Meetings of the UN's conventions on chemicals and waste will be held online in June as a consequence of the international travel restrictions and confinement measures in place to contain the coronavirus Covid-19 pandemic, according to the convention secretariat's executive secretary Rolph Payet.
The bureau meetings for the Stockholm, Basel and Rotterdam Conventions, which were set to be held in June in Geneva, should see a relatively smooth transition online, Dr Payet told Chemical Watch, because there are relatively few participants. Each bureau is a five-to-ten-person committee elected from delegates to the convention, whose task in June will be to prepare for the next conference of parties (COP) in July 2021.
But the Basel Convention on international trade and disposal of hazardous waste's open-ended working group (OEWG), due to meet in Geneva from 22 to 25 June, will be more difficult to host online. Between 200 and 300 people usually attend OEWG meetings, Dr Payet said.
It poses a number of logistical, technical and legal challenges, such as scheduling – the Basel Convention has 187 parties, covering nearly every country and time zone in the world – and finding an IT platform that allows audio or video conversations at reasonable bandwidth, as well as the sharing of documents, and requiring a function for decision making.
The meeting agenda includes items addressing a number of important technical guidelines, such as:
- the environmentally sound management of waste containing POPs or mercury;
- the identification and environmentally sound management of plastic waste;
- the transboundary movement of used electrical and electronic equipment and waste; and
- whether guidelines on environmentally sound management of waste lead-acid batteries need to be updated.
The OEWG will also discuss waste containing nanomaterials, and plastic waste on which the Basel Convention has increased its work recently. Last year, parties adopted an amendment that requires exporting countries to receive prior informed consent (Pic) from receiving countries before they export any plastics that are not clean, sorted and intended for recycling. This will come into effect in January 2021.
The online OEWG will not focus on revising the text of documents, but on "process-oriented" decisions to "enable as much progress as possible in an inclusive manner," according to the Basel Convention's website.
The decision to host the meeting online – instead of cancelling or postponing until later in the year – was made with a view to mitigating as much as possible the negative impact of the pandemic on progress under the Basel Convention, according to Dr Payet. He added that there is an expected lack of meeting venues available in the second half of the year, and that there are decisions that need to be made before all parties meet in July next year.
"We just cannot shift all this to the next COP, there is work that needs to be done in between," he said.
This article was amended on 13 May 2020 to clarify that 200-300 people attend the OEWG meetings, not 800-1,000.
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