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European Union Environment Commissioner Jessika Roswall and Danish Environment Minister Magnus Heunicke address reporters at the United Nations in Geneva as time runs short to strike a global plastics treaty.<\/p>\n\tEuropean Union Environment Commissioner Jessika Roswall and Danish Environment Minister Magnus Heunicke address reporters at the United Nations in Geneva as time runs short to strike a global plastics treaty.<\/p>\n
GENEVA<\/strong> \u2013 The European Union said Tuesday it is ready to make a deal on a global plastics treaty but will not accept an agreement \u201cat any cost,\u201d leaving the door open to rejecting a weak outcome as negotiators enter the final 72 hours of talks with core provisions still deadlocked.<\/p>\n \u201cThe EU is here to deal, but not at any cost,\u201d Environment Commissioner Jessika Roswall told journalists when asked about reports the bloc was prepared to walk away if production limits were excluded from the final agreement. \u201cIf there is no agreement that is good enough, these are negotiations. That\u2019s always an opportunity for everyone in negotiations.\u201d<\/p>\n The commissioner\u2019s carefully worded intervention came as high-level delegations arrived at the United Nations hoping to break a week-long impasse over production caps, health provisions, toxic chemical restrictions, financing, and definitions of key terms, including \u201cplastic pollution\u201d itself.<\/p>\n Countries also remain divided on the treaty\u2019s fundamental scope: whether the agreement should address the full lifecycle of plastics \u2014 from feedstock extraction to disposal \u2014 or focus only on waste management and recycling.<\/p>\n The EU and an alliance of over 100 states are pushing for hard caps on plastic production, but face stiff opposition from plastic-producing nations. The \u201clike-minded nations\u201d group led by Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran and their allies\u2014flanked by the United States and India\u2014have shown no signs of softening their total opposition to production limits in the treaty.<\/p>\n \u201cEveryone will need to compromise,\u201d Roswall said, calling on all 184 nations present to speed up progress towards a deal. \u201cWe have a global responsibility to fix this. No country can do this on its own.\u201d<\/p>\n Danish Environment Minister Magnus Heunicke, speaking alongside Roswall, characterised the negotiations as \u201cvery difficult,\u201d warning that tensions and \u201cdrama\u201d would escalate in the coming days as Thursday\u2019s deadline looms over the talks.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s going to be a whole lot more drama in the days to come,\u201d Heunicke said. \u201cIf you are looking for drama, I\u2019d say stay here, because more drama is going to happen. But our goal is that this drama should end up in a deal.\u201d<\/p>\n Both officials declined to specify the EU\u2019s red lines, citing the sensitivity of ongoing negotiations. However, Heunicke emphasised production as a key concern, calling plastic pollution \u201cone of the greatest environmental challenges\u201d globally.<\/p>\n \u201cWe know it harms our health, it harms our oceans, it harms our future,\u201d Heunicke said. \u201cAt the same time, we also know that plastic production is increasing at an exponential rate. That\u2019s why the EU is here \u2026 to secure a legally binding international agreement on how plastic is produced, consumed and disposed of.\u201d<\/p>\n The consensus-based format of the negotiations, which requires unanimous agreement for the treaty to be accepted, has been roundly criticised by nations and observer delegations for allowing nations seeking to weaken or remove articles on health, toxic chemicals and production limits to maintain their positions with little incentive to compromise.<\/p>\n Juan Carlos Monterrey, Panama\u2019s negotiator, told a panel on Monday that the like-minded nations had \u201cnot moved an inch\u201d since talks began last week.<\/p>\n Ninety-nine per cent of plastics are made from oil, gas and coal, generating a market projected to reach $1 trillion annually in the next decade. Major petrochemical states see booming plastic production as a hedge against declining demand for fossil fuels in traditional energy markets.<\/p>\n Behind closed doors Progress in the negotiations has been difficult to gauge for civil society observers and media alike. Crucial debates over the treaty\u2019s scope, definitions of key terms like \u201cplastics\u201d and \u201cplastic pollution,\u201d limits on toxic chemicals used in plastics and production caps have all occurred behind closed doors.<\/p>\n Neither INC representatives nor the UN Environment Programme, which oversees the negotiations, have held a press conference since Saturday. That briefing offered few details, with INC chair Luis Vayas Valdivieso deflecting questions about specific treaty articles and which issues were proving the most difficult to bridge between nations.<\/p>\n Negotiators are working from a text with nearly 1,500 items of disagreement on which no progress has been made since Saturday, leaving nations 13 pages further from agreement than after the last round of talks in Busan, South Korea, in December.<\/p>\n Melissa Blue Sky, a senior attorney at the Centre for International Environmental Law, noted that the brackets don\u2019t indicate the weight of support: while some clauses have backing from 100 countries, others may have only one supporter, yet all appear equal.<\/p>\n \u201cThe draft text is misleading because it presents all options as having the same weight, when in fact, some text additions have the support of over a hundred countries and some with only one,\u201d Blue Sky said. \u201cThe INC cannot continue with the status quo and expect the negotiations to result in a final treaty.\u201d<\/p>\n As nations race to find a compromise, experts from the Scientists\u2019 Coalition for an Effective Plastics Treaty \u2014 after a brief venue shuffle due to meeting room overbooking \u2014 held a press conference stressing the health and environmental consequences if negotiations fall short.<\/p>\n \u201cThe science is really undeniable that we need plastic production reduction and we need [it] on global levels and at national levels to be really, really ambitious if we\u2019re going to see any benefits,\u201d said Natalia Grilli, an environmental scientist from the University of Tasmania. \u201cFor us, the science is clear. We\u2019re not negotiators \u2026 so it\u2019s not that we have red lines: we\u2019re responding to the science.\u201d<\/p>\n It remains unclear when the next treaty text will be released. The clearest picture of progress from recent negotiating flurries will likely emerge at Wednesday\u2019s expected plenary session, though none has been formally scheduled.<\/p>\n Sources close to national delegations told Health Policy Watch they expect negotiations to extend deep into Thursday night and likely into Friday morning, an all-too-typical endgame for UN environmental negotiations.<\/p>\n \u201cIf it was only up to the EU, then we all know how high ambitions would be,\u201d Heunicke said. \u201cIt is not, however, up to the EU.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIf we all stick to our red lines, that deal is impossible,\u201d the Danish environment chief added. \u201cWe will be worse off if we don\u2019t succeed in making a deal. That\u2019s not me saying a deal at any price, but a deal that is legally binding and has strong text and lays the ground for our work in the years ahead.\u201d<\/p>\n Combat the infodemic in health information and support health policy reporting from the global South. Our growing network of journalists in Africa, Asia, Geneva and New York connect the dots between regional realities and the big global debates, with evidence-based, open access news and analysis. To make a personal or organisational contribution click here on PayPal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"European Union Environment Commissioner Jessika Roswall and Danish Environment Minister Magnus Heunicke address reporters at the United Nations…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":338957,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5174],"tags":[2000,299,5187],"class_list":{"0":"post-338956","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-eu","8":"tag-eu","9":"tag-europe","10":"tag-european"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115016891492014743","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338956","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=338956"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338956\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/338957"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=338956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=338956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=338956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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Press conference held on Tuesday by the Scientists\u2019 Coalition for an Effective Plastics Treaty.<\/p>\n