Sonia Gómez has spent her entire life around agriculture.

While COVID-19 has wiped out important development gains in mere months, with extreme poverty rising for the first time in decades, the pandemic could spark the transformations needed to achieve stronger social protection systems, the UN Secretary-General said on Tuesday.

The United Nations is commemorating World AIDS Day, on Tuesday, with a call for “global solidarity and shared responsibility” to overcome not only COVID-19, but also AIDS – another global pandemic that is still with us nearly 40 years after it emerged.

On 2 December, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres will deliver a landmark speech on the state of the planet at Columbia University, setting the stage for dramatically scaled-up ambition on climate change over the coming year.

Portugal is also an example of how reducing the risk from fire can mean restoring the economic and social fabric of whole regions.

Last week saw the first global decline in newly reported cases of COVID-19 since September, the head of the UN World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday, advising that the news, while welcome, must be interpreted with “extreme caution”.

A host of countries have recently announced major commitments to significantly cut their carbon emissions, promising to reach “net zero” in the coming years.

Gaps in life-saving interventions are undermining efforts to curb malaria, amid fears that the coronavirus pandemic could set back the fight against the disease even further.

Testing will still be a critical tool against COVID-19, even as vaccines are deployed against the disease, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday during his regular briefing on the crisis.

As efforts to find safe and effective vaccines for COVID-19 are showing increasing promise,  the African continent is “far from ready” to roll out what will be its largest ever immunization drive, the UN World Health Organization (WHO) said on Thursday.