Press Conference

Despite commitments made 20 years ago at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, a lack of action by several organizations and Governments highlighted a strong need for the upcoming “Rio + 20” Conference to remobilize stakeholders and build upon the economic, social and environmental pillars, said the Executive Director of Vitae Civilis of Brazil.

As the rest of the world begins to shake off the worst effects of the global economic and financial crisis, a United Nations report launched today argues that Africa should position itself for long-term development by pursuing an employment-intensive strategy prioritizing sustained growth and increased job-creation.

While pirate attacks in the Gulf of Aden had fallen from 20 per month in the summer of 2009, to between 4 and 5 today, the tenacity of pirates and level of their violence against mariners had changed over the years, said Rear Admiral Peter Hudson, Operations Commander of the European Union Naval Force in Somalia (EU NAVFOR) — Operation Atalanta, expressing hope that other countries would share in the asset-sapping task of combating the problem.

A two-day meeting on the African perspectives on security sector reform ended in New York today with agreement that, if such processes were to be sustainable and viable, they must be built on the basis of national ownership, Adedeji Ebo, Chief of the Security Sector Reform Unit of the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations, said at a Headquarters press conference today.

The adoption of a resolution this morning by the General Assembly to convene a high-level summit in September 2011 on the issue of prevention and control of non-communicable diseases was a “momentous and historical” occasion, not only for the world, but also for the Caribbean community which had taken the lead on the issue, Marina Annette Valère, Permanent Representative of Trinidad and Tobago said today during a press conference at Headquarters.

The United Nations was fully behind the electoral process in Guinea and confident that the elections set for 27 June would proceed smoothly, and it was equally engaged in the first round of elections in Niger, penned in the calendar towards the end of the year by the new leadership there in an effort to make the post-coup transition a short one, the Secretary-General’s Special Representative and Head of the United Nations Office for West Africa (UNOWA) said today.

Boosting the recycling rates of both everyday and specialty metals — from the cooper used to wire our homes to the lithium needed for battery packs in hybrid cars — would be critical to moving the global economy towards clean, environmentally friendly technologies, experts on United Nations-backed panel said today.

Launching the third Global Biodiversity Outlook in New York today, a senior United Nations development official warned that, without swift action and renewed political will, current “alarming” biodiversity declines would continue, and some life-giving ocean and rainforest ecosystems would spiral towards collapse, threatening sustainable development and human well-being.

Overdue commitments made to small island developing States must be fulfilled to enable them to survive climate change and other international crises that were threatening their very existence, officials from three such States said at a Headquarters press conference this afternoon.

Young artists from the former Soviet States — Georgia among them — would commemorate the sixty-fifth anniversary of the end of the Second World War with a concert at United Nations Headquarters showcasing the importance of tolerance and preservation of cultural ties, reporters were told today at a Headquarters press conference sponsored by the Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation.