By Sam Livingston

ALL BOLDED ITEMS ARE EXAMPLES OF THE PROGRESS MADE

10:30-12:30:

Today Marked a true turning point of the COP-5 Minamata convention. After Three days of deliberating planning and disputes, work that had gone until the late hours of the night before was presented in plenary in front of the secretariat and the COP President. You could tell that the delegates all felt this as well since the morning plenary session had the most delegates since the first day as seen in the first photograph. On the previous day (1/11/23) three content groups on budget, mercury waste thresholds, and Annex A and B (which included topics like the phase out/phase down of mercury in cosmetics and dental amalgams and industrial practices) and also a friends of the president group had met to discuss and hopeful finalize the appropriate conference room papers (CRP). The content group on Annexes A and B were first to conclude their deliberations after meeting for about 6 total hours. In regards to annex A, 2 phase out dates were agreed upon for 2 harmful mercury compounds. And 5 compounds were agreed to be harmful and it was agreed that they would be phased out and dates were given for these as well. Though dental amalgams and harmful cosmetic’s draft proposals needed more time to be considered and hence today another plenary group needed to meet. This item was primarily only given only an hour for decisions but after multiple objections the time given was two hours. The content group on mercury waste thresholds spoke next, there seemed to be less consensus in this group 2 nations have stated they would actually need more time to evaluate the scientific data before choosing a threshold while the threshold option of 25 mg/kg was taken off the table by the rest of the parties limiting the threshold to 10 or 15 mg/kg more deliberation was needed. The secretariat granted this group two more hours to discuss but demanded a threshold be met today or “it never will”. The third content group on budget had finalized and submitted the CRP, but still needs time to discuss, staff management, capacity building and effectiveness evaluation. After hearing these summaries I started to worry that no progress was being made and with the COP quickly coming to an end I wondered if some major issues would be brushed aside and no consensus would be held. This would not only be detrimental to this COP but set a precedent of endless deliberation and nitpicking deciding on small issues but forgetting about larger issues at hand.

Thankfully the small friends of the president group had come to a mutual agreement; they had previously discussed how many members each party should be allotted in the effectiveness evaluation for the Minamata convention, going into this meeting there was a very different idea of how many members were needed, the two numbers being 3 and 8. This again felt almost hopeless but through hard work and compromise 5 members were decided upon. The first in many steps forward today. After this the plenary addressed the agenda for today, CRP-7 which addresses artisanal and small scale gold mining was proposed and deliberated on with China having some issues with wording but with cooperation from Canada and Australia this was cleared up and the CRP-7 was passed with relatively no issues. Global supply production trade use of mercury compounds (CRP-2) was discussed briefly and after little discussion mainly by the group of Latin America and the Caribbean (GRULAC) but again the CRP-2 was passed with relatively no problems. This was all that was on the agenda and all were passed. These CRPs still need to be deliberated on later in a plenary session.

3:00-5:00:

The content groups on annex A and B met for a little over two hours. The basis of most deliberation is changing specific text and wording mainly of the phrasing “phase out” and “phase down” as shown in the second photograph. The results of this session were promising with small 3 having clean text and small 2 being close to finished, the CRP on mercury in cosmetics is completely cleaned and agreed upon. Similarly the debate on thresholds focuses mainly on phrasing differences and finally agreeing upon a threshold of 15 mg/kg in the final minute of the meeting.  Today was a great example of how the tone of a convention can shift. We went from debating smaller issues trying to get the draft CRPs exactly right to coming to agreements on some large ticket items such as cosmetics and threshold values. This I believe was in part thanks to strict deadlines set by the president and the secretariat that have constantly work to keep this COP orderly and most importantly timely an underrated necessity to these conventions.