‘Our Mother Earth is sick’: Leaders talk about growing plastic pollution in the Arctic

Every year, the Delbert Pungowiyi community comes together to clean up trash on the beach of their small island in Alaska.

“Name a country, any country. Your country is coming to our beaches,” Pungowiyi, a Yupik elder and Sivuqaq leader, said at a news conference on the international plastics treaty in Ottawa on Thursday.

“Plastic pollution, of all kinds, from all over the world,” he added. “The oceans are in serious trouble, our Mother Earth is sick.”

The Arctic is a “hemispheric sink” of chemical and plastic pollution coming from all corners of the world, according to a new report from IPENan organization campaigning to end toxic chemical pollution.

Rapid global warming caused by greenhouse gases linked to fossil fuels is causing the region to warm about four times more than the global average. This increases the speed of plastics traveling from other regions of the world. Warming is also accelerating the melting of permafrost and glaciers, which is releasing higher concentrations of chemicals into the Arctic.

The amount of chemicals and plastics in the Arctic is now building up to dangerous levels in the ancestral food supply of Arctic indigenous nations, Pamela Miller, executive director of Alaska Community Action on Toxics, told reporters at the news conference. (ACAT).

“Arctic indigenous peoples have some of the highest concentrations of persistent pollutants of any population on Earth because of this global transport and global distillation process,” he said, pointing to the world’s water systems that flow into the Arctic.

According to the IPEN report, more than 16,000 chemicals are used in plastics and 25 percent are known to be toxic, while 66 percent lack information about their dangers.

Vi Waghiyi, ACAT’s environmental and justice program director, is on the front lines in the Arctic. She talks about how indigenous Arctic people in Alaska eat ancient foods for their spiritual and cultural health despite the risks of increased chemical and plastic pollution.

That is why he calls the crisis of plastics and chemicals “environmental violence”, given their high accumulation in the ancestral Arctic food system.

It has led to higher rates of miscarriages and cancer. Waghiyi herself is a cancer survivor and has suffered three miscarriages. She now campaigns, advocates and conducts community research that she presents around the world.

She has been to Stockholm five times at the Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants and was appointed by US President Joe Biden to the Environmental Justice Advisory Council. Waghiyi is finally being heard, she said. Canadian National Observer.

“The burden of proof fell on my people,” he said.

I just finished two years since the world’s countries agreed to negotiate a legally binding treaty to end plastic pollution. The countries are trying to complete the treaty before the end of the year. This week’s negotiations in Canada are the fourth of five meetings, and Ottawa is now at the center of these discussions, influencing what will be agreed.

The last round of discussions held in November in Kenya failed to achieve a number of key objectives. There was no first draft agreement nor plans to continue talking between meetings. That means countries are heading into this week with what’s called a “Zero Draft” – essentially, a long text of placeholder options. The goal is to reduce it to something usable.

If countries are to meet their goal of agreeing a global plastics treaty by the end of this year, tremendous progress will need to be made this week before Canada passes the tariffs on to South Korea, which will host the fifth and final round. of negotiations. later this year.

Within the negotiations, the indigenous group demands the inclusion of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, indigenous knowledge systems and a production limit on existing plastics followed by production reductions, the leaders told journalists on Thursday.

There were also calls for reparations within “sacrifice zones” disproportionately affected by plastics and petrochemicals.

—With files from John Woodside