The environmental negotiator stepping away from the State Department

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The Biden administration’s top environmental diplomat is on her way out of Washington. Monica Medina, the State Department’s first diplomat specifically focused on biodiversity, is moving to New York to become president and CEO of the Wildlife Conservation Society.

Medina leaves behind a bureau negotiating toward two major international environmental targets: reaching U.N. agreements on ending plastic pollution and regulating deep-sea mining.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What made you decide to leave the State Department?

It was really a personal call because this new position is based in New York City, and I have three grown children and they all live in New York and they’ve recently gotten married and so I’m hoping that we’ll get to spend a lot more time with them.

I’ve always felt like government service was a privilege, especially as a political appointee. So it’s good to stay long enough to have an impact, but also to leave time for others to have a chance to do the job.

When you look back at your time here, what do you think will stick out the most?

The most surprising and important thing that we got done was the ratification of the Kigali amendment (to reduce the use of hydrofluorocarbons). It’s so important for businesses here in the U.S., but also for our climate future. It’s helping the U.S. to be a leader in this role, getting rid of one of the most potent greenhouse gases. But, you know, when I think about the BBNJ treaty (Biodiversity of areas Beyond National Jurisdiction), that’s also huge. Last but not least, the plastic agreement. It’s not done yet by any stretch of the means. But we took that first step, and I think we’ve got a great amount of political will to actually get it done.

What were some of the biggest challenges?

The war in Ukraine was a real challenge in that it’s created some bottlenecks and places that shouldn’t be — where ordinarily there’s been an awful lot of consensus and cooperation. The Arctic Council, for example, we had to basically shutter it, because Russia was the chair and we couldn’t move forward.

One of the things that is an interesting conundrum for the U.S. is the fact that we aren’t a member of some of the biggest conventions — the Law of the Sea Convention and the Convention on Biological Diversity. I personally hope that the Senate will see that it’s really important, particularly the Law of the Sea, for our strategic place in the world, particularly vis-a-vis, a country like China that’s making such aggressive moves on the high seas around fishing, much of it illegal, unregulated, unreported fishing.

What are some of the key issues that have to be hashed out at the negotiations for a global plastics treaty? Would you say your push for national action plans is among those, and what about caps on plastic production?

Those are exactly two of the biggest issues. I think there also may be issues surrounding certain chemicals and standardization of the number of chemicals. There’s so many different polymers that go into making plastic, and that makes it really challenging to recycle, to collect them, sort them and recycle them. So I think some narrowing of that is really, really important for the agreement.

All over the world, there are different recycling labels, they mean different things. The public everywhere is confused by that. I think that’s an important issue for the agreement to take on. And then obviously the national action plan versus a more top-down prescriptive one-size-fits-all approach and source reduction, which I think will naturally have to happen if you have a really ambitious goal like ours to end plastic pollution in the environment by 2040.

Has the U.S. gotten any country to formally sign on to its approach of national action plans considering that many of our allies have joined the High Ambition Coalition, which prefers top-down requirements in a plastics treaty?

I think there are a number of countries that are a little bit more like us that want to see ambition happen through a national strategy and national plans as opposed to a one-size-fits-all agreement. But I don’t concede on ambition in any way, shape, or form. We are just as ambitious. I think they’re just different ways to get there. And I also don’t see us as oppositional. I think in the end there will be probably some combination of both.

What do you think will happen, and what should happen, at the International Seabed Authority?

This is a subject of much debate within the federal family. And I think they’re pretty close. The [U.S.] interagency group is pretty close to coming up with a policy statement. So I don’t want to get ahead of that. But I do think everything we do has to be with caution.

When I sit back and I think about my work here, what really sticks out to me as lessons learned are that we need to think about nature positivity. So everywhere we’re mining, everywhere where we’re extracting resources, the system we have in place is one where you extract, extract, extract and then you clean up later.

But we can do better than that. We can be positive in the short run. If we create the same problem with things that we extract from the seafloor or here on land and we don’t create a more positive circular system, we will really regret it. And I think what’s beneficial about the ISA is that we will create rules. Without it there would just be a free for all on the seabed, and that would be horrible. But those rules should be very protective of the marine environment because we don’t know enough.

Your husband, Ron Klain, left the White House in February. Was there a family rethink here about your time in Washington and in government and deciding to start new chapters?

I think his job was a challenging one. Two years was a marathon. I think our kids being in New York and this opportunity coming along sort of all fell into place at the same time. That said, I hope to be as helpful as I can be from the outside — of course, minding all the ethics rules and all of my promises to not use this job in government to further anything on the outside. But mindful of that, I think there’s an awful lot I can do from the outside.

You have a month in between jobs. How do you plan to spend it?

Recharging my batteries. And I have a lovely dog, she needs knee surgery. So I’m going to spend a little time nursing my dog back to health and making the transition up to New York City. I haven’t lived there since I was in law school.

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