Concern rises over lack of progress as plastics treaty talks restart

The upcoming round of plastics treaty talks in Canada in late April may not yet be a make-or-break moment, but some see it as crucial for determining how successful — or not — any agreement will ultimately be.

With three rounds of talks done and only two more planned, including a seven-day round in Ottawa starting April 23, observers are pointing to a lack of common ground in many areas, including policies for extended producer responsibility and chemicals of concern in plastics.

Earlier rounds of talks have been marred by sharp disagreements among countries over the ambition of the treaty and, importantly, how nations will make decisions, either by voting or consensus.

"There's definitely a broad concern over where things are," said Felipe E. Victoria, senior manager for international plastics policy at Washington-based Ocean Conservancy and a former Spanish diplomat. "Most of the people involved in the negotiations either from the stakeholder side or the member state side would have thought that we would have been further along the process."

As the talks move toward the fourth meeting of what's called the intergovernmental negotiating committee, or INC, optimistic voices argue that countries are prepared to move toward more specifics, a significant advancement from when the talks started in late 2022.

But others are warning that the plastics treaty risks falling victim to the same decision-making by consensus process they say has thwarted the Paris climate agreement.

Carroll Muffett, president and CEO of the Washington-based Center for International Environmental Law, said requiring consensus in climate talks has meant three decades of delay in addressing fossil fuel pollution and creating financing mechanisms for poor countries.

"One of the most fundamental things it has taught us through 30 long years is consensus is a direct route to inertia, to bogged-down processes, to endless negotiations that lead to a very limited outcome," Muffett said on an April 11 webinar to discuss the Canada round.

Instead, CIEL wants the plastics treaty to follow a model like the Montreal Protocol on ozone-depleting substances, which seeks consensus among countries but has procedures that allow for voting.

Previously, CIEL negotiators blamed a coalition of major oil-producing nations including Iran and Saudi Arabia for trying to water down the plastics talks, and Muffett told the webinar a small number of countries want the treaty to use consensus decision-making.

But he said there's growing frustration among other nations that don't want to rely only on consensus to make decisions.

"As we head into the next phase of negotiations, I don't think that anybody expects that this can be fully addressed at Ottawa," he said. "But what is clear is that there is growing public interest, a growing demand from states, to break open the bottlenecks that consensus is forcing us into and really begin addressing these challenges in more fundamental ways."

Stalemates at the last INC round, in Kenya in November 2023, meant that countries could not even agree to move ahead on holding formal technical talks, called intersessionals, between Kenya and Canada to try to work out differences.

"Some people might even say that we have wasted a few months … from last November to this past April, where we could have done a lot of great work advancing on compromise and finding common ground amongst many of the options," said Ocean Conservancy's Victoria.

Other groups, including the International Council of Chemical Associations, said they hope the INC 4 in Canada can find compromise and urged countries to agree on important intersessional work ahead of the fifth and final negotiating session planned for South Korea in November.

"We're hopeful that INC 4 will provide an opportunity for governments to identify areas of consensus and areas of potential agreement and areas of intersessional work building the momentum toward the INC 5," said Stewart Harris, a treaty negotiator for the American Chemistry Council, speaking on behalf of the ICCA on a March 27 United Nations webinar.

Alexis Jackson, associate director of the California oceans program for the Nature Conservancy, said countries should determine what detailed work must be done within INC negotiations this year and what could be done in implementation meetings after the treaty is done.

"I do think it is possible to still land in a place of ambition, but we have to be more organized, more streamlined and think about what is critical now at this juncture and what can continue to be addressed in the implementation process," Jackson said.

Anja Brandon, Ocean Conservancy's associate director of U.S. plastics policy, said it's important for the treaty to include annexes and other provisions allowing for flexibility in those future implementation sessions, called conference of party meetings.

"Getting to a completed treaty is the equivalent of getting to the 50-yard line; really it's what you do after that," she said. "INC 5 is not going to be the end of the road."

Some countries and groups also face another possible motivation for wanting to wrap up talks at the end of this year: 2024 elections in the U.S. and other countries.

At a briefing for reporters, Ocean Conservancy officials noted election concerns while cautioning against making predictions and saying they want to remain optimistic that countries would find common ground.

Victoria said countries seem focused on completing the talks this year, under the time frame established by the United Nations Environment Assembly in 2022, rather than extending additional INC sessions into next year.

But Brandon also noted concerns about a potential second term for former President Donald Trump.

"Based on past examples under a Trump administration and their treatment of other multilateral environmental agreements, I'm thinking in particular about the Paris climate accord, we certainly have concerns about what would happen with the implementation of a plastics treaty," she said.

Brandon, who previously worked as a science fellow for Oregon Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley, said state and local governments would continue working on plastics policy, even if a second Trump administration takes a different approach to the treaty.

"We've also seen great examples of subnational folks stepping up and taking on issues should something like that happen," Brandon said. "We saw this, again under the previous administration, states, cities, counties around the country stepped up and said it doesn't matter what the U.S. as a whole is doing; we're going to step up and do more ourselves."