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    Update: Colombian Government Finally Gets Its Eco-Teeth

    Thursday, July 23rd, 2009

    Nearly a year ago I posted about the environmental sanctions law approved by Colombia’s congress.  What I didn’t know at the time of posting was that a week later the Executive Branch would raise formal objections to the law — essentially an attempt at a line-item veto. The Senate and Chamber of Deputies refused in […]

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    Peru Passes Environmental Enforcement Law / Perú aprobó ley de fiscalización ambiental

    Tuesday, February 10th, 2009

    The Peruvian Congress has approved the Law of the National System of Environmental Assessment and Control (Sistema Nacional de Evaluación y Fiscalización Ambiental – SINEFA), which aims to ensure compliance with environmental laws. At the heart of the SINEFA is the Environmental Evaluation and Control Organism (Organismo de Evaluación y Fiscalización Ambiental – OFEA) created […]

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    Guatemala Launches Environmental Enforcement Effort

    Saturday, January 24th, 2009

    Guatemala, like so many Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) nations, has many environmental rules on the books that more often than not are honored in the breach rather than with compliance. By the count of its Environment and Natural Resources Ministry (MARN), Guatemala already has on the books some 3,500 norms of various levels (primary, […]

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    Deforestation in Brazilian Amazon Drops

    Friday, January 23rd, 2009

    Brazil’s Environment Minister, Carlos Minc, just announced at a press conference that the pace of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon fell 82% in the last five months of 2008 compared to a similar period in 2007. Minc attributes the drop to two factors: policies put into place by the federal government and regional authorities, and […]

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    Update: Colombian Eco-Authorities Now Have Sharp Teeth?

    Friday, August 8th, 2008

    Last year I did a post about Colombia’s Environment Minister, Juan Lozano Ramírez, calling upon that country’s Senate to finally give environmental authorities “teeth” — a true, tough environmental sanctions regime. Proposals for such a law had been before the national legislature for years (Lozano says it’s been decades). A few weeks ago the legislature […]

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    Uruguay Gets Its GEO

    Friday, July 25th, 2008

    Earlier this month Uruguay’s GEO was finally unveiled with much fanfare by top Uruguayan environment officials and the local representative of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). What’s a GEO? It’s probably the best known type of comprehensive environmental diagnosis available. “GEO” was the acronym for “Global Environment Outlook” first prepared by the in the […]

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    Giving LAC’s First Plastic Packaging Law Teeth

    Saturday, November 3rd, 2007

    An interesting thing happened over the last two weeks. Well, interesting to people like me who’ve been following the packaging waste debate for decades, at least. Environment enforcement officials for Rio de Janeiro (RJ) state “blitzed” supermarkets in Rio de Janeiro city — first on 19 October in the well-to-do Leblon section, then on 23 […]

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    Digitizing Monitoring and Enforcement of Protected Areas

    Monday, September 10th, 2007

    In a prior post I discussed how the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais (MG) is digitizing its environmental enforcement efforts, and in one of my “Combating Deforestation” series posts I discussed a World Bank report that recommended, among other things, recruiting the help of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and indigenous and local communities in deforestation frontiers […]

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    Digitizing Environmental Enforcement

    Saturday, August 4th, 2007

    Minas Gerais is moving to accomplish something no other Brazilian state — or probably any Latin American/ Caribbean (LAC) nation, for that matter — has yet done: digitize its environmental inspection and enforcement. Currently Minas is winding up a pilot project in which its 21 waste and sanitation inspectors do much of their work utilizing […]

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    Reforming Rio’s Environmental Governing Machinery

    Thursday, June 21st, 2007

    Synopsis in English: The governor of the State of Rio de Janeiro (RJ) has sent to the State Assembly (ALERJ) a bill to create am single agency — State Environment Institute (INEA) — to handle most implementation and enforcement matters involving environmental protection and management of the state’s water resources. The agency would combine the […]

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