Browse Policies and Regulations

This policy brief highlights the need for a more comprehensive approach to addressing greenhouse gas emissions across the entire food system.

This policy brief offers insights on what forces shape our lifestyles, from our values and norms to economic factors and government regulations, underpinned by the physical infrastructure within which we live.

The objectives of the Convention are: (i) to promote shared responsibility and cooperative efforts among Parties in the international trade of certain hazardous chemicals in order to protect human health and the environment from potential harm; and (ii) to contribute to the environmentally sound use of those hazardous chemicals, by facilitating information exchange about their characteristics, by providing for a national decision-making process on their import and export and by disseminating these decisions to Parties.

The Globally Harmonized System of Classification and Labelling of Chemicals (GHS) is the culmination of more than a decade of work. GHS provides a basis for globally uniform physical, environmental, health and safety information on hazardous chemicals through the harmonisation of the criteria for their classification and labelling.

The Minamata Convention on Mercury is a global treaty to protect human health and the environment from the adverse effects of mercury. It was agreed at the fifth session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on mercury on 19 January 2013 and adopted later that year on 10 October 2013 at a Diplomatic Conference.

The Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal was adopted on 22 March 1989 by the Conference of Plenipotentiaries in Basel, Switzerland and entered into force on 5 May 1992.

The Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) is an international environmental treaty, signed in 2001 and effective from May 2004, which aims to eliminate or restrict the production and use of POPs. Since the adoption of the Convention, the Conference of the Parties has adopted a series of decisions to amend it and to list additional POPs.

This policy identifies the vision, purpose, scope, and timeframe for the implementation of the process to ban the importation of specific single-use plastic products into the Cook Islands. The vision of this policy is a Zero Waste Cook Islands through a systematic reduction of the amount of solid waste both generated and disposed of.