BBIA MD David Newman participated at the COP21 conference in Paris to help lobby in favour of increased consideration and funding for waste management projects, especially in developing countries.
Clearly the need to reduce organics destined to landfill is a obligatory response to methane emissions and their capture, or reduction, significantly contributes to emissions reductions.
Here, biomaterials play a small but important role because of their capacity to increase organics recycling and reduce packaging waste. Getting such messages across in an arena dominated by the debate on energy is quite an awesome task, but we had some positive results as waste management was raised by many countries in specific meetings regarding methane and black soot emissions. This means more funding will go to the sector in future spending plans on emissions abatement.
The overall outcome of the conference was, as we have read, positive. Criticisms regarding the lack of obligatory targets and a soft approach to monitoring miss the point.
The point is: diplomacy has succeeded and our thanks and compliments must go to the French Government and the UNFCCC negotiators in the UN secretariat. This is a big win for the United Nations. It puts international consensus politics back to the centre of resolving seemingly intractable crises and one can only hope this gives a push for resolution of other conflicts, of which the Middle East is the centre.