UNITED NATIONS - United Nations officials on Tuesday urged a gathering of world leaders and high-ranking representatives of member states and other representatives to help strengthen a new approach to sustaining peace, which aims to put prevention at the heart of UN's work.

NEW APPROACH

"The first line of the United Nations Charter commits us to saving succeeding generations from the scourge of war," UN General Assembly President Miroslav Lajcak said in his opening remarks to the High-Level Meeting on Peacebuilding and Sustaining Peace, which runs through Wednesday at UN headquarters in New York.

"In a way, we have met this commitment. There has not, since, been another world war. But, in many other ways, we have not," he said, noting that a new approach is needed to save people in places of unending conflict, including Syria, South Sudan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and Afghanistan.

Lajcak said that in 2016, the UN decided to take a new approach: the General Assembly, along with the Security Council, adopted what are now known as the "sustaining peace resolutions," which renew the world body's commitment to conflict prevention as embodied in the UN Charter.

Two years on, there are challenges in making this approach a reality, he said, calling for greater international attention to the need for scaled-up efforts to prevent conflict, achieve coherence within the UN system, and expand partnerships, financing, and inclusion.