Chief Executive Board & other topics - Daily Press Briefing (9 May 2019)

Noon briefing by Farhan Haq, Deputy Spokesman for the Secretary-General.
Daily Press Briefings:
- Chief Executive Board
- Sustainable Development Goals
- Qatar/Palestine
- Syria
- Yemen
- Sudan
- Libya
- Ebola
- Food Imports
- Contributions
CHIEF EXECUTIVES BOARD
The Secretary-General remains in Geneva today, where he opened the spring session of the Chief Executives Board of the UN System. The two-day meeting is hosted by the International Labour Organization on its 100th anniversary.
During today’s session, the heads of the UN entities agreed on ambitious and concrete steps to address climate change in advance of the September Climate Summit. In a statement, the heads of UN agencies said they are committed to strengthening their organization’s responsiveness to Member States’ needs to reduce the adverse impacts of climate change, including on the stability of regions, states and communities, build resilience, address loss and damage caused by climate-induced disasters, and enhance responsiveness of social protection systems to climate-related events. They also committed themselves to raising the UN’s own ambition to take concrete steps to combat climate change and to integrate more systematically sustainable development considerations concerning how the organizations work, both in terms of operations and programmes. The full statement will be out shortly.
In a short while, the Secretary-General will go the International Labour Organization to meet with staff as the organization marks its 100th anniversary. He said at a tree-planting event yesterday that, while he could not predict what the world would look like in a hundred years or how economies and societies will work, he remains absolutely sure that the trees planted today will be here and that the International Labor Organization will be here.
Tomorrow afternoon, the Secretary-General will address a special session of the World Trade Organization’s General Council, where he will stress the importance of preserving the multilateral rules-based order – including on trade – for a fair globalization and the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals.

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS
The Secretary-General is pleased to announce today a new class of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Advocates. These 17 influential public figures are committed to raising awareness, inspiring greater ambition, and pushing for faster action on the Sustainable Development Goals.
The group is co-chaired by Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, the President of Ghana, and Erna Solberg, the Prime Minister of Norway. Six members of the previous SDG Advocates class have been made SDG Advocate Alumni and six new Advocates have been appointed.
The six new advocates are: the Emir of Kano of Nigeria; Hindou Ibrahim of Chad; Dia Mirza of India; Edward Ndopu of South Africa; Nadia Murad of Iraq; and Marta Vieira da Silva of Brazil.
The Secretary-General looks forward to working with the group over the coming years to advance the SDGs. A full list of the SDG Advocates is online.

QATAR/PALESTINE
The Secretary-General would like to acknowledge with much appreciation the recently announced support of Qatar to Palestine, which will be key in helping address economic and humanitarian needs of the Palestinian people. The Secretary-General furthermore welcomes the continued excellent cooperation between the State of Qatar and the UN in implementing critical humanitarian and economic programmes in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
Rread More: