Julieta Carrizo, a 28-year-old Argentine environmental activist, attended an April meeting in Buenos Aires of the governing body of the Escazú Accord, the first regional environmental treaty for Latin America and the Caribbean, as a civil society representative. She did so a month after learning firsthand that implementation of the treaty has an extremely long way to go. Carrizo says that in March she invoked the Escazú Agreement while urging the mayor of her northern Argentina hometown of Fiambalá to ensure that plans for lithium mining there are subject to broad public discussion. The attempt fell flat, even though Argentina is among the 15 current parties to the accord, which took force two years ago. The mayor, she says, claimed not to know of the treaty, whose central goal is to promote broader public access to information and decision-making on environmental matters as a means of ensuring... [Log in to read more]