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The OPCC is a joint initiative by ECLAC and parliamentary leaders from the region, with the support of the Open Society Foundations (OSF). Together, they have created an information-sharing tool that provides valuable information on the state of environmental legislation and parliamentary treatment of environmental issues in Latin America and the Caribbean.
The OPCC aims to support inter-parliamentary cooperation and policymakers in the review and approval of relevant legislation for the just transition to sustainable and low-carbon economies. It is available in Spanish, English and Portuguese, providing legislators, civil society organizations, researchers, and citizens with easy access to a wide range of legislative instruments on climate change and the environment.
Empowering Decision-Making and Facilitating Dialogue
The OPCC facilitates the exchange of experiences and legislative proposals, monitors legislative debates, and provides a space for political and social dialogue.
The platform holds a comprehensive collection of information resources providing stakeholders with essential tools supporting decision-making, transparency, and strengthening environmental democracy. Users can explore case studies of just transition, commission reports, regional statements, and policy briefs with comparative analyses of legislative frameworks, among other key resources.
Streamlined access to legislative data
The main information resource of the OPCC is the Legislative Tracker, which provides a new way of looking at countries' legislative activity. The Monitor offers streamlined access to legislative data through interactive visualizations, key indicators, action panels, and integrated and comparable data from a database. The Legislative Monitor provides direct access to legislative data on countries' institutional sites.
To this date, the OPCC Legislative Tracker contains approximately 1,500[GO1] [GO2] [LL3] instruments on environmental legislation (1100+ laws, 331 bills and proposals) from 17 countries (Argentina, Barbados, Bolivia, Brazil, British Virgin Islands, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Curaçao, Grenada, Guatemala, Guyana, Montserrat, Saint Lucia, Trinidad y Tobago, Turks and Caicos, Uruguay). Soon, legislative data from Ecuador, Mexico, Panama and Paraguay will also be available in the portal.
Real-time updates of maps and graphs enable the visualization of the dynamic changes in environmental laws and the legislative activities of parliamentary initiatives across countries and topics. These tools provide valuable insights into the impact of laws on different economic sectors; they simplify the identification of countries with climate change framework laws and highlight specific components included, such as the implementation of the Paris Agreement and initiatives in line with the Escazú Agreement among others.
The parliamentary representatives participating in the OPCC and their advisory teams contribute updated legislative information about their countries. ECLAC encourages countries in the region that are not yet participating to become part of the OPCC initiative and contribute their legislative information to the portal.
