Policy brief: The need for data on plastics – ensuring a transparent, equitable and ambitious global agreement to end plastic pollution

Authors: Eliza Northrop, Emily Belonje, Dr Randika Jayasinghe, Helena Dickinson and Bella Charlesworth

All environmental agreements face a fundamental challenge: how to measure progress toward complex, global objectives and enable regular opportunities to course correct or increase ambition. Existing environmental agreements demonstrate that comprehensive data systems are the operational backbone of effective environmental governance. Without mechanisms to measure, report, and verify progress, even well-intentioned agreements struggle to move beyond aspirational language to concrete implementation. 

To this end, a systematic review of four multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs)—the Basel Convention, Minamata Convention on Mercury, Paris Agreement, and Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants —reveals several consistent approaches to data collection and reporting. 

Key messages

• The success of a global agreement on plastic pollution will ultimately depend on robust mechanisms for transparency, accountability, and reporting, and a binding obligation to compile relevant national data on plastics.
• Data on plastics across the lifecycle will be essential to measure progress towards global objectives and enable regularly opportunities to increase ambition.
• Most countries lack comprehensive data on plastic production, consumption and pollution.
• Looking to other Multilateral Environmental Agreements (the Basel Convention, Minamata Convention, Paris Agreement, and Stockholm Convention) all explicitly require parties to collect relevant data, establish national inventories, monitor progress, and report findings to their respective secretariats or Conference of the Parties (COPs).
• Such clear and binding provisions for comprehensive data collection, reporting, and monitoring have proven essential to the success of existing MEAs and will need to be included in the final text of the agreement.

Contact: Eliza Northrop (e.northrop@unsw.edu.au)

Closing the Information Gap in Global Plastics Governance: No Data, No Deal

Without improving national data on plastics, even the most ambitious treaty will be implemented in the dark, making commitments difficult to properly measure and collective progress impossible to accurately understand.

The Global Ocean Accounts PartnershipGOAP Secretariat