Climate and Environment

Ratify participation in an international agreement to strengthen national or local frameworks, where appropriate.

Pass legislation to ensure that the national legal framework meets basic standards as laid out in global and regional agreements (such as Escazú, Aarhus, and the Bali Guidelines), including provisions for greater transparency, civic participation, and public accountability.

• Close common loopholes, such as excessive exemptions in right to information laws, areas or topics covered by data disclosure rules, early notification of environmental impact assessment, or restrictions on standing or court costs.
• Require that agencies regularly report to the legislature on implementation of the law.

Establish one or more national multi-stakeholder advisory groups on environmental democracy or particular national priorities or policies. The body or bodies may be specific (such as a nuclear energy advisory council) or broad (such as an environmental justice council). This group may support both regional or global agreements as well as provide support or input into OGP. Such process or bodies often carry out one or more of the following functions:

• Policy coherence and evaluation: Some countries have established independent councils and commissions, which evaluate climate-relevant policies for coherence and make recommendations and evaluations of climate-sensitive budgeting processes).
• Standards and accounting: In a number of cases, councils may establish government-wide standards and practices for accounting and policy analysis. This may happen through lead regulatory agencies or independent audit institutions. An example that is increasingly popular is integrating green considerations into regulatory impact assessment and procurement.
• Sectoral: Sometimes councils may coordinate on complicated issues that fall across multiple jurisdictions. Examples of this have a long tradition, including in integrated water resources management (usually referred to as IWRM) or in forestry. Examples of this approach include Uruguay’s implementation of its national water plan and Indonesia’s efforts to meet UN-REDD targets (United Nations Collaborative Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries).

Support the collection and publication of data related to issues such as pollution, the state of the environment broadly, emergencies, environmental health (especially for vulnerable groups), and ambient environmental quality.

• Ensure data on impacts and environmental health is disaggregated by categories such as gender, race, income, age and disability to assess the differential impacts of policies, programs, and initiatives on diverse groups of people. In other cases, ensure that environmental data is interoperable with demographic and geographic data.

Standard-setting bodies (such as those responsible for environmental impact assessment or regulatory impact analysis) can ensure that there are additional procedures to proactively seek out and address concerns of communities that face environmental vulnerabilities when designing and implementing environmental policies, with additional outreach to impacted or vulnerable communities. For example, pressure from community groups called attention to irregularities in the approval process for dams in Chile, which led to the government to cancel the projects.

Improve the speed and effectiveness of undertaking publicly triggered enforcement and lower the risk of reporting actions for enforcement.

• Women, in particular face gender-specific challenges such as gender-based violence when seeking justice for environmental harms (including issues related to resource extraction and land ownership). These challenges should be explicitly taken into account when designing justice mechanisms.

Establish and enforce protections for whistleblowers, who are often the ones to flag cases for further investigation and enforcement.

Establish a database and publish all data on inspections, legal violations, and enforcement actions. Ideally, such a database should be fully interoperable with other databases, including permitting data, geospatial data, and entity ownership information.

Undertake ambitious reforms (such as new laws, required information disclosures, and accountability mechanisms for non-compliance) to improve the reporting, investigation, and prosecution of crimes against human rights defenders, including environmental defenders.