Amy Youngman is a legal and policy specialist at the campaigning group Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA).The chair's August Aid to Negotiations is being sold as a pragmatic way to rescue the global plastics treaty. However, the text is starting to resemble the architecture of a Paris Agreement-style framework: a patchwork of vague commitments, nationally determined action and reporting, with the hardest substantive decisions left to a future that, my experience following these negotiations tells me, would never arrive.In March 2022, governments adopted UNEA Resolution 5/14 by consensus, launching negotiations for a legally binding international instrument to end plastic pollution. I joined the global plastics treaty process in Paris in 2023, where hopes of drafting a treaty capable of confronting one of the defining environmental and human health threats of our time were first derailed by procedural warfare.
The world doesn’t need a Paris Agreement for plastics
As governments prepare for new talks, ambitious countries must reject a framework that locks in the wrong response to the plastic crisis, before the crisis outpaces diplomacy
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