"We Need a Global Plastics Treaty to Stop an Environmental Disaster - and truly global participation in the process will create more than just a Paris Agreement for plastics"

. What follows is a key point from article that we at OPLN want to be sure to stress:

"Whatever is decided at UNEA 5.2, stakeholders the world over will need a forum to talk to one another and build towards a quick implementation of plans. We should have open, multisectoral dialogues in every country, with recurring sessions while the treaty is being negotiated. The ideas and stakeholder mapping—or finding out what everyone wants out of a treaty—in these talks should feed global negotiations, ultimately informing treaty negotiations in a more dynamic and time-sensitive manner. To that end, OPLN has already begun convening Country Dialogues for the global plastic treaty in Chile, Malaysia, Indonesia, Ghana and the United States.

Consider the

 two billion people in the world, largely in developing nations, who do not have access to waste management collection services

 and are forced to illegally dump or burn their waste. Or the 

15 to 20 million people among them who make their living selling plastic scrap

 that they find on streets, beaches and dumps to secondary recycled plastic markets. Both groups are a vital part of the plastics equation, and their interests must be represented at the negotiating table.

As our initial country-specific forums have taken place, we’ve started to see the chaos of the plastic crisis become just a bit more tangible. Waste-pickers from Accra, Ghana have expressed their concerns to a CEO based in San Francisco. An activist working to protect their fenceline community from the emissions of a refinery next door spoke directly with an executive from the company that owned it. This simply hasn’t happened in previous global treaty processes.

So while the U.N. is gathered in Nairobi, discussing, among other things, what it will take to stem the flow of plastics waste, we want to urge national leaders to support dialogues accessible to everyone, to quickly expand the scope of who is at the negotiating table in this global agreement.

Participation will be the lifeblood of the solution, and an unpopular treaty is sure to stall. Let’s set ourselves up for every holder of every stake to get involved as soon as possible—because there is no time to waste."

Read OPLN's Op-Ed In Scientific American

Durdle Door, a natural limestone arch overlooking the Jurassic Coast in Dorset, England.

This is your Global Treaty Dialogues Report for 7/20

At the UN Ocean Conference in early July, the 

 (UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) announced our partnership for a series of dialogues that will bring together stakeholders from all parts of the plastic system.

For the UK Plastics Treaty Dialogues (UK PTDs), OPLN and Defra have identified 80 impact organizations across civil society, the value chain, industry, academia, ESG finance, waste management/recyclers, and more to shape a treaty that works for all stakeholders. This activist-to-industry network will assemble for six invitation-only meetings over the next two years in order to build capacity for the UK’s participation in the Global Plastics Treaty.

For maximum stakeholder impact, each UK PTD session is set to take place within a month of the next Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee meeting. In this framework, all UK stakeholders will be able to communicate their positions directly to the experts representing them at the UN-level. The experts can then bring stakeholder insights to their UN colleagues while they negotiate what has been called “

the most significant environmental deal since the Paris accord

Quick facts: the Global Plastic Treaty’s Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC)

The INC for the Global Plastics Treaty is the body responsible for completing the draft text of the global, legally binding plastics treaty.

The INC was formed in March 2022, when UNEA 5.2 voted to start negotiations on the treaty. The text of the Resolution is available 

The INCs goal is to - over at least five sessions - build consensus from government representatives of UN Member States in order to complete this draft by the end of 2024. Once the draft is complete, the UN will hold a diplomatic conference to open it for signature.

With preparations nearly finished (see this 

 on the preparatory working group), the first meeting of the INC (INC-1) is set to take place in 

Just as the INC was formed, the UK announced support for the negotiations via Defra and the office of the International Environment Minister. On March 3rd, Lord Zac Goldsmith said:

“This agreement by governments at UNEA is truly historic, and I’m so proud that the UK co-sponsored the proposals and helped get them over the line. In the space of just one human lifetime, we have caused unimaginable damage to the global environment, choking every single part of the global ocean with plastic pollution. And although there is much to be done now to turn it into an ambitious and far-reaching treaty, we can now begin to close this ugly chapter. I am so grateful to UK negotiators for their fantastic work securing agreement this week.”

A view of Tobermory, the most northerly point on the Isle of Mull in the Scottish Inner Hebrides

Defra is the lead Department for the plastics treaty negotiations and will negotiate for the UK in the INC process. Leading this effort is the Defra’s Marine Litter Policy team, headed by Julius Piercy.

Dr. Piercy has led the team since September 2019 and holds a PhD in Marine Biology. He and his team are working closely with OPLN on the UK Plastics Treaty Dialogues, helping represent national stakeholders' views to multilateral environmental negotiations at the highest level.

In conjunction with the five invitation-only sessions, OPLN will also design interactive learning primers with up-to-date curated insights into the treaty process and the evolution of solutions to the plastics crisis, both locally and globally.

News Digest - Plastic news in the UK over the past few weeks:

 launches 2nd Marine Litter Regional Action Plan at the United Nations Ocean conference in Lisbon. UK joined other North-East Atlantic states in an action plan that, among other solutions, tackles litter from rivers, phases out additional single-use plastic items, and reduces microplastic releases from shipping.

Global Plastics Action Partnership (GPAP)

 to be provided over the next three years, taking the total UK contribution to £15 million.

Earlier this month, cross-party MPs called for 

. It is estimated that 100 million such cups are used annually during music festivals and live sporting events, which are ‘rarely collected and processed for recycling’.

More announcements on the UK Plastics Treaty Dialogues are on the way. Check back in with OPLN Media soon for updates. 

An Early Look at the UK Plastics Treaty Dialogues

This is your Ocean Plastics Report for 6/2/2022

Pre-Negotiations for the Global Plastics Treaty Take Place in Dakar, Senegal

 open-ended working group (OEWG) to develop a legally binding instrument on plastic pollution got underway in Dakar, Senegal this week. According to an event organizer, 900 participants split between in person and online formats were reported to be in attendance.

The plan of work for this series of OEWG meetings was to focus on organizational issues for the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) that will handle negotiations. Topics included:

-The timeline of the negotiations and number of meetings

-How non-governmental stakeholders would participate

-Procedural concerns such as consensus, voting, and vetoes

What follows is a day-by-day breakdown of the proceedings.

Left to right: Siaka Coulibaly, Resident Coordinator; Inger Andersen, Executive Director, UNEP; Abdou Karim Sall, Minister for the Environment and Sustainable Development, Senegal; and Leticia Carvalho, UNEP.

On Day 1 of the meeting in Dakar attendees heard general statements touching on the timeline for the INC. When points were raised about how many meetings should take place, many attendees seemed to prefer a 5-meeting schedule.

Attendees also shared their priorities for the process, with many stressing the meaningful inclusion of a wide range of stakeholders, from the private sector to informal waste pickers.

Rokhaya Ndiaye Diop, Basel and Stockholm Conventions Regional Centre in Senegal.

Panels were held on the following topics:

Product and material innovation/product design

 - Archawat Chareonsilp, ETRAN, said regulatory pressure on the private sector will soon be amplified and directed to consumers, who will thus demand solutions to plastic waste. Members of plastic value chain were urged to get ahead of this trend.

 - Jodie Roussell, Nestlé, detailed the company's plans to ensure that none of its packaging ends up as litter or in landfills.

 - Rokhaya Ndiaye Diop, Basel and Stockholm Conventions Regional Centre in Senegal, promoted dual-involvement of the public and private sectors in waste management, alongside government entities.

Read more about May 29th proceedings at IISD/Earth News Bulletin 

Inger Andersen, Executive Director, UNEP, and Abdou Karim Sall, Minister for the Environment and Sustainable Development, Senegal, during a press event.

On Day 2 of the meeting in Dakar, participants began proposing rules of procedure for the future Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee meetings. These rules will form the basis of how the negotiation meetings will operate.

Many of the procedural rules being discussed draw from the template of the INC for the 

, which became effective in August 2017. The Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) has produced a comparison table to highlight similarities, differences, and issues of concern between the process followed to adopt the Minamata Convention and the suggested rules of procedures for the negotiations of a plastics treaty, available 

A Multi-Stakeholder meeting for this day was aimed to address concerns related to informal waste pickers/workers. Topics included:

Including informal waste workers in decision-making processes related to plastic pollution

Creating decent work opportunities for waste workers which ensure social protections

Establishing platforms for informal waste workers to engage with policymakers

Read more about May 30th proceedings at IISD/Earth News Bulletin 

The dais at the end of the June 1st meeting 

Robert Bunbury, Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade for Canada, reported that the informal working group addressing the rules of procedure for the INC had met into the night on Tuesday, reaching agreement on most of the rules at 1:00 am on Wednesday. (

Note: OPLN will follow up soon with a report on the rules of procedure)

Soon after, it was established that the first Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC-1) will take place in Uruguay in November 2022

Finally, delegates further discussed the organization of the multi-stakeholder forum for the exchange of information and activities related to plastic pollution, in order to inform INC-1. They agreed to submit additional comments and suggestions to the Secretariat by the end of June 2022.

The topic of the day's Multi-Stakeholder meeting was 

“Upscaling and redirecting finance, incentives and trade.”

The roles of banks in mitigating planetary challenges through financing solutions

Managing risks and opportunities for stakeholders

How trade policy can effect systems change

The airline industry's push to replace single-use plastics

Read more about the June 1st proceedings at IISD/Earth News Bulletin 

WWF Calls for "Start-Then-Strengthen" Approach to Treaty

, WWF has called for an approach to the global plastics treaty that addresses the most urgent issues and implements measures quickly, while also preparing mechanisms for States and other parties to discuss and further measures. WWF asserts that this method will improve the effectiveness of the treaty over time.

"The OEWG should acknowledge this complexity in their consideration for the INC’s organization of work, especially given the ambition for the INC to complete its work by the end of 2024.

This acknowledgement will help to facilitate discussions on prioritization of negotiation tasks and ensure that the most problematic pollution issues and the most impactful actions are at the top of the agenda. This way, the treaty’s ambition can avoid compromises in the face of both its subject matter’s complexity and the negotiation time frame."

Additionally, WWF's brief lays out three key ideas for promoting participation and compliance by Member States:

1. There should be a process where the treaty enters into force as an instrument of international law when a certain number of States consent to being bound by the treaty through signature and ratification or accession.

 "the entry-into-force threshold will serve as a tipping point: once a certain number of States have joined, it will be increasingly disadvantageous to remain outside the regime.

2. The treaty must provide States with strong incentives to join — meaning 

the cost of joining the treaty and complying with the common standard of action must be lower than the cost of not doing so

. The compliance system will likely be part of the treaty itself, for instance in the form of trade restrictions or certification procedures.

3. Accountability must also be coupled with implementation support. It is essential that a just transition is ensured through both cost-effective control measures and sufficient technical and financial assistance where necessary.

Resources should be distributed in a way that maximizes cost-efficiency and supports developing countries and countries with economies in transition in their efforts to implement their obligations.

First Global Plastics Treaty Talks in Dakar

Climate change mitigation & adaptation need high-impact natural solutions that support sustainable development. Time to “let nature do the job it spent billions of years perfecting”.

Last August, as many parts of the world suffered floods, fires and heatwaves, the UN IPCC presented ‘incontrovertible’ evidence of the link between climate extremes and human activity.
This week’s IPCC report is no less stark in assessing our human vulnerability to climate change. Up to 3.6 billion people already live in global hotspots. Here, climate risk compounds ‘overlapping challenges’, from poor access to clean water and healthcare, to livelihoods with little change resilience.

We can’t keep taking these hits” explained Inger Andersen of the UN Environment Programme. “Soon, the wounds will be too deep.” Our mitigation and adaptation efforts – so far weak and uneven – must shift the balance of interactions between ecosystems and human systems, and provide a basis for climate-resilient development. How do we start restoring the links between human, environmental and planetary health? “The best way to do it is to let nature do the job it spent billions of years perfecting.”


A liveable future depends on the ecosystem services that a biodiverse Earth provides.

In presenting the report, co-author Prof Hans-Otto Poertner singled out forest-based projects and agroforestry as powerful environmental responses, both for mitigating climate change and adapting to its impacts. And, as he explained, they are prime examples of ‘measures that not only improve climate resilience, but go hand in hand with lifting people out of poverty’ and contribute to multiple sustainable development goals.

For example, mangrove forests provide more than $80 billion a year in avoided losses from coastal flooding, and directly protect 18 million people in coastal areas. They also contribute $40–50 billion annually through fisheries, forestry, and recreation benefits.

This may not be new science, but it is far from established economic reality.

We know that protecting and restoring tropical forests is a complex challenge. But innovative forest business models can play a part, and are already being applied across the tropical belt.
At one level, this is simple economics: we can protect tropical forests by making them more valuable as living ecosystems than as felled timber.

In 2019, The Food and Land Use Coalition’s Prosperous Forests report showed how hundreds of regenerative businesses are already creating socio-economic incentives to halt deforestation and start restoring lost or damaged forest. These collaborations – with local cooperatives and other ‘forest stewards’ – rely crucially on the kind of indigenous and traditional knowledge highlighted by the IPCC “not only to frame questions in more relevant ways but to develop answers that are more inclusive”.

Regenerative forest-based businesses, taken together, are part of a nature-positive economy with huge investment potential. Yet they remain on the wrong side of a deeply damaging imbalance in the world’s financial flows. It’s estimated that transitioning to more nature-positive systems of food and land use requires at least $300bn a year in new investment – a huge sum… but still less than that invested in deforestation-related companies by UK pension schemes alone (as revealed in this study with Make My Money Matter, earlier this month).

Together with Climate Focus, the Food and Land Use Coalition will this year publish a major analysis that explores how to close this investment gap, including the role of different financing strategies and the voluntary carbon market in different countries and regions around the world.

The IPCC has left us in no doubt that the need for global action is even more urgent than we thought. And, as Dan Lashof, the WRI’s US director, wrote: “We no longer have the option to choose whether to cut emissions, adapt to climate impacts or figure out how to manage damaging consequences.”

Some natural countermeasures will no longer work above certain danger-points of global warming. So, effective but under-funded solutions, with high adaptation and mitigation potential, and which support most of the SDGs, need to be given the fullest chance to work now.

The report is dire warning against inaction. Yet many of climate adaptations, sustainable development priorities and economic opportunities point in the same direction. Perhaps co-author Dr Debra Roberts put it most simply: “A lot of the challenges we are facing can be addressed by creating equitable and sustainable world.”

To find out more about the IPCC’s findings on tropical forests, see its Cross-Chapter Paper 7. Section 7.2 looks at how sustainable tropical forest management can contribute to the SDGs.

SYSTEMIQ is a climate and systems change company, with a mission to accelerate the transition to a net-zero, nature-positive and more inclusive economy. We do this by building ambitious multi-stakeholder coalitions; advising leading companies, financial and public institutions; and investing in businesses that will scale new solutions in energy, natural solutions and materials.

Read OPLN's Op-Ed In Scientific American

"We Need a Global Plastics Treaty to Stop an Environmental Disaster - and truly global participation in the process will create more than just a Paris Agreement for plastics"

- Dave Ford, Founder of OPLN

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