Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
YouwillrememberthattheemergenceofPOPsasanenvironmentalandhumanhealth
issue came as a surprise to agencies responsible for chemical safety. They could not be-
lieve that these substances could be evading their ways of evaluating hazards and risks.
The experience warned negotiators of the danger of developing an agreement whose basic
structure is frozen to reflect the state of knowledge that existed at the time of negotiation.
Therefore, the POPs protocol and the Stockholm Convention were designed to be “living”
agreements and both share a very similar architecture. They can respond at any time to
new scientific information relevant to the objectives of the protocol or convention. The fea-
tures of the agreements that provide this ability are clustered around their essentially sim-
ilar three main “doorways” through which scientific information can gain access to their
decision-making processes.
The doorway with the most scientifically comprehensive range of potential topics is
Article 11 of the Stockholm Convention and the equivalent doorway is Article 8 of the
POPs protocol. They place obligations on parties concerning research, development and
monitoring. However, this doorway is not directly linked to a decision-making process in
either agreement.
A second doorway is the best known. Both agreements include a process for allowing
a party or parties to propose adding new substances to be controlled and for the technical
review of such proposals (Article 8 in the Stockholm Convention and Article 14 in the
POPs protocol). This process has been quite active. Most of the substances added since the
two agreements were negotiated are there because of Arctic data assembled and brought
to the CLRTAP and the Stockholm Convention by AMAP participating countries. Some
were already suspected to be a problem in the 1990s, but others were hardly thought of in
termsofthecombination ofchronictoxicity,biomagnification andlong-rangetransportun-
til Arctic screening studies and monitoring programmes were able to increase the number
of substances studied.
When the POPs protocol and the Stockholm Convention were under negotiation, the
common but not universal belief was that over time, the total number of substances con-
trolled under the agreements might perhaps reach 20. Those who believed in a larger num-
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