On March 15, 2019, after marathon talks at the UN Environment Assembly in Nairobi, Kenya, countries appeared to have reached a deal over throwaway plastic items such as bags, cups and cutlery to reduce the more than eight million tonnes of plastics entering oceans each year.
Countries have committed to ‘significantly reduce’ single-use plastics over the next decade, in a series of voluntary pledges that green groups warned fell short of tackling Earth's pollution crisis.
An initial ministerial statement at the beginning of the UN Environment Assembly had proposed a commitment to “phase out single-use plastics... by 2025”, a far stronger promise than the compromise nations appear to have reached.
“It's hard to find one solution for all member states,” said Siim Kiisler, UN assembly president, told journalists before the final decision. "The environment is at a turning point. We don't need verbose documents, we need concrete commitments."
The UN released its periodic assessment of the health of our planet. As much as a quarter of all premature death and disease is caused by man-made pollution, environmental damage and a lack of access to clean sanitation, said the Global Environmental Outlook report.
Joyce Msuya, the UN's interim environment head, said states had reached consensus on “issues vital to human and planetary health”. But unlike the UN's parallel process on climate change, the environmental assembly has no legal means of enforcing what countries promise.
Another major bone of contention during negotiations was geo-engineering, the use of untested, large-scale infrastructure projects to mitigate the climate impact of man-made emissions. A Swiss proposal for greater oversight on these potentially powerful but risky projects was met with “fierce opposition” from the US and Saudi Arabia, one source close to the talks told AFP.
Green groups fear geo-engineering such as carbon-capture and so-called ‘solar radiation management’—essentially pumping reflective material into the atmosphere to bounce back more of the Sun's rays—would allow richer nations to burn fossil fuels well into the future while seeming to commit to tackle climate change.
Even if these schemes eased global warming, they would not address the carbon dioxide emissions that are acidifying the oceans, say experts. “They want to avoid further regulation, governance, and oversight over these technologies and it's definitely in the interest of the fossil-fuel industry,” said Linda Schneider, senior programme officer of International Climate Policy at Germany's Heinrich Boell Institute.