How North Macedonia Is Updating its National Implementation Plan and Rewriting its PCBs Legacy скачать в хорошем качестве

How North Macedonia Is Updating its National Implementation Plan and Rewriting its PCBs Legacy

When North Macedonia ratified the Stockholm Convention 21 years ago, it joined the global effort to protect human health and the environment from persistent organic pollutants (POPs)—an endeavor that required strengthening national systems for POPs management, expanding data coverage, and developing new technical and institutional capacities to address emerging pollutants. Two decades later, the country remains a regional reference point in polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) management and is finalizing an update to its National Implementation Plan (NIP) under Article 7 of the Stockholm Convention. This progress reflects not only technical expertise but also the sustained commitment of professionals like Aleksandar Mickovski, National Project Coordinator in the POPs Unit in the Ministry of Environment and Physical Planning, and Slavjanka Pejchinovska-Andonova, national expert on new industrial POPs with EcoMosaic. The story they shared with Green Growth Knowledge Partnership (GGKP) goes far beyond the number of decontaminated transformers or the vast amount of datasets they analyzed. It is a story of collective, long-term efforts: strengthening methodologies, coordinating institutions, expanding inventories, securing resources, building trust with stakeholders, and preserving the institutional memory needed to ensure each NIP becomes more robust than the one before. It reflects years of technical work, dialogue, and perseverance that have steadily reshaped how the country understands and manages POPs.