June 28th, 2023
Geneva (CH) — In an unprecedented step, States at the Annual Meeting of the Parties to the Aarhus Convention — an agreement on access to information and environmental decision-making — acknowledged the need to curb corporate capture in international decision-making spaces to guarantee meaningful environmental democracy.
At the end of the meeting, Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) Senior Attorney and Human Rights and Climate Change Campaign Manager, Sebastien Duyck, stated:
“Civil society organizations have been sounding the alarm for decades; corporate actors and industry representatives have increasingly flooded international fora. This was evident at COP27, which saw an unprecedented number of fossil fuel lobbyists attending the talks, as well as corporate sponsorships. The trend shows that UN conferences are increasingly serving the interests of big corporations, particularly fossil fuel companies. In doing so, negotiation spaces fail to advance concrete solutions to avoid a catastrophic escalation of overlapping environmental crises while simultaneously enabling additional harm by offering a platform for greenwashing initiatives and dangerous false solutions. This must be fixed!
“Industry influence is not unique to climate spaces. There are reports of fossil fuel interests threatening to weaken other negotiations. Member States must take immediate action to ensure that other fora — including the intergovernmental negotiating committee to advance the plastics treaty and the Open-Ended Working Group to establish a Science Policy Panel on chemical, waste, and pollution — do not replicate issues experienced at the UNFCCC.
“States Parties to the Aarhus Convention’s recognition that meaningful public participation of those most impacted and tackling conflict of interests are two sides of the same coin to promote environmental democracy effectively is a clear step in the right direction. It comes at a time when UN Secretariats are under growing scrutiny to develop modalities to curb the role of fossil fuels lobbyists in negotiation spaces. But, much work remains to effectively enforce the Convention and ensure equitable and meaningful public participation in international decision-making spaces.
“For the credibility and integrity of all international decision-making spaces, it’s imperative that States, UN organizations and Secretariats place people over profits, ensure meaningful participation of those most impacted, and adopt concrete policies to both prevent and tackle conflicts of interest.”
###
Media contact: Cate Bonacini, press@ciel.org, +1-202-742-5847
Note for the editors:
The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe‘s Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters usually known as the Aarhus Convention, was signed on June 25, 1998, in the Danish city of Aarhus. The Aarhus Convention is the widest international legal agreement that protects access to information, public participation, and justice in environmental matters, protecting the rights of over 650 million people in Europe, Central Asia, and Africa. The Convention is supported by a robust quasi-judicial body tasked to ensure people can truly exercise these rights.