Latest news and updates on World Environment Day 2025
Latest news and updates on World Environment Day 2025
 
On World Environment Day 2025, Tamil Nadu Forest Department, India, collaborated with Aundipatti Government Boys Higher Secondary School to raise awareness about the urgent need to combat plastic pollution. A series of activities, including a painting competition, essay writing competition, and quiz competition were organized. Hundreds of students participated, and the event culminated in a symbolic formation of the words "BEAT PLASTIC POLLUTION" on the school grounds.
From Mexico to India, political leaders across the globe are voicing their support for World Environment Day. Many emphasized the importance of ending plastic pollution.
It’s been a busy day here at the live feed, with events and announcements pouring in from across the globe. To quickly catch up on what’s happened, check out our official World Environment Day press release. While the celebrations are over in many places, in some they’re just beginning. So, stay tuned here for the latest.
Former UNEP Champion of the Earth Constantino Aucca Chutas is urging everyone, everywhere to do their part to reduce plastic pollution. “Let’s go. We can do it,” he said in a video posted to YouTube. Chutas is the founder of two conservation groups that have planted millions of trees and revived ecosystems across South America’s Andes mountain range.
The natural world, in the way it reuses everything and wastes nothing, has a lot to teach humanity about how to end the plastic pollution crisis. That’s the message from UNEP’s Goodwill Ambassadors, a group of celebrities from around the world passionate about the environment.
“Today, the concept of circularity is no longer theoretical—it’s attracting investment from major brands,” said Elisa Tonda, Chief of UNEP’s Resources and Markets Branch, writing in The Telegraph. In an op-ed on World Environment Day, she highlighted the global shift on plastic pollution, moving from simply producing large amounts of plastic to designing out plastic waste altogether.
With the next round of negotiations for a global treaty to end plastic pollution scheduled for August, Tonda urged business leaders to align with this policy shift by actively engaging in solutions, emphasizing that doing so is a win for business, nature, and public health.
On World Environment Day, the World Economic Forum is highlighting eight innovative solutions exploring ways to tackle the plastic pollution crisis across the plastics lifecycle.
For more than 50 years Prezwalksi’s horses have been extinct in the wild, surviving only because of zoo breeding programmes. Yesterday, that changed. Six of the equines were released onto the plains of Kazakhstan, their old home. The horses had spent the last year at a specially equipped reintroduction center, where they learned to survive on the steppe. Conservationists say their release into the wild is a landmark moment in an ambitious effort to restore Kazakhstan’s iconic grasslands.
On stage at the Global Fashion Summit in Copenhagen, Jessika Roswall, the EU’s Commissioner for Environment, Water Resilience and a Competitive Circular Economy, wished players from the global fashion and textile sector a happy World Environment Day. The message came amid a talk exploring the work the EU is doing to advance a circular economy for textiles and a call to industry to bolster efforts to help deliver it.
Overall, almost 70 per cent of clothing and household textiles on the European market are made from synthetic fibers, according to the European Environment Agency.
In a video posted to Instagram, investor and philanthropist Roberta Annan urged her 16 million followers to draw lessons from nature when it comes to how they use plastic.
“We need to reuse more, [eliminate] what we don’t need [and] support materials that return to the earth,” said Annan, UNEP’s Advocate for Sustainable Fashion.