By Shanta Roy NEW YORK (IDN) – When a High-Level Political Forum (HLPF) concluded its four-day ministerial meeting assessing the current status of the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), one irrefutable fact stood out: despite “encouraging progress”, many of the goals were lagging far behind in their implementation since they were adopted by the […]
New Data Illuminates Inequalities Among the Poor Worldwide
By Caroline Mwanga NEW YORK (IDN) – A new report released at the UN High-Level Political Forum challenges the traditional concept of poverty and sheds light on the number of people experiencing poverty at regional, national and subnational levels, and reveals inequalities across countries and among the poor themselves. Findings from the 2019 global Multidimensional […]
New Report Calls for Breathing Life into Global Goals
By Santo D. Banerjee NEW YORK (IDN) – A new report finds that while the global community talks a lot about sustainability goals, it does not invest enough in implementing them. The industrialized countries play an ambivalent role in their implementation. On the one hand, they come closest to fulfilling the goals, but on the […]
New York Brings Global Vision, Urban Action to SDGs
By Santo D. Banerjee NEW YORK (IDN) – As host city to the United Nations, New York is making the most of its position through its ambitious Global Vision, Urban Action (GVUA) platform that uses the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a common framework for building a better city for its people and their environment. […]
World’s Poorest Expected to Suffer Most from Global Warming
By Jamshed Baruah GENEVA (IDN) – A spike in heat stress resulting from global warming is projected to lead to global productivity losses equivalent to 80 million full-time jobs or 2.2 per cent of total working hours worldwide and global economic losses of US$2,400 billion in the year 2030, according to a new report from […]
Serious Doubts about Sustainable Development Goals being Achieved by 2030
By Santo D. Banerjee NEW YORK (IDN) – Since the international community started implementing Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), efforts on some of the Goals have been successful “in a number of areas”, but on the whole “progress has been slow or even reversed”, notes the UN, adding that the most vulnerable people and countries continue […]
UN Partners with Dataminr to Keep UN Teams Abreast of Crises
By Felicia Vacarelu The writer is Communication Specialist of UN Global Pulse – a flagship innovation initiative of the United Nations Secretary-General on big data – on which appeared the following as blog. NEW YORK (IDN-INPS) – This is the age of citizen journalism, where anyone armed with a smartphone and a social media account […]
UN Calls for Bridging Palestinian Refugee Agency’s Funding Shortfall
By Jaya Ramachandan NEW YORK (IDN) – UNRWA, officially the Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, faces a “serious funding shortfall”, the General Assembly President María Fernanda Espinosa Garcés has warned. The agency is $211 million short of the $1.2 billion needed to deliver its aid programmes. She was speaking […]
China Bags Yet Another Trophy with Qu Dongyu as FAO Chief
By Ramesh Jaura BERLIN | ROME (IDN) – With the election of Qu Dongyu as Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), China has made yet another stride in its unrelenting efforts to take over a signature role in strategic UN organisations and foster its massive ‘Belt and Road’ infrastructure […]
Pressing Need to Put Degraded Lands Back to Life
By Ramesh Jaura BERLIN | ANKARA (IDN) – Profoundly concerned that “desertification and drought are problems of global dimension in that they affect all regions of the world,” the international community adopted the Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) in Paris on June 17,1994. Twenty-five years later, on the World Day to Combat Desertification (WDCD) on […]