Hello everyone! So great to be part of this group. I'm a photographer and storyteller documenting various elements of the sustainability movement, and use stories as a way of building awareness and understanding.

In March 2022, I was on assignment for the Earth Negotiations Bulletin (ENB) in Bali, Indonesia, covering COP4 of the Minamata Convention on Mercury, one of the most recent global agreements on the environment and health. It’s important to have a bit of background about mercury, how it’s been used and why this convention is so important.

Mercury is a curious thing. It shines like a mirror, liquid at room temperature but 13 times denser than water, its molten movement earned it the name quicksilver, and it soon became the stuff of legends – the key to alchemy and witchcraft, a potent medicine but also a deadly poison.

And this last part is important: mercury is deadly.

As a core earth element, mercury has been used for many things over the centuries: fluorescent lightbulbs, thermometers, dental amalgam, and a wide range of cosmetics. It was even used as a crop fungicide and was only identified as an industrial pollutant in the 1950s, after mercury-tainted industrial wastewater poisoned thousands of people in Japan’s Minamata Bay, leading to what is now known as ‘Minamata disease’.

Minamata disease is awful. A neurological disease, it causes numbness in the limbs, affects sight and hearing, causes tremors, impairs walking, causes brain damage, and can even affect the nervous system. It can also affect foetuses, causing severe deformities, mental retardation, deafness and blindness.

Minamata disease is serious, and that’s why the Minamata Convention was signed: a global treaty to protect human health and the environment from the adverse effects of mercury. Since its adoption in 2017, parties have been working to control the mercury supply and trade, reduce the use, emission and release of mercury, and to essentially, #MakeMercuryHistory.

I’ll start to unpack this – what mercury is still used for, how the convention works, but for now, check out the Earth Negotiations Bulletin (ENB) coverage at: https://enb.iisd.org/Minamata-Convention-Mercury-COP4-2

#MinamataCOP4 #MinamataConvention #mercury #UNEP #chemicalsmanagement #bali #onassignment #stories #livingfiercely