Basel convention an international treaty designed to reduce movement of hazardous waste from developed to less developed countries signed in ________ at ________.

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Correct — option (4), March 1989 - Switzerland. The Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal was opened for signature on 21 March 1989 at Basel in Switzerland, and it entered into force on 5 May 1992. Both blanks in the stem are therefore filled by the same option, and the second of them is given away by the treaty's own name: like almost every multilateral environmental agreement, it is called after the city where it was concluded, and Basel is a Swiss city on the Rhine. The convention was negotiated in response to a specific scandal of the 1980s, when hazardous waste from industrialised countries was being shipped for cheap disposal to poorer ones, sometimes under the description of recycling and sometimes simply dumped — the voyages of the Khian Sea and the Koko incident in Nigeria being the cases that forced the issue. Its object, as the stem itself says, is to reduce the movement of hazardous waste from developed to less developed countries, and it does so mainly through a prior informed consent procedure: a state may not export hazardous waste unless the importing state has been notified in writing and has consented in writing, and the exporting state must take the waste back if the shipment cannot be completed as agreed. It has 191 parties as of June 2024. Five United Nations members have not ratified it — East Timor, Fiji, Haiti, South Sudan and the United States — and the same list is worth carrying, because the American position recurs in questions on other environmental treaties.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The year is a decade too late and the country is wrong. The convention was concluded in March 1989 and had already entered into force in May 1992, so nothing could have been signed into existence in March 1999. Germany is not the venue either, and the treaty's own name settles that: these conventions are named for the city where they were adopted, and Basel is in Switzerland. The option is built to catch a candidate who remembers only that the Basel Convention belongs to the late twentieth century and that Germany is a large European country associated with environmental regulation — a plausible but unfounded pair of impressions. When a treaty is named after a place, the place is the first thing to fix, because it settles one blank without any recall of dates.  (b) April 1980 predates the negotiation of the convention altogether: the transboundary waste scandals that produced it belong to the middle and late 1980s, and the text was opened for signature in March 1989. Japan is the wrong country and is worth separating carefully, because Japan does host two major environmental agreements — the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gases, adopted in 1997, and the Minamata Convention on mercury, named for the city whose mercury poisoning gave the world the disease of that name. Neither is about the transboundary movement of hazardous waste in general. Keeping a short table of convention, city and country is the surest defence against a question of this construction, since the wrong options are always drawn from other treaties' venues.  (c) May 1979 is a full decade before the convention was opened for signature, and Norway is not its venue. The option pairs an early date with a Scandinavian country, which is plausible only as an impression — northern Europe did lead early work on transboundary pollution — but the Basel Convention is a 1989 instrument concluded in Switzerland. It is worth noting that the month in this option, May, does belong to the Basel story, but to a different event: the convention entered into force on 5 May 1992, three years after it was signed. Adoption and entry into force are separate dates for every treaty, and confusing them is one of the commonest errors in this part of the syllabus.

Concept: The Basel Convention is one of a cluster of chemical and waste treaties that examiners test together, and each is named after the city where it was adopted. Basel, opened for signature on 21 March 1989 and in force from 5 May 1992, governs the transboundary movement and disposal of hazardous wastes; its central mechanism is prior informed consent, backed by a duty on the exporting state to take back a shipment that cannot be disposed of as agreed. The Ban Amendment, adopted in 1995, goes further and prohibits the export of hazardous waste from developed countries to developing ones. In May 2019 the parties agreed to bring most plastic scrap within the convention's controls, an amendment binding on 186 states and one that reshaped the global waste-paper and plastic trade from January 2021. Alongside Basel sit the Rotterdam Convention, which applies prior informed consent to trade in hazardous chemicals and pesticides; the Stockholm Convention, which restricts persistent organic pollutants; and the Minamata Convention, which covers mercury. India is a party to Basel and regulates the subject domestically through the Hazardous and Other Wastes (Management and Transboundary Movement) Rules, made under the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986.

State PCS 2021 Q32 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2021 Q32 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer