Seventeenth Green Customs Initiative Partners Meeting
On 24 and 25 January 2023, the Green Customs Initiative’s (GCI) partners held their seventeenth annual partners meeting at UNEP’s OzonAction Office in Paris, France. The meeting addressed matters such as fostering multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) synergies, enhancing voluntary and mandatory reporting for MEAs, promoting the role of customs in a circular economy, enhancing gender integration in the partners’ and customs work, deepening linkages between trade and the environment, and promoting understanding of environmental terminologies that are of relevance to customs.
Rolph Payet and Megumi Seki, the Executive Secretaries for the secretariats to the Basel, Rotterdam and Stockholm Conventions and the Ozone secretariat respectively, and Patricia Kameri-Mbote, UNEP’s Law Division Director and head of the GCI secretariat, underscored the importance of GCI’s work, particularly in light of the initiative’s recognition by the United Nations General Assembly’s resolution on preventing and combating crimes that affect the environment.
The meeting culminated with a partners’ commitment to magnify the initiative’s impacts through robust resource mobilization, increased collaborative efforts and implementation of an agreed upon 2023 joint work plan.