INC4 Updates

The fourth session of the United Nations Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC4) began in Ottawa, Canada, on April 23, 2024, with approximately 4,000 delegates from 196 countries worldwide attending the meeting and deliberating issues around controlling plastic pollution. The objective of this week-long meeting was to develop an international legally binding instrument on all forms including air, water, and soil, of plastic pollution. The INC4 negotiations are scheduled to end on April 29, 2024.

This session aims to advance negotiations to enable the committee to finalise the draft resolution for approval at the fifth and last session, scheduled to take place in Busan, Korea in November 2024, before the implementation of the legally binding instrument in 2025. The ongoing penultimate stage of the negotiations follows three earlier rounds of deliberations, which started with its first version (INC1) in Punta del Este in November 2022, the second (INC2) in Paris in June 2023, and the third version (INC3) in Nairobi in November 2023.