This is the News in Brief from the United Nations.

Amid intractable challenges, solutions are ‘within sight’: UN rights chief

The UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights said on Friday that despite so many seemingly “intractable” crises around the world, peaceful solutions can still be found to them.

Volker Türk said that this human rights-based approach applied to many emergencies, including war-ravaged Ukraine.

“It is a war that needs to stop,” he told journalists in Geneva, ahead of Human Rights Day on Saturday.

The UN rights chief quoted from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights - adopted in 1948 to prevent the horror of two world wars from being repeated – to say that it was the “disregard and contempt for human rights” that “have resulted in barbarous acts (and) outraged the conscience of mankind”.

Assistance ramps up to refugees and displaced in northern Ethiopia

In Ethiopia, desperately needed relief assistance has been reaching some of the country’s most vulnerable communities, who were until recently almost totally cut off by conflict and displacement, the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, said on Friday.

Since a peace agreement was signed between the Ethiopian Government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front in early November, the UN agency has stepped up aid deliveries to Tigray, Amhara and Afar regions.

With overland routes blocked, some aid was flown in during the conflict, but it was never enough, said UNHCR’s Ethiopia representative Mamadou Dian Balde.

“Whenever we had opportunities for flying in medical supplies, we did it, but there were not enough. They were not commensurate to the needs. And yes, people have suffered, and they have suffered, and they have suffered.”

So far, 61 trucks have reached Tigray, with 2,400 tonnes of medicines, shelter materials, blankets and household items.

Thousands of Eritrean refugees have also been relocated from western Tigray to Alemwach site in Amhara region. One refugee reportedly told UNHCR that this meant that their children could finally go back to school, after more than two years away.

20 million jobs possible from nature-based solutions: UN labour agency

Twenty million jobs are within our grasp if we are prepared to harness natural solutions to climate change and other global problems, the UN said on Friday.

According to the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), investing in nature-based solutions would generate “significant employment, particularly in rural areas”.

In addition to tackling climate change, the nature-based solutions sector is involved in disaster risk reduction and food and water security.

Nearly 75 million people already work in the sector; nearly all are in Asia and the Pacific and in lower-middle income countries.

To generate an additional 20 million nature-friendly jobs, worldwide investment in the field needs to triple by 2030.

The rewards could be huge, the UN agencies insisted, from protection of biodiversity to land restoration and the achievement of desperately needed climate goals.

Daniel Johnson, UN News.