The first session of the Plenary of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Panel on Chemicals, Waste and Pollution (ISP-CWP P1) is taking place in Geneva, Switzerland on 2-6 February 2026. The IPCP delegation includes Gabriel Sigmund and Ipek Imamoglu who are also providing daily meeting summaries. Policy briefs prepared by the IPCP as inputs to the process are available here. Other IPCP board members in attendance include Noriyuki Suzuki as a member of the delegation from Japan and Miriam Diamond as the Chemicals & Waste member of the Scientific and Technical Advisory Panel of the Global Environment Facility.


Day 4 – A Short-Lived black hole Flare [of Hope]

The expectations this morning were for a short Plenary with an update on the slow but perceptible progress on agreeing to the Panel’s Rules of Procedure (RoP). Hopes were quickly dashed. Instead, hyper-breaks were applied, resulting in glacially slow negotiations regarding the RoP document. Our Plenary space shuttle comfortably sitting in space, far enough from the event horizon of a black hole to still move slowly, but close enough to make the progress almost imperceivable. Suddenly, however, we experienced a massive black hole flare with the proposal from the Columbian delegate! The proposal was for “The Plenary to decide on an extraordinary basis and exclusive to the first session of ISP-CWP, it will provisionally apply the RoP of UNEA mutatis mutandis until such a time where the first session is adjourned or the RoP of ISP-CWP adopted, whichever comes first.” This proposal from Colombia was meant to enable progress on essential items that had to be resolved before the end of the meeting on Day 5. Specifically, the Chair had stated on Day-3 that by the end of Plenary we need to: 1-adopt the RoP, 2-elected the Bureau (done), 3-decide the physical location of secretariat (a highly contentious issue), 4-establish the Trust Fund, and 5-decide on the dates of the next session of the Plenary, also including items for intersessional work.

Columbia argued that “adopting the idea of an illusion of progress is not progress”, and with only 12 agreed upon Rules out of 50 in the RoP, there was no realistic path to achieve the necessary progress.

We felt ecstatic about this potential way out of the gridlock. However instead, the infinite void that is the black hole of Cardassia, extinguished this flame of hope in an unprecedentedly aggressive and vehement manner. Two hours transpired of extremely antagonistic interventions and points-of-order, including shouting, beating tables and interrupting the Chair while he spoke. In fact, the diplomatic decorum of the meeting came to the brink of dissolving with near challenges to the authority of the Chair. The meeting adjourned at 12:30 to cool off and reconvene at 15:00.

At 16:00 we were welcomed back to the Contact Group (CG) by a smooth operational voice from the Secretariat explaining the rules of conduct for UN meetings, emphasizing that this was a Harassment-free Meeting.

Chair Alvarez Perez announced to the reconvened Plenary that he would meet with smaller group delegations. The Chair proposed Gudi Alkemade facilitate the CG on his behalf. Ms. Alkemade is the former Chair of the Open Ended Working Group (OEWG) and thus a decorated veteran of past “negotiations” (aka “do what you can to stall progress”) to establish the ISP-CWP. Thus, the Plenary dissolved around 16:15. Back we went to painfully glacial interventions on RoP, the black hole event horizon slowly creeping up on our Plenary space craft starting to stretch time beyond comprehension. “Please be succinct otherwise we can be stuck here forever”; these wise words uttered around 18:30 in the CG sounded all too real at 22:44, as we approach the end of Day-4, still working on the correct wording of the same three rules for the Bureau that extended over the last seven hours…


Policy briefs and other materials prepared by the IPCP as inputs to the process are available at: https://www.ipcp.ch/policy-briefs
https://www.ipcp.ch/publications

Longer daily reports prepared by the International Institute for Sustainable Development, Earth Negotiations Bulletin are available at: https://enb.iisd.org/isp-cwp-p1-intergovernmental-science-policy-panel-chemicals-waste-pollution

Official UNEP website: https://www.unep.org/isp-cwp/plenary/session-1