UN Secretary-General António Guterres
The theme of this year’s World Environment Day is “land restoration, desertification, and drought resilience.”
Humanity depends on land. Yet, all over the world, a toxic cocktail of pollution, climate chaos, and biodiversity decimation are turning healthy lands into deserts, and thriving ecosystems into dead zones. They are annihilating forests and grasslands, and sapping the strength of land to support ecosystems, agriculture, and communities.
UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen
This World Environment Day, we are asking everyone to join the global movement to restore our lands, to build drought resilience and to combat desertification.
Because land degradation and desertification affect over three billion people.
Freshwater ecosystems are also degraded, making it harder to grow crops and to raise livestock.
This disproportionately affects smallholder farmers and, of course, the rural poor.
But nature is resilient.
By restoring ecosystems, we can slow the triple planetary crisis: the crisis of climate change, the crisis of nature and biodiversity loss, including desertification, and the crisis of pollution and waste.
We can help to reverse biodiversity loss by 2030, in line with the Global Biodiversity Framework.
And we can get closer to limiting global temperature rise in line with the Paris Agreement by increasing carbon storage, including in the peatlands.
And we can reduce poverty and food insecurity, in line with the SDGs.
Work has begun.
The UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration is backing commitments to restore one billion hectares of land, an area larger than China.
Last year, six countries pledged to restore 300,000 kilometres of rivers and 350 million hectares of wetlands.
At the sixth UN Environment Assembly in February, nations agreed to strengthen sustainable land management.
And later this year, the three Rio Conventions – the one on climate, the one on biodiversity and the one on desertification – are each holding a Conference of Parties or COP to push further the ambitions of these conventions.
Land restoration can be a golden thread that ties these together, ties together action and ambition across all these three important gatherings.
So we must make this work count.
I thank the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for hosting World Environment Day 2024.
On this important day, I ask everyone to join Generation Restoration.
Our land is our future.
And we must protect it.