Following the request by the Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) region at its meeting held in Kingston, Jamaica, in March 2010 to meet in early 2011 to prepare for the first meeting of the Open-ended Working Group (OEWG), UNITAR in conjunction with the Strategic Approach to International Chemicals Management (SAICM)Secretariat held a regional meeting on SAICM and a UNITAR workshop on nanotechnologies and manufactured nanomaterials in Panama City, Panama, from 30 May to 3 June 2011. The region recommended that the outcomes of the meeting be included in the report on nanotechnologies and nanomaterials called for in Resolution II/4 E of the second session of the International Conference on Chemicals Management (ICCM-2), which explains the need for an inclusion of a number of emerging policy issues such as nanotechnology and manufactured nanomaterials to be carried out in order to establish cooperative actions. As a result, several recommendations were made by the region and will feed into the report that will be circulated at the OEWG (November 2011) and eventually at the third session of the International Conference on Chemicals Management (ICCM-3, in 2012) with the focus on issues of relevance to these countries.

The LAC workshop was immediately followed by the second regional workshop on nanotechnology and manufactured nanomaterials for Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries in Lodz, Poland, from 27 to 28 June. As with the LAC region, this workshop was held back-to-back with SAICM’s fourth regional workshop for the CEE region. During the nanotechnology workshop, countries made several recommendations for future activities in regard to nanomaterials which will again feed into OEWG and ICCM-3.
Both workshops had high participation and overall excellent ratings from participants. The next workshop on nanotechnology and manufactured nanomaterials for the Asia-Pacific region will be held in Beijing, China, in early September 2011.