UNITAR, UNEP Training Representatives in Nine African Countries to Inventory Mercury Releases
5 December 2012: The UN Institute on Training and Research (UNITAR) has reported on efforts to help develop mercury releases inventories in Cameroon, Ethiopia, Gabon, Kenya, Mali, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania and Zambia.
According to the UNITAR note, the project, which ran from August 2011 to September 2012, was carried out by UNITAR, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and GroundWork, a South African nongovernmental organization (NGO) affiliated with Friends of the Earth International (FoEI), with financial support from the Governments of Norway and Switzerland. Early in the project, in September 2011, technical officers of the participating countries attended a training workshop in Nairobi on the use of UNEP's Toolkit for Identification of Mercury Releases. The subsequent technical work in the nine countries to develop the release inventories was supported by GroundWork and the author of UNEP's toolkit, Jacob Maag.
UNITAR reports that a presentation of the preliminary results of the inventories made during a side event held during the fourth meeting of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee to prepare a global legally binding instrument on Mercury (INC4) has raised enough interest that UNITAR, UNEP and GroundWork expect to provide similar support for national mercury emissions inventories in other countries as they prepare national mercury control strategies related or inspired by the forthcoming global instrument. [UNITAR note]