World Health Organization

The World Health Organization (WHO) is the directing and coordinating authority for health within the United Nations system. More

The Secretariat cooperates with WHO on a regular basis on topics of common interest as they relate to environmental health and health risk assessment.

Areas of cooperation between the Secretariat and WHO are, among others:

  • Environmentally sound management of computing equipment, within the framework of the Partnership for Action on Computing Equipment (PACE), which is facilitated by the Secretariat of the Basel Convention. PACE is a multi-stakeholder public-private partnership that provides a forum for representatives of personal computer manufacturers, recyclers, international organizations, associations, academia, environmental groups and governments to tackle environmentally sound refurbishment, repair, material recovery, recycling and disposal of used and end-of-life computing equipment.
  • Sound management of industrial chemicals, in the framework of the Rotterdam Convention.
  • POPs issues, in particular:
    • DDT issues, e.g. in the context of the evaluation by the Conference of the Parties to the Stockholm Convention of the continued need for DDT for disease vector control; or DDT alternatives within the framework of the Global Alliance on Alternatives to DDT.
    • POPs pesticides, e.g. in the context of the work mandated by the Conference of the Parties to the Stockholm Convention to facilitate the development of requirements for assessing the availability of alternatives to lindane and the continued use of lindane;
    • POPs monitoring: e.g. in the context of generating human biomonitoring data on POPs, through the Global Human Milk Survey, within the framework of the Stockholm Convention’s Global Monitoring Plan.