India

The United Nations team in Indonesia is supporting efforts to vaccinate 80 per cent of the population, over 216 million people, against COVID-19.  Work has begun to bring the country into the COVAX facility, and the World Health Organization helped finalize a vaccine introduction road map and guidelines.

The following statement by UN Secretary-General António Guterres was issued today:

From Madagascar, the United Nations is issuing a flash appeal for $76 million to support more than 1 million people in the south who face a potentially life-threatening lack of food, nutrition, water and sanitation, and health assistance due to the region’s worst drought in 10 years coupled with the COVID-19 pandemic.

The new Permanent Representative of India to the United Nations, T. S. Tirumurti, paid a courtesy call on UN Secretary-General António Guterres today.

Experts at the Pacific Disaster Centre estimate that 70,000 people in Nicaragua and over 483,000 people in Honduras are vulnerable to the impact of Hurricane Eta, which is poised to make landfall as United Nations teams, national authorities and regional partners prepare response plans.

Mayerlín Vergara Pérez from Colombia is the 2020 laureate of the Nansen Refugee Award, the UN refugee agency announced today.  The Caribbean Regional Coordinator for the Renacer Foundation has spent more than two decades helping the non-profit pursue eradication of sexual exploitation and abuse of children and adolescents.

The United Nations and humanitarian partners today released a tri-national action plan seeking $10.4 million to support Government responses over the next year to urgent needs in the border area between Colombia, Peru and Brazil, which currently has the world’s highest COVID-19 mortality rates per 100,000 people.

Following are UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ remarks to the nineteenth Darbari Seth Memorial Lecture, “The Rise of Renewables:  Shining a Light on a Sustainable Future”, in New York today:

Polio immunization campaigns have resumed in Afghanistan and Pakistan, months after COVID-19 left 50 million children without their polio vaccines, UNICEF said today.  There is concern that up to 1 million children in Afghanistan could miss out as door-to-door vaccinations are not possible in some areas.

Officials at the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) say locust swarms linked to climate change remain a serious threat to food security in parts of East Africa, India and Pakistan.  United Nations agencies are helping affected areas by providing data on weather, climate and the desert locust life cycle.