Future Policy Award: Rewarding Policies That Improve Lives

Often described as the “Oscar on Best Policies,” the annual Future Policy Award showcases legislation and policies that create better living conditions for current and future generations. This unconventional award, organized by the World Future Council, aims to “raise global awareness for these exemplary laws and policies, and speed up policy action towards a healthy planet and just, sustainable and peaceful societies.”

With “Protection from Hazardous Chemicals” as this year’s topic — selected based on the urgency of policy progress — the 2021 award will celebrate the world’s best laws, policies, and legal frameworks that “regulate or ban the use of hazardous chemicals that threaten the environment and human health.”

As important as the 40,000-60,000 chemicals in commerce today are in our daily lives, they can and do harm our health and environment. They enter our food chains, soil, air, and water, and, if hazardous, may cause irreversible damage to human health as well as to the health of animals, fauna, flora, marine life, and the planet.

In 2016, the WHO estimated the number of lives lost as a direct or indirect consequence of hazardous chemicals at over 1.6 million — unfortunately, with an upward trend since 2012. Another 200 million people might be affected by waste sites, claims the Global Alliance on Health and Pollution’s (GAHP) recent report, while the EU estimates its yearly costs caused by certain exposure to chemicals at over 170 billion USD.

…this is a public health crisis that is present in all countries, from the wealthiest to the least industrialized.

The UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and hazardous substances and wastes Baskut Tuncak has called this a “‘silent pandemic’ of disability and disease associated with childhood exposure to toxics and pollution.” To build on this from the GAHP report, such toxic substances “may interfere with the normal expression of genes, brain development, the function of hormones and other processes necessary for children to grow into healthy adults.”

One of the causes for this “silent pandemic,” toxic pollution is now estimated to be “the largest source of premature death in the developing world, killing more people than HIV-AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria combined,” underlined the Special Rapporteur as part of the opening remarks at the 73rd session of the U.N. General Assembly in 2018. “However, this is a public health crisis that is present in all countries,” Tuncak went on, “from the wealthiest to the least industrialized.”

And indeed, even in countries like the U.S., babies today are born pre-polluted to a disturbing extent, reveals a U.S. National Cancer Institute report. Thus this global problem that affects people everywhere has the potential to impact both “present and future generations,” as President of the German Environment Agency Prof. Dr. Dirk Messner put it.

At present, particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of hazardous chemicals are pregnant women, the elderly, the poor, children, adolescents and women working in the informal sector, and workers — one of whom dies every 30 seconds as a result of exposure to hazardous chemicals in the workplace.