UN official advocates world with less plastic

Anne Marie Sloth Carlsen, director of the United Nations Development Program Seoul Policy Center

By Kim Se-jeong

Anne Marie Sloth Carlsen, director of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) Seoul Policy Center, has a pair of brown leather shoes that are 26 years old.

Carlsen, bought them in 1988 in Copenhagen, Denmark, where she is from.

“They weren’t anything expensive or anything,” she says. “They’re a decent quality, and I have been repairing them until now.”

She says she often mentions these shoes to illustrate how uncommon it is to re-use things nowadays.

“You couldn’t repair them if they were all plastic _ you would have to throw them out,” she says, looking down at her shoes. “Nowadays, so many things are plastic.”

Few would disagree that plastic is common in all kinds of products. But, despite its convenience, plastic is a major threat to the environment, and reducing the use of plastic is imperative, Carlsen says.

“The United Nations Secretary General said climate change is a defining challenge of our age,” she says. “I think a defining material of our age is plastic. We really have to think about plastic. And we have to reduce, re-use and recycle things as much as we can.”

Carlsen’s environmental awareness came about through her work.

As a career diplomat for Denmark she spent seven years overseeing environmental development projects around the world. Between 2008 and 2012, she was a senior political adviser on environment and energy at the UNDP’s Development Policy Bureau in New York. Through this work, she saw people suffering from poverty and health problems caused by environmental degradation.

She says she is doing what she can to reduce the use of plastic and other resources, but she strongly believes that for individual efforts to have real meaning, governments must act first.

“Unless the government comes in and levels the playing field, it would be very difficult to (reduce the use of resources and energy),” she says.

By a level playing field, she means setting up a unifying set of environmental regulations for companies.

She hopes the United Nations Climate Summit, which took place in New York on Tuesday, will motivate governments to act. Heads of state from around the world discussed what to do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It was the biggest environmental meeting since the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in 2009.

Carlsen joined the Seoul office in January. Her work focuses on matching Korea’s areas of expertise with a place where people need this knowledge. The collaboration with the Green Technology Center is one example, she says.

She has a degree in political science and public administration from the University of Copenhagen. She also studied at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris and at Washington State University.