Remarks by Siddharth Chatterjee, UN Resident Coordinator in China (pre-recorded)
A link to a recording of these remarks can be found on YouTube and Tencent Video
Ladies and Gentlemen,
I thank the Paulson Institute and Tsinghua University for the invitation to address this year’s launch event of the Paulson Prize for Sustainability.
My congratulations to the Paulson Prize on its 10th anniversary.
The effects of our impacts on the environment are expanding and becoming increasingly difficult to reverse. Global CO2 emissions remain at unsustainable levels, and we are experiencing extreme weather events with increasing frequency and severity. At the same time, we are witnessing alarming rates of biodiversity loss and are beginning to understand the magnitude of the associated risks to our economy, health and prosperity.
Global-level agreements, including the Paris Agreement under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, demonstrate that the international community is committed to addressing these challenges.
The United Nations Secretary-General, Mr António Guterres, said, “Climate action is the 21stcentury’s greatest opportunity to drive forward all Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). A clean, healthy and sustainable environment is a right we must make real for all.”
However, with every year that passes, the urgency grows. If we are to meet our climate and biodiversity targets, we must expand the scope and scale of our actions beyond incremental change towards identifying potential game changers and innovators that put us on a path to a stable climate and a nature-positive economy, improving water, food, energy, social and ecological security.
Our ability to achieve the SDGs will depend on those innovations. It will require a coordinated alignment of technology, policy and markets to spur more innovation, steer private sector investment, and develop and deploy solutions at scale and beyond borders.
In the past three years, I have had the opportunity to witness the ambition, progress and leadership of China on environmental protection. While much more remains to be done, given China’s scale, the innovations and solutions developed here can benefit the rest of the world.
That is why the Paulson Prize is important. By identifying replicable, transformative innovations in sustainability from China, the Paulson Prize is shining a light on the solutions that can help us to achieve our goals on climate change and biodiversity.
This is vital work, and I know that many in the UN will be watching closely to learn from the solutions uncovered by the Paulson Prize in 2023 and beyond.