Ninety-five countries across continents have called for the adoption of an “ambitious” UN pact to tackle plastic pollution that includes targets to reduce plastic production – a growing source of planet-heating emissions.
The show of unity comes two months before governments are due to restart formal negotiations on a treaty in Geneva, Switzerland, after they dramatically failed to reach agreement at what was supposed to be the last round of talks late last year.
In Busan, South Korea, a handful of oil and gas-producing states – vocally led by Saudi Arabia, Russia and Iran – blocked a push to include caps on the production of new plastic, arguing the pact should be limited to addressing consumption and recycling.
“This declaration sends a clear and strong message: we will not give up,” Agnes Pannier-Runacher, France’s minister of ecological transition, said on Tuesday at the launch of the declaration on the sidelines of the UN Ocean Conference in Nice, France.
“We cannot lie to them [our citizens] and to ourselves by saying that waste management and recycling will be enough to solve the problem. It’s a lie,” she added.
Lifeline for fossil fuel industry
Signatories to the declaration include European countries, Australia, Canada, Colombia and Mexico, as well as many African and Pacific island nations. No major plastic producers – such as China, the US, Saudi Arabia, India and South Korea – have endorsed the call.
Nearly all plastics are derived from oil and gas and, as the world gradually starts to wean itself off fossil fuels for energy, countries and companies that profit from carbon-based fuels view an expected ramp-up in plastic production as a lifeline for their industry.
The $712-billion plastics industry is set to at least double by 2050, which would see plastic production account for nearly a third of the remaining global carbon budget for staying below 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming.
In the Nice declaration, countries are calling for the adoption of a “global target” to reduce the production and consumption of the building block of plastic items to “sustainable levels”. The goal would be regularly adjusted to raise ambition and countries would be required to report on their production, imports and exports of primary plastic polymers, it added.
Failure of Busan talks exposes fossil fuel barrier to UN plastics pact
“A treaty that does not reduce plastic production will be empty paper,” said Lena Estrada, Colombia’s minister of environment, who called the declaration “an act of courage”.
The statement also calls for a binding obligation to phase out “the most problematic plastic products and chemicals” used in the manufacturing process and for “new and additional finance” that would support the implementation of the treaty.
Estrada called on opposing countries to act in good faith. “It’s not too late to stand with us,” she added.
Ambitious treaty or no treaty?
Alicia Barcena, Mexico’s minister for the environment and natural resources, said the Geneva talks in August will “mark a turning point” in the hard-fought negotiations that began over three years ago.
But she acknowledged that a treaty might not be concluded there as deep divisions remain. “We’re going to go to Geneva with the intention of getting as much as we can,” Barcena told journalists in Nice. “That doesn’t mean that the treaty might be finalised there. It depends if we want a mediocre or… an ambitious one.”
If the negotiations prove unsuccessful once again, governments could weigh up other options. Dennis Clare, a legal advisor for the Pacific Island state of Micronesia at the talks, told Climate Home that if the so-called ‘high-ambition’ group of countries cannot get an agreement through the current UN process, they can “bypass the blockers and do a deal elsewhere”.
While longstanding fault lines persist, it is unclear what position the United States will take in the next round of talks.
With Joe Biden at the helm, it offered lukewarm support for production caps. The new administration has not yet indicated its plans for the negotiations or whether it will even show up. But President Donald Trump strongly supports the fossil fuel industry and has already taken token measures to undo Biden’s efforts to cut plastic use, such as ending efforts to replace plastic straws with paper ones.
Speaking at Tuesday’s press conference, a French official said they had held informal discussions with the US. “Clearly there are some changes but we don’t know exactly what will happen,” she added.
The post Over half of countries push for plastic production cuts in new UN pact appeared first on Climate Home News.
Over half of countries push for plastic production cuts in new UN pact
Next week, diplomats from around the world will descend on Yerevan, Armenia, to negotiate a series of decisions under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
Between 19 and 30 October, 196 parties will gather to hammer out the precise wording of the dozens of legal texts that make up the decisions under the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the CBD.
This year’s summit is particularly significant, as it marks the halfway point between the agreement of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the deadline for achieving its targets.
The CBD has found that countries are currently not on track to meet 22 out of the framework’s 23 targets.
During the fortnight, delegates will also be negotiating decisions relating to the two supplemental protocols to the CBD: the Cartagena Protocol, which covers biosafety; and the Nagoya Protocol, which covers access and benefit-sharing for the use of genetic resources.
(The Cartagena and Nagoya Protocols, which are each governed by a “meeting of the parties”, or “MOP”, have fewer parties than the CBD as a whole, with 173 and 141, respectively.)
Carbon Brief is tracking the progress of countries towards consensus on dozens of negotiating texts using the interactive table below.
The tracker includes texts from the COP, as well as the MOPs for the Cartagena and Nagoya protocols. It also includes draft decisions from the most recent subsidiary body meetings, as these form the starting point for the negotiations in Yerevan.
The CBD has three subsidiary bodies: the subsidiary body on scientific, technical and technological advice (SBSTTA), the subsidiary body on implementation (SBI) and the subsidiary body on article 8(j) and other provisions (SB8J).
SB8J focuses on issues related to the Indigenous peoples and local communities. It was established at COP16 in Cali, Colombia, in 2024.
The first two columns of the interactive tracker list the topic of each agenda item and the relevant body, with subsequent columns including dates, page counts and links to the original documents.
The table is searchable and can be sorted using the arrows in the header.
Areas of disagreement in UN draft texts are denoted by square brackets. Counting the brackets in a particular iteration of a text therefore gives a sense of how far parties are from reaching consensus.
The bracket column is colour-coded, with dark green indicating a low number of brackets and red indicating a high number of brackets remaining.
Texts can also present parties with choices using “options” or alternatives (“alt”), which are counted together in the sixth column of the table.
The key discussions in Yerevan will centre around two agenda items in particular. The first is the global review, which will assess progress towards the GBF and make recommendations for accelerating action.
The second is finance, which can be separated into two parts: resource mobilisation and the financial mechanism. On resource mobilisation, biodiverse global south countries are likely to push for an increased amount of international finance for conservation.
Disagreement over the creation of the financial mechanism led to the suspension of COP16 in Cali in October 2024, as parties failed to find agreement on the mobilisation of finance before the end of the summit.
Global south countries want the establishment of a separate financial mechanism under the control of the CBD; global north countries largely prefer to maintain the existing mechanism, which sits under the Global Environment Facility.
At the resumed session of COP16 in Rome in early 2025, countries agreed on a roadmap that would lead to the establishment of a permanent mechanism.
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The post Interactive: Tracking negotiating texts at the COP17 biodiversity summit appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Interactive: Tracking negotiating texts at the COP17 biodiversity summit
A beacon of love
On an outer island of Fiji, two thousand nautical miles from Sydney, is a shining light of hope and resilience for our troubled world.
The island of Kioa is home to a Tuvaluan community who migrated from their atoll of Vaitupu in the late 1940s. It is a land of warm hearts, big smiles, and deep cultural roots; a place where the sound of a conch still summons the island together, where islanders paddle out to fish in carved outrigger canoes, and healthy happy children walk barefoot to school.
Here, culture is life. Kioans live sustainably through their traditional knowledge and practices. The island is alive with song, dance and the rhythms of a life tied to the tides, the winds, and the seasons.
Facing the future
Greenpeace has been lucky to have a relationship with Kioa for a number of years now, and we are continually learning from this remarkable community.
Last week, as part of our Voyaging Oceania project, we returned to the island. Our purpose was twofold —- to carry messages from the island to leaders gathering in Nadi this week for the Pacific Pre-COP, and to support the Kioa community in their efforts to improve water security for the island.
Unlike Tuvalu itself, with its eight atolls, Kioa is a mountainous, forested and richly fertile island. It will remain habitable far into the future. Kioans did not initially migrate from Vaitupu due to climate change, but the move was prophetic. They now have a lifeboat.
However, even Kioa faces challenges on our rapidly warming planet, in particular when it comes to water. Climate change is shifting once reliable rainfall patterns. On top of this, the island is already feeling the effect of this year’s intensifying El Niño event, which for Fiji means reduced rainfall and prolonged dry spells.
Right now, fresh water has to be carefully rationed, and is only available for a few hours a day. During last week’s visit aboard our campaigning ship Oceania, Greenpeace was privileged to work with the Kioa community on a new solar-powered water distribution project for the island.
Designed and led by the island, the project involves using a solar pump to move water from a reliable source to a storage tank and then using gravity to distribute the water around the village.
It was a lesson in how local knowledge and ingenuity can be the backbone of today’s climate solutions. To build a dam around the source, the local community knew the exact spot where they could gather gravel at low tide to mix with the cement. They took only what was needed, knowing that all resources must be carefully conserved. Kioa has no roads and no machinery, and it was an all-of-island effort to carry the materials up to the project site, including many heavy bags of sand and rock.
Such projects truly bring to life the vision of a resilient, locally-led, fossil fuel free Pacific.
Gallery photos taken by Raeed Ali, Pacific Community Mobiliser at Greenpeace Australia Pacific