Tough talk over mercury treaty
Baku, January 12 (AZERTAC). Governments are on the verge of agreeing the first legally binding, global treaty to tackle mercury pollution. It aims to clean up the legacy of centuries of untrammelled emissions of the toxic metal, and to limit future contamination from sources as diverse as coal-fired power plants and gold mining.
Delegates from 128 countries are expected to meet next week in Geneva, Switzerland, for a fifth and final round of treaty negotiations. All agree that action is needed urgently to reduce mercury emissions, which pose risks to the environment and human health. But consensus on how to achieve that will not come easily. The current top emitters, in Asia, want to know why they should shoulder the burden of clean-up when much of the world`s mercury pollution is due to the past economic growth of developed nations — an argument that parallels one of the main stumbling blocks to an international greenhouse-gas agreement.
Yet with mercury able to drift freely through air, soil, rivers and oceans, it is crucial that the negotiations deliver “a global treaty that is going to be implementable in all the countries”, says Fernando Lugris, chairman of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), which is coordinating the treaty.
According to a draft version of UNEP`s 2013 Global Mercury Report, about 6,500 tonnes of mercury was emitted into the air in 2010. Roughly 30% came from human activities, and a further 15% from natural sources such as volcanoes and erosion. The remainder was from the re-emission from soils, water and vegetation of mercury released into the environment decades ago. “Once emitted into the air, it`s like a genie that has escaped the bottle,” says David Streets, an environmental scientist at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. “It takes decades or even centuries to get it fixed.”
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