This week in Kingston, Jamaica, the United Nations’ International Seabed Authority (ISA) is conducting a second week of negotiations that could shape the future of the deep ocean.  In 2021, the Pacific nation of Nauru triggered something called the two-year rule, which gives the ISA until July 9 to establish regulations to govern the controversial practice of deep-sea mining. This 28th session, which launched March 16 and concludes Friday, is the body’s penultimate meeting before that deadline.  “The ocean is at stake,” University of California, Santa Barbara deep-sea biologist Dr. Diva Amon, who is representing the Deep Ocean Stewardship Initiative in Kingston, told EcoWatch.  But beyond the looming threat of commercial mining, something else was different about these negotiations. Influential civil society groups including Greenpeace, the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, the Pew Charitable Trusts and […]

U.S. grocery shoppers take note, it’s that time of year again. The Environmental Working Group (EWG) released on Wednesday its 2023 Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides in Produce, with its annual Dirty Dozen and Clean Fifteen lists of the conventional fruits and vegetables most and least likely to be contaminated with pesticides, and this year’s lists have important new additions.  In particular, blueberries and green beans were both added to the Dirty Dozen, with green beans even testing positive for a neurotoxic insecticide called acephate that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has already banned. “They actually took action on acephate for green beans [more than] a decade ago. Yet this most recent round of testing still shows that there’s levels above that EPA limit for acephate on green beans, which sort of highlights this broken […]

On Saturday, March 4, world leaders finally agreed on a treaty to protect the high seas.  The accord reached by the Intergovernmental Conference on Marine Biodiversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction establishes a mechanism for sharing the benefits of scientific discoveries from marine life, enforces environmental impact assessments for new human activities in international waters and makes it possible to create protected areas in the open ocean.  “It’s going to provide first-time protections ever for half of the planet that has not ever had that,” Greenpeace USA senior oceans campaigner Arlo Hemphill told EcoWatch in an email. “And that makes it the largest conservation agreement in the history of the world.” It’s also not one that was reached easily. The final agreement is the work of more than a decade of formal negotiations and two […]

Negotiators working on a legally binding United Nations treaty to end plastic pollution will need to be as ambitious as possible with the final document.  That’s the main takeaway from a new report from Back to Blue — a collaboration between Economist Impact and the Nippon Foundation — released Monday. The report modeled what would happen to plastic consumption in 19 G20 countries if three significant policy proposals were included in the treaty and found that they still were not enough to reduce consumption by 2050. “There is no single solution to the pollution problem,” report editor Gillian Parker told EcoWatch in an email. “We evaluated three solutions and while they had some impact on the consumption of plastic independently, they failed to make a significant dent in reducing plastic consumption.” More From EcoWatch What […]

Of the 8.3 metric tons of plastic produced in this world to date, 6.3 billion tons of that is trash, and less than 10% of it is recycled, which has created a global crisis, not just with the environment, but our health.  Microplastics — tiny pieces of plastic debris, which result from the disposal and breakdown of consumer products and industrial waste — are now ever-present pollutants now found to be in most places in the world, from marine life to the top of Mt. Everest, and now our bloodstreams.  Plastic pollution also disproportionately affects marginalized communities and communities living near plastic waste sites.  According to a report from the United Nations, polluting facilities and industries — particularly the companies drilling for the oil that helps make plastic — are often placed in vulnerable communities, […]