Dear colleagues and friends, on behalf of the United Nations Development Programme, it is a privilege to join our close partner CITES to mark World Wildlife Day 2024, which focuses on the power of digital innovation to advance wildlife conservation.
Our natural world is interconnected, intertwined and integral to human life. In this world, we co-habit the connection between our species and wildlife has ever become frayed, now, sometimes almost hanging by a thread. Yet the slowdown in human activity during the COVID 19 pandemic or anthropause demonstrates the potential for nature to rebound quickly.
Alongside our many partners. UNDP is supporting countries and communities to leverage the immense power of digital technologies and innovation to protect and revive our natural world while ensuring that communities continue to benefit also from this new technology. For instance, look to Kazakhstan, where digital technologies and solar power enabled the monitoring of millions of acres of natural reserves, helping to protect a range of species, including the Snow Leopard, or consider Indonesia, where UNDP has been supporting a cyber patrol team that plays a vital role in monitoring the protected wildlife trade in social media and online marketplaces.
Yet, we must ask what comes next, which involves embracing the concept of foresight and scaling innovation. As a partner of the Digital Public Goods Alliance, we are seeing the growth of open source tools that can contribute to wildlife conservation while advancing the global goals. To take just one example, consider the Zamba tool. It uses artificial intelligence to automatically identify the species seen in camera trap videos from sites in Central Africa, freeing up more time for humans to focus on interpreting the content and using the results. A growing number of such open source digital innovations are being made available on the Digital Public Goods Registry.
Or consider the potential of digitally enabled conservation based payments to help ensure the vital finances flow directly to local communities and indigenous peoples. These digital tools and systems must be complemented by a wider system shift. Through our nature pledge UNDP is supporting now over 140 countries to put the historic Kunming Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework into action. That includes changing narratives and behaviors and placing nature at the heart also of development and across sectors including governance, justice, economics, finance, health, and conservation.
Dear colleagues and friends we can only achieve transformational change through partnerships. In the spirit, I would like to thank our friends and colleagues at CITES for their exceptional efforts, and long standing cooperation. As we mark World Wildlife Day, recalibrating the interaction between our own species and wildlife isn't only an ecological imperative, but a profound acknowledgement of our responsibility as stewards of our planet's flora and fauna. That involves using the innate power of digital technologies to energize a new connection between humanity and our natural world, and indeed, also amongst all of us.
Thank you