UN Report: No One Reads UN Reports

“Last year alone, the Secretariat produced 1,100 reports – a 20 percent increase since 1990,” said Secretary-General António Guterres, in briefing the General Assembly on Friday. Those reports are getting longer — the average word count of a UN report is 40 percent higher than it was two decades ago — as are basically everything it produces including UN Economic and Social Council texts (95 percent increase), Security Council resolutions (three times longer than 30 years ago), and General Assembly resolutions (55 percent more words than just five years ago).

“Yet many of these reports are not widely read,” Guterres said, presumably accompanied by a melancholy strings arrangement. Almost 65 percent of reports released in 2024 were downloaded fewer than 2,000 times; even the top five percent were accessed only 5,500 times. “And downloading doesn’t necessarily mean reading.”

A UN report on how no one does the reading is, more or less undeniably, funny — but it also does present some real issues for international progress on things like the UN Sustainable Development Goals and all the careful policy progress that has to go into trying to meet them. Guterres called the cost of producing all that text “staggering,” and suggested that fewer meetings — the UN supported 27,000 meetings involving 240 bodies in 2024 alone — and fewer reports accompanying them might be in order.

“Meetings and reports are essential,” he said, probably as the download count for the report about reading reports ticked slowly upward toward double digits. “But we must ask: Are we using our limited resources in the most effective way?”