Your Excellency Uhuru Kenyatta, President of the Republic of Kenya,
Your Excellency Mokgweetsi E.K. Masisi, President of the Republic of Botswana,
Your Excellency Muhammadu Buhari, President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria,
Your Excellency Félix Moloua, Prime Minister of the Central African Republic,
Your Excellency Leila Benali, President of the 6th United Nations Environment Assembly,
Your Excellency Collen Vixen Kelapile, President of the United Nations Economic and Social Council,
Colleagues and friends,
UNEP, and the environmental movement, has travelled far since its birth at the 1972 Stockholm conference. Our journey has sometimes been difficult, but it has always been guided by vision. By science. By the certainty that a healthy environment benefits everyone, everywhere.
This journey has carried the environment from the fringes to the mainstream. Set the crises of climate change, nature and biodiversity loss, and pollution and waste buzzing on everyone’s lips. Led humanity to understand that we must transform our societies and economies to protect the Earth, our only home, so that it may sustain us.
Friends, today we are standing on the shoulders of the Stockholm giants.
Maurice Strong, who led the conference and became UNEP’s first Executive Director. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, whose speech linked environmental conservation and poverty reduction – one of the key principles of the Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs.
Prime Minister Olof Palme, whose call for concerted international action resonates even today. President Jomo Kenyatta, who gave a UNEP a home at the first United Nations headquarters in the global south – where we stand today, with his son, President Uhuru Kenyatta.
Their memories live on, in us. Their deeds live on, with us. Because these pioneers, and others like them – including former UNEP Executive Directors, such as Achim Steiner, with us here today – made everything we do possible. So let us remember how they put the environment on the global socioeconomic map.
Back then, carving out relevance for a little-known subject was not easy. People sent telegraphs, not emails. They took flights to advocate change, instead of placing video calls. There were no universities offering degrees in environmental studies.
Yet these pioneers succeeded, and how.
They laid the foundations for the awareness we see today. They wove the tapestry of multilateral environmental agreements that hold us to account – on everything from protecting species to slowing global warming.
The obvious example is the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer. Yes, you’ve heard this one before, but don’t stop me. Instead, pause to reflect on this achievement. The world united to repair a hole in the sky. Not a hole in a sock, a hole in the road, a hole in a budget. A gaping hole in the blue vastness above us.
Yes, human technology carved out this hole. But we didn’t double down on our mistake. We doubled back. We fixed the error, saving millions of lives and protecting nature. We showed that environmental multilateralism does deliver.
This is a lesson that should still inspire us.
Friends, there have been other achievements. The launch of scientific bodies, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC. The phase-out of lead in petrol. And, just yesterday, the resolution starting negotiations on a global plastic pollution deal.
But let’s zoom out and see one overarching success: today, UNEP is now at the heart of protecting the asset upon which we all rely, the environment. The world has realized that we cannot pollute our way to development and clean up after. We have a human right to a healthy environment. Youth are demanding change. Governments, cities and regions are acting. Businesses are acting. Investors are acting.
None of this was in place 50 years ago.
However, our journey will only conclude when we ensure that humanity can thrive without skewing the delicate balance of life on this glorious planet.
The IPCC told us this week that global warming has caused climate injustice and dangerous disruption to the natural world. Nature and biodiversity loss are undermining the SDGs. Pollution and waste are killing millions of people each year.
Now we must quicken our steps before the triple crisis leaves us stumbling to catch up through its growing wake of destruction. The global community must move from science to policy to real, meaningful action.
Our to-do list is long. Ensure economic decisions account for the global public good that is nature. Reshape our energy, transport and food systems around decarbonization and circularity. Transform economic and financial models so that capital backs planet and people, as well as profit. Reinvigorate multilateralism through the common agenda.
As the global organization through which nations can safeguard this planet, UNEP – backed by its many donors, to whom we are grateful – will throw everything it has at these transformations. Its science. Its innovation. Its commitment, its experience and its heart.
But UNEP and the environmental movement cannot travel alone.
We need everyone with us – not just the true believers. And yes, some of us must do more than others. This is how we deliver justice for those who bear least responsibility for the triple planetary crisis but suffer the most. We must change and deliver. On a stable climate. On rich and bountiful nature. On a pollution-free world. On the SDGs.
Friends,
I know that many people see the storm clouds thickening overhead and despair at being lost forever in the darkness. I understand. But I see the glistening golden thread of environmental action that our forebears wove for us in 1972. A thread that UNEP and the environmental community has thickened, strand by additional strand, into a guide rope strong enough for us all to grasp.
We must now hold fast to this rope, and follow it into blue skies, azure seas and verdant nature – thrumming with life in all its forms. Into peace, prosperity and equity. Into a world where humanity lives as part of nature, not above it. We owe this to our past, to our present and to our future.
Thank you.
