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Top UN officials met in the margins of the 76th General Assembly on Thursday,  with a strong call to action to stamp out gender-based violence (GBV), amid a rise in forced displacement and other humanitarian emergencies around the globe.

No region is immune to climate disasters the UN chief told the Security Council on Thursday, warning that “our window of opportunity” to prevent the worst climate impacts is “rapidly closing”.

Every day, hundreds of millions of people go to bed hungry. Three billion people cannot afford a healthy diet. Two billion are overweight or obese and yet 462 million, are underweight. Nearly a third of all food that is produced, is lost or wasted.  

With humanity on the edge of an abyss, and moving in the wrong direction, the world must wake up, Secretary-General António Guterres said in his keynote address to the UN General Assembly on Tuesday.

Outlining six “Great Divides” that must be bridged now, he called for greater action in areas such as climate policy, gender equality and closing the gap between rich and poor.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres on Tuesday welcomed important commitments made towards climate action by the world’s two largest economies, as the 76th High Level Debate began in New York.

He hailed United States’ President Jose Biden’s announcement that the US would significantly increase its international climate finance to approximately $11.4 billion a year.

Top politicians joined award-winning African performers and others on Tuesday, in New York, to take part in a special event organized by the UN Development Programme (UNDP), to discuss how COVID-19 vaccines can be fairly distributed worldwide, as a key priority for development. 

Despite the economic devastation wrought by COVID-19, the new technology sector continued to thrive and prosper last year, the UN’s intellectual property agency said in a new report published on Monday.

The world “is challenged like never before”, the UN Secretary-General António Guterres said on Monday, but the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) still offer a roadmap to get back on track.  

“It would be easy to lose hope. But we are not hopeless. Or helpless. We have a path to recovery. If we choose to take it,” he said.

Speaking alongside the UK Prime Minister in New York on Monday the UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, has called on world leaders for “decisive action now to avert climate catastrophe.” 

Mr. Guterres joined an emergency summit convened and attended by United Kingdom premier Boris Johnson, to press for more action on climate finance and other measures ahead of the watershed UN COP26 climate conference, which begins next month in Scotland. 

Health leaders agree that a world without COVID-19 will not be possible until everyone has equal access to vaccines. More than 4.6 million people have died from the virus since it swept across the globe from the beginning of 2020, but it’s expected that the rate of people dying will slow if more people are vaccinated.