Little more than a day after the gavel came down on the climate summit in Baku, the global diplomacy tour has stopped off in Busan. Delegates from 175 countries have descended on South Korea’s second-largest city for what’s supposed to be the final round of talks aimed at clinching an international treaty on plastic.
“The moment of truth is here to end plastic pollution,” said Inger Andersen, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, at the start of the talks. “We have a historic moment to end the world’s plastic pollution crisis and protect our environment, our health, and our future.”
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But much work is needed to get there by this coming Sunday when the summit is scheduled to end. Deep divisions over what the treaty should tackle have hobbled negotiations so far, with little progress at the previous four meetings over the last two and a half years.
Ambassador Luis Vayas Valdivieso, chair of the plastics negotiations, said delegates should “harness every tool of multilateralism, every ounce of creativity, and every moment of dialogue to overcome our differences and craft a treaty as ambitious as our collective will allows”.
As they hopped off the metro at Busan’s futuristic convention centre – the venue of the talks – delegates were welcomed with a simple message on the advertising boards: “Cap plastic now”.
Full life-cycle
Yet plastic production is one of the most contentious issues being discussed here. The majority of countries around the table want an ambitious deal that includes measures to reduce the amount of plastic that is manufactured, as well as ways to deal with plastic waste. Most rich countries, Latin American and African nations, and small island states firmly hold this view.
“You cannot end or reduce plastic pollution without reducing plastic production. That is just a fact,” Graham Forbes, Greenpeace’s head of delegation at the plastics talks, told reporters on Monday. Speaking to Climate Home in Baku last week, Andersen said sustainable production and consumption of plastics would need to be defined as part of talks on the new treaty.
On Monday in Busan, she underlined that the UN resolution underpinning the talks should be a “guiding star”. The resolution indicated that the treaty would need to address “the full life cycle of plastics” – meaning from production through to consumption and waste.
UNEP executive director Inger Andersen at the opening plenary of the INC-5 talks in Busan, South Korea, where countries are set to reach an agreement on tackling plastic pollution. (Photo: IISD/ENB – Kiara Worth)
But a group of fossil-fuel producing nations, primarily led by Saudi Arabia, Russia and Iran, have been resisting any push to include production cuts, arguing that the treaty should only focus on demand-side measures like recycling.
Nearly all plastics are derived from oil and gas and, as the world gradually starts to wean itself off fossil fuels for energy, countries and companies that profit from carbon-based fuels view an expected ramp-up in plastic production as a lifeline for their industry.
David Azoulay, managing attorney for the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), told Climate Home that countries opposed to production curbs are trying to prevent any constraints from being imposed on their ability to extract fossil fuels.
“To be a little blunt, they want to ensure that this instrument either never sees the lights of day, or if it does, is as inefficient as the climate instruments that they have managed to block and paralyse for the past three decades,” he added.
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Delaying tactics
At a plenary session on Monday morning, Andersen pleaded with delegates to “negotiate in good faith” and not to “lower the bar so that the treaty becomes meaningless”.
The chair, Vayas Valdivieso, said the clock was ticking and that “every minute” was needed to advance in Busan. Day one did not send a positive signal, however, as the plenary ran into overtime to sort out fraught procedural matters.
Fossil fuel-producing emerging economies first warned their counterparts against triggering a rule that allows for two-thirds majority voting when negotiators fail to reach agreements by consensus. “We cannot leave anyone behind,” said Saudi Arabia’s representative. “Consensus will ensure global ownership.”
Then the focus shifted to extensive discussions over which document should be used as the basis for discussions.
The latest round of negotiations back in April produced a monster-sized “compilation text” with countries’ disparate views nestled between nearly 3,700 brackets. In an attempt to make the negotiations more practical, Vayas Valdivieso took matters into his own hands ahead of the Busan summit and produced a more streamlined text with proposals on areas of convergence and suggestions on how to move things along.
Most countries were happy to proceed on that basis with Rwanda – the co-chair of the 68-nation-strong “high ambition coalition” – asking delegates to “get down to business” and the United States saying “we cannot continue to move in circles”.
But Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran and Kuwait – on behalf of the so-called “like-minded” countries – lined up one after the other to say they could not accept the chair’s proposal in its current form.
After a three-hour suspension, a compromise was found. The chair’s document will be used as a “starting point” to facilitate discussions, while the “compilation text” remains on the table as a source countries can refer to in negotiations. By then the sun had long set in Busan and substantive negotiations hadn’t moved forward an inch.
CIEL’s Azoulay told Climate Home that what happened at Monday’s plenary session was part “muscle-flexing” and part “time-wasting” from the fossil fuel-producing bloc of nations set against plastic production cuts.
Countries that profess to be ambitious will need to “stand firm” when similar tactics appear again in the negotiating rooms, he added.
Having settled the ground rules, diplomats will now start negotiating behind-closed-doors in four separate groups each focusing on a cluster of issues at the heart of the treaty.
(Reporting by Matteo Civillini; editing by Megan Rowling and Joe Lo)