Press Room
Press from Greening Justice: Creating and Improving Environmental Courts and Tribunals
The number of specialized courts that resolve environmental issues has grown from only a handful in the 1970s to more than 350 in 41 countries. And while past research has studied a few courts in one or two countries, The Access Initiative of the World Resources Institute (WRI) today releases the first comprehensive global report on the status of these courts.
Freedom of Information Not Enough to Hold Governments Accountable on Environment
WASHINGTON, D.C., June 5, 2008 – While many national governments have made real progress in honoring their 1992 Rio Earth Summit commitments to better include the public in environmental decisions, a new book released here today in honor of World Environment Day finds that all the countries studied have fallen short in some aspect.
“Access to information is essential, but in order to act on the information they get, people need to be able to participate in a fair and open process,” said Jonathan Lash, president of the World Resources Institute (WRI), which produced the book.