Plastic pollution, energy issues to top G20 agenda
AHEAD of the upcoming 14th Group of 20 summit in Japan’s Osaka, environmental and energy issues have been brought into spotlight, while climate change and marine plastic pollution are expected to be high on the agenda.
During the G20 Ministerial Meeting on Energy Transitions and Global Environment for Sustainable Growth in Japan’s Nagoya Prefecture on June 15-16, a joint communique was released, creating an international framework that aims at establishing voluntary measures to reduce plastic pollution in the ocean, under which each G20 member will need to report progress on its measures and make effort to reduce waste plastic under each other’s supervision.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has said that tackling plastic waste in the ocean is one of the key issues at the G20 summit in Osaka, during which Japan plans to seek consensus on the goal of zero plastic waste disposed into the ocean by 2050. In a gesture of effort to reduce plastic pollution, the media center at the G20 summit in Osaka does not offer drinks in plastic bottles.
According to the World Wide Fund for Nature, more than 300 million tons of waste plastic is produced every year, of which about 8 million tons end up in the sea and finally break down to form plastic particles. The World Economic Forum also warned that if the situation did not change, the total weight of plastic in oceans worldwide could exceed the total weight of marine fish by 2050. Scientific researches have shown that marine plastic pollution not only harms ocean species, but also affects the global ecosystem, which has become a global environmental problem.
Many countries are taking measures to control plastic pollution in the ocean. The Canadian government has announced that it will ban disposable plastic products from 2021. The move follows a decision made by the European parliament to ban the use of disposable plastic products.
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