Page 45 - Supplemento 2-2016 (ENG)

Tackling Environmental Crime throUgh standardized Methodologies

A healthy planet with healthy people: human health and well-being
and the 2030 sustainable development agenda

Michele Candotti
Chief of Executive Office, Principal Advisor to the Executive Director UNEP

This event fits in in an incredibly consistent and substantive manner with
what has happened during the year that has been flagged as the ‘year of sustai-
nability’.

2015 has in fact contributed to a sharp increase of awareness and analysis
of what are the practical effects and the desired evolution of sustainability, or the
conversation regarding sustainability internationally. 2015 has indeed contributed
to change the international global narrative about sustainable development, far
more than in previous years, far more than the incremental contributions that
international institutions, governments and stakeholders have contributed so far.

In Nairobi we shall soon host the United Nations Environment
Assembly; it is a follow-up to the Rio Conference we hosted in 2012 and it
comes with two incredible features. First of all, it is the only other assembly
within the United Nations system with universal membership and it is the only
assembly organised as a ‘parliament’ of ministers of environment, where bin-
ding decisions are taken with very interesting inputs to the broad international
arena, including the General Assembly. So, for an audience like this, it is impor-
tant to see how the usual narrative or cynical view that these international fora
and processes are detached from reality is actually challenged and counteracted
by an increasing concern about making a difference in real-life situations even
through these international processes.

The theme we have chosen together with member states for the United
Nations Environment Assembly is “healthy environment, healthy people and a
healthy planet, leading to people’s well-being”. It is a very interesting theme
because, of course, as an environmental programme, we have been questioned
about our legitimacy in promoting such a theme, linking the health and well-
being of populations to environmental issues; and yet all the narrative provided
so far during 2015 by three major events that marked the sustainable develop-

43