Interviews

Climate change has become such a major factor of global instability that even the UN Security Council has added it to its agenda. 

At the UN Environment Assembly taking place in Nairobi this week, experts including Christophe Hodder, climate peace and security advisor to UN Assistance Mission in Somalia (UNSOM), have been meeting to discuss the complex link between climate change and conflicts. 

An all-out Israeli invasion of Rafah could force the closure of the aid lifeline from Rafah, “but we will never leave the people of Gaza”, UN emergency relief chief Martin Griffiths said on Tuesday.

His expression of solidarity with Gazans came amid deepening concerns among humanitarians and the international community about the fate of some 1.5 million civilians uprooted by more than four months of heavy Israeli bombardment in the enclave, sparked by Hamas-led attacks in Israel on 7 October.

Radio Miraya has been broadcasting across South Sudan since 2006 and in that time its core message of peace hasn’t changed – and it must be a successful formula, since seven in 10 people in the country listen to it.

For World Radio Day, celebrated on 13 February every year, we caught up with Ben Dotsei Malor who’s just returned to UN Headquarters in New York from a posting to Juba, where Radio Miraya is based.

Here he is now, sharing his thoughts on his time there, with UN News’s Daniel Johnson.

Sharing borders with Gaza, Israel, Libya and Sudan, Egypt has taken a lead role in providing lifesaving aid in the region. Since the outbreak of conflict in Sudan last April and the four-month-old war in Gaza, both the Government and the Egyptian Red Crescent Society have been key actors in helping to assist millions of civilians caught in the crossfire.

Nearly half of the world’s migratory species are in decline and the global extinction risk is increasing, a new UN report has revealed. 

Some whale species, sea turtles and jaguars are among the animals at risk, according to the first-ever State of the World’s Migratory Species report, launched at the opening of a major UN wildlife conservation conference taking place this week in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. 

As war rages in Gaza, another simmering conflict risks escalating on Israel’s northern border with Lebanon – which is why the UN peacekeeping mission there is so important.

UNIFIL – the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon – has three important responsibilities: helping civilians affected by the war, protecting the so-called “Blue Line” that separates both countries and maintaining a channel of communication between them.

The UN agency for Palestine refugees (UNWRA) serves almost six million Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. 

UN News’s Khaled Mohamed spoke with Dorothee Klaus, who’s the top official for the agency in Lebanon, which is home to around 250,000 Palestinians.

Explaining the dire, immediate impact of funding cuts and the current suspension of aid by many key donors, she said UNRWA operations could ‘come to a halt’ in March.