UN Warns Drought May Be ‘the Next Pandemic’

Boats sit at a pier on Sun Moon Lake with low water levels during an island-wide drought, in Nantou, Taiwan May 15, 2021. (Reuters)
Boats sit at a pier on Sun Moon Lake with low water levels during an island-wide drought, in Nantou, Taiwan May 15, 2021. (Reuters)
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UN Warns Drought May Be ‘the Next Pandemic’

Boats sit at a pier on Sun Moon Lake with low water levels during an island-wide drought, in Nantou, Taiwan May 15, 2021. (Reuters)
Boats sit at a pier on Sun Moon Lake with low water levels during an island-wide drought, in Nantou, Taiwan May 15, 2021. (Reuters)

Water scarcity and drought are set to wreak damage on a scale to rival the COVID-19 pandemic with risks growing rapidly as global temperatures rise, according to the United Nations.

"Drought is on the verge of becoming the next pandemic and there is no vaccine to cure it," Mami Mizutori, the UN’s special representative for disaster risk reduction, told an online press briefing ahead of the report’s release.

Already, droughts have triggered economic losses of at least $124 billion and hit more than 1.5 billion people between 1998 and 2017, according to a UN report published on Thursday.

But even these figures, it said, are "most likely gross under-estimates".

Global warming has now intensified droughts in southern Europe and western Africa, the UN report said with "some confidence". And the number of victims is set to "grow dramatically" unless the world acts, Mizutori said.

About 130 countries could face a greater risk of drought this century under a high-emissions scenario cited by the UN.

Another 23 countries will confront water shortages because of population growth, with 38 nations affected by both, it said.

Drought - like a virus - tends to last a long time, have a wide geographic reach and cause knock-on damage, Mizutori said.

"It can indirectly affect countries which are not actually experiencing the drought through food insecurity and the rise of food prices," Mizutori said.

The UN expects more frequent and severe droughts in most of Africa, central and south America, central Asia, southern Australia, southern Europe, Mexico and the United States.

Ibrahim Thiaw, executive secretary of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation that deteriorating soil, caused in part by poor land management, had brought the world close to "a point of no return".

The UN has not researched the effect that desertification could have on internal migration within continents but Thiaw said that it was no longer unthinkable, even in Europe.

"It is certainly a phenomenon that is happening in other parts of the world and may well occur in Europe," he said

More than 40% of the European Union’s agricultural imports could become "highly vulnerable" to drought by the middle of this century due to climate change, according to a separate study published in the journal Nature Communications this week.



US Proposes Ukraine UN Text Omitting Mention of Occupied Territory, Say Diplomats

 Residents Yekaterina Tkachenko, 75, and Maria Seryogova, 49, walk past ruins of buildings as they come to visit their apartments destroyed in the course of Russia-Ukraine conflict in Pisky (Peski), a Russian controlled region of Ukraine, February 14, 2025. (Reuters)
Residents Yekaterina Tkachenko, 75, and Maria Seryogova, 49, walk past ruins of buildings as they come to visit their apartments destroyed in the course of Russia-Ukraine conflict in Pisky (Peski), a Russian controlled region of Ukraine, February 14, 2025. (Reuters)
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US Proposes Ukraine UN Text Omitting Mention of Occupied Territory, Say Diplomats

 Residents Yekaterina Tkachenko, 75, and Maria Seryogova, 49, walk past ruins of buildings as they come to visit their apartments destroyed in the course of Russia-Ukraine conflict in Pisky (Peski), a Russian controlled region of Ukraine, February 14, 2025. (Reuters)
Residents Yekaterina Tkachenko, 75, and Maria Seryogova, 49, walk past ruins of buildings as they come to visit their apartments destroyed in the course of Russia-Ukraine conflict in Pisky (Peski), a Russian controlled region of Ukraine, February 14, 2025. (Reuters)

The United States proposed Friday a United Nations resolution on the Ukraine conflict that omitted any mention of Kyiv’s territory occupied by Russia, diplomatic sources told AFP.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio urged UN members to approve the “simple, historic” resolution.

Washington’s proposal comes amid an intensifying feud between President Donald Trump and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, which has seen Trump claim it was “not important” for his Ukrainian counterpart to be involved in peace talks.

It also appeared to rival a separate draft resolution produced by Kyiv and its European allies—countries that Trump has also sought to sideline from talks on the future of the three-year-old war.

The Ukrainian-European text stresses the need to redouble diplomatic efforts to end the war this year, noting several initiatives to that end, while also blaming Russia for the invasion and committing to Kyiv’s “territorial integrity.”

The text also repeats the UN General Assembly’s previous demands for an immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine.

Those votes had wide support, with around 140 of the 193 member states voting in favor.

Washington’s text, seen by AFP, calls for a “swift end to the conflict” without mentioning Kyiv’s territorial integrity and was welcomed by Moscow’s ambassador to the UN, Vassily Nebenzia, as “a good move” but stressed that it did not address the “roots” of the conflict.

“The United States has proposed a simple, historic resolution in the United Nations that we urge all member states to support in order to chart a path to peace,” Rubio said in a statement Friday, without commenting in detail on the contents of the proposed resolution.

In a break with past resolutions proposed and supported by Washington, the latest draft, produced ahead of a General Assembly meeting Monday to coincide with the third anniversary of the war, does not criticize Moscow.

Instead, the 65-word text begins by “mourning the tragic loss of life throughout the Russia–Ukraine conflict.”

It then continues by “reiterating” that the United Nations’ purpose is the maintenance of “international peace and security”—without singling out Moscow as the source of the conflict.

France’s ambassador to the UN, Nicolas De Riviere, the EU’s only permanent member of the council, said he had no comment “for the moment.”

“A stripped-down text of this type that does not condemn Russian aggression or explicitly reference Ukraine’s territorial integrity looks like a betrayal of Kyiv and a jab at the EU, but also a show of disdain for core principles of international law,” said Richard Gowan of the International Crisis Group.

“I think even a lot of states that favor an early end to the war will worry that the US is ignoring core elements of the UN Charter.”