The United Nations Environment Programme

  • The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) was established in 1972 as a response to the growing recognition of environmental issues. The first UNEP committee meeting was held in Stockholm, Sweden, in June 1972, and was attended by representatives from 113 countries. The meeting resulted in the adoption of the Stockholm Declaration, which established the principles of environmental protection and sustainable development. Over the years, the UNEP committee has played a crucial role in promoting global environmental cooperation and addressing environmental challenges. 

    Today, the UNEP is a decision making body which consists of representatives from all 193 member states of the UN. They meet once a year to review the work of the agency, set its priorities and make policy decisions. It is responsible for providing guidance on the development and implementation of environmental policies and programs. Through its work, the committee aims to create a more sustainable and equitable world for all people.

  • Geoengineering refers to the deliberate, large scale intervention in the Earth's climate or environmental systems, generally intended to counteract the effects of climate change. It is typically divided into two broad categories: carbon dioxide removal, which draws greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere, and solar radiation modification (SRM), which aims to reflect a portion of incoming sunlight back into space to cool the planet. While these ideas are relatively new to international policy discussions, the underlying concept, humans deliberately reshaping large environmental systems, is not new at all, and understanding the difference between established, well governed environmental engineering and speculative, high risk climate intervention is central to this agenda item.

    The most discussed SRM technique is stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), which proposes spraying reflective aerosol particles, such as sulfur dioxide, into the upper atmosphere. The idea draws directly from nature: when Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines in June 1991, it injected an estimated 15 to 20 million tonnes of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, forming a global aerosol veil that lowered average global temperatures by roughly 0.5 degrees Celsius for almost two years. This remains the most important real world data point scientists have for how artificial aerosol injection might behave at scale, and it has fueled proposals to replicate the effect deliberately. However, SAI carries significant risks, including possible damage to the ozone layer, disruption of regional rainfall patterns such as monsoons, and the danger of “termination shock,” a rapid and severe rebound in warming if the intervention were ever stopped abruptly. Governance has struggled to keep pace with private sector interest: one startup has been launching sulfur dioxide filled weather balloons since 2022, and another raised approximately 75 million dollars in 2025 with plans for outdoor aerosol experiments in 2026 before facing public pressure and postponing them. UNEP's own 2023 expert review, One Atmosphere, called for stronger international governance of the stratosphere, but a formal proposal to create a dedicated UNEA study group on solar geoengineering has so far failed to gain consensus among member states.

    A second, far more speculative SRM concept is the space based sunshade, sometimes called a giant sun shield: a massive reflective structure, first proposed in 1989 and refined in later designs, positioned near the Sun-Earth L1 Lagrange point, about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, where it would block a small fraction of sunlight before it ever reaches the atmosphere. Because it would operate outside Earth's atmosphere entirely, a sunshade would avoid some of the direct chemical risks of SAI, but the engineering challenge is immense: estimates put the required mass at 10 million to 100 million tonnes, with costs projected in the trillions of dollars and a development timeline stretching to mid-century or beyond. Like SAI, it raises the question of who gets to control a technology capable of altering the planet's thermostat, and who bears responsibility if it fails or is switched off.

    It is worth remembering that humans have engaged in large scale, deliberate reshaping of environments for centuries, sometimes described as a form of terraforming closer to home. The Netherlands offers the clearest example: since the twelfth century, and especially through the twentieth century, built after the catastrophic 1953 North Sea flood killed nearly 1,800 people, the Dutch have used dikes, dams, and polders to reclaim roughly 17 percent of the country's current land area from the sea and lakes. Today, close to a quarter of the Netherlands sits below sea level, protected entirely by engineered infrastructure. This kind of localized, consensual, and heavily regulated environmental engineering stands in sharp contrast to planetary scale geoengineering proposals, which cannot be contained within a single country's borders and would affect the climate of every nation regardless of consent.

    • Should there be a binding international framework governing outdoor experimentation and potential deployment of solar radiation modification technologies, and who should have the authority to approve or halt them?

    • How should the international community balance the potential benefits of geoengineering research against the risks of unilateral or under-regulated deployment by states or private companies?

    • What lessons can established, large scale environmental engineering projects, such as the Netherlands' dikes and land reclamation works, offer for the governance of newer geoengineering technologies?

    • How should the potential costs, benefits, and regional climate impacts of geoengineering be distributed among countries, particularly between those most able to fund such technologies and those most vulnerable to their side effects?

  • Pharmaceuticals play an essential role in human and animal health, food production, and economic development, and an estimated 4,000 active pharmaceutical ingredients are in use worldwide across human medicine, veterinary care, and over the counter drugs. However, these compounds increasingly end up in the environment at every stage of their life cycle: through manufacturing wastewater, through normal human and animal excretion after use, through improperly disposed unused or expired medicine, and through inadequately treated waste from hospitals and health care facilities. Once released, pharmaceutical residues have been found to cause toxicity in aquatic organisms, endocrine disruption, and shifts in microbial communities. One of the most striking documented cases occurred across South Asia, where the veterinary anti-inflammatory drug diclofenac, administered to livestock and later consumed by scavenging birds, caused mass vulture die-offs and pushed several vulture species toward the brink of extinction.

    The environmental release of pharmaceuticals is also closely tied to one of the most serious long term threats to global health: antimicrobial resistance (AMR), the process by which bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites evolve to survive the drugs designed to kill them. AMR is already directly responsible for more than one million deaths every year, and a comprehensive 2024 global analysis published in The Lancet projected that AMR will contribute to roughly 39 million deaths between 2025 and 2050, with annual deaths directly attributable to AMR expected to rise from about 1.14 million in 2021 to 1.91 million by 2050. Environmental pollution is now recognized as a significant driver of this trend. When antibiotics and other antimicrobials enter waterways, soil, and wastewater systems, whether from manufacturing effluent, hospital waste, or agricultural runoff, they can create conditions that favor the survival and spread of resistant bacteria and resistance genes, even among microbes never directly exposed to the drug in a clinical setting. UNEP's 2023 report, Bracing for Superbugs, identified pharmaceutical and chemical manufacturing, agriculture and food production, and healthcare delivery as the three economic sectors most responsible for driving AMR through the environment.

    Despite this recognition, environmental protections remain unevenly applied around the world. A UNEP survey found that more than a third of countries have not incorporated environmental considerations into their National Action Plans on AMR, even though all UN member states have been asked to develop such plans. Addressing this gap requires a lifecycle approach: stronger wastewater treatment at manufacturing sites, formal take back and collection schemes for unused medicine, better waste segregation in hospitals and clinics, and improved municipal sewage treatment capable of breaking down pharmaceutical residues. At the same time, any new environmental standards must be weighed against the risk of raising production costs for antibiotics and other essential medicines, particularly for manufacturers and health systems in low and middle income countries where affordable access to these drugs is already limited. This tension sits at the center of the “One Health” approach championed by UNEP alongside the WHO, FAO, and WOAH, which treats human, animal, and environmental health as inseparable parts of the same system.

    • What responsibilities should pharmaceutical manufacturers bear for the environmental and public health impacts of drug residues released during production?

    • How can countries improve the collection and safe disposal of unused or expired medicines, particularly in regions lacking formal waste management infrastructure?

    • What measures can reduce the release of antimicrobials into the environment without compromising access to affordable medicines in low and middle income countries?

    • How should national AMR action plans more fully integrate environmental protections, and what role should UNEP play in supporting this?

Position papers are due on February 12, 2025 in order to be considered eligible for an award.

contact: hsmun.unep@gmail.com.