Category: Business

At a sprawling urban expo in Baku, visitors paused before giant digital screens flickering with flood simulations, subway control systems and virtual replicas of entire neighbourhoods. Across the space, cities offered a vision of urban life reshaped by artificial intelligence, digital infrastructure and real-time data – a glimpse of what many governments now call the […]

A major new UN report says such efforts are more than isolated successes. With the right tools, it argues, easing the global housing crisis – affecting billions – may be within reach. Released by UN-Habitat and launched on Tuesday at the 13th World Urban Forum (WUF13), in Baku, Azerbaijan, the report also points to a […]

His video address set the tone for the 13th session of the World Urban Forum (WUF13), which comes at a critical moment as cities grapple with deepening inequalities, rapid urbanisation and a growing climate crisis. Organised by UN‑Habitat in partnership with the Government of Azerbaijan, the forum, which has drawin a record number of participants, […]

How can cities be made safer and more resilient, and how can housing be made more affordable? These are the questions under discussion at the thirteenth session of the World Urban Forum (WUF13), which opened on Sunday. Over the past decade, many countries have made visible progress: around 160 countries have already adopted or are […]

The conference, organized by UN-Habitat together with Azerbaijan, will bring together world leaders, mayors, urban planning experts, as well as representatives of governments, the private sector, civil society and international organizations. An ambitious goal: housing the world The theme of the forum is a call to action: Housing the World: Safe and Resilient Cities and […]

The warnings came during a special meeting of the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) on Friday focused on safeguarding energy and trade flows amid continuing volatility in global fuel markets, shipping routes and critical supply chains. “This is not only an energy challenge. It is a development challenge. It is a financing challenge,” ECOSOC […]

Across the Gaza Strip, vast piles of debris scar the landscape. More than two years of war between Hamas fighters and Israel have left the enclave covered with nearly 57 million tonnes of shattered concrete and other rubble. With three quarters of Gaza’s built environment now destroyed, several reconstruction scenarios are under consideration. One of […]

Estimates indicate that around 28 million people in Afghanistan were living in poverty in 2025, with the situation compounded by mass population returns, worsening drought and shrinking international aid. While Afghanistan recorded a second consecutive year of economic growth, real GDP expanded by just 1.9 per cent in 2025, down from 2.3 per cent the […]

Even people with no grounding or interest in business news will probably have heard of GDP which is frequently cited in mass media as the indicator of progress.  In simple terms, GDP is the sum of everything a country produces and sells, but economists have known for years that it is fails to paint a […]

That’s the nightmare scenario that the UN is trying to avoid, in a call to all Member States to work together to avoid the cascading impacts of a “digital pandemic”. The risks to all of us are real and they have already been observed on Earth and in space, including a solar storm that narrowly […]