CONCEPT NOTE FOR THE UNITED NATIONS DEVELOPMENT ACCOUNT
i. Title: Chemicals and Waste in the 2030 Agenda - Building capacity in SDG follow-up and review in developing countries[1] to minimize chemicals and waste risks across sectors
ii. Implementing entity and UN Secretariat partners:
Joint implementation by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO), the International Maritime Organization (IMO), the World Health Organization (WHO), UN-Habitat, and relevant secretariats of multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs), notably the Basel, Rotterdam, Stockholm and Minamata Conventions.
iii. Background
The volume of chemicals manufactured and used continues to grow, with a shift in production from highly industrialized countries towards developing countries and countries with economies in transition. Increased international co-operation is needed to eliminate or reduce the use of toxic chemicals, to promote the development and adoption of safer alternatives, and to build capacity for regulation and management at every stage of the lifecycle of chemicals, including disposal. It is also important that existing national laws and international agreements for sound chemicals management be fully implemented. Public availability of adequate information about chemicals – including their multi-faceted impacts on health and the environment – is essential to support these efforts.
While there is a need to mainstream sound chemicals and waste management into national public health, labour, social and economic development programmes, the data and information available to do so is often lacking. WHO’s recently published report, “Preventing disease through healthy environments: a global assessment of the burden of disease from environmental risks”, reveals that nearly 1 in 4 of total global deaths in 2012 resulted from living or working in unhealthy environments. Of the 12.6 million deaths each year, as much as 8.2 million of these deaths are due to non-communicable diseases, including those associated with chemicals such as cancers and neurological disorders.This global number is likely an underestimate of the real burden, as the chemicals analysis is often limited to industrial and agricultural chemicals and chemicals involved in acute poisoning. To meet the internationally agreed goal to produce and use chemicals in ways that minimize significant adverse impacts on human health and the environment by 2020, we urgently need to increase our knowledge of chemicals. This is particularly relevant as global chemicals production is expected to increase in the next 25 years.
Sound management of chemicals and wastes is essential for sustainable development through its linkages with health (SDG 3), agriculture and food safety (SDG 2, 15), industrialization and economic growth (SDG 8), poverty reduction (SDG 1, 11), gender (SDG 4), water (SDG 6) and air pollution (SDG 13), and sustainable consumption and production (SDG 12). Among many other benefits, chemicals can help boost agricultural production, make water safe to drink and treat disease. However, they may also present risks to human health and the environment at every stage of their lifecycle, from production and use to storage, transport and disposal. So while there is not one specific SDG devoted to chemicals and waste, most sustainable development goals have targets and indicators that point to the need for their safe management to achieve the goals. Sound management of chemicals and wastes provides therefore solutions not only to environmental concerns but also social and economic issues. Integrating and coordinating regional, international and intergovernmental chemical and waste management programmes will thus promote synergies and increase effectiveness.
Reporting to the MEAs is a major source of data and information relevant to the follow-up and review of the environmental dimension of the 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development. Therefore, it is important to link the different reporting commitments related to chemicals and waste that tie data currently collected through the various international instruments with the SDG progress reporting. Currently, governments face however significant challenges in reporting to the chemicals and waste related MEAs due to lack of capacity, combined with a weak knowledge base and lack of effective compliance mechanisms. In addition, not all aspects covered in the SDGs are reflected in the MEAs (e.g. municipal waste in SDG target 11.6).
Other challenges relate to data availability and the quality of data, including the lack of harmonized definitions leading to data being heavily skewed as well as lack of data verification. In most developing countries, a large share of resource recovery from waste is performed in the informal sector, which makes it very difficult to measure and manage – the issue has become how to improve and formalize these sectors, in particular as jurisdiction falls among many sectors, and it also is a significant source of employment for poor and unskilled labour.
Labour and occupational health remains as a significant challenge as well. Nearly all workers are potentially exposed to some sort of chemical hazard because of the ubiquitous use of chemicals in every type of industry, ranging from mining, welding, mechanical and manufacturing work, to office work and other occupations. While significant advances have been made in occupational safety and health globally, workers around the world still face unhealthy and unsafe working conditions. Accidents resulting in exposure as well as chronic health effects from long‐term exposure to lower levels remain a global concern. Safety of people engaged in economic activities where chemical exposures are significant (e.g., waste recycling, agriculture, small‐scale and artisanal mining, lead acid battery recycling, etc.) need to be ensured without compromising employment opportunities. However, monitoring of exposure to hazardous substances is limited.
Although a number of chemicals are covered under the existing legal instruments, there is a large amount of chemicals and wastes released in the environment that are not being tracked and to which the population at large is exposed through products and releases to the environment, including Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) and endocrine disrupting chemicals often present in consumer goods. In the development of the SDG global indicator framework, there was broad agreement that the indicators should therefore be designed to be used by policymakers to better understand the impact of not managing chemicals safely.
Mainstreaming chemicals and waste management under the different domains or sectors (e.g. health, agriculture, industrial development) is important to capture the complexity of chemicals control and its relationship with sustainable development. Data and information demonstrating the linkages and identifying trends to inform policy action are essential, but often non-existent or scattered among different institutions. Currently, a framework for ensuring collaboration between Ministries of Environment, National Statistical Offices, Ministries of Finance and Planning, Ministries of Industry, Agriculture or Health, and others is not present in many countries. Especially in the area of chemicals and waste management, such institutional cooperation is however the foundation for the production and use of national environment statistics for the follow-up and review of the SDGs, the reporting to relevant MEAs, and the development of cross-sectorial policy and strategy development on chemicals and waste.
To make optimal decisions on how to protect human health and the environment, governments, industry and the public need more information to support policy making than is currently available to them. This includes information on the amount and types of chemicals used in products, the way chemicals are released from production processes and products throughout their lifecycles, and data on the physicochemical properties, degradability and toxicity of chemicals. For the vast majority of chemicals, this information has either not been generated or is not accessible by the public. This persisting lack of information is a serious obstacle to the assessment and management of chemical risks. While the chemical industry continues to expand and new products are developed, only a small percentage of chemicals on the market have been adequately evaluated for their potential health and environmental effects. For example, experimental data on degradation half-lives, bioaccumulation potential and toxicity are publicly available for only a small fraction of industrial chemicals (<5%).
Assessments provide the basis for understanding the relative contributions of different sources and ranking policy actions that address the most important environmental releases. Despite the significant information gaps that remain, we know much more today about chemicals, including their toxicity, pathways and environmental fate, than a few decades ago. With new technology, increasingly small amounts of chemicals can be detected in the environment. This allows earlier detection and better risk management. However, advances in technology also show that our knowledge is far from complete, as additional contamination issues emerge with advancing analytical methods.
This project aims to strengthen the knowledge base of chemicals and waste and enhance the capacity of selected countries to track progress towards the SDGs related to chemicals and waste across sectors in order to strengthen the evidence base for policy making and stakeholder action. By strengthening the evidence base as well as the science policy interface, the project responds to the need for better information to empower decision makers and stakeholders to take action and support policy making aimed at sound management to minimize risks associated with chemicals and waste.
The project aims to improve the current situation through two streams of work:
1. Global and regional knowledge development, including:
a. Conducting a global review of the status of MEA reporting on chemicals and wastes, including reviewing the current status of MEA reporting, the gaps in MEA reporting and identifying methodological gaps which need to be filled for the compilation of consistent, internationally comparable MEA indicators
b. Establishing an international expert group charged with developing and agreeing on metadata for the MEA indicators which currently require further methodological development. The expert group will consist of national and international chemicals and waste experts with knowledge of statistics, and will build on the existing metadata and methodological work of the Inter-Agency and Expert Group on SDG Indicators (IAEG-SDG), the UN Committee on Environmental Economic Accounting (UNCEEA) and the UN Expert Group on Environmental Statistics
c. Developing training modules and guidelines on data disaggregation, open access data policies, statistical standards and methodologies, including issues related to definitions and verification, and set up twinning arrangements to involve young statisticians
d. Review and enhance the Indicator Reporting and Information Tool developed by UNEP in order to ensure full compliance between the tool and the SDGs and other internationally agreed environmental goals with a focus on those relevant for chemicals and waste
2. National technical assistance, including through:
a. Assisting countries, in consultation with all relevant sectorial ministries and agencies in conducting chemicals and waste statistics assessments. These assessments will analyze the availability, quality and periodicity of data, and data priorities, constraints and needs. These assessments will take into account national priorities in terms of chemicals and wastes, as well as the synergies between the MEA reporting obligations and the relevant SDG targets and indicators
b. Providing assistance, based on the national assessments, to develop a strategy for the development of indicators and improvement of statistics on chemicals and waste. These will be informed by (a) the need for information to develop cross-sectorial chemicals and waste strategies, and (b) allow performance monitoring of national chemicals and waste strategies
c. Assisting countries with the development of a mechanism for improving MEA and SDG reporting, including through the national implementation of the Indicator Reporting and Information Tool developed by UNEP, for assessing data available at the national, regional and global level, and for uploading data into a central data repository
d. Providing countries with advice regarding developing an open access data policy related to disclosure of at least some parts of the information on chemicals use and properties that is currently confidential or only available in a fragmented way, by making information discoverable and providing open access on open platforms, and with the compilation of the information generated in databases such that this information is publicly available in a systematic way.
e. Supporting countries in improving coordination and information sharing, between relevant institutions in the countries, and link countries with relevant subject matter experts who can provide targeted technical capacity support for particular sectorial aspects of the chemicals and waste management and contribute to a global waste outlook
In order to maximize the impact and efficiency of national level interventions, the project will build upon existing national implementation initiatives of the Indicator Reporting and Information Tool developed by UNEP. UNEP Live, UNEP’s open online platform for the integration of data and knowledge relevant to the environment, will serve as the global hub to enhance access and discoverability of international and national data flows generated through the project.
The proposed project will build upon the areas where some progress has been made towards better information provision at the international level and datasets that are already publicly available. Of particular importance is the Globally Harmonized System of Classification and Labelling of Chemicals (GHS), first published in 2003 and updated every two years. GHS addresses the classification of chemicals by types of hazard and proposes harmonized hazard communication elements, including labels and safety data sheets. It aims to ensure that information on physical hazards and toxicity of chemicals will be available to enhance protection of health and the environment during handling, transport and use. The GHS also provides a basis for harmonization of rules and regulations on chemicals at national, regional and worldwide levels. However, it does not include the establishment of a publically accessible database for safety data sheets, nor does it address the need for information about chemicals in products.
At the international level, the MEAs have developed registries whose data can be made more accessible and discoverable through open platforms. In relation to agriculture and food safety, FAO and WHO jointly service the Codex Alimentarius or “Food Code” established in 1963 to develop harmonized food standards, protect consumer health and promote fair practices in food trade. WHO implements the Global Environment Monitoring System for food (GEMS/Food) with a network of Collaborating Centers in order to inform stakeholders on levels and trends of contaminants in food and their significance with regard to human exposure, public health and trade. UNEP, with the support of GEF, is monitoring POPs to identify changes in time and assess POPs regional and global transport. Mercury is being monitored as well in biotic and abiotic samples. UNEP also serves as the SAICM secretariat. The Strategic Approach to International Chemicals Management (SAICM) is a policy framework to foster the sound management of chemicals. Chemicals in products with supply chains, endocrine disrupting chemicals and environmental persistent pharmaceutical pollutants have been identified by SAICM as three emerging policy issues.