Hazardous Substances and Eutrophication Committee (2) 2020
HASEC held a second committee meeting from 5-7 October 2020, with the focus being to address outstanding issues that could not be addressed in HASEC(1)2020.
HASEC endeavours to be outward looking and to maintain links with sister organisations. So Contracting Parties involved in the Arctic Monitoring & Assessment Programme, the Helsinki Convention for the Baltic, the Barcelona Convention for the Mediterranean, provided interesting reports on relevant hazardous substances and eutrophication matters happening in those organisations.
OSPAR’s hazardous substances experts continue to collaborate with NORMAN[1] and HASEC agreed to the proposed approach for rationalising OSPAR’s List of Chemicals for Priority Action (LCPA) and List of Substances of Possible Concern (LSPC). Work is underway to conduct a comparison of the present NORMAN lists with OSPAR Lists from a policy perspective, by HASEC 2021. HASEC supported a proposal for OSPAR to become an Associated Member of NORMAN and the HASEC Chair will recommend this to CoG.
HASEC continues to review the applicability and relevance of its measures. HASEC decided to recommend to the OSPAR Commission that two measures are set-aside, whilst there will be reporting rounds for other measures to check Contracting Parties’ implementation. Next spring HASEC plans to discuss whether to establish and Intersessional Correspondence Group on measures that would be charged with overseeing extant measures and developing proposals for new ones where needed.
Pollution from marine scrubber systems is an issue of increasing importance. The EIHA Committee plans to circulate a questionnaire to Contracting Parties to gather national information. The issue will be further discussed by the Working Group on Monitoring and on Trends and Effects of Substances in the Marine Environment in November 2020.
[1] Network of reference laboratories, research centres and related organisations for monitoring of emerging environmental substances