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Under increasing threat from the  unsustainable use of forest resources and wildlife trafficking, the UN chief called on Wednesday for people and governments everywhere to step up efforts to protect forests and support forest communities. 

Trapping and storing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil power generation and industry is needed urgently to achieve carbon neutrality, the UN’s Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) said in a report published on Wednesday.

The world still has a “fighting chance” to limit global warming by ending dependence on coal, UN Secretary-General António Guterres told representatives from governments, local authorities and the private sector, meeting online on Tuesday. 

Addressing members of the Powering Past Coal Alliance, the UN chief stressed that keeping temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels is achievable over this decade.   

UN-Habitat and the Municipality of Beirut (MoB) announced the launch of a newly established Municipal Social Cell (MSC), which aims to mitigate social and protection issues encountered by vulnerable urban host and migrant populations within the city of Beirut.

The fate of tens of thousands of civilians being held in Syria’s “notorious” prisons or detention centres is still unclear, 10 years after the country’s civil war began, UN investigators said on Monday. 

After six consecutive weeks of decline, COVID-19 cases worldwide increased last week for the first time, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday. 

Four of the agency’s six regions reported a rise in numbers, with Africa and the Western Pacific excluded. 

COVAX has been trending in stories about the COVID-19 pandemic in recent days, particularly in relation to the shipment of vaccines to Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, the first to arrive in Africa. Here’s a UN News recap of what COVAX is, and why it is so important.

The UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) on Sunday urged all countries to repatriate and safely reintegrate their young nationals being held at Syria’s largest camp for refugees and internally-displaced, following a deadly weekend fire at Al-Hol camp which saw at least three children die, and another 15 injured.

As the COVID-19 pandemic gathers pace, people worldwide are “being left behind – or pushed even further behind”, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights warned on Friday. 

Delivering a global update to the Human Rights Council, Michelle Bachelet said people everywhere were being excluded from not only development, but also opportunities.  

The UN Security Council on Friday unanimously passed a resolution calling on all Member States to support a “sustained humanitarian pause” to local conflicts, in order to allow for COVID-19 vaccinations. Briefing journalists afterwards, World Health Organization (WHO) chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus argued that more could be done.