Photo: Photo by Tanner Larson on Unsplash
Specifically, IUCN’s European Regional Office has been focusing on the plastics challenge in the European and EU context. Supporting the efforts of our European Members in this respect, IUCN has been engaging in the EU debate on plastics and marine plastic litter for several years now – the 2017 publication on EU policies tackling marine plastic litter was for instance used for the impact assessment of the Single Use Plastics Directive in 2018.
IUCN continues to organize high level events on the subject. These have included an event organized together with the Austrian presidency of the Council of the EU (2018) to discuss the future of plastics and micro plastics policy in the European context; an event, organized under the auspices of the Romanian presidency, to help direct EEA grants to SMEs in Eastern Europe working on the plastics challenge (2019), and an event with the Joint Programming Initiative Healthy and Productive Seas and Oceans (JPI-Oceans) at the European Parliament (2020).
Furthermore, IUCN is a member of the MSFD Technical Group on Marine Litter. Finally, IUCN also engages in discussions with the private sector to tackle this issue, in particular IUCN follows the European Tire and Road Wear Particle Platform, and we are actively engaged in the European Circular Economy Stakeholder Platform.
Under the programme “Closing the Plastic Tap”, IUCN has produced several analyses and is supporting related actions in both the Baltic and the Mediterranean seas. Taking on a more global outlook, with its Marine Plastics and Coastal Communities initiative, IUCN is now seeking to extend this programmatic approach across Africa and Asia as well. A full list of projects and reports carried out under IUCN’s Global Marine and Polar Programme may be found linked here.
