Reframing Municipal Waste Management Local and Global Financing for all. Seizing a Historic Opportunity

Over a decade ago, the World Bank forecasted that the volume of waste generated by cities across the globe would be doubling by 2025, reaching over 2,2 billion tons, with an even faster growth in lower-income countries. Unfortunately, this proved to be right.

In 2018, the World Habitat Day focused on ‘municipal solid waste management’ and in 2019, the Global Sustainable Development Report (GSDR) quoted the 'growing amount of waste’ as one of the four main global trends threatening the delivery of the 2030 Agenda. In 2020, a group of experts of the U20, the group of cities of the G20, alerted on the urgency to review deeply waste governance and financing models. In 2023, the U20 India proposed to reposition waste issues at the crossroads of ‘accelerating climate finance’ and ‘encouraging environmentally responsible behaviour.’

Emerging and middle- and lower-income countries cannot enjoy the lengthy time it took for cities in the developed world to develop comprehensive waste management systems for all. Yet continuous mismanagement of solid waste will further pollute land, water, and air, locally and globally, with negative socio-economic side-effects, on health, productivity, carbon emissions, biodiversity etc.

As the increasing production of waste is overwhelming processing capacities, and more than 35% of the world’s urban population have no access to municipal waste management, the COP28 has acknowledged the linkage between climate issues and pollution and initiated a new cycle of negotiations regarding climate finance, including the creation of the ‘Loss and Damage Fund for Developing Countries.’ The world looks for a new generation of growth models and changes in economic production systems. This includes multiple attempts to redefine and reform GDP in the past two decades and recently, calls to reform the global financial architecture and push for a more proactive climate and environmental role of IFIs, starting with MDBs. In 2023, the G20 India adopted unanimously a ‘green development pact for a sustainable future’ aiming at putting the 2030 Agenda back on track by ‘designing a circular economy world’, ‘implementing clean, sustainable, just, affordable and inclusive energy transitions’ and ‘delivering on climate and sustainable finance.’

There is a historic opportunity to address the issue of waste management and waste financing AT SCALE. It starts by positioning the issue of waste, in particular municipal solid waste high within the upcoming global talks about climate finance in the climate COPs, the review of the Addis Ababa action plan for development, the safeguarding of the 2030 Agenda. Reframing the local and global financing of municipal waste management for all is even more critical that despite the worldwide development of circular economy, waste management remains under-financed in many middle- and lower-income countries, where solutions stemming from the informal economy and solutions from the industry just don’t add up.