I know, I know, it’s a bit of a trope to talk about the need for a “holistic approach” within UN spaces. I don’t think I’ve ever heard the phrase “synergy” or “breaking silos” so much as in the time I’ve been attending UN events in Geneva.
However, despite the cliché messaging, environmental decision-making is in need of a more “holistic approach.” The increasing mobilization and political saliency around the climate crisis, whilst positive, has meant emissions have begun to eclipse the other pressing issues of climate change. In fact, the blinkered focus of environmental decision-making on emissions reduction has been criticized for decades for sidelining broader environmental, social, and economic considerations. Exposure to hazardous substances and waste (i.e., toxics) is an environmental issue that has been consistently left behind, despite its serious implications for health, environment, human rights, and, yes, the climate.
While it has been a long time coming, climate change is now dominating the newscycle. From Greta Thunberg to Trump’s climate policies (or lack thereof), climate change is big news. However, the disaggregated nature of climate reporting and the climate-centric approach to environmental decision-making means that chemicals management and climate change are often approached as separate environmental issues.
What have chemicals got to do with it? How chemicals are worsening the climate crisis
It may come as a surprise to many, myself included, just how interlinked climate change and chemicals really are. The most obvious connection is through the emissions of the chemical industry, which accounts for a sizable chunk of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (approximately 7% of anthropogenic GHG emissions in 2018). However, the relationship between chemicals and climate change is more substantial than just this. New and unexpected ways that chemicals contribute to climate change are constantly being discovered. Recently, for example, the breakdown of marine plastic litter was linked to the oceans’ lowered capacity to act as carbon sinks. As if marine plastic pollution wasn’t bad enough…
It was a “well, duh” moment for me when I realized that obviously chemicals and emissions are linked; every stage of chemical manufacturing, use, and waste produces GHG emissions. For instance, agriculture — and chemical agriculture in particular — is one of the largest sources of GHG emissions. This is mostly due to the significant amount of energy needed to make synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. In fact, it’s the use of synthetic fertilizers that has the largest impact on agricultural emissions. Nitrogen-based fertilizers, in particular, pose a big problem, as the nitrate evaporates from the crops to form nitrous oxide, a GHG that’s 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide. This doesn’t even account for the other threats of nitrogen fertilizers (and chemicals more generally) on the environment, such as nitrate runoff contributing to the creation of low-oxygen dead zones in waterways, which suffocate fish and other marine life.
The increase in pests, droughts, and other climatic stressors induced by the climate crisis means more chemicals are expected to be used in agriculture. This further contributes to a global trend of exponential increase in chemical farming; fertilizer use alone has already increased by 25% in the last 10 years. Much of this growth is a result of global corporations peddling a myth that pesticides are needed to feed a growing world population. However, increased pesticide usage is not based on any real benefit. In fact, chemical farming is actually linked to hurting, not helping, crops’ resilience to climate change.
How does the climate crisis exacerbate the risks of chemicals?
In addition to driving more chemical usage, the climate crisis is also predicted to increase our toxic exposure to chemicals. The changes to climatic conditions, as if they weren’t catastrophic enough on their own, have the added effect of triggering more toxic pollution. For instance, temperature increase will cause the release of toxic chemicals stored in glaciers and permafrost, increased chemical evaporation (and thus more airborne pollutants), and drought damage to soil quality (so more groundwater contamination), just to name a few.
As the impacts of the climate crisis accelerate, we will breathe, drink, and consume more harmful chemicals. And to make matters worse, our heightened exposure to toxics is in tangent to our decreasing ability to cope with the exposure. The climate crisis, for a variety of reasons, is linked to higher vulnerability of humans to toxics. Temperature rise, for example, is linked to higher toxicity of chemicals and a decreased ability of our bodies to effectively deal with those chemicals. So, all in all, the climate crisis means both more exposure to toxics and greater vulnerability to them, which is not exactly reassuring news.
Tackling chemicals and the climate crisis
Yet despite the escalating risks of the climate crisis and chemicals, we lack the scope to tackle these threats as conjoined issues. It’s true that some existing chemical regulations feed into the goals of climate mitigation. For example, the Stockholm Convention, one of the major chemical regulation frameworks, aims to control persistent organic pollutants (POPs), the world’s worst chemicals, and in doing so, addresses large sources of carbon pollution (such as cement kilns and waste incinerators). Similarly, the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol, which outlined the phase-out and replacement of chemicals commonly found in fridges and coolants after they were discovered to be potent greenhouse gases, shows that chemical regulation can jointly serve the purpose of controlling chemicals due to their toxicity and their contributions to the climate crisis. However, international regulation remains fragmented, with large gaps in protection. For this reason, existing chemical regulation is widely considered to be ineffective in adequately addressing chemicals management, let alone in addressing the cross-cutting issue of the climate crisis.
The new chemical and waste framework (SAICM) is currently in development for chemical regulation beyond 2020. It seeks to address the current issues of chemical regulation by creating an overarching chemicals management policy. However, it’s still unclear how climate change will factor into SAICM as the discussion on addressing the interlinkages between chemicals and climate change is still in its infancy. The High Ambition Alliance (a ministry-led initiative to ensure an ambitious new global deal on chemicals and waste) introduced this topic to its latest meeting during COP25, but there is still a long way to go before chemicals are mainstreamed in climate conversations.
You might be bored, as I am, with the constant repetition in UN circles of the need to “break silos,” “create synergy,” and “adopt a more holistic approach.” But it’s true. Incorporating chemicals management and broader environmental considerations is essential to ensuring that emissions reductions targets don’t come at the cost of destroying the environment we mean to protect. Importantly though, we need to move from talking about creating a holistic chemicals management strategy to doing it.
So far, we have yet to sufficiently integrate the issues of chemicals and climate change, and the ramifications of this disconnect are increasingly being felt. We are missing powerful mitigation steps and collectively failing to recognize, and so protect from, the increasing climate-crisis-induced risks of toxic exposure. SAICM needs to prioritize bridging this gap. The development of the new chemical and waste framework presents a challenge — but also an opportunity — not only to shore up the loopholes of our current framework, but to embed climatic considerations into chemicals management beyond 2020.
Similarly, limiting warming to 1.5 degrees, especially in the disappointing aftermath of COP25, is an uphill challenge. However, integrating chemicals management by more explicitly including chemicals in emissions reduction targets and addressing toxic exposure risks is critical. A transition to a lower-emission, toxic-free world is dependent on us collectively realizing that we cannot reach a more sustainable future without more coordinated environmental decision-making.
By Hope de Rooy-Underhill, Geneva-based intern
Originally posted on February 10, 2020