The end of 2024 was rich in significant events, including the fifteenth meeting of the Partnership Advisory Group (PAG-15), international meetings, as well as regional workshops under ongoing GEF funded projects on mercury-containing products. 

Among the decisions made at COP-5, Parties defined new dates to phase out mercury-added products including cosmetics, strengthened ties with Indigenous Peoples, advanced the first effectiveness evaluation of the Convention, and reached an agreement on a threshold for mercury waste. Read more on Minamata Convention website

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. Among them is Jose Vigil, one of 800 people in the region who mine mercury, a highly toxic substance. But for Vigil and the other miners, the clock is ticking.

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.   Yoshinaga would learn her father was one of thousands of Minamata-area residents poisoned in the 1950s and 1960s by industrial runoff laced with mercury, a neurotoxin.

Communication from TAUW bv The not-for-profit Foundation of TAUW, who recently joined the Partnership, is currently calling for tenders with up to EUR 120,000 support available for individual projects that stimulate, accelerate, and (financially) support sustainable non-profit projects focused on initiatives that aim for a sustainable and valuable impact on the physical living environment, including reductions in mercury use, release, emission, and bioavailability.