The meeting, which inaugurated the two-year medium-sized GEF project, "POPs monitoring, reporting and information dissemination using Pollutant Release and Transfer Registers (PRTRs)”, included representatives of six partner countries, donor governments and international organizations.
The GEF project aims to design pollutant release and transfer registers to support monitoring, reporting and information dissemination of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) in six countries which are Parties to the Stockholm Convention on POPs: Cambodia, Ecuador, Kazakhstan, Peru, Thailand and Ukraine. The project will also support implementation of Chile’s PRTR system.
A further aim of the project is to promote the exchange of good practice between countries with developed PRTRs and the countries seeking to build their national registers.
The secretariats of the Aarhus Convention and Stockholm POPs Conventions and experts from Norway and Switzerland serve on the Steering Committee. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and United Nations Institute for Research and Training (UNITAR) lead the project.
Osmany Pereira, Stockholm Convention secretariat, said “the effort of countries to develop national PRTRs is expected to provide additional help to the Parties to the Stockholm Convention reporting on their inventories of POPs, without ‘reinventing the wheel’ each time they need to report”. “The information gathered by national PRTRs could complement the information captured through the existing reporting mechanism of the Convention,” he added.
The GEF project will have duration of two years. Stakeholder involvement will be a critical project component.
The Global Steering Committee will meet three times during the implementation of the project to evaluate its progress, share experiences and knowledge between parties, and identify opportunities for new activities.
The first meeting of the Steering Committee was hosted by the National Commission of Chile for the Environment (CONAMA).
