CSE welcomes the shift in Indian government's position on on endosulfan at the Stockholm Convention and wants government to expedite the phase out as its health hazards are now known & accepted.
The draft document of the Contact Group takes note of the recommendations by the POPRC to list technical endosulfan, its related isomers and endosulfan sulfate in Annex A of the convention, with specific exemptions. The group is yet to deliberate on pest-crop complex and the countries that have requested for the exemption.
Governments around the world will decide, at the on-going Fifth Conference of the Parties to the Stockholm Convention, whether to continue allowing the recycling of materials containing dangerous chemicals, Executive Director of the Centre for Environmental Justice Hemantha Withanage said.
India has submitted the National Implementation Plan of the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs). MoEF will coordinate its implementation & the activities will spread over a period of 12 years from 2011-2022.
The chemical industry produces over 100,000 chemicals which have improved the quality of our lives. These chemicals are being produced for purposes ranging from fulfilling domestic and industrial needs, boosting agriculture, making our clothing fire resistant and producing components for our mobile phones or other electronic devices. Every day new chemicals are formulated and produced.
The objective of the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (SC) is to protect human health and the environment from POPs. Article 7 of the SC calls for the development of the National Implementation Plan (NIP) that discusses how Parties aim to meet their obligations under the SC. This document has been developed by MoEF to provide an understanding of what measures India aims to undertake in this regard.
A systematic and authoritative global review of the impacts of climate change on the dynamics and toxicity of POPs has been released jointly by the Secretariat of the Stockholm Convention and the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) at the UNEP Governing Council, in February 2011. The report of the UNEP/AMAP expert group, ‘’Climate change and POPs: Predicting the
Serum concentrations of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) have been reported to be associated with the prevalence of type 2 diabetes in the U.S. general population, and this association appears to be higher among obese people than among the nonobese.
As part of the Global Atmospheric Passive Sampling (GAPS) study, XAD-resin based passive samplers are being deployed for consecutive one-year periods at numerous sites on all seven continents to determine annually averaged concentrations of persistent organic pollutants.
