Brussels World Environment Day 2022

Brussels, 7 June 2022-  Brussels celebrated World Environment Day on Sunday 5 June with events organised around the city, from morning to midnight. 

With nature in emergency mode, the 2022 World Environment Day global campaign #OnlyOneEarth called for transformative changes to policies and individual consumption choices to be cleaner, greener, and more sustainable while living in harmony with nature. We have Only One Earth, and time is running out. Everyone’s action counts.  

This message resonated throughout the celebrations in Brussels on 5 June, which started with the Fête de l’Environnement at Tour and Taxis by Bruxelles Environnement, an official UN Environment Programme (UNEP) World Environment Day partner. Later, in the evening, a reception was followed by the illumination of the Brussels City Hall in green, organized by the City of Brussels together with UNEP at the historical Grand Place in the heart of Brussels. All day, the Brussels public transport operator encouraged people to transit by public transport via digital World Environment Day posters in metro stations across the city.  

Festival for the Environment  

Despite heavy rainfalls, more than a thousand visitors came to la Fête de l'Environnement, organised by Bruxelles Environnement, the Environment Ministry of the Brussels Capital Region. This major family friendly festival was back for the first time since the beginning of the COVID pandemic and took place in a newly developed parc in the Tour & Taxis area of Brussels.  

At this all-day free festival filled with interactive games, good food, musical performances, and activities for the entire family. Visitors were triggered to learn more about nature and how to live sustainably in harmony with nature in an urban setting.  

The festival created an immersive experience to come together in nature and partake in sustainable activities and practices to learn how to reduce their ecological footprint by making sustainable consumer choices. Many information tents and workshops were organized throughout the day, multiple local associations and entrepreneurs showcased their work around beekeeping, urban gardening, along with energy smart housing, recycling, repair activities and much more. 

The EU Ecolabel Showroom on Wheels was one such booth, with a mini exhibition providing a sample of some of the best EU Ecolabel products available to EU consumers today. The displayed items included, dish washer and cleaning products, sustainably produced shoes and paint. The bike with caravan was inaugurated just days before, at the beginning of EU Green Week (30 May-5 June), the European Commission’s annual week of Europe wide events raising awareness on environmental policy in the EU. World Environment Day 2022 coincided with the last day of this year’s edition.

 The ecolabel bike was a perfect reflection of this year’s EU Green Week focus on the European Green Deal - the EU’s sustainable and transformative growth strategy for a resource-efficient and climate-neutral Europe by 2050 – and how to make it real. The EU ecolabel bike will be making a tour across Europe throughout the year. 

World Environment Day billboards on Brussels Public Transport network 

When transiting across Brussels by public transport on 5 June, one could not miss out on the fact that it was the World Environment Day! All day long, the STIB-MIVB, the public transport company in Brussels, promoted the World Environment Day through a digital poster campaign in  Metro stations. Passengers were thanked for choosing to take public transport, thereby helping to improve air quality in Brussels.

Evening programme - City of Brussels Celebrations 

In the evening, the City of Brussels hosted a reception in collaboration with UNEP, to mark the Day and reflect on its

theme. Over 40 representatives from the UN offices in Brussels, EU institutions, diplomatic community, Belgian government and civil society, attended the celebration inside the City Hall. This event brought speakers from the City, Belgian Federal government, European Commission and UNEP making introductory remarks, followed by an inspirational presentation of a successful local green up initiative showcase.  

The event was opened by Mr Benoit Hellings, First Alderman of the City of Brussels in charge of climate and sport, and the host of the event. In his speech he reiterated that the City of Brussels is in a climate emergency mode and very much supports the Only One Earth campaign of the United Nations. Through its climate policy, Brussels has committed to a series of measures to address climate change, which include local projects in support of circular economy, like the StaLem project presented at the event (see below). 

The sense of urgency for effective action was shared by Ms Zakia Khattabi, Belgian Federal Minister of the Climate, the Environment, Sustainable Development, and the Green Deal, who had just returned from the Stockholm+50 meeting. “The message is clear, we should do more, much more, in order to address the various global challenges, we are facing today in a timely, effective and efficient manner,” the Minister said, adding that “for this, we have to tackle them simultaneously as we won’t have the time and the resources to do so separately.”  

Ms Veronica Manfredi, Director for Zero Pollution and Green Cities at the European Commission, spoke out her enthusiasm for the progress she has witnessed of the green transformation of Brussels over the years, and the impressive ideas and startups developed across the city which she learnt about at the Fête de l’Environnement earlier in the day. She noted that this drive by so many initiatives to “try to change the world as we speak” was also showcased during the EU Green Week which ended Sunday 5 June and focused on making the EU Green Deal real. The European Commission is at the centre of rich policies to push for more sustainable consumption and production, she pointed out. This requires a lot of work, “but unless it is not done now, it will be too late,” she warned, adding that “if we continue the way we are, we would need 3 planets by 2050.” She welcomed the transformative action being pursued at the local, regional, national and transnational levels and assured that the European Commission, through the EU Green Deal, is there to assist, and “help us all to transform, to be the change we want to see, starting with ourselves.” 

As a last introductory speaker, Ms Veronika Hunt Safrankova, Head of UNEP Brussels Office, thanked Mr Benoit Hellings and the City of Brussels for hosting with UNEP the reception and illuminating the Brussels City Hall as in previous year, as a symbolic gesture in support of the World Environment Day. She recalled the historical momentum, 50 years after 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, under the same motto ‘Only One Earth’. This message holds true still now, when the Earth is facing the triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity and nature loss, and pollution. She added that this year also falls within the Decade of Action to meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), hence the SDG cubes on display at the event, and that in coming months, critical decisions will be taken to address climate change and biodiversity loss at several Conferences of Parties (COPs) of multilateral environmental agreements.

“The planetary crises are driven by our unsustainable consumption and production,” Ms Hunt Safrankova said. The ‘Only One Earth’ campaign calls for transformative action on a global scale while encouraging everyone, everywhere to live and act sustainably. The emphasis is on environmental action, she explained. In this respect, cities are very important, she noted. “55 percent of world population lives in cities, therefore environmental action starts there,“ adding that during the World Environment Day we are calling on all actors to scale up environmental action and share their best practices. To show how transformative change can be achieved in practice, UNEP and the City of Brussels therefore invited the initiators of the StaLem project to make a presentation on their project in a Brussels neighbourhood.  

Ms Layachi, from the StaLem project, presented the outcomes of a first pilot project of this successful Brussels association. She explained that the association collects waste from merchants in the Stalingrad-Lemonnier district by bicycle, and shares the management of this waste in the ‘Centre logistique urbain’ which has been made available to it by the City. Once at the center, the waste is sorted in view of recuperating as much as possible. For example, food that can still be consumed is redistributed to restaurants in the neighborhood. Other examples are milk carton bottles, that are dissembled and parts are then resold and recycled, or coffee grain leftovers that are given a new life as ground for growing mushrooms. Through these activities the StaLem project is bringing in practice the circular economy.  

Ms Layachi noted that their first pilot project has supported the neighbourhood, helping make it cleaner. For instance, so far, they have helped avoid 35 000 bags of waste ending on the streetsides. The project has empowered people in the area to find solutions to their local problems, she told the audience. StaLem has helped change the minds of local shop owners, now understanding that “waste means resources,” and that they are actually earning from it.  As a result of the project, local shop owners have now understood that their own ways of doing things has an environmental impact and have acquired a sense of responsibility for this. While in the beginning the shop-owners were part of the problem, they have now become part of the solution, Ms Layachi.

StaLem was seen as ‘leading the way’ in a community-based waste valorization project, and deserves replication by others. The powerful example of local bottom-up action in support of the environment, energized the participants of the event, who joined Mr Hellings at the end, along with Minister Khattabi, Ms Manfredi, Ms Hunt Safrankova and Ms Layachi and colleagues, onto the Grand Place, to watch the Brussels City Hall as it illuminated in green. 

That evening, between 9:30 pm and midnight, thousands of spectators  gathered on the Grand-Place to admire the City Hall as it illuminated in green to mark World Environment Day.