Our world is grappling with multiple persistent crises.
Climate shocks, geopolitical tension, poverty, and growing economic uncertainty are all imposing burdens and impacting people’s everyday lives. With only four years until the 2030 deadline of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the need for action is more urgent than ever.
At the 2026 High-level Political Forum (HLPF) on Sustainable Development, taking place from 7 to 15 July, the international community will come together to take stock of global progress towards the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and forge solutions. The three-day ministerial segment of the HLPF (13-15 July), convened as part of the ECOSOC high-level segment, will be followed by the segment’s concluding day on 16 July.
Learn more about the 2026 HLPF: https://hlpf.un.org/2026
Noon Briefing by Stéphane Dujarric, Spokesperson for the Secretary-General.
Highlights:
– Secretary-General Travel
– World Investment Report 2026
– Venezuela
– Lebanon
– Occupied Palestinian Territory
– Sudan
– Central African Republic
– State of the Climate in the South-West Pacific
– Kiswahili Language Day
– Briefings
WORLD INVESTMENT REPORT 2026
The World Investment Report 2026, today released by the UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD), shows that global foreign direct investment rose 6 per cent to $1.6 trillion in 2025, ending two years of decline, but the recovery remains narrow, fragile and uneven. The report notes that inflows to developed economies rose 11 per cent, while developing economies recorded only 2 per cent growth, reaching $901 billion.
According to UNCTAD, the world’s top 20 host economies attracted more than 80 per cent of global foreign direct investment in 2025, underscoring a trend that runs throughout the report: investment is becoming more concentrated across countries, sectors and projects.
VENEZUELA
The Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, Tom Fletcher, is arriving today in Venezuela on a four-day visit to meet with survivors and front-line responders after the devastating earthquakes nearly two weeks ago. Mr. Fletcher will also meet senior government officials and those supporting the search and rescue effort.
Tomorrow morning at 8:30 a.m. New York time, Mr. Fletcher will speak, from Caracas, at a virtual ministerial-level Member States’ briefing about the humanitarian response so far and what comes next.
And I was asked yesterday about assessments going on in Venezuela. Our colleagues in OCHA are referring to rapid assessments of people’s immediate humanitarian needs, a process which includes humanitarian partners, field visits and surveys with affected people. These are not the overall damage and recovery assessments, which normally include development partners and international Financial Institutions.
OCHA also wants to clarify the current status of humanitarian funding in Venezuela which, as you know, had a response plan in place prior to the earthquakes. Before the earthquakes, the $632 million Humanitarian Response Plan for Venezuela this year had received around $115 million. Since then, total reported funding for that plan has increased to $300 million, and we expect to hear more about the appeal in tomorrow morning’s Member States’ briefing.
Full Highlights: https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/noon-briefing-highlight?date=2026-07-07
Press Conference by Under-Secretary-General for Peace Operations, Jean-Pierre Lacroix, and UN Police Adviser, Faisal Shahkar, ahead of the fifth United Nations Chiefs of Police Summit (UNCOPS 2026).
Ahead of the fifth United Nations Chiefs of Police Summit (UNCOPS 2026), Peacekeeping Chief Jean‑Pierre Lacroix said budget cuts “have had real impact across the board where it really matters the most” for UN Police.
Lacroix told reporters in New York that “an integral part of UN Police work is their partnership with national police services to help build the skills, institutions and confidence needed for host countries to get to take increasing responsibility for their own security. “
He said the goal of the Summit “is to ensure that our organization is aligned and prepared to support the nearly 4,500 UN police from 77 countries who serve across our peace operations, while also helping shape how United Nations policing continues to evolve to meet today’s increasingly complex security environment.”
Lacroix said the Summit was also “an opportunity to enhance our collaboration with national police services, recognizing that today’s security challenges increasingly transcend borders and require collective responses.”
He noted that peacekeeping missions had to reduce their capacities “as a result of lack of full payment of assessed contributions,” including “reduced patrols in high-risk areas, longer response times to developing crises, and less opportunities to train and support local police so that they can assume full responsibility when the missions eventually wind down.”
For his part UN Police Adviser Faisal Shahkar said, “at a time of resource constraints, UNCOPS is an opportunity to show why an investment in United Nations Police is an investment in peace. A modern, people centered, rights based, specialized and fit for purpose UN police brings tangible returns for communities, national institutions and international peace and security.”
UNCOPS 2026 will bring together ministers, chiefs of police and senior representatives of regional and professional policing organizations to United Nations Headquarters from 7 to 8 July 2026 to engage on strengthening international peace, security, and development for all through the unifying power and enabling role of national and United Nations policing.
Fighting for and believing in change is in Jorge Moreira da Silva’s blood. Now executive director of UNOPS, the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS), the former Portuguese minister is helping to improve lives. From restoring roads and repairing power plants to running health centres and constructing renewable energy mini-grids, UNOPS implements projects in more than 130 countries – often in fragile and conflict-affected settings.
“It’s about providing social basic human needs. We have found a way to provide livelihoods to 15 million people in Afghanistan…rehabilitating roads, streets, water canals, paying men and women to do the job.”
In this episode, Jorge Moreira da Silva reflects on the practical and political challenges of delivering projects in complex environments – from funding gaps to lack of political will. He also shares how releasing an Iberian lynx and earning his pilot’s license have to do with keeping hope alive through dark times.
Since this interview was recorded, the UN Secretary-General has appointed Jorge Moreira da Silva to lead the UN task force for the Strait of Hormuz. The Initiative aims to facilitate the delivery and movement of much needed fertilisers and related raw materials to Asia and the African continent. The urgent delivery of these fertilisers is crucial to avert more hunger and food insecurity. He has been engaged in extensive consultations with all parties involved to drive this initiative.
“We need to be proactive and vigilant, and act before warning signs become mass graves,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres stated on prevention of genocide in his remarks to the General Assembly.
Earle Courtenay Rattray delivered remarks on behalf of the Secretary-General, presenting the 18th report on the Responsibility to Protect and warning that early warning signs of atrocity crimes are too often ignored.
Speaking at the 97th plenary meeting, Rattray said the report takes stock of two decades of progress since Member States committed to the Responsibility to Protect principle. “Atrocity crimes can happen anywhere. But their effects on the world, and on our humanity, are shared. While prevention begins at home, it can be supported collectively,” he said.
The report, he noted, reaffirms the responsibility of States to ensure cooperation with affected communities, civil society, and regional and international organizations. “The report we are discussing today — the 18th since this commitment was made — takes stock of two decades of progress. It includes a clear re-affirmation of the responsibility of States to ensure constructive and sustained cooperation with affected communities, civil society, subregional and regional organizations and the United Nations,” Rattray stated.
He pointed to a sharp rise in global conflict as evidence of the urgency of the report’s findings. “This report is not only about looking back. It’s also about taking action, now. The Responsibility to Protect commitment is more vital than ever. The world faced more than 120 conflicts in 2025. Conflicts are becoming more protracted, more complex, and more interconnected,” the Chef de Cabinet said.
Rattray added that responses to atrocity risks continue to fall short. “Too often, early warning signs are ignored. And responses are often too little, too late. This report makes specific calls to strengthen the Responsibility to Protect norm for this new era of instability and geopolitical risk,” he told the Assembly.
At the national level, he said, the report calls on Member States to invest in prevention and protection programming. “At the national level, it calls on Member States to invest in national prevention and protection programming, and forge partnerships with civil society by designating focal points and establishing new domestic institutional arrangements,” Rattray noted.
He said the report also calls for atrocity prevention to be woven into regional and multilateral tools. “At the regional and multilateral levels, it calls for integrating atrocity prevention across all the tools of peacemaking, conflict prevention and humanitarian efforts – including mediation and preventive diplomacy and dialogue, as well as security, technological, human rights and accountability frameworks,” he said.
Rattray closed with a call to the Member States, “We need to be proactive and vigilant, and act before warning signs become mass graves.”
Joseph Gordon-Levitt is the UN’s first Global Advocate for Human-centric Digital Governance, a role designed to strengthen public understanding of how digital technologies shape everyday life, rights and opportunities. In this video message to the Global Dialogue on AI Governance, the world’s first international platform on AI convened by the United Nations General Assembly, taking place in Geneva on 6-7 July 2026, he calls for policies that are effective, enforceable and fair in governing Artificial Intelligence.
UN chief António Guterres appealed on Monday for far-reaching, worldwide controls on Artificial Intelligence, as increasingly powerful AI chips that are designed for civilian use shift to the battlefield, where “killer robots” are already the norm.
Addressing the inaugural UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance in Geneva, the Secretary-General also insisted on the need for greater accessibility for the billions of people unable to access the revolutionary tech.
He insisted that any future agreement must be “worthy of global trust” and put safety first – and especially children’s – to protect them from digitally-generated manipulation and abuse.
Narrowing the digital gap
Other priorities for global checks and balances on AI should include locked-in access to the self-learning tech for developing countries, while all AI data centres should be powered by renewable energy by 2030, the UN chief stressed.
Although AI “sits at the heart of our common future”, it needs to be one where “machines can inform, but humans must decide, and answer”, Mr. Guterres told the summit gathered in Geneva, echoing calls for AI rules that he first made to the General Assembly in 2017.
In the three years since AI went mainstream, it has had a revolutionary impact across economies and societies, for better and for worse. Ahead of this, the UN has been leading international efforts to shape controls on the tech, culminating in Monday’s inaugural Global Dialogue on AI in Geneva.
The meeting involves companies, researchers, technical experts and civil society to discuss how to put humanity at the core of the transformative technology. A second Dialogue is scheduled for May 2027 in New York.
"AI is too consequential to be shaped by a few. We need a conversation that is global, inclusive and grounded in evidence," insisted Amandeep Singh Gill, UN Special Envoy for Digital and Emerging Technologies.
‘Great equalizer’
Used well and shared widely, AI “could compress decades of development into years” and become “the great equalizer of the 21st century”, the UN Secretary-General told delegates.
But before this can happen, the technology should be tested thoroughly for safety and legal responsibility assigned:
“When countries align on how to test systems, measure risk and assign responsibility, safety travels with the technology,” he said. “When they do not, a patchwork of incompatible rules raises costs, divides the world – and protects no one.”
Children’s safety and wellbeing should be priority in any future governance accord, Mr. Guterres continued, as he called for nations to adopt an AI Child Safety Pledge. “No child should be a guinea pig for unregulated AI…We do not let medicine reach a child until it is proven safe. We test every toy; yet AI has reached our children – their learning, their friendships, their most private questions, before anyone asked what it would do to them.”
What’s the Child Safety Pledge?
Under the UN child safety pledge, AI developers would need to prove:
• That the tech is safe – no company should deploy an AI system accessible to children without child-specific safety testing and independent oversight;
• Zero tolerance for sexual abuse – no company should allow its AI to generate sexual images of children; every company must detect, report, and remove them;
• When a child shows signs of distress, “the system must stop and connect them to real human support”, the UN chief said. “When a child is harmed, the answer must never be “the algorithm did it,” the UN chief said.
Human rights a priority
As second priority on AI controls, the UN chief stressed that human rights are not negotiable.
“AI must never strip away dignity or entrench discrimination. And in every high-stakes decision – in justice, in healthcare, in policing – machines can inform, but humans must decide – and answer,” he said.
Public funding in AI ‘a rounding error’
In a call for greater public investment in AI, the Secretary-General noted that private funding for AI infrastructure is approximately $500 trillion, while public support for AI capacity in developing countries remains “a rounding error”, by comparison.
To help close this gap, the UN chief announced that more than 20 countries had supported his initiative for a UN-supported Global Network for Exchange and Cooperation on AI Capacity Building.
“We cannot allow the digital divide to harden into an AI divide and the AI divide to become a development gap, a security gap, and a sovereignty gap,” he said.
Noon Briefing by Stéphane Dujarric, Spokesperson for the Secretary-General.
Highlights:
Secretary-General/Travels
Responsibility to Protect
Sudan
Ukraine
Venezuela
Lebanon
Occupied Palestinian Territory
Abyei
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Central African Republic
Myanmar
Senior Personnel Appointment
World Rural Development Day
Briefing
SECRETARY-GENERAL/TRAVELS
The Secretary-General is in Geneva today, where this morning, he took part in the inaugural Global Dialogue on AI Governance.
In his remarks at the Dialogue’s opening session, the Secretary-General said that, used well, and shared widely, Artificial Intelligence could compress decades of development into years. He added that the choice before us is not between faith in AI or fear of it. It is between governing by design, and drifting by default.
He shared four priorities for the road ahead.
First, safety, he said. He called for an AI Child Safety Pledge, so that when a child is harmed, the answer must never be “the algorithm did it.”
Second, the Secretary-General said we need red lines in protecting human rights.
Third, he called for capacity, adding that we cannot allow the digital divide to harden the AI divide.
The Secretary-General added that he will submit to the General Assembly his recommendations for a Global Fund for AI.
And finally, the Secretary-General reiterated his appeal for transparency through his AI Environmental Transparency Initiative, which calls on every major AI company to measure and publicly disclose the full footprint of its systems and to commit to power every data centre with renewable energy by 2030.
He also brought up the issue of lethal autonomous weapon systems, or killer robots. He reiterated his call to have them banned by international law, adding that some decisions must remain forever human, none more than taking a human life.
The Secretary-General expressed the hope that this dialogue will become the place where global participation leads to global action.
Later in the afternoon, at the Palais des Nations, the Secretary-General delivered remarks at a meeting of the International Law Commission. He said that finding legal solutions to today’s crises is a fundamental duty for us all. And shaping the future of international law, by anticipating tomorrow’s challenges, falls with particular weight on this Commission.
Throughout the day, he held a number of bilateral meetings with leaders taking part in the Global Dialogue,
The Secretary-General will back in New York tomorrow.
RESPONSIBILITY TO PROTECT
This morning, Courtenay Rattray, the Chef de Cabinet, delivered remarks on behalf of the Secretary-General at an event marking the 21st anniversary of the adoption of the commitment of the Responsibility to Protect, in which Member States undertook a promise to take collective action, timely and decisive action in line with the UN Charter if a State fails to uphold its responsibility to protect its own people.
In those remarks, the Secretary-General told Member States that the Responsibility to Protect commitment is now more vital than ever, with the world facing more than 120 conflicts in 2025.
He also warned that we need to be proactive and vigilant, and to act before warning signs become mass graves.
Full Highlights: https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/noon-briefing-highlight?date=2026-07-06
At first Global Dialogue on AI Governance, UN chief, António Guterres warns about the risks of artificial intelligence AI’s growing autonomy while calling for billions of people left behind to get equal access.
