Electricity is essential for the well-being and prosperity of traditional riverside communities in the Amazon, as demonstrated by the experience of the Santa Helena do Inglês community, located on the right bank of the Negro River in northern Brazil.
In the early morning, as the tide pulls away, Zulfa Abdallah ties her scarf tightly around her head. She adjusts her goggles, places a snorkel across her forehead, and wades into the chest-deep waters off Jambiani village in Zanzibar. The Indian Ocean is her livelihood now, its waves offering a lifeline to women like her who confront challenges of poverty and climate change.
In 2025, the United Nations will celebrate 80 years of shaping global policies, fostering peace, and driving international development. Yet, in those eight decades, not a single woman has held the position of Secretary-General.
It’s like walking through several psychedelic halls of history, where bold colours, electrifying compositions and contagious rhythms hit the senses all at once.
In 2025, our world remains deeply unequal.
Women earn, on average, 20% less than men globally.
As the world’s population increased five-fold since the start of the 20th century, the changes in the geographic distribution of the billions of people across the planet have been ongoing and significant.
LGBTQI communities across Europe and Central Asia are being ‘weaponized’ by governments as part of a wider attack on fundamental human rights and freedoms, rights activists have warned.
The picturesque Kashmir Valley is battling nature’s fury. This time of year, its majestic mountains would typically be capped with thick snow, and its emerald streams would gush with fresh waters. However, none of these scenes are visible this year.
A new global report analyzing sex discrimination in laws reveals that while some commendable gains have been achieved in strengthening legal protections for women and girls over the past five years, progress remains slow, uneven, and increasingly under threat from a growing backlash against women’s rights.
Speaker of the Tanzanian Parliament and President of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), Tulia Akson, has called for bold and immediate investments in young people to unlock the demographic dividend and accelerate sustainable development across Africa and Asia.
The United Nations, in its nearly 80-year-old history, is on the verge of fighting for its survival, as the Trump administration continues with its threats to drastically cut funding and pull out of several UN agencies which provide mostly humanitarian assistance worldwide.
Elon Musk, the tech billionaire, who acts as a virtual Prime Minister to President Trump, has called on the U.S. to exit the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the United Nations.
With global temperatures continuing to break records and every global indicator of the health of the natural world
showing decline, the need to quickly move away from fossil fuels and environmentally destructive practices has never been more apparent. But as has often been pointed out, how this ‘green transition’ is achieved matters.
In 2020, a historic announcement emerged from the Global Trafficking in Persons Report, an annual assessment that evaluates human exploitation in 129 countries. For the first time, the world witnessed a 13% decrease in the number of victims. For those of us who fight against this heinous crime, it felt as if a door to paradise had opened—an Eden where no human being is for sale.
Like any self-respecting don of a powerful crime family, Donald Trump - AKA “Don the Con” - always gets a taste of any action going down on his territory. And that territory, as recent events have made clear, knows no borders. (I mean, except for the southwest one.)
Problems such as hydraulic network breakdowns, water lost through leaks, power outages, and even fuel shortages are making access to water supply services difficult for the population in Cuba
The second round of the UN Biodiversity Conference, COP16, concluded in the early hours of Friday, February 28 in Rome, with an agreement to raise the funds needed to protect biodiversity.
Who bears the brunt in
trade wars? The answer is absolutely everyone. Not just the countries enacting or retaliating with tariffs and export bans, and not just the citizens of those countries. It’s everyone.
From late 2024 to early 2025, the humanitarian situation in Ukraine has taken a turn for the worst, with poverty, violence, displacement, and damage to critical infrastructures having grown in intensity. Following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine by Russia, tensions have grown among member states of the United Nations (UN) on how to resolve the Russo-Ukrainian War.
The U.S. administration has the prerogative to review and adjust public expenditure policies, including foreign aid. However, this power must be exercised responsibly, adhering to national and international legal frameworks, including the principles of human rights law.
Renewable energy and climate change activists have challenged African heads of state to take a united stance to safeguard essential mineral resources, particularly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and other parts of the continent, which are selfishly exploited by foreign miners with disregard for poverty-stricken local communities.
The world took a historic step in the fight against tobacco when the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC) came into force—the first legally binding global health treaty of its kind.