Sustainability in international chemicals and waste management: Further development of SAICM beyond 2020

The coming years will be a decisive phase for international chemicals and waste management. The mandate of the Strategic Approach to International Chemicals Management (SAICM) is linked to the goal that by 2020, "chemicals are used and produced in ways that lead to the minimization of significant adverse effects on human health and the environment”. For the time beyond 2020, the international community and other stakeholders must work on a renewed mandate and develop suitable instruments to further advance the sound management of chemicals and waste (SMCW). At the fourth session of the International Conference on Chemicals Management (ICCM4) in Geneva in autumn 2015, delegates decided to launch an intersessional process to carve out the scope and the details of a future framework.

An international consortium led by adelphi, including renowned experts in their respective fields, Minu Hemmati and Paul Hohnen, is working on behalf of the Federal Environment Agency to develop concepts and contributions to support the follow-up process, called SAICM beyond 2020.

First, the project analyses and evaluates the current SAICM process and then derives goals, sub-goals and priority topics for the intersessional process. This work also includes considerations as to how the concept of sustainable chemistry could be anchored more firmly in international chemicals management. Based on this analysis, parameters of a SMCW framework post-2020 are defined and discussed jointly with SAICM stakeholders in Germany, Europe and elsewhere.

The findings from the project will be fed into a participatory process at EU level for further consideration and refinement. It is planned to hold a total of six workshops in Brussels with representatives of EU Member States and the European Commission and to interview more than 30 SAICM actors at national and international level.