Message by UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen for World Wildlife Day 2023
March 3, 2023
联合国环境署执行主任英格·安德森2023年世界野生动植物日致辞
2023年3月3日
So this year on World Wildlife Day, we mark 50 years of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora or CITES. That’s 50 years of regulating international trade in endangered species. That’s 50 years of conserving some of the planet’s most iconic treasures, and 50 years of demonstrating that international cooperation between and amongst countries can work.
But we all know that we still have a long way to travel. An estimated one million of the nearly eight million species on our planet face extinction due to what we do, our human activity. So as we step up action to tackle biodiversity crisis, the Partnership for Wildlife Conservation, which is this theme of World Wildlife Day, will be critical.
And here, the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework provides a really important basis upon which we build these partnerships. So as we strengthen these partnerships, we need to work with indigenous peoples and local communities to ensure that their voices are not just participating, but are leading, are deciding, are showing the way to go. Because let’s face it, indigenous people know more about conservation than many a scientist does.
So we at UNEP, we are proud of our work with the collaborative Partnerships for Sustainable Wildlife Management, which we are privileged to work together with our friends at CITES, at the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Convention on Migratory Species and other international organizations that work on these issues so that, together, we can promote sustainable, legal, and safe use of biodiversity.
So this World Wildlife Day, let’s commit together to forge a closer partnership with nature, because our future and that of all species on this beautiful Earth depends on it.
