Latest news on the Asia-Pacific region from the United Nations

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has expressed “deep sadness” at the loss of life, injuries and damages caused by the tsunami that struck the Indonesian coast late Saturday, local time.

Women in Hoi An city in Viet Nam are profiting from rubbish and other waste while helping to create a more sustainable urban environment, thanks to a project supported by the UN Development Programme (UNDP).

Beset by millions of bamboo-chomping beetles, almost every shelter in the vast Rohingya refugee camps of Cox’s Bazar, in Bangladesh, needs replacing. With just over four months to go until the beginning of the monsoon season, the race is on for IOM, the United Nations migration agency which is managing the camp, to provide families living in the worst-affected temporary dwellings, with new and more durable bamboo.

On a small island in the remote South Pacific, a one-month-old baby has become the world’s first child to be given a vaccine delivered by a drone, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has announced.

Efforts to establish a constitutional committee for Syria are worth going the “extra mile” for, UN Special Envoy Staffan de Mistura said on Tuesday, after meeting the foreign ministers of Iran, Russia and Turkey - guarantors of a fragile ceasefire in the wartorn country – who agreed that it should convene for the first time early next year, in Geneva.

A negotiated end to the 17-year conflict in Afghanistan “has never been more real…than it is now”, the head of the United Nations peace mission in the country has said, highlighting a series of important milestones achieved over recent months.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, on Monday announced that they had received the Government go-ahead to develop community projects in Myanmar’s Rakhine province, and called on authorities to provide “more effective access” to the area.

Millions of jobs in the Asia and Pacific region have been put at risk by conflicts over trade, despite a recent agreement not to escalate tit-for-tat tariffs by the United States and China, according to a new regional UN report.

Uzbekistan’s success in becoming recognized as a malaria-free country by the World Health Organization (WHO), is an “extraordinary outcome,” said the Executive Director of the Global Fund on Tuesday, a UN-backed partnership to end malaria epidemics.

As gender-equality advocates discuss how a lasting peace can be secured in Afghanistan, the top UN official in the country has underscored the importance of women’s participation as “vital to ending the conflict and ensuring long-lasting stability.”

Afghanistan has undertaken significant reforms which the international community will continue to support long after peace is secured in the war-torn country, a top UN official pledged on Wednesday.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres has urged countries to fund a new initiative designed to reduce vulnerability, advance sustainable development and create decent living conditions for millions of people living around the Aral Sea, whose basin encompasses Uzbekistan, and six other countries in Central Asia.

The United Nations Security Council has condemned “in the strongest terms” Friday’s terrorist attacks in Pakistan’s Karachi city and in the north-western province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa that claimed dozens of lives and left many more injured.