ERMA New Zealand has role in mercury treaty
ERMA New Zealand has helped facilitate a historic treaty to tackle the worldwide threat from mercury, by way of staffer Donald Hannah.
Dr Hannah, the Environmental Risk Management Authority’s General Manager, Strategy and Analysis, was approached by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in 2006 to act as a special envoy, or “mercury ambassador”, in an effort to establish consensus and a way forward on the mercury issue.
Mercury threatens the health of hundreds of millions of people globally. Mercury emissions and discharges can affect the central nervous system, impair thyroid and liver function, and cause irritability, tremors, disturbances to vision and memory loss. Mercury has also been linked to impacts on animals that feed on fish in the polar regions of the northern hemisphere.
Everyone has some level of mercury in their bodies and, according to the World Health Organisation, there is no safe limit.
Much of the world’s supply of fish contains levels of mercury exceeding international health limits. And scientists are now flagging the increased consumption of tuna and shark meat in some parts of the world as a cause for concern.
Mercury also has the unusual characteristic of being recycled in the environment, with sediments and other “sinks” re-releasing trapped mercury into the ocean and the foodchain.
Mercury pollution is also on the rise, particularly as a result of increased coal-burning. Coal naturally contains low levels of mercury which can be released into the atmosphere when the coal is burnt.
Of approximately 6000 tonnes of mercury which enters the environment annually, about 2000 tonnes comes from power stations and related industrial uses. In the atmosphere, or released down river systems, the toxin can travel for hundreds and thousands of kilometres.
But reaching a unanimous decision on what to do about mercury was never going to be easy.
Says Dr Hannah: “There was general agreement that mercury was a problem. But there were divergent views on whether to include other metals in a treaty, and divergent views on what to do. The result was that limited global action ensued.”
Some countries wanted a legally-binding treaty for emissions of toxic metals, others wanted to use “voluntary measures” such as bilateral partnerships and to integrate mercury management into development programmes. And some wanted to know why they should do anything at all, says Dr Hannah.
UNEP’s Governing Council failed to reach any agreement on the global control of mercury when it met in 2003 and again in 2005.
Dr Hannah (third from left) talks to Dan Ryfschnyder, a senior US State Department diplomat, during a meeting on mercury.
Dr Hannah, who had previously led a World Health Organisation conference on dioxin research, and was heavily involved in the establishment of the Strategic Approach to International Chemicals Management (SAICM), became involved in late 2006.
As the UN Special Envoy in the lead up to the 2007 Governing Council he met with government representatives in Japan, Canada, Switzerland, Norway, Belgium and the United States as well as representatives from a host of developing nations to try to identify agreement on the global control of mercury.
And by the end of the biennial Governing Council meeting in February 2007, agreement had been reached on a formal process to prepare a decision for the 2009 Governing Council. Dr Hannah says that even to reach agreement on a process, let alone a decision, was very difficult, given the extent of the divergent views.
By October 2008, following conferences in Bangkok and Nairobi and many behind the scenes visits by Dr Hannah and by UNEP staff, there was general agreement on what needed to be done but still no agreement on how to achieve it. In particular the United States strongly advocated for a voluntary programmatic approach rather than a new treaty.
But Barack Obama’s resounding victory in the 2008 United States presidential election was to be the watershed for mercury, Dr Hannah says.
There was now a mandate from the US to negotiate a treaty for the global control of mercury.
The debate became not if a treaty would be agreed, but how broad its scope would be and when it would be negotiated.
In February this year, Dr Hannah was among representatives from the 140 countries of the UNEP in Nairobi for the Governing Council’s biennial forum, when a landmark decision to negotiate an international treaty for the global control of mercury was agreed.
The decision, according to UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner, sent a clear message to the world that the environment was moving back to the centre stage of political life.
It also “unblocked” what would have been an ongoing impasse, Mr Steiner says.
Under the guidance of the United Nations Environment Programme, countries will now negotiate the legally-binding options to end the unnecessary use of mercury and how to more effectively control the unwanted emissions of mercury into the environment. These negotiations will commence in 2010 and are scheduled to be completed in 2012.