The US decision to gut its foreign assistance budget has been cause for panic and confusion. A head-spinning succession of announcements from organisations seeing their grants paused, then exempted, then terminated, then restored, has made it difficult to get a clear picture of the scale of the impact of US funding. The latest piece of the puzzle comes from a leaked document from the US state department, reported last week by The New York Times and shared by Politico.

The spreadsheet covers thousands of awards the US plans to terminate. To make sense of what this means for Geneva’s international community, we ploughed through the list to look at organisations that are in some way a part of that network whose USAid-funded awards appear to be singled out for termination.

The list is not necessarily the final say. As the Trump administration’s constant back-and-forth, but also the battles playing out in court, have demonstrated, it is hard to predict what the final outcome may be. Many are still placing their hopes on the US Congress, which could potentially fight Trump’s attempt to kill USAid, if not at least walk back some of the proposed aid cuts. The inventory provides, however, the most comprehensive picture to date of who and what the US foreign aid reshuffle could affect.

Read the full story on Geneva Solutions.

Plastic and health. Yesterday, the Human Rights Council – on its next-to-last day of its spring session – adopted a resolution linking plastic pollution, the protection of oceans and the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment.

The resolution calls on countries to consider human rights at upcoming talks at the UN Ocean Conference in Nice in June and in Geneva in August to conclude a global treaty to end plastic pollution.

The Center for International Environmental Law welcomed the resolution as a “landmark step”.

According to the World Wildlife Fund, some 9 to 14 million tonnes of plastic end up in the oceans every year, disrupting people’s livelihoods and posing a threat to human health. At the current rate global plastic pollution is expected to triple by 2040.

📖Read our past coverage on (text: plastics: link: https://genevasolutions.news/tags/plastics-treaty).