Nairobi, 29 October 2015: As part of its advocacy, outreach and communications strategy started in 2012, UN-Habitat today launched its global website in Spanish, es.unhabitat.org and in Chinese, cn.unhabitat.org. Alongside the launch, UN-Habitat also introduced two new social media channels on Twitter and Facebook reporting globally on UN-Habitat’s agenda and activities in the Spanish language.

The new websites in Spanish and Chinese come two months after the launch of UN-Habitat’s corporate website in French and are part of a wider effort to provide global information on urban themes and UN-Habitat in all United Nations working languages. The launch of the global website in Arabic is scheduled for December this year.

UN-Habitat expects that the new communication channels in Spanish will be especially important ahead of the Habitat III conference, which will take place in October 2016 in Quito, Ecuador and determine a New Urban Agenda. With 80% of its population living in cities, Latin America and the Caribbean is the most urbanized region on the planet.

The new website in Chinese will provide important information for a country that is urbanizing at a very fast pace: between 2000 and 2010, China’s urban population grew at 3.8 percent annually. The United Nations projects that by 2050, the number of people living in cities in China will grow by 292 million.