By Inger Andersen, Executive Director, United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)
As the world gathers in Nairobi for the seventh session of the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA-7), one truth rises above protocol and diplomacy: humanity is running out of time to secure a livable planet. Yet here, in Kenya—the home of UNEP for 53 years—countries have come with something precious: the determination to choose cooperation over conflict, ambition over delay, and solutions over rhetoric.
UNEA has long been a beacon for multilateral environmental action. From safeguarding the ozone layer to launching global negotiations on plastics, it has shown that when nations work together, even the most complex challenges can be solved. UNEA-7 arrives at another such moment—a moment demanding clarity, courage, and collective resolve.
Why does this matter? Because a stable climate, thriving biodiversity, fertile lands, and an unpolluted planet are not luxuries. They are the bedrock upon which peace, prosperity and economic stability rest. Strip away that foundation, and societies falter, economies weaken, and inequalities deepen.
This week’s leadership dialogues drive the point home: planetary health cannot be separated from human health, from the health of the global economy, or from the stability of our financial systems. A country that degrades its natural capital is ultimately eroding its own economic balance sheet.
UNEP’s new Global Environment Outlook, released just days ago, underscores the stakes. The report is sobering: environmental degradation already claims millions of lives and drains trillions of dollars every year. If the world continues business as usual—burning fossil fuels, stripping natural resources, destroying biodiversity—the costs will skyrocket. Global GDP will fall. Inequality will deepen. Lives will be lost.
But the report also offers hope—and a roadmap. Investing in climate stability, healthy ecosystems, and pollution-free communities is not only morally right; it is economically smart. Such investments can generate massive economic gains, prevent millions of premature deaths, lift hundreds of millions out of poverty and hunger, and deliver greater equity and climate justice.
Environmental action is not a burden. It is a growth strategy—and a justice imperative.
This is what UNEA-7 must deliver: decisions that improve lives everywhere today while safeguarding the rights of future generations. Decisions that show multilateralism can still rise above division and deliver real, measurable results. Decisions that acknowledge that inaction is far more expensive than action.
The Assembly brings together an extraordinary range of voices—governments, Indigenous Peoples, youth, scientists, farmers, businesses, local authorities and civil society. Their shared presence is a reminder that no government, no sector, no community can tackle the environmental crisis alone. The response must be collective—across borders, across institutions, and across the global financial system.
Already, progress is emerging in the resolutions before Member States: safeguarding coral reefs; addressing sargassum seaweed blooms; promoting sustainable solutions through sport; and advancing the sound management of minerals and metals, aided by a new UN taskforce on critical energy transition minerals. These are not symbolic gestures—they are vital steps toward a safer, more sustainable world.
We do not ignore the reality that UNEA-7 unfolds in a fractured geopolitical landscape, under skies darkened by escalating environmental crises. But it is precisely in such times that multilateralism must prove its worth. From the Vienna Convention to the Montreal Protocol, from global chemical agreements to the ongoing plastics negotiations, UNEA has shown that cooperation is not only possible—it works.
So, as nations meet in Nairobi, the world is watching. People everywhere expect signals of determination and solidarity. They expect leaders to protect the most vulnerable—not leave them to the mercy of floods, droughts, wildfires and heatwaves. They expect commitments that match the scale of the crisis. They expect action, not posturing.
History will ask what we chose at UNEA-7: delay or determination; division or unity; incrementalism or transformation.
Let the record show that in Nairobi, the world chose courage. That here, nations lifted their eyes beyond the storms of today and fixed them on a horizon where a stable climate, a healthy environment and a pollution-free future are within reach.
The journey will not be easy, and it will not be short. But postponing change will only make it harder. Every day of delay increases costs, fuels human suffering and narrows the space for solutions.
UNEA-7 must be the moment we refused to look away. The moment we chose to act at the scale these crises demand. The moment we charted a better future for every nation—and every generation yet to come.