Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada — The UN80 Initiative, unveiled in March by Secretary-General António Guterres, is a system-wide effort to reaffirm the UN’s relevance for a rapidly changing world.
The Initiative comes at a time of brutal budget cuts across the UN system. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees is cutting 3,500 jobs and making reductions in senior positions and offices to manage budget shortfalls. The World Health Organisation is expected to cut 20-25% of its global staff. Cuts at The World Food Programme range up to 30%.
And yet the needs served by the United Nations remain stark. The UN appealed for US$29 billion funding for the Global Humanitarian Overview 2025 to assist nearly 180 million vulnerable people, including refugees, in December 2024. Near the midpoint of the year, just $5.6 billion – less than 13 per cent – had been received.
Facing this harsh fiscal environment, the Secretary-General established seven thematic clusters under the UN80 Initiative covering peace and security, humanitarian action, development (Secretariat and UN system), human rights, training and research, and specialised agencies to improve coordination, reduce fragmentation, and realign functions where needed.
The UN80 Task Force is scheduled to release its recommendations at the end of July.
In their timely opinon piece, “UN Reform: Is it Time to Renew the Idea of Clustering the Major Environmental Agreements?”, Felix Dodds and Chris Spence advocate for “clustering key conventions and bringing scientific bodies to strengthen international environmental governance, while also offering potential cost savings.”
“Currently, there are hundreds of different multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) in force but perhaps only 20-30 core global MEAs with broad international participation,” Dodds and Spence write.
Bringing the fragmented set of environmental conventions together in clusters to address the interconnected issues they address could strengthen their work, reduce inefficiencies, and fill significant gaps in how the UN approaches the triple plenary crises of biodiversity loss, climate change and pollution.
There is one experience which suggests how such a clustering of MEAs secretariats could be accomplished. In 2009, on an ad interim basis, the Joint Convention Services of the Basel, Rotterdam and Stockholm Conventions was set up, preparatory to a decision by an extraordinary conferences of the parties of the three chemicals and wastes conventions to establish a joint Secretariat in February 2010.
I was hired as the first staff member assigned to serve the three conventions equally in December 2009, holding the position of Public Information Officer in the Rotterdam Convention Secretariat while acting on behalf of the Basel, Rotterdam and Stockholm conventions until August 2014. This gave me a ring-side view of the process of “synergies” between the three clustered conventions.
The experience of the Basel, Rotterdam and Stockholm conventions with clustering their instruments provides a proof of concept of the benefits that may be gained by other closely related MEAs joining forces. The conventions addressing biological diversity and climate change may be ripe for applying the lessons learned from the three global chemicals and waste conventions.
The “synergies process” streamlined the three conventions’ implementation, reduced administrative burdens, and maximized the efficient use of resources.
Future conferences of the Parties (COPs) of the Basel, Rotterdam and Stockholm conventions are now held back-to-back on a biennial schedule. For the more than 180 governments which attend the ‘SuperCOPs’, the efficiencies gained in time, travel and expense are obvious. The joint nature of the conferences also allows for a greater exchange of information and views between the parties to the conventions, helping close gaps in implementation and increasing at the technical and scientific level understanding of how the actions of any one MEA impact the others.
The listing of a chemical in the Stockholm Convention’s annexes may trigger classification of products containing the substance as hazardous under the Basel Convention. Hazardous constituents that may be found in plastic waste due to their use as additives in various applications include halogenated organic compounds used as flame retardants. Several halogenated organic compounds used as flame retardants are listed under the Stockholm Convention’s Annex A to be eliminated or severely restricted. The adoption of amendments to the Basel Convention in 2019) sought to enhance the control of the transboundary movements of plastic waste and clarify the scope of the Convention as it applies to such waste.
Close coordination between the two instruments is therefore welcome.
Another important lesson concerns how the groundwork was successfully laid for the establishment of a joint ‘BRS’ Secretariat. The process needs to be owned and embraced by the Parties to the Conventions themselves. As legally independent entities, they must be the drivers of any envisioned reform.
A series of decisions taken by the parties to the conventions in 2008 and 2009 established an ad hoc joint working group on enhancing cooperation and coordination among the Basel, Rotterdam and Stockholm conventions. Under co-chairs nominated by the parties and drawn from the North and the South to steer the process, the ad hoc working group was mandated to prepare joint recommendations on enhancing cooperation and coordination among the three conventions at the administrative and programmatic levels. This ensured that the changes would have the political backing of the parties themselves.
A further lesson is that the leadership of the newly formed cluster of conventions’ secretariat needed to be placed in one team. In practice, this meant consolidating the executives of the three conventions (on the UNEP side, as Rotterdam has a joint secretariat shared by UNEP and FAO). Having multiple executives hindered the synergies process. Reducing three executive posts down to one brought coherence as well as additional cost savings. The streamlining of secretariat staff further contributed to creating a more efficient, less costly secretariat.
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My assignment in the ‘BRS’ Secretariat covered media relations, public information and outreach, including helping manage the joint conventions’ synergies website. Public information provided a fertile ground for joint activity between the three legally independent conventions.
The benefits brought by such administrative measures are minor when placed alongside the larger structural reforms of the synergies process which serve the ultimate purpose of promoting exchange of information, environmentally sound management, and the restriction or elimination of a broad range of undesirable hazardous substances from the planet.
Ultimately, this may be the highest benefit the clustering of the thematically-related hazardous chemical and wastes instruments bring to global environmental governance.
Felix Dodds and Chris Spence (July 17, 2025). UN Reform: Is it Time to Renew the Idea of Clustering the Major Environmental Agreements? Inter Press Service.
United Nations (June 16, 2025). Brutal cuts mean brutal choices warns UN relief chief, launching ‘survival appeal’. UN News.
United Nations (June 23, 2025). UN80 Initiative: What it is – and why it matters to the world | UN News.
Michael Stanley-Jones is an Environmental Policy and Governance Fellow at the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health, in Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada.
IPS UN Bureau