Environment Ministry and UASD Collaborate on First Environmental Report about DR

The Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources (SEMARENA) and the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo (UASD), wrote the first ever national report about the state of the country’s environment. The report is called GEO Dominican Republic 2009.

With a US $30,000 donation provided by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), the institutions will be working for the next 14 months to provide personnel from the Environment Ministry…

With a US $30,000 donation provided by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), the institutions will be working for the next 14 months to provide personnel from the Environment Ministry and the UASD to carry out precise research and evaluation of the country’s current environmental situation.    

The deputy minister of Environment Planning and Development, José Rafael Almonte, said the project was of vital importance for the effective management of the environment and natural resources. He explained that the project is in keeping with a mandate under Law 64-00 which, under Article 52, calls for the writing and publication of a report of this type to be done every two years.

Luis Carvajal, President of the UASD Environmental Commission, said the main challenge is that all participants are speaking the same language, that is to say, to gather all the existing information and define the criteria, then to organize and identify the incongruities and any vacuums that may exist.

The team, coordinated by SEMARENA, hopes that within one year they will be able to show the state of the country’s environment including which areas are deteriorating and what pressures are contributing to it, the tangible impact and responses being put forward by society, the business community and Dominican institutions and how they are confronting the problem helping to improve the country’s environment.

This Project meets the requirements of Article 52 of Law 64-00 which calls for the writing and publication of a report of this type to be done every two years.

The first activity of the project was a 3-day seminar held to define the outline and identify the obstacles in the different areas to be covered by the report such as water, atmosphere, forest resources, biodiversity, protected areas, etc. More than ten institutions participated in the project in the area of statistics related to natural resources. These included academic, environmental organizations and public institutions as well as international cooperation agencies and organizations connected to civil society. 

The meeting touched on the goals, characteristics and environmental priorities, public environmental policy context, response instruments in the Dominican Republic as well as the strategy and diffusion plan of GEO Dominican Republic 2009.

The workshop, held in November, was headed by José Rafael Almonte, Martha Pérez and Patricio Devers of SEMARENA, Carvajal and Franklin García Fermín, of the UASD, as well as Silvia Giada of UNEP.

Propuesta del sector ambiental, Reforma a la Constitucion(PDF)