NAIROBI, Feb. 28 (Xinhua) -- The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has designated February 28 this year as the Day of Multilateral Environmental Agreements. At the events of the sixth session of the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA) in Nairobi, Kenya, the United Nations** and other parties called on all sectors to practice multilateralism and jointly address the environmental crisis.
The MEA Day was established by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in advance of the current session to convey the importance of multilateralism. According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) are international agreements to address the most pressing environmental issues of global or regional concern, and are important tools for international environmental governance and international environmental law.
At the High-level Dialogue held on the same day, UN Under-Secretary-General and Deputy Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Xu Haoliang said that UNDP is supporting more than 100 countries and regions around the world to address issues such as biodiversity loss and climate change as part of environmental multilateralism.
Colombia's Minister of Environment and Sustainable Development, Susana Mohammed, said Colombia will host the 16th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP16) this year. Different sectors in countries and regions around the world have established cooperation frameworks to seek a new future for biodiversity, an action that could have a transformative impact on subsequent multilateral environmental cooperation. She said that she hoped that the targets of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework could be translated into international consultations and global actions, and that a stable mechanism would be established to absorb the views of all parties and find practical ways to cooperate.
No one is unaffected when it comes to environmental issues. African countries are the least able to cope with climate change and are most in dire need of multilateral cooperation to help us achieve sustainable development. Alios Prokova, a delegate from Tanzania's Maasai tribe, told reporters at the meeting that the drought has degraded the grasslands on which local nomads depend, forcing people to migrate in search of water. Prokova called on countries and organizations around the world to practice multilateralism and help impoverished areas cope with climate change through financial assistance and environmental education.
The five-day sixth session of the United Nations Environment Assembly opened in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, on the 26th, with more than 4,000 representatives from various countries attending to discuss global environmental governance under the framework of multilateralism. (Participating reporter: Liu Wanqing).