Participants in yesterday’s conference in Montreal on aid to Haiti after its devastating earthquake had agreed that planning for long-term recovery must be started while emergency assistance continued, United Nations officials told journalists at Headquarters this afternoon.
In progress at UNHQ
Press Conference
“It is sheer dumb luck that we have succeeded as a world without a nuclear catastrophe since 1945, and not a function of good policy,” Gareth Evans, an honorary professorial fellow at the University of Melbourne, said today at a Headquarters press conference sponsored by the Permanent Mission of Australia.
The head of the United Nations World Food Programme today warned that, while the international relief effort in Haiti was beginning to gain its footing, the scale of the devastation in the earthquake-ravaged country was immense, and helping more than 2 million people rebuild their lives would require the engagement of a broad spectrum of humanitarian actors “for at least the next 12 months”.
The United Nations top official in Haiti had presented to Government ministers today a proposal to better coordinate delivery of urgently needed food, medicine and other humanitarian supplies to people in earthquake-ravaged Haiti, Tony Banbury, Principal Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary-General for the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti, said this afternoon.
The absolute number of deaths during wartime ‑‑ people killed by violent means as well as deaths from disease or other non-violent causes that would not have occurred had there been no war ‑‑ always went down rather than up, suggesting a decline in the human cost of wars, no matter where in the world they were fought, according to a new study on war deaths up to 2007.
There was no clear picture yet as to what extra damage this morning’s aftershock had caused in Haiti, John Holmes, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and United Nations Emergency Relief Coordinator, said at Headquarters today.
Immediate employment for the Haitian population was a crucial part of the response to the earthquake, Rebeca Grynspan, the new Assistant Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) said this afternoon, as she announced a dramatic ramping up of the agency’s Cash-for-Work in the devastated nation.
The only effective way to stave off the life-threatening effects of climate change was to build a true consensus in favour of structural change in global consumption patterns with the participation of all the world’s peoples, Pablo Solón-Romero, Deputy Permanent Representative of Bolivia, said at Headquarters today.
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) today launched an independent report that calls for a new global financing initiative that could help fill an annual $16 billion funding gap in education, amid evidence that many countries were not on track to meet the pledges made at the 2000 World Education Forum in Dakar, Senegal, 10 years ago.
Getting urgently needed search and rescue teams, medical aid and basic sustenance to areas of Haiti devastated by Tuesday’s earthquake was a huge task, but the response of the United Nations and the international community had been focused and swift, John Holmes, Emergency Relief Coordinator, said this afternoon.