World's environment ministers gather in Nairobi

More than 100 environment ministers from around the world on Wednesday gathered at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) headquarters in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, to discuss the world's crucial environmental and development issues. The meeting, which is the ministerial segment of the 22nd Session of the UNEP Governing Council, followed a series of informal consultations among regional environmental agencies, UN and civil society representatives, which began at UNEP headquarters on Monday. Addressing the opening session, UNEP Executive Director Klaus Toepfer said meeting would focus mainly on the highlights of the implementation of the outcome of the World Summit on Sustainable Development, held last year in South Africa. The summit culminated in the "Johannesburg Plan of Implementation", a blueprint outlining ways of promoting sustainable use of resources and fighting poverty. "Our meeting is about making this blueprint - this road-map for fighting poverty that respects people and nature - operational," Toepfer said. "We must re-balance globalisation and trade for the benefit of rich and poor alike to reduce poverty." Toepfer told the delegates that Kenya, which in December ushered in a new government with popular support, was the ideal location for the meeting, as it also exemplified the environmental and developmental difficulties faced by much of the developing world. He said preliminary results from a recent survey of one of Kenya's famous but now threatened mountain ranges, pointed to massive deforestation, attributed to charcoal burning. An aerial survey conducted jointly by UNEP and the Kenya Wildlife Service of the Aberdare mountains in central Kenya had also spotted over 14,000 illegal charcoal-burning kilns, he noted. On neighbouring Mt Kenya, Africa's second-highest peak, where illegal logging was threatening indigenous trees, UNEP, with the help of the International Fund for Agricultural Development, would soon support a US $20-million-plus project to improve the area and the rivers flowing from it, Toepfer said. "We appear to have a tale of two peaks. One, the Aberdare range, where unsustainable development is likely to be pushing more and more people into the poverty trap, and the other, Mt Kenya, where we may be finally starting down the road towards sustainable development," he added. The UNEP Governing Council, which is the governing arm of the world environmental body, meets biennially to discuss global environmental trends, as well as UNEP's administrative and budgetary issues. The meeting, also attended by Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade and Kenyan Vice-President Michael Wamalwa, went on to address issues of globalisation and international trade which have created a wide development gap between North and South. Speaking at the conference, Wade, who is also the vice-president of the New Partnership for Africa's Development (Nepad), said the economic gap between Africa and the developed world could only be filled through partnership. He urged African countries to embrace Nepad in order to benefit from globalisation. Nepad, a plan conceived by African leaders, was launched in October 2001 to address the continent's social, economic and political problems. "We know alone we can't develop Africa. We think it is a part of the world, and therefore should be a partner in production, exchange and the creation economic goods," he said. "Now we have a very clear approach on developing Africa, which is different from previous initiatives. Africa has enormous natural and human resources." Wamalwa, for his part, told the delegates that the new Kenyan government, which was inaugurated on 30 December 2002, was committed to the "tenets of good governance, transparency and accountability", and would support the goals of environmental protection and, in particular, arrest the country's alarming rates of deforestation. "We will begin to plant trees all over again. I urge each one of us to ensure that the environment is not destroyed," he stressed. Wamalwa also urged countries to include women - whom he described as the custodians of the environment - in their programmes. "Women interact with the environment on a day-to-day basis. Hence, ways and means of incorporating them in the work programmes of UNEP should be sought, strengthened and enhanced," he said.