Highlights and images for 1 March 2024

Following many hours of non-stop negotiations over the past two weeks, delegates successfully concluded the sixth United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA-6), spending the final day listening to passionate speeches by leaders from around the globe calling to respond to the planet’s warning signals.

In the two provocatively titled leadership dialogues, moderator Salina Abraham, Chief of Staff, Center for International Forestry Research and World Agroforestry, CIFOR-ICRAF, challenged the assembled leaders to engage in "radically honest dialogue," and leaders did not disappoint in this regard.

In the dialogue on how to redirect nature-negative global finance flows towards the green transition, or “show me the money,” insights from the leaders included:

• the need for work on green taxonomies, and reconfiguring Nationally Determined Contributions as “economic opportunity plans”;
• existential threats cannot be addressed through “the law of the market” but require more countries to join an emerging multilateral pact; and
• incrementally building an enabling institutional and regulatory environment, while also launching a transformative agenda to tackle the triple planetary crisis, is critical to putting the globe on a sustainable development trajectory.

Attempting to respond to the challenge of whether environmental multilateralism is still “alive and kicking” in the second leadership dialogue, United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Executive Director Inger Andersen reminded delegates of the most recent successes of multilateral environmental negotiations, including the adoption of the Global Biodiversity Framework, the Global Framework on Chemicals, the Agreement on the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Marine Biological Diversity of Areas beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ Agreement), and the operationalization of the Loss and Damage Fund. She also highlighted historic achievements in the protection of the ozone layer and the global phase out of lead in gasoline. 

Grace Catapang, Global Fund for Coral Reefs (GFCR) Frontline Youth Ambassador, received a standing ovation following her passionate plea to delegates to remember the faces and voices of those who depend on the decisions being considered in the negotiating rooms.

All these calls from global leaders ended in solidifying these undertakings through adopting timely resolutions in many important issue areas. During the closing plenary, Member States adopted 15 resolutions and 2 decisions, as well as the UNEA-6 Ministerial Declaration to ensure UNEP fulfils its mandate as the leading UN agency to facilitate “effective, inclusive, and sustainable multilateral actions to tackle climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution.”

Thanking delegates for “bringing nature back into the room,” UNEA-7 President Abdullah Bin Ali Al Amri, Chairman of Environment Authority (Oman), said the only path forward for Member States is that of teamwork for “there is no other planet to escape to.”

UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen said the negotiations were not always easy, Member States did not always agree, but what matters is how we disagree, and this spirit of inclusivity represents true multilateralism.  

UNEA-6 President Leila Benali, in summarizing the achievements of UNEA-6, noted they call for enlightened leadership and urged scaling up means of implementation, enhancing national capacity to implement action plans and policies, and strengthening the science-policy interface.

UNEA-7 President Al Amri gaveled the meeting to a close at 6:23 pm (EAT).