UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen met with Korean Environment Minister Kim Wansup on Wednesday.

“Very grateful for Korean leadership in tackling plastic pollution and hosting World Environment Day,” she said in a post on the social media platform Bluesky. 

The Korean province of Jeju, in the midst of an ambitious effort to end plastic pollution, will be the site of official celebrations on 5 June. 

With the calendar now flipped to 5 June in many parts of Asia and the Pacific, World Environment Day is upon us. The next 36 hours will see a bevy of celebrations across the globe, including an official ceremony in The Republic of Korea, this year’s World Environment Day host. You can livestream the extravaganza here. Also, check out our interactive map for a list of 2,000-plus other events from around the world. There’s a solid chance something is happening in your neck of the woods. 

While plastic pollution remains a daunting problem, countries have made strides in addressing it in recent years, said UNEP Deputy Executive Director Elizabeth Maruma Mrema on the eve of World Environment Day. 

“This is a problem we can fix and we are beginning to see the solutions emerge,” said Mrema during a roundtable discussion at UNEP headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya. 

During the session Kang Hyung-shik, Ambassador of the Republic of Korea to Kenya, described how his country, which is hosting World Environment Day, is striving to end plastic pollution. 

The event also featured a question-and-answer session with several UNEP staff, including Sheila Aggarwal-Khan, Director of the Industry and Economy Division, Doreen Robinson, Deputy Director of the Ecosystems Division, and Jyoti Mathur-Filipp, Executive Secretary of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution. 

The "Sea Women" of Jeju Island live in harmony with the ocean. These free divers are more than cultural icons; they are guardians of the sea, and they report that what once was a clear ocean floor is now littered with waste.   

Ahead of #WorldEnvironmentDay, UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen met Haenyeo diver Jang Young-mi in Jeju to learn about their efforts. 

Ahead of World Environment Day, the United Nations Environment Programme, in partnership with the Global Partnership on Plastic Pollution and Marine Litter, launched the Global Plastics Hub. 

The hub, which has been funded by the governments of Japan, Norway and the United States of America, is designed to be a one-stop shop where government officials— and others— can track 80 plastic-pollution-related indicators. The portal is among the most comprehensive platforms of its kind in the world. In-depth country dashboards track how much plastic countries trade, how they manage plastic waste and what policies they have to counter plastic pollution. It’s designed to help countries make more informed decisions about how to address plastic pollution.   

Read the feature story 

Actor and environmentalist Alex Rendell, an avid diver, threw his support today behind the global effort to halt plastic pollution, nearly 11 million tonnes of which ends up in the ocean annually. 

“This World Environment Day on 5 June is a clarion call to end marine pollution, to keep it out of our waters and reefs, as well as our lands, air and bodies,” said Rendell, a UNEP Goodwill Ambassador, in an Instagram post. 

See the post here