself and surrounded by a ‘circle of friends’, especially in the east?

Twenty thousand football fans are expected in the Turkish city of Bursa in the middle of this month to see the national team take on Armenia. The game has significance beyond its status as a World Cup qualifier. It marks a new stage in a relationship that has been sour for more than a century. Can soccer help bring the sides together as ping-pong was said to have done with China and America some forty years ago?

Since the Berlin Wall was breached just twenty years ago, NATO has constantly searched for new purpose. Now a fresh strategy is in the works and the Organization’s new Secretary-General has to deliver.