Members of the International Indigenous Peoples’ Forum on Plastics demand to be heard at a plenary meeting on the third day of the plastics treaty talks in South Korea (Image: Bingying / UNEP, BY NC SA)
In November 2024, a dramatic scene unfolded midway through UN negotiations in Busan, South Korea. Representatives from 175 countries had gathered to draft a legally binding treaty on plastic pollution. During a formulaic plenary meeting in a vast conference hall, a group of Indigenous Peoples stood up, raised their fists, and demanded to speak.
“We were completely being ignored. We were saying: ‘Chair, we need just two minutes. Chair, Indigenous Peoples are also here!’” says Prem Singh Tharu, regional programme officer at the Asia Indigenous Peoples Pact, who stood that day.
Eventually, pressured by a delegate from Tuvalu, the meeting’s chair agreed to give the floor to an Indigenous representative, who listed the group’s priorities. These included that the treaty should cut global plastic production, eliminate harmful plastic chemicals, and “uphold the distinct rights of Indigenous Peoples”.
The moment highlighted the systemic failures on that last point, say Indigenous Peoples and their allies. They have faced huge obstacles to participation and fear the globally important treaty will be weaker as a result.
An attempt to end an insidious pollution
The UN negotiations, which started in 2022, were borne out of recognition that the world must deal with the 20 million tonnes of plastic waste entering the environment each year.
Walruses rest by plastic waste washed up on a beach in northern Svalbard (Image: Ashley Cooper / Alamy)
If unchecked, plastic production will triple by 2050 by some estimates, fuelling yet more pollution. This waste plastic turns up everywhere, including in human bodies.
Meanwhile, the extraction and refining of fossil fuels used to make plastic frequently occurs on Indigenous lands, where it often pollutes the environment and drives displacement. Plastic also pollutes coastlines, especially in the Global South. Research has shown that Indigenous coastal communities in Fiji struggle to reach their fishing grounds across plastic-choked shores. In the Arctic – a “hemispheric sink” for plastic pollutants – the accumulation of plastic chemicals in culturally important foods like walruses endangers Indigenous health.
A deluge of single-use products is also replacing traditional materials and practices, undermining cultural knowledge. “Plastic pollution is impacting our Indigenous values, our Indigenous norms, our collectiveness, our solidarity,” says Tharu, a member of an Indigenous community in western Nepal.
The disproportionate impacts Indigenous Peoples face, combined with their collective knowledge as environmental stewards, should mean they play a critical role in shaping the plastics treaty, says Juressa Lee of Greenpeace Aotearoa (the Māori name for New Zealand.)
“We believe that these discussions must not only be open to us to observe, but that our perspectives and our lived experiences should be centred, and that our solutions should be in those discussions,” says Lee, who is Māori and advocates for Indigenous participation in the plastics treaty as co-chair of the IIPFP.
Formed in 2023, the IIPFP has 40 members and has attended four of the five Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee meetings (INCs), where countries gather to discuss what the treaty should contain.
But getting to negotiations is far from easy for Indigenous Peoples.
A long way on a small budget
The UN mandate to draw up a plastics treaty instructs countries to consider Indigenous knowledge. A 2007 UN declaration on Indigenous rights also lays out their right to self-determination and to participate in decisions that affect them. Yet the IIPFP has faced barriers even getting accredited to attend the plastic talks.
Rwandan delegate Juliet Kabera at the closing plenary of the talks. Rwanda is a member of the group of high ambition countries pushing for an effective and powerful treaty (Image: Duncan Moore / UNEP, BY NC SA)
“Our accreditation should be our indigeneity,” says Lee. As it stands, if Indigenous People aren’t part of an accredited organisation such as an NGO or business group, they must find someone willing to host them. This is hard when each accredited organisation only has five spots at the talks.
Global South participants can also face prohibitive costs in trying to reach meetings, three out of five of which have been held in the Global North. “A lot of our people run into real issues trying to get visas, and sometimes they have to do big, expensive routes because they can’t come through certain countries,” Lee says. The forum’s 40 individual members rarely all make it to an INC.
On top of this, the talks are dragging on, meaning these costs keep mounting. Busan was meant to be the fifth and final set of negotiations and end with a treaty finalised. But a stalemate – between a bloc of over 100 nations that want the treaty to limit the amount of plastic the world makes, and a handful of oil-producing states that oppose this – pushed negotiations into 2025. Some in civil society are not sure budgets will stretch to allow their ongoing participation.
The INC Secretariat, a body that supports the committee’s work, provides 20 travel grants to civil society participants, including Indigenous Peoples. It says this is “an exceptional practice in a process such as this”. Over 3,300 participants were registered to attend INC-5.
Turned up, locked out
Even when they do make it to meetings, Indigenous People often find they do not get access and influence. They largely attend as “observers”, a category that includes civil society groups, scientists and industry. While they cannot negotiate directly, observers can join so-called “contact group meetings” that deal with specific issues, where they can keep track of the discussions between international delegates. Sometimes, as in Busan, meeting rooms are too small to meet demand, leaving dozens of observers queuing outside.
INC-5 saw “increased shut out of both Indigenous Peoples and other members of civil society,” says Pamela Miller, co-chair of the International Pollutants Elimination Network and executive director of the Alaska Community Action on Toxics (ACAT). “We were relegated to trying to meet with delegates in the hallways,” she says.
“To be shut out is a violation of human rights,” she says. “It makes the treaty weaker.”
Frustrations were dialled up during the final two days of INC-5, when the INC Bureau – the committee that organises and guides the negotiations – changed the meeting format to “informals”: negotiations that are officially off-limits to observers. Suddenly, the venue’s foyers and cafes were teeming with people who had nowhere else to go.
While it is not unusual for negotiations to clam up towards the end, some see a controlling hand at play. After the stand-up protest at the plenary, “the INC Secretariat was fully aware of the capabilities of observer groups to shake the room”, says Rufino Varea, an Indigenous Rotuman scientist from Fiji who is a regional director at the Pacific Islands Climate Action Network. “I think maybe they were trying to pre-emptively avoid any form of disruption to the meeting.”
This is a recurring theme at the UN climate change meetings and the Convention on Biological Diversity too, says Natalie Jones, a policy adviser at the International Institute for Sustainable Development, and a researcher on Indigenous participation in international governance. “Across the board, closed meetings are definitely an issue,” she says. “If Indigenous Peoples, and others, can’t get into the room they have no way to ensure their interests are being protected.”
An INC Secretariat spokesperson told Dialogue Earth that at each INC, observers have been forewarned that seating in contact groups would be subject to availability, and that it is standard practice at all UN negotiations to close informal meetings to observer groups.
What is lost
The exclusion of Indigenous Peoples shuts out vital expertise from discussions, multiple experts told Dialogue Earth. Many participants, especially smaller, under-resourced delegations from Global South nations, rely on civil society and scientists to help them navigate the material and provide guidance.
Varea, part of Fiji’s delegation in Busan, says certain countries actively “lean on the advice of the Indigenous Peoples Forum”. Being in the room also enables Indigenous Peoples to lobby less progressive states and hold to account ambitious countries that have promised to push for a strong treaty, adds Lee.
This leaves gaps that some fear are being filled by industry. There were 220 members of the plastics and petrochemical industries registered for INC-5, exceeding delegates from the EU. Several attended on national delegations, granting them direct access to the document under debate. That power dynamic may be showing in the text. A version released at the end of INC-5 dropped references to Indigenous Peoples rights. The phrase “chemicals of concern” had been scrubbed from the title of an article on managing plastic products and chemicals of concern.
A group of observer organisations, including members of the IIPFP and a coalition of scientists, have publicly condemned the limited access, warning it risks creating an ineffective treaty.
“Our knowledge can ensure that these treaties put the strictest, most protective measures in place to protect our people, but also everybody,” says Viola Waghiyi, a Yupik Indigenous leader from Alaska, who has attended several INCs and works with Miller at ACAT. “We recognise that it’s a global crisis.”
As observers wait for countries to agree on a date and place for another supposedly final meeting (dubbed INC-5.2), there has been time to reflect on what should change. Some want more funding to increase participation of Indigenous Peoples.
Inspiration could also be drawn from more inclusive UN meetings, such as the Stockholm Convention on chemicals called persistent organic pollutants. There, Indigenous Peoples have been able to observe, intervene and participate in contact group meetings, they say. “That is a much more open process,” says Miller, who alongside Waghiyi, has been an observer in those meetings for years.
Varea wants Indigenous Peoples to be recognised in the plastics treaty not just as stakeholders but rights holders, to elevate them beyond observers. Something like this is taking shape in the UN General Assembly, where a resolution is being discussed that could grant Indigenous Peoples a position alongside states, effectively giving them equal negotiating power in UN processes.
That could be years in the making. For now, the road ahead for Indigenous participation in the plastics treaty process remains unclear. Asked if he feels optimistic about INC-5.2, Varea pauses. “Well, I don’t know,” he says. “But what I can tell you is that I will be prepared.”
