The Diplomat
From today until September 24, the first Ibero-American Environmental Week will be held, a space for cooperation and dialogue that aims to advance the Ibero-American Environmental Agenda agreed during the XXVII Ibero-American Summit of Heads of State and Government, which took place in Andorra in April this year.
Through 30 virtual meetings with top-level protagonists, the objective of the Week, organized by the Ibero-American General Secretariat (SEGIB), the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID) and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), is to serve as “a space for technical reflection on the urgent challenges facing the region in areas such as water, energy, health and environment, climate crisis and biodiversity loss,” according to the organizers in a press release.
The meeting, which will precede two United Nations conferences on climate change and biodiversity, aims to draw attention to the situation in Ibero-America, a region highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change and greatly affected by the loss of biodiversity in terrestrial and marine ecosystems. It is also part of the United Nations Decade of Ecosystem Restoration for the benefit of people and nature.
Some one hundred representatives of national and local governments, institutions, foundations and companies will participate in the sessions, including the Third Vice President and Minister for Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge of the Government of Spain, Teresa Ribera; the Vice President of the Dominican Republic, Raquel Peña; the Minister of the Environment and Natural Resources of that country, Orlando Jorge Mera; the Minister of the Environment of Chile, Carolina Schmidt; Portugal’s Secretary of State for the Environment, Ministry of the Environment and Energy Transition, Inês Dos Santos Costa; UNEP’s Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean, Jaqueline Álvarez; the Mayor of Bogotá and Vice President of the Ibero-American Center for Urban Strategic Development (CIDEU), Claudia López; the Mayor of Seville and President of the Spanish Network of Cities for Climate, Juan Espadas; and the CEO of the Chilean waste recycling company Triciclos, Verónica de la Cerda.
“All the discussions will contribute to formulating the environmental dimension of Ibero-American Cooperation towards the XXVIII Ibero-American Summit of Heads of State, which will be hosted by the Dominican Republic in 2022 under the slogan Together for a fair and sustainable Ibero-America“, the organizers specified. The Ibero-American Environmental Week will coincide precisely with the 30th anniversary of the Ibero-American Summits.
During the first meeting of environment ministers of the Ibero-American Community, organized in September 2020 in Andorra, the 22 Ibero-American countries agreed to give a decisive boost to the environmental agenda, after stressing that the fight against climate change and the loss of biodiversity are pillars of sustainable development alongside the economic and social dimensions.
