Meetings Coverage

With an “irreversible torrent” of physical and ecological transformations threatening to profoundly alter human existence, senior United Nations officials joined Government delegations today urging rapid progress on the Organization’s objectives for sustainable development, as well as in the design of new approaches for protecting and healing the finite resources of our embattled planet.

Amid sluggish global growth and declining aid flows, financing sustainable development would require significant funding from various sources, and the Economic and Social Council could play a crucial role in promoting a “forward-looking” development agenda to foster transformative change beyond 2015, Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson said today, as the 54-member body convened its annual high-level meeting with international finance and trade institutions.

Calling on Governments to recognize that forests and the socioeconomic benefits they provide were essential to human development, the United Nations forum working to build global consensus on implementation of forest-related agreements concluded its tenth session late this evening, also deciding to consider setting up a voluntary global fund to support sustainable management of all types of forests and trees.

A frank and open exchange of views during the Disarmament Commission’s three-week session had helped to rebuild trust between delegations and set the stage to bridge longstanding differences of position and bring much-needed legitimacy to the United Nations disarmament machinery, speakers said today, as the body’s 2013 session drew to a close.

Describing the situation in Syria as a “humanitarian catastrophe” with ordinary people paying the price for the failure to end the conflict, a senior United Nations official said today that even amid that grim reality and the possibility looming that humanitarian programmes critical to ease the suffering might have to be shut down, the Security Council had been unable to reach the consensus needed to support a political resolution to the crisis.

With facilitators appealing for more time to wrap up the work of the tenth session of the United Nations Forum on Forests, Chairperson Mario Ruales Carranza (Ecuador) urged delegations to redouble their efforts and show flexibility so that expected late-night negotiations would yield concrete, consensus-based decisions by tomorrow.

Despite success in cracking the silence around the systematic use of sexual violence as a war tactic, it persisted as one of the world’s most vicious crimes, destroying individual lives and terrorizing communities, delegates in the Security Council stressed today, calling on the 15-member body to ratchet up pressure on perpetrators and use its full means to prevent its occurrence.

While Côte d’Ivoire had entered a positive “new phase” in consolidating the hard-won peace achieved following the 2011 post-election crisis, the West African nation continued to face formidable security threats — including from disruptive networks affiliated with the former regime — which required the continued presence of the United Nations Operation in the country, the Assistant Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations told the Security Council today.

While welcoming a 75 per cent increase in donations to the voluntary trust funds supporting the work of the United Nations Forum on Forests, the Director of that entity’s Secretariat stressed today that contributions needed to be scaled up in the coming year so the Forum could carry out its expanded mandate and take steps to remedy its “precarious” staffing situation.

Capping debate in the Security Council today on ways to anticipate, prevent and respond more nimbly to conflict across the vast and varied African continent was a presidential statement that stressed the need to address the root causes and regional dimensions of the violence and underlined the valuable contribution of regional and subregional organizations in ensuring the coherence, synergy and collective effectiveness of those efforts.