Herd of elephants
Roughly 20,000 elephants are killed each year in Africa. UN Environment

Rooted in the decade that gave rise to the global environmental movement

The General Assembly designated 22 April as International Mother Earth Day through a resolution adopted in 2009.

Since then, the United Nations celebrates this observance through the Harmony with Nature initiative, a platform for global sustainable development that celebrates annually an interactive dialogue on International Mother Earth Day.

But the original roots go back to the 1970s when environmental protection was not yet a priority of the national political agendas.

The UN Conference on the Human Environment 1972 in Stockholm marked the beginning of a global awareness of the interdependence between people, other living species and our planet, as well as the establishment of World Environment Day on 5 June and the UN Environment Programme.

Since then, the global movement rippled across the planet, with the UN helping to push the needle on environmental awareness one major conference at a time.

In 1992, Agenda 21, the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, and the Statement of principles for the Sustainable Management of Forests were adopted by more than 178 Governments at the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit, the first major conference in which Sustainable Development was the main issue discussed by member states.

From then on, all efforts to conserve the environment experienced an exponential growth: from the 1994 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the 2002 follow-up to the Earth Summit, held in Johannesburg, to the declaration of 2008 as the International Year of Planet Earth and the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change.

More recently, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 Goals strikes a greener, cleaner, fairer path forward for all; in December 2022, the world came together and agreed on a biodiversity global plan to sets goals and concrete measures to stop and reverse the loss of nature by 2050; and every year, world leaders and civil society gather to take stock of the UNFCC at a conference of the parties (COP), with COP30 approaching this November 2025.