Meetings Coverage

The United Nations’ Department of Public Information must perform a balancing act in expanding multilingual coverage of issues within the existing financial and human resources and finding the right mix of traditional and new media to tackle emerging communication challenges, delegates told the Committee on Information today as it concluded its general debate.

Market solutions alone were not enough to handle the problems caused by excessive sovereign debt, a Nobel Prize-winning economist told delegates at a special meeting of the Economic and Social Council today.

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.

Harnessing the rapidly evolving opportunities presented by migration must be a key component of the post-2015 development agenda, speakers emphasized today as the Commission on Population and Development opened its forty-sixth annual session.

Through new media, multilingual information platforms, and stronger partnerships with Member States, the Department of Public Information was conveying the United Nations’ message to global audiences in a more cost-effective and coordinated way, its senior communications official told the Committee on Information as it opened its annual session this morning.

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.