27 November 2024- Busan Korea - What will it take for negotiators and delegates at the fifth Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee to come up with an international legally binding instrument on plastic pollution, including in the marine environment, at the end of the week?
In Busan Korea, some 80 delegates from Pacific countries are here to advocate their key asks during the final scheduled round of negotiations of the INC. In 2022 the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA-5.2) unanimously approved a resolution to end plastic pollution, setting the stage to create a legally binding treaty by 2024.
It’s a big task but negotiators including Pacific officials have been working around the clock since they arrived in Busan. And with five days for parties to agree on a new treaty text, Pacific negotiators, although outnumbered by bigger countries, are strategically placed across different tracks of the negotiators to ensure the One Pacific Voice is amplified and heard.
We catch up with Ms Tekau Frere, the Pacific Islands Developing States (PSIDS) lead on exemptions and product design, contained in Article 4 and Article 5 of the INC Chair’s non-paper being discussed, for an update.
Ms Frere, a member of the Palau delegation, has also been following negotiation threads on Core Measures in Contact Group 1 and Contact Group 2. Core measures cover the lifecycle of plastics from chemicals of concerns, plastic product production all way to waste management and legacy plastic.
QUESTION: What is the Pacific asking for in terms of the area of the plastics treaty negotiations that you follow?
Answer: The Pacific’s position has always been for the instrument to address the full lifecycle of plastic. The key priorities is legacy plastic and what happens in the ocean with all those giant waste clusters. We also have substantial issues with our waste management with all the products we consume. Our islands are so tiny, waste management is expensive and difficult, so we also want this treaty to reflect and address those concerns.
In order to address those two key areas, waste management and legacy plastic, we need to turn off the tap. The Pacific SIDS have been pushing and have been very strong in advocating to have robust provisions to reduce production of primary plastic polymers but to also see how we could have local standards on product design to ensure we have circularity that works for us.
We also want to ensure we adopt a sectoral approach to ensure that it’s targeted at different complex products. We are advocating for increased research development and innovation in alternative and non-plastic substitutes because we need to break away from plastic and see what kind of alternative exists with a caveat that we don’t want to adopt solutions that will be counter-productive or will be more harmful to us.
We need to ensure there is adequate research put in place to ensure it is safe, environmentally sound. In addition we have been promoting the use of traditional knowledge and methods, but if we do that we also need to respect the holders of such knowledge.
And for course, as island countries, our circumstances are such that we are disproportionately impacted by plastic pollution. In addition, to implement the measures needed to tackle this crisis, we, as active participants in this fight, will need significant support.
Question: Can you talk to the progress of the negotiations/or perhaps the lack of?
Answer: The pace of negotiations are slow. The first contact groups made very limited progress, we went through the first reading of the non paper and in our contact group we only focused on one article and we only managed to get through one paragraph. What is clear is that there needs to be a lot of reasonable flexibility which I cannot see at the moment. The Pacific countries however remain strong and united in our positions.
Question: What will it take for INC-5 to reach a successful conclusion? What's your gut-feeling about what's going to happen in the next few days?
Answer: In some of the Contact groups, we’ve been requesting for the co-Chairs to come up with text. The issue is to see how we can have some give and takes. Understanding that for us as PSIDS but also within the wider AOSIS context is important. We do have some strong red lines. We don’t necessarily just need a treaty, we need a treaty that actually contributes to solving the problem. We do not need a weak treaty that reaffirms the current state of things and the status quo. We need a treaty that responds to our communities’ real needs.
Thefifth Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee to develop an international legally binding instrument on plastic pollution, including in the marine environment is taking place in Busan, Republic of Korea, from 25 November to 1 December 2024.
The Pacific Islands are represented by the Cook Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Niue, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu and Vanuatu through the support of the Government of Australia and the United Nations.
They are supported by the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP), working with partners the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat (PIFS), Office of the Pacific Ocean Commissioner (OPOC), The Pacific Community (SPC), Forum Fisheries Agency (FFA), Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), Centre for International Environmental Law (CIEL), University of Wollongong, WWF and Massey University.
For more information, visit:https://www.unep.org/inc-plastic-pollution/session-5