The need for capacity building and first results for the Stockholm Convention Global Monitoring Plan

The Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) established an effectiveness evaluation to assess the efficiency of measures taken by Parties under the Convention. Among these measures, a Global Monitoring Plan requires countries to analyze core matrices for POPs. To assist countries in setting up networks for these core matrices and to generate high-quality, comparable results, the United Nations Environment Program has implemented projects in 32 developing countries. The results demonstrate the worldwide presence of POPs in air and in humans, although at different scales. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd.