International Day of Peace

Launched in 2019, the #Youth4Disarmament (Y4D) initiative of the United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs (UNODA) seeks to engage, educate and empower young people to facilitate their meaningful contribution to disarmament efforts. The “Spotlight Stories” section of the Y4D community website (https://www.youth4disarmament.org/youth_spotlight) offers a space for young people to share – in their own voices and from their own perspectives – why the work of disarmament is critical to building peace and how they are helping push the field forward. This compilation of stories reveals the hope for a better future shared by members of the largest generation in history, and it shows some of the diverse ways they are finding to pursue peace through disarmament in the twenty-first century.

The interwoven futures of humanity and our planet are under threat. Urgent action, taken together, is needed to change course and reimagine our futures. Education, long acknowledged as a powerful force for positive change, has new, urgent and important work to do. This report, two years in the making, invites governments, institutions, organizations, and citizens around the world to forge a new social contract for education that will help us build peaceful, just, and sustainable futures.

This is a joint publication by the United Nations and the International Cartographic Association on how cartography can help to better understand, share and communicate the status of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGS). It demonstrates how effective mapping techniques can reduce complexity to reveal relevant spatio-temporal patterns, including global population growth, socioeconomic disparities, and climate change. Such visualisations make tangible the challenges to and successes in achieving the SDGs, facilitating public awareness thereof. The publication describes foundational design decisions in cartography, introduces the SDGs in relation to geographic datasets, alongside the common map types and diagrams for representing SDG indicators, and discusses consideration for map use environments. By integrating geospatial and statistical data of the Global SDG Indicators Database, cartography can enhance action and decision-making at the local and national level and help create a sustainable world.

The first UNEP synthesis report presents a scientific blueprint for how climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution can be tackled jointly within the framework of the Sustainable Development Goals. The report serves to translate the current state of scientific knowledge into crisp, clear and digestible facts-based messages that all the world’s citizens can relate to and follow up on. It first provides an Earth diagnosis of current and projected human-induced environmental change, putting facts and interlinkages in perspective with smart infographics. Building on this diagnosis, the report identifies the shifts needed to bridge the gap between current activities and those necessary to achieve sustainable development. Ultimately, the analysis is anchored in current economic, social and ecological realities and framed by economics and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. By synthesizing the latest scientific findings from a range of recent global environmental assessments, the report communicates the current status of the world’s urgent issues and explores the opportunities to solve them.

UNCTAD convened the 5th BioTrade Congress “Linking trade and biodiversity” to provide a platform for substantive discussion among trade, biodiversity and development decision-makers and practitioners to support the 2030 Agenda and the 2050 Vision for Biodiversity of “Living in Harmony with Nature” and provide inputs to the post 2020 Global Biodiversity Framework. The congress enabled practitioners to share best practices and lessons learned in implementing innovative business and trade models to help upscale biodiversity conservation, sustainable trade of biodiversity-based goods and services, and increase private sector engagement in the biodiversity agenda. This publication summarizes the key discussions and conclusions of the 5th BioTrade Congress.

This report analyzes how five megatrends (climate change, emerging and frontier technologies, demographic trends, inequalities, and urbanization) and their drivers, individually and in combination, transform societies and affect the ability of countries to achieve the SDGs. However, the Agenda is already offtrack. The devastating impacts of the COVID-19 (coronavirus) crisis have further diminished prospects for achieving the SDGs, with the greatest adverse impacts falling on countries and people least able to protect themselves, and already at greatest risk of being left behind. Consideration is given to the interlinkages among trends and how these trends can be fundamentally shaped by policy so that their individual and collective impacts support sustainable development in its various dimensions. The report concludes by identifying a range of policies and interventions that could be effective in shifting the evolution of the megatrends, and establishing the principles that should guide the choice of policies in countries.

This report gathers expert analysis from a broad cross-section of stakeholders who are committed to bringing this unacceptable situation to an end. It draws out common findings and perspectives that demonstrate increasing cohesion in the action taken across regions to end violence against children. It shows how people the world over are stepping up to prevent and respond to violence and to protect children from its impact. In addition this report demonstrates that success breeds success and there has been real momentum since the 2015 adoption of the 2030 Agenda. Furthermore, this report asks a key question: if the costs of inaction are so high and the solutions are known, why does violence against children continue to take place? What must we do to move better, faster and further in our urgent quest to bring it to an end? We hope that this report, by recognizing progress made, demonstrating what is needed and highlighting what can be done, will chart a course for accelerated action and for an ever-growing movement to end the scourge of violence.