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Edited News | UNOG
UNOG press conference: United Nations Geneva Director-General Tatiana Valovaya
“I am the first female to lead the United Nations Office in Geneva,” she said. “That is, of course, a great honour and at the same time it is a great responsibility, because you know the Secretary-General has a very strategic and long-term policy on acquiring gender parity, in all United Nations institutions. For me, it’s a topic very close to my heart.”
At this historically important juncture – 100 years after the founding of UN forerunner, the League of Nations, and approaching 75 years since the UN was created – Valovaya touched on current geopolitical instability and the damaging impact it threatens to have on international cooperation.
“We are going through very uncertain times and during these uncertain times, multilateralism, the United Nations organizations – organization - is more important than ever,” she said. “Here in Geneva we have a real platform of multilateralism which we can really use.”
Acknowledging the value of the Swiss city in helping to promote the three pillars of the UN Charter – peace, security and human rights – the Director-General indicated that UN chief António Guterres was particularly keen to utilize its expertise and global reach.
“During my meetings with the Secretary-General, he always made a special stress that we should be more proactive in Geneva’s sphere,” she said. “That we should do more substance work, that we should more communicate with academia, with expert society, with Member States, with you, with the business community, because the United Nations should be more active in all these fields, because here in Geneva we have a fantastic hub of knowledge.”
A day after teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg arrived in New York by boat, ahead of the next month’s Youth Climate Summit and Climate Action Summit at UN headquarters, Valovaya insisted that tackling rising global temperatures in line with development goals that leave nobody behind were key issues for her, too.
“Among these big priorities, a very crucial priority is climate change and Sustainable Development Goals. You know pretty well that it will be the emphasis during General Assembly this year; there will be Climate Summit, there will be a discussion on Sustainable Development Goals. For me, Sustainable Development Goals are of very crucial importance.”
After taking up her post earlier this month, one of the new Director-General’s first tasks involved addressing the Geneva-based Conference on Disarmament, in her official capacity as Secretary-General of the Conference on Disarmament and personal representative of the UN chief.
In her speech on 14 August, which emphasized to Member States the “critical work of the Conference” in pushing for agreement on denuclearization and in tackling multiple threats to global security, Valovaya also acknowledged the need to break the stalemate on disarmament discussions.
She also reiterated the message of her predecessor, Michael Moller, that “whenever States seek security not in the collective value of diplomacy and dialogue, but in the false protection of weapons, they are sleepwalking into disaster”.
Highlighting those sentiments, she told journalists at the UN Palais: “I’ve been officially appointed Secretary-General of the Conference on Disarmament, the Personal Representative of the Secretary-General. You know the situation is in the Conference is rather – well, it’s stable, I would say it’s stable; it’s stable not from the positive point of things, (that) well, not too many things are going to develop. Of course, it’s for the Member States to take the initiative.”
The Director-General also highlighted the potential advantages of the fact that in addition to herself, three other women now lead disarmament affairs in Geneva: Izumi Nakamitsu, Under-Secretary-General and High Representative for Disarmament Affair, Anja Kasperson, Director, United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs, and Renata Dwan, Director, United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR).
“On the executive level, the High Representative of Secretary-General is a woman, I am a woman, the Officer-in-Charge, (of disarmament affairs), she is a woman, UNIDIR Director (UN Institute for Disarmament Research) is a woman. So I even started joking that it was for men to make armaments and for women to start disarmament.”
She added: “I really think that active participation of other women could provide some more positive atmosphere to our Conference on Disarmament and to disarmament as such.”
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As world’s water reserves change, countries must prepare for a new reality: WMO
New data showing that rivers were at their lowest level for decades last year provides further evidence that the climate crisis is real and countries must act immediately to protect themselves from the increasing threat to communities and livelihoods, the UN World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said on Thursday.
The key findings from WMO’s State of Global Water Resources 2025 report covering the hydrological cycle and extreme events in the five-year period to last year:
- 2025 was one of driest years for river discharge in 35 years
- Past seven years have seen abnorfmal river flows
- Water storage on Earth’s land surface has decreased in past decade
- Widespread glacier loss across all regions for fourth consecutive year
- Asia and Africa are regions most affected by water-related disasters
- Water data availability has improved, but gaps remain in hard-hit areas
Highlighting the long-term decline in the Earth’s freshwater storage and glacier melt, WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo explained that the planet’s water reserves used to act as a planetary “savings account” that absorbed the occasional dry season, avoiding a water crisis. “One of the central stories of the 2025 report is what is happening to that savings account? And the simple answer is that we are depleting it,” she told journalists in Geneva.
Groundwater reserves are equally stretched and have been in decline since 2014, WMO’s report states, with nearly two-thirds of monitored wells worldwide showing levels lower than the historical norm and indicating a shift “further toward deficit…not recovery”.
“At the same time, we are seeing more water-related disasters,” Ms. Saulo said, while also stressing that the currently strengthening El Niño “will increase the risk of drought in some areas, and flooding in others”.
Glaciers disappearing
In 2025, for the fourth consecutive year, every major glaciated region on Earth lost ice mass, leading to short-term hazards including floods and long-term water insecurity, according to WMO.
Responding to a question about whether the changing global water cycle might have contributed to the deadly Nepal-China flooding disaster, Ms. Saulo explained that melting ice and rock was just one factor in the chain of events that ultimately sent a massive and deadly wall of water and debris downstream on 26 August, killing at least 1,367 people.
“You asked if it could happen again? Absolutely; the problem in this region is that there’s 63,700 glaciers at the last count,” she told a Press Conference in Geneva. “Even if you’re looking with remote sensing with satellites at these glaciers, you might see some faults, you might see some slight shifting, that does not mean necessarily catastrophic collapse. So, in order to plan for this, it’s very, very difficult. But the international community is looking very hard at ways in which we can bring people together to solve some of these monitoring issues.”
Data indicates that glaciers shrank between 2023 and 2025 with cumulative losses of 1,400 gigatonnes of water – or about one third of annual fresh water needs.
Every major glacier region on Earth lost ice for the fourth consecutive year.
“All 19 glacier regions around the globe lost ice; in Central Asia, Iceland, the Russian Arctic and western Canada and the United States, it was among the three worst years on record,” said Wayne Jenkinson, WMO’s Director of Hydrology and Cryosphere.
Some regions with smaller glaciers such as Central Europe, the Caucasus, the western Canada and the United States may already have reached “peak water”, Mr. Jenkinson warned.
“After this point, the glacier gives less meltwater each year simply because there is less ice left to melt. That matters for every community downstream that relies on water during hot, dry summers,” he explained.
Narelle van der Wel, WMO’s Head of Cryosphere Monitoring, Predictions and Services, stressed that while some further glacier loss is unavoidable, the eventual scale of the decline is not predetermined.
“Some glacier loss is inevitable, but total loss of glaciers is not yet inevitable,” she said, pointing to emissions reductions as central to limiting future losses.
Preparing for moving baselines
The report does not attribute every observed change to climate change alone. WMO says pressure on water resources and natural variability also contribute.
Mr. Jenkinson said governments need to prepare for “moving baselines” as historical patterns become less reliable.
“The situation 30 years ago is not where we are today,” he said. Countries, he added, need to prepare “for those changes that have really already arrived”.
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