Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary
General and Executive Director the United
Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) addresses
the 117th Assembly of the Inter-Parliamentary
Union
Geneva, 8 October 2007 - Distinguished Parliamentarians,
UN colleagues, friends, ladies and gentlemen,
Thank you for inviting me to this 117th
Assembly of the Inter-Parliamentary Union.
I am particularly delighted to be here given
this meeting's focus on the UN and the newly
established IPU Committee on UN Affairs.
I believe your decision to establish this
committee reflects a fundamental - and to
some extent re-discovered truth-namely that
multilateralism is even more relevant today
than ever before.
That many of the challenges faced by this
and future generations-both persistent and
newly emerging-can be best tackled by nations
united rather than through bilateral deals
on the side that favour one group of countries
over the legitimate interests and needs
of another.
UN Reform and Relevance
The Committee also, I hope, reflects a sense
that the UN is shedding its 20th century
skin and evolving into a more efficient,
creative and responsive organization fitted
for the 21st century.
We still have some ways to go, but under
the UN reform initiative initiated by the
former Secretary-General Kofi Annan - and
being taken up vigorously by the new SG,
Ban Ki-Moon- we are being gradually transformed
and really beginning to 'deliver as One".
We have, in the new Secretary-General,
someone who understands that the UN needs
to re-connect with the concerns of citizens
and communities as well as governments.
In 2007, "We the People' are looking
to their leaders-be they Members of Parliament;
Prime Ministers or Presidents or senior
officials in the UN-for urgent action on
perhaps one topic above all and a topic
that connects so many environmental and
development concerns.
That topic is climate change. Only some
weeks ago, the Secretary-General hosted
a High Level Event for world leaders at
the UN headquarters in New York on climate
change.
Proof, if proof were needed, that Ban Ki-Moon
is determined to put global warming at the
top of the global political agenda and determined
to build the trust so urgently needed if
we are to succeed in combating climate change.
Under his leadership, the UN is also determined
to demonstrate its 'sustainability credentials'
by action on the ground and by good housekeeping
at home.
Reviews are underway across all agencies
and programmes to establish a strategy for
a carbon neutral UN and to make the refurbishment
of the UN headquarters in New York a model
of eco-efficiency.
I hope the IPU can share the SG's vision
and ensure that member states fully support
such proposals.
So ladies and gentlemen, I hope in this
speech to reflect and demonstrate this positive
transformation underway within the UN as
it relates to the environment and sustainable
development generally.
But also in respect to the wider landscape
where environment interfaces with issues
such as security and human rights up to
gender issues and trade-issues, many if
not all of which are firmly on your national
parliamentary agendas too.
Indeed, I was fascinated to see that legislators
here today will be debating an emergency
item "Disaster risk reduction and parliamentary
support to build action and resilience against
climate risk".
You will be debating an environmental change
phenomenon but with huge ramifications for
economies; livelihoods; health and human
security.
Brundtland and Achievements Since
Ladies and gentlemen, we need to look a
little back to go forward.
We meet here in Geneva in the 20th anniversary
year off the UN-commissioned Brundtland
Commission report "Our Common Future"
which in many ways popularized the phrase
sustainable development.
It is also a report as fresh, relevant and
as poignant today as it was in 1987.
In a few days, 25 October to be precise,
UNEP will launch its 4th report in its flagship
Global Environment Outlook series.
GEO-4 takes it departure from Brundtland,
assesses the state of the environment today
and outlines plausible scenarios for the
future.
If you read GEO-4, you might wonder what
we have all been doing over the past 20
years.
In some ways this would be a justifiable
pessimism but it is also ignoring some important
milestones which the international community
and the UN-in partnership with governments;
parliaments; the private sector and civil
society-have achieved.
20 years ago UNEP assisted in the negotiation
of the Montreal Protocol-the treaty established
to save and repair the ozone layer following
evidence it was under attack from consumer
and industrial chemicals.
Montreal, which celebrated its birthday
only some weeks ago in the city of its birth,
has so far phased out 95 per cent of ozone
damaging chemicals.
In the late 1980s UNEP, in cooperation
with the UN's World Meteorlogical Organisation,
set up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) to assess emerging scientific
evidence that increased burning of fossil
fuels was changing the climate.
(I'd would like to return to the IPCC in
a few moments.)
And in 1992, at the Rio Earth Summit, conventions
covering biological diversity; desertification
and of course the framework convention on
climate change were agreed.
A $ 3 billion funding mechanism, the Global
Environment Facility, was soon established
to assist developing companies meet the
environmental and sustainability challenge.
The Kyoto Protocol on climate and the Cartagena
Protocol on Living Modified Organisms have
also come to pass alongside countless other
agreements, guidelines and initiatives.
The Johannesburg Plan of Implementation
was agreed at the World Summit on Sustainable
Development (WSSD) in 2002 and re-confirmed
at the World Summit in 2005.
The reality is however that the intentions
and good work has failed to match the speed,
pace and magnitude of the challenge particularly
in the translation of global agreements
to legislation and action at the national
and regional level.
The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, requested
by the former Secretary General; funded
in part by GEF; coordinated by organizations
including UNEP and involving 1,300 scientists
and experts, is the reality.
Some 16 of 25 ecosystems (check)-natural
services such as wetlands, forests and coral
reefs-degraded or managed unsustainably.
Agricultural land is the only one truly
enjoying a bumper time at the expense of
most of the others.
Coal, oil and gas-fossil fuels that were
powering the vehicles, homes and factories
or our grandfathers let alone our great
grandfathers-almost completely dominate
the energy and electricity production of
the globe.
The Millennium Development Goal to "reduce
by half the proportion of the world's population
living on less than $1 per day" has
lifted some 250 million out of extreme poverty
since 11000.
But in Africa, especially sub Saharan Africa
there remain fears that none of the seven
MDGs will be met by 2015.
A recent report by scientists has concluded
that all commercial fish stocks could have
disappeared by 2050.
At WSSD governments agreed to establish
a network of marine reserves-one management
tool that might assist fish stocks.
At current rates of listing, this will
only be achieved in 2085 or more than three
decades after the world's fishing fleets
have been mothballed for lack of stocks
to catch.
Why Have We Not Achieved More
There are scores of reasons why, faced with
the ever impressive science designed to
inform national policy-makes and legislators,
governments have ambled rather than run.
One, perhaps simple answer is that the
scenarios of environmental Armageddon have
often been sketched out in time frames of
centuries or at best half centuries-well
beyond the term of most politicians and
indeed the lives on many making decisions
on a given day.
There has also been a great deal of finger-pointing
between nations with governments in the
North haranguing and harassing those in
the South over, say rapid forest loss forgetting
that deforestation was the path they chose
in their early development.
And failing to applaud the measures many
are taking-Brazil has for example cut its
rate of deforestation in the Amazon by 50
per cent in the past three years with little
or no applause.
On greenhouse gas emissions, China and
India are now often characterized as to
blame for global warming.
This is despite the fact that the rapidly
developing economies emissions are recent
phenomenon whereas developed countries have
been polluting for some 200 years.
And also ignores the fact that on a per
capita basis they are still far below countries
like the United States and nations in Europe.
The phenomenon of globalization has also
been, to my mind, a factor.
Many national governments appear over recent
years to have in a sense abdicated their
traditional regulatory role-abdicated it
in favour of the globalized free market
and a belief that they were either powerless
in its path or that somehow wealth generation,
free of red tape, would eventually resolve
all our difficulties.
Finally, there is the question of resources.
I head the UN Environment Programme established
in 1972 to be the multilateral response
to environmental challenges.
In 1972 we had early concerns about the
thinning of the ozone layer but in many
ways environmental concerns were local concerns
about a lake or a beauty spot or national
ones such as the loss of meadow lands to
roads.
GEO-4, alongside reports like the Millennium
Ecosystem Assessment, underline that human
impacts have gone way beyond this.
We have reached a point where we are fundamentally
and systematically running down the global
services that nature once so abundantly
and renewably provided.
So how much are governments investing in
the Earth's natural assets and improved
intelligent management? Well let's take
UNEP. Our core funding approved from governments
is around $60 million a year.
A few weeks ago, during the Montreal Protocol
meeting, the front page of the Canadian
newspaper Le Devoir ran a front page picture
and story about the refurbishment planned
this winter for the Ritz Carlton Hotel.
$100 million is the price tag-that's one
hotel, in one city in one developed country
over a few months versus the funds being
spent to try and meet the global environmental
challenges of the 21st century over one
year.
Currently, consumers spend some $36 billion
a year on pets in the United States.
Meanwhile, the multilateral environment
agreements are drowning in a seemingly never-ending
sea of decisions by governments that can
often paralyze rather than energize the
sustainability quest.
