Environmental Governance Indicators for Latin America & the Caribbean

A healthy environment is critical to public health, ecosystem vitality, and the sustainability of societies. A majority of countries have endorsed this view and adopted environmental framework laws or included the right to a healthy environment in their constitutions. However, implementation often lags behind environmental laws, and to date, there have been very little data to help understand and address this implementation gap. The Environmental Governance Indicators for Latin America and the Caribbean (EGI) represent the first-ever effort to address this challenge by measuring how environmental governance
functions in practice in ten countries in the region: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Jamaica, Peru, and Uruguay. The EGI provides new data organized around 11 primary indicators of environmental governance for each country: 1) Regulation and Enforcement; 2) Civic Engagement; 3) Fundamental Environmental and Social Rights; 4) Access to and Quality of Justice; 5) Air Quality and Climate; 6) Water Quality and Resources; 7) Biodiversity; 8) Forestry; 9) Oceans, Seas, and Marine Resources; 10) Waste Management; and 11) Extraction and Mining. In addition, this report presents key third-party data on each countrys governance context, institutional capacity, laws and regulations, and environmental performance in order to provide a more complete picture of contextual issues impacting or resulting from the state of environmental governance.