Astrid Puentes Riaño, AIDA's co-executive director, and Florencia Ortúzar, an AIDA attorney, are the lead authors of chapter 12 of Progress and Opportunities for Reducing Short-lived Climate Pollutants across Latin America and the Caribbean, a publication edited by the Climate and Clean Air Coalition (CCAC), the Molina Center for Energy and the Environment and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
Short-lived climate pollutants are gases and particulates that contribute to climate change and degrade air quality, affecting health and thus the enjoyment of human rights, especially among the most vulnerable populations. To promote measures to mitigate SLCPs, the Interamerican Association for Environmental Defense (AIDA), in collaboration with the Institute for Energy and Environment (IEMA) in Brazil, has written a report that analyzes the legislative and regulatory frameworks governing SLCPs in Brazil, Chile and Mexico. 23 The review covers policies, laws, and air quality and climate change programs, as these relate to SLCPs. The three countries were chosen because they contribute an important amount of SLCPs regionally, and their governments have shown political will to reduce the contaminants.
Mexico has already officially incorporated SLCPs into its climate change policies. Chile has recently included actions to mitigate SLCPs in its new National Action Plan on Climate Change 2017-2022. In contrast, Brazil has displayed few signals that the government will adopt concrete measures to regulate SLCPs anytime soon, though it has shown political will to reduce GHG emissions as a whole. Cost effective measures to mitigate SLCPs exist and have already been applied in various countries with proven positive short-term impacts.
unep_assessment_slcps_lac_0.pdf
