The landmark Escazú Agreement: An opportunity to integrate democracy, human rights, and transboundary conservation
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Muñoz‐Ávila, Lina
Roberson, Leslie A
Suárez‐Castro, Andrés F
Ochoa‐Quintero, Jose Manuel
Crouzeilles, Renato
Gallo‐Cajiao, Eduardo
Rhodes, Jonathan
Dressler, Wolfram
Martinez‐Harms, María José
Runting, Rebecca K
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Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) is one of the world's most biodiverse regions, but this diversity is threatened by the overexploitation of natural resources and internal social conflicts. In 2018, 33 LAC countries were invited to sign and ratify the landmark Escazú Agreement, which is the first legally binding environmental agreement to explicitly integrate human rights with environmental matters. The agreement outlines an approach to enhance the protection of environmental defenders, increase public participation in environmental decision-making, and foster cooperation among countries for biodiversity conservation. However, clear mechanisms to implement the ideals of the Agreement are currently lacking. We identify the key provisions of the Agreement and link these to tangible mechanisms which aim to integrate human rights and nature conservation. These mechanisms include technological (e.g., free online data), human-based (e.g., legal advice from multidisciplinary teams), and nature-based solutions (e.g., transboundary species management). As environmental assets––and threats to them––span national boundaries, the collaborative and participatory provisions of the agreement could catalyze coordinated transboundary environmental management. Because of the importance of this Agreement for the LAC region, we added a Spanish version of this manuscript in the Supplementary Material (versión del artículo en español en el material suplementario).
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Conservation Letters
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© 2021 The Authors. Conservation Letters published by Wiley Periodicals LLC. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided theoriginal work is properly cited.
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Conservation and biodiversity
Environmental management
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López‐Cubillos, S; Muñoz‐Ávila, L; Roberson, LA; Suárez‐Castro, AF; Ochoa‐Quintero, JM; Crouzeilles, R; Gallo‐Cajiao, E; Rhodes, J; Dressler, W; Martinez‐Harms, MJ; Runting, RK, The landmark Escazú Agreement: An opportunity to integrate democracy, human rights, and transboundary conservation, Conservation Letters, pp. e12838