Many countries are disappointed the UN didn’t reach a more definitive agreement on plastic pollution in Kenya, yet efforts continue at national and international levels.
NAIROBI, KENYA: It didn’t take long after the recent United Nations environmental assembly in Kenya ended for environmentalists to sharply rebuke the United States for allegedly derailing global ambitions to prevent plastic debris from flowing into the oceans.
“The tyranny of the minority,” their statement declared as environmentalists denounced the Americans for what they said was slowing progress on marine plastics by diluting a resolution calling for phasing out single-use plastic by 2025 and blocking an effort to craft a legally binding treaty on plastic debris.
Yet that unsparing critique doesn’t fully reflect the negotiations that played out in a small roof-top conference room on the UN’s campus in Kenya’s capital city of Nairobi. What happened is perhaps best viewed not as tyrannical but as isolationist, more akin to the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement. Yes, the U.S. won concessions in Nairobi to the wording on two resolutions involving the fate of marine plastics, but it waged the argument essentially alone, with backing only from Saudi Arabia and Cuba.
“I would not say the U.S. is making itself irrelevant,” says David Azoulay, a Geneva-based lawyer for the Center for International Environmental Law, who observed the negotiations. “But it is true that the U.S. is setting itself further apart, as it did with the withdrawal from the Paris accord, from addressing the critical challenges of our generation. The whole world is addressing the plastic challenge at its roots. The EU is doing it, India is doing it. The world is moving forward.”
The Americans sought to define marine debris as an issue solved exclusively by waste management, said Hugo-Maria Schally, the European Union’s lead negotiator on marine plastics, in an interview, while “virtually everybody else in the room was focused on the idea that there is a problem with production and the use of single-use plastic.”.......
Credit by: https://on.natgeo.com/2HE9qzF
0 Comments