Thais Vojvodic, Director of Government and Business Partnerships at Common Seas, explores what’s needed from this week’s Plastic Treaty negotiations in South Korea.
At INC-5, governments must learn from the missteps of treaties past and mandate national plans on plastic that work to translate global commitments into action.
Over the past ten years, the fight against plastic pollution has gone from being the domain of beach cleaning groups and largely overlooked frontline communities, to being recognised as part of a triple planetary crisis that demands urgent and unified action.
This leap in public awareness is for good reason. Each year, roughly 25 million tonnes of plastic flows into our environment.
It chokes our ocean, contaminates food chains, and even pollutes the air we breathe, and, as we found out in our groundbreaking “Blood Type Plastic” research, it’s also in our bodies.
In response to this escalating threat, delegates from nearly 200 countries are set to convene this week in Busan, South Korea for the fifth and final round of negotiations toward a Global Plastics Treaty.
The Plastics Treaty could become the cornerstone of a coordinated response to the plastic problem by establishing bold, globally-binding rules that address the environmental, health and socioeconomic impacts of plastics, starting by cutting production.
However, any meaningful treaty also requires a robust means of implementation that empowers countries to do their part in contributing to global goals – and holds them accountable for doing so.
The Paris agreement on climate is not on track – and weak national plans are one culprit.
What are national plans?
National plans are the common implementation framework for most environmental agreements – but they have something of a checkered past.
The Paris Agreement is the leading cause of their controversial reputation, due to the fact that the agreement left it down to each country to create its own Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to address climate change.
This approach compounded the absence of binding global obligations, leading to inconsistent national plans that were difficult to compare, evaluate, or enforce.
Combine this with limited financial resources and technical support for low and middle-income countries, and it’s no mystery why we’re currently on track for a 3-degree future, which wildly overshoots the Paris Agreement’s 1.5 target.
Despite these challenges, national plans remain the most effective path to meaningful and sustainable implementation of Treaty obligations by member states. But, to get them right, we must build from the learnings of treaties past.
We must get the Plastics Treaty right. Global rules and effective national plans can get us there.
The Montreal Protocol, which has reversed damage to the Earth’s ozone layer, is considered one of the most successful environmental agreements in existence.
Its success largely stems from its effective structure for international cooperation. In the Protocol, time-bound targets for phasing out ozone-depleting substances were supported by binding targets and financial support for national plans.
This allowed global goals to be translated into successful national action, and today, the ozone layer is on track to recover by 2066.
The Stockholm Convention is another notable environmental agreement where national plans have played a key role.
Through a combination of globally-binding rules and robust national obligations, the Convention is proving effective in reducing the trade of hazardous substances – something we hope to see replicated to prevent plastic waste shipping as part of the Plastics Treaty.
For many countries, the need for an effective national plan goes beyond compliance with Treaty rules – they are also much-needed roadmaps to addressing the existential threat of plastic pollution within their borders.
Despite challenges, small coastal nations are frontrunners in action on plastics.
The impact on Small Island Developing States
Plastic pollution is increasingly placing a vast and unequal economic burden on Small Island Developing States (SIDS) and small coastal countries that have contributed little to global plastic production but today find themselves on the frontlines of the plastics crisis.
Every year, thousands of tonnes of marine plastic wash up on their shores and, with limited waste management infrastructure, most of it ends up polluting the environment and harming health.
This is exacerbated by climate change, also driven by plastic, which currently contributes more greenhouse gas emissions than the entire aviation sector.
Small island states are among the countries hardest hit by climate change due to their geographic vulnerability to extreme weather events.
We recently saw this in Barbados, which in July was hit by Hurricane Beryl, the earliest-forming Category 4 Atlantic hurricane in history. Here, plastic waste exacerbated flooding during heavy rains as it accumulated in the drainage system.
Despite being on the frontlines of the plastics crisis, Barbados is among a growing number of small coastal nations that are proving to be frontrunners in the movement to tackle plastic pollution.
Amid hurricane preparations, Barbados launched it voluntary National Action Plan to End Plastic Pollution, co-developed by Common Seas and local stakeholders to lay out strategies to radically reduce the country’s plastic pollution by 73% over the coming decade.
During our ongoing work developing national plans on plastic with countries like Barbados and The Gambia, we have seen true environmental leadership.
These countries – and many others like them – are ready to drive systemic change to tackle plastic pollution. But they need the enabling framework to make it possible.
With SIDS alone being stewards of 30% of the world’s ocean, it’s clear that developing a robust, equitable framework for national action will have international consequences.
The Global Plastics Treaty can act as the world’s compass by introducing binding measures that point all countries to our shared destination – ending plastic pollution by 2040.
But, with small coastal countries having very different starting points and circumstances to those of larger economies, they also need roadmaps to determine the most effective route to this destination.
That is exactly what ambitious, effective national plans can provide.
A robust Global Plastics Treaty must get national plans right, guiding their development and implementation, with time-bound targets and reporting requirements that keep countries accountable.
And, as our research with the University of Portsmouth’s Global Plastics Policy Centre has demonstrated small coastal countries and SIDS will need support in the form of technical and financial assistance to translate strategies into action.
The opportunity for change
The urgency of this Treaty cannot be overstated.
At INC-5, governments must seize this opportunity to adopt a Global Plastics Treaty that combines ambitious, binding commitments with well-designed national plans.
With strong, unified action, the Global Plastics Treaty can not only tackle plastic pollution but pave the way toward a just and circular future, freed from plastic.