UN Interviews

UN scientists on Monday delivered a dire warning about the impact of climate change on people and planet.

The report launched by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) shows how climate change is affecting every continent.

Although it is a global issue, its “negative impacts fall particularly strongly on disadvantaged and poor people across the globe, who have the least ability to adapt”.

The comment is from Professor Mark Howden, Director of the Institute for Climate, Energy and Disaster Solutions, at the Australian National University, one of the authors of the report, and Working Group Vice-Chair. 

Professor Howden spoke to Julia Dean from the UN Country Team in Australia, explaining to her how nature can play a part in the solution, and what other actions are needed.

There’s no time to lose if we’re to ensure that the world after COVID-19 is fairer, more inclusive and more sustainable, UN labour agency chief Guy Ryder insists.

In an interview with UN News’ Daniel Johnson, the International Labour Organization (ILO) Director-General also offers some refreshing advice: There should be “no more programmes” and “no more plans…let's just get down to the rock face and start making progress together".

Here he is now, speaking after the Global Forum for a Human-centred Recovery at ILO headquarters in Geneva. He begins with an assessment of the human and economic cost of the global health crisis.

Broadcasting in indigenous languages connects these communities to culture and at times provides important information that can save people’s lives.

That’s the opinion of Rhianna Patrick, a journalist from the Torres Strait Islands, located in the western Pacific.

On World Radio Day this Sunday, 13 February, she calls for more funding for Indigenous broadcasting.

But first, Ms. Patrick explains to Julia Dean from the UN Country Team in Australia why radio is such a good way of communicating with Indigenous communities.

Despite rising global wealth, most people today feel anxious about the future, according to a new report from the UN Development Programme (UNDP). 

The study reveals that six in seven people worldwide are plagued by feelings of insecurity, even those in countries with some of the highest levels of good health and wealth, and this was before the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Dianne Penn spoke to Heriberto Tapia, the Research and Strategic Partnership Advisor in the Human Development Report Office at UNDP.  

The new report is entitled New Threats to Human Security in the Anthropocene, and he began by explaining what this means. 

Pinchas Gutter is from Łódź, Poland, where he enjoyed a very happy childhood before the Second World War. He survived six different Nazi concentration camps – a life forever changed by the traumatic events of the Holocaust. 

The worst moment of all, was when he lost his father, mother, and sister on the same day, murdered by the Nazis.

In this powerful and moving interview marking this week of Holocaust Remembrance at the UN, he tells Nathan Beriro, that he turned “almost into a nothing”. Survivors, he says, “can’t ever run away from what they have lived”. 

Now a Holocaust educator, he has one chief demand: a world without discrimination or hate. 

A dusty old suitcase that lay undiscovered for decades in a backyard shed in Australia, has revealed an astonishing story of friendship, courage and resistance to the Nazi regime and its extermination camps, where millions of Jews were systematically murdered during the Second World War. 

Letters inside the suitcase relate to an Australian family with a generational commitment to peace, whose friendship with another family in Germany, the Schindlers, produced a network bonded by a powerful sense of humanity, to save peoples' lives. 

On the eve of the International Day in Commemoration of the victims of the Holocaust Julia Dean from our UN Country Team in Australia, spoke to Dr Frances Newell, whose mother and grandfather were part of this network who together with the Schindlers, helped Jews, political dissidents and other persecuted groups, escape the horrors of the Nazi regime.

The Chair of the Global Partnership for Education (GPE), former Tanzanian president Jakaya Kikwete, says that although the key objective is helping disadvantaged children everywhere get access to quality schooling, supporting girls is their top priority.

In an exclusive interview with UN News, Mr. Kikwete said that gender equality is hard-wired “in everything we do”.

After meeting UN Secretary-General António Guterres at UN Headquarters this week which also saw the world mark the International Day of Education, the distinguished Chair of GPE sat down with Leah Mushi, to review how the partnership has been fulfilling its mission over the past 20 years.

There was already a learning gap before the pandemic, with disadvantaged and marginalized children lagging far behind in terms of educational achievement.

Since the onset of COVID-19, which has seen millions of children affected by school closures, it has become a gulf, and by some estimates, around 70 per cent of 10-year-olds can’t read a simple piece of text.

Richard Jenkins, the Director of Education at UN children’s agency, UNICEF, spoke to Conor Lennon from UN News ahead of the International Day of Education, marked on 24 January, and began by explaining the severity of the COVID effect on children’s schooling.

One week after the volcanic eruption and tsunami that hit the islands of Tonga, the UN Coordination Specialist there, says people “are still overwhelmed with the magnitude of the disaster.” 

The disaster has affected 84,000 people, more than 80 per cent of the population, and killed three people - although many islands have yet to be reached.  

Sione Hufanga explained that UN agencies are in the field distributing dignity kits to the most affected, along with food support, and trying to kick-start the agricultural sector, much of it blanketed in volcanic ash. 

Mr. Hufanga spoke to UN News’s Alexandre Soares, detailing the most urgent needs and how the disaster can affect the country long-term.

Stunning images of a just-discovered deep-sea coral reef near Tahiti travelled across the world on Thursday – the result of a UNESCO-supported scientific mission to map the oceans.

For dive team member Laetitia Hedouin, from France’s National Centre of Scientific Research, it was an exciting chance to examine how living coral can adapt to our warming seas, as she told UN News’s Daniel Johnson.