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Angèle Delo began panning with mercury in her town in southeastern Burkina Faso at the age of 12. Now she is one of 116 miners who are newly equipped with skills to process ore without the use of this toxic metal, thanks to a new vocational training program developed by planetGOLD Burkina Faso.

Angele plans to not only use this training for her own work, but to also raise awareness among her fellow women miners, especially in the town of Poura where many women still work using mercury.

Meet Angele in episode 12 of planetGOLD's #DispatchesFromTheField series.

As an Assistant Task Manager within UNEP’s GEF Chemicals and Waste Unit, Inaki Rodríguez is working to end the harm caused by toxic chemicals and waste.

In an interview, we sat down with him to discuss his work and how he came to work on artisanal and small-scale gold mining.

What do you do in the Chemicals team?

As the sun rises across Mexico’s Sierra Gorda nature reserve, a golden light illuminates its nearly 400,000 hectares of mountains, gorges and valleys.

Set amid this vast wilderness is the Bucareli mercury mine.

Just after dawn, a metal door to the mine opens. The morning’s silence is broken by the dull sound of a generator and workers traipsing to their posts.

The Caribbean island of Barbuda still bears the battle scars of its most brutal encounter with climate change. In 2017, Hurricane Irma, a Category 5 leviathan of unprecedented power, roared across its pristine turquoise waters.

The island’s only storm shelter collapsed, with 300 people hiding inside. Around 95 per cent of Barbuda’s buildings were wrecked, including homes, schools and critical infrastructure.

It is October 2013, and Rimiko Yoshinaga is standing behind a podium in Minamata, Japan, gazing at an auditorium packed with world leaders.

Silence descends upon the room as she begins recounting how a mysterious illness had killed her father decades earlier.  

For two decades, paint maker Universal Colors has churned out an assortment of paints and industrial coatings from a small factory in Callao, Peru. Over time, the company has worked to weed out lead, a toxic chemical, from its products. But two varieties of paint proved to be especially problematic to reformulate, including one yellow epoxy paint.

A few dozen kilometres inland from northern Panama’s coast is the Hato Chami school.

Set amid winding roads, green trees and stunning mountains, it has more than 1,000 pupils, most of whom hail from one of Panama’s largest indigenous groups, the Ngäbe.

Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) are organic compounds that used to be produced worldwide but are now banned under the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs), a global treaty aiming to eliminate or restrict the production, use and trade of chemicals that are recognized as persistent, bio-accumulative and harmful to human and environmental health.

The Pacific Islands are hard-hit by the economic, social, and environmental costs of climate change. Despite the region’s less than 0.02 per cent contribution to the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions, Pacific Island countries are at the frontline of the triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution.

A newly launched Climate Transparency Platform offers a one-stop shop to track countries’ latest reported progress towards global carbon reduction goals, providing a key source of information for governments, civil society, and academia on the road to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change’s COP28 summit in Dubai.

    An innovative partnership is advancing a simple and effective solution to clearing plastic waste from waterways and turning it into a key element of a circular economy.

During the GEF Assembly, Canada and the United Kingdom announced contributions to the new Global Biodiversity Framework Fund, created to ramp up investment in nature restoration and renewal.

VANCOUVER – In good news for nature in a challenging moment, representatives of 185 countries agreed at the Global Environment Facility’s Seventh Assembly in Canada to launch an innovative new fund for biodiversity that will attract funding from governments, philanthropy, and the private sector.

The rhythmic sound of voices singing in harmony floats across Mozambique’s Limpopo River as several women stand ankle deep in the sticky mud along its banks.

In a well-rehearsed routine, one woman scoops up sediment with a hoe while another buries a fragile mangrove sapling in the void.

The joyous songs of the women obscure the difficulty of their job.

The monsoon season, which runs from June through September, has become a nervous time for the people of Nepal.

The climate crisis has supercharged the fallout from the annual rains, which are triggering an increasing number of floods and landslides, disasters that are especially devastating in a nation defined by its vertigo-inducing slopes.

Today is the sixth anniversary of the Minamata Convention on Mercury, a landmark global agreement to protect people and the environment from the toxic effects of mercury. To mark the occasion, UNEP is looking back at a story originally published in February about the campaign to end the use of mercury in small-scale gold mining.

Alfredo Somebang is an elder of the Pidlisan Indigenous tribe, which is part of the collective tribe of Igorot, or "people of the mountains," in the Philippines' Sagada region. He works as a gold miner as well as a farmer to support his family of eight. Small-scale gold mining is an increasingly important part of this region’s economy, and for the past two years, the planetGOLD Philippines project has worked with Alfredo and other miners to design a mercury-free gold processing plant that is fully accepted and approved by all local Indigenous communities.

It was an ecological time bomb.

In mid-2022, a toxic algal bloom began to quickly spread through the Oder River, which in part straddles the border between Germany and Poland.

This quarter's

Two new facilities nearing completion in Mongolia will allow small-scale gold miners to use a centralized, professional processing service that is mercury-free, rather than doing the gold processing themselves in secret using mercury.

Visit both new mercury-free facilities in this episode of planetGOLD's #DispatchesFromTheField video series.

Beneath the picturesque turquoise waters of Trinidad and Tobago, plastic pollution is wreaking havoc on marine ecosystems.

15 countries have united behind the GEF-funded Plastics Integrated Program to transition to a circular economy in the food and beverage sector and combat plastic pollution from single-use plastic packaging

$107-million program is the largest global investment in tackling plastic pollution to date

Brasilia, 26 June 2023 – The world’s largest funder of environmental action has announced its backing for over $321 million in UN Environment Programme initiatives to tackle the triple planetary crisis of climate change, nature and biodiversity and waste and pollution. 

As the world experiences the triple crises of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution, Canada continues to show leadership in advancing environmental action at home and around the world by bringing diverse partners together to find solutions for a healthy planet.

"Plastic kills, and the damages of plastic pollution have no borders. We cannot beat plastic pollution if we don’t tackle climate change, environmental loss and food crises at the same time.” 

The ISLANDS Programme has launched a new app to turn the tide on plastic pollution

Plastic waste harms human health and the environment, releasing toxic persistent organic pollutants if improperly managed

The Tide Turners app will equip over 100,000 young people around the world with youth-focused community-based solutions to stop plastic waste