Secretary-General

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today announced the release of his vision statement on his “Sustainable Energy for All” initiative, and announced the members of the High-Level Group that would spearhead the initiative.

As the world population officially reached 7 billion today, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called for global solidarity to address pressing problems of climate change, economic crisis and inequality in order to make the world a better place for current and future generations. He pledged to work towards those aims this week during the Group of Twenty (G-20) Summit in Cannes.

There was firm evidence that both pro-Government elements and opposition forces in Libya were responsible for the recruitment of child soldiers, a war crime, Special Representative Radhika Coomaraswamy said at Headquarters today as she released the Secretary-General’s annual report on children and armed conflict.

Raising the $100 billion needed annually to help developing countries adapt to and mitigate the impacts of climate change would require a mix of new public sources, a scaling-up of existing public sources and more private flows, the Co-Chairs of an expert group charged with analysing options to meet that goal said today as they formally presented their findings to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

As the world continued to reel from the financial crisis, and climate change, poverty and resource constraints tested capabilities, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged more than 1,200 top business executives gathered in New York City for the 2010 Global Compact Leaders Summit to usher in a new era of sustainability in which corporations played a central role.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called for an intensified focus on priorities, political will and partnership to achieve the Millennium Development Goals this morning, as he launched a report that showed a mix of progress and obstacles in reaching the anti-poverty targets. “This report shows that economic uncertainty cannot be an excuse to slow down our development efforts. It is a reason to speed them up,” he said, introducing the major findings of the Millennium Development Goals Report 2010.

Global momentum is growing in the fight to save the lives of 10 million women and children every year by 2015, in an effort spearheaded by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

A global effort to scale up investment in clean, efficient energy and bring affordable energy services to the 1.6 billion people worldwide currently lacking them would go a long way towards stopping climate change and achieving the Millennium Development Goals, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said today.

Urging reporters in New York to “keep the focus on Haiti”, United Nations Deputy Secretary-General Asha-Rose Migiro today said that “although commendable progress has been made, the situation remains dire” three months after the massive earthquake that killed nearly 250,000 people, left 1 million others homeless and levelled the capital, Port-au-Prince.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told a Headquarters press conference today at the conclusion of the one-day International Donors’ Conference for Haiti aimed at securing financial resources for the earthquake-stricken country’s recovery that the friends of Haiti had acted far beyond expectations.