IPEN's Annual Report summarizes our accomplishments from 2023. As our Co-chairs noted, in 2023 “we were consistently inspired by the dynamic IPEN teams working together for a safe, healthy, and just society.”
Born in Nairobi, Kenya, where my father was a teacher and my mother a farmer, I must confess that the issue of pollution - any type of pollution, never bothered anyone in my community. Of course, we knew the theory that “smoke is harmful to health,” but that was it!
On Tuesday 23 April, more than 20 women attended the IPEN Women’s Caucus meeting in Ottawa, Canada, during the fourth session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee to develop an international legally binding instrument on plastic pollution, including in the marine environment (INC-4), in Ottawa, Canada.
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 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:
While over-fishing continues to be problematic, our report details three case studies of river ecosystems in Vietnam, Canada, and Australia to highlight other significant causes of sustainability decline which remain dangerously overlooked.
Years ago, I went to a public hearing in Washington DC about chemical exposures in the United States. The discussion centered on whether we should have stronger regulations to match the EU’s new REACH legislation. To the nodding heads of the government officials conducting the hearing, a chemical industry spokesperson explained that Europeans wanted REACH because they were now genetically risk adverse. He explained that the people who were willing to take risks had done so by migrating to the United States over the last two centuries.
The IPEN participating organizations in South Asia and Southeast & East Asia attended the international conferences on EDC Free Asia II and Addressing ASGM Concerns for a Safe Asia conducted last January 23-24, 2024 in Seoul, South Korea.
