POVERTY, ALONG WITH FAILURES OF GOVERNANCE, NEGLIGENCE AND GREED, MAIN CAUSES OF ECOLOGICAL CRISES, SECRETARY-GENERAL SAYS

POVERTY, ALONG WITH FAILURES OF GOVERNANCE, NEGLIGENCE AND GREED,

MAIN CAUSES OF ECOLOGICAL CRISES, SECRETARY-GENERAL SAYS

Following is the text of a message from Secretary-General Kofi Annan to the twenty-first session of the Governing Council of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the second global ministerial environment forum, delivered today in Nairobi on his behalf by the Executive Director of UNEP Klaus Toepfer:

It is a pleasure to send my greetings to all of you who have gathered for this important session, at a time when the task of protecting the global environment is becoming more and more urgent.

Last year, in my Millennium Report "We the Peoples", I stressed the inadequacy of our current responses to the challenges of sustainability, and the urgent need to give these issues higher priority.  The world's leaders signalled their agreement when they decided, at last September's Millennium Summit, to "spare no effort to free all humanity, and above all our children and grandchildren, from the threat of living on a planet irredeemably spoilt by human activities, and whose resources would no longer be sufficient for their needs".

Environmental sustainability is everybody's challenge.  But the heaviest responsibility falls on you who have accepted positions of leadership, whether in politics, business or civil society.

This year we are preparing the 10-year follow-up to the Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), which will take place in 2002.  This second Earth Summit -- the World Summit on Sustainable Development -- raises a lot of expectations.  It is my hope that governments will take advantage of the time between now and then to revitalize the sustainability debate, and to prepare the ground for the adoption of concrete and meaningful actions by that time.

Alongside failures of governance, negligence and greed, poverty is one of the causes of the ecological crises we confront today.  The Summit should address this issue, in order to find a way of breaking the vicious circle of environmental degradation and increased poverty.  To achieve the goal of sustainable development, environmental constraints must be fully integrated into mainstream economic policy.  In my Millennium Report I urged governments to modify their systems of national accounting so that they begin to reflect true environmental costs and benefits.  I hope this concept of "green" accounting will gain increasing support among Member States. 

A strong signal of our determination to "adopt a new ethic of conservation and stewardship in all our environmental actions" -- to borrow once again the words of the Millennium Declaration -- would be to ensure the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol.  Therefore, I urge you to work towards its entry into force by 2002.  It would be a fitting celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Earth Summit and of the thirtieth anniversary of UNEP. 

Last but not least, given the wide-ranging threats to our global environment, we need a strong, financially secure institutional architecture, through which the world's States and their peoples, working together, can develop a coherent international environmental policy.

The Global Ministerial Environment Forum in Malmö last May made a good start, working in a spirit of international solidarity and partnership among States, civil society and the private sector.  Let us continue in that spirit.  I look forward eagerly to the results of your deliberations.

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