Despite growing evidence of harm, negotiations for a plastics treaty collapsed this month. Earth Commissioner Miriam Diamond reflects on what this means for ecosystems, human health, and the fight to curb plastic pollution.
Plastic pollution is a defining environmental crisis of our time. From Mount Everest to the Mariana Trench, it can be found just about everywhere, even inside our bodies.
That’s why the Earth Commission is working to define a Safe and Just boundary for novel entities, chemical compounds and other substances created by humans that are new to the Earth system, such as plastics, as well as naturally occurring chemicals for which humans have changed their abundance.
In 2022, countries committed to negotiating a legally binding global treaty to curb plastic pollution. Yet despite five rounds of talks and mounting urgency, governments remain divided on the path forward.
In this blog post, Commissioner Miriam Diamond, who co-leads the team of researchers working on novel entities, unpacks the collapse of the most recent negotiations in Geneva and what it reveals about the struggle to rein in plastics at their source.