Case studies from rivers in Australia, Canada, and Vietnam highlight threats to fish populations from toxic chemicals, including from plastics and pesticides
Tuesday, 26 March 2024
A new report released today finds that global fisheries decline, often attributed to overfishing, is highly linked with pollution from toxic chemicals. The report, with three case studies of river ecosystems in Vietnam, Canada, and Australia, reviews the significant harmful effects on fisheries from toxic chemicals and demonstrates that chemicals and other pollutants harm productivity and render fisheries at greater risk of overfishing, with severe consequences for global seafood resources.
IPEN Quick Views: Fourth Session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC-4) to Develop an International Legally Binding Instrument on Plastic Pollution
IPEN offers our warm congratulations to Herlin Hsieh Chen, Secretary-General of the Taiwan Watch Institute as he recently received the 2024 Taiwan Environmental Protection Lifetime Achievement Award.
Herlin Hsieh Chen shared the following award speech, which was translated into English:
How Chemicals and Pollutants Drive Fishery Declines and Ecosystem Collapse
Fishery managers strive for sustainability of fisheries natural resources, but declining fisheries is a global problem. While overfishing continues to be problematic, other significant causes of this decline remain dangerously overlooked.
The evidence and the historic record shows that plastic chemical recycling has failed for decades and will not contribute significantly to resolving the plastics crisis. IPEN members created these images to let delegates to the Plastics Treaty negotiations know that chemical recycling is a myth. At the end of 2023, IPEN announced the contest titled Chemical Recycling & Unicorns = a myth. There were of 31 submissions from 23 Participating Organizations (POs) IPEN is excited to announce the three winners:
14 March 2024, Pasay City/Quezon City. The thriving paint industry in the Philippines marked another milestone with the launch today of duly certified Lead Safe Paint® (LSP®) products at the Philippine World Building and Construction Exposition, or the WORLDBEX 2024, that was graced by government, industry and civil society leaders, as well as by basketball players from the Rain or Shine Elastopainters.
There is wide agreement that the health and environmental impacts of plastics are a global crisis, but many people still have questions about how to solve the plastics problem.
This FAQs answers many of the most common questions around plastics, explaining the basic building blocks of plastics, plastic chemical additives, and how a Plastics Treaty can address the health and environmental threats from toxic chemicals in plastics and promote reductions in plastic production.
New report shows that more than two hundred highly hazardous pesticides prohibited in the EU are still widely used in the developing world
Friday, 01 March 2024
Nairobi-In a historic move for safer food and farming, the U.N. Environment Assembly (UNEA) today called for action by 2035 to eliminate the use of the world’s most toxic pesticides globally. Called highly hazardous pesticides (HHPs), these chemicals are known to cause significant environmental damage and pose serious threats to health. Exposures to HHPs have been linked to cancer, impaired neurodevelopment in children, reproductive health effects, and endocrine disruption, among other serious conditions.
IPEN and PAN have collaborated on efforts to end the use of HHPs around the world for more than a decade. An IPEN report released at UNEA earlier this week outlines 83 projects by public interest groups in 43 low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) focused on ending the use of HHPs and promoting safer farming practices. The analyses in the report were based on the PAN International List of Highly Hazardous Pesticides. The report found that while wealthier nations have banned or regulated most HHPs, the toxic pesticides are still widely used in LMICs, with some countries reporting that almost 70% of all pesticides allowed for use were HHPs.
The call for UNEA action was led by African nations, with Ethiopia taking a leading role. “These highly toxic chemicals continue to threaten our health and the health of millions of people where HHPs are still used,” said Dr. Tadesse Amera, Executive Director of PAN-Ethiopia, International Co-coordinator of PAN, and IPEN Co-chair. “We know that organic and agroecological practices are available and profitable in many countries but marketing and sales of HHPs undermines the transition to these healthier practices. We need a swift phase-out of HHPs for our health and the health of the planet.”