Environment ministers find collective voice again
UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner is optimistic about the results of the just concluded Bali environment ministers` meeting here as the conference had enabled them to find a collective voice again after the "great frustrations" in Copenhagen
ANTARA News | February 27, 2010
"Without that there would never be any progress," Steiner told the press after the closing of the three-day 11th Special Session of the UNEP Governing Council and the Global Ministerial Environment Forum here on Friday.
He described the meeting organized by UNEP and attended by around 1,000 participants including 40 ministers from 135 countries, as the first test whether a multilateral system is capable of convincing member states to make joint decisions, after the Copenhagen climate change conference was considered to have shown a `trust deficit` by some parties.
"The ministers responsible for the environment, meeting just over a month after the climate change conference in Copenhagen, have spoken with a clear, united and unequivocal voice," Steiner said.
The world environmental affairs minister meeting, the biggest gathering after Copenhagen Conference last year, issued a wide-ranging Nusa Dua Declaration.
The Declaration underlines the vital importance of biodiversity, the urgent need to combat climate change and they key opportunities from accelerating a transition to a low carbon resource efficient Green Economy.
Ministers also recognized that action towards a Green Economy was taking route in economies across the globe. "Accelerating this is a key element of the Nusa Dua Declaration and one that can direct future action towards realizing the kinds of transitions needed on a planet of six billion people, rising to nine billion by 2050," he said.
The Declaration, the first by world environment ministers since they met in Malmo, Sweden in 2000, will be transmitted to the UN General Assembly later this year.
Delegates attending the Nusa Dua meeting backed UNEP`s support to Haiti in the wake of the devastating earthquake of January 2010 and called on the organization to assist the UN country team to incorporate environmental issues in the rehabilitation and reconstruction as well as restoration phases.
On the environmental destruction in Gaza after the Israeli attacks in December 2998 through January 2009, delegates asked UNEP to assist in implementing recommendations from its environmental assessment of Gaza Strip compiled following the Israeli aggression.
The assessment covers issues such as solid waste management, pollution and the acute decline of Gaza`s underground water supplies.
"We don`t want the recommendations remain on paper. We need implementation, concrete actions to repair the environmental damages in Gaza," Palestinian Ambassador to Indonesia Fariz Mehdawi told ANTARA after the meeting closing.(*)
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