UNEA-7: charting a path to a brighter future for every nation
Your Excellency William Samoei Ruto, President of the Republic of Kenya,
Your Excellency Prosper Bazombanza, Vice President of the Republic of Burundi,
Your Excellency Abdullah Bin Ali Al-Amri, President of UNEA-7 and Chair of the Environment Authority of Oman,
Your Excellency Lok Bahadur Thapa, President of the 2026 session of the United Nations Economic and Social Council,
Ministers, excellencies, delegates, esteemed guests, and friends.
Welcome to radiant Kenya, the gracious host of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). I extend sincere gratitude to the people of Kenya, to President Ruto, and to the Kenyan government for the steadfast support that has accompanied UNEP throughout our 53 years of partnership in this home away from home.
Welcome to vibrant Nairobi, often called the environmental capital of the world. And welcome to the seventh session of the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA-7) — the globe’s most influential decision-making body on environmental matters. My appreciation goes to the generous donors who stepped forward and to the many partners and colleagues who have made this Assembly possible. I also thank all delegations for engaging in dialogue and cooperative spirit.
At UNEA-7, Member States aim to build on a long legacy of unity and achievement. Not to perform for appearances, but to drive a sustainable future and deliver practical, resilient solutions that are now essential for a stable planet.
Why do these solutions matter?
They matter because every country, city, business, and person stands to gain from a stable climate, thriving biodiversity, healthy land, and a pollution-free world. The environment isn’t a mere add-on to development; it is the bedrock on which peace, prosperity, growth, and stability rest.
Make no mistake: weakening that foundation jeopardizes our own futures, economies, and societies.
The three leadership dialogues occurring today and tomorrow make this point unmistakable. Human health and planetary health are inseparable. Economic vitality and planetary health are inseparable. A stable financial system and planetary health are inseparable. An economy that degrades its natural capital eventually erodes its own balance sheet.
UNEP’s Global Environment Outlook, released this week, reinforces this message. It shows environmental challenges exacting a heavy toll on human, economic, and planetary wellbeing—causing millions of deaths and costing trillions each year. If we persist with fossil fuels, unsustainable extraction, nature destruction, and widespread pollution, damages will escalate: GDP will shrink, more lives will be lost, inequality will widen, and precious resources will be squandered.
Yet the report also points to another possible future. If we invest in a stable climate, healthy nature, fertile lands, and a pollution-free world, the potential gains are vast: substantial economic growth, millions of premature deaths prevented, hundreds of millions lifted out of poverty and hunger, greater equity and climate justice, and far more.
Raising environmental action from a mere cause to a growth strategy and a justice imperative is not optional—it is essential.
Excellencies, colleagues and friends,
This Assembly is fundamentally about improving lives for all people, everywhere. It is about choices that advance national interests today while safeguarding the well-being of future generations. It is about proving that multilateralism can still deliver in a world that desperately needs effective solutions.
To accomplish this, we must strike a global balance: preserve the advantages of development and technology while avoiding harmful side-effects—extreme weather, drought, degraded nature, unproductive land, and toxic air—that are increasingly frequent, intensified, and interconnected. These effects threaten to roll back hard-won human development gains.
And since no single government can tackle these challenges alone, the response must be shared across sectors, borders, societies, and the global financial ledger.
That is why this gathering includes a full spectrum of stakeholders: business and industry; children and youth; farmers; Indigenous Peoples and their communities; local authorities; non-governmental organizations; the scientific and technological community; women; workers and trade unions.
It is also why we have gathered leaders from Multilateral Environmental Agreements and their Presidents to explore closer cooperation and faster, more coordinated action across environmental challenges. This is multilateralism at its best—complex at times, yet indispensable.
Multilateralism has already yielded meaningful progress through UNEA resolutions, which Member States will review here. Resolutions safeguarding coral reefs, sound management of minerals and metals (following yesterday’s launch of a new UN task force on critical energy-transition minerals), and initiatives promoting sustainable solutions through sport, addressing sargassum seaweed blooms, and more.
Excellencies, colleagues, and friends,
We recognize that the world sits in an increasingly fragmented geopolitical landscape, with environmental crises casting a dark veil over skies. That makes it even more crucial for multilateralism to demonstrate its value. Here in Nairobi, the global community has repeatedly shown that cooperation across borders and differences can yield tangible results—from the Vienna Convention and Montreal Protocol healing the ozone layer to the creation of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Panel on Chemicals, Waste and Pollution born from this Assembly, and ongoing negotiations on plastics. UNEP and UNEA have proven that working together across borders and interests is not only possible but produces real, measurable outcomes.
So, I invite you now to look beyond the current storm and toward a horizon where we can secure a stable climate, a clean and healthy environment, and a pollution-free world that benefits every nation, every person, and every unborn child.
No one claims the road ahead will be easy or brief. Yet delaying ambitious, science-guided decisions won’t make change easier. Every year of inaction raises the cost, deepens human suffering, and narrows the space for viable solutions.
Excellencies, from this Assembly the world expects clear signs of resolve and solidarity. The global community expects the multilateral system to function, even as we work to strengthen it for UN80. The world looks to you to protect the most vulnerable people from floods, droughts, and heatwaves, and to align words with deeds.
Let us ensure that history remembers this Assembly as a moment when we acted at the scale demanded by the crises we face.
