Week in Review

This year’s UN Climate Conference takes place in Sharm el-Sheikh, against a backdrop of extreme weather events worldwide, an energy crisis propelled by the war in Ukraine, and scientific data reiterating that the world is not doing enough to tackle carbon emissions and protect the future of our planet.

“It is my appeal to all the representatives of States, to ensure there is no safe haven provided to any kind of terrorism whatsoever”: the words of Nidhi Chaphekar, a survivor of the 2016 Brussels terrorist attacks, opening a Special Meeting of the United Nations Counter-Terrorism Committee in India on Friday.

With daily violence spiralling out of control in the occupied West Bank, leaders in both Israel and Palestine need to take steps to restore calm as best they can, “with the full support of the international community”, said the UN’s top official in the region on Friday.

National pledges to reduce harmful emissions offer little hope of avoiding climate disaster, UN climate experts said on Thursday, in an urgent appeal for a radical transformation of the energy sector, before it’s too late.

Condemnation of the brutal and on-going crackdown of protests in Iran is “not enough”, said the UN independent human rights expert for the country on Thursday, calling for the establishment of an international investigative mechanism.

Haitians are coming together to tackle the recent outbreak of cholera in the country, says the UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator in the country. Ulrika Richardson, the most senior UN humanitarian official in Haiti, visited a number of cholera treatment centres in the country’s capital, Port-au-Prince, where she met medical staff treating patients with the disease.

Eugenio Gastelum has been obsessed with video games since he was a kid. And now, he’s managed to turn his passion into a career, as the first-ever UN video game expert, using the popular game Minecraft, as a tool to help communities improve their public spaces.

Nearly four decades on from the adoption of the UN Convention against Torture, there is evidence that it is still taking place in all regions of the world, even though it’s a recognized international crime.

On this week’s episode of The lid Is On, Conor Lennon met Claude Heller and Suzanne Jabour – the chairpersons of the UN Committee against Torture, and the Sub-committee on the Prevention of Torture – two independent human rights experts who attempt to convince countries to end the practice.

They explain that, in some countries and regions, torture is still seen thought to be a useful or acceptable part of interrogations, even though it has been shown to be ineffective.

Music: Within the Earth, Ketsa

During his two-day visit to India this week, UN Secretary-General António Guterres visited a model project site in Gujarat state, designated the country’s first solar-powered village. He commended villagers there on the shift towards renewable energy, which he said is not only changing lives in the community, but also combating climate change. 

Cities have an in-built bias against women, who overwhelmingly describe them as unsafe and unwelcoming. A UN report released on Monday, calls for a complete overhaul of city design, and for women to be more closely involved in urban planning.

If you had to name some of the planet’s most life-threatening fungal diseases, would you know where to begin? 

While plans submitted by most signatories of the Paris Agreement would reduce global greenhouse gas emissions, they are still not ambitious enough to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, a new report by UN Climate Change (UNFCCC) warned on Wednesday.

Heatwaves have become an unavoidable health hazard for many nations, but new data indicates that they are set to affect virtually every child on earth by 2050, the UN Children’s Fund, UNICEF, warned on Tuesday.

Governments must invest more in building safe drinking water systems, both to ensure greater access to this resource and to mitigate the effects of climate change, according to a report published on Monday by the World Health Organization (WHO), UN children’s agency, UNICEF, and the World Bank.