Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), speaks at the opening ceremony of the 14th World Health Summit, in Berlin, 16 October, 2022. (Credit: Keystone/DPA/Carsten Koall)

Health summit in Berlin. The World Health Organization’s (WHO) key annual meeting kicked off on Sunday in Berlin with calls from director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus to take "global health to a new level", as climate change, Covid and war continue to converge, pushing fragile populations to the edge. Protesters gathered outside of the hotel where the summit is being held to call for climate action. The three-day meeting will focus on health strategies, including pandemic preparedness, healthy food systems but also the battle against polio, with Bill Gates announcing by video message a donation of 1.2bn Euros for the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, which will hold a donors conference on Tuesday.

Digitalisation for tracking progress in human rights. The digital age comes with immense human rights challenges as the virtual world becomes fertile ground for abuses, but it also provides new technological tools for monitoring and protection, observe executive director Felix Kirchmeier and project coordinator Domenico Zipoli of the Geneva Academy's Geneva Human Rights Platform (GHRP), ahead of its 2022 annual conference.

📌 17-21 October | WTO Trade and Environment Week 2022. How to push for economic development while fighting climate change? This year’s trade forum on sustainable development focuses on environmental cooperation, with events around key issues, including plastic trade, ESG, the energy crisis and decarbonisation.

📌 19 October | Sixty Years after the Cuban Missile Crisis: Lessons for the 21st Century. The war in Ukraine has revived Cold war era fears of an escalation that the world wouldn’t be able to come back from. American and Russian nuclear experts will look at what prevented nuclear war in 1962 and compare it to the current situation.

For more events, visit the Genève Internationale website.