Ladies and gentlemen,
I would like to thank New Zero World for inviting me to address you, as well as express my appreciation for their decision to host this event and demonstrate support to the goals of the Moment for Nature High-level General Assembly debate.
Convening the Moment for Nature was a pledge that I made during my campaign for President, through my vision statement. I am pleased to have been able to honor that pledge, and pleased more so with the show of support from Member States and from the wider community, as can be seen here today.
My friends,
Since the start of the 76th session of the General Assembly, we have seen summit and COP-level engagements on biodiversity, on climate change, on the ocean, on desertification, on energy and on food. We also saw action on sustainable transportation, and reflections on our environmental impact over the past 5 decades.
Knowing this, I called for today’s Moment for Nature to focus the attention of the international community on these work streams, and to ensure that we recognized that each of these workstreams is bound to the others, and success on one will depend on success of the others.
Indeed, they are not separate streams, but strands that can only hold the weight we have placed upon them if bound together and woven into a net of hope.
As I mentioned in the General Assembly this morning, my message of hope is not just nice words, it is founded on my belief that, despite the challenges we face, humanity is capable of incredible things.
We have the technologies to tackle climate change.
We have the resources to protect biodiversity.
We have the know-how to ensure the health of our ocean.
We have the means to prevent land degradation and ecosystem loss.
What we lack, all too often, is the political will to see these things through. To follow through on declarations and pledges that will lead to and real action and transformational results.
My friends,
This is where Net Zero World, and so many other stakeholdersare desperately needed.
Achieving our global environmental goals will require mobilizing whole-of-society responses, with all sectors engaged and involved.
Because we are not talking about piecemeal changes anymore. We are not discussing small, siloed projects.
We are talking about society wide transformations; we are talking about a tangential shift that alters the very way we live and exist.
Achieving this means that we overcome the differences of opinion and work together.
It means that we relay the messages – the facts, figures, and actions – to women, men and children across all continents.
Our ambitions cannot be confined to the General Assembly Hall or rooms like it. It must be clear and understandable in the legislatures, in the city halls, in the schools and living rooms around our world.
Too often we fail to reach people because we often talk about existential environment issues in numbers and complicated terms. We forget that at the heart of all of this are people. Their lives. Their futures. Their hopes, dreams and fears.
These are the stories we have to capture and share and ensure that they are understood.
Achieving this will require further simplifying and disseminating key messages at unprecedented scale.
It will require engaging both traditional and new media.
And it will require listening to people and hearing their stories.
On this note, I commend the Net Zero World goal of fostering greater partnerships on environmental action. As the campaign aptly notes: to break cycles of inaction and disengagement, we need to find a new way forward.
I also take this opportunity to express my appreciation for Art 2030, for convening the first Hope Forum during the Venice Biennale this past April. This Forum helped to galvanize the art and culture worlds in support of this Moment for Nature.
Dear friends,
I look forward to hearing all of your thoughts today, which will also inform today’s afternoon discussions in the General Assembly.
Indeed, some of the panelists here will be joining our discussion this afternoon, which will focus specifically on the topics I have just mentioned.
This will be the first time that an entire segment of a high-level meeting is dedicated to the issue of messaging.
I hope it is not the last.
Dear friends,
I will leave you with this: we have to find the right narrative and storytelling means to get these messages across and to spur people to act.
I would like to thank each of you for being here and commend you for your support for environmental action. I am very much looking forward to the discussion and to the outcomes this afternoon.
I thank you
