just 29my The Climate Conference of the Parties (COP29) ended in Baku, Environmental diplomacy meets in Pusan (South Korea) to address another planetary threat, plastic. Delegates from 175 countries are expected from November 25 to 1Ahem December for what is supposed to be the fifth and final round of negotiations aimed at finalizing a global treaty to end plastic pollution. With one objective: to achieve a legally binding international instrument before the end of the year. As in Azerbaijan, the specter of failure looms over Pusan.
As rounds of negotiations progress, starting in March 2022 with a United Nations resolution described as“historical”the draft text (zero draft) has grown to an 87-page summary, with conflicting options and sub-options, with 7,400 mentions in square brackets. “If we only stay with what is not in parentheses, that is, what there is consensus, we are left with a page and a half, it is terrifying”says Henri Bourgeois-Costa, director of public affairs at the Tara Océan Foundation, which has been documenting plastic pollution since 2010 through its scientific expeditions.
To break this impasse, the president of the Intergovernmental Negotiation Committee (INC), the Ecuadorian Luis Vayas Valdivieso, took the initiative to draft another text (not paperin UN jargon), of the elements that it considers to benefit from sufficient “convergences” : 31 articles, which occupy about fifteen pages. This note, which is not official, could serve as a basis for negotiations in Pusan if the States accept it. But with an important risk: undermining his ambition.
Turn off the tap on the fountain.
For the French Minister for the Ecological Transition, Agnès Panier-Runacher, who will not go to Pusan because the Korean host does not plan it meetings ministerial, this text does not constitute “It is not a good basis for negotiations” and predicts “difficult discussions” and a “uncertain agreement.”
Main complaint: the document avoids any reference to any objective of reducing plastic production. This issue constitutes the main dividing line, which has not stopped widening, between the two blocs that have faced each other since the beginning of the negotiations.
On the one hand, a coalition that brings together 67 members, including France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the European Union (EU), defends a text of “high ambition”, which takes into account the entire life cycle of plastics, and therefore their production, to cut off the tap at source. On the other hand, oil-producing countries, for which plastics and, in particular, the packaging sector constitute a new source and which we want to limit the treaty to the issue of waste management and recycling. Around Saudi Arabia and Iran, a “group of the same sensitivity”, which includes Russia, Brazil and India. China, the main producer of plastic, is in the same line.
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