Message by UNDP Administrator Achim Steiner for World Wildlife Day 2025

Dear Colleagues and Friends,

On behalf of the United Nations Development Programme, UNDP, it is a privilege to join our close partner, CITES, to mark World Wildlife Day 2025.

It highlights the intrinsic link between protecting wildlife and securing our collective futures.

To forget this truth is to lose sight of one of humanity’s most fundamental pillars of well-being.

At the core of these efforts lies wildlife conservation, supported by the innovative financing needed to sustain it.

Together with our many partners, UNDP continues to assist countries and communities to harness new financial solutions to protect wildlife and their habitats.

For instance, consider the Tiger Landscape Investment Fund, which channels resources to protect tiger habitats in countries such as Malaysia while at the same time, benefiting local communities.

Or look to the Rhino Bond, a pioneering initiative tying investment returns to tangible conservation outcomes such as growing endangered black rhino populations in South Africa.

We need a system-wide transformation to fully integrate nature into global, national, and local decision-making.

UNDP’s Nature Pledge drives this vision by supporting over 140 countries today to put the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework into action. 

It encompasses groundbreaking efforts, such as UNDP’s Biodiversity Finance Initiative, which has catalyzed 1.5 billion dollars in new biodiversity financing to date.

On World Wildlife Day, I extend my deepest gratitude to our colleagues and friends and communities all over the world for their tireless dedication to protecting our natural world.

The survival of wildlife and the wild spaces they inhabit are indeed the vital markers of a thriving world – and a flourishing future for all life on Earth.  

Thank you.