UN chemicals convention meetings to be held online in June

Meetings of the UN's conventions on chemicals and waste will be held online in June as a consequence of the international travel restrictions and confinement measures in place to contain the coronavirus Covid-19 pandemic, according to the convention secretariat's executive secretary Rolph Payet. The bureau meeting for the Stockholm Convention on persistent organic pollutants (POPs), set to be held on 10 June in Geneva, should see a relatively smooth transition online, Dr Payet told Chemical Watch, because there are relatively few participants. The bureau is a ten-person committee elected from delegates to the convention, whose task in June will be to prepare for the next conference of parties (COP) to the Stockholm Convention in July 2021. But the Basel Convention on international movement of hazardous waste's open-ended working group (OEWG), due to meet in Geneva from 22 to 25 June, will be more difficult to host online. Between 800 and 1,000 people were expected to attend, Dr Payet said.  It will pose a number of logistical, technical and legal challenges, such as scheduling – the Basel Convention has 187 parties, covering nearly every country and time zone in the world – and finding an IT platform that allows video conversations at reasonable bandwidth, as well as the sharing of documents, and possibly requiring a function for voting or decision making.