Enhancing Environmental Law Enforcement in North America
Status: Completed
Operational Plan: 2013 - 2014
By strengthening cooperation to further environmental compliance and intelligence-led enforcement, this project improved the Parties’ capacities to target illegal trade in environmentally regulated materials, including e-waste, hazardous waste, ozone-depleting substances, non-compliant motorcycles, and targeted species of wildlife in North America. An important element of this project was to increase understanding of regulatory gaps and to improve intelligence-led information-sharing.
Key Accomplishments
- Reduced the limiting factors to sharing enforcement-sensitive information and intelligence among countries, including legal, technological and security issues, notably through actions of the North American Working Group on Environmental Enforcement and Compliance Cooperation (EWG); opened and reinforced channels for sustainable communication and collaboration among the three countries
- Addressed some EWG core activities: building the enforcement capacity of inspectors at border crossings, incorporating intelligence-led enforcement into the operations of the enforcement
agencies, and promoting innovative and emerging technologies to support surveillance and monitoring by enforcement officers in the three countries - The EWG has increased trilateral understanding of the regulatory gaps that exist among the three countries that may allow illegal smuggling of environmentally regulated materials to occur
Products
- The first edition of the CEC-EWG Digest, a compilation of enforcement-related information from the three countries, was produced and widely disseminated amongst the Parties’ officials
- An online training course to curb illegal imports of ozone-depleting substances—a free and easy-to-use tool available to the public at <www.cec.org/ODS>, which complements the Hazardous Waste Online Trainer
