The livestock industry is responsible for a staggering amount of greenhouse gas emissions, with a single beef burger taking up to 450 gallons of water to produce. The UN is ramping up awareness on the issue, and two companies who make “plant-based meat”, were recently named “Champions of the Earth” by UNEP. Conor Lennon from UN News went along to see how the new generation of meat-free meals are going down with the notoriously hard-to-please burger-loving public of New York City.

A $5.5 billion appeal has been launched by the UN to help 5.6 million Syrian refugees and millions more people hosting them in neighbouring countries.  In an interview with UN News, Samuel Rizk from the UN Development Programme (UNDP), explained that although around 30,000 Syrians have gone home so far this year, the overwhelming majority still need help in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and Iraq.

At COP24, thousands gathered to find concrete ways to move forward on the historic Paris Agreement. Discussions were very much based on October’s alarming report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC,  that said it wasn’t impossible to cap global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius but that “unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” would be required." Yasmina Guerda sat down with one of the leading scientists behind the report, Professor Diana Ürge-Vorsatz.

Thursday’s announcement that a ceasefire deal has been reached between Yemen’s warring sides in the key Red Sea port of Hudaydah will make it “easier” to save millions of lives in the wartorn country, the World Food Programme (WFP) has said. In an interview with UN News’s Daniel Johnson, WFP spokesperson Hervé Verhoosel explains how more such deals are needed to help severely food insecure people in 45 districts across Yemen.

Growing up with albinism was so difficult for Robdarius Brown that he was tempted to take his own life. Now he’s a rap star and activist who challenges discrimination to help others like him, who face bullying and worse because their hair, eyes and skin lack colour. In an interview with UN News, RobenX, as he's known, tells Daniel Johnson how music has  helped him do this.

In Libya’s capital city of Tripoli, the humanitarian crisis is so intense, pregnant women are being asked to bring their own medical supplies for their babies to be born. The UN's Ursual Mueller described the scene to UN News's Ben Malor.

The private sector and civil society, working in tandem, “hold the biggest promise” for making the first-ever Global Compact on migration a success. That’s the opinion of Tarek Yousef, the director of the Brookings Institution at Doha Centre who spoke to  Mustafa Al Gamal of UN News. 

When “conflict was underway, and checkpoints were increasing everywhere” in the Syrian capital, Damascus, Sarah Zein started biking to avoid the traffic, but verbal sexual harassment on the streets, soon became a big problem. The co-founder of “Yalla Let's Bike" – or Come on Let's Bike - sat down for an interview with UN News’s Yasmina Guerda at the COP24 climate change conference in Poland, where she received an award for her work on gender and climate. 

It’s easy to get lost in the argument over who needs to do the most to stop global warming, but the fact is, everyone needs to do their bit and “we’re all responsible.” That’s one of the guiding principles for Satya Tripathi of India, who in this latest Lid Is On podcast from UN News, spoke with Yasmina Guerda from the crucial COP24 climate change conference in Poland.

Many Palestinians living under Israeli occupation suffer from a “coercive environment” where settlement expansion has made people’s lives so unbearable that they feel pressured to move, according to James Heenan, head of the UN human rights office in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.  Mr. heenan spoke with Reem Abaza of UN News in Jerusalem, explaining the challenges Palestinians routinely face, in the West Bank,  East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip.