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Plastic pollution: 184 states try:
Diplomats from 184 countries attempt to round the angles on Monday. Furthermore, reduce their deep divisions in the hope of being able to display Thursday as planned the first world treaty against plastic pollution, including in the marine environment.
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After a day of respite on Sunday following a first week of UN discussions which did not mark any decisive advance. However, the delegates resumed their work in specialized or regional working groups on Monday.
Some informal. Similarly, even “informal-informal” meetings took place on Sunday; This means in UN language meetings outside the corseted and transparent framework of formal negotiations.
These discreet meetings, sometimes in villas around Lake Geneva, allow a better respective understanding of antagonistic positions.
Even if it does not contain much. Consequently, plastic pollution: 184 states try there will be a treaty as planned on Thursday, assured an African negotiator at AFP which speaks subject to anonymity. Nevertheless, “We did not work three years to leave without anything.”
Informal negotiations “go very quickly,” adds another diplomatic source. In addition, According to this source. For example, the fact that some states accept these “informal-informational” meetings, while they are ideologically opposed, is a sign of “compromise search”.
“Ambitious” countries
Since the start of the talks two. a half years ago, a group of mainly oil -based countries (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Russia, Iran, Malaysia …) has blocked the process.
The United States is close to this movement, as well as India. They wish that the treaty relates almost exclusively to the treatment of plastic in the state of waste. and to oppose any constraint on the “upstream” part of plastic, from oil.
Opposite. a growing group of countries – plastic pollution: 184 states try qualified as “ambitious” – want measures to regulate production, the only solution to slow down the plastic pollution scourge that infiltrates ecosystems, mountains, rivers, oceans, and to the inside of the human body.
This group requests that the treaty has a clause providing for a reduction in exponential production of plastics. which must triple by 2060.
It brings together the 27 countries of the European Union (EU). many countries in Latin America, Africa, Australia, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Canada as well as most of the island countries overwhelmed by waves of plastic waste from the ocean.
For the representative of the Palaos. the Pacific archipelago, who is expressed in the name of 39 micro-states islands, the treaty must be used to clean the waste which is “already stifling the ocean”.
“We knew before coming to come that it would not be easy (…), we came here to try to find plastic pollution: 184 states try priorities,” said AFP the Ambassador of Barbados to the UN, Matthew Wilson.
A vote?
“Press time,” alerted Eirik Lindebjerg, WWF advisor to plastic policies, which suggests, like other NGOs, a radical acceleration of procedures.
“The ambitious majority that has been committed for a long time to ask for a strong treaty has chosen. to let a handful of countries block the process. Hoping to find an exit door by consensus is an illusion, “he told AFP.
“The only possible solution to finalize a text in the time given is to resort to a vote” according. to him.
But consensus – and not the vote – is the default rule.
“By triggering a vote. the minority that blocks the process would realize that it will lose and would be forced to compromise” adds Claire Arkin, spokesperson for the NGO Gaia (Global Alliance for Incinerator alternatives), based in Europe, Africa and plastic pollution: 184 states try the United States. “It is not too late, but it must be announced as quickly as possible.”
Seventy ministers. thirty senior administration executives, the environmental officials of around a hundred countries, are expected in Geneva from Tuesday to help unlock the end of negotiations.
The European environment commissioner, Jessika Roswall, called on Monday “all the parties to be constructive and oriented towards the results”. “We have more parentheses in the text (that is to say. paragraphs on which countries have not yet managed to get along, note) than plastic in the sea,” she said.
Plastic pollution: 184 states try
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