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With two-thirds of the world’s population expected to live in urban areas by 2050, forests are critical part of the solution to the unprecedented demand for water, food and energy that these cities will face, senior United Nations officials said Wednesday, on the International Day of Forests.

“How we manage forests will determine how we meet this demand,” said Manoel Sobral Filho, Director of the UN Forum on Forests Secretariat (UNFFS).

People with Down syndrome, their advocates and supporters gathered at UN Headquarters in New York on Wednesday to rally employers and make sure they saw the benefits of enabling people with Down syndrome and disabilities to make meaningful contributions in the workplace.   

The humanitarian crisis in Syria is reaching new peaks as hundreds of thousands of people flee the escalating fighting in Eastern Ghouta and Afrin, the latest flashpoints in the long-running conflict, United Nations relief agencies said Tuesday.

With five billion people at risk of having difficulty accessing adequate water by 2050, finding nature-based solutions, such as China’s rainwater recycling, India’s forest regeneration and Ukraine’s artificial wetlands, is becoming increasingly important, according to a United Nations report released Monday at the world’s largest water-related event in Brazil.

At a time when resources for refugees from Syria is declining, the top United Nations humanitarian official in Lebanon, the country host to some 1.5 million Syrian and several thousand Palestinian refugees, has launched a funding allocation to ensure that critical relief programmes can be sustained.

Calling Lebanon “a fundamental pillar of stability” in the Middle East, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres on Thursday told a high-level meeting in Rome that it is absolutely essential for the international community to show strong solidarity with the country.

Lebanese NGO Assabil, in collaboration with the United Nations Information Centre in Beirut (UNIC Beirut), held a panel discussion entitled “When a woman speaks: readings in 70 current books from Lebanon and 100 folk tales,” on Tuesday 13 March, 2018, to mark International Women’s Day.

With 700 million people worldwide at risk of being displaced by intense water scarcity by 2030, water infrastructure investment must be at least doubled over the next five years, a panel set up by the United Nations and the World Bank recommended on Wednesday.   

Continuing fighting forced the postponement on Thursday of a United Nations inter-agency relief convoy to Douma, a neighborhood in Syria’s war-ravaged Eastern Ghouta, a UN spokesman reported.

This news comes after the UN and other humanitarian agencies were forced on Monday to leave after nine hours in Douma amid ongoing shelling in east Ghouta and the Syrian capital, Damascus. Only 10 trucks were fully unloaded while four were partially unloaded.  As a result, half of the food for 27,500 people was not delivered.

Following Sunday’s military operations in Syria’s east Ghouta, which claimed 30 lives, including women and children, reliable reports indicate that fighting continued and that shelling between East Ghouta and Damascus was ongoing in both directions, the United Nations humanitarian wing reported Tuesday.