World Environment Day

Since 1973 the United Nations Environment Programme leads World Environment Day. It puts a global spotlight on the pressing environmental challenges of our times. This UN international day has become the largest global platform for environmental outreach, with millions of people from across the world engaging to protect the planet.

World Environment Day is a global platform for inspiring positive change. People from more than 150 countries participate in this United Nations international day, which celebrates environmental action and the power of governments, businesses and individuals to create a more sustainable world.

Public transport is the most climate-friendly way of traveling besides walking and cycling. For citizens’ daily mobility, a modal shift to collective public transport and active mobility is needed. Achieving this, brings benefits to the planet and every person living on it.

What do the deepest point in the ocean, the Mariana trench, and the highest mountain peak in the world, Mt. Everest, have in common?

Despite being among the planet’s most remote and inaccessible environments, they both contain tiny pieces of plastic from human activities miles away. Plastics are the largest, most harmful and persistent fraction of marine litter, accounting for at least 85 per cent of total marine waste.

World Environment Day 2023 is a reminder that everyone’s actions on plastic pollution matter. The steps governments and businesses are taking to tackle plastic pollution are the consequence of this action.

How the public transport sector supports World Environment Day 2023:

• Display UITP branded videos and posters on your networks.
• Add your environmental activity or event on the World Environment Day map and receive a registration card.
• From 17 May, find solutions in the Beat Plastic Pollution Practical Guide.
• Join the #BeatPlasticPollution movement on social media using the tags #BeatPlasticPollution #WorldEnvironmentDay.

UITP and UNEP have worked together to promote public transport as a solution to environmental challenges since 2019.

Under the theme ‘Beat Air Pollution‘, in 2019 we showed how public transport improves air quality. It produces far fewer quanitities of air pollutant per passenger kilometre than individual motorised mobility.

One year later, in 2020 UITP teamed up with UNEP to deliver a joint statement on the necessity for cities to ‘Build Back Better‘ with more public transport. After the shock of the onset of COVID-19 at the start of the year, World Environment Day offered a clear opportunity to encourage governments to build happier, healthier cities.

Check out our news article on the statement!

2021 put the spotlight on ‘Generation Restoration‘, calling for urgent action to revive our damaged ecosystems. From parks and forests to wetlands and coasts, we all depend on healthy ecosystems for our survival.

Today is #WorldEnvironmentDay!

We have once again teamed up with @UNEP to produce a video showing the ways our sector & members contribute towards reviving our ecosystems 🌿

Watch the video below! 🎥👇

Read more here 👉 https://t.co/7aeWYdbmlq

Join #GenerationRestoration! pic.twitter.com/1LfedNfGaH

— UITP (@UITPnews) June 5, 2021

And in 2022 World Environment Day reminded us that we only have ‘Only One Earth‘. Public transport is much needed to go from harming our planet, to healing it.