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Interviews

UN News/Fatima E. Mendez

FAO Official: Youth and civil society are 'change agents' for restoring forests

It’s up to young people and civil society groups to reverse the long-term trend of deforestation around the world.

That’s the view of Hiroto Mitsugi, Assistant Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) Forestry Department, discussing how deforestation can be stopped worldwide, in line with the Sustainable Development Goal 15  target date, of 2020.

Audio
9'25"
WFP/Saikat Mojumder

30,000 Rohingya refugees moving to raised land, to escape floods: WFP

With monsoon rains threatening to flood Rohingya “mega camps” in Bangladesh, the World Food Programme (WFP) is leading a UN-wide effort to relocate around 30,000 refugees to higher ground.

Shelley Thakral, WFP Spokesperson in the Bangladeshi city of Cox’s Bazar, explained to Fatima E. Mendez how WFP and other agencies were turning hilly land donated by the government, into usable camp ground.

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12'33"
UNICEF/Fati Abubakar

Cholera vaccination drive targets two million people in five African nations

An “unprecedented” response to a spate of cholera outbreaks across Africa is under way but vaccinations alone will not be enough, UN health experts and partner agencies said on Monday.

Between now and June, some two million people will benefit from an inoculation drive across five countries.

The World Health Organization’s (WHO) Michael Ryan, told Daniel Johnson that effective as vaccines are, access to clean water and sanitation are just as important.

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5'5"
UN Photo/Evan Schneider

‘Once in a lifetime opportunity’ for Asia-Pacific to build resilience against disasters

It has been 10 years since more than 200,000 people lost their lives in two major deadly natural disasters in the Asia-Pacific region.

Loretta Hieber-Girardet of the UN office that works on disaster-risk reduction, UNISDR, talked to Julia Dean about lessons learned since Cyclone Nargis and the earthquake in Sichuan province in China.

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6'29"
UN News/Daniel Dickinson

‘Fake news’ challenges audiences to tell fact from fiction

The emergence of so-called “fake news” has created “competing versions of information and the truth,” a situation which is challenging for audiences across the world; that’s according to a senior journalist who is joining a panel of experts at the United Nations on Thursday to discuss press freedom.

Farnaz Fassihi of the Wall Street Journal says that the rise of social media has made it more difficult for the average person to differentiate between verified facts and misinformation.

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13'37"
UN Photo/Manuel Elías

‘Free, informed consent’ of Indigenous Peoples over land-use, is key: forum chair

The “free, informed consent” of Indigenous Peoples over how their historic territory is used, is a key demand arising from the latest UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, which ended on Friday.

That’s according to the chairperson of the Forum, Mariam Wallet Aboubakrine, who is a medical doctor from Mali, who told Liz Scaffidi how the two-week event had gone.

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4'22"
UN Photo/Oleg Veklenko

Fallout from Chernobyl disaster still a 'very important challenge' for Belarus

The explosions at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine exposed around 8.4 million people to life-threatening radiation, and the three countries affected are still living with the consequences today.

In an interview with UN News to mark the anniversary of the disaster, which took place on 26 April 1986, the Permanent Representative of Belarus to the United Nations in Geneva, Yury Ambrazevich, told Sandra Miller that around 70 per cent of the radioactive fallout spread across his country, affecting some 2.2 million.

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8'25"
IAEA/Dana Sacchetti

A quarter of thyroid cancer cases ‘probably’ due to Chernobyl: UN scientific committee

A quarter of all thyroid cancer cases among patients who were children at the time of the Chernobyl accident 32 years ago, are “probably” due to high doses of radiation received during and after the event.

That is the conclusion of the latest study undertaken by the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), which looked at cancer rates between 1991 and 2015.

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6'9"