The impacts of climate change on people's lives and ecosystems cannot be ignored and are being felt in every corner of the globe. Not simply an environmental issue, it's a humanitarian crisis.  Shockingly, over the last five years alone, approximately 1.59 billion individuals have been affected by climate and weather-related disasters. As a result, around 130 million people have been forced to leave their homes and have become internally displaced.

When Teenari Tekeraoi (Kiribati) began her assignment in June 2023, she was the first international UN Youth Volunteer from the Small Island Developing States in the Pacific. She joined the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) as a Sustainable Development Monitoring Assistant, supporting Fiji, Kiribati and Tuvalu in reviewing and monitoring their national development progress. 

The RESIGUI project delivers cash transfers and nutritional supplementation to 20,000 Guinean households. Funded by the European Union to the tune of eight million Euros, the project also assists communities in market gardening, rice cultivation, processing, storage and marketing of agricultural products.

Iraq has a long way to go towards peace and prosperity. The United Nations is doing its best to support the Iraqi people on this path and make the future bright for families like the one I met in Mosul. Behind this reconstruction, there is a lot of hard work done by UN agencies, local contractors and UN Volunteers. Among them is Gladys Gbegnedji, a civil engineer from Spain, who came to Iraq to help improve construction designs.

The security situation in Tripoli is improving, so some UN agencies are relocating their offices back to Libya. Over the past year, Ghazi worked as a national staff at the UNDP Libyan office in Tunis. At the beginning of June 2018, he moved to Tripoli as an international UN volunteer.

Earlier this year, we launched our social integration strategy. Based on considerable research, it sets out a new definition of social integration – emphasizing that it is about more than simply the degree of contact between people but also includes promoting equality and improving people’s levels of activity and participation in their local communities. But encouraging social integration is a meaningless exercise unless people are provided with opportunities to come together. Volunteering does just that.

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The Forum The ECOSOC Youth Forum (30-31 January 2018) will provide a platform for youth to engage in a dialogue with Member States, discuss policy frameworks and promote innovative, institutionalised approaches and initiatives for advancing the youth development agenda at national, regional and global levels with a view to promoting solutions to the global challenge of strengthening resilience and sustainable development. 

Approximately one billion people are engaging in voluntary action globally.  Their activities range from delivering services, preparing and responding to disasters and providing technical assistance such as in mapping and monitoring climate and environmental data. The growing environmental awareness, often enabled by powerful and cheap new mobile and open technologies, is further triggering new data collection and monitoring efforts by volunteers. 

The Global Environment Facility project on which I am working endorses the "farmer-field-school" approach to train farmers in how to adapt to climate change. It is an outdoor school where learning and sharing takes place through hands-on practical training.