The second session of the ad hoc Open-Ended Working Group (OEWG-2) on the Science-Policy Panel on Chemicals, Waste and Pollution Prevention is taking place in Nairobi, Kenya, from December 11 to December 15, 2023. Three IPCP Board Members are in attendance and are providing their daily summaries.
Today the Science & Technology Major Group made plans to organize a group open to scientists that would focus on the development of the SPP from OEWG-2 to OEWG-3 and on to the actual establishment of the SPP by an intergovernmental meeting after OEWG-3, and possibly also continue to work on a longer-term basis to provide input to the SPP’s work when it is established.
In the morning plenary, contact groups (i) and (ii) reported back to the plenary and asked for more time to continue their work on conflict of interest, operational principles, capacity building, and institutional arrangements. The plenary decided to provide more time for this work, but there were also voices pointing out that progress was rather slow and there was only today (Thursday) left for contact-group work while many unresolved questions remained in all the in-session documents (see tab “in-session documents” on the , tab “Pre-session documents”. In the Annex to this document, paragraph 17, which acknowledges the participation of major groups and stakeholders, remains in the document, but it was put into brackets, which means that it is not agreed on and will have to be discussed again at OEWG-3. Overall, the group was able to complete its work on section C (institutional arrangements) and D (evaluation of operational effectiveness and impact of the panel) of the document by including all of the interventions of the member states with some consensus, but with many remaining interventions that have not been resolved. The secretariat will provide a revised set of the document as early as possible for member states and stakeholders to review more carefully.
Contact group 3 reviewed a working structure of the SPP and also reviewed criteria for requests made to the SPP for assessments or other products to be prepared by the SPP.
Overall, it was again a very long day of hard work by delegates and facilitators. A lesson learned is that the countries of the world have widely diverging views on many important aspects of chemicals policy and chemicals management.
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Longer daily reports prepared by the International Institute for Sustainable Development, Earth Negotiations Bulletin are available at: https://enb.iisd.org/oewg2-science-policy-panel-contribute-sound-management-chemicals-waste-prevent-pollution