UNEA-6 opens with a call for environmental multilateralism

The sixth assembly of the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEA-6) opened in Nairobi, Kenya on February 26, 2024 with a call for multilateral actions to address the rising environmental crisis fuelled by climate change.

The assembly also called upon member states to formulate and adopt a comprehensive and binding Global Plastic Treaty to address the plastics menace,  formulate an international treaty for phasing out fossil fuel production and support a just transition in favour of “sustainable and renewable energy sources”.

The speakers noted that the world was drowning in plastic, a crisis linked to the fossil fuel industry, a huge contributor to climate change and pollution.

An international fossil fuel treaty was not only necessary but urgent as well, they noted, observing that a non-proliferation treaty had the potential to tackle both crises — plastics and fossil fuels — facing the world.

According to Kenya’s Environment Minister Soipan Tuya, the world also needed to accelerate the implementation of the UN’s 2030 Agenda in order to stay the course for sustainable development.

She noted millions of people in the developing world still are in deep poverty amid heightened economic inequality, made worse by climate change.

Tuya said the solution lay in conserving the environment. She added that the global community was “not doing too well”, and must change course and do so soonest.

“We are living in a time of turmoil. And I know that in this room, there are people who are, or who know, those deeply affected by this turmoil. Our response must demonstrate that multilateral diplomacy can deliver,” Leila Benali, president of UNEA-6 and Minister of Energy Transition and Sustainable Development for the Kingdom of Morocco. “As we meet here in 2024, we must be self-critical and work towards inclusive, networked and effective multilateralism that can make a tangible difference to people’s lives,” she added.

Strengthening environmental multilateralism 

The assembly said UNEP Executive Director Inger Anderson will make resolutions to boost multilateral actions to address climate injustice and a global conversation on emerging technologies. This will equip nations with the science to help make the right choices for the future of the planet and its people under the concept of environmental multilateralism.

“We are living through an intensifying triple planetary crisis: the crisis of climate change, the crisis of nature and land loss, and the crisis of pollution and waste. This crisis casts its shadow over every person on this planet, regardless of nationality, colour, faith or gender,” the director noted.

The time, she noted, had come for putting political differences aside, focusing on threats facing the planet and embarking on the pathway to a sustainable and safe future.

“We’ve all felt and seen the impacts — baking heat, intense storms, vanishing nature and species, failing soils, deadly dirty air, oceans stuffed with plastic waste and much more,” she lamented.

Unfortunately, she observed, the poor and the vulnerable, also the least responsible for climate change, were the hardest hit by the impacts which had made their lives almost unlivable.

At least 19 resolutions are before the assembly, and 30 side events and associated events are expected to take place during the five-day event.

More than 7,000 delegates from 182 UN member states and more than 170 ministers have enrolled for UNEA-6, whose theme is effective, inclusive and sustainable multilateral actions to tackle climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution. 

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