Stockholm Convention Regional Workshop on New POPs and the Process of Reviewing and Updating NIPs

During the last Conference of the Parties of the Stockholm Convention, it was approved the decission of including the nine new chemicals in the Convention.

Parties are now requested to review their National Implementation Plans and update it when appropiate according with the ammendments of the annexes.

In light of that, on 14th October 2009 the CP/RAC signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Secretariat of the Stockholm Convention in order to jointly organize a workshop on the process of reviewing and updating NIPs.

As a result of that, during 2, 3 and 4th December 2009, the “Stockholm Convention Regional Capacity Building Workshop on New POPs and the Process of Reviewing and Updating NIPs” was held in Barcelona.

The main objectives of the workshop were as follows:

1. Clear understanding of participants on the scope of the obligation to update and review national implementation plans under Article 7 of the Convention in light of the recent amendment of Annexes A, B and C of the Convention;
2. Increased knowledge of participants on the guidance and training tools available to them in order to assist them in complying with their new obligations and assessing their need to update their national implementation plans accordingly;
3. Feedback is shared among the participants on the experience in using the various guidelines and training tools when developing their national implementation plans.

The participants were representatives 18 persons from some of the Mediterranean and French-speaking African countries, as Chad, Cameroon, Djibouti, Greece, Guinea, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Senegal, Spain, Tunisia and Turkey. Other stakeholders were also attending to the meeting as the Global Environmental Facility (GEF), the World Bank, UNEP-DGEF, the NGO IPEN and the CNTPP of Algeria (National Centre for Cleaner Technologies).

The working languages of the workshop were English and French.

The training workshop was very interactive, participants were practicing how to approach the different aspects of the review and update process of national implementation plans through a series of working group sessions.

Participants from Parties, NGOs and private sector groups were sharing their experiences through the preparation of national case studies.