Focus on Arts and Ecology

With a global plastics treaty still out of reach, experts say the region’s piecemeal bans on waste imports move the target without stemming the flow. 

By Isa Lim, March 27, 2026

In August 2025, Malaysian campaigner Wong Pui Yi stood outside the UN headquarters in Geneva and made an appeal to Global North nations: “Stop treating the Global South as the rubbish bin for plastic waste you cannot handle.”

During that meeting, representatives from 184 countries failed to reach an agreement on a treaty to end plastic pollution. But the need for one has not gone away, particularly for Southeast Asian nations.

The region became the top destination for plastic waste imports following a solid waste import ban by China in 2017. Imports remain at a higher level in some of the region’s countries, according to data from UN Trade and Development. Data from the OECD, a group of mostly high-income countries, found that Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam remained the top non-OECD export destinations for waste from OECD countries in 2023.

Some Southeast Asian countries have implemented bans on plastic waste imports. But experts fear this will only lead to a reshuffling of waste to other countries with weaker restrictions, perpetuating the cycle of what critics call “waste colonialism”.

This term, first recorded in 1989, suggests that the trade enables the high-consumption lifestyles of the Global North, with countries in the Global South left to deal with the consequences.

Exporting health and environmental harms

The global waste trade emerged in the 1980s as a means for countries with high recycling costs to send waste to countries where recycling could be done at lower cost. In countries like China, imported waste also filled a gap of raw materials to produce plastics, metals and papers.

Looser environmental regulations in importing countries made the plastics trade commercially viable. “They export the pollution to Southeast Asian countries, since we have less regulation and less control because of our historical context,” explains Punyathorn Jeungsmarn, a plastics campaigner and researcher at the Environmental Justice Foundation.

In theory, the trade is meant to create jobs while developing new revenue streams and recycling infrastructure. In practice, however, it has overwhelmed waste management systems in many importing countries.

Thitikorn Boontongmai is programme manager and researcher at Ecological Alert and Recovery Thailand (EARTH). The NGO inspected several “illegal recycling factories” in eastern Thailand and observed waste simply dumped in landfills rather than processed.

With heavy rainfall, much of this plastic ends up in the oceans by way of the region’s long rivers and coastlines: six of the ten highest plastic polluting countries are in Southeast Asia.

In Thailand, the availability of cheap imported plastics has led to lower demand for recyclables. This lowers prices for the waste pickers who collect and trade these materials, Punyathorn explains. He notes that pickers have threatened to stop collecting waste unless the government bans the import of plastics. “If they stop collecting, then the waste in the ground and on the streets is not collected, and you have a situation where the entire domestic supply chain is disrupted.”

The plastics trade has also affected human health. An investigation by Greenpeace Malaysia around a dumpsite in Pulau Indah found hazardous chemicals and heavy metals such as cadmium and lead. The report noted that these contaminants may cause health issues including cardiovascular, respiratory and cognitive diseases. Between 2018 and 2019, when plastic burning spiked in Sungai Petani, Kedah, community advocates reported a 30% increase in cases of respiratory diseases.

Southeast Asia pushes back

In response to their environmental impacts, several Southeast Asian countries have rolled out restrictions and bans on waste imports. In January 2025, the Thai and Indonesian governments announced the immediate halting of plastic scrap imports.

Fearing the arrival of waste diverted from those countries, Malaysia restricted the inflow of plastic waste. In July 2025, it banned shipments from countries not party to the Basel Convention on the waste trade. A further ban in February 2026 forbade the import of e-waste, introduced shortly after a six-month blanket moratorium on all types of waste import was proposed.

Sedat Gündoğdu, a marine biologist and member of the Scientists’ Coalition for an Effective Plastics Treaty, says complete bans work because “shipping companies will avoid carrying any kind of waste to your country. This is what China did”. But some activists and experts note that bans have not always stopped imports. Thitikorn says EARTH had seen cases of imported plastic waste being declared as something else in Thailand. Campaigners in Indonesia have also documented paper scrap imports being contaminated with plastic, with up to 30% of the import being plastic. These have been sold to brokers or burned as fuel.

“At the end of the day, when it comes to a local level,” Punyathorn says, authorities with power to regulate or permit certain things coming in “may have vested interests that allow them to just… circumvent these [bans]”.

Lukas Fort, who researches Indonesia’s environmental governance at the University of Copenhagen, tells Dialogue Earth that the recycling industry’s dependence on imported plastics “raises the possibility that imports may continue in some form if enforcement is uneven”. He says this is especially so due to the often competing interests of government bodies, for instance the environment ministry and the trade or industry ministry.

Even if bans are effectively implemented, campaigners raised concerns that they would just change where plastic waste ends up. “Every year it’s a new destination,” says Kaustubh Thapa, a post-doctorate researcher at Radboud University’s Faculty of Environmental Science. “Waste traders always will find [new] destinations to exploit.”

An example of this can be seen in 2023, as plastic waste import restrictions were tightening in countries like Thailand. An investigation into customs data during this period revealed that much misreported waste from Europe and North America had been illegally dumped in war-torn Myanmar, transiting through Thailand.

Though Punyathorn thinks the effectiveness of restrictions are limited, he is hopeful about other measures being considered. In Thailand, these include the Sustainable Packaging Act, in which producers will be responsible for post-consumption management of waste, such as recovery and recycling. This act, along with proposed policies on circular economy and a pollution register, show that there is a “growing momentum towards trying to use domestic waste rather than imports”, he notes.

The global plastics treaty

As Southeast Asia deals with the continued influx of imported plastic waste, a global plastics treaty still hangs in the balance. The most recent round of negotiations in Geneva in August 2025 ended with a weakened draft text. Chief among the challenges faced were efforts by oil-producing states to block measures to curb plastic production and regulate chemical additives to plastic.

Even nations pushing for an ambitious treaty have avoided confronting the waste trade directly, Gündoğdu notes, referring to member states of the High Ambition Coalition to End Plastic Pollution (HAC). “How can a high-ambition group not be ‘high-ambitious’ about strict control of plastic waste trade to [countries in] Africa and other countries?” he says, noting that European HAC members are some of the largest plastic exporters to developing countries. Similarly, some Southeast Asian states have had to balance their petrochemical industry ambitions with resolving the negative impacts of imported waste.

“The last negotiation left off on a very uncertain note,” says Punyathorn, highlighting the resignation of former treaty chair Luis Vayas Valdivieso after nations were unable to agree on two drafts he proposed. Since Dialogue Earth spoke to Punyathorn, a new chair was elected, revitalising hopes of momentum towards an effective treaty.

Existing international legislation could provide a guideline for what an effective plastics treaty could look like. In 2019, the Basel Convention was amended to strengthen control of the transboundary movement of plastic waste, notably requiring prior informed consent before such waste crosses borders.

However, being voluntary, the convention is insufficient, says Gündoğdu. A treaty should address the waste trade in a manner aligned with the convention, while consolidating the existing codes for hazardous, non-hazardous and plastics under a single definition of plastic waste to make it more difficult to exploit loopholes, he notes.

One of the key dividing lines in the negotiations – for which next official rounds are anticipated at end-2026 or early 2027 – is whether the treaty will include a cap on plastic production, which is where the harms of the waste trade begin, Punyathorn says.

He explains that countries with more natural gas and oil than needed for energy production will use it to produce plastics, particularly disposable single-use items such as bags, spoons and straws, in order to flush out a high supply as quickly as possible. Once disposed of, these low-quality plastics are harder to collect, recycle and manage, and so are often exported to poorer countries.

He says the best way to stop this is to turn off the fossil fuel tap causing this overflow, “make plastics more expensive, and then you would only have necessary products that can be properly managed throughout the value chain”.

What happens when fuel security collides with climate ambition in South Asian countries like Pakistan? Climate finance expert Kashmala Kakakhel weighs in. 

By Kshmala Kakakhel, March 27, 2026

As the war intensifies, consequences are being felt far beyond the immediate theatre of conflict. Across South Asia, governments are confronting an increasingly familiar dilemma: how to maintain energy security amid geopolitical shocks while sustaining long-term commitments to climate action?

For Pakistan, the situation is particularly acute. Already grappling with fiscal constraints, currency volatility and high dependency on energy imports, the country now faces record fuel price pressures and supply shortage. This has pushed it to adopt immediate austerity measures. In the past week alone, the country has had to keep spectators away from cricket matches to curb consumption, cancelled its Republic Day parade, and increased prices on some types of fuel by as much as 200%.

While the headlines focus on these measures, alongside fuel rationing and budget reallocations to absorb fuel price hikes, the deeper implications lie in how such crises reshape national priorities, one of them being global climate financing.

The energy crisis reveals the fragility of such financing’s underlying economic model.

Climate finance frameworks, from institutions such as the Green Climate Fund and the World Bank, are designed to catalyse long-term investments in renewable energy, climate resilience and low-carbon infrastructure. These investments assume a baseline level of macroeconomic stability and fiscal predictability.

When energy shocks occur, however, those assumptions collapse.

Governments facing fuel shortages and public unrest cannot realistically prioritise solar parks, electric mobility strategies or climate-resilient infrastructure. Instead, they must stabilise their energy systems immediately, often through expensive short-term imports or expanded reliance on fossil fuels.

For countries navigating both debt distress and energy insecurity, climate commitments risk becoming politically untenable if the international financial system cannot cushion these shocks.

This creates a paradox at the heart of the global climate transition: the countries most exposed to climate impacts are often heavily dependent on imported fuels and are fiscally constrained, a reality particularly seen across South Asia. Short-term crisis management leads to long-term decarbonisation becoming slower, yet it is through investment in such pathways that future energy shocks can be absorbed.

Climate finance architecture must thus evolve to account for – and be able to withstand – geopolitical volatility.

The geography of energy vulnerability

South Asia’s energy systems are already among the most vulnerable to energy shocks. This is compounded by the fact that much of the region’s imported oil and liquefied natural gas moves through strategic maritime chokepoints in Southwest Asia, particularly the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea corridor.

Pakistan, for instance, imports roughly two-thirds of its energy requirements, so even short term, brief disruptions can trigger cascading impacts: currency pressure, inflation, higher power tariffs and fiscal strain. Governments like Pakistan’s are then pushed to divert scarce public resources toward emergency fuel procurement and subsidies, crowding out investments in renewable energy infrastructure and climate adaptation.

This is the geopolitical domino effect that rarely receives sufficient attention in climate discourse. Conflict in one region destabilises the financial foundations of climate action elsewhere.

But in countries like Pakistan, it is this very climate action that will prove crucial to staving off the impacts of energy shocks like the Gulf conflict.

A recent analysis by the organisations Renewables First and the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) highlights how Pakistan is quietly emerging as a leading market for adoption of distributed solar.

With this model, electricity no longer flows in only one direction, from the grid to the consumer. Instead, consumers can produce electricity for their own consumption, and also sell it to the market when they have a surplus, in some cases making a profit. This creates two-way flows and allows consumers to take control of their own energy demand.

Rapid solarisation is already reducing reliance on imported fuels in the country, with rooftop and decentralised systems shouldering a growing share of national electricity demand. Since 2018, this expansion has helped the country avoid an estimated USD 12 billion in fossil fuel import costs, with further savings of over USD 6 billion expected this year.

However, this trajectory will only translate into durable gains if policy governing it remains consistent. Frequent shifts and uncertainty around net-metering regulations risk undermining investor confidence and discouraging households and businesses that have committed significant capital to solar solutions. Energy independence through renewables is not only a technological transition, it is also a policy credibility test.

Short-term security vs long-term transition

In recent years, Pakistan and other emerging economies have begun exploring innovative financial instruments, carbon markets, blended finance, venture capital for climate technologies, and sovereign debt restructuring linked to climate investments. These mechanisms aim to unlock the capital needed for large-scale green transitions.

However, when geopolitical crises drive fuel prices upward, the policy focus inevitably shifts. Governments prioritise keeping lights on and industries running. Though the tension between fuel security and climate ambition is not new, it has certainly intensified due to the war.

The risk is that repeated shocks from either global energy spikes or domestic crises, such as floods, could entrench a cycle in which climate investments are perpetually delayed by immediate economic pressures, recovery or stabilisation. Long-term decarbonisation priorities remain on hold, leaving climate transition efforts chronically underfunded and vulnerable. This is particularly concerning in South Asia, where energy demand is projected to rise sharply in the coming decades as populations grow and economies expand.

If renewable investments stall now, the region may lock itself into a longer period of fossil fuel dependence – precisely the opposite of what global climate goals require.

But ironically, geopolitical shocks like the Gulf conflict could both slow and accelerate the energy transition: slow it in the short term by forcing fossil fuel reliance but potentially accelerate it in the long term by highlighting the strategic value of energy independence.

We see this playing out in the current crisis within maritime logistics.

Global energy markets depend on secure shipping routes. If prolonged instability disrupts traffic through the Strait of Hormuz or related routes in the Gulf region, energy supply chains could undergo structural shifts. With insurance premiums rising and several shipping operators reassessing routes through the Gulf, even the perception of instability can translate into immediate price volatility for fuel-importing economies. Shipping costs will rise, and countries might be forced to diversify supply routes or suppliers.

For heavily indebted developing economies, these additional costs can translate into billions of dollars in unforeseen expenditures.

Over time, such disruptions could accelerate a broader realignment of energy trade patterns, pushing countries to reconsider their dependence on distant suppliers and to invest more heavily in domestic energy generation, including renewables.

Rethinking climate finance for a volatile world

What this moment ultimately reveals is that climate finance architecture must evolve to account for geopolitical volatility.

Current climate funding mechanisms are largely structured around long-term project cycles and predictable financial flows. Yet the world is entering a period defined by overlapping crises: conflict, debt stress, supply chain disruptions and climate impacts themselves.

For countries like Pakistan, the challenge is not simply accessing climate finance; it is ensuring that climate investments remain viable even during periods of economic turbulence.

This may require new financial instruments that integrate energy security with energy transition objectives. Emergency energy financing linked to renewable projects could stabilise supply during crises like fuel disruptions or floods while ensuring Pakistan’s climate transition stays on track.

Similarly, debt restructuring mechanisms that reward climate investments could create fiscal space for countries facing simultaneous energy and climate pressures.

The escalating war is a stark reminder that energy transition does not occur in a vacuum. It unfolds within a complex geopolitical landscape where conflicts, markets and climate imperatives intersect.

South Asia’s high dependence on imported fuels, along with its limited domestic energy buffers and rapid economic growth, make it especially sensitive to global price shocks. As such, the current fuel crisis is not simply a temporary disruption for the region – it is a test of whether the region can navigate immediate energy security needs without abandoning its long-term climate ambitions.

The stakes extend far beyond fuel prices. They will shape the trajectory of economic development, energy independence and climate resilience for decades to come.

If the global community hopes to maintain momentum toward decarbonisation, it must recognise that climate finance cannot be insulated from geopolitics. Instead, it must be designed to withstand it.

Dialogue Earth speaks with the new chair of the African Group of Negotiators about the continent’s priorities, finance and the declining focus on climate change.

By Zubaida Mabuno Ismail, April 2, 2026

The start of the year saw the appointment of a new chair of the African Group of Negotiators (AGN) – Nana Antwi-Boasiako Amoah, Ghana’s director of climate vulnerability and adaptation.

Since the first UN climate negotiations in 1995, the AGN, which represents the continent’s 54 countries, has sought to elevate African priorities, like securing funding for adapting to climate impacts.

With next year’s major climate conference – COP32 – taking place in Ethiopia, the significance of the bloc is increasing. However, it is not without its internal divisions and disagreements.

Amoah recently sat down with Dialogue Earth in Accra to discuss his priorities and vision for the bloc, the challenge of keeping climate change high on the political agenda, and the increasingly consequential role of China in the continent’s climate responses.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Dialogue Earth: What do you see as the priorities for the African Group of Negotiators over the next two years?