Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) governments have committed to foster sustainable development, as evidenced by their active participation in international forums and the design of sustainable development policies and plans over the last decades. There has also been increasing recognition that environmental damage harms the poor above all and stands in the way of overcoming social and economic inequality, and therefore must be addressed as part of any strategy to achieve more equitable development, which has been a strategic priority for ECLAC. However, important obstacles remain for the implementation of environmentally sustainable development. Among them are deficiencies in institutional capacity to generate data on the environment and environmental damage to analyze and interpret this data in order to design and implement effective policy and development planning conducive to sustainability and to ensure the exercise of rights of access to information, participation and justice in environmental matters (“access rights”), which are critical instruments in the protection of citizens and communities from the negative environmental externalities of both public and private undertakings. The purpose of this project is to improve the capacity of countries in the ECLAC region to generate, analyse and disseminate information on environmental issues and to adopt a participatory and evidence-based approach to environmental policy-making, in line with the overarching concept behind the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Rio Principles. Thus, the project revolves around two interrelated and complementary issues: information to ensure evidence-based policy making, and access rights. The project specifically addresses the following topics: i) tracking environmental costs and expenditures ii) assessing environmental performance and sustainability and iii) moving towards a regional instrument on the rights of access to information, participation and justice in environmental matters (all detailed below). Each of these issues will be addressed through regional and national meetings or workshops, advisory services, and publications. These activities will aim at building capacity in beneficiary countries by promoting the transfer of skills, techniques, methodologies and knowledge as well as by promoting intra-regional cooperation. The project is mainly directed at civil servants and government institutions (statistics institutes, ministries of finance, ministries of environment, planning bodies, among others), but it also includes civil society and the private sector in selected activities, due to the centrality of these stakeholders in the generation and use of information and in the exercise of access rights. ECLAC will be the implementing entity, in collaboration with the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) (due to its experience as secretariat of the Aarhus Convention, a regional agreement on access rights, and the Kiev Protocol on PRTRs), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) (for technical expertise in environmental matters) and the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) (for its experience in capacity-building on PRTRs). The expected accomplishments of the project are: EA1 Enhanced capacity of civil servants to collect and analyze information related to environmental costs and expenditures EA 2 Enhanced capacity of civil servants in the target countries to assess environmental performance EA 3 Enhanced capacity of countries in the region to ensure the rights of access to information, participation and justice on environmental matters, in the context of a regional agreement on the implementation of Principle 10 of the Rio Declaration.