Speech prepared for delivery at ‘The One Planet Summit delivers for biodiversity’
I am honoured to address you on behalf of the United Nations today.
Humanity’s pursuit of growth and profit at all costs has caused the triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution. Now we are living with the consequences – despite the many warnings we have received. Our one planet is being destroyed by one species. Us.
But we can do better. We can change. We can unite under the banner of global cooperation. We have done it before: to form the United Nations and address global conflict. To protect the ozone layer. To end the use of leaded petrol. Now we need to do it to protect nature and biodiversity.
The post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework will be our latest blueprint to protect nature and biodiversity. We need a framework that shifts the way we define the multiple values of nature. That transforms agriculture and food systems by moving to regenerative practices and weeding out nature-destroying subsidies. That promotes a better built environment and circular economies. That listens to the voices of indigenous people and local communities. That brings nature’s solutions to restore a degraded planet and delivers up to one-third of the mitigation action required to keep global temperatures below 1.5 degrees Celsius.
But the framework is not the only blueprint for healthier nature. The Paris Agreement. The UN Convention to Combat Desertification. The Montreal Protocol. The beyond 2020 chemicals framework. Dozens of smaller environmental agreements across the globe. All these agreements deal with issues that damage biodiversity. And all must work together to deliver.
But as the One Planet Summit acknowledges, we need a whole-of-society lift, not just the environmental movement straining to lift this burden. We need a global movement in which businesses report on their dependencies and impacts on nature and change to nature-positive business models. In which big investors stop backing industries like single-use plastics and start backing those that make money while restoring the planet. In which governments put the right policies in place, eliminate harmful subsidies and start to plug funding gaps – including through using COVID recovery spending - to create a global economic recovery that takes us forwards, not backwards.
The One Planet Summit has helped to create such cooperation and we at the United Nations have been proud partners. At the 2017 summit for example, UNEP and BNP Paribas signed an agreement to invest at least USD 10 billion into sustainable land management and renewable energy by 2025. UNEP’s Finance Initiative amplifies this work, with over 450 banks, insurers and asset managers working to develop the sustainable finance and responsible investment agendas. Such cooperation helps, but we all need to step up.
Look, we often talk about biodiversity as if we, humanity, are separate from it. We are not. We are part of the incredible web of biodiversity. But we act like the spider who created the web and can tear it down. Unlike the spider, we cannot build another web. This One Planet is our only web. It is time we started treating it that way.
Thank you.
Executive Director
