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Small island developing states: Forging a position on plastics [1]

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Date: 2024-11 

SIDS are a crucial stakeholder in current efforts to forge an international plastics treaty. However, emerging from the second meeting of the intergovernmental negotiating committee (INC-2) in Paris in June 2023, there was a sense of frustration among the SIDS delegation. “There had been a high expectation of spending more time discussing the substantive issues which was the options paper that many of the countries prepared to respond to ahead of time. This paper was agreed upon at the first INC and contains the options for elements towards a legally binding international agreement regarding the life cycle of plastics,” according to Safiya Sawney, ocean and climate policy expert from the Caribbean SIDS of Grenada.

“We did not have the time to really get into the substance as much as we would have preferred. We need quite a bit of time to really understand what it is that we’re negotiating and how that impacts us. We have not been able to come together as SIDS to understand how best to represent our needs and our priorities within the negotiation,” she told Back to Blue.

The SIDS economies are centred around fishing or tourism, both of which are negatively impacted by plastic pollution: beaches dirtied by plastic waste are unattractive to tourists and can damage fish and boats. In Saint Lucia, for example, the direct costs of marine plastic waste to fisheries and tourism was estimated at between US$654,389 and US$1,356,666 in 2019 alone. For SIDS, the knock on effects extend to job and revenue creation in related critical sectors.

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[1] Url: https://backtoblueinitiative.com/small-island-developing-states-forging-a-position-on-plastics/

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