‘Turn off the tap on plastic,’ UN Chief declares amid debate over new global treaty

December 4, 2022 / activist360

*Photo by Naja Bertolt Jensen on Unsplash*

“Plastics are fossil fuels in another form,” said U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, “and pose a serious threat to human rights, the climate, and biodiversity.”

Hours before the first round of negotiations to advance a global plastics treaty concluded Friday in Punta Del Este, Uruguay, the leader of the United Nations implored countries “to look beyond waste and turn off the tap on plastic.”

“Plastics are fossil fuels in another form,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres tweeted, “and pose a serious threat to human rights, the climate, and biodiversity.”

Guterres’ comments elevated the demands of civil society organizations, scientists, and other advocates fighting for robust, legally binding rules to confront the full lifecycle impacts of the plastic pollution crisis. A coalition of more than 100 groups has called for limiting the ever-growing production and consumption of plastic and holding corporations accountable for the ecological and public health harms caused by manufacturing an endless stream of toxic single-use items.

Petrochemical industry representatives who attended the first intergovernmental negotiating committee meeting (INC-1) for a global plastics treaty, by contrast, attempted to bolster fossil fuel-friendly governments’ efforts to slow the pace of talks—convened by the U.N. Environment Program and set to continue off-and-on through 2024—and weaken proposals for action.

In the wake of this week’s opening round of debate, the Break Free From Plastic (BFFP) alliance launched a petition outlining what it calls the “essential elements” of a multilateral environmental agreement capable of “reversing the tide of plastic pollution and contributing to the end of the triple planetary crises of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution.”

According to experts associated with BFFP, an effective global plastics treaty must include the following:

Significant, progressive, and mandatory targets to cap and dramatically reduce virgin plastic production;
Legally binding, time-bound, and ambitious targets to implement and scale up reuse, refill, and alternative product delivery systems;
A just transition to safer and more sustainable livelihoods for workers and communities across the plastics supply chain; and
Provisions that hold polluting corporations and plastic-producing countries accountable.

BFFP member Graham Forbes, head of the Global Plastic Project at Greenpeace USA, said in a statement that “we cannot let oil-producing countries, at the behest of Big Oil and petrochemical companies, dominate and slow down the treaty discussions and weaken its ambition.”

“If the plastics industry has its way, plastic production could double within the next 10-15 years, and triple by 2050—with catastrophic impacts on our planet and its people,” said Forbes. “The High Ambition Coalition must show leadership by pushing the negotiations forward and calling for more ambitious measures which protect our health, our climate, and our communities from the plastics crisis.”

A global plastics treaty, Forbes added, represents “a major opportunity to finally end the age of plastic, and governments should not let this go to waste. We demand that world leaders deliver a strong and ambitious treaty that will dramatically reduce plastic production and use, open inclusive and justice-centered discussions, and ensure that the next INCs are free from industry interference.”

Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) senior attorney Giulia Carlini pointed out that profit-maximizing corporations “have deliberately manufactured doubt about the health impacts” of their products in previous treaties that address health issues, such as the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.

“There is strong scientific consensus that plastics-associated chemicals cause diseases,” Carlini continued. “If the treaty is to succeed in meeting its health objectives, it will be essential to set strict conflict-of-interest policies going forward.”

After more than 145 governments expressed support this week for developing a pact with specific and shared international standards—which could include a ban on single-use items and requirements to ensure reuse and circularity—Eirik Lindebjerg, global plastics policy lead at the World Wildlife Fund, said that “the momentum demonstrated at these negotiations is a promising sign that we will get a truly ambitious treaty with effective global measures to stop plastic pollution” by 2024.

“It has been a very important week in the history of protecting the environment and people,” said Lindebjerg. “This week we saw an encouraging level of agreement, both in formal and informal spaces, on the urgency of seeking a joint solution to this major threat to nature and communities, and to do so in a comprehensive, effective, inclusive, and science-based manner.”

However, he warned, “this is just the first step towards a legally binding global treaty that can help us stop plastic pollution.”

“The next stage of negotiations will be more challenging, as countries must agree on the technical measures and rules,” said Lindebjerg. “Although in the minority, there are also some powerful opponents of global rules and standards, which risk potentially weakening obligations on countries to take action. The push for an ambitious global plastics treaty has only just begun.”

“Millions of people around the world, whose livelihoods and environments are affected by plastic, have their eyes on these negotiations,” he added. “Now negotiators must harness this momentum to push for specific rules to be negotiated as part of the treaty.”

Lindebjerg’s assessment was shared by other summit delegates.

“Negotiations at INC-1 this week demonstrated that the majority of countries are ready to take urgent action to confront the plastics crisis, including by addressing the plastic production that drives that crisis,” said CIEL president Carroll Muffett. “Sadly, it also proved that plastic producers and their allies are equally committed to slowing progress and weakening ambition—from the U.S. insistence that the plastic treaty replicate the weaknesses of the Paris agreement, to last-minute maneuvers by other fossil fuel and petrochemical states to block countries’ ability to vote on difficult issues.”

“Despite these maneuvers, the world made real progress in Punta Del Este,” said Muffett. Robust “global commitments and binding targets remain both necessary and achievable,” she added, but securing them will require “the U.S. and other countries join the rest of the world in pairing claims of high ambition with the policies that high ambition demands.”

While this week marked the first time that governments have met to hash out global-scale regulations to restrict plastic production, the United States and the United Kingdom—the world’s biggest per-capita plastic polluters—have so far refused to join an international treaty to curb the amount of plastic waste destined for landfills and habitats, though both countries are reportedly now open to the idea.

“Over this week, we have seen multiple interventions raising whether the future treaty will be based on national action plans, or global, mandatory targets,” said CIEL senior attorney Andrés Del Castillo. “We know that this will be top of the agenda at INC-2. The failure of countries to fulfill their emissions reduction plans under the Paris agreement shows that we cannot afford another treaty that centers on the whims of its leaders.”

The next session of the conference aimed at creating a global plastics treaty is set to take place in Paris in May 2023.

This is how Japanese youth view climate change today

November 27, 2022 / activist360

By Naoko Kutty, World Economic Forum

Pressure to act on the climate crisis is building among Japanese youth.
They are beginning to exert influence domestically and at international forums like COP27.
Japan’s younger generation must be fully integrated into climate policy-making decisions.
Read the blog in Japanese here.

As the world becomes increasingly aware of climate change, there is growing interest in sustainability, especially among the younger generation who will live to face the challenges in the next part of the 21st century. A survey of 6,800 consumers aged 15-69 in Japan about attitudes toward sustainability found that many consumers of all generations are open to paying a premium for sustainable products. What is noteworthy, however, is the flexibility on price. Generation Z have the highest tolerance for paying more, with 20% that would consider paying double – which is 2.5 to 10 times more than other generations.

Japanese about attitudes paying a premium for sustainable products.

Japanese youth mobilizing

Youth activism to demand more concrete action on climate change from the government and business is also gaining momentum. Youth Climate Conference Japan, which provides a forum for young people to talk about the climate crisis, has exchanged views with the government, major political parties, Japan Business Foundation, and has made the voices of young people visible in the form of policy proposals such as the regulation of plastic packaging and compulsory emissions labelling on food by 2025. The fact that the new generation will be the most affected by climate change, yet policy decision-makers are much older, creates a huge gap in society’s ability to address the crisis, according to one of the steering members of Youth Climate Conference Japan.

In addition, Global Climate Action, in which young people from around the world appealed for stronger measures against global warming, was organized around Japan to coincide with the UN General Assembly in September, with about 400 young people participating in demonstrations in the streets. At this protest, the first youth climate one in three years due to the spread of COVID-19, young people expressed their urgent desire to address the climate crisis, saying: “It is now or never to stop climate change” and “We can reshape our future.” One university student who is part of the Fridays For Future‘s movement in Japan, which was inspired to take action by Greta Thunberg’s school strike in Sweden, said she hopes the Japanese government will take more concrete action against its stance of maintaining coal-fired power production.

Next-generation leaders at COP27

With young people around the world speaking out against climate change more than ever before, global youth are taking a seat at COP27 in Egypt for the first time ever. Designed to amplify children and youth voices within global climate policy-making, the COP27 Children and Youth Pavilion in Egypt is positioned front and centre in the Blue Zone and is entirely led by young people.

Japanese high school and university students also participated in COP27. Suzuka Nakamura and Daiki Yamamoto, who have also been involved in Fridays For Future, are making a film at the conference, saying: “We now want to not only appeal, but also listen to people from various standpoints and send out messages.” The two students, who have continued to raise their voices on the streets and in the National Diet, admit that: “We feel weighed down by the fact that we were expected to play a role in solving climate change simply because we are young.” Their new project, entitled record 1.5, is a documentary that will chronicle the voices and actions of young people, environmental activists and local people from around the world gathering at COP27. Through these recordings, they hope to share the sense of urgency that those affected by climate change victims have for creating a foundation for dialogue toward essential solutions.

Involving children and youth in decision-making

As our planet faces a critical situation due to climate change, the world needs to take seriously the fact that young people are speaking out and taking action to challenge adults’ response to climate change.

Japan is on the path to carbon neutrality, with an interim goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 46% compared to 2013 levels by 2030. According to the Ministry of the Environment and the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, 797 local governments and more than 200 companies have declared their commitment to net zero emissions by 2050, and the public and private sectors are working together to achieve this goal. As the voices of children and youth are incorporated into these efforts, change will accelerate. Given that young people are powerful agents of change, it is hoped that a system will soon be in place to enable their participation in all decision-making processes related to climate change.

Ants – with their wise farming practices and efficient navigation techniques – could inspire solutions for some human problems

November 20, 2022 / activist360

By Scott Solomon, The Conversation

King Solomon may have gained some of his famed wisdom from an unlikely source – ants.

According to a Jewish legend, Solomon conversed with a clever ant queen that confronted his pride, making quite an impression on the Israelite king. In the biblical book of Proverbs (6:6-8), Solomon shares this advice with his son: “Look to the ant, thou sluggard, consider her ways and be wise. Which having no guide, overseer, or ruler, provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest.”

While I can’t claim any familial connection to King Solomon, despite sharing his name, I’ve long admired the wisdom of ants and have spent over 20 years studying their ecology, evolution and behaviors. While the notion that ants may offer lessons for humans has certainly been around for a while, there may be new wisdom to gain from what scientists have learned about their biology.

Ants have evolved highly complex social organizations.

Lessons from ant agriculture

As a researcher, I’m especially intrigued by fungus-growing ants, a group of 248 species that cultivate fungi as their main source of food. They include 79 species of leafcutter ants, which grow their fungal gardens with freshly cut leaves they carry into their enormous underground nests. I’ve excavated hundreds of leafcutter ant nests from Texas to Argentina as part of the scientific effort to understand how these ants coevolved with their fungal crops.

Much like human farmers, each species of fungus-growing ant is very particular about the type of crops they cultivate. Most varieties descend from a type of fungus that the ancestors of fungus-growing ants began growing some 55 million to 65 million years ago. Some of these fungi became domesticated and are now unable to survive on their own without their insect farmers, much like some human crops such as maize.

Ants started farming tens of millions of years before humans.

Ant farmers face many of the same challenges human farmers do, including the threat of pests. A parasite called Escovopsis can devastate ant gardens, causing the ants to starve. Likewise in human agriculture, pest outbreaks have contributed to disasters like the Irish Potato Famine, the 1970 corn blight and the current threat to bananas.

Since the 1950s, human agriculture has become industrialized and relies on monoculture, or growing large amounts of the same variety of crop in a single place. Yet monoculture makes crops more vulnerable to pests because it is easier to destroy an entire field of genetically identical plants than a more diverse one.

Industrial agriculture has looked to chemical pesticides as a partial solution, turning agricultural pest management into a billion-dollar industry. The trouble with this approach is that pests can evolve new ways to get around pesticides faster than researchers can develop more effective chemicals. It’s an arms race – and the pests have the upper hand.

Ants also grow their crops in monoculture and at a similar scale – after all, a leafcutter ant nest can be home to 5 million ants, all of which feed on the fungi in their underground gardens. They, too, use a pesticide to control Escovopsis and other pests.

Yet, their approach to pesticide use differs from humans’ in one important way. Ant pesticides are produced by bacteria they allow to grow in their nests, and in some cases even on their bodies. Keeping bacteria as a living culture allows the microbes to adapt in real time to evolutionary changes in the pests. In the arms race between pests and farmers, farming ants have discovered that live bacteria can serve as pharmaceutical factories that can keep up with ever-changing pests.

Whereas recent developments in agricultural pest management have focused on genetically engineering crop plants to produce their own pesticides, the lesson from 55 million years of ant agriculture is to leverage living microorganisms to make useful products. Researchers are currently experimenting with applying live bacteria to crop plants to determine if they are effective at producing pesticides that can evolve in real time along with pests.

Improving transportation

Ants can also offer practical lessons in the realm of transportation.

Ants are notoriously good at quickly locating food, whether it’s a dead insect on a forest floor or some crumbs in your kitchen. They do this by leaving a trail of pheromones – chemicals with a distinctive smell ants use to guide their nest mates to food. The shortest route to a destination will accumulate the most pheromone because more ants will have traveled back and forth along it in a given amount of time.

In the 1990s, computer scientists developed a class of algorithms modeled after ant behavior that are very effective at finding the shortest path between two or more locations. Like with real ants, the shortest route to a destination will accumulate the most virtual pheromone because more virtual ants will have traveled along it in a given amount of time. Engineers have used this simple but effective approach to design telecommunication networks and map delivery routes.

Not only are ants good at finding the shortest route from their nests to a source of food, thousands of ants are capable of traveling along these routes without causing traffic jams. I recently began collaborating with physicist Oscar Andrey Herrera-Sancho to study how leafcutter ants maintain such a steady flow along their foraging paths without the slowdowns typical of crowded human sidewalks and highways.

We are using cameras to track how each individual ant responds to artificial obstacles placed on their foraging trails. Our hope is that by getting a better understanding of the rules ants use to respond to both obstacles and the movement of other ants, we can develop algorithms that can eventually help program self-driving cars that never get stuck in traffic.

Look to the ant

To be fair, there are plenty of ways ants are far from perfect role models. After all, some ant species are known for indiscriminate killing, and others for enslaving babies.

But the fact is that ants remind us of ourselves – or the way we might like to imagine ourselves – in many ways. They live in complex societies with division of labor. They cooperate to raise their young. And they accomplish remarkable engineering feats – like building structures with air funnels that can house millions – all without blueprints or a leader. Did I mention their societies are run entirely by females?

There is still a lot to learn about ants. For example, researchers still don’t fully understand how an ant larva develops into either a queen – a female with wings that can live for 20 years and lay millions of eggs – or a worker – a wingless, often sterile female that lives for less than a year and performs all the other jobs in the colony. What’s more, scientists are constantly discovering new species – 167 new ant species were described in 2021 alone, bringing the total to more than 15,980.

By considering ants and their many fascinating ways, there’s plenty of wisdom to be gained.