The Ministry of Environment aligns itself to the efforts to implement the Action Plan for open governance. Recently, the institution opened the data about the projects approved for funding from the National Environmental Fund.

The Ministry’s initiative comes in response to the request of the civil society stated during the consultation sessions on the Action Plan for open governance. Civil society representatives reported at that time that a number of valuable data held by the Ministry of Environment have not been made public yet. Among them, they discussed about the environmental quality data and the distribution of financial resources from the National Environmental Fund.

Subsequently, civil society recommendations were taken in the Action Plan for open governance, approved by Government Decision nr. 195, April 4th, 2012, including the list of priority data belonging to the Ministry of Environment that should be open in 2012.

Thus, the citizens can now find on the open data platform – date.gov.md – the following sets of data from the Ministry of Environment:

• The list of approved projects financed from the National Ecological Fund in the first semester, 2012;
• Environmental official statistics on freshwater (rivers), soils, ozone depleting substances;
• Environmental official statistics on waste, air quality, protected and endangered species;
• The volume of emissions of pollutants into the atmosphere from stationary sources.

On July 10th, 2012, the Moldovan Government presented at Washington the Action Plan for open governance. The Plan includes a number of actions in order to open the public data held by various institutions. By opening such data can be ensured the transparency in the public sector and the citizens have access to information that ministries are collecting and operating.