World Summit on Sustainable Development
Address at the Foundation of The Healthy Environments for Children Alliance
Your Royal Highness,Honourable Ministers,Excellencies,
I am delighted to welcome everyone to this important gathering on this first day of Spring in South Africa. I am particularly grateful to Her Royal Highness Princess Chulabhorn Mahidol for gracing us with her presence, together with other dignitaries from the Government of Thailand who are accompanying her.
Tonight is the Foundation of a new Alliance - to promote Healthy Environments for Children.
"We are the World: We are the Children" - these were the voices of the Soweto Youth Choir who sang to some of us last night. Yes: the health of today's children determines the destiny of tomorrow's world.
On Friday last week, Klaus Töpfer made the observation that 80% of our concern about the environment is linked to human health. Indeed, people are at the centre of sustainable development, and health and environment are intrinsically linked. Our children are the most vulnerable.
Taken together, unsafe environments, ill-health and under-performing public services make for a deadly combination. They undermine livelihoods, social structures, political stability and the prospects for a sustainable future.
How do unsafe environments make children sick? Human waste and other contaminants find their way into water, into food, onto children's feet and hands. The water they drink is contaminated with germs or chemicals. There may not be enough of it to wash hands and food. The air they breathe is polluted with smoke from cooking or from tobacco use. Children are exposed to toxins in the air and soil. They are bitten by disease-carrying insects, and injured as a result of accidents in the home, on the road or, perhaps, in a nearby pond.
These threats are real and deadly. They cause up to one-third of the global burden of disease. Their importance varies from place to place, between women and men, and among different people.
Our children are the guardians of our common future. We must now make the right choices, and enable them to be able to do the same. We want the places where children live, learn and play to be safe, and not to harm their health. To that end, we are all working hard at this Summit for fairer distribution of safe water and food, for universal sanitation, for clean air, and other basic needs for life.
We need to ensure that these resources are available - and are well used - in each child's environment. Most of us here are already heavily involved in this vital task. We now come together to find ways of being more effective. Doing more, doing it better and, most of all, working together - with each other, and with the children themselves.
What does this mean in practice? We are laying the foundations for an alliance between groups who share a common commitment. This alliance will build on work already underway through efforts of local and central government, civil society and NGOs, academic groups, private entities and the media. It will provide a platform for each of us to intensify what we do.
The alliance will give us the space we need to reach agreement on risks, interventions, strategies and indicators. It will provide the linkages we need to advocate for more action, to share information, to work together on problems and find solutions.
I believe it will inspire us to work harder and be more effective. We all want to do our part to secure better lives for children and achieve the Millennium Development Goals agreed by our world leaders. We all want to secure sustainable development for our planet
We will be working while building and implementing more actions that will lead to healthy environments.
I thank the Government of South Africa for being the first to formally indicate its full commitment to the alliance, and - of course - to fellow UN agencies for working with us to build it up. And we are happy to see the involvement of the "International Society for Doctors and the Environment". I look forward to hearing from many of the governments and organizations here how you could help build this alliance for children; an alliance to shape the future of life.
It is with the greatest pleasure that I now ask her Royal Highness Princess Chulabhorn Mahidol to say a few words.
Your Royal Highness . . . .