Context

• Fourth UN Environment Assembly was held in Nairobi, represented by thousands of delegates, business leaders and campaigners.
• Assembly will provide the framework for shifting our global economic systems towards more sustainable trajectories that tackle our environmental challenges and bring us closer to the ‘future we want’.

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• The theme of the fourth Assembly was ‘Innovative Solutions to Environmental Challenges and Sustainable Consumption and Production”.
• Major focus was to curb plastic waste, a source of long-term pollution and worsening contamination of the ocean’s food chain.
• The 2019 Assembly will aim to build the policies, partnerships and a culture of innovation that will support the solutions and systemic change needed for sustainability to thrive.
• Areas of focus:

1. Tackling the environmental challenges related to poverty and natural resources management, including sustainable food systems, food security and halting biodiversity loss;
2. Introducing life-cycle approaches to resource efficiency, energy, chemicals and waste management;
3. Ensuring sustainable business development at a time of rapid technological change.

What is UN Environment Assembly?

• It is the world’s highest-level decision-making body on the environment.
• It addresses the critical environmental challenges facing the world today.
• Understanding these challenges and preserving and rehabilitating our environment is at the heart of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
• It meets biennially to set priorities for global environmental policies and develop international environmental law.
• Through its resolutions and calls to action, the Assembly provides leadership and catalyses intergovernmental action on the environment.
• Decision-making requires broad participation, which is why the Assembly provides an opportunity for all peoples to help design solutions for our planet’s health.

How did it come into being?

• The UN Environment Assembly was created in June 2012, when world leaders called for UN Environment to be strengthened and upgraded during the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, also referred to as RIO+20.
• It embodies a new era in which the environment is at the centre of the international community’s focus and is given the same level of prominence as issues such as peace, poverty, health and security.
• The establishment of the Assembly was the culmination of decades of international efforts, initiated at the UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972 and aimed at creating a coherent system of international environmental governance.

Earlier Sessions:

• The first and second sessions tackled and adopted resolutions on major issues of illegal trade in wildlife, air quality, environmental rule of law, financing the Green Economy and the Sustainable Development Goals.
• It also aimed at “delivering on the environmental dimension of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”.
• The Third Environment Assembly took place in Nairobi, in December 2017 Assembly under the overarching theme “Towards a pollution-free planet”.