This is the News in Brief from the United Nations.

2021 joins top 7 warmest years on record: WMO

Last year, 2021, was one of the seven warmest years on record, despite the cooling effect of the La Niña phenomenon, the UN weather agency has confirmed.

The announcement from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) was reached after crunching data from six leading international datasets.

Last year was also the seventh consecutive year when the global temperature was more than one degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels, WMO said, meaning that the planet is edging closer to the limit laid out under the 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate Change.

Global warming and other long-term climate change trends are expected to continue because there are record levels of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the agency said.

Since the 1980s, each decade has been warmer than the previous one, said WMO, and “this is expected to continue”.

Afghanistan: 500,000 jobs lost since Taliban takeover

More than half a million people have lost or been pushed out of their jobs in Afghanistan since the Taliban takeover, the UN International Labour Organization (ILO) has found.

In a warning about huge losses in jobs and working hours since the de facto authorities took control last August, the ILO said on Wednesday that women workers have been hit especially hard.

By the middle of this year, job losses could even reach 900,000 as a result of the economic crisis in Afghanistan – the UN agency said - and restrictions on women’s participation in the workplace.

Women’s formal employment levels are already extremely low by global standards, but ILO said that they are estimated to have decreased by 16 per cent in the third quarter of 2021, and they could fall by up to 28 per cent by mid-2022.

Tonga volcano latest: evacuations continue, relief flights soon to resume 

To Tonga, where it’s been reported that the runway at the island nation’s international airport is now clear of volcanic ash and could be operational by Thursday.

Three people have been confirmed dead after an under-sea volcano erupted off the Tongan coastline on Saturday, creating a tsunami with one-metre-high waves that crashed into communities.

An update from UN aid coordination office, OCHA, said that information from outlying areas is slowly coming in.

It is now clear that the sparsely inhabited islands of Mango, Fonoifua and Nomuka bore the brunt of the impact, but OCHA said that evacuations are underway.

In its latest emergency update, the UN relief office also confirmed that water supplies have been seriously contaminated by volcanic ash, but that the authorities were working to assist those in need.

Some 84,000 people have been affected, out of a total Tongan population of 100,000.

Daniel Johnson, UN News.