Your Excellency Félix Moloua, Prime Minister, Head of Government of the Central African Republic
Mr. Espen Barth Eide, President of the 5th UN Environment Assembly and Minister of Climate and the Environment, Norway
Deputy Secretary General Amina Mohammed
Mr. Keriako Tobiko, Cabinet Secretary for Environment and Forest, Kenya
Excellencies, Ministers, Delegates
Let me begin by thanking our host country, Kenya for your leadership on the environment and for its outstanding efforts in making the resumed fifth United Nations Environment Assembly a resounding success.
While we meet at a time of turmoil, when peace remains more important than ever, I can say without doubt that UNEA 5.2 is the most relevant and important gathering of this body since its formation. Why? Because the triple planetary crisis of climate change, nature and biodiversity loss, and pollution and waste is threatening to pull the very rug out from under the Sustainable Development Goals – and with it whip away our aspirations to end hunger and poverty, deliver peace and equity, and live in harmony with the natural world.
Climate change, as the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report told us this week, is unleashing impacts of greater scale and intensity across the planet. We are seeing dangerous disruption across the natural world. Species are migrating in search of more liveable conditions. Climate injustice means indigenous peoples and local communities are being hit harder.
Nature and biodiversity loss are gnawing at the foundations of human health and prosperity. One staggering example is that 20-40 per cent of land is degraded. This degradation affects almost half of the world’s citizens and makes it increasingly difficult to feed everyone – a task at which we are already failing.
Pollution is, quite simply, deadly. All life lost is a tragedy, of course, but let us give some scale: COVID-19 has caused close to six million deaths in two years. Indoor and outdoor air pollution alone causes seven million premature deaths every year. We stopped the world for COVID-19, yet we let it spin on with pollution.
These three crises add up to one interlinked planetary emergency, driven by the unsustainable way we produce goods and consume resources.
Given the statistics, it is understandable that people are anxious about the triple planetary crisis. That youth are worried about their future. That many people feel helpless. But we are not helpless. What we did, we can undo.
We have already achieved a lot – through this body, through international multilateral agreements and action by governments, businesses, civil society and individuals. There is record awareness of the issues and their science-based solutions. Record engagement from stakeholders – most prominently youth. Record meaningful action. Record commitment to raising ambition. Yes, we are still moving too slowly to catch up on the accelerating crisis. But we know the solutions. I am confident we can deploy them at the pace and scale required.
Colleagues, as we are celebrating 50 years since Stockholm and the birth of UNEP this year, we must also acknowledge the efforts of those who came before us: from Maurice Strong, the first Executive Director of UNEP, to those committed individuals who lost their lives coming to UNEA in March 2019. They have all helped to build a platform for action. We owe it to them to soar from this platform into a net-zero world. A pollution-free world. A world in which people live in harmony with nature.
UNEA 5.2 has given us an opportunity to soar. The negotiators have done an amazing job. For adoption today, we have resolutions that can add thrust to our leap, direction to our flight. They cut across the triple planetary crisis.
But of the resolutions that you will adopt, there is one big-ticket item that stands out.
As I told negotiators a few days ago, the world is demanding that we act on plastic pollution. They, the negotiators, have delivered the first step in this process by agreeing to establish an Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) that will forge a global agreement on plastic pollution.
This would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. But today, here in Nairobi, in the only United Nations Headquarters in the developing world, in the environmental capital of the world, you are taking a crucial step to turn the tide on plastic pollution. This is a historic moment. I congratulate everyone involved for bringing us to this point. But a lot of work lies ahead to deal with the sheer scale of plastic pollution.
Look, in the space of one human lifetime, we have created a massive problem. I remember my mother telling me about sitting in a café immediately after Denmark had been liberated, before I was born. At the table next to her were two American businessmen with colourful blocks made from a strange new material. As she eavesdropped, the curious 18-year-old schoolgirl heard them say, “This is plastic. This is the future.”
These businessmen foresaw only a future of profit and convenience. They did not foresee a future – now our present – in which plastic pollution is everywhere, from the deepest ocean trench to the highest mountain peak. We see this pollution. We feel its climate impacts. We live with the sheer waste of taking a versatile, durable material and making it disposable – losing all value instead of retaining it.
Now we must make the wrong-headed way we manufacture and use plastic the past.
Distinguished guests, the world is watching. I ask you to adopt the INC resolution so that negotiations can start, and we can then land the agreement itself at the earliest possible opportunity, and no later than, the end of 2024.
And as we embark on this journey, let us be clear that the agreement will only truly count if it has clear provisions that are legally binding, as the resolution states. It will only count if it adopts a full life-cycle approach – stretching from design to production to circularity to reducing, managing and preventing waste.
We need to explore all options, including goals for new raw polymers brought into the economy. We need to explore monitoring and reporting mechanisms to support national action. We need to set in place financing mechanisms and means of implementation. We need to provide incentives for all stakeholders and engage with business. And, finally, we need to ensure that the agreement has real political support at the highest level – to both agree on the deal in record time and start implementing it.
So, the decisions we take today will be monumental. As we gavel the INC resolution, we will have the most important international multilateral environmental deal since Paris. And such a deal could be transformational.
Getting the agreement right will kickstart a circular economy that delivers huge benefits.
A comprehensive circular economy approach could reduce the volume of plastics entering our oceans by over 80 per cent by 2040. It could reduce virgin plastic production by 55 per cent. It could save governments USD 70 billion by 2040. It could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25 per cent. Create 700,000 additional jobs, mainly in the global south.
And getting it right could create a model for a much-needed move to circularity in other sectors – particularly in energy, transport and construction. What works for plastics could just as easily work in these sectors, creating jobs and mitigating the triple planetary crisis.
Distinguished guests,
UNEP@50 shows we have achieved much. But we do not have another 50 years to finish the job we started in Stockholm back in 1972. We have less than ten years to almost halve greenhouse gas emissions and stay on track for a 1.5-degree Celsius temperature rise this century. We have the same amount of time to deliver on the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration and reclaim productive and healthy land from degradation and desertification. And when we do this, when we overcome the triple planetary crisis, we land the SDGs.
UNEP is focusing and drilling down on the triple planetary crisis – including through establishing three thematic funds: Climate Stability, Living in Harmony with Nature and Towards a Pollution Free Planet. These funds will allow Member States to back UNEP’s work on addressing the triple crisis in ways that support countries’ economies and deliver greater impact.
You, meanwhile, are about to deliver at UNEA 5.2 – on plastic pollution and each focused and meaningful resolution. For this, I thank you. But remember that these resolutions will only shift the needle if, once adopted, they rapidly create real-world impact. And they can only create real-world impact if they receive unequivocal backing at the highest political level.
So, it behoves us to follow the science, together, as a global community. We must leap high, soar far and move fast to create a world in which we can all live, together, in peace and prosperity. Thank you, again, to everyone who brought us to the point where we have the chance to do this. Now let us adopt these resolutions and take that leap.
Thank you.
