Tag Archives: says UN

GENEVA: Funding for innovation swelled during the Covid-19 pandemic, with significant growth in developing countries, the UN said on Thursday, warning though that the current geopolitical turmoil was threatening the advances. In a fresh report, the UN’s World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) found that research and development spending and other investments that drive innovative activities continued to boom last year …

GENEVA: The United Nations said on Friday that 3.5 million children in Bangladesh urgently needed safe drinking water following this month’s devastating floods. Unicef, the UN children’s agency, said it needed $2.5 million quickly in order to fund its emergency response. Relentless downpours last week inundated vast stretches of Bangladesh’s northeast, with troops deployed to evacuate households cut off from …

BEIRUT: More Syrian children are in need than at any time since a devastating civil war erupted over a decade ago, but funding for them is “dwindling”, the United Nations warned on Sunday. “Syria’s children have suffered for far too long and should not suffer any longer,” the UN children’s agency said in a statement, noting that 12.3 million were …

GENEVA: A new climate change report out on Thursday shows that limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius will be impossible without immediate, large-scale emissions cuts, the UN chief said. The United in Science 2021 report, published by a range of UN agencies and scientific partners just weeks before the COP26 climate summit, said climate change and its impacts were …

GENEVA: The United Nations warned on Wednesday that weather-related disasters have skyrocketed over the past half-century, causing far more damage even as better warning systems have meant fewer deaths. A report from the UN’s World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) examined mortality and economic losses from weather, climate and water extremes between 1970 and 2019. It found that such disasters have increased …

PARIS: The world is missing a once-in-a-generation chance to rebuild a sustainable post-pandemic future, the United Nations said on Wednesday in an assessment showing less than 20 percent of recovery finance can be considered “green”. Although the unprecedented economic slowdown caused by Covid-19 saw greenhouse gas emissions fall dramatically in 2020, institutions from the UN to the International Energy Agency …

GENEVA: Governments have the right to restrict protests on public health grounds, within reason, the UN Human Rights Committee said, as Black Lives Matter and other demonstrations clash with the coronavirus outbreak around the world. The committee stepped in to formulate its legal interpretation having seen a gap in the international norms being tested before the pandemic started, since when …

GENEVA: The coronavirus crisis has taken a much heavier toll on jobs than previously feared, the UN said on Tuesday, warning that the situation in the Americas was particularly dire. In a fresh study, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) estimated that by the mid-year point, global working hours were down 14 percent compared to last December — equivalent to some …

GENEVA: Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere hit a new record in 2018, exceeding the average yearly increase of the last decade and reinforcing increasingly damaging weather patterns, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said on Monday. The UN agency’s Greenhouse Gas Bulletin is one of a series of studies to be published ahead of a UN climate change summit being held …