Madam Chair, Cabinet Secretary Tobiko, Excellencies
As this week of intense work and commemoration draws to a close, let me thank Minister Espen Barth Eide, who served so ably as president of UNEA 5, and Minister Leila Benali, who has taken over the reins of UNEA 6.
My huge thanks go to our host country, Kenya. To member states. To the UNEA and CPR Bureaux. To our donors and partners, including Major Groups and Stakeholders.
I also want to pay special tribute to the UNEP personnel who make this organization tick so smoothly: from the longest serving, whose UNEP careers date back to the 1970s and 1980s, to the freshest faces to UNEP’s former leaders – including my friends Achim Steiner and Ibrahim Thiaw, who so kindly joined us in Nairobi this week. You are all part of the interwoven golden threads of environmental action that link past to present and will carry us on into the future.
Friends,
It is to this future that we must now look. A future that begins today. A future that we do not have another 50 years to shape amid the accelerating triple planetary crisis.
Yes, UNEA 5.2 and UNEP@50 have delivered. On plastic pollution. On nature-based solutions. On biodiversity and health. On chemicals and waste. But history ultimately will not judge us on resolutions agreed or plans made. It will judge us on actions delivered. It will judge us on whether we create a world without plastic pollution, a world in which we can all live in peace, a world in which the right to a healthy environment is respected and upheld.
And friends, we must be clear. The environment is facing many threats, including from conflict. The environment is always a casualty of war. Always. We have seen this in many conflicts, regardless of how they begin or how they end. And when the environment is a casualty of war, people suffer – not for a few weeks or months, but long after the conflict has ended.
As then Prime Minister of Sweden, Olof Palme, said at the Stockholm Conference in 1972, “The immense destruction brought about by indiscriminate bombing, by large-scale use of bulldozers and herbicide is an outrage sometimes described as ecocide, which requires urgent international attention. We know that work for disarmament and peace must be viewed in a long perspective. It is of paramount importance, however, that ecological warfare cease immediately.”
I wish these words didn’t carry the same weight today as they did fifty years ago. But they do. The mistakes of the past don’t just haunt us. The mistakes of the past are also the mistakes of the present. It is our job to work together and ensure they are not the mistakes of the future.
So, as we stand here, let us all heed the words of Olof Palme, one of the giants who helped to create UNEP. Let us carry these words with us – in our minds, our hearts, our consciences. Let us take them into the world and act on them so that we can, one day soon, live together as one people, on one planet, in peace with nature and each other.
Thank you.
