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, distinguished guests and friends.
Welcome to beautiful Kenya, the gracious host of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). My deep thanks to the people of Kenya, to you President Ruto, and to the Kenyan government for the unwavering support that we have enjoyed from this great nation in our 53 years of calling this place our home.
Welcome to beautiful Nairobi, the environmental capital of the world. And welcome to the seventh session of the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA), the worlds most-influential environmental decision-making body. My thanks to the many donors who reached deep and to the many partners and colleagues who have made this Assembly possible. And my thanks to all the delegations who have come here in the spirit of dialogue and cooperation.
Here, at UNEA-7, Member States are looking to build on a long history of unity and success. Not for symbolism or show, but to drive a sustainable future, and deliver sustainable solutions that are now indispensable for a resilient planet.
Why do such solutions matter?
They matter because every single Member State, every single city, every single business and every single individual will benefit from a stable climate, will benefit from thriving biodiversity, will benefit from healthy and thriving lands, will benefit from a pollution-free planet. They matter because the environment is not an add-on to development; it is the very foundation upon which peace, prosperity, economic growth and stability rest.
Make no mistake, when we undermine that very foundation, we undermine our own future and our own economies and societies.
The three leadership dialogues we are holding today and tomorrow make this abundantly clear. Human health and planetary health are inseparable. Economic, business and planetary health are also inseparable. The stability of the financial system and planetary health are inseparable. An economy that degrades its own natural capital in the end erodes its own balance sheet.
The seventh edition of UNEPs Global Environment Outlook, which we released on Tuesday, reinforces this point. The report tells us that environmental challenges have exacted a heavy toll on human, economic and planetary wellbeing claiming millions of lives and costing trillions of dollars each year. If the world continues down this path of relying on fossil fuels, extracting virgin resources, destroying nature, and polluting the air, land and water, the damages will mount further: slashing global Gross Domestic Product (GDP), claiming many more lives, worsening inequality and burning through the natural resources that keep economies and businesses afloat.
But the report also reminds us there is another future withing reach. If we invest in a stable climate, if we invest in healthy nature, if we invest in good and fertile lands, if we invest in a pollution-free planet, the world can enjoy significant economic gains, avoid millions of premature deaths, lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and hunger, deliver greater equity and climate justice, and so much more.
Reinforcing environmental action is not a cause to be postponed. It is a growth strategy and a justice imperative.
Excellencies,
This, fundamentally, is what this Assembly is about. Taking decisions that make lives better for everyone, everywhere. It is about making choices that advance national interests today while safeguarding the interests of future generations and the unborn tomorrow. It is about proving that multilateralism can still deliver in a world that so badly needs these solutions.
To do this, we must perform a delicate balancing act on a global scale: retain the many advantages that development and technology have brought and continue to bring to the world, while avoiding the unwanted side-effects. Side-effects that can be deadly and disruptive: extreme weather, droughts, degraded nature, unproductive land, toxic air, and so on. Side-effects that are becoming more frequent, more intense and so interconnected that they threaten to reverse the very human development gains that we have made.
And because no government can address this alone, the response must be shared across sectors, across borders, across societies and across the financial balance sheet at the global level.
That is why everyone is represented here at UNEA-7. 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.
And this also why we have here the Multilateral Environmental Agreements and their Presidents, who yesterday gathered to find ways to work closer together and spark stronger, faster, more joined-up action across the environmental challenges that we navigate. This is multilateralism at its best. Complex at times, of course, but indispensable.
Multilateralism has already delivered strong progress on resolutions at this UNEA, resolutions that Member States will now review. Resolutions on safeguarding coral reefs. Resolutions on the sound management of minerals and metals, which follows yesterdays launch of the new UN taskforce on critical energy transition minerals. Further resolutions on sustainable solutions through sport, addressing sargassum seaweed blooms and more.
Excellencies, colleagues and friends,
We all know that the world is operating in an increasingly fractured geopolitical landscape, beneath skies darkened with the clouds of environmental crises.
Yet this is precisely why, at such a time, that multilateralism must show its value. And here in Nairobi, the global community has again and again, over the decades, demonstrated that it can deliver when it matters most. From the Vienna Convention and Montreal Protocol that healed the ozone layer to the new Intergovernmental Science-Policy Panel on Chemicals, Waste and Pollution, born out of this Assembly, to the ongoing negotiations on plastic, UNEP and UNEA have shown that cooperation across borders and boundaries and across differences and interests is not only possible; it delivers real measurable results.
So, I ask you today to look beyond the storm and to fix your eyes on the horizon, to a future in which we can secure a stable climate, we can secure a clean, healthy and sustainable environment and we can secure a pollution-free world that will benefit every nation, every person and every unborn child.
No one is saying that the journey is going to be easy, and it certainly will not be short. But delay will not make the change easier. Every year we postpone ambitious decisions guided by science, the cost of inaction grows. The human catastrophe grows. And the space for solutions shrinks.
So, excellencies, from this Assembly the world expects signals of determination and solidarity. The world expects the multilateral system to work, even as you work to improve it under UN80. The world expects this Assembly to protect the worlds most-vulnerable people, not to leave them to face floods and droughts and heatwaves alone. The world expects you to align your words with actions.
So let us assure that when history looks back at this Assembly, it will be said that here we chose to act at the scale these crises demand.
