The United Nations Environment Programme, through its Regional Office for Latin America and the Caribbean (ROLAC), and the University of Massachusetts Boston, have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to establish a new partnership oriented to develop, consolidate, and detail their cooperation in the field of the environment. Since 2011, UMass Boston, through the Center for Governance [...]

As reported by New Europe Online, Europe faces escalating costs in human health and environmental productivity due to the region’s failure to implement existing European Union environmental laws. The €50 billion estimated annual environmental price tag alarms some European Union policy makers who are now actively advocating for more effective implementation of their environmental laws. Janez Potočnik, [...]

In Perspectives on Rio+20, a UNEP publication series, Mark Halle, Executive Director of the International Institute for Sustainable Development Europe, argues that the best way to fix the international environmental governance system is to tear it down and rebuild it. He compares the existing system of multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) to “an overloaded vegetable cart [...]

January 24, 2012 marked the beginning of the six-day long World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil. The 12th Annual meeting, organized by NGOs,social movements and citizens associations from all over the world, intentionally opened at the same time as the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland. WSF held its first open meeting in 2001 [...]

South Africa is ready to join over 190 parties at the 17th Conference of the Parties (COP17) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), taking place from November 28th to December 9th 2011 in Durban. COP17 is particularly important because it will be the last Conference of the Parties before the Kyoto [...]