A distinguished group of world leaders convened on 5 April 2006 to harmonize efforts in development, humanitarian assistance and the environment across all the units of the United Nations system. Secretary-General Kofi Annan urged the panel, co-chaired by three Prime Ministers-Luisa Dias Diogo of Mozambique, Jens Stoltenberg of Norway and Shaukat Aziz of Pakistan-to produce a stronger, more effective Organization.

"I count on your personal and collective leadership and efforts to help produce bold but implementable recommendations that will lead to a UN system that is greater than the sum of its parts in the areas of development, humanitarian support and the environment. A United Nations that is better able to ensure that these areas are much more closely and effectively integrated and coordinated with its other key pillars: peace and security, and human rights, norms and standards", Mr. Annan said in his statement to the first meeting of the High-level Panel on United Nations System-wide Coherence in the Areas of Development, Humanitarian Assistance and the Environment.

The Panel will produce a study, requested by Member States at the 2005 World Summit, which is intended to lay the groundwork for a fundamental restructuring of UN work in the field. It is also meant to complement other major reform initiatives currently under way in the Organization, including the newly created Peacebuilding Commission and the Human Rights Council, as well as the proposal for a comprehensive management reform recently submitted to the General Assembly.

"We are meeting at a time of great global challenges", the Secetary-General told the Panel, citing "uneven progress in poverty reduction in many parts of the developing world, natural and man-made disasters that vastly outstrip our capacity to respond, and increasing environmental degradation that threatens the sustainability of our future well-being". There is an expectation that the Panel, he added, "can help make a decisive breakthrough in realigning and revitalizing the United Nations in the crucial areas of our work, so that the Summit's political goals are translated into real action on the ground".

The three Panel chairmen said they were looking for serious reform that could help the United Nations keep up with the dizzying pace of global change. "We need to retool and reorganize ourselves to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow", Mr. Aziz told reporters after the close of the Panel's first session. "The UN has a broad mandate and there are many organizations, and sometimes they do tend to work at cross purposes", he said, citing the example of the social sector, where both the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) work in similar areas. "Coherence means bringing them all together, so we get the maximum firepower, the maximum punch, and get results. And the results are improving the delivery mechanism in the country."

Ms. Dias Diogo stressed that it was crucial to have coherence between national programmes and the various programmes of the UN system in any particular country. Mr. Stoltenberg said that another important area was financial coherence, citing the new Central Emergency Relief Fund, which gives the United Nations more ability to coordinate among agencies in an emergency, and the common vaccine fund that allows WHO and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) to take on complementary roles in inoculation campaigns in various countries.

On 6 April, Deputy Secretary-General Mark Malloch Brown acknowledged that there have been previous coordination efforts, such as those by UNDP at the country level and the creation of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs for humanitarian relief. Unfortunately, "the world has changed faster than the UN", he said. "We realized after steady reform that we're hitting up against a ceiling and we probably need to look at something more radical."