In the Peruvian city of Ayacucho, the indigenous Quechua people have a tradition known as chirapaq. As the red-orange glow of the setting sun gives way to a deep blue twilight, the Quechua look to the heavens in the hopes that two stars will collide to birth a sparkling, star-filled skyscape.

For some Quechua, the celestial renaissance is an allegory representing the hope that indigenous cultures around the world will return to prominence, in many cases after generations of repression.

There’s a growing realization among environmental advocates that the spread of indigenous practices is also crucial to the planet’s future. An emerging body of research suggests that traditional techniques, some millennia old, for growing food, controlling wildfires and conserving endangered species could help arrest the dramatic decline of the natural world.

“We must preserve and strengthen indigenous practices, which contribute to sustainable environmental management and provide leadership in combating climate change, nature and biodiversity loss, and pollution and waste,” says Siham Drissi, a Programme Management Officer at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). “It must be preserved and enhanced."

In December, governments from around the world will gather at the United Nations Biodiversity Conference (COP15) in Montreal, Canada, to agree on a new set of goals that will guide global actions on nature through 2030. The framework acknowledges the important roles and contributions of indigenous people and local communities as stewards of nature and partners in its conservation, restoration and sustainable use.

The world’s indigenous population comprises some 476 million people living across 90 countries and representing 5,000 different cultures. They manage an estimated 25 per cent of Earth’s land mass, which accounts for 40 per cent of all ecologically intact landscapes.

Yet indigenous peoples are arguably among the world’s most disadvantaged and vulnerable groups due to systemic marginalization. They’re almost three times as likely to live in extreme poverty than non-indigenous people, and they account for 15 per cent of the world’s poorest.

Despite that, in many parts of the world, indigenous communities are at the forefront of conservation, according to a 2021 report supported in part by UNEP. Many are specialists at living in fragile ecosystems and managing limited biodiversity. 

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, the Bambuti-Babuluko community is helping to protect one of Central Africa’s last remaining tracts of primary tropical forest. In Iran, the semi-nomadic Chahdegal Balouch oversee 580,000 hectares of fragile scrubland and desert. And in Canada’s far north, Inuit leaders are working to restore caribou herds, whose numbers had been in steep decline.

In areas like Australia and South America, indigenous land management, including slow-burning and purposefully set brush fires are considered key to preventing large-scale wildfires, which in many places could become more common as the climate becomes hotter and drier.

“Indigenous fire is about burning in a way that supports healthy culture, ecosystems and society,” says Oliver Costello, Director of the Jagun Alliance Aboriginal Corporation in Australia. “More socio-political change and investment is required to properly implement indigenous fire and land management in Australia and beyond to realize the potential of indigenous custodianship and knowledge in practice.”

Tending to traditional knowledge

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, adopted in 2007, requires all entities to obtain free, prior and informed consent from indigenous peoples before engaging in activities that impact their rights, survival, dignity and well-being. The declaration posits that interactions must occur on indigenous peoples’ time frames and in indigenous languages.

To that end, 2022 marks the start of the UN’s Decade of Indigenous Languages, which emphasizes the importance of enabling indigenous languages in justice systems, the media, labour and health programmes. Given the importance of oral traditions in passing down environmental management practices and indigenous knowledge, experts say the preservation of language and customs is of the utmost importance.

At the resumed fifth session of the UN Environment Assembly earlier this year, Member States adopted a key resolution that focuses on deploying nature to find solutions for sustainable development. The resolution calls on UNEP to support the implementation of such solutions, which safeguard the rights of communities and indigenous peoples.

UNEP also has a policy that aims to protect environmental defenders through denouncing attacks, torture, intimidation and murder while advocating for better protection of environmental rights.,

Recognition and respect

“Indigenous peoples’ traditional knowledge has informed how to practically ensure the balance of the environment in which they live so it may continue to provide essential services – such as water, fertile soil, food, shelter, medicines – to all life forms,” says Drissi.

The Stockholm+50 conference in early June strongly positioned indigenous peoples, who produced a declaration calling for “an effective and immediate mainstreaming of [indigenous] scientific knowledge into all relevant decisions and actions to address” the triple planetary crisis of climate change, nature and biodiversity loss, and pollution and waste.

The declaration also highlights the plight of indigenous women, who have particularly high levels of poverty, limited access to health and economic services, and often suffer from institutional, domestic, political and sexual violence.

“Indigenous women face a triple risk: being a woman, being indigenous and being an environmental defender,” said Drissi. “They safeguard the biodiversity of our ecosystems and transmit ancestral and indigenous knowledge, languages and worldviews. However, indigenous women and girls are too often stigmatized, harassed, criminalized, tortured or killed for defending their land and rivers, their cultural heritage, life in their territories and beyond.”

Tarcila Rivera Zea, a Quechua activist from Ayacucho who’s dedicated over 30 years to defending and advocating for indigenous cultures and peoples, says stronger action and recognition of indigenous peoples’ rights is needed.

“It is critical that indigenous women are recognized in our full capacities, above all, as bearers of knowledge and in our role of producers within indigenous families,” says Rivera. “The violence that comes from outside has much to do with the denial of our collective and individual human rights.”

Such mainstreaming requires the development of true partnerships, experts say.

The Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad), a professional body that ensures funds of Norwegian development aid contribute to global development, was among the participants in discussions with indigenous peoples at the Stockholm +50 conference.

“Indigenous peoples must be at the center of the table in the climate and environment debates, because indigenous peoples are the real experts,” says Stig Ingemar Traavik, Director of Climate, Energy and Environment at Norad. “They already have many of the solutions we are looking for, and we need to listen and learn.”

The Dushanbe Declaration, adopted this year as part of the International Decade for Action on Water for Sustainable Development, upholds the critical role of women, youth, indigenous peoples, local communities, and other major stakeholder groups in water governance at all levels.

“We must increase recognition of such practices and foster respectful dialogue in an ethical space between scientific and policy spheres with indigenous peoples,” says Yolanda Lopez-Maldonado, Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Indigenous Affairs Officer at the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC). “Such ethical space is where indigenous knowledge can be appropriately shared and carefully handled and received. If this space is never created, the erosion of indigenous knowledge will continue.”

But increased recognition must be complemented by action. For Rivera, that takes the form of training a new generation of indigenous women leaders.

“There is always optimism and a lot of hope to achieve respect based on rights, and we put all our efforts into it,” she says. “With information, training and access to appropriate tools, I am sure that the new generation will achieve greater things and understand that global decisions have implications in local contexts.”

Contact Information: To learn more, please contact Siham Drissi

From December 7-19, countries will meet in Montreal for COP 15 to strike a landmark agreement to guide global actions on biodiversity. The framework will need to lay out an ambitious plan that addresses the key drivers of biodiversity loss and puts us on the path to halt and reverse nature loss by 2030.

See UNEP’s COP 15 page for more information and the latest updates.

Fly over the crystal blue waters of the South Pacific archipelago of Palau, and in many places you may notice something unusual: a total lack of fishing boats.

In 2015, Palau designated 193,000 square miles of its maritime territory a protected reserve, where no fishing can take place.

While that has helped protect marine life, it has created a challenge. How can the country ensure its focus on conservation does not come at the expense of job creation and economic growth?

Palau, with support from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), is examining one possible solution: aquaculture.

While the cultivation of both aquatic plants and animals in many places has become a blight on the environment, in Palau officials are hoping to build an environmentally friendly aquaculture industry, one that will provide jobs and ensure the country’s 18,000 residents are not totally reliant on wild fish stocks.

Palau’s aquaculture industry has huge potential, says Tsunghan Lin, an aquaculture specialist who works for the Palau government. But it is still nascent. There are only two commercial scale aquaculture farms, which produce fish for bait, and eleven fish farms at sea, Lin says.

Palau is not the only country grappling with how to protect fish stocks while also safeguarding fishers’ livelihoods and the marine biodiversity that underpins coastal tourism.

According to the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, up to 10 per cent of the global population relies on fisheries for their livelihood. Yet in 2019, one-third of the world’s fish stocks were overfished, up from 10 per cent in the mid-1970s, while another 60 per cent have been exploited at their maximum sustainable limit.

Aquaculture has grown hugely in the past three decades and now provides half of all fish for human consumption. Global aquaculture production more than tripled to 112 million tonnes in 2017 from 34 million tonnes in 1997, says Sang Jin Lee, Task Manager within the UNEP- Global Environment Fund Biodiversity Unit.

By 2030, aquaculture could produce nearly two-thirds of the fish consumed globally.

And with the world’s population expected to grow from 7.96 to 9.8 billion by 2050, food security will continue to be a vital global issue.

Aquaculture is not just about the production of food: it also generates products used in food processing, feed, fuels, cosmetics, and a variety of other industrial products.

“Over the past 20 years, aquaculture has evolved from having a relatively minor role to playing a mainstream part in the global food system,” Sang Jin Lee says.

But aquaculture is not without its problems.

Much of the aquaculture practiced across the world causes pollution, leads to disease outbreaks and degrades coastlines, Sang Jin Lee says. 

Aquaculture farms can vary hugely in size, from the Salmars Ocean Farm off the coast of Norway, which can hold 3 million salmon, to small, freshwater farms in earthen ponds, which hold hundreds of fish.

In 2022, UNEP designed a national project funded by the Global Environment Facility to strengthen aquaculture policy, planning and management in Palau.

The country has one of the most biologically diverse underwater ecosystems globally, yet unsustainable development practices, the impacts of climate change, overharvesting of natural resources, and ongoing expansion of tourism represent significant threats to Palau’s environmental quality and biodiversity. “Many of the human-induced ecosystem changes currently occurring on and around these fragile islands are irreversible,” Sang Jin Lee adds.

These issues extend to the country’s aquaculture industry, which according to Sang Jin Lee, has suffered from limited planning, capacity, and coordination. “This has often resulted in unintended ecosystem impacts, and mismatches in seedling production, needs, and sites for aquaculture farms,” he says.

The UNEP-led project will guide the development of the aquaculture sector to complement Palau’s legacy of marine biodiversity conservation.

“When developed responsibly, aquaculture represents a significant opportunity to simultaneously meet the three pillars of the UN Sustainable Development Goals: ending poverty and hunger and promoting prosperity, while protecting the planet from degradation,” says Sang Jin Lee.

About 0.1 per cent of the ocean’s floor is covered in lanky green flowering plants known as seagrasses.

Their often-sprawling meadows purify ocean water, shelter fish and provide food for thousands of marine species. But seagrass habitats have been in decline since 1930, with 7 per cent of them disappearing each year, according to United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) research.

Along with being a haven for marine life, seagrass sediment is one of the planet’s most efficient carbon stores and prevents it from becoming a planet-warming greenhouse gas.

Now, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Germany, a one-time coordinator of a European Union-UNEP project, have discovered how seagrasses store carbon.

The research shows that seagrasses convert organic carbon into large amounts of sugar during photosynthesis, mainly sucrose. Globally, seagrasses have produced between 0.6 and 1.3 million tonnes of these sugars. This is comparable to the amount of sugar in 32 billion cans of Coke.

Microorganisms usually quickly consume such sugars for food, energy and growth processes that convert the sugars into CO2 and return them to the ocean and atmosphere.

However, seagrasses excrete compounds – also found in red wine, coffee and fruit –that deter the microorganisms from consuming the sucrose. This ensures that the sucrose remains buried underneath the meadows and cannot be converted into carbon dioxide and returned to the ocean and atmosphere. 

“It adds another layer to our understanding of how seagrasses are such efficient carbon sinks,” said one of the researchers, Maggie Sogin, an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Merced.

“This study is important as it offers useful lessons to policymakers and communities, helping them understand seagrasses, an underappreciated marine ecosystem,” said Leticia Carvalho, Principal Coordinator of the Marine and Freshwater Branch at UNEP. Given the sequestering power of seagrasses, Carvalho said they could play an essential role in helping countries achieve their targets under the Paris climate change agreement.

The study came out ahead of World Oceans Day. An annual event held on 8 June provides an opportunity to celebrate the importance of the underwater world and better understand how to interact with it sustainably. This year’s theme, Revitalization: Collective Action for the Ocean, puts a spotlight on ocean health, which experts say is at a tipping point.

The ocean, which covers more than 70 per cent of the planet, feeds billions, regulates the climate, and generates most of the oxygen we breathe. However, the ocean is threatened by climate change, plastic pollution, and overexploitation.

Seagrasses are found in shallow waters in 159 countries. They are increasingly imperilled by agricultural and industrial run-off, coastal development, rising sea temperatures due to climate change, unregulated fishing, and dredging, among other things. What would happen if such human activities destroyed seagrasses?

The research from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology shows that if microbes degraded the sucrose in the seagrass roots, at least 1.54 million tonnes of carbon dioxide would be released worldwide – an equivalent to the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by 330,000 cars in a year.

“This is our biggest fear,” said Sogin. “If all of the seagrasses were to disappear overnight, this would limit the ability of that ecosystem to store normally simple sugars and organic carbon. This could alter the delicate ecosystem dynamics found in our coastal waters.”

The study was carried out between 2016 and 2019 on Elba Island, Italy and the Carrie Bow Cay in Belize. Researchers hypothesise that other marine plants, including those in salt marshes, may also store sugar in their sediments.

Carvalho added, “As seagrasses are often overlooked, so too are the mesmerising and understated dugongs and manatees that call them home and rely on these meadows as a primary food source.”

There have been global efforts to map the socio-economic benefits of seagrasses and threats to them.

A new study from UNEP’s World Conservation Monitoring Centre has revealed that rising sea temperatures over the next 30 years will lead to seagrass loss in the coastal regions of Italy, Tunisia and Cyprus. The study shows that only small pockets in the south of France and the Turkish coast could “possibly escape major susceptibility to heatwaves.”

UNEP’s Out of the Blue: The Value of Seagrasses to the Environment and to People report makes recommendations on protecting and managing the habitat.

UNEP and its partners also recently launched a manual for community seagrass projects, which guides how to run a community-based seagrass conservation project.

World Oceans Day reminds every one of the major role the oceans have in everyday life. They are the lungs of our Planet and a major source of food and medicine and a critical part of the biosphere."Revitalization: collective action for the ocean" is the theme for World Oceans Day 2022, a year framed by the UN Decade of Ocean Science and the celebration of the United Nations Ocean Conference, two years after being cancelled because of the pandemic.

In everywhere from snowy Boreal forests to coral-studded Pacific coastlines, national parks, protected areas and traditional approaches are critical to conserving biodiversity. But shielding pristine habitats and endangered species is no longer enough to halt the rapid loss of nature.

That is why governments and experts are urgently preparing a comprehensive new global framework for biodiversity. Amid a raft of measures, including more protection, the framework is expected to include a drive to restore ecosystems of all kinds around the world.

Restoration is already on the rise since last year’s launch of the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. Both the UN Decade and the new biodiversity framework will run through 2030. And the mutual benefits of conservation and restoration are already becoming clear.

Ahead of the International Day for Biodiversity on 22 May, five different restoration initiatives show how reviving ecosystems, conserving biodiversity, and building a sustainable future go hand-in-hand.

Let them inspire you to take action for biodiversity and join #GenerationRestoration.

Grasslands buzzing with life in Canada

A restoration project in Ontario, Canada is creating and enhancing more than 1,500 hectares of grassland ecosystems. The Grassland Stewardship Initiative aims to protect and recover threatened bird species, including bobolinks and meadowlarks, while improving the quality of the soil and its ability to capture carbon.

How you can help: Look for grasslands near you. Find out what species depend on them and whether their habitat is under threat.

Greening farms across Zambia

Agroforestry systems, which combine crops with trees, support biodiversity. Now hundreds of small farmers in Zambia’s Copperbelt province are receiving training and tools in return for letting indigenous trees grow on their land. The WeForest project provides families with better and more diversified livelihoods, such as beekeeping, which cuts their dependence on the charcoal business degrading local miombo woodlands.

How you can help: Find a corner of your garden, school grounds or local park where indigenous tree seedlings could be protected and nurtured.

Urban parks flourishing in Scotland

With 80 per cent of the global population expected to live in cities by 2050, the need to preserve, restore and create urban spaces for nature is urgent. A project in Glasgow, Scotland uses exhibits exploring 10,000 years of local history to entice visitors to the restored Seven Lochs Wetland Park. The 16km² park aims to promote the heritage and well-being of local communities and become a haven for wildlife, from deer to damselflies.

How you can help: Join a community group helping manage a nearby park or a citizen science project mapping and monitoring the nature it contains.

Hope springs for coral reefs in Belize

Coral reefs are biodiversity hotspots, food banks, storm barriers and tourist magnets all in one. To offset the damage from coral bleaching events, the Fragments of Hope project in southern Belize is regenerating its barrier reefs with species that can be resilient in the face of climate change. The initiative promotes the sustainable management of coastal habitats so the natural wonders that draw visitors and support local livelihoods can have a long-term future.

How you can help: For your next vacation or outing in the sea, check your sunscreen for the coral-friendly label, make sure you stay in designated areas and don’t forget to collect and sort your waste.

Regenerating peatlands in Borneo

Tropical peatland fires eliminate biodiversity while pumping vast quantities of climate-altering carbon into the atmosphere. Sebangau National Park in Borneo is home to clouded leopards, sun-bears and the world’s largest protected population of orangutans. To prevent fires here, the Borneo Nature Foundation is empowering communities to restore burnt peatlands by planting 1 million native trees and blocking drainage channels.

How you can help: Try to put only certified deforestation-free products on your shopping list as rainforests are cleared to produce global commodities like palm oil and animal feed.

Looking for more inspiration? Explore these 22 actions recommended by the Convention on Biological Diversity to commemorate World Biodiversity Day 2022 on 22 May.

Sir David Attenborough is awarded with the United Nations Champions of the Earth Lifetime Achievement Award by the UN Environment Programme Executive Director, Inger Andersen. In an exclusive interview, they discuss Sir David's life, the importance of restoring nature and how science can appeal to the hearts of people.

The Champions of the Earth award is the United Nation’s highest environmental honour. It recognizes outstanding leaders from government, civil society and the private sector whose actions have a transformative impact on the environment.

Sir David Attenborough is the recipient of the Champions of the Earth Lifetime Achievement Award for his dedication to research, documentation, and advocacy for the protection of nature and its restoration.

When Sir David Attenborough was a boy, he spent much of his free time bounding through abandoned quarries in the English countryside, hammer in hand. His prey: fossilized ammonites, spiral-shaped mollusks that lived in the time of the dinosaurs.

To a young Attenborough, the fossils were like buried treasures and he was amazed to be the first to set eyes on them in tens of millions of years. 

The natural world would keep him enthralled for the rest of his life.

Today, Attenborough, 95, is arguably the world’s best-known natural history broadcaster. During a career that began with the dawn of television, he has penned and presented some of the most influential documentaries on the state of the planet, including his decade-spanning, nine-part Life series.

With what the New York Times called his “voice-of-God-narration” and an insatiable curiosity, he has spent 70 years revealing the beauty of the natural world – and laying bare the threats it faces. Along the way, he has offered hundreds of millions of viewers a vision for a more sustainable future.

“If the world is, indeed, to be saved, then Attenborough will have had more to do with its salvation than anyone else who ever lived,” wrote environmentalist and author Simon Barnes.

The United Nations has recognized Attenborough’s outsized impact on the global environmental movement, presenting him with the UN Champions of the Earth Lifetime Achievement Award. The award is the UN’s highest environmental honour and celebrates those who have dedicated their lives to tackling crises like climate change, species loss and pollution.

“You have been an extraordinary inspiration for so many people,” said Inger Andersen, the Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), as she presented Attenborough with the award.

“You spoke for the planet long before anyone else did and you continue to hold our feet to the fire.”

Along with his work in the media, Attenborough is one of the leading voices of the global environmental movement. He has appeared at landmark summits, like the 2015 Paris Climate Change Conference, where he has called for a unified global effort to combat the threats to the Earth.

He has also collaborated with UNEP for at least four decades, lending his voice to a series of campaigns and short films that have cast a spotlight on the organization’s efforts to counter the climate crisis, biodiversity loss and pollution. That work is driven by a belief that no one country alone can solve the planet’s environmental ills.

“We are living in an era when nationalism simply isn’t enough,” Attenborough said in accepting the UNEP Champion of the Earth Lifetime Achievement Award. “We must feel like we are all citizens of this one planet. If we work together, we can solve these problems.”

Attenborough graduated from Cambridge University in 1947 with a degree in natural sciences, but soon found he didn’t have the disposition for a life of research. And so, he made his way to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) just as television was creeping into homes.

His first tv appearance came on 21 December 1954, in Zoo Quest, a globe-trotting series that introduced rapt Britons to exotic creatures, like orangutans and Komodo dragons.

As talented an administrator as he was a presenter, Attenborough would rise through the ranks of Britain’s national broadcaster, eventually coming to helm BBC Two. There, he commissioned Monty Python’s Flying Circus, among other series.

But administration wasn’t really for him, and in 1973 Attenborough left the executive suite to return to making films.

The result would be his landmark 1979 series Life on Earth, an epic that charted the history of the living world, from the first microbes to humankind.

The series took three years to make and Attenborough travelled 1.5 million miles during filming. With its scope and ambition, Life on Earth would redefine the natural history documentary and be viewed by some 500 million people.

Over the next three decades, Attenborough would write and present eight more grand documentaries, focusing the world’s attention on what he called the “spectacular marvel” of nature.

But as his career progressed, Attenborough came to bear witness to the cratering of the natural world. As humanity’s presence grew, nature’s receded. Human activity has altered three-quarters of the Earth’s surface and placed 1 million species at risk of extinction.

“Immensely powerful though we are today, it's equally clear that we’re going to be even more powerful tomorrow,” he said at the conclusion of 1984’s The Living Planet. “Clearly we could devastate the world. [The Earth’s] continued survival now rests in our hands.”

Attenborough’s films showed the world that the wild is not infinite, that it was delicate and needed protecting – and that humanity was growing dangerously apart from nature.

Last year, halfway through his 90s, he addressed world leaders at the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland.

“We are already in trouble,” he said. “Is this how our story is to end? A tale of the smartest species doomed by that all-too-human characteristic of failing to see the bigger picture in pursuit of short-term goals.”

But then, as almost always, Attenborough’s words were tinged with optimism. A recurring theme of his films has been that despite the dire state of the planet, humanity can still repair the damage it has done.

“It’s not all doom and gloom,” he said in 2020’s A Life on Our Planet, a look back at his career. “There’s a chance for us to make amends, to complete our journey of development and once again become a species in balance with nature. All we need is the will to do so.”

In the same film, he offered a prescription for making peace with nature. It centered on raising living standards in poorer countries to curb population growth, embracing clean energy, like solar and wind power, eating more plant-based foods, which are easier on the planet, and abandoning fossil fuels.

“If we take care of nature, nature will take care of us,” he said. “It’s now time for our species to stop simply growing, to establish a life on our planet in balance with nature, to start to thrive.”

Attenborough’s work and activism would see him knighted (twice) and become the namesake of dozens of species, from attenborosaurus (a prehistoric swimming reptile) to nepenthes attenboroughii (a carnivorous plant).

In recent years, Attenborough has continued to lend his voice to natural history documentaries, earning a pair of Emmy nominations in 2021 for narration. (In his career, he has won three Emmys and eight BAFTAs.)

For decades, Attenborough has been sought by world leaders looking for solutions to the crises facing the natural world – and perhaps a jolt of his enthusiasm.

In 2015 he visited the White House for a conversation with United States President Barack Obama. Obama asked Attenborough what sparked his “deep fascination” with the natural world.

“I’ve never met a child who’s not interested in natural history,” he replied, perhaps recalling his fossil-hunting days in the English countryside. “So, the question is, how does anyone lose it?”

Nairobi, 21 April 2022 – The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) announced today that Sir David Attenborough is the recipient of the Champions of the Earth Lifetime Achievement Award for his dedication to research, documentation, and advocacy for the protection of nature and its restoration.

“Sir David Attenborough has devoted his life to documenting the love story between humans and nature, and broadcasting it to the world. If we stand a chance of averting climate and biodiversity breakdowns and cleaning up polluted ecosystems, it’s because millions of us fell in love with the planet that he showed us on television,” said Inger Andersen, UNEP Executive Director. “Sir David’s work will continue to inspire people of all ages to care for nature and to become the restoration generation.”

Attenborough’s career as a broadcaster, natural historian, author, and environmental advocate spans over seven decades. He is most famous for his work with the BBC’s Natural History Unit, including documentaries such as Life on Earth, the Living Planet, Our Planet and Our Blue Planet. In addition, his advocacy to preserve and restore biodiversity, transition to renewable energy, mitigate climate change and promote plant-rich diets contribute to the realization of many of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

“The world has to get together. These problems cannot be solved by one nation – no matter how big that single nation is. We know what the problems are and we know how to solve them. All we lack is unified action,” Attenborough said upon receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award. “Fifty years ago, whales were on the very edge of extinction worldwide. Then people got together and now there are more whales in the sea than any living human being has ever seen. If we act together, we can solve these problems.”  

Attenborough has been a long-time and staunch supporter of environmental multilateralism. In 1982, during the 10^th meeting of UNEP’s Governing Council, he told UN Member States: “What you and I and other ordinary people around the world can do will not by itself save the natural world. The great decisions, the great disasters that face us, can only be dealt with by governments and that is why this organization is so important.”

This Lifetime Achievement Award is given in a historic year for the global environmental community. 2022 marks fifty years since the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, Sweden, which was one of the first international meetings on the environment. The conference spurred the formation of environment ministries and agencies around the world, kickstarted a host of new global agreements to collectively protect the environment, and led to the formation of UNEP, which is observing its 50^th anniversary this year.

Previous laureates include environmental justice advocate Robert Bullard (2020), environment and indigenous rights defender Joan Carling (2018) and plant biologist José Sarukhán Kermez (2016). Recipients are selected by the Executive Director of UNEP, who also confers the award.  

NOTES TO EDITORS

About the UNEP Champions of the Earth The UN Environment Programme’s Champions of the Earth honours individuals, groups, and organizations whose actions have a transformative impact on the environment. The annual Champions of the Earth Award is the UN’s highest environmental honour. It recognizes outstanding leaders from government, civil society, and the private sector.

About the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration

The UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration 2021-2030 is a rallying call for the protection and revival of ecosystems all around the world, for the benefit of people and nature. It aims to halt the degradation of ecosystems, and restore them to achieve global goals. The United Nations General Assembly has proclaimed the UN Decade and it is led by the United Nations Environment Programme and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, including the building of political momentum for restoration as well as thousands of initiatives on the ground.

About the UN Environment Programme (UNEP)

UNEP is the leading global voice on the environment. It provides leadership and encourages partnership in caring for the environment by inspiring, informing and enabling nations and peoples to improve their quality of life without compromising that of future generations.

For more information, please contact:

Keishamaza Rukikaire, Head of News & Media, UN Environment ProgrammeMoses Osani, Media Officer, UN Environment Programme