What's New

The COVID-19 pandemic has reversed development gains for millions in poor countries, creating an even more sharply unequal world, according to a new UN report released on Thursday.  

Over 30 years after the invention of the world wide web, The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child has laid out the ways that young people and children should be treated in the digital world, and how their rights should be protected.

COVID-19 confirmed cases continued to rise around the world for a fourth consecutive week, with around 3.3 million new cases reported in the past seven-day period, the UN health agency said on Wednesday.

The number of new deaths from the coronavirus levelled off after a six-week decrease, with just over 60,000 new deaths reported.

The United Nations Secretary-General on Tuesday urged all countries, companies and financial institutions to commit to net zero or carbon neutrality, with “clear and credible” plans to achieve the target, starting immediately. 

As the living tissue of the earth, biodiversity is “intimately linked to human health” the head of the UN’s scientific agency told a global forum on Wednesday, noting that “we are part of that living tissue”. 

Ending violence against women in politics is critical to encouraging more women to participate in public life, the President of the UN General Assembly said on Tuesday. 

Volkan Bozkir convened experts from the UN, academia and civil society for an online discussion to examine links between political leadership and preventing violence targeting women and girls. 

Famine is already on the doorstep of millions of families in 20 countries, two UN agencies warned on Tuesday in a report that calls for urgent action to avert rising hunger due to factors such as conflict, climate extremes and the COVID-19 pandemic.

The UN Secretary-General António Guterres has issued a statement expressing his profound concern over the rise in violence against Asians, and people of Asian descent, during the course of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The growing gap between the number of vaccines being given in rich countries and those administered through COVAX is becoming “more grotesque every day”, the head of the UN health agency said on Monday.

“In January, I said that the world was on the brink of a catastrophic moral failure unless urgent steps were taken to ensure equitable distribution of vaccines”, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) told journalists at a regular news briefing. 

Climate change has hit the world’s oceans hard, UN weather experts said on Monday, in a call for lifesaving monitoring and early warning services that were interrupted by COVID-19 to be ramped up again, to protect shipping and coastal communities at risk.