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The University of North Carolina Water Institute’s Water and Health Substack.

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The UNC Water & Health Substack is free to read and subscribe to on Substack . If your work involves water quality, sanitation, hygiene, environmental health, infectious disease, WASH policy, or public health, subscribe and make it part of your regular scan of the field. One Place to Keep Up with Water and Health Research Anyone working in water, sanitation, and hygiene knows the problem: there is more useful research being published than most of us can realistically follow. A study on drinking water quality appears in one journal. Research on sanitation and enteric disease turns up somewhere else. New evidence on antimicrobial resistance is published in a public health journal we may not routinely monitor. Conference announcements circulate through professional networks. Funding opportunities appear on agency websites, often with little connection to the research conversations that should inform them. Keeping up can become a research project of its own. That is the prob...

Nature and the Environment: How Can the UN Improve Its Work on the Environment?

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  By Felix Dodds, Chris Spence, Hugo-Maria Schally, Peter Bridgewater and Craig Boljkovac  Just published in Inter Press Service here APEX, North Carolina / SAN FRANCISCO, California / VIENNA, Austria / SHEFFIELD, United Kingdom / GENEVA, Switzerland In March 2025, United Nations Secretary-General Antรณnio Guterres launched “UN80”. Recognizing that the world is in a state of dramatic and rapid change at a time when funding for the UN is under threat from budget cuts, Guterres declared that, on the anniversary of the UN’s 80th birthday, a review of its work was long overdue. Now, UN80 is coming to a head with a set of recommendations that cover almost every aspect of the UN’s work. Some of the recommendations are focused on reducing budgets. With some major governments cutting their funding and heavily in arrears, the UN needs to cut its spending. The current target is a reduction of roughly 20%. This has already resulted in a decision to shift staff from high-cost duty ...

UN General Assembly High Level Meetings

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        Dear friends and colleagues, High-level Week is just around the corner! ๐ŸŒŽ From 18 to 28 September , New York will become a hub for global dialogue as world leaders, civil society, and partners gather at the United Nations to tackle some of the world’s most pressing challenges and advance international cooperation. From climate action and sustainable development to public health, peace and security, and human rights , this year’s programme will bring together diverse v...