The Impact of Mask Waste in Our Oceans: The Role of the UN and Recommitting to SDG 14 Efforts in the Wake of COVID-19
By: Advocacy
Tags: UN, Oceans, Covid 19, Climate Change, Sustainable Development

The Impact of Mask Waste in Our Oceans: The Role of the UN and Recommitting to SDG 14 Efforts in the Wake of COVID-19 Advocacy @ UNA-NCA Follow Apr 6 · 7 min read

By Kayleigh Thompson, UNA-NCA Advocacy Fellow

A face mask found during a beach cleanup in Hampton Beach, New Hampshire, USA | July, 2020

From shedding light onto poverty, industrial shortcomings, and the importance of good governance, the COVID-19 pandemic has left the global community scrambling to find solutions to problems both old and new. The threat of climate change has further exacerbated these challenges with extreme weather, forest fires, and other natural disasters. Covering more than 70% of the Earth’s surface, the ocean bears the brunt of the combined challenges of climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic.

While the United Nations (UN) has dedicated itself to prioritizing clean and healthy oceans through Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 14, the question of what a post-COVID ocean recovery effort will look like still remains uncertain. At present, there are UN initiated or partnered programs — such as the UN Development Programme (UNDP), UN Environment Program (UNEP), and The Global Environment Facility (GEF) — that invest in sustainable, clean oceans. Additionally, 70% of nationally determined contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Climate Agreement focus on marine issues. With the added weight of a global pandemic exposing existing deficiencies in ocean conservation and protection efforts — specifically a lack of data collection and progress tracing — the UN must expand on its initiatives to reach the SDG 14 targets by 2030, especially because the negative impact of COVID-19 on oceans will not be fully realized for some time.

While it was initially projected that the pandemic may cause a slowdown in fishing and international shipping, the increase in personal protective equipment (PPE) production and resulting waste has increased the threat of pollution in oceans. While the full volume of COVID-19-related waste is still unknown, the UN must be prepared to take estimated impact into account within future clean-ocean initiatives as the global community transitions towards pandemic recovery.

Evaluating the Consequences of COVID-19 on Oceans

SDG 14 advocates for ocean conservation, sustainable use of marine resources, and ensuring the continued development of healthy marine ecosystems. This goal also aims to ensure sustainable tourism and development of small-island states that are directly threatened by rising sea levels. Through partnerships with environmental groups, the UNDP orchestrates dozens of ongoing projects focused on protecting large marine ecosystems and encouraging sustainable fisheries, integrated coastal and watershed management, and transboundary river, lake and aquifer conservation.

At the outbreak of the pandemic, the UN Sustainable Development Agenda was updated to meet new challenges. At first, the main consequences of the pandemic as they related to SDG 14 looked positive — due to global quarantines, there was less coastal tourism and development, shipping, oil and gas extraction, and fishing. The GEF Global Marine Commodities Project reported that demand for shrimp, octopus, crab and other common fish consumed in restaurants decreased significantly, providing relief for species facing rapid population depletion from overfishing. Additionally, cargo shipping would face a projected 10% decline in 2020, and the decrease in oil and gas extraction had the potential to cause up to a 5% decline in global greenhouse emissions. While this is all encouraging news from an environmental standpoint, it should be noted that this is a slow progression towards SDG 14 targets at best, and with the existing lack in statistical data for SDG 14, these can only represent strong estimates. The UNDP predicts that, even at this new COVID-driven rate of change, it would take 10–15 years for depleted fisheries to fully recover, and the potential risk of a dramatic increase in these industries as a result of COVID-19 recovery cannot be estimated until the full-scale resumption of global economic activity.

Gary Stokes, Director of Operations of OceansAsia

Despite these projected positive effects, the UN should primarily focus on the negative impacts of the pandemic, especially in regards to PPE waste. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, there were already an estimated eight million metric tons of plastic dumped into oceans every year. During the pandemic, an estimated 129 billion face masks and 65 billion gloves are used every month–with China alone producing 200 tons of PPE waste every day. According to the Scientific American, gloves and masks are mistaken by marine life as jellyfish, a common food source, and have raised concerns over the already significant risk of entanglement for fish, birds, and other marine animals.

Making matters worse, the global oil market crash significantly decreased the cost of single use plastics. On top of this, the demand for single-use plastics rose in response to early COVID-19 mitigation tactics. Even though scientists deemed reusable plastics safe to use without threat of spreading the virus, take out and grocery bags, online shopping packaging, and the replacement of sustainable packaging with cheaper single-use plastic options may have caused up to a 30% increase of single-use plastics in 2020. Upwards of 90% of plastics aren’t recyclable; even when they are, a number of governments are cutting recycling programs due to COVID-19 imposed budget restraints. These setbacks make it likely that a significant proportion of single-use plastic waste will either end up in landfills, be incinerated, or will be put into open dumps, sending waste to make its way into the environment and eventually, the oceans.

In fact, the pollution in oceans has significantly increased in the last year as a result of the pandemic. In an annual international coastal cleanup event in October, volunteers collected at least 62,000 PPE items and additional plastic waste on beaches and waterways. Dr. George Leonard at the Ocean Conservatory stated that this number is expected to rise as the pandemic continues. As global vaccination campaigns are underway and there is hope of managing the virus, the focus must shift to evaluating how this increase in both plastic production and plastic waste has affected current data on ocean pollution — and the UN must be prepared to make adjustments to SDG Indicators and the general strategy of ocean conservancy programs in response.

The Role of the UN

At present, movements to curb COVID-19 plastic waste increases have yet to garner significant international attention. In June of 2020, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) launched Resource: Plastic, a project that aims to encourage businesses to engage in supply chain transparency and promote the use of more sustainable materials that replace single-use plastics. Additional recommendations by the US National Institute of Health to accommodate pollution resulting from COVID-19 include advocating for improved municipal waste management and disinfection of medical waste and PPE to allow for recycling.

Despite a plethora of programs led by the UN, challenges such as a lack of databases to show the progress of such initiatives threaten their ability to achieve not only the target goals of SDG 14, but also the entire 2030 agenda. The UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) reports both UN programs and individual nations committed to ocean cleanup have a distinct lack of statistical mechanisms and data transparency to allow both the public and the scientific community to identify problem areas that still exist within the target goals. The unknown consequences of COVID-19 are likely to muddle this information gap even further.

Before any COVID-19 recovery initiatives can be fully effective, the UN must address this lack of accurate data collection and publishing. The UN exists largely to help coordinate the implementation of the SDGs and facilitate conversations for international cooperation on these issues, and agencies like the UN Statistics Division (UNSD) specifically function as one of the primary global databases that can ensure cohesive international responses based on shared data. At present, less than half of the 193 signatory countries to the UN have comparable data on 4 of the 17 sustainable development goals, which makes COVID-19 responses based on existing data much more difficult. One of these 4 goals is SDG 14, meaning that because the existing data is already lacking, it will be difficult to evaluate the true impact of COVID-19.

This information must also be made available to the public in order to not only gain their trust but also promote civil engagement in sustainability efforts, especially as the new challenges from the pandemic are fully realized. The UN must commit to support more comprehensive data collection and analysis both at the national and international level to indicate that global organizations and major national efforts are making progress and to demonstrate exactly how far the global community has to go towards achieving its shared goals.

As the true impact of COVID-19 on ocean pollution unfolds over the next year, the UN must also look beyond data collection and advocate for a more robust ocean cleanup effort. Partnering with automated waste collection boats/ floaters to remove plastics from surface water, promoting water treatment services, or adding in COVID-19 accommodations to existing global ocean conservation projects are all possible paths that the UN can consider. As the organization responsible for guiding international frameworks of engagement, especially with regards to the 2030 Agenda, the UN must be prepared to incorporate the full extent of COVID-19’s environmental impact into existing projects and future guidelines. Until the full consequences of the pandemic are realized, the UN must bolster its data transparency and encourage member nations and partner organizations to be as prepared as possible to adjust existing initiatives to incorporate the impact of COVID-19.