WRI's Executive Vice President and Managing Director Manish Bapna, who is also Co-Chair of the Open Government Partnership, address the United Nations General Assembly, setting out three priorities for the Partnership in the coming year.
The 2015 Paris Agreement has given a new impulse for the implementation of REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) programs.
This paper presents practical ideas for REDD+ countries to consider as they implement activities that establish or strengthen accountability mechanisms. It presents a general framework for evaluating the institutions, standards, and oversight mechanisms that most countries are developing as part of their REDD+ processes.
A right to know, a right to be heard, a right to access justice.
Research by WRI and other organizations has shown that while national laws governing commercial land-based investments often mandate community participation in decision-making processes, in practice community participation remains weak, particularly for women. Women’s specific vulnerabilities, contributions to agriculture, and role as primary food providers in rural households necessitate their engagement in land acquisition and investment processes.
Encroaching on Land and Livelihoods examines whether national expropriation laws in 30 countries across Asia and Africa follow the international standards established in Section 16 of the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries, and Forests in the Context of National Food Security (VGGTs).
Most national governments can legally acquire land for public needs such as roads, schools and other infrastructure, in a process known as expropriation. But in many countries, weak laws allow governments and companies to take land for private interests without adequately compensating and resettling displaced people. Here are six ways to bring those laws up to global standards.
Demand for electricity is increasing rapidly in India due to economic growth and urbanization. The growing residential sector offers the opportunity to achieve significant energy efficiency gains, which will be critical given India’s widening demand-supply gap.
Ensuring that indigenous and community land rights are respected and protected is important, not only from a human rights perspective, but also as a sound climate mitigation strategy.
Negotiators made major and encouraging promises when they adopted the new Paris Agreement at COP21 last week. Yet the future success of this Agreement relies on tough questions about accountability, participation, transparency and effectiveness—all of which have governance challenges at their core.
"The shift to a clean energy economy is inevitable -- it's no longer a matter of if, but when," WRI President and CEO Andrew Steer writes. "Elected officials can make America a leader in this new clean energy future and ensure that Americans enjoy better health and a more vigorous economy."
Satellite data reveals that concessions cover more than half the Malaysian state of Sarawak, often overlapping with sensitive intact forests that are being degraded at one of the highest rates in the world.
The world’s legally recognized community forests hold about 37 billion tonnes of carbon, about 29 times the annual carbon footprint of all the passenger vehicles in the world.
How can open government accelerate implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals and the post-2015 development agenda? One overlooked answer is “forests.”
While members of the Open Government Partnership have made notable progress toward government accountability over the past four years, there has been little attention given to making land holdings and land transactions more transparent.
A key objective of the Open Government Partnership's Global Summit this week is supporting implementation of the new Sustainable Development Goals.
10 Questions to Ask about Distributed Generation, a collaboration between WRI, WWF and Prayas (Energy Group), is part of the 10 Questions to Ask Series and provides a framework for stakeholder engagement around the common questions and challenges that arise in the context of planning for and implementing DG option to address electricity access gaps.
Solving the challenges of air and water pollution will require more than the adoption of top-down solutions or greener technology. It will require countries to address key governance challenges, like inaccessible information and a lack of public participation.
WRI's new Environmental Democracy Index tracks and scores 70 countries' progress in enacting national laws that promote transparency, accountability and citizen engagement in environmental decision-making.