Federal Climate Change Minister Senator Sherry Rehman said Wednesday that international conventions on risk management should assess and guide the capabilities of authorized countries to recycle hazardous materials.

ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint/Pakistan Point News – June 1, 2022): Federal Climate Change Minister Senator Sherry Rehman said on Wednesday that international conventions on risk management should assess and guide the capabilities of authorized countries to recycle hazardous materials.

The Minister was speaking during her participation in the bilateral meetings on climate and forests and the high-level segments of the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the Basel, Rotterdam and Stockholm conventions at the Stockholm +50 international meeting which will be held in Sweden from June 1 to 3.

Sherry said waste management is one of the challenges that shouldn’t require a moral imperative, because people who just clean up their backyards in a national and local sense don’t need a lot of motivation.

“It impacts human health, the food we eat, the water we drink and the air we breathe, which is the triple crisis we face,” she said.

In short, National Action Plans (NAPs) need to be better aligned with these three conventions, which can only be done if the world does not deal with the problem in sectoral silos, she stressed.

Sherry added that the world needed to move out of global, national, provincial, municipal and institutional silos, adding, “We address many of our problems and existential issues in boxes, even in one country there is a federation that tackles to a major crisis, including pollution, waste management and hazardous waste as part of a linear bragging effort.” The minister also posed a relevant question to the forum that she said climate advocates could answer: “When you take prior authorization to transport hazardous materials to a country that seeks or is able to recycle. Is it ensured at ground level that either country has the capacity to handle the complete recycling process?” She told the forum that South Asian economies and especially Pakistan were true masters of recycling as they didn’t want to waste anything due to their limited resources. “The poor always have a second, third and fourth life for every product. They want to reinvent not because they can, but rather because they can’t afford to buy new or replace old ones. This is why our lives are less carbon intensive,” she noted.

The minister, while introspecting the process of transferring hazardous waste to less developed economies, asked if countries’ capacities were assessed for recycling or were they simply left to rot in landfills, like many of them. they did, which posed a risk to human civilization and water.

She also questioned the use of these conventions to develop NAPs as they were useful for governments that are distracted due to multiple other crises for relevant strategies.

She mentioned that Pakistan has become one of the hottest places on earth, with its geographical location reaching the hottest urban dwelling temperatures in the past three years. “This year it crossed 51 degrees Celsius, which is completely uninhabitable. We will also face a water shortage by 2025. We have the largest or almost glacial mountains outside the region. fleece that are melting faster due to an unprecedented heat wave.” She said the country was stunned by the recent occurrences of flash floods, droughts which recurrently occurred while half of the country was under drought, desertification, aridity and food security, as well as the mango products it exported.

She said the world, especially developing countries, were looking at these conventions to develop NAPs which then guided them and their governments to create synergies between the three crises of pollution, biodiversity and the crisis. climatic.

She urged the forum to realize that Pakistan was a developing country that did not have huge resources and technologies.

“What’s happening is the shifting of responsibility to other communities, especially in riverine cultures. River pollution will flow down the watercourse where the annual global dumping of plastics and litter finds its way, not to recycle the rivers instead.” 30% of global industrial waste is recycled and the rest goes to oceans and landfills, she said.

“90% of our plastic bags end up in our oceans, damaging marine life and ultimately human health. They not only damage our coastlines and coral reefs, but they poison marine life with products very harmful chemicals like mercury,” she said.