The fourth round of U.N.-led talks on a proposed Global Plastics Treaty ended with negotiators skirting commitments to curb production but for the first time wading into details of the text, in a mixed sign of progress.
Before the talks finished early Tuesday in Ottawa, Canada, negotiators agreed to keep working on the text ahead of the fifth and final round of talks to clinch a treaty starting in late November at Busan, South Korea.
Though they essentially ignored plastic production, the delegates agreed to examine financing for the treaty, product design, and how to assess the toxic chemicals in plastic products. The U.N. Environment Assembly called for a treaty to be negotiated by the end of 2024 that covers the marine environment. The first three rounds of talks were held in Uruguay, France and Kenya.
Proponents failed to win firm plans to cut plastics production or to phase out toxic chemicals, but plastic-producing countries and oil and gas exporters also failed to erase the idea from the text. Fossil fuels and chemicals make up most plastics.
"This compromise diminishes the ambition of this process as it ignores the central role of plastics production in fueling the climate, biodiversity and pollution crises," said the Break Free From Plastic movement. "This is not only an utter disappointment, but also a missed opportunity to tackle the root causes comprehensively."
The latest round of talks was a success, however, because it advanced the text and will be followed by inter-sessional work, according to Inger Andersen, executive director of the U.N. Environment Program, which is governed by the 193-nation assembly, the highest decision-making body on the environment.
"We leave Ottawa having achieved both goals and a clear path to landing an ambitious deal in Busan,” she said. "The work, however, is far from over. The plastic pollution crisis continues to engulf the world and we have just a few months left before the end of year deadline agreed upon in 2022."
Getting to the finish line
More than 2,500 delegates from 170 countries and 480 observer organizations attended the talks, which concluded with a 69-page revised draft of a legally binding treaty. They created a legal drafting group to continue the work.
The delegates "managed to build on and advance the revised draft text of the instrument, providing streamlined text and entering textual negotiations on several elements," said the chair of UNEP's Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee, Ecuador's U.K. Ambassdor Luis Vayas Valdivieso. “At the same time, we also leave with a much clearer picture of the work that remains to be done."
Steven Guilbeault, Canada’s minister of environment and climate change, said said nations are "no longer talking about 'if' we can get there, but 'how' to agree on a treaty as significant as the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change.
"We are doing everything we can to raise the international profile of the plastic pollution crisis so that the agreement gets the global attention it deserves to cross the finish line," he said.
But to Jacob Kean-Hammerson, an ocean campaigner for the Environmental Investigation Agency in the United Kingdom, the INC once again failed to ask what he called the most fundamental question to the success of the future treaty: how do we tackle the unsustainable production of plastics?
"While it is important to discuss the financial aspects, how can we discuss means of implementation without knowing what we are implementing?" he said. "If we continue to ignore the calls of progressive countries and allow blocker countries to hold the talks, hostage, we will fail to reach our shared ambition of ending plastic pollution.”
