Stopping progress on plastic pollution in the COP21 climate change treaty and recommending a formal body for scientific assessment of environmental impacts on ecosystems
“It’s clear the present process cannot overcome the coordinated opposition of those who block consensus and progress at every turn,” Carroll Muffett, president of the Center for International Environmental Law, said in a statement.
Fossil fuel producers are allowed to shape the negotiations by governments, according to a statement by the head of the treaty delegation.
An ExxonMobil spokesperson said in a statement in early November that the company is “launching real solutions to address plastic waste and improve recycling rates.” The company has previously said the problem of plastic waste can be solved without cutting how much plastic society uses.
The Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA) said in a press release that the negotiations have failed to deliver on their promise. The statement added: “A small group of mostly oil and plastic-producing countries halted progress toward an internationally binding legal document.”
“The results this week are no accident,” David Azoulay, program director for environmental health at the Center for International Environmental Law, said in a statement. If Member States do not confront and address the fundamental reality of industry influence in this process, progress on plastics will be impossible.
Lobbyists are also present at the talks. The last round of talks that ended in June saw a jump in the number of lobbyists from the fossil fuel and chemical industries.
Representatives from around 150 countries met for talks last week in Nairobi. Most of them “worked to find commonalities among diverse global perspectives, but the entire process was continually delayed by a small number of Member states prioritizing plastic and profit before the planet,” Erin Simon, head of plastic waste and business at the World Wildlife Fund, said in a statement. On Sunday, the talks came to an end.
Most countries seem to support “strong, robust terms” for an agreement, Simon told NPR on Sunday. But there are “a handful of really lower ambition countries calling for a looser voluntary agreement.”
A group of scientists sent a letter to the treaty on November 11, requesting a formal process for integrating science into it. It also asks for the creation of a scientific body, similar to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that would provide negotiators and policymakers with regular updates on the scientific evidence surrounding plastic pollution. This body would, for example, assess new research to help update targets and the list of chemicals of concern. “We have clearly called for delegates to establish a credible and transparent science engagement process for the INC,” says Margaret Spring, chief conservation and science officer at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California, who is lead author of the letter.
The model shows that we should be ambitious, says the model’s author. “A low-ambition treaty would be worse than no treaty at all,” he adds, “because then we are pretending we are solving the problem.”
The process was kick-started in March 2022, when 175 nations voted to create a legally binding international agreement aimed at plastic pollution — a problem that has reached epic proportions since the 1950s. Humanity now manufactures more than 450 million tonnes of plastic per year, and about 22% of plastic waste is ‘mismanaged’: dumped or burnt in open areas rather than being placed in sealed landfill, incinerated or recycled. According to one estimate, the world is on track to accumulate roughly 12 billion tonnes of plastic waste in landfill and the natural environment by 20501.
Researchers continue to tally the impacts of this litter: plastic has formed islands in the ocean, been incorporated into reefs on the sea floor and even chemically bonded to rocks in river beds. They are also documenting a large number of environmental and health effects from plastic chemicals and microparticles in the air, at sea and on land2. Plastic has found its way into food, blood and breast milk with unclear impacts.
Progress on plastic pollution at the next UN Environment Programme session: Observations and comments on the results from the Nairobi/Nairobi plastic pollution meeting
The final draft of the treaty was not narrowed down during last week’s meeting, despite the fact that the second and third sessions were the halfway point of the process. The next session will be in Ottawa in April.
But researchers told Nature that progress was disappointing. “We now only have about a year left in this process and are nowhere near where we need to be,” says Douglas McCauley, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who has modelled plastic pollution.
Scientists rallied last week to support delegates working on a global treaty to eliminate plastic pollution at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) headquarters in Nairobi.