In his first major speech of the year, the UN Secretary-General underlined the need for global cooperation to address today’s challenges such as the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change.
For many years in Nigeria, farmers and cattle herders have been in conflict over land rights. But the disputes have reached crisis levels in recent years, killing thousands of people and displacing many thousands more from their homes, left in ruins by attacks. More people have been killed in such disputes than by the Boko Haram insurgency. One of the main culprits? Climate change.
The global population is expected to reach nearly 10 billion people by 2050, which will significantly increase the demand for food. The steady increase in hunger since 2014, after a decade of progress, indicates that there is a need to accelerate and scale-up action to strengthen the resilience and adaptability of food systems and livelihoods.
Drug trafficking has long been a problem in the Golden Triangle, the region where Thailand’s Chiang Rai province meets Myanmar and Laos. Gita Sabharwal, UN Resident Coordinator in Thailand, and Jeremy Douglas, UNODC in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, explain how the UN and the Thai government are working together to tackle the issue.
From banking, to food delivery, and taxi bookings, Uganda is rapidly becoming accustomed to many of the online tools that are commonplace in developed economies, and which don’t rely on face-to-face interactions. The UN is supporting this shift, as a way to help developing economies recover from the global economic crisis brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic.
In January, Thailand became the second country to confirm a COVID-19 case but, since then, the country has shown remarkable resilience and, as of late July, there had not been any recorded cases of domestic transmission for nearly two months. Gita Sabharwal, the UN Resident Coordinator in Thailand, explains that this success is thanks to a combination of government action, social responsibility and community solidarity.
Together with national authorities, the private sector and other partners, the UN teams serving 162 countries and territories continue to prioritize the fight against COVID-19. Today, we highlight some of their work as of 19 June 2020.
Here are nine ways our UN teams are working to address what UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described as the greatest global crisis since World War II.
