Panama Ratifies the Bunker Fuel Pollution Liability Convention
Saturday, January 17th, 2009On 14 January Panama’s National Assembly ratified the International Convention on Civil Liability for Bunker Oil Pollution Damage (“Bunker Convention”). The Convention, negotiated under International Maritime Organization (IMO) auspices, was adopted in 2001 but did not come into force until last November. Until Panama ratified, the only Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) nations that had […]
Climate Change Country Profiles for 17 LAC Nations
Sunday, November 23rd, 2008The UN Development Programme (UNDP) and the School of Geography and Environment at Oxford University have generated country-level studies of climate observations and multi-model projections for 52 developing countries, 17 of them in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). For each country there is a report that contains a set of maps and diagrams illustrating […]
The High-Level Caribbean Sustainable Energy Seminar
Thursday, July 31st, 2008Temas Observation: This seminar is a follow-up to the meeting held in Guyana last year, where some of the same promises were made. Let’s hope that not another year must pass before something more concrete emerges from this initiative. ________________________ From the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB): Plans to unleash the Caribbean region’s renewable energy potential […]
Get Tested, Caribbean
Friday, June 27th, 2008If you happen to be in Anguilla, Antigua & Barbuda, Barbados, Dominica, St. Lucia, St. Kitts & Nevis, St. Maarten or Jamaica tomorrow, Friday 27 June, stop by the local branch of Scotiabank. Why? Because Scotiabank, in cooperation with the local health authorities and members of the Caribbean Broadcast Media Partnership on HIV/AIDS (CBMP), is […]
The Caribbean Challenge
Tuesday, June 24th, 2008Yes, I know, this announcement was made publicly at the end of May. I held off talking about here, in part to work first on older backlog from The Temas Blog queue, and in part to see if, as hinted, Antigua and Barbuda, St. Kitts and Nevis, Dominica and St. Lucia would quickly announce that […]
LAC Health Stats, Trends and Trivia
Saturday, June 21st, 2008Which Latin American or Caribbean nation smokes or drinks the most? In which are you more likely to die from cancer than infectious diseases such as malaria or dengue? Which has the highest percentage of obese people? Which spends the most on the health of their citizens? If you you’ve ever wondered about such questions, […]
OECS Needs to Get Serious About Environmental Management
Friday, September 28th, 2007Temas Foreword: The OECS is a collection of nine small island states (Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, Saint Lucia, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Vincent and the Grenadines) and territories (Anguilla, British Virgin Islands, Montserrat) in the Eastern Caribbean that cooperate in a variety of areas, including the environment (wastes, watershed management, environmental planning, etc.). […]
Environment Provisions in LAC Constitutions
Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007Enshrining the Green It is by now common to most constitutions in Ibero-American LAC — including many of the state and provincial constitutions in federal republics of Argentina, Brazil and Mexico — to have environmental provisions, although they differ in content, context, clarity and detail. Most of these provisions are minimal, and have one or […]
The Basics II, Foundations: Is a Constitutional Provision on the Environment Necessary?
Thursday, June 28th, 2007I had in the backlog queue a “Basics” piece on the importance of setting a solid environmental governance foundation through adoption of properly crafted and targeted laws, but held off publishing it for Temas administrative reasons I will not go into here. In the meantime, however, the Dominican Republic (DR) has come forward with ideas […]
Overview of Consumer Authorities in LAC
Thursday, May 17th, 2007Classifying the National Entities Putting aside for the moment the complex and unique Brazilian system (discussed below), are there distinctive ways LAC nations organize who is charge of setting consumer protection policy and defending consumer interests? I have yet to see anyone else suggest a typology for consumer entities (in LAC or elsewhere), so here’s […]
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