Programs
AIDA partners with local groups to field multinational teams of lawyers and scientists to tackle a range of environmental and human rights crises – including the decline of freshwater resources, the proliferation of toxins, climate change, and the decimation of vulnerable biodiversity.
AIDA’s efforts are divided into five strategic themes:
1. Human Rights and the Environment- AIDA works to establish the connection between environmental degradation and harm to under-resourced communities throughout the Americas. When big business moves in to extract natural resources or develop infrastructure, local people are often left with contaminated water, polluted air, and no way to feed their families.
2. Marine Biodiversity and Coastal Protection- Marine ecosystems are among the most threatened environmental resources in the Americas. AIDA works to implement legal, administrative, and political strategies to help protect endangered species, encourage the sustainable harvesting of delicate marine resources, and protect coastal areas that provide essential habitat to threatened biodiversity and human communities.
3. Climate Change - Global warming is the most systemic and long-range threat to environmental health. AIDA has recently expanded its efforts to include work on climate change, with a focus on developing legal tools and regulatory frameworks that will help move human societies toward energy sustainability and protect those most harmed by rising sea levels and changing weather patterns.
4. Freshwater Preservation- Clean water is a cornerstone of human and environmental health. AIDA implements legal strategies to protect ecosystems that serve as vital freshwater resources for nearby communities and biodiversity. AIDA also works to prevent companies from polluting freshwater supplies with poisonous toxins.
5. Strengthening Environmental Governance and Public Participation - AIDA works to build capacity in Latin and Central America by educating decision makers, distributing information to nonprofit organizations, and building alliances among communities and lawyers working for environmental protection. We work to protect the ability of the public to participate meaningfully in important environmental decisions.
Read more about this topic: Interamerican Association For Environmental Defense
Famous quotes containing the word programs:
“Short of a wholesale reform of college athletics—a complete breakdown of the whole system that is now focused on money and power—the women’s programs are just as doomed as the men’s are to move further and further away from the academic mission of their colleges.... We have to decide if that’s the kind of success for women’s sports that we want.”
—Christine H. B. Grant, U.S. university athletic director. As quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, p. A42 (May 12, 1993)
“Whether in the field of health, education or welfare, I have put my emphasis on preventive rather than curative programs and tried to influence our elaborate, costly and ill- co-ordinated welfare organizations in that direction. Unfortunately the momentum of social work is still directed toward compensating the victims of our society for its injustices rather than eliminating those injustices.”
—Agnes E. Meyer (1887–1970)
“Government ... thought [it] could transform the country through massive national programs, but often the programs did not work. Too often they only made things worse. In our rush to accomplish great deeds quickly, we trampled on sound principles of restraint and endangered the rights of individuals.”
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)