agency Archives - Page 2 of 4

We must do more to keep the air we breathe clean: UN weather agency

·September 5, 2024·2 min read

“Almost everybody on Earth, basically nine out of 10 people breathe air that is essentially unfit for purpose,” said Lorenzo Labrador, Scientific Officer at WMO. “This means that it is air that exceeds the [UN World Health Organization] WHO guideline limits and contains a high level of pollutants with low...

Barely a drop of safe water to drink in Gaza, UN aid agency warns

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·December 20, 2023·2 min read

“Access to sufficient amounts of clean water is a matter of life and death…children in Gaza have barely a drop to drink,” said UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell. “Children and their families are having to use water from unsafe sources that are highly salinated or polluted. Without safe water, many more...

‘Hunger catastrophe’ looming in war-ravaged Sudan, UN agency warns

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·December 13, 2023·1 min read

The World Food Programme’s (WFP) latest food security analysis of the country shows the worst hunger level ever recorded during the harvest season (October through February), which is typically a period when more food is available. If there is no significant increase in assistance by the time the lean season...

Israel-Palestine crisis: Gaza City a ‘ghost town’, reports UN aid agency

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·November 29, 2023·2 min read

“As we drove through Gaza City it was like a ghost town; all the streets were deserted,” said Thomas White, Director of UNRWA Affairs in Gaza. “The impact of heavy airstrikes and shelling was so visible. Roads are riddled with craters, complicating aid deliveries.” Truce deadline looms Wednesday marks the...

UN agency heads unite in urgent plea for women and children in Gaza

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·November 23, 2023·4 min read

Briefing the Security Council, Sima Bahous, Catherine Russell and Natalia Kanem – heads of UN Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women), UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and UN Population Fund (UNFPA), respectively – also welcomed the agreement on the release of some of the hostages taken...

100,000 reasons to help: The UN migration agency at work in Armenia

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·October 13, 2023·4 min read

Goris, population 20,000, is a picture-postcard town, sitting in a bowl in the high mountains of southern of Armenia. It’s 25 kilometres to the border with Azerbaijan, to the Lachin corridor. During the last week in September, over 100,000 ethnic Armenians fled the Karabakh region and arrived in Goris, Armenia,...

Sudan conflict displaces nearly four million: UN migration agency

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·August 2, 2023·2 min read

Latest data from IOM’s displacement matrix indicates that the clash between the Sudanese army and paramilitaries has uprooted a staggering number of people, with more than 926,000 seeking refuge abroad and a total of 3.02 million internally displaced. According to IOM’s latest humanitarian situation update, individuals have been forced to...

Warming trend in Asia set to cause more disruption: UN weather agency

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·July 27, 2023·1 min read

Melting ice and glaciers and rising sea levels threaten more socio-economic disruption in future, according to the agency’s latest State of the Climate report for the region. The mean temperature over Asia for 2022 was the second or third warmest on record and was about 0.72 degrees Celsius (°C) above...

Aspartame sweetener ‘possibly’ cancer-causing, WHO agency reports

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·July 15, 2023·2 min read

The joint assessment from WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), and the Joint Expert Committee on Food Additives (JECFA), which is part of WHO and the Food and Agriculture Organization, represents the first public intervention by the UN health agency on the widely used sweetener. Aspartame has been...

UN space agency vigilant over threat posed by ‘near-Earth objects’

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·June 30, 2023·2 min read

NEOs are asteroids or comets that come relatively close to the Sun, to about 50 million kilometres from Earth’s orbit. Some of them, ‘potentially hazardous objects’ (PHOs), come even closer – in interstellar terms – with a minimum distance of less than 7.5 million kilometres. Measuring more than 140 meters...

UN refugee agency predicts spike in resettlement needs next year

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·June 26, 2023·1 min read

According to the Projected Global Resettlement Needs Assessment for 2024, over 2.4 million refugees will be in need of resettlement, marking a 20 per cent increase compared to 2023. A woman leaves a refugee camp in Rwanda on her way to resettlement in Norway. Escalating challenges With a deepening refugee crisis,...

United States commits to rejoin UN cultural agency

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·June 13, 2023·1 min read

UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay told Member States that the decision was “a strong act of confidence, in UNESCO and in multilateralism,” and in the way that the agency was implementing its mandate on culture, education, science and information. Reforms and modernisation UNESCO said that in a letter sent to Ms....