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.

The United Nations today launched its first report on the state of the world’s indigenous people, with the Chair of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, saying it offered a “daring and bold” description of the situation of indigenous persons in health, poverty, education and human rights, and should be fed into the upcoming review of the Millennium Development Goals.

Investors were eager to invest in clean energy but needed public policies that would provide market certainty and minimize risks, participants in today’s Investor Summit on Climate Risk said at a Headquarters press conference.

Speaking by audio-video link from Haiti, Chief of Public Information David Wimhurst and Deputy Special Representative Kim Bolduc briefed reporters on humanitarian relief efforts that have been taking place, the situation of the UN Stabilization Mission, and the ongoing effort to assess damages and casualties.

John Holmes, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, told reporters today: “We still don’t have any reliable figures for dead or injured, although, of course, we recognize that those numbers are likely to be extremely high. […] On the search-and-rescue side, that effort is going on with all possible speed. Some people are still being recovered alive, relatively fewer, as you would expect, but that is still happening.”

Alain Le Roy, Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, and Susana Malcorra, Under-Secretary-General for Field Support, who both travelled with the Secretary-General to Haiti Sunday, took questions on that trip and all else related to ongoing efforts to help the people of Haiti.

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.

Assistant Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations and Acting Head of MINUSTAH Edmond Mulet said that since his arrival in Haiti last Thursday his main task had been to put the mission back on its feet. With most of its leadership dead or not operational, his main task was to “put the whole thing back together”.

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.